fireball carole lombard

Unbalanced

Samuel Langley, a smart guy

In the late 1800s, a scientist named Samuel Langley pretty much invented airplanes. Lots of things astonish me, and many of them involve aeronautics. I’ve never gotten past the concept that a hundred tons of metal can get off the ground and stay off the ground. That’s number one, and it goes from there, and here’s the guy who from nothing imagined that humans could fly around in the sky and then wrote about it in a book called Experiments in Aerodynamics that was published in 1891.

Do you hear me, people? Langley dreamed up the “airfoil” and invented the idea of “lift” and the concept that became wind tunnels. Then he successfully flew UAVs powered by mini-steam engine almost a mile on two occasions late in 1896. UAV, you know, like the Predator drone? An Unmanned Air Vehicle in EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND NINETY-SIX. Langley was flying these things around seven years before the Wright Brothers! In fact, nine days prior to the Kitty Hawk breakthrough in 1903, Langley was floating on the Potomac River on a houseboat-turned-aircraft-carrier and was trying to catapult a manned, powered airplane into successful flight. It was a failure of an experiment that came oh-so-close to trumping Orville and Wilber on the verge of their great triumph. Langley was called a fool and a failure afterward.

Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 by Robert Matzen

Langley’s successful UAV, which he dubbed an “Aerodrome.”

I can hear you saying, What’s your point, Matzen? Well, OK, my point is simply this. People don’t much care for history lessons but people love stories and Langley’s is a hell of a story, the race to figure out how to enable humans to fly. Here you have these incredible people in 1890 and 1900 working desperately with sticks, fabric, and leather to make a contraption that could go up and stay up, and less than 40 years later movie stars in fur coats are stepping into polished-aluminum airplanes and flying across the country.

I’ve been saying it a lot in lectures and interviews lately, but it bears repeating: TWA Flight 3 crashed in January 1942, killing Carole Lombard and 21 others, at a time when commercial flight was still in the process of being figured out. It was still the era when biplanes were serving as the training platform for U.S. military pilots. DC-1s and DC-2s still served commercial passengers along with the beefier DC-3—these were the very first modern airliners replacing the serviceable but clunky Ford Tri-Motor.

One of the most telling quotes in Fireball was spoken during the House investigation into the crash of Flight 3 by TWA DC-3 Captain Alexis Klotz. In describing the airway out of Las Vegas, which includes the Spring Mountain range and Mt. Potosi, Klotz said, “It is very true that you can wander off just a little bit and hit something…. We drive down a narrow highway. There is traffic within 12 inches on one side and a gully on the other. It is considered safe. You watch what you are doing.”

They didn’t call this the Greatest Generation for nothing. These men had no virtual displays or talking consoles. They had no radar. They had guidelines, procedures, rudimentary gauges, two wings, and a prayer, and flying perhaps the finest airplane ever constructed, Douglas Corporation’s DC-3, they got where they were going and safely conveyed passengers, 15 and 20 at a time, from place to place.

Except on January 16, 1942.

Enabled by Samuel Langley: the Douglas Corp. masterpiece DC-3.

If you do the math, between December 1903 when the Wrights flew on that ridge in the Outer Banks and January 1942 when Flight 3 smacked into Mt. Potosi, that’s a tad more than 38 years. Now think about what was going on 38 years ago today, in 1976. All of a sudden 38 years is nothing. It’s the blink of an eye, but in that span of time, airplanes went from fabric to aluminum, from sputtering engines with spindly propellers to two or four growling beasts, and from open cockpits to luxurious, closed cabins with meal service on transcontinental flights. All in 38 years.

I was a great disappointment to my father the mathematician and physics professor. He would try in vain to tutor me in high school trig, and there was no way I was ever going to get it. I still don’t get it. But in the end, Dad, I did turn out to be smart enough to recognize a smart guy when I see one, and Samuel Langley was one smart guy whose ideas changed the world—just 38 short years prior to the crash of Flight 3.

Note: If you want to see a great documentary about Samuel Langley, check out Undaunted: The Forgotten Giants of the Allegheny Observatory because, oh, by the way, Langley was an astronomer who invented aviation in his spare time. And I can’t even balance my checkbook.

My checkbook, unbalanced.

A Little Don Juan

I find myself down of late. I started to spell out exactly why, but I’m a little too private for that, so let’s just leave it as, I’ve got the blues. I’ll admit that, in part, it has to do with Fireball, my baby and the book of my life to date, being out there in the world, all grown up. And there are some other things.

At times like this I find myself needing to reach for the touchstones of my life, the things that evoke strong memories of other times. One of these is Adventures of Don Juan, Errol Flynn’s Christmas 1948 masterpiece that many people haven’t ever seen. To many, there’s only one “Adventures of” picture connected to Errol Flynn, but they just don’t know.

Swedish-born Viveca Lindfors as Queen Margaret of Spain.

Adventures of Don Juan is a sassy picture that pokes fun at Flynn’s reputation, but it’s also the very sad story of the seventeenth century character Don Juan falling in love, really in love, after a lifetime spent wooing women and carousing. It’s a brilliant depiction of vulnerability and sacrifice, of a wanderer who finds something he’s been seeking—one great love—and must give it up for a greater good. It contains sequences that move me every time, interactions between Don Juan and the woman he falls in love with, who happens to be Queen Margaret of Spain.

They say Flynn had great chemistry with Olivia de Havilland. Wait, I said that, in the book Errol & Olivia. Sure they did. They were point/counterpoint: big, athletic, hedonist Errol and diminutive, depressed Livvie. They recognized a kinship from the first time they met—two young people who had endured brutal childhoods at the hand of tyrannical parents, and two beautiful people who made a beautiful couple onscreen and, sometimes, off.

But chemistry’s a funny thing. Errol and Olivia had it, but not to the degree that Errol had it onscreen with Swedish actress Viveca Lindfors, newly brought to the United States by the Warner Bros. under contract to make pictures, the first and biggest being Adventures of Don Juan. This lady had talent. She would go on to a great career as an acting teacher, and here she presents every inch a queen. Every single inch, in every frame in which she’s seen.

And then there are the scenes with Flynn.

In her memoirs, Lindfors—26 years old when shooting commenced—would say she liked Errol, she really did, and she could see that the weight of being a sex symbol was crushing him to death. Of course she was right; he was oppressed by the pressure, and production of Adventures of Don Juan was a year-long exercise in hell for all involved because Flynn spent a good deal of time off the deep end. Undiminished, however, is the fire between Flynn and Lindfors; such natural combustability in three particular sequences that it’s no wonder the climax of the picture involves a fire at the palace.

In the first, Don Juan shows Queen Margaret around his workplace, the fencing academy. We know via a previous scene that he’s fallen for her, but she doesn’t know. He describes the workplace with veiled references to his attraction; we see from her nonverbals that she’s attracted but fighting it, and with Max Steiner’s score behind them in this high-ceilinged set, we face more repressed passion than Hollywood had presented in all the film noir produced to that time.

Sequence 1, Don Juan is infatuated and the Queen is starting to soften.

The chemistry between the two stars is visible early on.

In the second sequence, he makes it clear that he has fallen in love with a mysterious someone, and as the queen, she commands him to talk about it. Steiner’s score again sets up a gut-wrenching moment: He confesses he is in love with her, his “paragon among women,” and for a flash, an instant, she is happy at this news, but then suspects that he’s just laying the ol’ Don Juan line on her and she’s furious. She orders him away, and he’s crushed.

In sequence 2, Don Juan confesses his love for his “paragon among women,” and she explodes in fury.

In the third, after Don Juan has gained credibility by thwarting the bad guy and proving himself a national hero, she comes to him and confesses her love. This hard, nationalist leader is now laid so bare, so tortured, ready to give up the throne to be with Don Juan. The scene between two vulnerable people is so intimate that I’m surprised it passed the 1948 censors. My friend Trudy and I have long marveled at the string of saliva between Flynn’s lips and Lindfors’, captured in 35mm Technicolor after their passionate, all-revealing first kiss. These two didn’t just enact a stage kiss; these two kissed like they meant it. You can’t fake a kiss like that. For all time we’ve got it on record. When she kisses him a second time in this sequence, it’s clear she’s not interested in the kind of buss learned in acting school. Come on, Errol, let’s sell this thing! And we can see that the boy was willing.

Sequence 3: Queen Margaret is ready to abdicate and run away with Don Juan, but he knows she can’t do that because “the people will suffer.”

Yes, I’m a little down and so I turned to one of my touchstones, Adventures of Don Juan, in part to wallow in a wistful and bittersweet picture, and in part to lift myself out of the blues (such a magnificent, Technicolor masterpiece from the tail end of Hollywood’s Golden Era).

What it leads me to is, what are your touchstones? What are the things you turn to when you’re down? Movies? Books? Music? Places? People? Why do you turn to them? Maybe we can form our own support group to get through a couple down days in this crazy thing called life. It’s the place where I am this evening, and I know I’m not the first person ever to be here, and I won’t be the last.

Mathematics

DOS…Oscar-winning visionary, mad genius, and ODing druggie.

I’ve had a couple of weeks now to digest the fact that America is not celebrating 75 years of the motion picture version of Gone With the Wind. I’ve tried to think of any cast members still with us beyond the indefatigable Olivia de Havilland, little Beau Wilkes, played by now-82-year-old Mickey Kuhn, and littler “Melanie’s Baby,” played by Patrick Curtis. Come to think of it, maybe OdeH is rubbing off on her celluloid kin since the Wilkeses are the only ones left among us. I asked you to help me put Gone With the Wind in perspective and the response was enlightening, and got me to thinking.

Let me run this past you: aside from spine-tingling stories of the sneak preview, David Selznick’s epic run on uppers that should have killed him but didn’t, the coast-to-coast search for Scarlett that ended by firelight in Culver City, and the notorious replacement of George Cukor with man’s man Vic Fleming (note to Vic and his pal Clark Gable: this is still a women’s picture despite the testosterone injection), the motion picture version of Gone With the Wind isn’t as great as the sum of its parts. In some respects it’s sort of…average.

Oh, man, I’m pretty sure my mom just rolled over in her grave. Sorry, Mom.

Gone With the Wind is the big, inspired vision of a filmmaker, but so is David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, James Cameron’s Titanic, and Peter Jackson’s trilogy of the Rings, and I attest that GWTW doesn’t measure higher than any of these later examples. It’s too fixated on the performance of a decent-at-best English stage actress affecting a Southern belle. Selznick and his three directors (counting Sam Wood) threw the picture her way because the country was then ripped through with Scarlett Fever, and there was no cure in sight.

Gable loved winning his statuette for It Happened One Night, then gave it away to a little boy after the death of Carole Lombard.

The epidemic is over, my friends. Miss Leigh is long gone, and her performance, despite the golden doorstop, plays today as antiquated as a sternwheeler. I always found Leslie Howard an embarrassing Ashley, embarrassing because his miscasting damns the picture’s credibility for future generations. For God’s sake where was Randy Scott when we needed him?

Over the years I’ve been surprised to see the shots taken at two-time Academy Award winner Olivia de H. for lack of acting range. For kicks you should peruse the reviews of her Broadway version of Romeo and Juliet in the early 1950s. Yikes! My point being that Livvie was an accomplished actress in her day, but considering that her day was 1939 and by 1951 she was passé, her performance as Melanie isn’t new-school enough to help keep the good ship GWTW afloat.

Then there is The Saving Grace of Gone With the Wind. Well, wait. All those craft Oscars went to people who were saving graces of Gone With the Wind: cinematographers Ernie Haller and Ray Rennahan, art director Lyle Wheeler, and the film’s heroic editors, Hal Kern and James Newcom. Sidney Howard probably helped to save the picture with all that screenplay he wrote, which was then rewritten by a couple dozen other writers and finally Selznick himself. Walter Plunkett’s costumes, Max Steiner’s music—fantastic craftspeople at work, no doubt.

But it’s Clark Gable’s picture to save and looking back from a modern perspective, he’s the best thing about it. In all his glorious insecurity and grousing and grumbling, his Rhett Butler was perfect in 1939 and it’s a bulls-eye 75 years later. I know a lot about Gable now, but I feel there’s more still to learn. I’m tempted to say that Gable rose to the occasion when he spent eight months playing Rhett, but I need to keep reminding myself that the part was fitted to him with great care, staying within the “Gable range,” which was sort of from A to B or maybe, on a good day, C. Parnell was still fresh on everybody’s minds and neither Selznick nor Mayer could survive Gone With the Wind becoming another Parnell.

I’ve never committed myself to MM’s novel, but I very much want to read it now. I know that the book version of Rhett is a good deal darker than the movie-star Rhett drawn up by that football team of screenwriters. What we get from Gable as depicted is a square-shouldered, worldly wise, wry-humored, and slightly tarnished knight in armor. Honorable enough to reclaim wedding rings and rakish enough to look comfortable in Belle Watling’s parlor. Between the Hays Office censors on one side and his MGM bodyguards on the other, Gable was safe as safe can be making Gone With the Wind. But who could have predicted that the greatest role of a not-so-great actor would hold water so well all these decades later?

I’m tempted to call this column, “Disillusioned,” because that’s what I realize I am about Gone With the Wind. All the fuss and bother of my boyhood, all the reverence paid to the picture as it floated for oh so long and oh so watertight on the memories of a couple of generations. Gone With the Wind is now a Technicolor time capsule of 1939 Hollywood, more interesting for what went on behind the cameras as what is captured in front of them. I wish it were otherwise. I wish it were a perfect 10 of a picture that could serve as THE shining example of Old Hollywood. Counting everything, the entire experience of Gone With the Wind, the people and the pre-World War II times, it probably still is. But just as a big stack of cans of celluloid, math has overtaken the movie of the Novel of the Old South, and it’s getting, for me at least, old.

OdeH: two Oscars in four years, but she would never get an award-quality role again.

So Red the River, in Black & White

Buy it, consume it, spread the word about it.

I want to continue the discussion of Gone With the Wind that we started this past week, but have to interrupt to report that I couldn’t be happier for my friend and colleague Scott Eyman for the success of his new book, John Wayne: The Life and Legend, released April 1 by Simon & Schuster. It hit the New York Times bestseller list at mid-month and is, as of this writing, #1 on the Amazon bestseller list for Movies/History & Criticism and #8 in Biographies. A writer can work a lifetime and never achieve success like this. Of course Scott has emerged as the preeminent Hollywood biographer and he’s done very well with his past books, particularly Lion of Hollywood, his Louis B. Mayer bio that was of such help in researching Fireball themes.

All this week Scott has been sitting with Robert Osborne in prime time on Turner Classic Movies introducing the best of John Wayne’s pictures and last night it was one of my favorites, Red River. Back when I was a silly, uneducated youngster, I was enthralled with Lonesome Dove, in part because of the vivid depiction of that cattle drive up to Montana. I had thought what a wonderful thing they dreamed up for television, not knowing that the epic cattle drive had long before been envisioned and executed by director Howard Hawks in black and white for Red River, and that Lonesome Dove was a pale, small-scale update.

I’ve taken John Wayne way too much for granted my whole life and felt free to skip some of his pictures, including The High and the Mighty, which I discussed here a couple months ago, and also Red River, which I only discovered in recent years. I didn’t know until last night, when Scott told us that Red River was actually produced in 1946 and sat around for a couple years, that it represents Montgomery Clift’s first screen work. I find Clift mesmerizing in this picture, young, lean, tough, handsome, and so damn capable with his new type of underplaying that would soon change Hollywood. I’ve never read a Clift bio, so I didn’t know how he learned to ride a horse like he does in Red River, as if born in the saddle. He has this thing where he hops up into the stirrup like some sort of trick rider. I know he became obsessed with bringing realism to his roles, as confirmed by Howard Hawks later.

John Wayne and Montgomery Clift

Speaking of Clift to Peter Bogdonovich, Hawks said, “He came down two weeks early and went out after breakfast with a cowboy, taking a lunch with them, and they rode all day long – up hills and down steep places, and through water and so on. And by the start of the picture he really rode well. You could tell that. And I taught him a little jump step to get into the saddle – he’d make a little hop into the stirrup. He worked – he really worked hard.” So that answers my question about the riding, and that hop. Clift was one rare specimen, and looked every bit the equal of John Wayne in the saddle after only two weeks of training.

I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the peculiar way Howard Hawks handles dialogue, but since at least three Hawks pictures are on my favorites list, I don’t consider Hawksian quirks a deal breaker. You know, he has actors step on the lines of other actors, which can emulate realism when done right, but often his players aren’t quite up to it and come off instead as self-conscious. Hawks also has his women constantly saying their man’s name in the clinches. “You know what I’m talking about, Matthew, don’t you, Matthew?” All right already with the Matthews!

Last night, Eyman referred to Red River as something like “nine-tenths a classic,” and I agree with him. Here we have this spellbinding epic with noirish qualities, and suddenly, toward the end of the last reel, a Damon Runyon picture breaks out. Here we see the worst of Howard Hawks and his obsession with sassy dames, throwing figurative cold water on a perfectly set up, deadly confrontation between two beautifully written and played characters in Wayne’s Dunson and Clift’s Garth. Such a shame the way it ends. Two hours of buildup, the pace ratcheting up until there’s so much going on in every frame that you can’t take it all in. Then…that? As Scott put it, “Hawks blinked.” Eyman described how Mr. Dunson was supposed to die at fade out, but Hawks couldn’t bring himself to see it end that way. Instead, Joanne Dru’s Tess Millay, a character just recently introduced into the narrative, breaks up the big fight, and Wayne and Clift laugh and make up while sprawled there in the dust. It’s an all-wrong ending. It was all wrong in 1948 and it’s all wrong today.

Adding to the realism, Hawks chooses to show an arrow striking Joanne Dru in the shoulder, nailing her to the side of a wagon. She barely flinches, and Montgomery Clift reacts with bemusement rather than concern.

But Hawks was so damn good that I am forced to forgive him his trespasses. Tell me you don’t have a Hawks picture somewhere on your favorites list. Twentieth Century, maybe? Bringing Up Baby? His Girl Friday? Ball of Fire? Sergeant York? He did two of Bogart’s best pictures in To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, and also two other favorites of mine, The Thing (from Another World) and Rio Bravo.

Cinematographer Russell Harlan and director Howard Hawks capture the sweep and grime of a cattle drive long before budget-friendly CG effects are around to help.

Another “so damn good” ingredient in Red River is the cinematography of Russell Harlan. When you see the way he frames up a cattle drive, with no CG effects and thousands of cattle and cowboys visible going back a quarter mile as Wayne and Clift play a scene in foreground, you think this must be the most gifted cameraman in Hollywood. But Harlan was a journeyman who cut his teeth on Hopalong Cassidy westerns and would move on after Red River to photograph Gun Crazy and Tarzan and the Slave Girl, proof once again that Hollywood was after all a factory chock-full of highly skilled cinematographers. No time to sit around dreaming of art. We must shoot! They’ll need this picture next month in Hoboken!

So thank you, Scott, for a very enjoyable Thursday night, and congratulations on the release of John Wayne: The Life and Legend. My goal this weekend is to go to my closest independent bookstore and buy a copy. In the meantime, may the awards and acclaim roll in.

The furious, hate-filled climax that is soon to be spoiled by Joanne Dru.

Help Wanted

Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3

Margaret Mitchell, the quiet little woman who caused a big ruckus.

I am at a loss and would appreciate your help. Here it is, the 75^th anniversary of the release of Gone With the Wind, the blockbuster 1939 classic motion picture of the classic Margaret Mitchell novel of the Old South. And I can’t find a Gone With the Wind celebration anywhere. Not a convention, not a conclave, not a picnic. Because Fireball is so much about Clark Gable, and includes an account of Gable’s tribulations making the picture and a description of the attendance of Clark and Carole Gable at the Atlanta premiere, I thought it would be natural for me to schedule a presentation about Fireball at a Gone With the Wind event this year. So where are the diamond jubilees? I guess it was the late 1980s when I attended one, maybe two, GWTW barbecues at Clark Gable’s birthplace in Cadiz, Ohio. These were pretty big shindigs with women in hoop skirts and an opportunity to meet and chat with original cast members Fred Crane (Stuart Tarleton) and Cammie King (Bonnie Blue Butler).

Come to think of it, that was 25 years ago, wasn’t it? GWTW was in sprightly middle age then. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but all the cast members are gone except for Olivia de Havilland. Is 75 years just too many for a celebration? Is it time for museums and musty, dusty antiquity? Is Gone With the Wind fast becoming as archaic as, say, Birth of a Nation?

I don’t know how well attended the digital restoration of Gone With the Wind was at last weekend’s Turner Classic Film Festival in Hollywood—we were in transit from the West Coast as it was unspooling. How did it go? Did any of this blog’s readers attend? Were there women in hoop skirts among the patrons that day?

Fred Crane shares face time with Vivien Leigh. The Cadiz barbecue held 50 years later, during which I met Fred, looked exactly like this. Well…….sort of. Don’t they hold these kinds of things anymore?

I must be missing something, right? There have to be GWTW conventions that I’ve managed to overlook. We can’t be so rapidly losing touch with this epic motion picture. Or can we? It was such a cultural phenomenon, truly, unparalleled in American history. The book went off like a crate of dynamite upon release in June of 1936 and was reprinted upwards of 30 times by the end of the year. It earned a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for Margaret Mitchell, and again reigned as the top-selling novel in America in 1937. This novel was Big, and then came the movie, which was Just As Big. Speculation raged over which Hollywood star would play which role. Could David O. Selznick pull this miracle picture off? Or would it bomb? Would he even finish the thing? Then it premiered, and played, and played, and hit the road, and played on well into the war years. Then came the 1947 reissue, and then 1954, and the Civil War Centennial reissue of 1961, and a 70mm hatchet job in 1968, and another reissue in 1974. Gone With the Wind hit TV like Sherman in Georgia and played on pace with The Wizard of Oz and The Ten Commandments. It was a TV event, as it had been a theatrical event.

The Gables receive a royal welcome upon their arrival in Atlanta for the GWTW premiere in December 1939. More than 150,000 people would flock to Peachtree Street to glimpse them.

But that was then. How are you feeling about Selznick’s Gone With the Wind these days? Do you still sit down and watch it? Do you try to introduce it to your children and grandchildren? Is there any hope for even attempting such a thing in our short-attention-span age? Is the 4×3 aspect ratio too out of date? Is the acting too corny? Is the lack of action too extreme? Or has it just plain been overexposed?

Personally I still get a kick out of Gone With the Wind, although not as much as I did 20 or 30 years ago. Now the back half moves pretty darn slowly and I get impatient with Scarlett for chasing around the feckless Ashley. Olivia de Havilland’s Melanie has grown on me quite a bit, though. Oh, how my mother despised Melanie, but I have to side with Rhett’s assessment that she was the only truly admirable woman in the story. Of course, I’m partial to Ona Munson’s Belle Watling too and think it would be swell to have a friend exactly like her.

So, help me out, will you? Where are the hot Gone With the Wind celebrations that I’m missing? What’s happened to the Epic Motion Picture of Our Time? Is it . . . gone with the wind? I’d welcome your perspective

that Gone With the Wind still holds onto some sort of relevance in 2014. I’m hoping it does. I’m hoping that maybe I’m just being a pessimist.

Also on a related but unrelated note: There have been many books written about the production of this motion picture. What is your favorite?

Selznick’s money shot.

Fireball in Las Vegas

Las Vegas features a giant that dwarfs even the mightiest casino. That giant is Mt. Potosi, which looms high in the southwestern sky and can be seen from nearly every vantage point in town. You can’t see it if you’re standing behind the Luxor, or Caesar’s, or the other casinos, but if you’re out and about, Potosi can’t be missed. Potosi is where life ended for Carole Lombard and where life began for Fireball. Each year when I’d visit Las Vegas on business, there would be Potosi, never an inviting sight, but always a compelling sight. I knew the wreckage of Flight 3 was up there, and I knew that one day I would go see it. This is not new information to anyone who has read the book, but I bring up the subject of Potosi again because I just returned from my most important visit yet to Las Vegas after four TV interviews and two on radio, and a Saturday lecture at the impressive Sahara West Library on Sahara Avenue.

On Las Vegas NBC affiliate Channel 3 with Tom Hawley talking about the 1942 plane crash near their town. [Clicking on the image takes you to the TV segment.]

Sahara is a street that’s important to the narrative of Fireball, because at the intersection of Sahara and Las Vegas Boulevard, Clark Gable spent the longest weekend of his life, waiting in a bungalow under heavy guard at the El Rancho Vegas Hotel for word on the fate of his wife. Back then the El Rancho stood alone in desert as the southernmost point in town and the first of the modern casinos. Now the site of the El Rancho is one of the last remaining empty lots in that stretch of the Vegas Strip. Nothing’s been there since the main building, the Opera House theater and casino, burned to the ground in 1960 during a Betty Grable appearance (Betty reportedly lost $10,000 in costumes that night). The owner tried to keep going on just the cluster of bungalows around the casino-in-cinders, but it didn’t work.

One of those bungalows had been Gable’s, and I have stood at the spot and pondered what he went through that weekend as he stared at Potosi, what his MGM handlers went through, and Gable’s friends, who rushed to his side by the carload when they heard that Carole’s plane was down. My appearance on that street, in that city, with Potosi visible just to the southwest, was what I can only describe as meant to be.

The first modern Las Vegas casino complex, the El Rancho Vegas, along Highway 91 just south of town. Here Clark Gable endured the longest weekend of his life.

On Saturday the story poured out of me to the assembled crowd of locals; I showed two videos and then came the Q&A. It was fantastic to get the perspective of people who have lived with the story all their lives. One woman remembered as a little girl looking at Potosi and seeing the polished aluminum of the wreck gleaming in the sun. TWA had tried to dynamite the mountainside to cover over the site, but their plan failed and locals for years afterward remembered the eerie, reflective glow of the right wing against the cliff wall.

Attendees of the Sahara West event watch one of the GoodKnight Books videos.

Attending on Saturday was well-known Southern California poet Lee Mallory, whose father and stepfather were pilots. Lee’s Uncle Harry grew up in Goodsprings and learned about the crash and aftermath from people who lived it. In fact, those eyewitnesses passed on relics from the crash to Harry, who had them built into a shadow box with brass name plates, and this incredible history display is now in Lee’s possession. Lee hadn’t yet read the book but was able to pepper me with questions that hit on many key facts and myths related to the event. Another attendee firing impressive questions was named Dennis. He had visited local spots connected to Flight 3, like the site of the El Rancho and the Pioneer Saloon in Goodsprings, where Gable supposedly drank his way through the weekend. No doubt the Pioneer was a player in the tragedy, if not Gable’s home base, because it was here that reporters congregated during days of rescue and recovery. It was a practical matter: in an area so remote, the Pioneer featured the closest telephone and the best way for reporters to get their stories out.

Signing books after the lecture and Q&A.

The Sahara West Library is a state-of-the-art facility. I haven’t seen better audio and video capabilities anywhere, and I want to thank Marci Chiarandini for fantastic support throughout the planning and execution of the event.

We also snuck down to L.A. for a couple of days. I paid my usual respects to Carole, Clark, and Petey at Forest Lawn, and we stopped in at Maria’s Italian Kitchen in Encino, which is currently featuring a Fireball tie-in. Patrons bringing a copy of the book into the store receive a discounted meal. The crazy thing is that Maria’s is located near the corner of Ventura Boulevard and Petit Avenue, and Petit Avenue was the address of the Gable ranch. George Healy of Maria’s, who read Fireball and has become one of its leading proponents, wasn’t aware that one of the key locations in the book was less than a quarter mile away! It’s just the latest in a thousand weird little coincidences and ironies around Fireball, which is a very special book to me and, as I’m finding, to a growing number of people around the country.

Shooting Star

Bruce R. Medici said some very nice things about Fireball in a recent comment. He also said, “Carole would have most likely enjoyed it, and perhaps she may have had some choice words about it too.” I wondered every so often as I was writing Fireball whether Miss Lombard would approve of what I was doing. I knew I had found the real person, that I was uncovering the soul of this woman and artist, and does anyone really want to be laid bare before the world?

My friend Steve had a strong reaction to the Carole he read about in Fireball. Steve had known Gable, as discussed here previously, and had heard time and again from Clark and all the other MGM players wonderful stories about this glorious, perfectly remembered, bigger-than-life personality, Carole Lombard. Said Steve in his critique of Fireball, “I was surprised to find out that she was so spoiled and willfully stubborn and strong-headed. To have bullied her way thru life as it appears is surprising to me. Yes, she was attractive and full of joy and fun and laughter. But if you read between the lines, she was also so determined to do as she pleased, that at times I didn’t like her and wondered why so many others liked her. It also killed her.”

Gable and Lombard are adored as American royalty wherever they go.

This is a bulletin to many: Carole Lombard lived a mortal existence and had shortcomings and frailties like we all do. She never wanted for money because she came from it, and so “spoiled” is a fair term. She did what she wanted with her life and if necessary could lean back on her heels and put up her dukes with any man who wanted a fight, including Hollywood moguls. She also most decidedly did put her own insecurity and self-interest ahead of the feelings of her traveling companions that last night in Indianapolis, with fatal results. So “willfully stubborn” certainly fits. Carole did bully Wink and Petey onto the fancy Sky Club that had taxied into the Indianapolis Municipal Airport. And she did it because of a very human, irrational, insecure, unLombard-like reaction to Lana Turner, a girl more than 10 years younger, petite, gorgeous, needy, and husband hunting. Ma was an intuitive creature, and could sense that Pa was hearing this siren’s song and liking the tones. She felt his distraction like she had never felt it in the chorines and bit players that had queued up previously for 15 or 30 minutes of the King’s time.

It was imperfect of Carole Lombard to react this way and force her mother and Otto Winkler onto a plane after promising both repeatedly that they would not have to fly on the bond tour. She strong-armed Petey onto the plane even though Petey knew the numerology was all wrong and she begged her daughter not to get onto the plane. Imagine, your mother begs you. And poor Otto had dreamt he would die if he got on a plane on this trip. It gives me chills even now to write that sentence.

Luckily, Carole found a writer who is also an apologist for human frailties. I don’t hold her stubbornness against her. I don’t hold Gable’s roving eye and “swordsman” tendencies against him. How could we do either? How dare we do either? It’s easy for us to sit here all these years later and tsk-tsk as we turn the pages and say how we would not have done these things and conveniently look past our own imperfect lives and the things we’ve done less than optimally. It wasn’t easy to be a Hollywood star. They worked six out of seven days a week at the whim of their studios and were forced into the limelight almost every night of the week. Imagine everywhere you go you’re assailed for autographs and people tear at your clothes. The first hour would be awesome; after that, not at all. Imagine you have total power over everyone you meet. How would it warp you? Not at all? Forgive me if I have my doubts. So, yeah, Carole Lombard threw her weight around and got on that plane and then in Albuquerque she refused to give up her three seat assignments even though the law required it. That’s willfully stubborn and a half! In her own mind there were compelling reasons why she needed to do what she did, just as there were compelling reasons why Clark needed the attention of every female in sight.

Hollywood-struck Hoosiers press in on Carole in Indianapolis the day before she will die.

I told Carole Lombard’s story without passing judgment on Carole Lombard and knowing her as I do, she wouldn’t give me as much as a “You can kiss my ass” about it. Somewhere on the other side of that cliff she ran into is an understanding that the train would have been better. There’s remorse over the fate of Petey and Wink and sorrow at letting her brothers and friends down, people she wanted to continue to see and love and cherish and support. Sorrow at deserting Clark and the ranch. Lessons always come at a price, and brother the price she paid. The price all these characters in Fireball paid for getting mixed up with dynamic, charge-straight-ahead Carole Lombard. Sure she was imperfect, but on balance no one ever quite got over her loss, not her husband or closest girlfriends or the grips on the pictures she made or anyone in between. All they would ever allow when they remembered the girl who lit up the sky as she streaked across it and then hit a granite cliff at 7,700 feet was, “That was Carole for you.” Human? Hell yes. Which is what made this a story, and why people can’t get enough of it.

At the Crossroads

When you enter the state of Indiana on President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System, you see a sign that says, “Welcome to Indiana, Crossroads of America.” Further probing into the state reveals that Indianapolis is also known as the Crossroads of America, so you’re really at the crossroads when you reach Indiana’s capital city. On Sunday I spoke at a quaint bookstore on Mass Ave in downtown Indianapolis called Indy Reads Books talking about Fireball and on Monday morning I appeared on CBS affiliate WISH-TV’s Indy Style talking more Fireball in general and Carole Lombard’s last day of life in particular. For Lombard it was a blur of a winter’s day with appearances from downtown at the Capitol Building to the tony northern suburbs.

Indianapolis is laid out crazily around a downtown circle much as Pierre Charles L’Enfant designed Washington DC, with diagonal streets laid over a city grid, and the diagonals intersecting in roundabouts here and there. I guess it’s no coincidence since L’Enfant disciple Alexander Ralston co-designed the street pattern of Indianapolis. It’s easy to argue that these guys were geniuses…or that these guys were just plain nuts. Indy’s got six-way intersections and more pedestrians that you can shake a stick at. Jaywalking seems to be a sport in Indianapolis, and some streets have bike lanes but all streets seem to have bicyclists—who don’t always behave predictably. Downtown motorists had better be on their toes all the time because fancy driving doesn’t just happen on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway; it happens all over Ralston’s complicated downtown system.

But I digress. I asserted on Indy radio, TV, and in person that Carole Lombard enjoyed two especially stellar days in a stellar life: her March 29, 1939 elopement with Clark Gable to Arizona, and her January 15, 1942 day selling war bonds in Indianapolis. Carole had to love everything about her time in Indy, where thousands of people treated her like a queen from the first instant to the last in a slate of appearances that ran like clockwork.

Getting started at Indy Reads Books.

An excellent Indianapolis Star feature by Will Higgins that heralded my lecture looked exclusively at the local angle on Lombard’s Indy trip, which was orchestrated by local businessman J. Dwight Peterson. I had seen the name in my research but didn’t call him out in Fireball, so Higgins’ article dovetails nicely with the narrative. I quickly learned in my Indy Reads lecture just how much the locals claim Lombard and how magical her day in town has remained over the decades. Attendees were very much into it, and included a rare father-daughter combo with the young lady maybe 13 and not too enthusiastic at the beginning, but the story is irresistible and before long she perked right up. I also met longtime Lombard-Gable fan Patricia Kennedy, who filled me in on some local particulars about the Lombard visit. It was a wonderful give and take of information—my national view and their local view, and I learned some things that will certainly make a future edition of Fireball.

My TV segment the next morning on Indy Style was more magic, as host Andi Hauser found herself engrossed in a copy of Fireball while prepping, and when I offered the exclusive Myron Davis Indianapolis photos as roll-ins with the segment, Brian, the director, snapped them up. How’s the saying go—Print anything you want about me; just spell my name right? I found out afterward that they spelled my name wrong in the super, and if you click the link it’s hideously misspelled still, but only because TV people live in a world where everything happens fast and the next thing is important and the thing that already happened isn’t. The meeting before airtime was maybe three minutes and the host, producer, and director asked brief questions and I knew to give brief answers because of the general state of hurry. But they treated me and Fireball very well, so Robert Matzum it is!

With Andi Hauser on CBS Channel 8’s Indy Style.

Afterward Mary and I sped down to the Capitol for a private tour of the Lombard hotspots, using Davis’s photos for visual reference. Jennifer Hodges and Rose Wernicke of the Tour Office helped us triangulate where Carole stood and handed out war bond receipts imprinted with her photo, personal message, and signature. It was near the office of Indiana Governor Henry Schricker, which made sense in terms of logistics. But Lombard and party were tucked away in a corner behind a makeshift wooden counter, outside a doorway. I asked Jennifer why that would have been. She thought a moment. “That’s the governor’s business office, so they would have been able to take her out that way afterward, down the stairs and outside without having to go out through the crowd.” Like I say: clockwork.

http://wishtv.com/2014/03/31/author-robert-matzum-fireball-carole-lombard-the-mystery-of-flight-3/

The 2014 view inside the Indiana State Capitol Building showing a glimpse of the same spot in 1942. The building was refurbished in the 1980s, so some of the appointments have changed–but not much.

Outside the building Mary and I easily found the spot where Carole stood on a makeshift platform for her speech that was covered by all the newsreel companies and by national radio. It was at the bottom of the steps near the east entrance, with the facade of the building unchanged today from what the Davis photos showed in 1942.

Our tour of Indianapolis was a clear success, and I can only hope the stop in Las Vegas next week goes as well. It will include some TV early in the week, followed by a lecture and signing on Saturday, April 12, at the Sahara West Library, with Potosi Mountain in full view. I know from writing the story how special Nevadans are; I’m hoping to meet some whose parents or grandparents participated in the search and recovery in 1942. Or maybe there are a couple hardy first responders still with us who can teach me a thing or two like the people of Indianapolis did just yesterday.

Carole Lombard delivers a speech outside the Indiana Capitol Building in 1942.

The same spot today.

Scarface Comes Across

I have a question in the category of “How the hell did they do that?” I’ve got a couple of appearances coming up in Indianapolis, this Sunday at Indy Reads Books on Massachusetts Avenue at 3:30 P.M., and Monday morning on Indy Style at 9 A.M. on WISH-TV. (Come out and see me!) In preparing for these appearances I’ve been studying the Myron Davis photos of Carole Lombard selling war bonds at the Indiana State House the day before she died. Davis took several shots of Lombard, one after another as she handed out receipts for bond sales. He was using his Speed Graphic camera, the most famous press camera of its day, with Kodak film, and the detail of these shots is incredible.

It was while studying the digital files that had been processed at 800 dpi from the original Kodak negatives that I realized, in some of the shots, you can see one of the scars on Carole Lombard’s face. It’s common knowledge that Carole’s face was sliced up by windshield glass in a freak car crash just after she turned 17. She had nearly bled to death that night, cut to the cheekbone on one side, upper lip nearly severed, and deep cuts close to the left eye. She had been put back together by a cosmetic surgeon, but the wounds were so egregious that for a long time afterward, she was despondent and wanted to die.

Detail of one of the Myron Davis photos shows the boomerang-shaped scar beside Carole Lombard’s left eye.

Here I was looking at the candid bond shots taken by Myron Davis, and I started to be aware of the scar by her left eye. It runs up beside the eye in the shape of a little boomerang, broad and milky as scars can be, and a good inch long. There are others that are visible now and again in photos, the big one on her cheekbone and another dimply scar beside her mouth. What astonishes me is that I can see the eye socket scar in these Davis photos, but you don’t notice them in motion pictures of the day. Granted she worked with hand-picked directors of photography who knew how to photograph their way around the scars but still, given all the physical comedy she did, all the closeups, where are the scars?

So that’s my “How the hell did they do that?” question of today. This was 60 years before the invention of computer software that would obliterate such imperfections in motion pictures performers, frame by frame. Somehow in the 1930s they did it with lighting that smoothed out the skin, and angles that hid the damage. And there was a lot of damage, as is evident by the shots taken in Indianapolis.

The same scar is visible in this screen capture from 1939, as is the scar on her cheek.

One of the first things people who met Carole Lombard face to face must have remarked to themselves was, “Whoa! Look at the scars!” Bogey had that scar on his lip, a souvenir of World War I. You’ll see a divot here and divot there on other stars too, and there are the painfully obvious examples of Montgomery Clift and Van Johnson, their boyish good looks butchered in car crashes worse than Lombard’s. But for a glamorous leading lady of the 1930s to be sporting facial scars and not caring, not letting them get in the way of a thriving career, allowing cameras to get in so very close—that’s something. Carole’s pal Alice Marble said, when asked about the scars, that they only accentuated her beauty, and I can see that. They were character lines, visible in life and once in a while on film. It’s interesting that scars are not what people saw when they looked at Carole Lombard. They saw something genuine that transcended flawless skin. Granted the girl had help from camera and lighting geniuses. She also had guts, and a personality that made sense of an occasional railroad track on her face. I just wonder if she would be given a chance today, when the press and style gurus are so quick to judge and label a woman as hideous for the slightest deviation from some standard of beauty that they themselves could never attain. I think Carole Lombard would have a quick two words for such people, and I think you know what those two words would be.

Presenting Clark Gable

I knew going into the writing of Fireball that understanding and presenting the real Clark Gable was going to be tough. Some people said this guy was electric in a one-to-one conversation; others said he was boring. How do you get inside the head of a bigger-than-life personality with a public persona crafted and maintained by the publicity department of MGM, the most powerful Golden Era Hollywood movie studio?

I read what there was. Gable biographer Lyn Tornabene helped on two fronts: her 1976 book Long Live the King provided key information about “Billy” Gable’s childhood and upbringing. Tornabene’s gesture of donating all her research materials to the Academy Library placed a great deal of previously unseen and unheard material at my fingertips, and I sifted through it like a geologist, discovering gem after gem. I talked to those few still around who knew Gable.

Fireball: Carole Lombard in Hollywood by Robert Matzen

Clark Gable before.

What emerged were two Clark Gables: there was the self-centered, spoiled-movie-star Gable that existed up until January 16, 1942, and the Gable that survived the crash of Flight 3 and the loss of Carole Lombard, Carole’s mother “Petey,” and Clark’s own best friend, press man Otto Winkler. Imagine for a moment the trauma of that event, especially since he felt partly responsible for actions that led his wife to feel compelled to rush home.

I was interviewed recently by Dick Dinman for his radio show that’s heard via podcast on TCM.com, among other places. Dick asked about my presentation of Gable and related a story about David Niven, whose wife died in a horrible accident. Dinman said that Gable went out of his way to console Niven, and Dick said that this episode was in no way consistent with my depiction of a self-centered movie star. BUT, I responded, it was perfectly consistent with the empathetic Clark Gable, the survivor of Flight 3 and that horrible weekend in Las Vegas.Did I capture the real Clark Gable? Proof came just this week from someone who would know, Hollywood novelist, screenwriter, and actor Steve Hayes, a friend of Gable and intimate of both Ava Gardner and Lana Turner. Steve read Fireball and here are his comments, in part:

“Gable’s character was well laid out and his many facets as a personality have been captured. Since I only knew him after her death, I’ve had to rely on others (Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner, etc.) to understand how he was before Carole died. I knew this wasn’t Rhett Butler I was talking to, a man whose charm and sex appeal and charisma were absolutely irresistible. But until Franchot Tone and Walter Pidgeon and others I’ve just mentioned told me how he was in real life before Carole’s death, I really had no way of judging how huge this change was.“I found Alan Ladd, whom I knew after working for 11 weeks on Botany Bay, and then occasionally bumping into him at Paramount and being invited to swim at his Holmby Hills home, equally sad inward, as if carrying a personal tragedy. I don’t know what his sadness was—I know he loved June Allyson and couldn’t break loose of Sue Carol—but it certainly wasn’t of the magnitude of Gable’s loss. But there was a definite similarity between them regarding a strange inner sadness.

Clark Gable after.

“Your portrayal of him is dead on. Anyone who met Gable always remembered how immaculate he was—clothes and toiletry, nails, shaven, etc.—and for a boy from the oil fields of Ohio, he’d certainly come a long, long way. He could still laugh, mostly it seemed at himself—I recall having lunch [at MGM] with Pidgeon, Tone and some other actor, and in came Gable, and he looked lost—in his own studio! But he brightened up when he saw us (not me, them) and readily joined our table. Everyone in the commissary turned and stared—and I have to admit it was one of the high moments of my life to be part of that group at that moment. Hell, The King had joined us!

“I don’t think that he really cared much about his life after Carole died. He was pretty much an alcoholic and chain smoker—as so many other stars were—and it’s symptomatic of the era. He once said about Flynn, “Well, he’s killing himself with cigarettes and booze—like most of us are.” Yet he was so wonderfully tolerant of Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits, constantly excusing her bad behavior in front of the others. So inwardly, he was a gentle giant, and a genuinely nice guy. Which is how I will always remember him.”

The always-immaculate Gable, seen at the Encino ranch in 1947. It was the place he felt closest to the one he called “Ma” and “Mrs. G.”