fireball carole lombard

To Tweet or Not to Tweet

I hate the sound of bagpipes. To me the sound of bagpipes is more torturous than the squeal of a feedbacky microphone, or the wail of a screaming baby, or the pounding and grinding of a dumpster being emptied in the middle of the night. It’s the top reason I’m not a fan of St. Patrick’s Day. I’m also not a fan of people going out and getting drunk obnoxiously when they could just as easily, no, more easily, stay home and drink in silence. So where have I been the past few days, you ask? I was waiting out St. Patrick’s Day in the Cone of Silence and now it’s the day after, and safe to come out.

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

My idea of hell.

I need to know. Do you people tweet? Do the cool kids these days tweet? It seems as if people must sit around watching TV with the remote in one hand and a phone in the other so they can report their thoughts in real time, and maybe if you’re a great pundit who has thoughts in real time that would be desirable, but if you’re just a guy or a girl and go reporting on how the ref made a non-call in a basketball game, is this a good thing?

My housemate has been railing for years that there’s too much communication in the world today, and the emergence of “Twitter wars” seems to bear this out. Someone disrespects someone else on Twitter, and suddenly a snarkfest is unleashed, often with no winner but just a lot of nasty messages hanging in the ozone. To me, Facebook is a fine thing and allows me to keep people at the far end of arm’s reach while still learning of their comings and goings. Facebook is perfect for the reclusive introvert, which I’m one of. I care about my friends, which doesn’t necessarily mean I want to talk to them all the time. Now I don’t have to: there’s Facebook.

But Twitter. Quite some time ago, Basil Rathbone authority Neve Rendell encouraged me to start tweeting. I thought, what the heck, why not, and I signed up on Twitter and got my handle (@robertmatzen) and guess what. I have only tweeted I believe one thing in my entire Twitter career, and that was a funny little something to a co-worker. I just couldn’t bring myself to tweet because who cares what I have to say? Why is my viewpoint important? Does the world need to know that I hate bagpipes? RT if U h8 bagpipes 2.* NO! I can’t murder the king’s English that way. I can’t go against the grain and reveal my loathing of an “instrument” played at heroes’ funerals!

I have seen an effective use for Twitter, and that’s to build a brand. If I were a comic attempting to build my brand, RT if U h8 bagpipes 2 would actually make sense. As a matter of fact, comedian Stephen Wright used to talk in tweets long before Twitter was born. But even if I were building a brand, I can’t see myself shamelessly self-promoting because reclusive introverts aren’t made that way. Ironically, I am building a brand and can’t make my thumbs use Twitter! You can see my conundrum.

Besides, with a subject matter like vintage Hollywood, my tweets would just be a litany of sadness.

Shirley Temple dead. Bummer.

Sid Caesar gone. Nooo!

Harold Ramis passed. Can’t B.

Robert Matzen, angel of death.

So please tell me, do you tweet? Are you on Twitter? Should I do this or not do this? I’d love a pro or a con from you, the most influential people in my life (other than she who lives with me). And most importantly, would you have RTed that U h8 bagpipes 2?

*RT = ReTweet

Raked by the Spotlight

Wow, the last 36 hours have been interesting. My publicist asked me in a phone meeting if I wanted to write a piece tying Fireball to Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. My first inclination was, of course I don’t. In no way do I want to exploit so obvious a tragedy, but some hours passed and she queried me again, prompting me with an article about unsolved air mysteries.

I banged out 500 words in 17 minutes and sent it off; in no time at all she told me Fox News had asked for an exclusive on my op-ed. And so was born my first national byline. Within minutes I was asked for radio interviews by Fox national radio and Voice of Russia, and then Relevant Radio in Minnesota. A national op-ed and three significant radio interviews resulted from the gut feeling of my publicist that my expertise connected with research into the 1942 crash of TWA Flight 3 in Nevada could be informative and maybe even important to this global story.

Sean Hannity saw the op-ed and asked me to appear with him on Fox TV today, but then the story shifted from air disaster to air what-the-hell? prior to my 6:30 P.M. interview slot at the studio in downtown Pittsburgh, and I was “pushed” to an indeterminate point in the future.

In the radio interviews of the past 24 hours, I have been asked interesting, thoughtful questions about air transportation in general because the current mystery is do deep, so engrossing, that humans struggle to grasp it. Sure there’s historical context related to TWA Flight 3: commercial air transportation still isn’t an exact science, and in a void of information, wild speculation fills that void, and pilots are highly trained and worthy of the benefit of the doubt, and most important, until we know otherwise, we keep hoping for a miracle.

Then I’m asked about Fireball, and I’m reminded how incredible this 1942 air mystery is, how enduring, and all of a sudden seasoned radio professionals are stunned, mesmerized, asking for more and more about something that’s 72 years old.

All I want to do is keep spreading the Fireball message: so many angles, so many people to honor—from those on the plane to first responders to investigators; so much relevance to the audience of 2014 for a story that originated before the middle of the last century.

No, we haven’t yet figured out air travel. Yes, fragile humans continue to strap themselves into tubes and wings and launch themselves into the upper atmosphere and rely on other humans to see them safely down again. I continue to watch with the rest of the world as this latest aviation mystery unfolds, and marvel at the ongoing mysteries of flight.

The Name Game

Hockey players nickname everybody. Locally, the National Hockey League Pittsburgh Penguins have a “Kuny,” a “Scuds,” a “Duper,” a “Tanger,” and a “Borts.” They do this at rinks all around the world. I’ve found no evidence that Carole Lombard ever played professional hockey, but hockey players would admire her penchant for nicknaming everyone, including her own mother. In fact, alternate names run so rampant in Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 that a reader I met in L.A. in January, Ruth Peeples, asked for the creation of a scorecard to keep all the nicknamed people in Carole’s life straight.

Since it’s impractical to drive around inserting a cheat sheet in every copy of the book in stores and warehouses, let’s take a moment and run them down here.

Carole’s mother was Elizabeth Peters, and you’d think that “Mom” would suffice, or “Mother,” but to Carole she was “Petey” or “Tots,” and mostly I used Petey in the book with an occasional Tots thrown in when looking at Elizabeth Peters from the perspective of her famous daughter. In unpublished interviews kept at the Academy Library, Alice Marble refers to Mrs. Peters entirely as “Petey,” including when Marble recounts conversations in which Carole referenced her mother…always as Petey.

Carole and Bucket

Carole knew her brother Fred as “Fritz” and her brother Stuart as “Tootey.” There wasn’t much Carole could do with close friend Dixie Pantages because Dixie already fit the bill, but her other best galpal, Madalynne Fields, became “Fieldsie” to Carole and then to everyone else in Hollywood. Jean Garceau, secretary to Clark and Carole Gable, was just “Jeanie,” but Loretta Francelle, the hairdresser who worked on all Carole’s pictures, was, picturesquely, “Bucket.” The people in Lombard’s universe knew they had arrived if they picked up a nickname, and I have to wonder if it was Carole who dubbed close friend Cesar Romero “Butch” because this one certainly has a Lombardesque ring to it.

Carole and Butch

When Carole took up tennis, her teacher, Elinor Tennant, became “Teach” first on the courts of Hollywood and then all over the world. Carole’s protégé Alice Marble, the TB-hospital refugee whom Carole sponsored to worldwide tennis stardom, including U.S. and Wimbledon championships, became “Allie.” Then Margaret Tallichet, whom Lombard sponsored for a career in pictures, became “Tallie.”

Carole and Teach

Carole’s men had nicknames too. You’d think “Bill” would suffice for first husband William Powell, but just to note their age difference of 17 years, Carole called him “Pops” or “Popsie,” and every once in a while, “Junior.” Her tempestuous year with crooner Russ Columbo saw each referring to the other as “Pookie,” and when Clark Gable came along and became husband number two, Carole didn’t go with the obvious “Clark” or even “King,” as in King of Hollywood. She called him “Pa” or “Pappy” or sometimes what Spencer Tracy called him, “Moose.” In turn, Gable referred to Carole as “Ma” or “Mrs. G.”

Carole and Pops

So this is for you, Ruth, a glossary of Carole Lombard’s nicknames for friends, family, and lovers. This is in no way comprehensive and I invite additions.

…not to be confused with Carole and Pappy

Allie – Alice Marble, tennis star
Bucket – Loretta Francelle, Carole’s hairdresser
Fieldsie – Madalynne Fields, Carole’s friend, housemate, confidante, and secretary
Fritz – Frederick Peters II, Carole’s eldest brother
Jeanie – Jean Garceau, secretary to the Gables
Junior – William Powell (alternate to “Pops” and “Popsie”)
Moose – Clark Gable (alternate to “Pa”)
Pa or Pappy – Clark Gable
Petey – Elizabeth Peters, Carole’s mother
Pookie – Russ Columbo
Pops or Popsie – William Powell
Tallie – Margaret Tallichet, Paramount PR girl who became a leading lady
Teach – Elinor Tennant, Carole’s tennis instructor
Tootey – Stuart Peters, Carole’s elder brother
Tots or Totsie – Elizabeth Peters, Carole’s mother (alternate to “Petey”)

Riding the Wave

This past Tuesday I did a local Fireball lecture/book signing on Pittsburgh’s North Side and then introduced a showing of the 1936 screwball comedy My Man Godfrey with William Powell and Carole Lombard. It’s been a while since I visited 1011 Fifth Ave. and Tuesday marked the first time I’ve ever seen Godfrey in a public setting.

Pittsburgh is the home of William Powell, or to be precise, William Powell hails from Allegheny City, which was once Pittsburgh’s sister city before being gobbled up via hostile takeover in 1908. But that’s another story. And my ancestors hail from Allegheny City after coming off the boat from Germany in 1844, but that’s yet a third story. For now let’s stick to the fact that Powell met the world as a bouncing baby boy in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, and spent his childhood there and some of his best pictures are being shown publicly in a series running two months in a church on the very streets he once walked. I was invited to introduce My Man Godfrey because of Fireball, a book about Carole Lombard that covers her brief and turbulent marriage to Mr. Powell and their close friendship that endured to her death. In fact, the couple had been divorced for more than two years when Universal offered Powell My Man Godfrey, and he said he would take the part only if his ex-wife was offered the co-starring role.

Map of Allegheny City, home of actor William Powell and site of a showing of Carole Lombard's My Man Godfrey.

Allegheny City was once Pittsburgh’s elegant sister. The showing took place roughly at the T in City.

The pro-Powell crowd was into My Man Godfrey, which is a loud, sometimes frenetically paced picture. In a nutshell, the zany Bullock family of Fifth Avenue, New York City, has way more dollars than sense and lives extravagantly, frivolously, and foolishly among Big Apple’s elite. On a whim daughter Irene rescues a “forgotten man” named Godfrey off the city dump and gives him a job as their butler not knowing he is a Bostonian from old money who had fled a bad relationship by deciding to live among honest bums by the East River. Or maybe it’s the Hudson.

Carole Lombard and William Powell in My Man Godfrey.

Carole Lombard and William Powell pose for a My Man Godfrey publicity photo. Both acknowledged that they made excellent friends and terrible spouses.

Familiar character actors populate the sets. Gravel-voiced Eugene Pallette plays the head of the household, a reasonable man who processes things in practical fashion but is no match for his shrill wife Angelica, scheming older daughter Cornelia (Gail Patrick), and capricious younger daughter Irene. Alice Brady plays the wife as if she’s off her Prozac. Brady was a fine actress and stage veteran, but the other night it occurred to me that a little of Angelica goes a long way.

Carole Lombard and other cast members of My Man Godfrey, a motion picture described in Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 by Robert Matzen

Mischa Auer as Carlo takes the spotlight in this scene also showing Lombard as Irene, Alice Brady as Angelica, and Gail Patrick as Cornelia.

I was curious about the reaction of my companions, including my friend Eric, who had never seen a Lombard picture, to Carole and her performance. He was quite taken, commenting on the subtlety of her playing and command of the screen even when confined to the background. Lombard would call Irene “the most difficult part I ever played. Because Irene was a complicated and, believe it or not, essentially a tragic person.”

My Man Godfrey is really Powell’s vehicle and he gets most of the attention, with Carole hemmed in by Irene’s pining for Godfrey through half the run time. She’s really part of an ensemble cast that assures Powell his picture will work. These players keep the plot moving along as they toss off classic one liners that stand the test of time. Strength of cast is measured by the sweep of Oscar nominations in all four acting categories—Powell, Lombard, Brady, and Mischa Auer as “Mother’s protégé,” the freeloading concert pianist Carlo. Director Gregory LaCava was also Academy Award-nominated for My Man Godfrey, as were screenwriters Eric Hatch and Morrie Ryskind.

Scene from My Man Godfrey, which is featured in Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 by Robert Matzen

Godfrey is oblivious to the fact that both Irene and Molly the household maid (portrayed by Jean Dixon) are in love with him.

I can only imagine how many William Powell and Carole Lombard fans were born of stumbling into this picture halfway through on the late show or TCM. The household at 1011 Fifth Avenue (which was the name of the novella by Eric Hatch on which the screenplay was based) is a charming and friendly place and if you watch any 30 seconds of this film you’ll be re-upping for 30 more until you’re hooked.

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

Publicity photo of the screwball queen, Carole Lombard.

I’m amazed by the light in people’s eyes when they learn that Fireball is all about Lombard. This actress, gone 72 years now, continues to haunt popular culture to a degree I never expected. If you Google Fireball and Carole Lombard you come up with pages and pages of hits, largely because people are out there responding to the book and chattering afresh about the queen of screwball. I pinch myself frequently that no writer had done a fresh take on her in almost 40 years, and I get the feeling we’ve only scratched the surface of what might be a significant Lombard resurgence ahead.

Crossing Over

When the idea of Fireball came to my attention, the seed planted in my head by pal John McElwee, and I started investigating elements of the story, I couldn’t believe that some writer hadn’t already turned it into a book. The more I looked at the event, the more angles I found, so many in fact that when I talked to writer Scott Eyman about the idea, he sat there stunned and murmured, “That’s commercial. That’s commercial.”

Considering that Scott had written the bestseller Lion of Hollywood about Louis B. Mayer among many other successful biographies, and experienced the publishing landscape from a lofty perch, that reaction affected me. I realized then that I was writing something that had the potential to cross over into the mainstream. It’s one thing to write a niche book about Errol Flynn’s house, a book you know will appeal primarily to Flynn’s fans and secondarily to Hollywood buffs in general and perhaps fans of Rick Nelson, the last owner of the house. It’s something else to find a concept with the potential to jump niches and find a broader audience.

But in establishing the parameters of the Lombard story, I felt I had something akin to A Cast of Killers, Sidney Kirkpatrick’s account of the 1922 murder of silent-film director William Desmond Taylor. After its 1986 release, A Cast of Killers reached an audience far broader than those interested in old Hollywood. It’s been 25 years since I read it, but I remember I couldn’t stop turning the pages of a spooky mystery that felt so authentic I could smell the must of an aging Mary Miles Minter’s home. I aspired to take the readers of Fireball to a similar place where the pages had minds of their own and demanded to keep on turning as the complex story unfolded.

And Fireball is complex. It’s a juicy dual biography of two juicy people, Carole Lombard and Clark Gable. It’s about Hollywood’s glamorous golden age in the time of My Man Godfrey and Gone With the Wind. It’s about scandal for what Gable did with Lana Turner and what Carole felt compelled to do in response. It’s about 21 other people—all the souls aboard Flight 3 with Lombard as it lifts off one last time in Las Vegas on a course for Burbank, California. It’s about lives interrupted on the ground in Vegas when a fireball suddenly appears on the southwestern horizon and about heroism as brave men rush to the spot of the fireball in hopes of finding survivors of what they know to be a plane crash. It’s a true crime story as victims are plotted and the scene is scoured for evidence. It’s a mystery as investigators try to determine how in the world TWA’s most experienced pilot controlling its most reliable aircraft on a clear night could fly straight into a mountainside. It’s about aviation now in adolescence after a childhood spent barnstorming, and of how they still can’t quite figure out how to make air transportation run. It’s the story of a world war newly begun for the United States, of sacrifice for the cause, of a great call to action. Perhaps most of all it’s romance—a king, a queen, a love lost.

I had the equivalent of a basket of parts and looked at the basket and wondered how to make this story work. Should I tell it as straight biography? Carole Lombard’s life from birth to death, from stem to stern, from 1908 to 1942? I couldn’t imagine it that way because lives are experienced chronologically, but stories are not. This needed to be a story, like A Cast of Killers. One scene kept playing in my mind, on an endless loop: Night in the flat basin of desert. Cold, lonely, quiet night. A plane flies overhead. I hear it more than see it. Then I spot running lights. The plane flies right over me and off into the distance, and the growl of its engines spreads out and echoes and then goes away.

Carole Lombard Flight 3 crash site, Potosi Mountain, Nevada

Flight 3 slammed into Potosi just below the ridge line at right center, in the saddle of the mountain.

A plane flies over. No big deal, right? We all experience planes flying over at all hours. But Flight 3 flying over? That’s a hook. That, I realized, was where the narrative of Fireball had to begin. The plane flies over, people who witness it go back to the task of the moment, and a little later a fireball is seen on Potosi Mountain in the distance. If the chapter ends there, tell me you don’t have to turn the page.

Then and only then, with the forward push established, could I flash back to start telling the story of Carole Lombard’s life and how she got to be on that plane and in that fireball. Flash back to a portion of her life. Flash forward to those moments on the ground in Las Vegas. Back. Forth. I knew this was risky because the reader would be jarred every time, practically a fender bender each time it happened. But it’s a jarring story anyway for so many reasons, so why not go with it? So I did.

One of the first reviews of the galleys was from Library Journal and I awaited it the way a political candidate awaits the votes. Guess what: the LJ reviewer made it a point to hate this construction above all the other things that annoyed him about Fireball. He didn’t damn it with praise, faint or otherwise, he just damned it. And then he recommended that Fireball be added to library collections. Go figure.

I won’t lie; his criticisms stung, and I had to wonder if I had miscalculated. He also said I “did the writerly thing” and presumed to know what was going on in people’s heads. I took umbrage at that one because I did know what was going on in people’s heads. I had researched this thing so thoroughly and found so much detail that I didn’t have to make up what people were thinking, saying, and doing. I had it in 2,000 pages of official testimony about the crash. Plus I had dug up so much on Lombard and Gable that I knew their characters inside and out and from every other angle.

There were a few other pans of Fireball, but just a few. Praise for the book poured in from the start, from the time it hit NetGalley in September, and by now I’m feeling vindicated by the positive comments in reviews and by those I’ve heard in person at book events. I don’t prompt people to talk about the story construction; they can’t help but tell me they love the way the story unfolds and often it’s the first thing they have to say about the book. I guess the lesson is, trust your gut. If it feels right, go with it.

I knew as I was writing Fireball that it was the book of my lifetime, to date at least. I dreamed about the characters, received break after break, met great, helpful people, and Fireball became an inferno in my computer. That doesn’t happen many times in a writer’s career. Will it cross over? It shows signs, but since GoodKnight Books isn’t Simon & Schuster, the headwinds remain strong, and only time will tell.

Fear of Flying

I didn’t expect to be writing another column about Mary Johnson Savoie, the girl who lived, but she passed on Thursday night, two weeks shy of her 95^th birthday. To refresh your memory, Mary is a survivor of TWA Flight 3, the DC-3 that crashed on January 16, 1942 killing 22 people, including Carole Lombard. No, Mary didn’t walk away from the crash. She was bumped from the flight during a refueling stop and a serviceman with priority status took her seat. The serviceman died; Mary did not.

A local California newspaper reporter wrote on January 17, 1942, “Today, Carole Lombard, idol of millions, is dead, and little Mary Anna Johnson of Benicia, whom millions do not know, is still alive. In a little New Mexico city called Albuquerque, Fate held out its hand—and then waved back Mary Johnson.”

How Mary Johnson did live. Survivor’s guilt? She felt sorry for those who perished, but chose to look on the bright side, summing up decades later, “I’ve always been lucky.”

Fear of Flying? That would be natural after such a close brush with death. Not Mary. She loved to fly before the crash and loved to fly after it. “I took a plane to San Francisco the next day,” she said with a shrug. “No problem.” Then she added, “Some people might have taken the train, but trains have crashes too.”

In an era where women aspired to find a good man and settle down, Mary graduated from college and became a working girl. After the war, she told me, grudgingly it seemed, she “met a Cajun” and that was it for her career. Lee Savoie snagged the girl who lived, and they were married for a while and had a son. But the marriage didn’t take and they divorced—and remained close friends for the remainder of Mary’s life. Mary had a lot of friends and a wonderful family, and they represent the finest group of people I have ever met.

Mary’s friend Pamela Weir said of her back in December: “Mary has a spirit of adventure. She finds adventure in everyday life, always. It could be going to lunch, but there’s always adventure. She creates it or she finds it.” In fact, Mary loved the experience of helping with Fireball, and being a part of the narrative, and holding a copy in her hands. She found working with me to be yet another adventure.

Marie Earp is the one who connected me with Mary’s family, allowing her story to be included in Fireball. Said Marie, “Mary is and always was lovely, daring, exciting, and chock full of life. I think she did it all at one time or another. Carole Lombard was ‘another Mary’ in my book.”

Marie makes a great point: Mary and Carole were peas of a pod and shared many traits. Both were attractive, energetic, humorous, met life head-on, took each day as it came, loved hard, and surrounded themselves with people of high quality. I can’t say whether Mary lived life recklessly like Carole did because I only met Mary near the end of her life. Then again, if you get to almost 95, it means you made a great number of right decisions and no fatal ones.

In the photo above, Mary (in plaid skirt) clowns in Lombard fashion with an aeronautics researcher reluctant to return a research document he had borrowed from the NACA library at Moffett Field, California.

For this column I tracked down Mary’s own encapsulation of a long, successful life as related to me. “I can sum it up in a sentence,” said Mary. “I rode a camel to the pyramids of Egypt; I rode an elephant in India; I rode the Bullet Train in Japan; and I walked the Great Wall of China.”

Mary’s story reveals what was lost with the crash of Flight 3. Of the 22 people killed, 20 were under 40 years of age and most were in their 20s, as was Mary. These people were highly accomplished and on their way to destinations far beyond Burbank, where the DC-3 was scheduled to land. But, as Carole herself said on a number of occasions, “When your number’s up, your number’s up.” Twenty-two died on that remote mountaintop, while Fate granted Mary another 72 years and 1 month.

I’m not going to say that the world is a poorer place because Mary Johnson Savoie has left it. In fact, the world is a far better place for Mary having been here. Mary’s story lives on in Fireball and her spirit lives on in those fortunate enough to call her “Mom” or “Grandma” or “friend.” Boy, am I lucky to have been a friend, even if only for a little while.

The Girl Who Lived

I have done a lot of public speaking in support of Fireball, most recently this past Sunday at Way Public Library in Perrysburg, Ohio, just south of Toledo. I looked out on a large and enthusiastic crowd, especially for a snowy Sunday afternoon in the middle of the worst winter anyone can remember.

In case you don’t know, Fireball is the irresistible story of Carole Lombard’s hurly-burly life and the circumstances that led to her last fatal trip aboard TWA Flight 3 along with 21 other souls, which ended in catastrophe just west of Las Vegas on January 16, 1942. Reviewers are calling Fireball a thriller, a page turner, a heartbreaker, and a book that’ll make you cry. It really is. I didn’t realize it myself until I reviewed the audiobook and heard the story performed by national voice talent Tavia Gilbert.

But there are some smiles in Fireball too. On Sunday in Perrysburg I told the crowd that I had found a survivor of Flight 3, a woman who had flown cross-country with Carole Lombard on January 16 and lived to tell the tale. You should have seen their faces. Mouths hung open. There were even some gasps. I always liken this survivor to hundred-year-old Rose Dawson whose memories form the basis for the plot of Titanic. Mary Johnson is my Rose Dawson, and at age 94 the unknown survivor of a catastrophe.

Mary was, of all things, a young aviation researcher working for the feds and NACA (the precursor to NASA) at Moffett Airfield, California. She had been on assignment in Washington, DC, and was heading for home that fateful day. To show you what a small world we live in, I worked in the same wind tunnel (the 7×11 wind tunnel) at Moffett Field in 2007 and 2008 during my NASA years that Mary had worked in during World War II.

Mary was in her seat on Flight 3 when Carole Lombard, Elizabeth Peters (Carole’s mom), and Otto Winkler (Clark Gable’s publicist) boarded in Indianapolis. Mary then flew all the way to Albuquerque sitting two rows behind Carole, enduring stops in St. Louis, Kansas City, Wichita, and Amarillo. These weren’t fun stops either. There were weather and cargo delays for the plane and Miss Carole Lombard was anything but happy.

In Albuquerque a big clot of Army Air Corps personnel needed to fly west and all seven civilians on Flight 3 were ordered off the plane to make room for these priority passengers. Mary Johnson and three others gave up their seats; Carole Lombard refused to surrender her three tickets, so she stayed on the plane, and Mary Johnson’s dream of seeing Clark Gable up ahead in Burbank ended in what was the worst moment of her young life. Then the unthinkable happened and, said Mary Johnson, “Suddenly Clark Gable didn’t seem that important.”

I caught up with Mary Johnson Savoie near the end of the Fireball project. She’s right up there with the most interesting people I’ve ever met—smart, funny, and possessing vivid memories of that winter’s day. Just a couple of weeks prior to seeing Carole, Mary had been at the White House where she laid eyes on FDR and Winston Churchill, and after living through the crash of Flight 3 she went on to a rich full live with a husband and kids and became a world traveler. Hers is one of the central storylines in Fireball and yet another of a hundred layers of irony in its pages.

For me it was the biggest kick in the world to hand deliver a copy of the book to Mary this past December, and it was clear to me by the wonderful people surrounding her that Mary is a wonderful person herself and glows with an attitude that embraces life. She has been known to say, “I’ve always been lucky,” but isn’t luck really about the decisions a person makes that sets the stage for magic to happen?

Right now, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Mary is having some health challenges, and I hope you will take a moment to send some positive energy her way. The world needs Mary Johnson Savoie to be up and around and setting an example for all of us to follow, keeping it positive, showing us how to set the stage for good things to happen, and in general making the most of every single day because we just don’t know how many there’ll be.

Fireball’s Companion Piece

Please tell me I’m not the only one who loves The High and the Mighty, John Wayne’s 1954 aviation picture made by his independent production company, Wayne-Fellows, and released and distributed by Warner Bros. I find The High and the Mighty to be an irresistible experience specifically because of writing Fireball and becoming immersed in mid-century aviation. Not much had changed between 1942 when TWA Flight 3 went down and the world of commercial aviation of 1954 as seen in the picture, when a flight departs Hawaii heading for San Francisco and all hell breaks loose.

By 1954 the quad-engined Douglas DC-4 had replaced the twin-engined DC-3, but both NC 1946, the DC-3 in Fireball, and the DC-4 seen in The High and the Mighty rolled off the Douglas Corp. assembly line in Santa Monica and first flew from Clover Field, also in Santa Monica. However, the DC-3 cockpit crew had been augmented by 1954; in addition to a pilot and co-pilot, the crew now included a navigator.

We get some nice exteriors of the Glendale Grand Central Terminal filling in for Hawaii and lots of shots inside an airport terminal of 1954, with its desk and station man and the stewardess on hand to get to know the passengers as they check in. It is a glamorous world of flight depicted here, with men in suits and ties and women in dresses and heels for their ocean-hopping commute. The pilots chain-smoke in the cockpit, and when a passenger pulls out a cigarette, the stewardess is there instantly with a light.

The High and the Mighty has some interesting parallels to Flight 3, which carried 22 people to their deaths. The DC-4 seated 44 passengers but the flight depicted in the picture carried 5 crew members (including an alternate pilot for the long flight) and 16 passengers for a total of 21. There was one stewardess on board, and she reminds me very much of Alice Getz of Flight 3. Co-pilot “Whistling Dan” Roman, portrayed by John Wayne, is described as an old barnstormer and airmail pilot who turned to commercial aviation. It’s a description that fits Flight 3 Captain Wayne Williams to a T. A backstory in The High and the Mighty (one of many) has Roman surviving the catastrophic loss of a DC-3 he had piloted, a crash not dissimilar to that of Flight 3. As a result, Roman is busted back to co-pilot, and nobody quite trusts him. But at the critical point in the picture, it’s Roman who doesn’t crack because he’s been there before, and his experience pays off.

The flight crew mesmerizes me: Doe Avedon as stewardess Miss Spalding; William Campbell as the brash young 20-something alternate pilot; Wally Brown as the nervous burnout navigator; Wayne as the too-old co-pilot; and my old pal Robert Stack as the captain who’s highly skilled but just a little too willing to fold when dealt a bad hand.

In a nutshell, TOPAC Flight 420 is flying east toward San Francisco from Hawaii and past the point of no return when an engine flames out, spilling fuel into the Pacific. It’s clear that the crew will have to ditch their plane hundreds of miles short of land and hope for rescue, and yet there’s a chance to reach the coast on remaining fuel if they can lighten the load and if tailwinds become favorable.

William Wellman directed an ensemble cast that included many heavy- and middle-weight motion picture actors of the golden age, headlined by Claire Trevor as a blonde show business star in furs not unlike you-know-who. Much of the goings-on don’t fit two-fisted Wellman, like the long, syrupy exchanges of dialogue revealing character backstories, with overdone reaction shots straight out of the days of silent cinema. Sure this becomes tedious in places and, yes, inspired some scenes in the 1980 masterpiece spoof, Airplane. But the screenplay’s got a lot of heart and before long we care about these souls who may soon be tossed into the sea. Up ahead at TOPAC headquarters in San Francisco, operations manager Regis Toomey waits. In real life both my parents knew Regis Toomey, who hailed from their Pittsburgh stomping grounds and went to Pitt some years prior to my dad’s arrival there. Talk had it that one of my mom’s friends dated Regis Toomey and so I always see him as a part of the family, and never was he better than here portraying the cranky, cigar-chomping airline official waiting to see if crisis-control will be necessary because his plane has gone into the drink.

CinemaScope adds a lot to the proceedings, as when the giant beast of a plane growls right at and then over camera on takeoff, filling the screen wingtip to wingtip. When you see magnificent shots of this big airliner lost in wide angles of blue skies and cloud tops, you understand where James Cameron may have gotten his shot of tiny Titanic from high in the sky and far off, lights blazing, against a big, ebony canvas of ocean.

I can’t get Dimitri Tiomkin’s musical score out of my head. It’s full of big, bold, blockbuster themes, one of which spawned several runaway hit records upon the film’s release.

I spent a lot of time in Fireball putting Flight 3’s last transcontinental trip in context: 15 years after Lindy crossed the Atlantic; 12 years after the first instrument landing; 11 years after the crash that killed Knute Rockne; 4 years after the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. Think about what you were doing 15 years ago, and 12, and 11, and 4. It’s a compressed timeframe for the evolution of something as important as aviation, with our corporeal selves suddenly high up in the air and vulnerable to going splat at any moment.

Flight 3 went splat at a time when the government and airlines were still figuring out how planes flew in the first place and what rules and regulations would assure that they stayed up and didn’t come down all-of-a-sudden-like. As a result, and as demonstrated in The High and the Mighty, flight crews received training on every contingency, including the loss of an engine and fuel dump on a long-distance flight, and how to ditch to save as many passengers as possible. By now, they had also figured out that a pilot and co-pilot had plenty to do without also navigating, and so airlines added a third man to the DC-4 crew whose job was to calculate head and tail winds, load, fuel consumption, course, and position, and feed this information constantly to the men in command of the ship. Everything just listed became a factor in the crash of Flight 3 when pilot and co-pilot had their hands full trying to get their over-packed ship with the movie star and Army fliers efficiently west toward a final destination. There they were, powering up to cruising altitude on a moonless night when disaster struck—disaster that would have been averted with a navigator on board to tend to little details like terrain and compass heading.

Ernest K. Gann, author of the novel The High and the Mighty, had been flying DC-2s and DC-3s for American Airlines at the time Flight 3 was lost, and the aero details in the picture are fantastic. The crew flying into San Francisco knows the altitude of the hills and radio towers on final approach because it’s their job to know, so this deepens the mystery of Flight 3 because those pilots knew the altitude of the terrain around Vegas. It was their job to know. When we see Stack, Wayne, and Campbell at the controls, it feels absolutely authentic because a pilot wrote the words and described the actions.

The crash of Flight 3 was a game changer in commercial aviation and well-known background for Gann since he was flying DC-3s and would have been briefed on the findings of the investigation. At one point in The High and the Mighty, Campbell and Avedon are talking about a DC-4 trying to ditch in the Pacific and fatalist Campbell says of a water landing, “You might as well crash into a mountain.” When John Wayne proposes that they not ditch and instead try to make it to SFO, Campbell reminds him, “This isn’t seat-of-your-pants flying days,” and that Wayne should “go back to your helmet and goggles.” It’s classic conflict: youth not respecting the experience of one who had flown way back in the era of the biplane and is therefore of no value flying modern ships in modern times. But it had been Wayne who first noticed vibrations signaling engine trouble; vibrations that meant nothing to Campbell.

I intended Fireball as an ode to the 22 companions on that TWA DC-3. As with the characters in The High and the Mighty, every passenger and crew member on Flight 3 gets (at the very least) one moment to shine in the book because I wanted to honor them all. I feel that John Wayne’s movie can also be viewed as a salute to Flight 3 in glorious CinemaScope and WarnerColor as the determined pilots of a doomed airliner overcome grim odds and bring their ship home safely. It doesn’t take much imagination to see Capt. Williams and First Officer Gillette walking down the steps to look up at the belly of their DC-3 after a safe landing in Burbank like Stack and crew do at the end of The High and the Mighty. In my alternate universe, TWA Flight 3’s “ancient pelican” of a skipper gets to whistle safely off into the darkness as the music swells, his mission accomplished and his passengers all delivered safe. It’s a nice alternate ending for a real-life heartbreaker of a story, and so I guess my imagination helps to make the last scene of The High and the Mighty such a spectacular, smile-worthy, spine-tingling payoff.

Titan of the Twentieth Century

I had prepared another column to kick off my new blog, but learned that Shirley Temple had passed on last evening. The news hit me hard because every second I’ve been on the planet, I’ve been sharing it with Shirley Temple. Shirley Temple was a given, and now she’s not.

For anyone around my age (whatever that may be), Shirley Temple is half moppet and half cliché. My generation knows what an icon she was during the Depression. The generation behind mine is vaguely aware that once there was a child star named Shirley Temple. The generation after that hasn’t a clue what power the letters S-H-I-R-L-E-Y T-E-M-P-L-E wielded on a theater marquee from 1934 through 1938. This knee-high kid, around three-feet tall at her most popular, made tens of millions for 20^th Century Fox and became the first personality, real or imagined, to have her likeness and adorable little self spun off into all manner of product, from the highly profitable Shirley Temple Doll to paper dolls to coloring books, magazines, writing tablets, record albums, and more. Whatever Shirley Temple was selling, people lined up to buy.

Then came this unwelcome thing called adolescence. As Shirley neared it, she started to grow and the cute factor reduced from a million to about, well, zero. I guess audiences experienced letdown that she dared be biological, and then betrayal that Fox continued to wardrobe this suddenly gangly 11 year old in little-girl dresses and force her to affect the time-tested pout and delivery. Boy, it must have been awkward for the masses, for Fox, and for Shirley and her mother, to spend years beating back the fame monster—and then to be dismissed by Fox and on the outside, hearing nothing but crickets.

Unexpectedly, puberty was kind to Shirley. Very kind. She re-emerged working for Selznick in 1944, and then made pictures here and there through the 1940s and became a hottie, which produced a new paradox: Wouldn’t any guy be a dirty old man for thinking the recent-moppet sexy?

With nothing left to prove in pictures and caught as she was in that purgatory of grown-up child star, she walked away from Hollywood at 21 and aspired to matrimony and motherhood. What a life she went on to live! In 1972 she experienced breast cancer and moved right past it, saying, “I have much more to accomplish before I am through.” She justified that pronouncement by becoming U.S. Ambassador to Ghana and then U.S. Chief of Protocol. She wrote her autobiography, Child Star, in 1988 and earned a SAG Life Achievement Award in 2006.

My own brush with Shirley Temple came in 1989 when I requested an autograph by mail. She was at that time akin to the Soup Nazi of autographs. If you followed certain protocol and sent a still photo and return envelope, you stood a reasonable chance to get something back. I did, and I did, a bold signature on a still of tiny moppet Shirley riding the shoulders of Carole Lombard. Shirley Temple Black read the signature, along with the year. When I first held it in my hands I could feel the weight of history, of greatness, but then I went back to taking Shirley Temple for granted, secure I guess in the knowledge she would always be around. After all, wasn’t she just a child star, so really, how old could she be? Well, old enough, I guess, because now she’s moved on, and we are left to reflect on a titan of the Twentieth Century. In fact, the littlest titan of all.