fireball carole lombard

The Good, the Bad, and the (so) Ugly (it’s GREAT)

You know those pictures that are so good in places it’s like sex and so bad in places it’s irresistible? The best example I can think of is Titanic. There are moments in Titanic that are so damn good and moments that are so damn bad. Those match dissolves from underwater wreck Titanic to 1912 Titanic and back again are spellbinding. Almost every scene with Gloria Stuart pops because she makes the stereotypical doddering old-woman canny and unpredictable. These things are on the one hand. On the other is Billy Zane, an otherwise fine actor who stumbles through Titanic trying to figure out how to play rich-boy Cal. He’s so bad he’s mesmerizing! David Warner as Cal’s sadistic butler is right up there in awfulness as a walking, talking bad-guy stereotype. The bottom line for me is picture-making on a grand scale and the vision of one driven man—a man who sometimes bites off more than he can chew. But I admire the fact that James Cameron swung for the fences just as hard as Selznick did with Gone With the Wind. And hit a box-office home run, just like Selznick.

Kate Winslet and Billy Zane in Titanic. In a moment he will grow melodramatic and sweep the table clean, ruining many dishes in an otherwise peaceful moment.

There’s another motion picture like this for me. The Greatest Show on Earth, Cecil B. DeMille’s homage to all things circus. Today, the general consensus is that clowns are creepy—why America didn’t realize this a hundred years earlier, I don’t know. But once upon a time the circus represented an alternative lifestyle and huge entertainment every time it hit town. I never had any interest in the circus. I went one time as a little kid, Cole Brothers I think, with a big top, trapeze artists, clowns, all the rest of it. The only reason I went was they had a contest for coloring the clown and I stayed inside the lines and got a free ticket. Come to think of it, I tried cotton candy for the first time at that circus and haven’t had it since. Even at age seven I knew cotton candy to be too messy for a Virgo.

Anyway, I’m no circus freak, but you can sign me up for DeMille’s bigtop anytime. There’s a terrific documentary on DeMille here—check it out sometime to see the ultimate showman/filmmaker. And here’s the incredible trailer for The Greatest Show on Earth. The hardest thing for me to believe is that C.B. ever died! This larger-than-life powerhouse human and Hollywood mastermind of not one but two versions of The Ten Commandments up and died! Ceased to be! I’m sure he’s as surprised as the rest of us at this revolting man-bites-dog turn of events because people like Cecil B. DeMille should get some sort of exemption from human decline and just go on doing brilliant things. I guess the perception of DeMille as an immortal deity is enhanced by his growling narration on his pictures, Grandfather telling us a five-million-dollar bedtime story, full of surreal spectacle filling the screen long before C.G., along curvaceous, bejeweled women and noble, or hateful, or lustful men. If you watch a DeMille picture, that gravel voice stays with you, or it does me, and suddenly C.B. is narrating my drive to work “as the brawny hills of Pittsburgh shake off their night’s peaceful slumber and a restless giant awakens into the orangish hues of dawn.” DeMille’s brilliance gets in your head, I’m telling you. Come to think of it, he made a picture about early Pittsburgh called Unconquered that, as a colonial historian, made me roll over in my grave, and I’m not even dead yet.

Charlton Heston’s Brad Braden may be jealous of the way the Great Sebastian is carrying on with Holly but it’s hard to tell because Heston just comes off as nuts.

So yes, C.B. was brilliant, but with qualifications. Even by 1952 standards The Greatest Show on Earth was nailed as a big-old can of corny nonsense, which audiences ate up, making Greatest Show a box-office smash, winner of the Best Picture Academy Award, and generator of imitations for a decade to come. Greatest Show proved to have legs through re-releases in 1960 and 1967, and Steven Spielberg claims it as the first picture he ever saw, age 4—a picture that changed the history of entertainment. He says as a filmmaker, and with glee, “I lost my cherry to Cecil B. DeMille!”

When I learned Greatest Show was playing on Retro the other night I knew I was a goner, and the moment the music began, a swarm of goosebumps consumed me. I’ve got ‘em again just thinking about it. C.B. had me in his grip and didn’t release me until 2.5 hours later when heroic Holly sang the title tune and survivors of the spectacular train wreck lured townspeople to “come to the circus – the greatest show on earth!” The show must go on after all. Goosebumps.

James Jimmy Stewart in The Greatest Show on Earth

James Stewart as Buttons, the only crown I never thought was a creepy killer who would murder me in my sleep.

Of particular interest at this point in my life is James Stewart’s role of a mercy-killer on the run hiding in the circus as a clown who never takes off his makeup. It only sounds ridiculous because it is, but watch the picture and tell me it doesn’t work because Stewart brings to the role quiet wisdom, quiet vulnerability that pays off when he saves the circus boss’s life in the last reel.

Charlton Heston is that circus boss, Brad Braden, and he’s spectacularly over the top; practically the blueprint for Billy Zane. Throughout the 1950s Heston went from zero to Moses in a second; didn’t matter who he was playing, whether he was fighting ants in the jungle or pharaoh in Egypt or the British at New Orleans. He played it BIG with a capital BIG, bellowing his love scenes with fragile Eleanor Parker as surely as he bellowed fire and brimstone at gold-plated Ramses II.

All the women in the circus are in love with Brad, which says a lot about circus folk. Betty Hutton headlines as aerialist Holly, but Dorothy Lamour gets a lot of screen time as Phyllis the “iron jaw” and so does Gloria Grahame as Angel the elephant girl. They’re all sexy in different ways, and why they want Brad at all is beyond me. I have to wonder if C.B. had some issues because his heroines tend to be, well, a certain type. Usually the Paulette Goddard, Hedy Lamarr, Ann Baxter, Dorothy Lamour type, mostly brunettes and some of them bad girls. Betty Hutton was something of a lightning rod as a personality and most people find her icky, but I’m sorry, in this picture, she’s hot too.

Prototypical DeMille girl Anne Baxter in The Ten Commandments. Sign me up.

In fact I’m tempted to say that Betty Hutton steals Greatest Show, but how can I think that when James Stewart’s already stolen it? But wait, no he hasn’t. Cornel Wilde steals the show as the flamboyant French trapeze artist the Great Sebastian, swashbuckling his way through the picture just as he did in his other title that year, Sons of the Musketeers. Wilde owns the screen every minute he’s on it; a performance that’s wild all right. The whole picture is wild—we don’t believe any of it as something that could ever really happen, but who cares? These are irresistible people intensely interested in what they’re doing, both the characters on screen and the people playing them.

Because of the Stewart connection, I spent half a day going through DeMille’s personal Greatest Show production files at BYU (thank you, Jim D’Arc, for making me aware of them). What a giant undertaking C.B.’s circus epic was. DeMille was intimately involved in every detail, every act coming out of the woodwork begging to appear, every old character actor lobbying to play the ringmaster. DeMille’s right-hand man was associate producer Henry Wilcoxon, C.B.’s most dependable actor for decades and one helluva behind-the-scenes presence judging from the letters and memos. Some tidbits from the papers:

Betty Hutton spent weeks learning trapeze work and did many of her own stunts in the picture. It’s a tribute to her athleticism that not once does she look uncoordinated up there. In fact, she goes out of her way to make sure we see her—yes that’s her—over and over so audiences knew it was Hutton and not a stunt woman hanging upside down 40 feet off the ground.

Cornel Wilde was thrilled to play Sebastian and after the run of the picture kept sending C.B. letters thanking him for the opportunity. He signed them not Cornel but Sebastian. Wilde’s biceps and abs are ripped like crazy in this picture but, unlike Betty Hutton, he’s doubled extensively in the aerial sequences and there are zero shots where Wilde hangs upside down way up there so we know, “Look, it’s me and not a stuntman!” He left the dangerous stuff to the professionals.

Lucille Ball was set to play Angel the elephant girl but withdrew. To me this is a lucky break because Gloria Grahame is about as sexy as the 1950s got and perfect to play a girl who calls every guy “sugar.”

Dorothy Lamour was on the career skids by now and signed for only $2,000 a week when peers like Ball were signed for $3,500.

The mysterious, on-the-lam clown played by Stewart was originally named Koko, but there must have been a real Koko the Clown who put up a stink, so they had to rename Koko and what a pre-pro firestorm this produced! About 40 names were pitched, and there’s no documentation on how they arrived at the final name of “Buttons.”

James Jimmy Stewart Betty Hutton in The Greatest Show on Earth

“So Buttons, look at this story about a doctor who mercy-kills the girl he loves. Isn’t it a funny coincidence how you go around all morose talking about killing the thing you love? Why, they even talk about killing the thing you love in this article, by sheer coincidence. And, by the way, how come you never take off your clown makeup?”

Stewart didn’t audition for the role of Buttons. He just cabled DeMille and said if you’re looking for a clown on the run, how about if I play him? And C.B. gave him the part on the spot. It’s another of those offbeat, unresolved-issues characters that Stewart went after in the 1950s in the wake of his experiences in the war. In many of his pictures of this period his character had a streak of unspeakable pain or unspeakable violence in him—even good-guy George Bailey who let loose, ripped his living room and terrorized his family in It’s a Wonderful Life. There’s some evidence that Stewart cracked up on one of his missions in the Eighth Air Force, but that’s a story for a major book and feature motion picture down the line.

Stewart also had a “pregnancy clause” built into his contract because his wife was expecting (twins, as it turned out), and he stated he would not report for work until after the delivery.

I can’t imagine any of you under 40 would ever take the time to sit through The Greatest Show on Earth with all the computer-generated thrill shows out there today, Furious 7 and Avengers and all that, but when you run out of titles on your Netflix list and if you settle on Greatest Show, please, I’m begging you, let me know if it gave you goosebumps like it did, and still does—always does—give them to me.

After the circus train crashes in spectacular fashion (move over, The Fugitive), Buttons reveals himself to be the doctor who has killed the thing he loves so he can save Brad so Brad can live happily ever with Holly. In the meantime, being free of Holly allows Sebastian (left) the chance to hook up with Angel (right).

When I Grow Up…

…I want to be Rudy Behlmer. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but I can dream, can’t I? If you’re a fan of classic film, Rudy’s work has likely touched you in some way. If you have seen Ken Murray’s Hollywood Without Makeup, which plays often on Turner Classic Movies, then you’ve watched a program directed by Rudy Behlmer. If you have read Memo from David O. Selznick or Memo from Darryl F. Zanuck, just two of his many books, then you’ve been enriched by Rudy Behlmer’s scholarship. If you have explored the bonus features of DVDs like The Adventures of Robin Hood or King Kong or dozens of others, you’ve been enlightened by Rudy’s crazy knowledge of the production of classic Hollywood pictures. Rudy is the guy who took us Inside Warner Bros. where he sifted through those terrific inter-office memos that circulated during the production of Warner classics and gave us glimpses of the off-camera dramas. And, of course, Rudy was co-author along with Tony Thomas and Clifford McCarty of The Films of Errol Flynn, the 1969 Citadel volume that put Flynn’s career in perspective. Just this week I was enjoying the BYU CD original score of Dodge City—Rudy wrote the liner notes—70 pages worth!

I have asked for Rudy’s help on a number of occasions and at first it wasn’t easy because the man’s a legend and has an imperious quality about him. He has known and worked with the greats. Every time he answered one of my questions (or 10 of my questions) or reviewed a piece of my writing, I felt honored that he thought my work was worthy of his time and expertise.

No, I will never be Rudy Behlmer when I grow up; there’s only one, and I appreciate his love for Golden Hollywood. I respect his desire to protect the memories of those who made the pictures. I revel in his body of works that have benefited those of us who care about the studios and the stars. If there were a Mount Rushmore of film scholarship, he’d be on it.

I’m curious to know what your favorite Rudy Behlmer work is. If you look him up on IMDB you won’t believe how many credits he has in media. He’s one guy that we just haven’t taken time to appreciate and thank for a lifetime of service to classic film.

2D to 3D

I have nothing profound to say today.

Ooh, I just heard about a hundred clicks as people flew off this page.

The time between book releases is quiet, and a lot happens within the confines of an office surrounded by government documents and original photos and published works like biographies and military histories. At the moment there’s a stack of file folders related to the Eighth Air Force a foot high beside my chair, and another pile half that high next to it.

A funny thing happened about three weeks ago. I was researching a bombing mission by Capt. James Stewart’s squadron over Frankfurt, Germany, and all of a sudden the project went from 2D to 3D. From black and white to color. From mono to six-speaker surround. It happened when a character I didn’t know would be in the book jumped out from the shadows of history and said boo to me. A woman I had never heard of but realized would be a friend by the time this book is finished. Granted she’s been dead 71 years, but we’ll be friends just the same, just like I’m friends with Alice Getz and Wayne Williams. They’re real to me, flesh and blood, thoughts and dreams, cologne and perspiration. Now, I have to learn all about this German woman, track her down in a language I don’t speak (sorry Miss Diamond, but your two years of trying to teach me German in high school were for naught … kaput) in places I haven’t yet seen.

I’ve said more than once that a couple years ago I’d be sitting here writing Fireball all alone for months on end thinking, who the heck is going to care about a movie star dead for 70 years? What if nobody cares? But I don’t have any such concerns rattling around in my head this time. I’ve got an epic story to tell, a story as big as Europe and 30,000 feet tall. But just like in Fireball it all comes down to molecules of human beings; who they were, where they were placed, how they acted and reacted in good times, bad times, and the worst times. If I do it right, then you’re riding along in the airplane with engine number 3 on fire or you’re on the ground under 1,000 bombers screaming to yourself, I can’t stand this! I’m going to die!

It’s strange looking at an outcome like that when it’s still two years away, with so much research dead ahead, trips to libraries and interviews of experts. In between each trip and each interview, I’ll be sitting here in the smoke of battle, writing.

As the final validation that people would care about the movie star dead 70 years, Fireball won the 2015 Benjamin Franklin Gold Award for biography of the year at ceremonies in Austin, Texas, on Friday night. It was agony not being there because of a scheduling conflict, but all was well because my friend of 30 years Carole Sampeck stepped in and represented author and book beautifully, accepted the crystal statuette, expressed my appreciation and my regrets about not being there in person, and stood for photos better than I ever could have. Ms. Sampeck—a leading expert on Carole Lombard and her place in Hollywood history—played a crucial role in the development of Fireball, so it was fitting that she experienced this payoff and heard the heartfelt cheers of those in attendance. I am certain of 22 attendees, my friends from Flight 3 whose stories were told in Fireball. Mary Johnson was there too, the 23^rd passenger who left the plane in Albuquerque. They will always be my friends, very close at hand, and I am thrilled to see them get a moment to stand there with Carole Sampeck and enjoy the spotlight of an Austin Friday evening.

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

Carole Sampeck after accepting the Benjamin Franklin Award in Austin, Texas last Friday evening, April 10.

Killer

A group of men climbed a mountain on January 17, 1942. Men had been climbing mountains for thousands of years before that, but these men were special. They were in a rush. They didn’t know exactly where they were going, and they were underequipped, underdressed, and underfed for the climb. History forgot these men, but I had a feeling they had a story worth telling. Brother was I right.

Ron Kantowski, a writer for the Las Vegas Tribune-Review, reminded me this week about these men when he climbed Mt. Potosi to the site of the crash of TWA Flight 3, where Carole Lombard and 21 others died on the evening of January 16, 1942. I hadn’t met Ron when I was researching Fireball in the Vegas area or when I stopped there on the book tour last year. I wish I had, because Ron gets Fireball. He took inspiration from Fireball and decided to make the climb himself.

Mt. Potosi as seen from Ninety-Nine Mine Road. The outcropping at center-right is an hour’s hike/climb away up a boulder-strewn dry wash. Then you cut left along the line of green at the right edge of the photo, which is where the loose shale begins. Then you go UP. The outcropping seems to be the peak but no, it’s just a foothill.

Ron documented his climb in a Review-Journal piece that to me was validation. Mt. Potosi kicked my butt the day I climbed it and left me bruised and bleeding after falling and bouncing off rocks onto other rocks, with enough cactus embedded in my arm to make a hairbrush. I could feel cactus needles in my arm for a year after the climb; there will always be cactus needles in my arm. “Something to remember me by,” I can hear Potosi saying.

Guess what? Kantowski’s experience was similar, like reporting cuts and bruises and torn clothes. Like getting mired on all fours in shale, which doesn’t sound like peril but try it on a 45-degree mountainside with a drop of a couple thousand feet behind you. The oddest thing about the Potosi climb was going up facing the mountain, focused on each branch to hold on to, choosing rock ledges carefully because some were solid and some weren’t. Going up occupied my brain so completely that I didn’t think much about getting back down until I started the descent. Then the realization: holy shit, I can see all the way down. Thousands of feet down.

After 2.5 hours of climbing, you reach a ridge. Across a valley you can make out the destination, visible through trees at lower-center.

There’s a way to access the crash site along the ridge that calls for driving and then hiking, but it’s the long way and first responders to the plane crash followed a more direct route. The leader of this group was a Clark County deputy sheriff named Jack Moore; the group also contained a former high school football star named Lyle Van Gordon who climbed into the morning sky like a rocket that day and reached the crash scene, in two feet of snow, long before the others.

I’ve been told that the most powerful moment in Fireball is when Van Gordon climbs up to where he can first see gleaming silver aluminum from the plane and believes that it has crash landed; that he can smell wood smoke from a campfire built by survivors. Van Gordon was an uncompromising man, not the friendliest in the world, but in this moment having just made that climb his intentions were pure. He represented the best in all men. Because he did smell a campfire, because the aluminum gleamed silver in the morning sun, he believed in a happy ending. It becomes chilling because of what happens next.

The plane, in a million pieces large and small, ended up in a ravine. This is the lower end of the ravine, where Lyle Van Gordon climbed 73 years ago until he could see gleaming airplane ahead. The first pieces of debris that I saw that day were spotted here, far below the impact point.

Ron alluded to this passage in his column—he and I both understand that moment, having stood where Van Gordon stood in a place that I guess is beautiful for a limitless view toward the north, with Las Vegas spread out 30 miles off like Plasticville. To me Potosi is a harsh place. A savage, unforgiving place. It was harsh prior to the crash, and it was harsh after the crash. It will always be harsh. Brittle, brown desert that goes straight up. Potosi is a killer—that’s the truth of it. Anyone who scales its heights is lucky to come down more or less intact.

The crash site is about to grow a lot less accessible in coming weeks, as the heat takes over, bringing with it all the trappings of a desert summer. Round about October nature will unlock the peaks of Potosi again for the next adventurer. I know I want to go back one of these days to pay my respects to the 22 lost there, and 6 men who scaled a mountain.

This photo of a random spot of ground at the crash site shows the amount of debris on the mountain. The more you study the photo, the more pieces of airplane you can find.

Royals

Seventy-six years ago today, March 30, 1939, Carole Lombard and Clark Gable addressed the media at her Bel Air home and announced that they had wed. Newsreel cameras rolled, flashbulbs popped, and a cultural phenomenon was born. Gable then reigned as the hottest thing in Hollywood—the number-one box-office draw in the world and definitive sex symbol of the movies. Lombard was a popular leading lady known as the “screwball queen” for her comedy pictures and madcap Hollywood parties.

Their relationship was more than three years old by this time. Lombard had made herself available on the social scene 16 months after the Labor Day 1934 shooting death of her lover, 26-year-old popular singer Russ Columbo. She emerged from a period of mourning with a vengeance, landing a very married Gable at the end of January 1936 and carrying on a public love affair based from her home right there on Hollywood Boulevard, in full view of the movie colony and the press. But scrutiny proved withering and Lombard left her Hollywood “party house” for a home in secluded, difficult-to-access Bel Air where she continued her activities with Gable.

I’m not sure that we can imagine today what a sexual playground Hollywood was in the 1930s. We think of the stars of the day as above it all, but nobody was immune and everybody was doing it with everybody. They were beautiful people dressed by professionals and promoted by powerful ad men. They cavorted with other beautiful people, and sex became a sport of who could bag whom. Many stars came from troubled backgrounds and brought emotional baggage with them to a city without morals. This was Clark Gable, certainly, a narcissist by definition because he was an image created by his acting teacher/wife and projected by MGM. Lombard, on the other hand, had bounced westward as a child after her parents’ separation back in Indiana, but she had enjoyed a solid Los Angeles upbringing thanks to her practical, loving mother. Solid, yes; conventional, no. Lombard had grown up a sexual athlete from her teens on and been made wise beyond her years due to a car crash that chopped up her face just shy of her 18^th birthday.

The couple that met the press this day 76 years ago had been galvanized by years of couplehood in the glare of the public spotlight. He had been crowned king of Hollywood and she had made some big pictures and now earned more than any other actress in town. Their out-of-wedlock shenanigans had earned scorn in the Bible belt, and the backlash reached the board room at MGM, where Gable was ordered to divorce his wife and make an honest woman of Lombard. Gable didn’t take kindly to orders from anyone about anything, but he had been beaten down from all sides, and so during a day off from production of Gone With the Wind, he sneaked out of town with his girl and got hitched.

Fireball tells the story of the elopement for the first time thanks to an unpublished account by Jill Winkler, whose husband Otto had driven the disguised couple out of Hollywood and clean to Kingman, Arizona, for the ceremony. They didn’t have a proper wedding night, or any sleep at all for that matter. You can see it in their faces in the thousand-and-one photos snapped at the Bel Air press conference. One has to laugh at Lombard’s acting job, playing it demure for the newsreels complete with shy and loving gazes at King Gable.

The press conference on this date proved to be a brilliant move as it established these two, dressed to the nines and appropriately bashful, as the closest thing America had to a royal couple. They wouldn’t enjoy even three years past this date as husband and wife due to the plane crash that removed Carole Lombard from the living in January 1942. As explored in this column recently, the union was in rough waters and possibly heading for the rocks by the end of their second year as an official couple, but her tragic passing erased any trace of negativity and pressed these two into America’s book of memories as one of the perfect couples of all time.

Carole’s mother, known as Tots or Petey, stands with the happy couple at the Bel Air press event. Less than three years later she would ride into history with her daughter aboard TWA Flight 3.0

Electronic Eyewitness

We now know that no alarms sounded in the cockpit of Germanwings Flight 4U 9525. The co-pilot locked the cockpit door from the inside and set the autopilot for an altitude of 100 feet. It was an eight-minute controlled descent from 38,000. There were no automatic warnings because that co-pilot was operating the ship within parameters, and passengers didn’t catch on for several minutes.

No civilized human being outside of a psychiatrist or psychologist can comprehend the murder of 149 innocent people, and I certainly can’t make sense of it here. But the parallels with TWA Flight 3 continue. Earlier this week we all wondered, was the Germanwings crash due to mechanical failure? Terrorism? Sabotage? Investigators ran through the same checklist in January 1942 after Flight 3 went down, with the United States fighting a new world war against the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Was the crash of Flight 3 the result of a premeditated act? Another theory had to be examined after the crash of this “giant” DC-3 airliner with 19 passengers and a crew of 3: Did the pilot, Captain Wayne Clark Williams, commit suicide by intentionally crashing the plane? At least one civilian claimed that he did and expressed the opinion in writing to the FBI. The Civil Aeronautics Board and House Committee investigating the crash in 1942 scrutinized Williams’ behavior and mind-set on the day of the disaster, interviewing eyewitnesses that included the TWA station managers in Albuquerque and Las Vegas, the two stops of Flight 3 prior to its crash. Both TWA men stated that Williams was in good spirits and a positive frame of mind, like always. Williams was a cool character, a former barnstormer who had flown in all weather and faced all adverse conditions with a calm demeanor. Wayne Williams could be counted on to bring his ship in safe. More than 14,000 flying miles confirmed this fact.

The “black box” hadn’t been invented in 1942, and answers were uncovered (if they were uncovered) the old-fashioned way—by investigation and scientific measurement. In March 2015 we can usually figure things out by examining those two critical collectors of data: the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder. Already the cockpit voice recorder has revealed truths we can’t fathom but must accept.

Some reviewers of my book on the TWA crash, Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3, gave the opinion that there really wasn’t a mystery. Air & Space Smithsonian, while praising the book in general, took that approach. I disagreed then and disagree now. Imagine if the Germanwings plane had gone down without data recorders. Maybe it was tracked on radar but we couldn’t know what went on in the cockpit because there were no witnesses, human or electronic, to tell the story. How could we ever know for sure that one of the pilots had deliberately flown the ship into the ground? We couldn’t. In 1942 the answers were never found because of a lack of conclusive evidence. I think I ultimately did find the reasons for the crash through a synthesis of 70 years of evidence and perspectives that investigators didn’t have in the 1940s. Back then they tossed the “official” cause of the crash into a bucket called “pilot error” because, ultimately, the engines and controls were deemed to be working, so the pilot must have been at fault.

But they didn’t know why back then. Yes there was circumstantial evidence like an erroneous flight plan, but an experienced pilot should have spotted trouble and taken evasive action. In that sense the crash of TWA Flight 3 is a mystery and always will be, specifically because no one lived to answer the question, why?

Today the data recorders “lived” and we learned the what of this past Tuesday. Time will tell if we end up getting an answer to the question we want so desperately to be able to ask that co-pilot: Why?

Too Much

Well, it’s happened again. An airliner has crashed into a mountain, this time in the French Alps. Reports indicate that the A320 flying from Barcelona to Dusseldorf descended from 38,000 feet to the impact point at 6,000 over the span of 8 minutes. There may have been a fire on board that incapacitated the pilots. There may have been a failure of one or both engines, with the descent accompanied by automatic warnings chiming in the cockpit and pilots desperate to restart an engine or engines. I’ve sat in various flight simulator cockpits that are used to train airline pilots. It’s chilling when you’re sitting in a simulator on terra firma and warnings begin to sound—it’s a simulator and utterly realistic. Imagine living the experience six miles up. Better yet, don’t imagine it.

My heart goes out to the crew, the passengers, the families. And my heart goes out to the recovery teams because I was once forced to relive the recovery effort at the crash scene of an airliner—TWA Flight 3 that crashed into Mt. Potosi, Nevada, on January 16, 1942. I undertook this exercise while writing Fireball. Among those lost in that crash was Hollywood actress Carole Lombard. It was “only” a 21-seat, twin-engine DC-3 and there were “only” 22 people on board (19 passengers and a crew of 3) and it hit the mountain at “only” 190 miles per hour versus the 180-seat A320 with 150 that hit at 350 yesterday.

A plane crashes into a mountain, in this case TWA Flight 3 on January 16, 1942.

The fuselage of a state-of-the-art 1942 DC-3 Sky Club was gleaming aluminum, meaning that when the aircraft struck granite, it exploded and deformed, but large pieces remained. In fact, some of those pieces of twisted aluminum can be seen today on Mt. Potosi. Modern airliners are made of composites that disintegrate on impact, resulting in the bizarre scene in the Alpine landscape, which looks like a litterbug went mad. How many pieces of people and debris are up there? Hundreds of thousands? A million? Each will have to be removed from the site with care because some are human remains and the rest are potential clues to what happened to Germanwings Flight 4U 9525. Perhaps the aircraft’s badly damaged voice recorder and flight data recorder will answer all questions, in which case the jigsaw puzzle of wreckage will still need to be collected and removed. All this will be done by people who are now witnessing sights that are meeting and then far exceeding the human capacity to rationalize and cope.

Previously unpublished and in some cases undiscovered accounts of the recovery effort of TWA Flight 3 were blunt by 1942 standards. A few of the bodies of crash victims were thrown clear of the impact point when the ship blew apart and these remained intact. The rest were put through a literal meat grinder—and then set afire. Imagine being ordered up the mountain on a U.S. Army recovery team or volunteering for the recovery job. Better yet, don’t imagine it. The team of about 30 painstakingly picked up what there was to pick up in the way of human remains for four solid days. In the book I referred to it as a “pudding” composed of flesh, bone, melted snow, and pieces of plane as small as splinters. There were 22 victims, remember. Then the recovery team declared the job finished and departed the scene. An hour later, a TWA man still onsite discovered more human remains and stuffed them into all he had with him—a mail sack. Seventy years later when I visited the site, a human bone turned up. That’s the way it is at such sites.

The recovery team reaches the scene 36 hours after the crash.

Take that scene times six and you’ve got something akin to what’s facing recovery teams in the Alps as we speak. There isn’t any snow, but there is a vast mountainside and a ravine covered in objects foreign to serene Alpine landscapes. As for people living the recovery, let me put it in perspective this way: One of the Flight 3 civilian volunteers was interviewed more than 40 years later as a wheelchair-bound old man and said in something akin to bewilderment, “I still see it in my dreams sometimes.”

More than 300 police officers and a like number of firefighters are up there at present, all of them heroes for doing what they’re doing. Many will get past the task they’re accomplishing right now, but none will forget it. They’ll keep seeing it in their dreams.

Mystery Within the Mystery

News of the death of my friend Kenneth Keene has hit me hard. I mean, come on, I’m not telling tales out of school when I say the man drank liquor a quart a day and knew the word exercise only as a theoretical experience. But he was one of the most extraordinary humans I have ever met, and his passing has left a hole in my heart.

As you will recall from a post dated last October, Ken Keene owned Tuckaway, an Indianapolis National Landmark and a home tied to the death of Carole Lombard. Ken Keene insisted, Ken Keene swore to me, that Carole Lombard stood at the front door of Tuckaway the day before her death and was warned by scientific palmist Nellie Simmons Meier “not to take the plane.” Ken learned this from the lips of Nellie’s niece Ruth, making it more than legend. It was oral history. But the fact of the matter is, I have not been able to find evidence that Lombard managed to sneak off to Tuckaway, located on the north side of Indianapolis, on the hectic day of the bond sale on January 15, 1942. If you followed my Twitter campaign of January 15 and 16 of this year, when I recounted Lombard’s day selling war bonds minute by minute, you know how frantic was her time in Indianapolis.

I would say to Ken that I needed evidence of her Tuckaway visit, and he would respond, “You don’t believe me!” I assured him that yes, I did believe him, but I needed verification to put it in print. But Ken had heard it from Ruth, and Ruth had heard it from Nellie, so it was incomprehensible to Ken that I needed more than that.

The dark and mysterious interior of Tuckaway. Ken is barely visible at center of photo, beside the lamp.

Now, about Ken. He was a dark-haired man with a puppy-dog-sad face. According to the feature obit in the Indianapolis Star, he was 69 or 70. He mentioned that he was the son of Army Air Corps Brigadier General Ken Keene, although the subject only came up because he asked me what I was working on and I told him a book about James Stewart in World War II. He said, “Oh, my father knew him and used to tell stories about the two of them in the war.” It was then he showed me a picture of Gen. Keene and his wife Gigi, the stunning woman who was Ken’s mother. But knowing the unorthodox Ken, I sensed that there was a lot of discontent among parents and child, because he was the last guy to be thought of as a chip off the ol’ block of Gen. Keene. Another sign of problems was the fact that Ken had no interest in recounting his father’s experiences with James Stewart.

Ken was often bombed from all the scotch, but a brilliant conversationalist at all times. He tracked every word that anyone said and had an immediate response, even after a full tumbler of scotch. I mean a big glass of scotch and ice. He might slur a word or two, but the man had his faculties and his brain processed like a NASA supercomputer.

The “other” Lombard autographed portrait that I found on Ken’s wall.

Ken’s passion was Tuckaway, and Carole Lombard was among his favorite Tuckaway topics. He would point out the autographed portrait of her hanging at the bottom of the stairs, which had become famous over the years through newspaper coverage. As Mary and I wandered through the house, I found another Lombard inscribed and framed portrait hanging in the library, which didn’t really look so much like her so it was no wonder it had been overlooked. It was taken off the wall and handed to Ken, who fixed his hazy eyes on it and said, “Oh yes, I had forgotten about this one.”

It turns out that I spoke to Ken by phone within a week of his death on February 18. He had asked me when I would be out for a visit—he always asked that—and I promised to get there in the spring. I was thinking about planning that visit the day I learned about his passing, just hours after thinking about him, this past Tuesday.

I interviewed Ken extensively about his connection to the story in Fireball, this incredible missing piece of the Fireball timeline, so it’s not as if his death has affected the historical record. But I so admired this guy for being gracious, and brilliant, and determined to show visitors to Tuckaway the time of their lives. I admired him for his warmth at all times, whenever I’d call. Above all he was a brilliant individualist who lived life on his own terms and never compromised. He never skimped on the liquor bill and never condescended to see a doctor even when it was obvious he should. What good does it do now to scold the guy? I’d rather celebrate this life brilliantly lived, and pursue the clues he left me about what is potentially a chilling moment in the last days of Carole Lombard’s life when she was warned what was ahead and for some reason ignored the warning and hurried to her doom.

Crazy Town

I have learned the hard way to rely on primary sources. Taking for granted the accuracy of secondary sources or information that has passed hand to hand over the course of time leads to mistakes. If you have never noticed, humans like to take information and spin it for their own purposes.

I’m not breaking new ground when I report that, this week, we heard about the 18-month-old girl who was rescued from a riverbed in Utah when her mother’s vehicle went off the road at night and landed upside down under a bridge, blocked from view of the road above. The story made national news: infant rescued after being suspended upside down in her car seat for 14 hours, inches from icy rushing waters with mother dead in driver’s seat. It’s some story; this was a miracle rescue. The cops and paramedics who removed the girl from the vehicle and rushed her to the hospital are heroes.

Then the story takes a turn toward crazy town, as reported by the four cops who arrived on the scene after a fisherman spotted the vehicle. Those cops, all of them eyewitnesses who had not sought the limelight, none with a vested interest to write a book and cash in on the rescue, all of them professionals going about their job, stated right after the event that they heard a woman’s voice calling for help from inside the car. They said the voice was “there but not there.” It was audible enough that one of the cops reports that another answered by calling into the vehicle, “We’re trying. We’re trying our best to get in there.”

“I was thinkin’ I was hearing things,” said Spanish Fork (Utah) Officer Tyler Beddoes to ABC News, “and when I talked to the other officers, we all heard the same thing. You know, a voice saying, ‘Help us,’ ‘help me.’”

The four of them managed to push the vehicle onto its side (all were later treated for hypothermia) and then discovered that the woman who seemed to be calling for help had been deceased for many hours—but her daughter was alive.

I’ve experienced some strange things in my own life that I generally don’t like to talk about because straying away from the tangible can earn a historian the label of kook. There was one during the writing of Fireball–very strange indeed. But sometimes the facts themselves tell the story, like the time I was working on Errol Flynn Slept Here with Mike Mazzone and intended to do a “ha-ha” sidebar about Errol Flynn’s Mulholland Farm supposedly being haunted. I had experienced an odd moment at Mulholland Farm that I attributed to an overactive imagination. Then, in the course of interviewing people who had lived in or visited the home, more than two dozen from different generations, different walks of life, and vastly divergent spiritual/religious perspectives were willing to go on the record documenting eyewitness encounters with something in the house over a 27-year period. Suddenly, my overactive imagination wasn’t so overactive after all. In the end, the facetious sidebar became a serious chapter in the book.

You can tell me you know for sure that when we die, we will go to heaven or hell. You can tell me you know for sure that when we die, there’s nothing at all. But in truth, nobody knows, and we’ll all get to find out the same way. In the meantime, there are things out there that we, the living, can’t explain. It’s possible that the rushing water of that river sounded like a woman crying for help. Or the metal roof of the overturned vehicle scraping against rock and producing a sound similar to a woman’s voice. Or is it possible there was an additional hero in this rescue? The first responders were tremendous as can be seen in unedited video shot at the scene. Was the most heroic of all Lynn Jennifer Groesbeck, a 25-year-old woman who reached out past all hope, past her own lifespan, to save the life of her child in peril?

Revisionism

Glamour pusses Gable and Lombard share an ‘up’ moment exiting Ciro’s on the Strip in August 1941.

Why do we need there to be a happily ever after? When I was interviewed during the Fireball book tour, I would often hear things like, “Gable and Lombard had the kind of love that would have endured.” There would be such conviction in the voice of the interviewer, and at moments like that I found myself in an awkward place because the interviewer believed what was being said and, in fact, it was and was not true.

During the years that Carole Lombard and Clark Gable were together, she was in love with him in a mature way and he was in love with her in his own way. She was an older soul and possessed a strong altruistic streak. He was a perpetual adolescent and quite selfish the way males can be. Up to the time they became an item, he had relied only on himself, number one, and there was no number two. But suddenly she became number two and worked like hell to maintain that position, which must have been, for her, something like barbequing in a snowstorm. As the premiere sex symbol in the world and therefore a male of unquestionable power, Gable cut a swath through the female population of Hollywood. He slept around and continued to sleep around until the day Lombard died. She approached this fact as practically as she could: This is the price I’m paying to be Mrs. Clark Gable. He can get his rocks off wherever he likes because I know he comes home to me.

But that doesn’t mean she found rationalizing easy, and even a self-confident soul and sexual libertine like Carole Lombard had her limits.

Every indication is that if she had lived, he’d have gone right on as a brigand for as long as the marriage could endure. There were rumors at the time of her death that their union had already hit the rocks. A particular photo that appears in Fireball bears this out. They are sitting together in a restaurant, and she is smiling politely but looking like hell and he looks as miserable as you’ll ever see Clark Gable looking. It’s not the kind of grouchy-miserable that you see when Clark Gable is acting. This is vulnerable-miserable, pained-miserable, as if they are arguing and he’s wrong and he knows he’s wrong.

Three months later, here they are, her smile painted on, his nonexistent. She rests her hand on top of his hand, but she’s not holding his hand and he’s not playing along.

When the host of a Fireball interview would turn the statement into a question, “Gable and Lombard had the kind of love that would have endured, didn’t they?” there was my opening and I would answer with the truth: They loved each other, yes, but there were problems with the marriage that I think would have ended it before too much longer. Probably by 1945 or 1946, had she lived, she would have given up and left Clark Gable. Sometimes, loving someone and giving it your all isn’t enough. Sometimes, unconditional love causes the self to endure too much, give away too much; in this case she would have given away the prime of her life. I could easily see her reaching age 36 or 38 and no longer being willing to serve as consort to a hard-drinking, womanizing sovereign. Or I could see Gable waking up one morning and beholding a Lombard whose looks were beginning to wane from smoking, drinking, stress, and the natural process of aging. You can see the beginnings of it in the photo discussed earlier. At that point Gable might decide to trade his wife in for a newer model, say the sleek, 10-years-younger Lana Turner.

Whether Carole would have ended it or Clark would have, I don’t think this relationship was headed for happily ever after, and it was the shattering event of her death at age 33, after only two-and-a-half years of marriage, that bronzed the timeless, forever love of Gable-Lombard legend, the kind of love this twosome sometimes captured but was beginning to find elusive.

Looking even further down the line, I could see the Gables divorcing and remaining friends like she was friends with her ex William Powell and somewhere around 1955 getting together again for a Gable-Lombard picture or two. Precedent: Lombard made My Man Godfrey with Powell three years after their divorce. Gable made Key to the City with Loretta Young 16 years after she bore their love child—a child he would never acknowledge. Stars set personal feelings aside for the sake of box office. Astaire and Rogers weren’t exactly fond of one another; Abbott and Costello grew so far apart they didn’t speak except in front of the camera.

That’s life is how I look at it. Happy endings don’t come about very often and “for keeps” usually isn’t for keeps, especially in Hollywood. But that doesn’t detract from the story of Lombard and Gable. They were real people, “juicy people,” Loretta Young called them, and they deserve to be remembered for who they really were, not who we wish they would have been.