fireball carole lombard

Man’s Man

Fifty-four years ago today, Clark Gable died. He had been hospitalized for days after having suffered a heart attack at the ranch in Encino and was thought to be recovering, but succumbed suddenly on November 16, 1960. He passed out of this world as the logo of the Golden Age of the motion picture. His face, toothy grin, and jug ears were IT for Hollywood. He made only two features that stand the test of time, It Happened One Night and Gone With the Wind, but two were enough. Oh, sure, he made other big pictures and many movie buffs will remember Red Dust and Honky Tonk, but by the time Gable’s wife Carole Lombard died on Flight 3 in 1942, Gable’s best work was behind him. He went off to fight in World War II and came back to a huge box office return in 1945 when he made Adventure with Greer Garson, but this was a bad picture and would be followed by many other pictures that were, if not bad, then indifferent.

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

On top of the world, Ma! Or so Clark Gable thought, seen with Carole Lombard here at the announcement of their wedding in March 1939.

Why didn’t the Gable brand endure? Simple. When Carole died, Clark died. He would go on roaming the earth for 18 years as a guy in a Clark Gable suit, but the essence of what made Gable Gable, the swagger, the growl, the I’ll-smack-you-around-and-you’ll-like-it, were gone. Once his character Rhett Butler had thrilled the world by saying, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn,” and then life imitated art and he didn’t give a damn after his wife died on an airplane on a freezing Las Vegas night.

I was chatting in Detroit with my new friends Joe and Marsha the other day about Fireball, and about the Clark Gable that emerged from the Flight 3 disaster. Joe admires what Gable did with the rest of his life, just as I admire it. Clark learned from tragedy; he appreciated what he had lost; he put one foot in front of the other; he kept breathing; he endured. Gable was never the same man, but he was a man—he was called a “man’s man” and proved it. He gave himself a month to grieve; he went back to work; he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, and he went to Europe to fight. He was 41 then, and served with men 20 years younger. He asked for no special favors and ran the obstacle course just like anyone else. He went up in B-17s and secretly wished to go down in flames so he could experience Lombard’s last moments and then lie with her at Forest Lawn.

But, goddammit, he lived. And he kept on living, always haunted by the woman who blew into his life like a tornado, challenged him, adored him, cast her spell…and then was gone. She haunted him every day, her face, her voice, her perfume, the things she said, the way she said them, always there. But not there, because she was gone.

Just killin’ time, waiting for his ticket to be punched in 1951.

The self-righteous among us will condemn Clark Gable and say from the soap box, “If he loved her so much, why wasn’t he faithful? Why did he carry on with Lana Turner and cause Carole to rush to her doom?” I always go all biblical at that point and advise that those out there without sin should cast the first stone.

There’s nothing in this world quite like sitting with Clark, Carole, and Petey in the Great Mausoleum of Forest Lawn. The three of them and me, sitting there, in utter peace and quiet in a sequestered corridor. It brings so much to mind, first and foremost the sadness of it all, the way Carole and Petey died, and the way Clark, in his way, died with them. Three crypts side by side by side, with simple faceplates and dates of birth, dates of death. There’s a story of a million words there in that tiny little 10 feet of corridor. He purchased three crypts in January of 1942, two for his wife and mother-in-law, and one for himself. He married twice more, but his wishes were ironclad: place me next to Ma.

On this date 54 years ago, Clark finally got his wish. After years of smoking too much, years of drinking too much, years of enemy flak, fast cars, fast motorcycles, eating food too rich for him, he finally, finally got his wish. He punched a ticket to see Ma. He returned to the only human companion who ever made sense to him. This day, 54 years ago.

I wonder if Spencer Tracy (left) is thinking about spending two days with Gable at the El Rancho Vegas awaiting word of Carole’s fate. Here the greats, including Robert Taylor and James Stewart, gather for the King’s funeral at Forest Lawn in November 1960. At this same Church of the Recessional, Gable had endured the funerals of Ma and Petey 18 years earlier. In this shot, Air Force Chaplain Johnson E. West accompanies Kay Williams Gable, widow of the actor, after the service.

The Censor Almost Forbade

Lombard models a gown she wears early in To Be or Not to Be.

Carole Lombard’s last picture, To Be or Not to Be, aired on the Saturday night prime time edition of The Essentials on Turner Classic Movies the other night. I only learned this the day after. Damn! I missed it, which is a shame because I enjoy the perspectives of Robert Osborne and Drew Barrymore as they dissect the classics.

To Be or Not to Be shares with Saratoga, Rebel Without a Cause, the upcoming Paul Walker picture, Furious 7, and many others, the distinction of being released after the death of a major star. Saratoga was in mid-production when Jean Harlow took sick and passed away, causing a problem for MGM that became a publicity gimmick: spot the scenes featuring a body double for Harlow. As recounted in John McElwee’s fantastic book, Showmen, Sell It Hot! producers and distributors sometimes face this macabre fork in the road, having to complete or market a motion picture featuring a leading player who’s suddenly deceased. McElwee discusses at length the problems facing MGM when another Walker, this one Robert, died during production of My Son John. Following the death of super-hot cult icon James Dean in a car crash, Warner Bros. cashed in with a teenaged population that camped out in theaters to watch their “crossed-over” hero over and over and over again. As described by McElwee, the stellar box office of Rebel led to a fast reissue of Dean’s two other pictures, East of Eden and Giant, as well as production of an odd little documentary, The James Dean Story. Cash registers really do jingle when a big star dies.

I had always read that Carole Lombard’s last picture didn’t do well, which made no sense given the very public, very heroic, way she died. Then I did the research and learned what boffo business To Be or Not to Be did upon its release in February 1942, a discreet one month after Lombard’s passing on TWA Flight 3. To Be was a smash hit for United Artists, which it probably would not have been otherwise due to the three strikes against it.

Another photo from one of her last portrait sessions.

For those few of you who haven’t seen To Be or Not to Be, do yourselves a favor and rent or buy it at once. The plot concerns a troupe of actors in a Warsaw that experiences Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939. The harmless group of performers is enjoying a run of Hamlet but had also been rehearsing a comedy about Hitler that is now shut down by the invaders—the censor forbids such satire of the Fuhrer.

Who in an America plunged into war was going to buy a comedy about Hitler? That was strike one. The title, a line from Hamlet, itself spelled trouble in rural areas, and UA sought to change it prior to the picture’s release. Strike two. In fact, Carole Lombard spent the first leg of her bond tour in a tizzy because To Be or Not to Be was about to become The Censor Forbids. As covered in Fireball, telegrams shot back and forth between the train and New York, with Carole asserting that a change to this new title “in no way conveys the spirit of the picture and is unbecoming to an organization as important as United Artists.” She found the new title “suggestive” and distasteful, and in general raised such a stink that UA quickly backed down.

Strike three was Lombard herself. She wasn’t scoring at the box office, and her pictures of late had been unsuccessful. Only two of her past seven pictures had done well, and neither was a smash. The two pictures she had lined up after To Be were practically B-level and both at second-tier studios, one at Columbia and the other at Universal.

All these factors conspired with the outbreak of war to make United Artists executives in New York nervous, and the combination of them indicated that the picture was about to premiere to middling business.

No wonder Lombard was in a pissy mood on the train. Well, it didn’t help that she had just brawled with her husband, Clark Gable, about his eyes wandering in the direction of a hot little number at MGM named Lana Turner. Stakes were high for Carole all around on this bond trip, and she was plenty shrewd enough to understand that headlines of big bond sales in Indianapolis would help restore her name at the box office.

Carole and co-star Jack Benny knew they had something special in To Be or Not to Be. They had fun and shooting went fast—two positive signs for the picture that was supposed to be sneak previewed on the evening of Monday, January 19. Theoretically Carole could have completed the bond tour as scheduled by train and still made the preview, but of course she died on January 16 and the preview never happened. She did not live to see her last picture, which most fans call her best.

Restrained UA artwork announces “Carole Lombard’s last picture.”

I urge you to watch To Be or Not to Be because it’s such a smart picture. The humor is sly throughout, with Lombard portraying a famous Polish actress who contemplates infidelity with a young air force pilot 10 years her junior. Laugh at Nazis? The audience couldn’t help but laugh because the premise worked. This joke really was on Hitler.

Carole Lombard turned 33 as production commenced, and she never looked better. To Be or Not to Be is a swan song that needed no tricks and no ballyhoo, and UA was careful not to say or do anything untoward—anything that could upset a grieving Mr. Gable or his studio, powerful MGM. Metro itself had gone to questionable extremes in pitching Saratoga, like urging theater operators to set up shrines to the dead blonde bombshell, complete with saintly photos, crucifixes, and floral displays. No such showmanship seeped out of UA—To Be or Not to Be sold itself as the masses sought one more date in the dark with the late queen of screwball and American war hero, Carole Lombard.

Don’t Call Him “Jimmy”

In 1952 James Stewart played a doctor wanted for murder in The Greatest Show on Earth. Through the course of picture, he never appeared without clown makeup.

It’s happening again: I’m on the trail of an elusive subject, trying to figure him out, following clues leading to deconstruction of his personality to the elements, then examining them and reassembling the human. This time, I’m finding the exercise frustrating. Well, as frustrating as usual.

The subject is James Stewart, Hollywood leading man from 1937 to the early 1970s, not to mention war hero, political conservative, and deity to what seems to be an entire demographic of the U.S. population. One of the first things I learned: He didn’t favor the familiarity of “Jimmy.” I interviewed his movie and television co-star Julie Adams recently and picked up on the fact that she called him not “Jimmy” but “Jim.” Said Adams, “I always called him that, and so did everyone else; I don’t think he liked Jimmy.”

The biggest heartbreak about the only picture Carole Lombard and James Stewart made together was the amount of money this contrived melodrama lost at the box office.

This is a tough nut to crack, this chasing down of a deified figure. There are a thousand stories out there of good deeds done by James Stewart, and I’m finding nothing juicy, nothing to humanize him. It takes me back to trying to decipher the real George Washington—not the capital city, not the university, not the bridge. The man who started it all. Eventually I got at this guy, who was in youth an ambitious, hot-tempered (did you know he was a redhead?), self-educated natural athlete who dearly loved the ladies. A theme of one of my documentaries was that GW pursued the married Sally Fairfax—which earned the video a ban by a major Christian DVD distributor! George Washington loved freedom, all right—the freedom to make an untaxed fortune, and it was self-interest, not altruism, that started him down the revolutionary road. Eventually, he was willing to give up everything for the good of his fellow Americans. Everything. And believe me, he had a lot to lose. The courage of convictions that grew within him, the awareness to know what was required of a leader, and a pre-existing and unshakeable self-discipline, all combined into what became the most admired man in the world. All that said, it was interesting that he had a violent temper; it was interesting that he pursued the wife of his best friend. It was all part of the same package.

In the end, I figured out George Washington, and I admired his human failings because he fought these parts of himself on his way to immortality. So now I have to learn the failings of James Stewart. He’s practically got the Knights Templar guarding his image; to me their protection harms his legacy rather than protects it. Isn’t a subject of biography interesting precisely for what he or she overcame in life? The inner conflicts? The failings? The handicaps? The demons?

The next book will be about a lot more than James Stewart, but he’s the focal point like Carole Lombard was in Fireball. I’ve been busily watching Stewart pictures of late, most recently Broken Arrow with Jeff Chandler and, as Stewart’s love interest, 16-year-old Debra Paget, nearly unrecognizable sans trademark heavy eye makeup. Yes gang, I said Stewart had a 16-year-old love interest to his 41! Today, they call that statutory rape, and even in the context of a picture made in 1950, I grew a little fidgety looking at their clinches.

James Stewart with Debra Paget.

I’m blazing a trail of pictures I never gave a hoot about. Another one I caught recently was The Naked Spur co-starring Janet Leigh and Robert Ryan and before that Strategic Air Command with June Allyson. I could always take or leave James Stewart as an actor, which, really, makes me a match as a biographer because I’m starting out neutral. No image to protect. No axe to grind. Oh, sure, he’s perfect in It’s a Wonderful Life and I really liked Harvey—although I never bought him as an alcoholic in that picture. His ingenuousness and his playing against cynical Henry Fonda worked beautifully in The Cheyenne Social Club. His body of work is simply outstanding and the more you think about the variety of his pictures, the more impressive Stewart becomes. He was much more the chameleon as an actor than he appears at first blush. Like when he played a clown in the circus and on the lamb from the cops who stayed in makeup throughout the film. This wasn’t John Wayne or Errol Flynn playing 17 variations of his public persona; Stewart could be a man with a past, a killer, a voyeur, or an obsessive-compulsive. Throughout the 1950s you never knew which James Stewart you’d meet in the dark.

James Stewart picks up his mail at a rented Brentwood home in 1936, soon after arriving in Hollywood.

What the hell made this guy tick? He played the accordion and built model airplanes as a pastime during years most young men his age spent getting laid, or trying to. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps nine months prior to Pearl Harbor at a time when a majority of Americans were staunch isolationists trying to look the other way from an inevitable war. Instead of cashing in on celebrity and spending the war in his crisp uniform stateside, getting laid some more, he itched for combat and finally got an overseas assignment that landed him smack in the middle of hell. He sounds too good to be true, and maybe he was.

I’ve already got some great clues about the real James Stewart and how he got that way. For the record, I’m determined to confine my book to a particular theme and not encroach into the territory of a writer also developing an aspect of Stewart. I don’t feel that my book on Stewart will be competing with anybody else’s because I think one will complement the other and demand for both will be heightened.

I encourage all of you to help me write this book. What do you know about Stewart that can help me grasp his character in the way I ultimately understood others I’ve chronicled? Your opinions, insights, and clues are welcome as we embark on this grand new adventure into the past.

Wishing They’d Go Bump

I want nothing so much as to run into a ghost face to face. Wouldn’t that be fantastic? I just don’t get it when grown men say they saw a ghost and ran away. What’s a ghost going to do to you? Rattle a chain? Go, “BOO”? I don’t have a bucket list, but if I did, I’d put two things on it for sure: I want to see a ghost, and I want to see a bear. I don’t mean like a bear in the zoo, I mean a bear in the wilds. A bear rooting through my trash. A bear on the porch. Or a ghost anyplace at all. I’d turn interviewer at once. I’d want to know all about that ghost. Name, year of birth, occupation, address, year of death, manner of death—the works. With all those questions I’d likely bore that ghost to d… Well, not to death certainly. But far from running away, I’d be interested.

Here I am sitting on Errol Flynn’s diving board. On my return trip, all alone, I felt the ghost.

I felt Errol Flynn’s ghost, as described in Errol Flynn Slept Here. I stood at his deserted home, Mulholland Farm, and I was all alone, and I felt him watching me to the point the hairs stood up on my arm. I told no one about my brush with the ghost at the time—I thought I was imagining things—and it wasn’t until 15 years later that I started to hear other, much more startling personal encounters with the ghost of Mulholland Farm. Tracy Nelson, for one, saw Flynn’s ghost up close, as did her brother Gunnar.

I felt Jean Harlow while visiting Forest Lawn Glendale a long time ago. I felt her reaching out to me, quite distinctly, and what I sensed was, Write about me. I sensed great loneliness; great sadness. A soul alone. Circumstances prevented me from doing it at the time, but I felt a heavy sense of obligation. I carried it around for years. Finally David Stenn wrote Bombshell and Darrell Rooney and Mark Vieira wrote Harlow in Hollywood and whatever needs the Baby had, these books must have satisfied because they are both fantastic—and very different—approaches to telling her complete story.

From a distance it even looked haunted–Errol Flynn’s Mulholland Farm.

Another time I was on a ghost hunt in an old house near Pittsburgh and something touched the back of my neck as I walked down a narrow hallway. I saw nothing, but I felt a hand on my neck. Not a cobweb. Not a draft. A hand.

The most frequent question people ask me related to Fireball is, “When you were at the crash site, did you feel anything?” By that they mean, did you feel, did you see, did you experience ghosts? I wondered if I would at this spot where 22 people died in one second. I felt the sadness of the place; I held a human bone in my hand. More than anything, I felt obligation to those souls.

When you explore as much history as I do, you walk well-worn paths and you feel things. I’ve had my fair share of “stranger than science” incidents, but I haven’t seen nearly as much as I want to. One of my best friends lives in a very haunted house that’s full of residual energy. He can lie in bed in the early morning and hear commotion downstairs that’s clearly his family going through their routine from 50 years earlier. Imagine hearing noises of busy family life coming from your kitchen and knowing it’s your mother in there cooking; it’s 10-year-old you and your brothers and sisters sitting down to eat and then scraping back chairs and rushing off to school. That house also has at least one ghost, as proved by dozens of odd little incidents.

Imagine, if you can, Flight 3 flying into the middle of this scene and crashing against the cliff. Ghosts here? I felt close to the crash victims; I knew I had to tell their story.

A few weeks ago I walked through several homes from the pre-Civil War and Victorian eras and felt the presence of the former inhabitants. I heard others describe ghostly encounters, but I had no encounters of my own. I’m also helping to restore a Victorian home these days and will spend tomorrow there alone. It’s a hundred years old but do you think I’ve heard one thing out of the ordinary? I’m afraid not. Maybe I need to walk in tomorrow and challenge the ghosts to show themselves. I haven’t tried that yet and who knows, maybe it will kick something up.

Do you want to make me jealous? Tell me about an encounter you had with a ghost, or an odd experience that you think may have been ghostly. Something you can’t explain. It’s the perfect time of year for a ghost story, and I want to hear some.

Pre-Code Carole

“Many men filled her life,” teased the poster in the lobby. Images of Lombard in negligee and Lombard showing leg added to the promise of a good show within.

I caught a couple of Lombard pre-Code pictures this past week, the hot-sounding Virtue (1932) and boring-sounding Brief Moment (1933), and only one lived up to my preconceptions. As you know, pre-Code refers to early talkies made prior to institution of the Motion Picture Code (read: censorship) when Hollywood was more like Dodge City and onscreen vice reigned. Virtue and Brief Moment ran 69 minutes each, with the former going fast and the latter an excruciating life sentence.

“Dump that bum!” I shouted at the screen; Carole didn’t listen.

Brief Moment only lifted itself above tedium when I was shouting at the screen for Carole to get over that bum Gene Raymond, but did Carole listen? No. She continued to refuse to come to her senses and ended up staying with him at fade out. She enacted a torch singer named Abby Fane and he was Rodney, the spoiled son of a vastly wealthy family, and their sudden marriage produced page-one headlines in major metropolitan newspapers. You know how the montages went—1930s screenplays advanced via the device of big headlines in newspapers that saved 10 minutes of exposition.

Brief Moment, another picture that Lombard made on loan out to Columbia, was one of those girl-meets-bum, girl-loses-bum, girl-gets-bum kind of pictures. Personally I was hoping that an apple would fall on Abby’s head and she’d take up with shady nightclub owner Toots, played by Steve Walsh. Toots is clearly nuts for Abby, see? But she doesn’t love him “that way,” so he goes all heart of gold and patches things up between Abby and Rod in the last reel.

How did Lombard survive pictures like this? Her agent, Myron Selznick, must have been one hell of a salesman is all I can say. Only a big star could have pulled this thing off—a woman with a set screen personality like maybe Ruth Chatterton, who was the prototypical long-suffering actress of the early 1930s, or maybe Kay Francis, who was still trending upward in 1933. I’m not saying Lombard wasn’t good; she knew her way around a script and the cameras by this time, but just when you start to believe her performance, she reverts to that deep voice and stilted playing that caused Howard Hawks to nearly fire her from Twentieth Century.

She’s actually much better in the other picture I watched, Virtue, made with Pat O’Brien on loan out to Columbia in 1932. I guess I had seen Virtue 30 years ago, but I have no conscious memory of the experience. All I knew going in was that Lombard played a prostitute and this was a pre-Code picture so I had high hopes of skin and smut—on the order of Joan Crawford’s Rain, made the same year—but after investing those 69 precious minutes as Virtue unspooled, I had experienced neither skin nor smut and found my innocence intact. The setup of the picture has Carole as Mae, a prostitute who is deported out of New York City, but gets off the boat before it sails and stays in town, where she meets hard-boiled, down-on-dames cab driver Jimmy (O’Brien). Oddly, the opening of the picture, with Mae sentenced to get out of town for prostitution, is audio only, with the screen black, so the audience never actually gets to see the actress as a hooker.

Judging by this image in Film Fun, Virtue was a must-see picture.

Mae and Jimmy get hitched in a New York minute, and he’s dim to the fact that she used to turn tricks. Personally, I’d wonder on my wedding night where my young bride got such talent and enthusiasm, but that’s just me. For the remainder of the picture Mae tries to fly right while we count the minutes until Jimmy gets wise to his wife’s big secret. Then he does find out and circumstances lead him to suspect she’s out turning tricks again, but since Jimmy’s already established as a cynic at heart, it’s not like he’s crushed or anything and at fade out (spoiler alert) they kiss and make up, and I could only hope he spent the next 50 years making the most of his wife’s earned-on-the-street abilities.

More Columbia Pictures enticement to go see Carole Lombard in Virtue.

I couldn’t make up my mind if I could imagine 23-year-old Carole Lombard as a pay-for-play babe and really, it’s ridiculous unless she was hopped up on opium or booze. But she’s as lucid as always and so we know going in this is a tidy little Hollywood fantasy. Aside from one bouncy braless scene on a city street, there wasn’t any skin, which was the biggest disappointment for me considering Virtue stills that made 1930s voyeur mags like Film Fun. Judging by these images Virtue was a smutfest with lesbian undertones, not a gee-whiz romance espousing, well, virtue. If this were a picture made after institution of Hollywood’s Production Code less than two years later, there could have been no happy ending and Mae would have lost her man as penance for life on the streets.

I came away from these two pictures believing that prior to her big break in 1934, Carole Lombard was only as good as her director and whatever script she was handed. She could act OK, but she couldn’t transcend. Am I wrong here? In what pictures did Lombard rise above the material as a leading lady? It seems clear that it was through her social connections—married to William Powell at this point in her career and benefiting from her access to Powell’s superagent—that she positioned herself for the good fortune that would come with casting in Twentieth Century. Then the tutelage of Howard Hawks changed everything.

Umbrella Man

Josiah Thompson was a hero of my youth. Nicknamed “Tink,” Thompson is an Oxford-educated private investigator, former Navy man, and author who wrote the ground-breaking first “micro-study of the Kennedy assassination,” Six Seconds in Dallas. Super-cool guy. He’s the kind of guy that, when you’re thinking of writing a book about the crash of TWA Flight 3, causes you say to yourself, “What would Tink Thompson do?” WWTTD? Well, of course, he’d climb the mountain, so I went and climbed the mountain.

Josiah Thompson and his second book, Six Seconds in Dallas, which caused quite a ruckus in 1967.

Six Seconds in Dallas appeared in 1967, nearly 50 years ago, and now Tink is advanced in age, but he popped up in a fascinating YouTube video that had been forwarded to me, and I delighted in the concept he described—a concept developed by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Updike in response to reading Thompson’s book.

In case you don’t know, when JFK was murdered in Dallas, he was riding in an open limo along a city street. At the very point where bullets rained down on him, a man stood by the curb holding an opened umbrella on a sunny Texas day. Conspiracy theorists ascribed deep meaning to that man and his umbrella: obviously he stood at the spot where triangulated gunfire from the Book Depository, the grassy knoll, and God only knows where else would have deadliest effect. Obviously, Umbrella Man was there to direct the assassination of a president.

Six Seconds in Dallas merely identified that a guy was standing there holding an umbrella and wondered why, but a decade after it was written, Umbrella Man came forward and testified before Congress about why he was there and what the opened umbrella represented: He wasn’t killing Kennedy, he was protesting the 25-year-old actions of JFK’s dad prior to the outbreak of World War II! The umbrella represented Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler, and Joseph Kennedy’s agreement with Chamberlain’s actions.

Thompson pokes fun at himself in the YouTube video, directed by Errol Morris, and discusses a concept that Updike introduced in a New Yorker think piece about conspiracy theories and the Kennedy assassination. Basically, Thompson says that you may think you know why someone did something in the context of an important historical event, but you don’t really know.

There he is in all his weird glory, Umbrella Man, encircled in yellow along with the head of a U.S. president.

Thompson’s first book, written prior to Six Seconds, had been on the works of Kierkegaard, so Tink’s philosophical musings on the Updike theory are well grounded: “In historical research,” says Thompson of the Updike position, “there may be a dimension similar to the quantum dimension in physical reality. If you put any event under a microscope, you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on. It’s as if there’s the macro level of historical research, where things sort of obey natural laws and the usual things happen and unusual things don’t happen, and then there’s this other level where everything is really weird.”

Said Updike in The New Yorker in 1967, “The truth about those seconds in Dallas is especially elusive; the search for it seems to demonstrate how perilously empiricism verges on magic.” With hundreds of eyewitnesses in the area, with reporters nearby and photos being snapped and movie film being exposed, with law enforcement all over the place, there should have been one set of facts and an open-and-shut case developed about a very public murder. But then it got weird and to this day, nobody can agree who did the shooting, from where, why, who else might have been involved, or even how many shots were fired!

Seeing the YouTube video and reading Updike’s original think piece hit me like a pumpkin to the head because I had spent years trying to sort out the circumstances leading up the crash of Flight 3—circumstances that should have been sortable and explainable but read like Fiction 101. The crash of Flight 3 and the reasons why Carole Lombard died on the plane with 21 others fit perfectly with Updike’s subatomic realm because the more we apply the rules of man’s physical world, the less the story makes sense. Last weekend in Fort Wayne, for example, I spent roughly 45 minutes talking about what a wonderful person Carole Lombard was, how down to earth, empathetic, generous, and considerate. Then I was asked, “If she knew her mother was terrified to fly and the PR man had dreamt his own death on an airplane, why did Lombard force them to get on the plane?” It’s an excellent question—I complimented the woman who asked it. Then I gave her a palms-up shrug and said, “I have no idea.” In Fireball I call it the fatal flaw, Carole’s charge ahead at full speed manner of living life, and it’s the only answer I can provide. There were times when she let nothing stand in her way, including reason. Yet her actions on January 16, 1942, which shattered the emotions of her traveling companions and then shattered their bodies, don’t sound like Carole Lombard at all. They just don’t.

If it wasn’t weird enough that Carole turned a deaf ear to Petey and Wink; if it wasn’t weird enough that TWA’s most experienced pilot, the one who had trained bomber crews on how to fight a war, suddenly behaved like a rookie flyer and steered his plane right into a mountain on a clear night; if it wasn’t weird enough that Hungarian violinist Joseph Szigeti had been scheduled to fly on a DC-3 that crashed in 1940 and a DC-3 that crashed in 1942 and survived both—if all these things weren’t weird enough, I have learned of two more truly astonishing Flight 3-related incidents since Fireball went to press a year ago. Both easily qualify for the Updike Dimension, and then some.

As I mentioned to a reporter in Fort Wayne, I have now finally accessed the FBI files on the plane crash and, I kid you not, UFOs were seen in the Flight 3 airway on nights leading up to January 16. No, seriously, UFOs. Many people logically dismiss UFOs as Cold War paranoia, but we’re talking sightings of odd lights in the sky before the era of Roswell and the “flying saucer” by eyewitnesses that include a Civil Aeronautics Authority man. A fed. A trained observer equivalent to today’s FAA investigators who saw spherical lights in the sky that were not aircraft. (For the record, I don’t believe that UFOs had anything to do with the crash of TWA Flight 3. I am remarking on how bizarre it is to find UFOs in the official FBI investigation.) Then there’s the other incident that I’m still working on that’s no less odd. Neither solves the mystery of Flight 3. On the contrary, both make answers all the more elusive and demonstrate how sometimes evidence and logic go right out the window, and, suddenly, you’re in that other dimension where people are dead and nobody can figure out how they got that way.

Tucked Away

On the way to Fort Wayne for the Carole Lombard weekend, we stopped in Indianapolis for 90 minutes at a place I bet you never heard of and one that, if I ever compile a list of my top-10 most memorable experiences, would easily make the cut.

Nellie Simmons Meier, a scientist at heart and international sensation in the first half of the twentieth century.

Once there was a “scientific palmist” named Nellie Simmons Meier, who lived with her husband, fashion designer George Phillip Meier, in a bungalow tucked away on North Pennsylvania Street in Indianapolis. Because it sat back off the street and was modest in appearance, it acquired the name “Tuckaway,” and it was here that Nellie held court for many of the most powerful people of the twentieth century. I’m not kidding about the significance of her clients. We’re talking Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, and an ardent pursuer, Adolph Hitler. Walt Disney was among her close friends and frequent visitors, to the extent that Nellie’s readings and Nellie’s home became instrumental to the creation of Disneyland.

Tuckaway looks like any old bungalow on any old street in the United States when you view it from a distance. Even people with an appointment drive right past it—I can tell you that from experience. When Ms. Garmin announced, “Arriving at destination, on right,” I groped to see anything on the right, let alone a destination shaped like a bungalow.

I can’t explain the physics of it, but Tuckaway is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, a yawning beast of Victorian design. We walked in to a vaulted-ceilinged parlor ablaze from a fire in the enormous fireplace. The walls were done in gold canvas because Nellie Meier had visited Coco Chanel’s gilded apartment in Paris and wanted her own home to be “dipped in gold,” like Coco’s. Cigarette smoke filled the yawning space, as (it sounded like) Marlene Dietrich purred torch songs from the walls themselves. Our host was Kenneth Keene, an impossible-to-describe raconteur who bought Tuckaway from the heir of Nellie Meier in 1972.

You’re saying, WHAT? There’s a home back there?

It’s forgotten today, but Nellie Simmons Meier was such a highly regarded professional at the scientific interpretation of palms that the brightest minds in the world sought her out. Rachmaninoff played piano in that parlor we walked into, and 80 years later it felt as if he were still there, trapped in time, along with all those other luminaries. Gershwin was a fan, as were Duncan Hines, Margaret Sanger, and Amelia Earhart. So prestigious was the library of palm prints and readings of Nellie Simmons Meier that President Franklin Roosevelt insisted that a portion of her collection be housed in the Library of Congress, where it remains today. When the president of the United States insists, what’s a girl to do?

The walls of the hallway and library downstairs hold dozens of framed portraits of the greats of the century past, every one inscribed to Nellie. Carole Lombard is there in a prime spot at the bottom of the stairs, the green-ink inscription on her photo attesting to the accuracy of Nellie’s reading.

The parlor of Tuckaway, as mysterious and compelling as an episode of The Twilight Zone. And what role in Carole Lombard’s life did the front door (seen at right) play?

I had come to Tuckaway to interview Mr. Keene about the connection between Lombard and Meier, based on a tip I had gotten while on the Indianapolis stop of the Fireball book tour. Local lore had it that Carole had stopped at Tuckaway the day of the bond rally and Nellie had warned her “not to take the plane.” I have more research to do beyond what I learned during the October 3 visit to Tuckaway, and by the time the trade paperback revised edition of Fireball goes to press after the first of the year, I believe I’ll have a definitive answer to the question: Beyond everything already described in Fireball, was there yet another chilling episode, tucked away in time since 1942, that compounds the mystery of the chaotic, improbable, and tragic last 24 hours of Carole Lombard’s life?

The inscription of Carole Lombard’s photo on the wall, signed as always in green ink, reads, “For Nellie Meier, In sincere appreciation of your Great Talent and kindness and truth of your reading. Cordially, Carole Lombard.”

Woodstock on the Maumee

I don’t suppose there will ever be another weekend like this one spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, at what became a Carole Lombard love-in, retracing her heritage as biological product of three great families, the Cheneys, Knights, and Peters, with wealth between them in the tens of millions of dollars. Considering the value of money in 1900, the vast fortune underpinning Elizabeth Knight Peters, the mother of Carole Lombard, was astonishing.

The weekend included a stop at the ancestral home of the Knights on Spy Run Avenue in Fort Wayne. A Knight had married a Cheney (as in the Cheneys of Wall Street) and settled on Spy Run, above the St. Joseph River, in the house where in 1902 Elizabeth Knight married Frederick Peters. Today the Knight building is home to Shepherd’s House, a shelter for homeless veterans of the U.S. military. Barb and Lonnie run the place as a taut but loving Christian ship and host more than 40 veterans at a time. Despite busy schedules they spent more than an hour showing us through many interesting spots within the massive structure.

The Knight mansion on Spy Run Avenue, now Shepherd’s House, home to more than 40 veterans.

We visited the Wayne Street mansion of John C. Peters, hardware mogul of Fort Wayne and “Gramps” to Jane Peters/Carole Lombard. Peters had his hand in all manner of construction enterprises and owned part interest in the Horton Manufacturing Co., which produced early automatic washing machines. Whereas the Knights and Cheneys were embedded nationally in big money, the wealth of J.C. Peters was homegrown in Fort Wayne. His mansion is a pure Victorian masterpiece.

The Victorian masterpiece John C. Peters mansion on West Wayne Street. An elderly woman once approached the owner with a memory of seeing baby Jane Alice Peters in this house.

Next, came a stop at the home of Elizabeth and Frederick Peters at 704 Rockhill Street, the place where Jane Alice Peters was born on October 6, 1908, 114 years ago today. You know you’ve found the right house because there’s a brass plaque on the front that was placed there as a publicity tie-in to the release of the David O. Selznick comedy, Nothing Sacred, in 1938. It was, at the time, pure cornpone to be putting up historic markers on the home of an actress not yet 30 years of age, but the type of flak that made Selznick PR man Russell “Birdie” Birdwell a living legend and perfect publicity partner for Carole Lombard. Whereas the Birdman dreamed up stunts like a plaque on Carole’s home, it would have been Lombard approving the message and assuring history would record that she actually drew her first breath within the walls of 704 Rockhill. It’s a deceptive house, modest in street views but another grand Victorian inside, as revealed on a tour led by the current owners, Rick and Cora Brandt. The place has a dark and mysterious past since some sort of physical and/or emotional violence within forced Elizabeth to leave her husband of 12 years in 1914 and flee to southern California with children Frederick, Stuart, and Jane.

The home of Frederick and Elizabeth Peters on Rockhill Street. Jane’s earliest memories were playing with her brothers in and around the house.

First thing yesterday morning I reported to WANE TV-15 for a short but punchy on-camera interview with Gina Carano. Four hours later came the main event: an exhibit of a couple dozen Carole Lombard-owned items at the Fort Wayne History Center, and an accompanying lecture by yours truly about the book Fireball. My initial doubts about attendance vanished as the crowd poured in. We ended up with a near house record of 133, including Rick and Cora Brandt of the Lombard house, Barb and Lonnie Cox of the Knight (Shepherd’s) House, and Bill and Janet Heffley, owners of the Peters house—making it a clean sweep of Lombard-related homes.

Operating on three hours of sleep but ready for action on WANE-TV with Gina Carano.

Other VIPs included three third cousins of Jane Peters/Carole Lombard, all named Peters, along with Fireball researcher and Carole Lombard expert Marina Gray and Carole Lombard Archive Foundation director Carole Sampeck. My lecture was followed by a lively Q&A, a book signing, and then a well-attended tour of the Lombard house on Rockhill Street.

Lecturing in the spectacular Fort Wayne History Center.

I heard many stories of the supernatural over the course of the weekend. Not Halloween bump-in-the-night ghost stories but interesting real experiences by sober inhabitants of these and other classic Indiana homes. I guess that’s fitting for October.

Lots of books signed.

…including one for Fort Wayne patron of the arts Anita Cast.

I want to thank the Fort Wayne History Center for booking me into that fantastic venue, particularly Todd Maxwell Pelfrey, executive director, and Nancy McCammon-Hansen, marketing director, and also Steve, Randy, Bob, and Carmen for their help onsite. Thanks also go to Anita Cast for her help in lining up the lecture, Kevin Kilbane of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel for his print pieces heralding the event, and Gina Carano and Natalie Wagner of WANE for one of the smoothest TV appearances of the whole Fireball tour.

Special thanks go to partners in crime Marina and Carole for a wild ride this weekend. From the two of them—and I’m sure all of you—I want to say directly to the cosmos, Happy Birthday, Carole Lombard. Fort Wayne loves and remembers you.

Displays included a clutch purse, monogrammed handkerchief, and jewelry owned by Carole Lombard.

Another case featured snapshots of Gable hunting trips, a Gable duck call, a handwritten note from Lombard to MGM VP Eddie Mannix, and a bond receipt from Indianapolis.

Also at the History Center, a display of material from the Flight 3 crash site, including partially burned mail and melted aluminum–reminders of the ferocity of impact and daunting task facing investigators in 1942.

Dynasties

I like to tell the story of the time I was subpoenaed to testify as an eyewitness to a car crash. Afterward, my co-worker Amy asked, “When you were sworn in and put your hand on the Bible, did it burst into flames?” Anyone who knows me would not be surprised at this question. However, in my time I have indeed opened a Bible or two, and during the confirmation process many years ago I read about all that “begetting” that started in Genesis, and I was never more bored in my life. All these people begat all these other people and so on and so forth. I don’t even much care about my own genealogy as it extends back into the distant Bavarian past…unless of course I’m somehow connected to rich Matzens and vast European fortunes. Then, by all means, sign me up for genealogy classes.

So, I had mixed feelings when a couple of weeks ago my friend and Fireball researcher Marina Gray sent me a thorough, 12-page document containing years of her expert research on Carole Lombard’s genealogy, the story of the Knight and Peters families, which combined their gene pools into the begetting of three children: Frederick Peters II, Stuart Peters, and Jane Peters. Marina sent me the fruits of her genealogical work, which turned out to be a fascinating history, as prep for my upcoming lecture on Fireball in the hometown of Jane Peters/Carole Lombard, Fort Wayne, Indiana, on Sunday October 5. Click here for an article about the event published September 28 in the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel.

As you may know, Fort Wayne is the second-largest city in Indiana and was named after Revolutionary War General Anthony Wayne, known as “Mad Anthony,” after he chose this spot on the map for one of several forts to defend white European settlers from the Miami Indians—who had every right to be “mad” themselves after a bunch of white people started to claim Native American lands.

Fort Wayne sits in the northeastern corner of Indiana and it was here that a whole lot of wealth congregated. On Carole’s mother’s side, the Cheneys were already on the level of “magnates” when they joined with the Knights, who were Wall Street wizards. On Carole’s father’s side, John C. Peters, or “gramps” to Carole, pretty much owned Fort Wayne. Among his businesses was the Horton Manufacturing Company, which introduced the first automatic washing machine to the world and offered replacement to back-breaking manual labor in the cleaning of clothes. It was quite the revolutionary device and that alone would have made any family a fortune, but to the Knights and Peters, the income from washing machines was pocket money. Chump change. All this is why I say in Fireball that money grew on trees around Carole Lombard all her life. This girl was lucky enough to be rolling in dough long before she became the highest-paid actress in Hollywood in the late 1930s.

Part of the fun of visiting Fort Wayne will be the ability to get a glimpse of the three-story home of John C. Peters at 832 West Wayne Street. It’s so big that it was converted to an apartment building. The elegant brick home of the Knights, in which 26-year-old Elizabeth wedded 27-year-old Frederick before begetting the three children (including Jane/Carole), still stands at 519 Tennessee Street and is now known as “Shepherd’s House,” a shelter for homeless veterans. The house built for Frederick and Elizabeth Peters in 1902 still stands at 704 Rockhill Street. It was within these walls that Fred exhibited such dark, violent behavior that Elizabeth, known later as “Tots” and “Petey” to daughter Carole, had to gather up the children and flee to California.

Elizabeth Knight Peters sits for a portrait with her three children in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1911. From left: Stuart, Frederick II, Tots, and Jane, who would grow up to be Carole Lombard, and already looked the part.

Sunday, October 5, is going to be a big day for any Carole Lombard fan. It really starts on Saturday evening at 8 (Eastern) when Turner Classic Movies shows Carole Lombard’s Twentieth Century on The Essentials with Robert Osborne and Drew Barrymore. The following morning, Sunday the 5th, I’m appearing as a guest on WANE-TV to talk about Fireball and the day’s events. Then at 2 P.M. I’m speaking at the Fort Wayne History Center. Before and after, you will get to see a once-in-a-lifetime collection of personally owned Carole Lombard items on display at the History Center, including jewelry, purses, hats, a cigarette lighter and cigarette case, compact, documents–including the hunting licenses of Lombard and Gable, a letter handwritten from Carole to MGM VP Eddie Mannix, and the 11×14 Hurrell portrait that Carole inscribed to Clark, “Pa dear, I love you, Ma.” There will also be movie memorabilia and rare photos on display, including candids from the Myron Davis set taken in Indianapolis the day before the crash of Flight 3. At the conclusion of the History Center event, at approximately 5 P.M., attendees will get to tour the Rockhill Street house to see the room in which Jane Peters was born and slept, and the streets she roamed with her two big brothers, “Fritz” and “Tootey.” [Note: the Lombard house is not a working bed and breakfast at this time.]

As I understand it, the History Center event is free to the public (but I can’t swear to that); I know for a fact that the tour of the Rockhill Street house that will be hosted by Rick and Cora Brandt is free.

Special guests on October 5 will be Carole Sampeck, director of the Dallas-based Carole Lombard Archive Foundation and consultant in the development of Fireball, and the aforementioned Marina Gray, one of two Jedi Ninja researchers who helped to make Fireball a book that has drawn praise for the comprehensive nature of its information. [DC-based Ann Trevor is the other Jedi Ninja.]

I’ve had some terrific experiences speaking about Fireball around the United States, and met many people I now call friends, but I can’t imagine there’ll be anything to top this celebration of Carole Lombard in her own home town and on the day before her October 6 birthday. I hope to see as many of you there as possible.

And, for the record, no, the Bible did not burst into flames that day.

Babies and Bathwater

As you may know, I don’t approach biography like most writers. I like to tell the story of a life like a story, not as a series of chronological events. Maybe I’ll start a new wave of biography, who knows, but with co-author Mike Mazzone I told Errol Flynn’s story from the perspective of his home, Mulholland Farm. Then I surveyed the lives of Flynn and co-star Olivia de Havilland from the vantage point of their intersection at ages 25 and 18, respectively. I projected the story of Carole Lombard through the prism of the plane crash that killed her. Next, I hope to reveal James Stewart through the global stage of World War II.

So, yesterday I received an email concerning Mr. Flynn from a woman who recently, as she says, “became fascinated” with him and did a lot of reading. She doesn’t say specifically that she read either Errol Flynn Slept Here or Errol & Olivia, but she addressed the message to me because I was the most easily accessible of his biographers.

In the course of reading about Flynn she became turned off. Her distaste for the man is evident in her communication to me and centers around the fact that Flynn recruited men into slave labor among his 67 other odd jobs in the years after he left home and before he found England and acting. (Note: Errol had so many jobs because he was lousy at everything, including slave trading.) This episode in Flynn’s life rendered the man entirely unsympathetic, and this woman figured she would “start a fight” on my blog by stating her negative opinion of Errol Flynn.

Errol Flynn, age 21, in one of many failed jobs, this one running a copra plantation in the absolute fringes of the British Empire. Hollywood stardom was still four years away.

Here is Errol Flynn Psychology 101: His brainy father knocked up his histrionic mother and forced matrimony ensued. Mom was an aspiring gadfly who never, repeat never, forgave Errol for making an appearance in this world. She loathed her son from his first breath, and soon he was loathing himself, and forever seeking the two things she would never give him: love and approval. He began to act long before he found a stage or camera. He began to project a successful, attractive self to cover up the poisoned soul inside him. He always had anger close at hand and once in a while it would whip out of him snakelike and take down a bystander. David Niven’s classic line about Flynn, “You could count on Errol; he always let you down,” was funny in delivery but rooted in the pain of one friend experiencing another.

If ever there were a person damaged beyond repair by a parent, it was Errol Flynn. It was the wildest, one-in-a-million fluke that this human survived his early years in a remote corner of the world to become a world-famous actor in Hollywood. He not only engaged in the slave trade, he was involved in the shooting death of a native; he lied and stole his way to England in the globe-trotting course that he eventually led him to become the king of adventure films.

In my return email, I postulated to my correspondent that her opinion of Flynn would not cause a ruckus on this blog because my readership is sophisticated and would readily admit Flynn’s shortcomings. I, for one, have never been a hero worshipper of Flynn or anyone else, and I’ve stated publicly that if given the opportunity by some time warp or other, I wouldn’t want to hang around Flynn for long because of that cruel streak.

BUT.

There are two buts, actually.

If one is going to use the slave labor argument to condemn Errol Flynn, then condemn the entire British Empire of several centuries along with him because Flynn was a British subject at a time when entire races were subjugated in the normal course of events. If you were a white Brit within the span of empire in 1925 you were one of the cool kids and God help anyone in your way. These days, there’s this tendency to look at historical events and people with 2014 sensibilities, which I find unrealistic and unfair, whether you’re talking about Thomas Jefferson or Errol Flynn.
Flynn did some beautiful things in his life. He became a writer, a good writer. He aspired to be a writer instead of an actor, being of the opinion that one was far more noble than the other. He wasn’t thought to be a good actor but left behind performances that stand the test of time 60 and 75 years later. He could channel good guys and make people root for him, which means to me that he had good stuff inside him, residing in there with all the bad. The particular mix of good and bad in Flynn makes him, in my mind, one of the most compelling people of the twentieth century, even before you consider the fact that he entertained millions over the course of his career. I am not going to touch millions of people in a positive way through the course of my life. I doubt that this Errol Flynn critic will either. Whatever poison was in his soul, he gets credit for spreading a lot of good.

The writer concludes her email with, “I really just cannot understand why every biographer judges Flynn so generously.” I laughed at this one because my correspondent must have missed a volume called Errol Flynn: The Untold Story, the 1980 poison pill written by the late, unlamented biographical hack, Charles Higham. In this volume Higham listed Flynn’s shortcomings chapter and verse, some of it pure fabrication that was later proven so, but all of it a study in loathing of a biographer for his subject.

As for me, I would respond to the assertion that I’m too easy on Flynn this way: Why would I take the time to write a book about a person I disliked? I leave that to the Charles Highams of the world. I like to think that I bring to the table a natural curiosity to understand what made my subject tick. Who was he or she? Why was a particular course undertaken? What were the factors? What were the outcomes? I strive to present real people making real decisions and often, real mistakes. And, brother, Errol made his share like we all do, and then some.

Now you know what I think. I’m curious to get your thoughts on this subject.