TWA Flight 3 Lombard | Robert Matzen

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

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

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

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

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

Carole Lombard Flight 3 crash site, Potosi Mountain, Nevada

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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