Remembering Carole Lombard

Carole Lombard died 83 years ago today, on January 16, 1942. On a record-setting ward bond selling trip with her mother and Gable friend Otto Winkler, they all perished in a plane crash on Mount Potosi outside Las Vegas. As someone who only started researching Clark Gable and Carole Lombard the past 20 years or so, it is incredible to me that she has been gone 83 years. Carole just oozes a tangible human quality–you can see her walking down the street in 2025 no problem. It’s so sad to think we missed out on an elderly Carole, still in her fur coat and diamond brooches with cigarette in her hand with long red nails, cracking up Johnny Carson on his show.

One of many Associated Press articles printed on January 17, after it had been confirmed that Carole had perished, by Hubbard Keavy:

Carole Lombard was universally liked in Hollywood because she had an intense dislike of everything that was artificial or insincere.

Carole will be missed in Hollywood as is another great figure, Will Rogers, who also pricked the balloons of fakery. Rogers also died in an airplane crash.

Carole’s likeable debunking trait first came to my attention 10 years ago. Through a typographical error, her name came out on the screen with an “e” that never was there before. The studio, to alibi this, announced she had consulted a numerologist who told her a 13-letter name was much better than one of 12. This was Carole’s reply when I asked about numerology:

“Don’t let ’em kid you, honey. That’s a lot of bunk, but, since they’re paying me so well, I don’t give a damn how they spell my name.”

Few persons in Hollywood had a more colorful vocabulary. But Carole was never offensive. She could be very much the lady, but when she was among friends, as she usually was, she spoke as she pleased.

Not long ago Carole declared that she wanted to make as many pictures as she could–just so she could give her government more income taxes. Some criticized her for such a statement, accusing her of supreme egotism.

Carole was unimpressed.

“Nuts to ’em,” she told me, “if I can give the government a quarter of a million bucks a year, who’s better off for it? Certainly I’m no worse off for working–pardon me, did I say working?–I mean for doing something like this instead of pouring coffee in a canteen.”

Her marriage to Clark Gable was one of the town’s ideal romances. She wanted very much to have children but her health would not permit. Her friends warned her that she and William Powell, her first husband, were too much alike temperamentally; that they’d never make a go of it.

Although she and Gable apparently were alike in their happy-go-lucky, causal, gag-playing ways, they complimented each other. Lombard liked fun and practical jokes (she sent a large ham to Gable after their first meeting) and people. Gable, older, is more settled, the stay-at-home type.

The Gables built an unpretentious ranch house but they never entertained large groups, never gave parties to maintain a front. They entertained only the people both liked. When they could, Carole and Clark went away in their elaborate station wagon to hunt or fish or just to ride.

Great wealth did not impress Carole. She earned more than two million.