{New Article} 1939: Lombard Unlimited

She’s harum-scarum, she dances in the park at three A.M., she dotes on practical jokes, she hates pink, and she’s so impulsive she almost lives behind the eight-ball. Meet Carole, screw-ball comedian, dramatic actress, and radio’s new star.

Continuing in our Carole Lombard theme for the month of October, here’s one from 1938. This article is from Radio Mirror magazine and was written to promote the fact that Carole was a newly minted radio star on the new Kellogg-sponsored program “The Circle.” Well, unfortunately for Radio Mirror, Carole left the show just a few weeks after it premiered, so calling her the new radio star is a bit foolish. But, nonetheless, it’s a cute article about Carole.

She has always been able to take tough breaks of her own—even the automobile accident she was in years ago and its consequences. It happened when she was fifteen. Already out of junior high school and a pupil at Los Angeles High (yes, she has lived in either Los Angeles or Hollywood since she was seven) she was regularly winning Charleston contests at the Cocoanut Grove and those blue eyes of hers were fixed on the movies. She had been in pictures when she was a child—at least she had worked for two days in “The Perfect Crime” with Monte Blue. She now had visions of being a great actress. Then trouble came along.

It wasn’t much of an accident at that. The driver of a car in which she was riding only stopped rather short. But the movable seat came unhinged and Carole, thrown into the windshield, suffered an ugly cut from her upper lip to the middle of her cheek. They marched her into the nearest hospital, where a young doctor, not long past his internship, took a look at the cut and a look at her.

“You’re a pretty youngster,” he remarked. “We’ll try to keep you that way…but it’s going to hurt…”

Well, it did—the fourteen stitches he took in her face without even a local anesthetic. But anesthesia would have meant relaxed facial muscles and a bad scar so Carole gritted her teeth and “took it.”

“I’ll never be in the movies, now,” she said, quietly…Her dreams were over now. She would have to hide herself away, where no one could see and whisper about her “misfortune.” She did hide herself away for months, and scarcely saw anyone.

Inevitably, though, her courage came back and she listened to the advice of a friend. “If you still want to be in the movies, why don’t you try Mack Sennett? He cares more about figure than face, and you do have a figure…”

“I couldn’t,” Carole protested at first. “Who ever heard of a face like this in any kind of movie? It isn’t even comic.”

But the next day she put on her hat and went down to Sennett’s. “I can’t be killed for trying,” she thought.

She was right. She got herself a job. They put a little grease paint over the streak on her face and for two happy, healthy years she was a target for pies, was dunked, chased, tripped and so generally maltreated before the camera that she had no time to think about her personal “affliction”…until, one day, she suddenly realized that the angry red scar had disappeared, leaving only the faintest of tiny, white lines.

Since then, she has “taken it” in other ways. She “took” the failure of her marriage with Bill Powell. They were terribly in love, those two, in the beginning. She used to call the suave, sophisticated Bill “Junior” and he adored it. They were married and planned to live happily ever after. But Hollywood was even harder on marriage in those days that it is now. The pace a star, any star, had to set and keep left time for nothing else. They grew apart. And when Carole saw this happening, she did the next best thing. She salvaged friendship and has kept it intact—so beautifully intact that when Jean Harlow died it was to his ex-wife, Carole, the best friend he had, that Bill Powell turned in his grief…

Carole has “taken it” since her romance with Clark Gable. But she has continued to mind her own business; has never talked back to the gossips. You only have to see her look at Clark to know how she feels about him. But if she loses him, she’ll “take” that, too, and we’ll be seeing her in the movies and hearing her on the radio, a greater, stronger personality than ever.

Only, I don’t think anything will happen to those two.

I’ve seen them often at the Kellogg rehearsals, Clark sitting in the front row of the auditorium making occasional wisecracks; Carole on the stage with the others, wrinkling an impudent nose at him or sticking out a saucy tongue or maybe just smiling at him with that assured comradeship which bespeaks deep regard.

I think one of the things that draw people in about Carole—she really was a resilient person, an optimistic person, the kind that picked up the pieces and carried on. Her facial scar was visible often and she never seemed to mind; it was a part of her. And I love the description of Clark sitting and watching her radio rehearsals. To be a fly on the wall and watch those two interact, even for a just a little while! It seems everyone knew that they were something special.

And Carole off the job? A good deal has been written about the simple, wholesome life she leads. A good many writers have told about her small house and small staff of servants (two) and how she would rather go hunting with Clark and friends than to a night club; and skeet shooting than to a preview, even of her own pictures. But perhaps not so much has been written about the fact that even now, at the height of her career as an actress, she spends a good deal of her spare time considering possibilities if a career apart from screen or radio.

“I’ll never retire,” she told me just the other day. “I’ll always want to be doing something…Maybe advertising, maybe publicity. Maybe I’d like to manage a theater. I don’t know. I just know that when pictures turn thumbs down on me as one day they must, and radio, too, I’ll try something else. I’d go crazy just sitting around.”

She would. Even now, busy as she is, that vitality of hers is like a dynamo driving her to action. Harum-scarum? Certainly. She lets off steam that way. It is as natural for her to get out of a cab and dance in Central Park at three in the morning (as she actually did one time) as to wash her face. Spurred, too, by an incorrigible sense of humor, it is natural for her to play elaborate jokes on the people. They aren’t cruel jokes, though. She hates cruelty. I think one of her greatest faults—and she has faults, of course—is a driving urge to mix into other people’s affairs because she thinks they have been abused.

“Little champion of the downtrodden,” “Fieldsie” calls her, jokingly. But it’s true.

A lot is written about how Clark and Carole were so different and she “changed” for him. If you examine articles about them separately, even years before they got together, you can see that they really were quite similar in a lot of ways. Both described as humble and caring, both despised cruelty to others and were sympathetic. NICE people, in Hollywood. They did exist!

You can read of the article in its entirety in The Article Archive.