{New Article} 1937: The Utterly Balmy Home Life of Carole Lombard

Carole Lombard was wacky. This was an adjective that would be used to describe her for years and, I think, often exaggerated. I know she did have a menagerie of animals and liked to play pranks, but I doubt her home was a virtual funhouse every day of the year. BUT this is a cute article anyway, describing the crazy antics of Carole’s humble abode.

Take—if you can stand it! Carole Lombard’s household—

There’s Carole and Fieldsie, her secretary-pal-confidante-companion-advisor-manager-sparring-partner-critic-et-cetera; then there’s two dachshunds, one bantam rooster, six doves, two ducks, one Pekinese named “Pushface the Killer,” two hens, one cocker spaniel, three goldfish, one cat named “Josephine,” which insists on sleeping with the dogs; also there’s a nice “comfy” mammy cook named Ellen, from Memphis, Tennessee, a butler named Edmund who’s also colored, and Carole’s personal maid named Eleanor, who never knows what her mistress is gonna do next…

“There’s all that,” says Fieldsie, and who knows what else there’ll be tonight. Because Lombard’s out shopping right now!”

Nuts? Sure, kind of. But that’s only the beginning. You see, you’ve got to mix all that up to really get an idea of Carole’s homelife, if any! I mean, you never know where you’ll find any part of that set-up…

Carole, herself, may be down in the kitchen swapping jokes with the cook and Edmund, the cat may be in the goldfish bowl, and ten-to-one, the ducks are wandering around the dining-room. The only place the ducks can’t go is the living room. That’s got white rugs!

To add to the confusion, the bantam rooster is named Edmund, and the two hens are named Ellen and Eleanor—so when Carole calls, nobody ever knows whether she’s calling the pultry or the household staff into conference.

“That house,” admits Fieldsie, “is MAD!”

Does all this sound absolutely batty? Screwy? Insane? Balmy?—oKAY, then, make the most of it. I simply can’t help it. I’m going to tell you about Carole Lombard’s home life, and that’s all there is to it. You can take it or leave it. All I’ve got to say is this—when it comes to the business of getting the most downright, sheer fun out of this usually drab business of living, then I had all prizes unreservedly to Carole Lombard.

Carole affectionately called her Bel Air home “The Farm” and even had stationary that said so. I imagine she was such a ray of sunshine to be around!

there’s the bee-bee gun. It was a gag present to Carole from—well, anyway, there’s the bee-bee gun. Carole takes it out in the backyard and shoots it. She’s got a target on some bushes, but she’d rather shoot anything and anybody else.

“I don’t dare go out in that yard,” says Fieldsie, “when Carole’s got the bee-bee gun, without wearing a red hat. With that gun, Carole is just too bad–!”

It isn’t only the gun that takes Lombard into the yard. She gardens, too. Oh, yes—she’s got orange trees and lemon trees and she picks the fruit and works in the garden. She always dresses for it, though—overalls, white cotton gloves, and a sunbonnet-sue top-piece. Lombard “dresses the best gardener I ever saw,” says Fieldsie. That’s another thing about Carole that just kills Fieldsie—“no matter what she does, she always dresses the part!”

One weird thing about this article: it never mentions Clark by name, but purposely avoids it in a way that makes it perfectly aware of whom they are speaking of. Why? Add a hint of mystery? Just to be cutesy? Or threatened by the editor not to mention her married boyfriend by name?

The dogs? Oh, they’re assorted gifts. “Fritz,” one of the dachsies, was just about hi-jacked, though, by Carole. It belonged to Mr. Whoozis—a friend of Carole’s—who was going away on a hunting trip or something. He loves to hunt.

“Why don’t you leave Fritz here?” Carole suggested.

“No,” said Whoozis.

“Why?”

“Because I know you’d never give him back to me.”

“Hmph!”

So Whoozis went away, and left Fritz with his own servants. Now it so happens that his servants are the mother and father of Carole’s maid. And ma and pa came to visit. And they brought Fritz along. “Why don’t you just leave him here? You might just as well,” suggested Carole to them. They did. And so Whoozis came back from the hunting trip, and there was Fritz in Carole’s house. Fritz didn’t seem particularly excited when his master returned.

“See?” crowed Lombard; “you’ve been gone three months and now he doesn’t even know you!” So Whoozis gave up, and now Fritz belongs to Carole.

“Pushface the Killer” came because Carole hates Pekes. A friend asked her one day: “You like dogs, don’t you?” (This was before Pushface’s advent, and led to it.)

“I just L-O-V-E dogs,” Carole cried.

“Pekes, too?” asked the man.

“I H-A-A-A-T-E Pekes!” howled Lombard.

That settled it. Because Lombard plays positively outrageous practical jokes on everybody she knows, everybody she knows plays outrageous practical jokes on her. So next Saturday, a big basket of flowers arrived for Carole from them man who talked about the dogs.

“Ooooo,” cried Carole, delighted, and buried her face in the flowers.

“Yap! Yap! Yap!” went the flowers, and something nipped Carole’s nose. “Those,” she protested, as she dropped them, “are the utterly weirdest flowers I ever saw. They bark and bite.”

Investigation revealed, buried deep in the posies, the Peke pup, six inches long, but full of vinegar! Carole’s hatred for Pekes ceased instantly, and now that she’s found the ideal name for him, “Pushface the Killer,” he’s lord of the household.

So, “Mr. Whoozis” is obviously supposed to be Clark, although that is the first I have heard of her stealing one of his dogs. And I’ve heard a couple of stories about how she acquired dear old Pushface–this one seems a bit farfetched.

You can read all about Carole’s house of craziness in the Article Archive.