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{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…
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Gossip Friday: Carole Lombard–Mrs. Kanin?
From January 1941: [When Garson Kanin was directing Carole] in “They Knew What They Wanted,” he’d say when he wanted her in a sad mood: “Just imagine you had married me instead of Gable.” [He] says it always worked!
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{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…
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The Gable Gallery: Come One, Come All!
This website has many moving parts: content, blog, Facebook, gallery—the gallery being the most frustrating part by far. I want to share the over 10,000 pictures with Clark Gable fans the easiest way possible. However, I learned early on that if I leave the gallery wide open for anyone to register whenever they want, I am literally inundated with spam comments. Thousands of them, posted all day and all night long–sometimes it would take me hours to delete them all! I got so tired of dealing with that that I locked the gallery down and made it so that you must request a username from me to register. I tried…
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Gossip Friday: Joke’s on Clark
From December 1940: The town is chuckling over a gag that Carole Lombard recently pulled on Clark Gable. Clark couldn’t see the humor of the prank, they say, and he left the gathering in a huff. He and Carole were entertaining some friends at dinner and afterwards say down to see some home movies. Instead of the usual color shots of mountain streams and snow-clad peaks there appeared on the screen the first test Clark ever made for MGM. He was playing a native lover in nothing but a loin cloth and a hibiscus back of his ear. Gable couldn’t take it, but his guests had a hilarious evening running…
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October Movie of the Month: Comrade X (1940)
This month, Clark is a rogue foreign correspondant in Russia and Hedy Lamarr is his reluctant hostage in Comrade X. Gable is McKinley Thompson, an American reporter living in Russia who is secretly sending news out of the country as the elusive “Comrade X”. His bumbling valet, Igor (Felix Bressart) discovers who he is and blackmails him to take his headstrong Communist daughter (Hedy Lamarr) out of Russia to protect her from prosecution. Everything doesn’t go as planned and soon the three of them are racing out of Russia with the Russian army on their tails. This one isn’t legendary film making by any means, but it’s fun. Clark is always at ease…
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{Photos} Clark Gable and Carole Lombard on a Picnic
By 1938, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard were madly in love, and everyone knew it. The stories of “Will Their Romance Last?” were starting to dissapate and the “When Will Ria Gable Give Clark the Divorce so These Lovebirds Can Marry?” stories were roaring. So, no surprise, Carole was Clark’s date to the annual MGM company picnic that year (I think I am mostly surprised Clark attended at all–maybe Carole convinced him to be a good sport?). The pictures of them from this event are some of my very favorites. Clad casually in sweaters and Carole with very little make-up and her hair pushed off her face, they look like…
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Gossip Friday: Keeping Miss Lombard Waiting
From May 1941: Chief among the 1941 Academy Award winners whose name does not appear on the official honors list is your present correspondent, who won an Oscar for perpetrating the outstanding bonehead play of the year. In the interests of her millions of fans he arranged to interview Miss Carole Lombard. A rendezvous was promised in a quiet sitting room on a side street in Beverly Hills for a certain Thursday. The hour, the date and the place were as clear as a blueprint in his mind. He thought. The momentous day arrived. Your correspondent, methodical as ever, leaped into his motor car well ahead of schedule and went…
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Happy Birthday, Carole Lombard
Carole Lombard, aka Jane Peters, aka Carole Gable, would have been 105 today! It wouldn’t be Carole’s birthday without this snippet of Clark singing Happy Birthday to his “Ma”: HappyBirthday To celebrate, here is the tale of Carole’s 32nd birthday and how it didn’t go exactly as she planned it… [On the set of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, on her birthday, Carole Lombard] had a hunch that [director Alfred] Hitchcock would send her a Western Union singing boy, so she decided to top his gag by having ten Western Union singing boys arrive on the set at five o’clock and sing birthday greetings to everyone on the set except herself. It was…
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Gossip Friday: Dachshund Wanted
From November 1935: Carole [Lombard] is playing in “Hands Across the Table,” with Fred MacMurray and Ralph Bellamy. We drop in with the F.S. Reinhardts from Minneapolis for a chat, to find her trundling Ralph in a wheelchair, for a scene in the flicker. Enter Fieldsie, Carole’s secretary: “Carole, I give up. I can’t find a black, male dachshund anywhere.” Carole: “But we’ve got to!” Ralph Bellamy: “Try Frank Morgan–he knows all about dachshunds.” We: “What’s this all about?” Carole: “Well, the nephew of a friend of mine lost his dachshund, and he is broken-hearted. I’ve got to locate one just like it before the boy discovers his pet is…