They were the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (minus kids) of Hollywood’s Golden Era — but the legendary romance of superstars Clark Gable and Carole Lombard ended abruptly when she was killed in a 1942 plane crash while returning home from a World War II War Bonds tour.
A new book reveals the chain of events that ultimately took Lombard’s life. It was set into motion when Gable, then 40 and Hollywood’s top box-office attraction, cheated on his wife — 33 and one of the most desirable women in the world — with one of his co-stars, 21-year-old bombshell Lana Turner.
“When Gable and Lombard got together and spent three full years as bedmates before they married, she became a one-man woman,’’ says Robert Matzen, author of “Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3.’’
“But Gable was self-centered and never felt it necessary to have self-discipline when it came to sex outside the relationship because he had a sense of what a catch he was,’’ he continues. “And, really, was Carole going to give all that up? She was a shrewd businesswoman and knew the power of being close to the biggest movie star in the world.’’
Though Turner later denied the affair with Gable in her memoirs, Matzen confirmed their liaison with several of the actor’s friends — as well as Lombard’s nephew, the last living relative who was familiar with the situation. In fact, Gable and Lombard had a fight over his infidelity at their ranch in Encino, Calif., the night before she left for a successful bond-selling tour in her native Midwest.
Lombard had tickets to return to California by train, but was so determined to save her marriage, says Matzen, she decided to save time by embarking on a cross-country trip, with several refueling stops, on a noisy and bumpy commercial airplane with an unpressurized cabin.
Her terrified traveling companions — Lombard’s mother, Elizabeth Knight, and MGM publicist Otto Winkler — tried to talk her out of the flight. But Lombard, who had pulled strings to get last-minute seats on TWA Flight 3, challenged Winkler (who told his wife he had a premonition of a crash) to a coin toss. He lost, and all three, along with all 19 other passengers and crew, ended up losing their lives.
It was just five weeks after Pearl Harbor had plunged America into war, and military personnel on their way to assignments had priority on civilian transportation. When Flight 3 landed in Albuquerque to pick up mail and passengers, Lombard was told by an airline employee that she and her party were being bumped to make room for Army Air Corps flyers.
Based on testimony from a Civil Aeronautics Board inquest cited by Matzen, Lombard not only wouldn’t budge, but threw her weight around — and got her way after citing that she had just sold $2 million worth of bonds in a single day and threatening to make calls to the big shots who had gotten her on the plane in the first place.
Because of the weight of Lombard’s copious luggage and equipment carried by the flyers, the plane could only carry a limited amount of fuel leaving Albuquerque — not enough to make it to the final destination, Burbank, Calif.
Ideally, there would have been a refueling stop in Boulder City, Nev. But Boulder City didn’t have landing lights, and a series of delays (caused by weather and the abortive attempt to remove Lombard) forced a fateful nighttime stop at another, better-equipped airport just outside Las Vegas.
Exactly what caused Flight 3 to slam into a Nevada mountain peak, on a perfectly clear night shortly after takeoff, has been debated for decades. But Matzen, who climbed to the crash site — so remote that debris from the crash remains 72 years later — convincingly argues it was the combination of factors. Among them: A slightly erroneous flight plan, a blackout of a warning beacon because of the war, and the pilot’s vision being obscured by cockpit lights at a critical juncture on a black night.
Lombard’s death was a huge international story for days, particularly after the grief-stricken Gable arrived and tried to scale the steep 7,800-foot peak to help recover his wife’s body.
Gable returned to MGM and eventually completed his second film with Turner, the ironically titled “Somewhere I’ll Find You.’’ As Lombard had urged him to do, he enlisted and served in the Army Air Force.
His swagger gone, Gable resumed his Hollywood career after the war but, by all accounts, was haunted by the memory of the woman he lost. Though married twice more (to women who resembled Lombard), when he died following a heart attack in 1960, Gable was buried next to her in a mausoleum.
“Clark only learned how important fidelity was in his relationship with Lombard when it was too late,’’ Matzen says.
“She kept trying to get through to him, including in that final fight. Then she did get through to him and proved how important this marriage was to both of them, by dying in an effort to rush home and save it.’’