#22 Golden Age of Hollywood Series
Clark Gable married five times and slept with every woman who would have him, regardless of his—or her—marital status.
But the only woman he ever loved was Carole Lombard.
Clark Gable made eight movies with Joan Crawford. He made seven with Myrna Loy, six with Jean Harlow, four with Lana Turner, and two each with Marion Davies, Norma Shearer, Claudette Colbert, Loretta Young, Heddy Lamarr, and Ava Gardner.
But he made just a single film with the leading lady of his heart.
They met on the set of No Man of Her Own, a rather charming Paramount picture. Clark Gable plays Babe, a gambler and card sharp. To avoid trouble with the police, he leaves New York City and hides out in a small town until things cool down. He meets Lombard’s Connie Randall, a bored and beautiful librarian who is ripe for adventure.
Babe turns on the charm, and Connie is not immune. Though inexperienced, Connie is not naïve, and when Babe proposes they spend the night together, she presents a counteroffer—they flip a coin, and if she wins, they get married.
She wins the toss.
They proceed from lust to marriage to love. Babe hides his criminal enterprise from Connie, but eventually gives it up and goes straight to be worthy of her. Yet in the end Connie proves an able match for Babe, for she has known of his gambling and stealing all along and loves him anyway.
No Man of Her Own is a good but not great movie, forgettable but for the fact that Gable and Lombard eventually became Hollywood’s real-life power couple.
There’s chemistry between them on the screen.
On the set, however, there was nothing doing.
Lombard was still happily married to her first husband William Powell, and Clark Gable thought Lombard swore far too much for a lady.
Four years later, they met up again at a party and this time Gable fell in love with her, even if she did swear like a drunken soldier.
But in her profanity, as in so many other things, Carole Lombard was crazy like a fox. It started as self-defense. As a young, beautiful blonde in Hollywood, the men she worked with both on and off camera were constantly pawing at her. Lombard delivered her profanity in a breezy, devil-may-care attitude that usually turned their minds from seeing her as a romantic object, to one-of-the-guys, a pal. Thus she got the men to keep their hands to themselves without alienating those who could help advance her career.
She played pranks, threw parties, went hunting and fishing with Clark and his friends.
And fell for him just as hard as he fell for her.
They married in 1939 during a break in filming Gone With the Wind. It was a private ceremony with only a few attendants, as neither wanted the media to turn it into a circus.
Because she was as savvy with her business dealings as she was with her swearing, she made more money than Clark, despite him starring in the most commercially successful movie of all time.
She could convince anyone to do anything. She talked Alfred Hitchcock into directing her in a screwball comedy. He did it because he loved her. Mr. and Mrs. Smith was a good film, starring Lombard and Robert Montgomery as a couple who find out four years after their wedding that due to a technicality their marriage license isn’t valid, and that they’re not legally married. It was Hitchcock’s only comedy in his long career.
When World War II broke out, Carole Lombard wanted to help. She wrapped filming on her film To Be Or Not To Be with Jack Benny and signed on to sell war bonds. She took her mother on a cross-country trip and due to her tireless efforts, sold a record-breaking two million dollars of war bonds in a single day.
While on that trip, she pondered the next phase of her life and her career.
Trying to win an Oscar, she’d dipped her toes into some films with more serious subjects. Maybe she could do another one of those. Or maybe she’d keep making comedies—she was already signed on to star in They All Kissed the Bride with Melvyn Douglas.
Maybe she’d take an extended leave from Hollywood—throw herself into the war effort. Convince Clark to enlist in the war, then start a family when it was over. She knew a lot about the movie business—maybe when she returned to work she’d direct a film herself.
But for now, all she wanted was to finish the war bond tour and return home to Clark.
If they made a movie of the story of Carole Lombard’s life, I’d tell you to turn it off right now.
You don’t want to know how this story ends.
She didn’t make They All Kissed the Bride, or start a family. She didn’t direct.
On January 16, 1942, the plane she was taking back to Hollywood and Clark and her future crashed in the mountains outside Las Vegas.
There were no survivors.
Carole Lombard was dead at thirty-three.
Because she was flying back from her war bond tour, President Franklin Roosevelt declared her the first woman killed in the war. In June the United States christened a war ship the S.S. Lombard, and it served in the Pacific theater throughout the war.
Clark Gable fulfilled her dying wish and enlisted in the United States Army Air Force.
Joan Crawford filled her role in They All Kissed The Bride, and donated her salary to the Red Cross that had helped search for the bodies in the Nevada mountains.
Though she’s left us with a stack of wonderful films, Carole Lombard’s death at thirty-three cut her down in her prime. Hollywood is haunted by the films she never made.
If she’d lived, she’d almost certainly have eventually won an Oscar. She had the looks of a quintessential Hitchcock blonde, and the director loved her. She likely would’ve starred in one of his thrillers and perhaps opened up a whole new chapter in her career.
Thirty-three.
At thirty-three, Katharine Hepburn had never even met Spencer Tracy, much less made a picture with him. She scored ten of her twelve Oscar nominations and three of her four Oscar wins after age thirty-three.
At thirty-three, Bette Davis had not yet made All About Eve, Barbara Stanwyck had not made Double Indemnity, and Joan Crawford had not made Mildred Pierce.
Undoubtedly, the best was yet to come for Carole Lombard.
Her death ripped the guts out of Hollywood, and out of Clark Gable.
Hollywood recovered, of course. Hollywood is bigger than any one star, even one as bright as Lombard.
Gable never did. Despite living eighteen more years and marrying two more times, upon his death Clark Gable was buried next to Carole Lombard Gable.
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