More On Carole Lombard



A few years back, a good friend and Lombard historian told me the incredible story of an aviation buff who'd located and examined the wreckage of Carole Lombard's plane, the one on which she and 21 other passengers died that fateful evening of January 16, 1942. Just getting to this site is an incredible ordeal. First there's a jeep ride over rocky terrain, then the hike on foot, which takes hours, they say. The mountain peak they hit that night was 8000 ft. high, so you can imagine the effort of reaching it. Over the last sixty plus years, a number of scavengers have made the trek, and the incredible thing is, they’re still finding artifacts from the crash, including personal effects. One scavenger actually discovered a piece of Lombard’s jewelry with her monogram --- and this was within the last ten years! There's a plane engine embedded yet in a rock wall on the mountain's face. Pieces of the landing gear are still there. The only reason they haven’t been carried out is because they’re too heavy and unwieldy. Smaller pieces of the wreck have been hauled down and sold on ebay. Maybe you’ve seen the listings now and then. There’s something morbidly fascinating about a hobby like that, or maybe it’s just plain morbid. According to various websites (HERE’S the most detailed one), there are folks who travel from one plane crash site to another, just looking for clues as to how and why. The Lombard mountain is a rite of passage for these air disaster enthusiasts. My girlfriend thinks that owning such artifacts would be ill-advised, that to do so might bring evil tidings, and result in a haunted house. Indeed, it may be unwise to disturb those restless spirits up on that mountain, and to sell recovered articles from such hallowed ground (on ebay, yet!) would seem to invite disaster. All I can say to the prospect of making that trip is --- include me out…


Nothing’s harder than selecting the best of these glamour shots for our Monday postings. For Carole Lombard, I wanted to include a few striking pre-code images along with the later stuff, so here she is in some early 30’s publicity poses. That set grouping is for The Princess Comes Across, a 1936 comedy with Fred MacMurray, seen with her here. I assume that's director William K. Howard in the chair, although there's no caption to confirm it. I couldn’t resist one of those gorgeous rotogravures (the one on the bed) from a typical Sunday newspaper section of the day. Each week, subscribers could depend on at least one beautiful color image of a favorite star. Fortunately, a lot of readers saved them. Finally, there’s a color image from a Paramount exhibitor’s annual heralding the 1934-35 season, wherein Carole was announced for another teaming with Gary Cooper in Twenty Hours By Air, an intriguing project for the two which was subsequently cancelled.