The starlet and wife of Clark Gable perished along with 21 others after a flight on her war bond tour crashed outside Las Vegas, as chronicled in this exclusive excerpt from the new book, 'Hollywood Victory: The Movies, Stars, and Stories of World War II.'
In January 1942, the actress embarked on a tour to sell war bonds. A last-minute decision to surprise Gable in L.A. led her to book a TWA flight with her mother from Indianapolis, where the Indiana-born Lombard raised $2 million. The three-leg trip culminated in a Jan. 16 flight from Las Vegas to Burbank, but the plane, also filled with servicemen, crashed right after takeoff, killing all 22 on board and making Lombard Hollywood’s first war casualty.
The chairman of the actors branch of the Hollywood Victory Committee was Clark Gable, flanked by his wife, Carole Lombard, at that Roosevelt Hotel meeting. They had been married for more than two years, since they tied the knot during a production break on. It was his third marriage, and her second. They were both Midwesterners, she from Fort Wayne, Indiana, he from Cadiz, Ohio. Their nicknames for each other? “Ma” and “Pappy.
Gable and Lombard threw themselves enthusiastically into the war effort. They lent horses from their Encino ranch to a group of mounted air-raid wardens who patrolled the San Fernando Valley. On December 22, fifteen days after Pearl Harbor, Gable convened a meeting of the actors branch of the Victory Committee at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where he’d once lived. This event was considered one of the last all-out displays of Tinseltown glamour before more frugal days ahead.
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