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A salute to Lombard's glamour

By Gary Arnold (Contact) | Sunday, October 5, 2008

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Carole Lombard, whose centennial birth date Monday coincides with the start of a Turner Classic Movies series devoted to her career, is one of the legendary Hollywood actresses whose image will remain forever young.

Born Jane Alice Peters in Fort Wayne, Ind., she grew up in Los Angeles from the age of 6 and was discovered without premeditation. A prominent director, Allan Dwan, noticed her on a neighborhood street, evidently playing baseball with such gusto that he cast her in a silent feature titled "A Perfect Crime," made in 1921, when she was 12.

That was the one picture in which she was billed as Jane Peters. A few years later, Miss Lombard quit high school in order to act professionally, always within the orbit of the Hollywood film industry. She became Carol Lombard in a Buck Jones Western of 1925, "Hearts and Spurs," and had appeared in about two dozen features or shorts, including a string of slapstick vehicles at Mack Sennett's fading studio, by the time the final "e" was added to Carol in 1930.

The earliest title in the TCM retrospective is "The Racketeer," a gangster talkie of 1929 starring Robert Armstrong. It concludes an evening of obscure early Lombard on Oct. 20. Chances are the subject may not yet resemble the blond comedienne with the sharply chiseled jawline, cheekbones and brow who emerged as a distinctive alternative to Jean Harlow in such romantic farces of the middle 1930s as "Twentieth Century," "We're Not Dressing" and "My Man Godfrey."

Vintage stills suggest that it took a while before a Carole Lombard identity was realized, facially and humorously. A DVD set called "Carole Lombard: The Glamour Collection," consisting of six movies, five of them excluded from the TCM series, begins with a romantic melodrama of 1931, "Man of the World," written by Herman J. Mankiewicz and starring William Powell as a debonair extortionist.

Miss Lombard is cast as the society ingenue whom he courts and deceives, while clouded by an exquisite sense of shame. She enters with a nervous giggle and remains decoratively awkward until the plot obliges her to slap Mr. Powell's guilt-stricken face. Later, she was always game for combative interplay. In 1931, she could be mistaken for other aspiring starlets of the period.

Mr. Powell and Miss Lombard ventured into a brief marriage during the early 1930s. As amicable exes, they were destined to become a delightfully preposterous match in "My Man Godfrey," a durably clever and harmonious romantic farce whose blend of topicality, absurdity and geniality remains unrivaled. Mr. Powell plays the title character, a hobo of patrician origins recruited as scavenger hunt prize and then family butler by Miss Lombard, the lunatic kid sister in a wealthy household mocked with exemplary wit and generosity. Eventually, the attraction between hero and heroine, respectively a dignified outsider and a lovelorn brat, makes sense only as a sublime comic fancy, similar to the screwball compatibility of George Burns and Gracie Allen, who had crossed paths with Miss Lombard as a socialite in "We're Not Dressing."

Miss Lombard is recognizable in a 1932 romantic comedy with Clark Gable, "No Man of Her Own." Conveniently, it will be revived by TCM on Oct. 13, right after the evening begins at 8 p.m. with "My Man Godfrey."

In 1932, the Lombard-Powell marriage was still in force, and the actress evidently became smitten with Gary Cooper and crooner Russ Columbo well before she and Mr. Gable emerged as Hollywood's royal couple in the late 1930s. "No Man of Her Own" remained their only co-starring vehicle. The marriage had endured for less than three years when Miss Lombard was killed in a plane crash on a mountain range near Las Vegas on Jan. 16, 1942, while returning from a war bond drive in the Midwest.

The country's first celebrity casualty of the war effort, a mere five weeks after the Pearl Harbor shock, Miss Lombard perished in a flight that also included her mother and 15 airmen returning to duty in California. President Franklin D. Roosevelt took the loss personally in a telegram to Mr. Gable that began, "Mrs. Roosevelt and I are deeply distressed. Carole was our friend, our guest in happier days. She brought great joy to all who knew her, and to millions who knew her only as a great artist." The message concluded, "She is and always will be a star, one we shall never forget, nor cease to be grateful for."

Miss Lombard was 33 when she died.

One of the best comedies she ever made, Ernst Lubitsch's ill-timed but admirably impudent anti-Nazi farce "To Be Or Not To Be," had yet to be released. Miss Lombard's recent death probably accentuated the reluctance of many reviewers to acknowledge the movie as a satirical gem (or boon to the war effort) when it was new. In retrospect, it's more satisfying to reflect that the Lombard career ended with a classic, which has passed the test of time as stoutly as "Twentieth Century" and "My Man Godfrey."

Had she lived, Miss Lombard would no doubt have been a mainstay of the USO and the Hollywood Canteen during the remainder of World War II. The aftermath remains a fascinating imponderable. Perhaps the Gable alliance would have lasted; perhaps her starring career would have extended for another decade or more, matching the durability of Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Rosalind Russell, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford and other contemporaries. It also pleases me to imagine that Miss Lombard might have reinvented herself as an early queen of television situation comedy, giving her pal Lucille Ball an illustrious rival.

Not that one imagines Miss Lombard and Mr. Gable as a sitcom marital tandem. She would probably have found a more plausible partner in Fred MacMurray, a frequent co-star in comedies at Paramount during the 1930s. He was destined to make a successful transition of his own from movies to television, cast as a widowed dad. Maybe they could have gotten a head start on "My Three Sons." Why not an "Our Three Sons" where the boys had a glamorous madcap mom? And there would still have been room for another Paramount alum, William Demarest, as the resident grandpa.

WHERE: Turner Classic Movies cable channel

WHEN: Mondays at 8 p.m. throughout October

CONTENTS: Revivals of 19 movies featuring Miss Lombard, originally released between 1929 and 1942

www.tcm.com