Hollywood Starlet Carole Lombard Met Her End Thanks To An Ill-Fated Coin Toss

Carole Lombard died on January 16, 1942, in a plane crash on the outskirts of Las Vegas. She had been helping with the war effort at the time, and the news of her death left Hollywood in a state of shock.

The U.S. entered the war at the end of 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Before this time, though, Lombard and her incredibly famous husband, Clark Gable, were outspoken in their backing of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Indianapolis proved to be the perfect place for Lombard to start her tour of duty. She was originally from Fort Wayne, and her home state was no doubt proud of her for achieving a life of fame and fortune. They certainly responded to her rally.

Will Hays was particularly pleased with Lombard's performance. “Great day here today," Hays wrote in a wire to Gable. "Carole was perfect. Really, she was magnificent and they sold in this one day $2,017,513 worth of bonds."

After their work was done, Lombard, Peters, Winkler, and a number of other passengers boarded a commercial TWA flight bound for Los Angeles. It took off without incident and landed in Albuquerque sometime around 4:00 a.m. on January 16, 1942.

Clark Gable was already at Burbank airport when he heard news of the crash. He immediately got on a plane and flew to Las Vegas — but there was little he could do by the time he got there.

The TWA flight took off from Las Vegas with the intention of reaching Burbank sometime later. But 50 miles southwest of Las Vegas, the aircraft struck Mt. Potosi in Nevada. The plane was obliterated and its wreckage scattered over the landscape.

This was despite Lombard being a face known around America. Part of the reason she had captured the hearts of a nation was her fairytale Hollywood story. After all, she had come a long way since being born as Jane Peters in Fort Wayne.

Dwan gave Lombard a small part in his silent 1921 movie, A Perfect Crime. It was hardly a massive success, but Dwan later claimed that Lombard "ate up" her two days on the production.

Lombard was not exactly impressed with her early roles. "All I had to do was simper prettily at the hero and scream with terror when he battled with the villain," she once said. But in 1925 she turned heads with a rare leading role.

Lombard was coming up in the world as a “bathing beauty” in short films produced by Mack Sennett. But then she went on a date with a man named Harry Cooper — and they crashed into another car.

Luckily, Sennett promised her he'd get her career big on track — and he did exactly that. He named her "Carole of the Curves" and put as much publicity behind her as possible. The strategy worked.

In 1931 Lombard starred in the films Man of the World and Ladies Man with William Powell, who was a big star for Paramount. She had admired Powell from afar before they started working together — and then the pair developed an intimate off-screen relationship.

In 1936 Lombard said that their careers "had little to do with the divorce." Instead, she revealed, "We were just two completely incompatible people." She made her one and only film with Clark Gable, No Man of Her Own, in 1932.

Gable and Lombard were the power couple of the age, and they were devoted to each other. They bought a ranch together and started referring to each other as Ma and Pa. But this devotion didn't stop Gable from straying.

Gable and Turner made four movies together, and they were rumored to have been very close. Turner even claimed that she had “a wonderful chemical rapport” with her frequent co-star, and that was enough of a red flag for Lombard.

In Warren G. Harris’s 1974 biography, Gable & Lombard, Harris claimed that Lombard and Gable had a blazing row on January 12, 1942 — a few days before her death. The problem? Lombard had had enough of Gable's wandering eye.

Harris also claimed in his book that Gable only got involved in the Hollywood Victory Committee to get Lombard off his back. She was apparently the one who was most obsessed with wanting to do something to help with the war.

Author Matzen told Time, "At the end of January 15, 1942, [Lombard] decided she had done her duty — and now it was time to take care of Carole Lombard by getting home to her carousing husband by the fastest means possible."

Matzen also said in his book that Lombard was desperate to get back before dark. But in a Life article published right after her death, the magazine said she'd told them she just couldn't face three days on "the choo-choo train."

Lombard's mother was a believer in the Bahāʾīs religion and a follower of numerology. Matzen claimed that Elizabeth didn't want to get that train because she saw signs that something bad would happen.

Lombard won, and it proved to be a fateful decision. “She died for her country,” the Treasury Department said in its tribute. President Roosevelt paid his respects to Lombard with a statement, too.

Lombard and her mother were burned in a joint funeral on January 21, 1942. Gable turned down the government's offer of a military funeral because it didn't fit with Lombard's view of herself in the world. But Gable was never the same again.

Vanity Fair reported that Gable once told his secretary, “You know, I have everything in the world anyone could want but one thing. All I really need and want is Ma.” But he did turn his life around.

Clark Gable left an impressive legacy in Hollywood, but his personal life is another story entirely. Sadly, the generations who came after him have suffered terrible difficulties.

The legendary actor’s late grandson was Clark Gable III – the son of John Clark Gable and Tracy Yarro Scheff. Unsurprisingly, he grew up right in the middle of the entertainment world.

Though Clark III knew his father, John Clark Gable never did. The first famous Gable passed away in 1960, just four months before his son was born to his fifth wife Kay.

But fate, unfortunately, had other plans. On November 6, 1960, Clark had a heart attack and was kept in hospital for several days. The newspapers reported that he was improving.

When arrangements were made for the funeral, it was decided that Clark would be buried next to his deceased third wife: Carole Lombard.

Although of course Clark had been married many times, it was rumored that Carole had been the real love of his life. When they first met, the actor was still officially married to his second wife Maria “Rhea” Langham.

In an attempt to avoid scandal, Clark requested an official divorce from Maria. She agreed, but only if her estranged husband paid her off. The star subsequently asked his bosses at MGM for the money.

If Clark had indeed learned the value of fidelity earlier, his love child Judy Lewis might never have been born. The latter was the half-sister of John Clark Gable and thus the half-aunt of the late Clark Gable III.

Judy’s mother was the famous actress Loretta Young, and the latter had met Gable while the two were filming the 1935 movie The Call of the Wild.

Loretta and her family worked fast to hide the pregnancy. If news got out to her studio that she was pregnant, they would insist that she had a quiet abortion, but Loretta’s religious beliefs put her firmly against that.

When a reporter dropped into Loretta’s home to see her, the actress spoke from her bed with pillows that were carefully placed to conceal the pregnancy.

As soon as the baby arrived, a telegram was sent to Clark informing him of the news. Reportedly, however, he took a look and ripped it up.

Fearing blackmail, the family decided to spin a story about Loretta adopting some children. First, little Judy would spend a short time in an orphanage – despite her parents being very much alive.

That left Loretta with one child – her biological one. But she was still worried that rumors might start swirling as Judy grew older. The child had the same ears as her father too.

In 1949, the same year Clark married his fourth wife, Sylvia Ashley, Loretta agreed to star in Keys to the City with the secret father of her child. The actress had married at this point to a man called Tom Lewis.

During the publicity tour for Keys to the City, Loretta went out of her way to announce that she had barely seen Clark in the past few years. The truth, of course, was much more complicated.

Eventually, as Judy grew older, the truth began to unravel. At 23 years old she became engaged to a man called Joseph Tinney, who told her that Clark was her father.

In 1994, long after Clark’s death, Judy published a memoir about her experiences: Uncommon Knowledge. It began with the words, “My life has been filled with hypocrisy and deception from the moment I was born.”

In 2002 Judy gave an interview to The Telegraph in which she spoke about the mental state her childhood had left her with. She said that sometimes she would watch Gone with the Wind and have a very emotional reaction.

Judy passed away in 2011 at the age of 79, and she left behind one daughter: Maria Tinney Dagit. Obituaries for her pointed out that although she’d spent some time in showbusiness just like her father, she took on a different path.

Judy’s life was chaotic, but so was that of her half-brother and his family. John Clarke Gable was an object of interest as he grew up, as he was the son that his Hollywood superstar dad never got to meet.

As it turned out, John attempted to follow in the footsteps of his father, and he appeared in a few movies from 1990 onwards. But he wasn’t anywhere near as successful, unfortunately.

John’s son Clark Gable III seemed to have more success in showbusiness at first. From 2012 to 2013 he was the host of the reality television show Cheaters.

But Clark III likewise had trouble with the law. In 2011 the lookalike grandson of the famous actor was arrested for the crime of pointing a laser inside a police helicopter.

At the time, Clark III’s manager Roxane Davis told the CNN website. “Boys will be boys, and he was playing with what he thought was a toy and not a felony piece.

And when Clark III sadly died, it was reported that drugs were involved. In April 2019 the celebrity gossip website TMZ announced that alprazolam, oxycodone, and fentanyl were found in the young man’s system.

TMZ sought out the people who had been working with Clark III on Cheaters. The creator of Cheaters, Bobby Goldstein, told TMZ that he had never seen him using drugs.

The Gable family was naturally devastated when Clark III passed. His mother Tracy Yarro Scheff posted on Instagram, “It is with an extremely heavy heart we say goodbye to my beautiful son Clark."

After the untimely passing of her son, Tracy spoke to the Daily Mail newspaper about what had happened. She said of the youngest Clark Gable:

Clark III had become a father not long before he died, Tracy said. He was the dad to a toddler called Shore. The grieving mother and grandmother said:

Now another child in the Gable family would grow up not knowing their father, as both John Gable II and Judy Lewis had done. Tracy said, “I saw a sweet boy who loved his little girl.”

Unfortunately, the tragic event put some unpleasant things in the spotlight with regards to the wider Gable family. After her brother’s death, Kayley posted some screenshotted text messages to Facebook.

The message from John read, “I’m sorry for your loss. This is what I want. Cremate him; he’s not going in my family’s plot and I’m not paying for anything. All of you use my father’s name in disgrace...

John too had struggled with drugs in the past, Tracy claimed in her Daily Mail interview. She said, “Addiction ruined our marriage. I wasn’t going to have it, so I took my kids."

Tracy said that she hadn’t spoken to John for a long time, but of her son’s death she concluded, “I don’t blame anybody. I think addiction is nobody’s fault but the addict’s."

But as a response to the text message from her father, Kayley expressed deep anger. She wrote on her Facebook page:

Kayley wrote on, “You’re the one who got us high on drugs and did drugs in front of us as kids and tortured us and especially Clark so I’m going to write a book and let the world know the truth!”