How a Twist of Fate Ended the Love Story Between Hollywood’s Golden Couple Clark Gable and Carole Lombard

Their love story is the stuff Hollywood movies are made of. Rising stars Clark Gable and Carole Lombard were both married when they worked together in 1932’s romantic drama No Man of Her Own, but when they met again at a party four years later, sparks ignited.

“It was almost a Romeo and Juliet story,” Barry Sandler, screenwriter of the 1976 film Gable and Lombard, told Closer. “She was this great, daffy, screwball comedienne and he was more the heroic fighter pilot.”

They were opposites, but “Carole really melted him,” added Sandler. “She brought out his warmth and humor and humanity like no other woman had before. He was wildly in love with her.”

And America fell in love with them. Carole had risen to fame in such films as My Man Godfrey, and Clark had captured hearts as a sardonic leading man and Oscar winner from It Happened One Night.

“He was the most desired man in the world,” Robert Matzen, author of Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3, told Closer. “He needed someone who would give him some sass.”

Free-spirited Carole excelled at that, and their romance burned bright for six years as they played practical jokes on each other and tried to have a baby, and she worked to support the troops in World War II. But their love came to a heartbreaking end when she died in a 1942 plane crash that shocked the country and crushed Clark’s spirit. Said Matzen, “He was devastated by grief.”

The future seemed full of promise, though, when Carole and Clark started flirting at that 1936 party. Twenty-eight at the time, she had divorced actor William Powell, but Clark, 35, remained unhappily married to his second wife, Ria. Despite his boss, studio head Louis B. Mayer, being dead set against their affair, Carole and Clark were magical together. By November that year, the press was speculating about marriage. Ria reluctantly granted Clark a divorce, and he and Carole eloped during the filming of Gone With the Wind in 1939.

A Madcap Duo

As a couple they epitomized fun and reveled in giving each other gag gifts. “She wanted a kitten, so he bought her a cougar cub,” Matzen told Closer. “He liked high-end automobiles, so she bought him broken-down jalopies.”

They lived on a working ranch in Encino, Calif., where they raised chickens and sold produce. The life suited tomboy Carole. “Personally, I resent being tagged ‘glamour girl.’ It’s such an absurd, extravagant label,” she once said, according to a website dedicated to chronicling her life and career. The couple wanted to start a family, but Carole struggled to get pregnant.

After Pearl Harbor, Carole joined the war effort and urged her husband to enlist. “He wanted no part of it,” Matzen says of 40-year-old Clark. But he did become president of the Hollywood Victory Committee, to come up with ideas to help the war effort. “Carole volunteered to be the first star from the committee to go back to her home state and sell bonds,” Matzen added. On the January 1942 trip, she brought in more than $2 million.

A Fateful Flight

Carole’s mother, Elizabeth Peters, and Clark’s friend and PR agent Otto Winkler accompanied her to Indiana. Before returning home, she and Otto flipped a coin to determine if they would travel by plane or train. Carole wanted to fly, eager to see Clark, and she won. What caused their DC-3 plane to crash into Nevada’s Mount Potosi remains a mystery. “The government called it pilot error,” Matzen explained. “The most likely scenario is the plane was overweight and on the wrong heading and crashed after dark.”

Clark didn’t just lose his beloved that night, but also, Photoplay wrote, “the only mother he had ever known” in Elizabeth (his own mother died when he was 10 months old).

“Clark aged 10 years in one weekend,” Matzen said. The loss affected the rest of his life. “He never made a big hit [film] again. He lost his drive to be a movie star and started drinking a lot.” The country, too, reeled at the news. Because she died with 15 other Army Air Corps flyers who were on the plane, noted Matzen, “It drove home the cost of war.”

Carole’s death finally prompted Clark to enlist and he flew five combat missions in 1943, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross. He also returned to making movies, but he focused more on his offscreen life. “He finally came to grips with the loss by adjusting himself to being more like her,” said Matzen. “He started to do nice things, reach out to people.”

And while the country has Carole’s films to remember her as a brilliant comedienne, Clark, who eventually remarried, would tell personal stories of his lost love: “ ‘Ma and me did this’ and ‘Ma and me did that,’ ” Matzen said. “That was his way to keep her alive in his memory. He just kept that up for years and years.”