28: Star Wars Episode II: Carole Lombard and Clark Gable

You Must Remember This

Karina Longworth

Tv & Film

4.7 • 15.1K Ratings

🗓️ 13 January 2015

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The queen of screwball comedies married the king of Hollywood in 1939, but Lombard's 1942 death in a plane crash on the way home from a trip to sell war bonds drove Gable into a physical and emotional breakdown, and eventually the Army. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	You met him in the middle of the night.
0:02.0	Welcome to another episode of You Must Remember This.
0:28.7	Today we continue our Star Wars series in which we explore stories of Hollywood women during World War II.
0:54.7	Last week we talked about Betty Davis and the Hollywood canteen, the nightclub for
1:01.3	servicemen staffed by stars, which opened in the fall of 1942. Today we're going to backtrack a bit to tell the story of the first American celebrity casualty of the war,
1:12.7	which dovetails with the story of almost certainly the most famous soldier to be gently pushed out of the US armed forces for being a nuisance.
1:22.7	Today we're going to tell the story of Carol Lombard and Clark Gable.
1:28.7	Carol Lombard was the queen of screwball comedy, a genre which really only became a thing thanks to it happened one night,
1:38.7	the film for which Gable, Lombard's second husband, won an Oscar.
1:42.7	But Lombard's career as a screen comedian long predated her involvement with Gable,
1:48.7	a man whose mythos was so grand that in Hollywood he was known simply as the king.
1:56.7	She was discovered at 12, signed her first studio contract at 16, and after surviving a near fatal car accident at 17,
2:04.7	Lombard became a slapstick silent starlet.
2:08.7	By the time she hooked up with Gable, she was already divorced from another major male star,
2:13.7	and she was a Hollywood veteran who had successfully remade herself in the model of the ultimate screwball dame.
2:21.7	By the time Gable met Lombard, he was on his second wife, and about halfway through a phenomenal decade-long run as the movie industry's most marketable stud,
2:32.7	a run which would hit its peak with Gone With The Wind in 1939.
2:37.7	But Gable felt pressure to live his persona off screen as well as on, and that led to tension in his marriage to Lombard.
2:45.7	Tension which may have played a role in her untimely death at the age of 33, a disaster after which Clark Gable was never again the same.
2:57.7	Join us, won't you, as we tell the story of the brief life and horrible death of Carol Lombard, and its impact on Clark Gable.
3:16.7	Do you want to get the Inside Scoop on awards season? I'm Katie Rich, I'm the Awards and Audio Editor at Vanity Fair.
3:23.7	And I'm Richard Lawson, the Chief Critic at Vanity Fair.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Karina Longworth, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Karina Longworth and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.