“You’re forgetting Gable. He grieved the rest of his life.”
“When I heard he’d volunteered to serve as a tailgunner in the air force, I almost came forward,” she said. “It was a suicide’s cry for help. But then I realized MGM would protect him if it meant bribing Hitler to send the Luftwaffe in the other direction. And later, when he remarried, he seemed happy. I kept up with him through the trades and film magazines right up until he died. I cried that day, too. But, you see, I didn’t love him.”
Anger flared. He tamped it down through an effort of will. “Gable and Lombard is Hollywood’s greatest love story. Greater than Bogie and Betty. Greater than Pickford and Fairbanks and Garbo and Gilbert and all the rest.”
“You’re overlooking the fact that Garbo left Gilbert at the altar. That Pickford and Fairbanks broke up. That Bogie may have cheated on Betty and vice versa. The rest is PR. You’ve been around this town long enough not to judge by appearances. Russ Columbo was the love of my life.”
“The bandleader. He and Lombard were seeing each other when he was killed in a hunting accident.”
“For a long time after that, I expected to die any minute of a broken heart. Well, I didn’t and I knew Pa wouldn’t either. Deep down, under the public show of tragedy, I think he knew we couldn’t have lasted. He’d been through divorce; me too, and it stinks. Drives a wedge right down through the center of your fan base. But everyone gathers around a handsome widower.
“Meanwhile,” she continued, “I had someone new to love, a beautiful daughter. I raised her in Buffalo, New York, which is as far as you can get from Hollywood culture without going Amish. She died four years ago of leukemia, still thinking her father was the man I married, the owner of a fleet of Great Lakes ore carriers.” She flicked away another tear, leaving a smudge of ash on her temple. “By then he was dead, too, so I moved back here, away from the Buffalo winters. The old bastard left me loaded. I never did take his name.”
“Why are you telling me all this now?”
She was busy lighting a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last. She dropped the remnant among the others floating in the water glass. “I keep thinking about that poor girl, that army nurse who took my place on the plane. There’s a family somewhere that doesn’t know if she was murdered or ran away or if she is lying at the bottom of a well. They can identify people now by DNA. If they exhume the body interred under my name in Forest Lawn and run tests, maybe someone can be notified, even if it’s a grandnephew who wasn’t even born at the time of the crash. What’s that word? Closure? Everyone deserves that.”
“Are you telling me the film’s a dummy, just to get me to listen to your story?”
“Of course not. It’s the McCoy. I’ll even let you take a reel with you to screen. Reel three, to guarantee you won’t just run off with it. No one wants to come into a picture in the middle.”
“But why now? Why not years ago, when there was a better chance some of the dead woman’s immediate family was still around to hear the news?”
“Well, that’s not the only reason.” She blew smoke at the ceiling, tipping her head back the way actresses used to do in glamour shots to show the smooth line of a throat. Hers was festooned with loose skin. “It’s part of the price for donating that turkey to UCLA. I want you to tell the world my story. You can use the campaign to promote the film as a vehicle. ‘Lombard Lives!’ Boffo box office.”
He leaned forward, choosing his words carefully. If she wasn’t just posing, his pointing out the basic inconsistency in her story could arouse paranoia and possibly violence. “I don’t understand. I thought the whole point of your not coming forward was to put all that behind you.”
“It was. But I miss it. I miss the fame, God help me. Gable’s gone, Bogie’s gone, Jimmy and Kate and Spence and Bette. At the end they were dropping like leaves, from one Oscar telecast to the next. I’m the only name-above-the-title star left from the glory days. The last dinosaur. I want to feel flashbulbs bursting in my face one more time, put my dainty foot on the red carpet, wave at whoever knows who the hell I am sitting in the bleachers on the sidewalk. Stick my hands and feet in the cement at Grauman’s. I never got to do that.”
“That’s your price? Fifteen minutes more in the spotlight?”
She flashed that crooked smile. “Time is relative. Gloria will tell you I haven’t much longer than that.”
“I can’t promise anything without proof. Will you submit to a DNA test?”
“Absolutely not. Even if you can find some shirttail blood relative to provide a match, I won’t open my mouth for some joker to swab around inside it. How do I know they won’t clone me after I’m gone? There’s only one of me; that’s the selling point.” She extinguished another butt. “I want to be Carole Lombard again. Who wouldn’t?”
He and Kyle Broadhead screened the silent reel in the projection room where the professor showed films to his students. They sat at kidney-shaped writing tables and watched the pubescent star-to-be pretending to be Monte Blue’s kid sister. She was unconvincing, even in pantomime. “Howard Hawks said she couldn’t act,” Broadhead said. “Getting the performance he got out of her in Twentieth Century proves just how great a director he was.”
Valentino said, “John Barrymore told her she was the best he ever worked with. She claimed she learned more from him on that shoot than she did during her previous twelve years in pictures.”
“What are you going to tell the old lady?”
“I owe her a look-see into her story just for this. Do you know anyone who could check and see if any army nurses vanished around the time of the crash?”
“If I knew my way around the Net as well as the worst of my students, I could hack into the Bank of America and finance the whole preservation program. I’ll ask one. Don’t tell me you’re buying into this fairy tale.”
“Give me a break. People who are supposed to be dead are rumored to be still alive every day, and none of them has come out of hiding yet.”
“If you try trotting her out like Princess Anastasia, when it blows up in your face the scandal will do more harm to the program than if this piece of tripe stayed buried.”
“I know.”
“The smart thing to do is to return the reel and call it off.”
“I know.”
Broadhead blew through his pipe. He never lit it in a room that contained film. “So how far do you think you can string her along?”
“What makes you think I won’t do the smart thing and forget all about it?”
“Ten years of daily association. Every loose frame left unaccounted for is an orphan. You’d adopt them all even if it ended in disgrace for you and the institution that keeps us off food stamps.”
Valentino patted his friend’s knee and stood. “Put your whiz kid to work.”
Star vehicles are like peanuts, and twenty minutes of A Perfect Crime created a hunger that demanded satisfaction. Valentino checked out Twentieth Century, My Man Godfrey, and No Man of Her Own — her only appearance on film with Clark Gable — from the university library and watched them back-to-back at the Oracle, using the rebuilt Bell & Howell projector and state-of-the-art composition screen that had set him back two mortgage payments. He had them all on tape and disc, but preferred to watch the classics the same way they were seen back when stars still glittered like gifts from the Milky Way and ushers prowled the aisles ready to expel any atheists who wouldn’t stop talking during the feature.