Bird of Paradise
Carole Lombard, the immensely popular comic actress who starred in movies like Nothing Sacred and To Be or Not to Be, died in January 1942 when a plane carrying her crashed into a mountain while returning to Hollywood from her native Indiana. She had been there selling war bonds, very successfully. America had entered World War II the previous month. Lombard died with her mother, to whom she was very close, and with the crew of the plane.
Adela Rogers St. Johns, a prolific writer and friend of Lombard’s, wrote a long, two-part obituary for her, two essays that ran in successive issues of Liberty magazine, February 28 and March 7. I bought those issues from antiques dealers, then resold them to another antiques dealer I know, but not before photocopying St. Johns’s obituary to read in full. It is a strangely, feyly, almost dangerously beautiful text. It has all the worst features of 1940s writing about celebrities (self-mythologizing; corny word choice; an entirely-too-positive assessment of Clark Gable), but these are mere speed bumps before the almost operatic juggernaut of St. Johns’s writing about her friend. She treats Lombard as a martyred saint. Not a martyred virgin; Lombard, who swore like a South Park character, hated wearing underwear, threatened to peg Fredric March on the set of Nothing Sacred, and was in any case married multiple times, would have been miscast in that role. But a martyred saint. St. Johns’s Lombard is “a bright and undaunted companion with whom to fly on through that hole that opens in the sky for lost pilots,” whose “inner life, so strong and tender and aspiring, is worth preserving because it is the story of a struggle toward the light.”
Strong words from, and about, a strange woman. The thing about St. Johns’s hagiography of Lombard, the fey and queer and almost prelapsarian thing, is that it works. It fortifies the reader in the cause for which Lombard died—make bright the arrows!—and, yes, even goes some way towards convincing the reader of Lombard’s personal sanctity. Lombard was a Bahá’í convert, and more serious about it than widely known then or remembered now. St. Johns reports an extended theological discourse that Lombard delivered, off the top of her head and apparently out of nowhere, shortly before her death. According to St. Johns, Lombard told her that she “[didn’t] think God [was] a softie, either. In the end it’s better if people are forced back into—well—into being right, before they’re too far gone. I think your temple is your everyday living.” Then she changed the subject.
A genuinely bizarre thing for a screwball comedy actress with Lombard’s personality and public image to say, but consistent with a lifelong longing for something else, something high and noble and far beyond the stars. I recently woke up to “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” playing on the radio station to which my clock radio is set. In the current catastrophe—political, economic, ecological, moral, perhaps even military—that song sounded like it was coming from very far away, from marble halls or a palace beneath the sea or the garden at love’s end. I believe Adela Rogers St. Johns that Carole Lombard was someone who might have heard that song that way even when it was first recorded. Like Julia from Brideshead Revisited: “surely I was made for some other purpose than this?” But that’s an insult to Lombard because her main purpose in life did matter—because the movies are art, and art matters, just as the war bonds turned out to matter.