Carole Lombard Laughing Between Scenes Of Fools For Scandal – 1938

Carole Lombard and Fernand Gravet (Gravey) starring in director Mervyn Leroy’s Fools For Scandal (1938) are apparently amused by something during a break in filming. The candid photograph taken by Otto Dyar perfectly displays Lombard’s exuberant personality.

During a war bond drive. Lombard, along with her mother, died tragically in a plane crash on January 16, 1942. She was 33.

Kyle Crichton’s biting memoir of literary. political and celebrity attachments,Total Recoil (1960) Doubleday & Company, gives a brief portrait of Lombard.

There is always a temptation to see extra qualities in a person who has died young and tragically, but I still say that Carole Lombard is the most fascinating person I ever met in Hollywood. She was a beauty, but she was also a down-to-earth girl with wit and bounce. When I first encountered her, she was charging up in a little motor dingus she used for getting around the movie lot. Her hair was flying, her lovely legs were sprawled carelessly all over the car, and she stopped the vehicle with a whomp that dumped her out on the pavement.

Her vocabulary was extensive and lusty. She looked like a dream and talked like a garage mechanic. Everything she said seemed funny, whether from the vigor of it or the frankness of it. She had been in movies since childhood and could spot a phony three blocks away around a corner. Her disdain for for Hollywood stuffed shirts was monumental and included heads of studios, producers, supervisors, directors, and set designers. For the good guys, she had nothing but praise; for the fakes, she reserved a special lexicon that frizzled them where they stood. Not even the czar of the movies, Will Hays, could have kept her from speaking when the mood was on her.

When Carole said that Marion Davies was her best friend, I must have given a start, for she looked at me with disgust..

“Don’t be a dope like all the rest,” she said bitterly. “She’s a wonderful girl. She helps more people than the Red Cross. You’ll never meet anybody better.”

…Carole was killed in an airplane crash in the mountains of Nevada. I don’t want to get sentimental about it, so I’ll just say that there were at least a hundred other Hollywood personalities who could have been better spared.