Screenland (Nov 1935-Apr 1936)

70 SCREENLAND wet about marriage and possessiveness. They were married June 27, 1931, at Mrs. Peters' home in Beverly Hills at seven o'clock in the evening and Carole's oldest brother gave her away and quite a few people gave Bill away. While the guests were looking for old shoes and rice and drenching themselves in champagne Bill and Carole gave them the slip and sailed that night for Honolulu. "Bessie" cried a lot, but no one else seemed to care as they had found another case of champagne. "Bessie" is what Carole calls her mother, Mrs. Elizabeth Knight Peters. After the honeymoon they settled down in Bill's house on Walden Drive — he had not started his Versailles mansion in those days — and Bill became absorbed in his Warners' contract, and Carole was busy at Paramount. But Carole soon realized that she had been right about marriage and Bill wrong. Carole doesn't let things drag on. She never quibbles with herself or people. One night in July, 1933, she had a frank talk with Bill ; once again they talked for seven hours straight ; and the next day she flew to Reno. They were divorced August 18, 1933. Carole and Bill ceased being married just in time to become good friends. And today you can't find two better friends in Hollywood. I would stake my last dollar on their loyalty to each other. So Carole's first and last marriage was not a success, nor was it a failure ; rather it was a successful failure. It gave her a good friend whom she could trust to the utmost; it gave her a sense of responsibility, for now she had her own home and her own affairs to run ; but most of all, it gave her a career. Carole had wanted to act ever since she was a small child when she had paraded up and down the street in her mother's clothes proclaiming haughtily to the neighborhood children that she was an actress. Now it's the unwritten law in Hollywood that no woman can be both a successful wife and a successful actress; it seems to be just one of those things and there is nothing we can do about it. Carole was free now to be an actress. That career which she had prayed for since she was six years old was within arms' reach. She was not through with love, but it could wait until she had fulfilled her childhood's ambition. And now — how did Carole get into pictures? Uh, huh, I knew you'd want to know that ! Well, it seems that Rita Kaufman, famous designer and social light, was a neighbor of the Peters' and she had often seen Carole do her prima donna act in her mother's trailing dressing-gown — (Carole still loves anything that trails) — out on the front side walk. So one day Rita sneaked Carole out of school and took her over to the California Studios and got her a part in "The Perfect Crime." Carole played Monte Blue's daughter, and she was terrifically bad and ecstatically happy, and received fifty dollars for five days' work, and success went to her head. That one little whiff of grease-paint was all Carole needed. She knew quite definitely that she was destined for the glamorous life of the screen star and no amount of lecturing from "Bessie" about arithmetic and geography would make her falter from her one purpose in life — to be an actress. But, alas, no producer seemed terribly concerned over her performance in "The Perfect Crime" and Carole had to content herself with acting at school. One summer while she was vacationing at Catalina, opportunity knocked again. She bumped right smack into Charlie Chaplin, and the next thing she had him in a boat out on Avalon Bay and was confiding in him her great ambition. Chaplin was looking for a leading lady for "The Gold Rush" and was quite impressed by Carole's looks and poise, so he asked her to report at the Chaplin studios for a test. There were two tests, both bad, and when Carole learned that she was not going to get the part she nearly died of disappointment. But the wounds finally healed, the old confidence returned, and once more Carole promised herself that she would be an actress or burst. She didn't burst. The "break" came quite unexpectedly one day when Al Kemper, a Fox executive, noticed her resemblance to Constance Bennett, made a test of her, and signed her on a contract at seventy-five dollars a week. She was Charles Laughton, who trained off some 65 pounds to play "Cyrano de Bergerac," seen as he takes off for London. sixteen the day the contract was signed. Up until the time of her Fox contract Carole Lombard was Jane Alice Peters. But there was a Janice Peters already on the Fox contract list, so the studio commanded that she change her name for picture purposes. She chose Carol, (without the "e"), because she liked the name. She chose Lombard because when she was a little girl she used to hang around the Red Cross with her mother who was making bandages for the boys over seas, and there she had met a Mrs. Lombard, who, to the little Jane Peters, was the most beautiful, charming, gracious woman she had ever met. "When I grow up I want to be just like you," Carole often told her; and so quite naturally when she was looking for a name that was fated to flash in electric lights on the theatre marquees of the world, she remembered the beautiful lady of her childhood. It was several years later that a numerologist suggested that she put an "e" on Carole to bring her good luck. She did, and it certainly did. Well, anyway, under the new Fox contract she made "Marriage in Transit" with Eddie Lowe, and a sterling little drama of the great open spaces called "Hearts and Spurs" with Buck Jones. Carole was a leading lady at sixteen, but she realized deep down in her heart that she really wasn't an actress. The studio had just about reached the same conclusion, too, and had demoted Carole from leads to bits in Westerns, and when her option came up at the end of the year they offered to sign her again, but at the same salary. Now seventy-five dollars was a lot of money to Carole then, but she had sense enough to realize that if she didn't take time off to improve herself she would be playing bits for the rest of her life. She left Fox, joined a little theatre group, and started studying dramatics, poise, and voice culture for dear life. "The next time I get a contract," she swore to herself, "I'll keep it." And then Fate stepped in, as Fate often has a way of doing. Carole was in a serious accident, and for one long year she lay helpless on her back, waiting for her torn body to heal. But even in her agony she had sublime faith. She would win yet, she would still be a great actress some day — and thank heaven, there would be only one slight scar. Once again fit as a fiddle and ready for a job Carole sought out Mack Sennett, and became the last of his famous bathing girls. She chased policemen, threw pies, squirted hose, and galloped about in bathing suits for a year and a half — at which time the worldfamous Sennett studios closed. It was at Sennett's that she met Madalyn Fields, and after tossing oozing pies at each other for a year they became quite friendly. Fieldsy later became Carole's secretary, business manager, and best friend. Carole was then signed on a Pathe contract, and there was a romantic interlude with Charles Kaley, the singer. When Pathe merged with RKO Carole was signed by Paramount, and she has been there ever since with brief excursions to Columbia and Metro. The Peters family had long lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, but when Carole was six Mrs. Peters decided that a brief separation from her husband — (there had never been such an awful thing as divorce in the family) — was best for all of them; so for a vacation she brought Carole and her two boys, Frederick and Stewart, to Los Angeles. The kids were crazy about California, camping on Mount Baldy, watching the studios make Westerns in the hills, swimming and fishing at Catalina, and playing all day long in the bright sunshine ? and soon the days slipped into years and the Peters family never returned to Fort Wayne. Mrs. Peters' marriage had been unfortunate, and there was no hope of a reconciliation, so they managed to live in Los Angeles on the scant income provided by the grandmother. Carole, being a sensitive child, had realzed her mother's unhappiness in those early days in Fort Wayne, and became a very tender and loving daughter. I am told by those who knew Carole then that she wasn't a brat at all, (that disappointed me), but a very sweet and rather shy child with charming manners. She was rather baffled by grown-ups, for they never seemed to want to face the facts, and even as a child Carole was desperately frank and curious. (I'm glad I never had to visit in her house.) She remembers the time she almost cut her gums with a razor to see why her teeth didn't come out like grandmother's. She also recalls the time she brought a snake home for a family pet, but her mother didn't take to the idea. With all her angelic sweetness, and her lovely blonde hair, and her innocent blue eyes I suspect tl perhaps ere was just a bit of the br; lb i ole — and that makes me feel b< . so much for Carole's life. Oh, yes, s'.e was born twenty-six years ago in Fo ;t Wayne, Indiana. That makes it a legil mate life story! I