TIWH: March 29th

March 29, 2010 | by Daniella Flores

March 29, 1939
Clark Gable & Carole Lombard

Clark Gable and Carole Lombard met several times throughout their lives, and with each meeting they’d only become closer. They starred in the 1932 film No Man of Her Own, but both were married at the time and were cordial with one another.

In 1936, during the celebration of screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart’s wife’s release from a sanitarium, Lombard came riding in an ambulance, in a nightgown, and on a stretcher. Gable found it in poor taste. After an argument, they decided to settle it with a tennis match, and played until it became so dark that they couldn’t see.

Their next meeting was at the annual Mayfair Ball a couple of months later, and they danced all night. Accounts from that night afterward differ, however. One is that as they danced, Gable discovered Lombard wasn’t wearing any underwear. He proposed they go back to his hotel. Her response? “Who do you think you are, Clark Gable?” Another account states that they disappeared but only ended up driving around for a couple of hours.

Either way, he left angry, but she made it up to him the next morning when he found birds in his bedroom, birds she had sent and asked the hotel staff to put in. One carried a note that said “How about it? -Carole” That sparked their famous relationship.

Gable eventually divorced Ria Langham on March 7, 1939, and proposed to Lombard at a phone booth at the famous Brown Derby restaurant. Doing their best to avoid the press. they headed for Kingman, Arizona at dawn. Once they got there, they immediately got their license at the courthouse and to the church to be married. They drove back to Beverly Hills, only to receive the press in the morning with only a few hours of sleep. You can view the newsreel here.

Their marriage unfortunately ended in 1942, when Lombard’s plane crashed in Las Vegas. Though he married twice after,  it has been stated that their time together were the happiest years of his life, and that he was never the same after her death.