Carole Lombard: 704 Rockhill Street to the top of Hollywood

1908-1942

The birth: She was born Jane Alice Peters on 6 October 1908, at 704 Rockhill Street in Fort Wayne, the third child and only daughter of Frederic Christian Peters and Elizabeth Jayne Knight Peters, a prosperous family of the city's west central neighborhood. The Rockhill Street house still stands on the heritage trail, and the city's claim on Carole Lombard begins in it, plainly: born here. Her parents divorced in 1916, and her mother took the children west, to Los Angeles, so the Fort Wayne years are the first eight of her life, the tomboy childhood her biographers describe, keeping up with two older brothers. Everything after belongs to California. The fame, though, is the point of this section, and the fame is as large as Hollywood fame got in her decade.

The stardom: Spotted as a child, she made her screen debut in A Perfect Crime in 1921 and signed with Fox in 1924, taking the name the world knows. The 1930s made her the defining actress of screwball comedy, the performer who could be, in Britannica's summary, elegant and zany in the same scene: Twentieth Century in 1934, My Man Godfrey in 1936, which brought her an Academy Award nomination, and Nothing Sacred in 1937. By the late 1930s she was the highest paid star in Hollywood. The American Film Institute, ranking the screen legends in 1999, placed her twenty-third among the greatest female stars of classic Hollywood cinema. She married William Powell in 1931 and, after that marriage ended, Clark Gable in 1939, a union the fan magazines treated as Hollywood royalty.

The end, on Indiana business: In January 1942, weeks after Pearl Harbor, Lombard came home to Indiana to headline a war bond rally in Indianapolis, the star lending her name to her home state. The rally raised millions. Flying back to California on 16 January 1942, her plane, TWA Flight 3, crashed into Mount Potosi outside Las Vegas, killing everyone aboard, Lombard, her mother, and the servicemen travelling with them. She was thirty-three. The bond tour made her death a national story of a particular kind: the first famous American woman, the papers said in effect, to die in the service of the war effort. Fort Wayne's claim is a birthplace and a childhood street, and this section prints it at exactly that size, and notes that the woman who left Rockhill Street at eight chose, at the end, to spend some of her last days working for Indiana.

Sources:

1. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Carole Lombard (born Jane Alice Peters, 6 October 1908, Fort Wayne; the screwball comedies; the war bond rally and the crash of 16 January 1942).
2. Encyclopedia.com, Lombard, Carole (1908-1942) (the highest paid star in Hollywood; the marriages; the death returning from the home-state bond drive).
3. Clio, the Carole Lombard House, Fort Wayne (704 Rockhill Street; the first years in Fort Wayne; citing ARCH Fort Wayne's Heritage Trail and Tom Castaldi, Indiana Historical Bureau, 16 June 2016).
4. American Film Institute, AFI's 100 Years, 100 Stars (1999), as carried in her standard biography (the twenty-third ranking).