17. When Clark Gable’s Wife Carole Lombard Died in a Plane Crash, He Joined the Air Force
The star of films, It Happened One Night and Gone with the Wind, Clark Gable was one of Hollywood’s most in-demand actors throughout the 1930s and 1940s. When he met actress Carole Lombard on the set of No Man of Her Own (1932), they were both married to other people. He thought she was high-strung and dramatic until he ran into her at a party four years later. Fascinated by the newly-divorced Lombard’s frank honesty which originally turned him off, Gable fell completely in love with her.
In 1939, after finalizing his own divorce, Hollywood’s most notorious ladies man married the screwball comedy actress while he was on vacation from filming Gone with the Wind. When the United States entered World War II, Lombard joined the war effort, encouraging her husband to do the same. In January 1942, returning to California after a war bond tour, Carole Lombard died in a plane crash at age 33. The devastated Gable, honoring his wife’s wishes, joined the Air Force. Although he married two more times, Clark Gable was buried next to Carole Lombard when he died in 1960.