Carole Lombard, the Hoosier Tornado

Book excerpt: For Millions of Movie Fans During the 1930s, an actress from Fort Wayne, Indiana, personified the madcap adventures of their favorite form of screen comedy -- screwball. Nicknamed "The Hoosier Tornado" for her energetic personality, Carole Lombard did as much as anyone to define the genre, delighting audiences with her zany antics in such films as Twentieth Century, My Man Godfrey, Nothing Sacred, and To Be or Not to Be. She also captured America's attention through her romance with and eventual marriage to screen idol Clark Gable. In this inaugural volume in the Indiana Historical Society Press's Indiana Biography Series, Wes D. Gehring, a noted authority on film comedy, examines Lombard's legacy, focusing on both the public and private figure from her early days as merely beautiful window dressing in Mack Sennett silent films, to her development as the leading motion-picture comedienne of her time, to her tragic death in a January 1942 plane crash following a successful war-bond rally in Indianapolis. He also explores the rapport this sometimes "Profane Angel" (Lombard swore like a sailor) enjoyed with not only directors, but also the blue-collar workers who toiled on movie sets. The biography also features a foreword written by Scott Robert Olson, dean of the college of communications, information, and media, and professor of communication studies at Ball State University. In her comedic roles, Gehring states in the book, Lombard offered the life lesson that "the irrational mind -- crazy Carole -- stood a much better chance of surviving in the equally irrational modern world." Lombard's film persona continues to survive in the public's collective conscious. "Her screwball heroine is as significant for modern audiences as yesteryear's more traditional literary figures," Gehring writes. Nationally respected for its publication program, the Indiana Historical Society Press has always excelled particularly in one area: telling the life and times of those who have had an impact on the Hoosier State. The Press continues this tradition with its new Indiana Biography Series, which pairs writers with Indiana subjects of note. Future volumes in the series will highlight such personalities as Jonathan Jennings, Gus Grissom, Thomas Marshall, James Dean, Meredith Nicholson, Susan Wallace, David L. Chambers, and Cleo Blackburn. Book jacket.