Step Inside Carole Lombard's Dutch-Style Residence in California
The
screwball-comedy icon purchased the Hollywood Hills residence in 1934,
shortly after her divorce from her first husband, fellow actor William
Powell
“This article originally appeared in the March 2006 issue of Architectural Digest.”
Screwball comedy," a term cooked up by a press agent that came to describe an entire genre of American moviemaking, appears to have been first used to promote Gregory La-Cava's My Man Godfrey (1936), the picture that made Carole Lombard a major star. What a nice piece of synchrony: The actress who helped define, and whose best work was largely defined by, this kind of ebullient, magical, zany but often sly soufflé of a movie helped to name it too.
Lombard wasn't born a screwball heroine; she and the genre evolved together. The actress liked to say that her feature movie career (which followed an important apprenticeship in a dozen Mack Sennett two-reel shorts) began with "17 flops in a row." Before he directed her in Twentieth Century (1934), her breakthrough movie, Howard Hawks called her the worst actress in the world. But he is also said to have told her costar John Barrymore that she would be a sensation—if only they could keep her from acting.
What the notable director and actor did was encourage Lombard to be herself, and this turned out to be the key to liberating an antic original from the restraining shell of a gifted, if not particularly inspired, contract player. "Coolly intelligent and calculatedly alluring in former pictures," a perceptive reviewer wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "in [Twentieth Century] she vibrates with life and passion, abandon and diablerie."
Carole Lombard was no ditz, although at the height of her career she certainly played a number of them. Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, "The Hoosier Tornado" or "The Profane Angel"—depending on who was nicknaming her—came to Hollywood with her mother as a young girl and appeared in her first movie at 12. Adela Rogers St. Johns, admittedly a friend, said of Lombard in a contemporary profile that she had "ideas and intense curiosity about everything on earth." For once this doesn't seem to be a bit of movie magazine puffery. Lombard paid attention to how scripts were constructed. She paid attention to the way the camera photographed. She paid attention to her fellow actors too—she learned more from Barrymore in the six weeks they worked together, she said, than in her six previous years in the pictures.
Screwball comedy," a term cooked up by a press agent that came to describe an entire genre of American moviemaking, appears to have been first used to promote Gregory La-Cava's My Man Godfrey (1936), the picture that made Carole Lombard a major star. What a nice piece of synchrony: The actress who helped define, and whose best work was largely defined by, this kind of ebullient, magical, zany but often sly soufflé of a movie helped to name it too.
Lombard wasn't born a screwball heroine; she and the genre evolved together. The actress liked to say that her feature movie career (which followed an important apprenticeship in a dozen Mack Sennett two-reel shorts) began with "17 flops in a row." Before he directed her in Twentieth Century (1934), her breakthrough movie, Howard Hawks called her the worst actress in the world. But he is also said to have told her costar John Barrymore that she would be a sensation—if only they could keep her from acting.
What the notable director and actor did was encourage Lombard to be herself, and this turned out to be the key to liberating an antic original from the restraining shell of a gifted, if not particularly inspired, contract player. "Coolly intelligent and calculatedly alluring in former pictures," a perceptive reviewer wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "in [Twentieth Century] she vibrates with life and passion, abandon and diablerie."
Carole Lombard was no ditz, although at the height of her career she certainly played a number of them. Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, "The Hoosier Tornado" or "The Profane Angel"—depending on who was nicknaming her—came to Hollywood with her mother as a young girl and appeared in her first movie at 12. Adela Rogers St. Johns, admittedly a friend, said of Lombard in a contemporary profile that she had "ideas and intense curiosity about everything on earth." For once this doesn't seem to be a bit of movie magazine puffery. Lombard paid attention to how scripts were constructed. She paid attention to the way the camera photographed. She paid attention to her fellow actors too—she learned more from Barrymore in the six weeks they worked together, she said, than in her six previous years in the pictures.
In
time she also had the good fortune to collaborate with some of the most
deft and talented directors and writers in the business, who gave her a
series of golden roles in the mid-1930s. After Hawks she worked with
Ernst Lubitsch in 1935, when he produced Hands Across the Table, and again in 1942, when he directed To Be or Not to Be. In LaCava's Godfrey
she received her only Oscar nomination, for her portrayal of Irene
Bullock, a dingbat heiress who picks up a tramp in a scavenger hunt and
brings him home to be the family butler. William A. Wellman and Ben
Hecht created Hazel Flagg for her in the newspaper satire Nothing Sacred (1937), and even Alfred Hitchcock, venturing out of genre, directed her in the 1941 comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
The
reason Hawks and Barrymore encouraged Lombard to be herself at that key
early juncture in her career was that, by all accounts, she had an
irreverent, playful and infectious personality. Lombard loved practical
jokes; she used colorful language; on the set she was generous and
thoughtful to a tee—a profane angel indeed. She gave wildly creative
themed parties and was sexually frank, in and out of her two marriages.
The first was to William Powell, who, after they amicably separated,
angled for her to appear opposite him in Godfrey, and the second, near
the end of her life, was to Clark Gable.
The end of her life came too early, when, after indefatigably raising serious money at a series of war bond rallies in 1942, she insisted on hurrying home to Los Angeles, and the plane carrying her there crashed.
Now what kind of a home does so vivacious a personality establish for herself? Of Lombard's various residences, the most memorable—and in the history of Hollywood interior decoration, the most influential—was the house she bought in 1934, after her divorce from Powell. For decoration Lombard turned to her old friend and colleague William "Billy" Haines, whose career as a silent-screen wit and wisecracker had tanked with the arrival of the talkies but whose career as an interior designer was just about to take off. Lombard's house was arguably Haines's first complete project, and one of the actress's goals in asking him to take it on was to help him launch a new professional life.
Many years later Haines told a Lombard biographer that in designing the interiors he aimed for a femininity and a buoyancy that echoed the actress's. In the moment, or close to it, Motion Picture magazine paid a visit to the house, which was in the foothills of Hollywood just west of Fairfax Avenue; while the profile now reads very much like a comic piece, it also gives a fairly detailed account of Haines's, and presumably Lombard's, thinking about how to get the décor to "match her personality" (and her hair: The story is titled "Carole Lombard's House Is a Background for a Blonde!").
The visiting journalist reported that the actress's drawing room was done in six shades of blue (italics hers) and was "no place for tweeds or slacks, but a perfect setting for trailing tea gowns and evening dresses." Haines selected the furniture after analyzing Lombard's "type" and concluding that she was a "seductive sort of a woman who recalls a period of great elegance and formality of living" yet at the same time was modern and sophisticated. Somehow this translated into a Directoire sofa, a screen hand-painted with Greek gods and goddesses, and dining room chairs "almost Grecian in shape."
Even in this early project you can see Haines's trademarks in their first incarnations. He made side tables in his own workshops with a motif of arrows, quivers and lyres (later the shapes would be more streamlined, but similarly custom-made); he adapted lamps from black-marble busts (custom lighting would become another Haines standard touch); he added a bit of chinoiserie, a staple of just about every Haines interior. In the playroom he painted a piano in plaid to match the wallpaper, and in Lombard's bedroom he used a mirrored screen.
Commenting on this debonair accessory, soon to be copied all over town, Motion Picture magazine raved, "Seven Caroles are better than one in any room!" It's hard to argue with that.
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/carole-lombard-article-032006
The end of her life came too early, when, after indefatigably raising serious money at a series of war bond rallies in 1942, she insisted on hurrying home to Los Angeles, and the plane carrying her there crashed.
Now what kind of a home does so vivacious a personality establish for herself? Of Lombard's various residences, the most memorable—and in the history of Hollywood interior decoration, the most influential—was the house she bought in 1934, after her divorce from Powell. For decoration Lombard turned to her old friend and colleague William "Billy" Haines, whose career as a silent-screen wit and wisecracker had tanked with the arrival of the talkies but whose career as an interior designer was just about to take off. Lombard's house was arguably Haines's first complete project, and one of the actress's goals in asking him to take it on was to help him launch a new professional life.
Many years later Haines told a Lombard biographer that in designing the interiors he aimed for a femininity and a buoyancy that echoed the actress's. In the moment, or close to it, Motion Picture magazine paid a visit to the house, which was in the foothills of Hollywood just west of Fairfax Avenue; while the profile now reads very much like a comic piece, it also gives a fairly detailed account of Haines's, and presumably Lombard's, thinking about how to get the décor to "match her personality" (and her hair: The story is titled "Carole Lombard's House Is a Background for a Blonde!").
The visiting journalist reported that the actress's drawing room was done in six shades of blue (italics hers) and was "no place for tweeds or slacks, but a perfect setting for trailing tea gowns and evening dresses." Haines selected the furniture after analyzing Lombard's "type" and concluding that she was a "seductive sort of a woman who recalls a period of great elegance and formality of living" yet at the same time was modern and sophisticated. Somehow this translated into a Directoire sofa, a screen hand-painted with Greek gods and goddesses, and dining room chairs "almost Grecian in shape."
Even in this early project you can see Haines's trademarks in their first incarnations. He made side tables in his own workshops with a motif of arrows, quivers and lyres (later the shapes would be more streamlined, but similarly custom-made); he adapted lamps from black-marble busts (custom lighting would become another Haines standard touch); he added a bit of chinoiserie, a staple of just about every Haines interior. In the playroom he painted a piano in plaid to match the wallpaper, and in Lombard's bedroom he used a mirrored screen.
Commenting on this debonair accessory, soon to be copied all over town, Motion Picture magazine raved, "Seven Caroles are better than one in any room!" It's hard to argue with that.
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/carole-lombard-article-032006
