By: Sonia Lee

Carole Lombard owes her success today to no one but herself. She was the person who developed her personality, her ability – and even her beauty.

Carole Lombard today is Hollywood’s outstanding self-made woman. From the tips of her toes to the crown of her head, from that beautiful figure to that clear-thinking mind, she is a momenument to forethought, ambition, and relentless self-control. She is a glamorous, inspiring example to women the world over.

In many instances, beauty may be God-given, even intelligence may be inherited, and honesty may come through childhood training- but Carole Lombard is personally responsible for the woman she is today, even to the remaking of herself physically.

She is a unique personality. Alternately, she has the consuming fire of a dynamo and the placidity of a lily pool. She is perhaps the most honest person in Hollywood – because she is essentially honest with herself. There is no phase of herself, either in relation to her work or to her fundamental self, which she allows to be obscured by any confused notions.

Today she is not only one of the best-dressed women on the screen, but one of the most beautiful, whose beauty is a curious blend of flesh and spirit, which can never bendefinitely labeled. In the past year, she has taken her place in the upper roster of competent Hollywooed celebrities by effetictive work in a half-dozen productions. After seeing her personance as a temperamental Broadway queen in Twentieth Century, not only producers, but the country at large, became aware of this girl’s talent, and instantly began to mine her potentialities (her newest picture is the colorful Hands Across the Table with Fred MacMurray).

Here was feminine beauty; here was an honest reaction to emotion; here was a lucid mind that easily comprehended the limitations of a character as well as its possibilities. Her was no surface interpretation, but, rather, a keen analysis of drama and emotional expression. People began to ssuepct a fact that has actually been true for years: Carole Lombard is a person who can subtract fluff from substance; who has almost second sight where people and their motives are concerned.

She was by no means a remarkable child. She had delicate coloring, a certain grace, a habit of walking on her toes that convinced the family that she was destined to be a dancer, but she had all of a small boy’s inclinations and curiosities. She had then – and still has – an insatiably inquiring mind. Nothing daunted her then – and it doesn’t now. even as a child no horse was too spirited for her, no wall too high to climb, no water too swift to swim.

To all intents and purposes the small Jane Peters, who later became the glamorous star, Carole Lombard, might have been a boy. Certainly she had little that would give even an inclination that the small girl would eventually, through her own labor, become a famous beauty and a famous actress.

The first intimation of what she might become, in some seemingly impossible future, came during her high school days when her boisterous good humor and her ready comradeship were an irresistible magnet to cohorts of her contemporaries. But her arresting personality required polishing, development and amplifying before she was even embryonically the Lombard of today. Moreover, she herself knew it. That is important.

She studied dancing until she became so adept that she was invited ot join the Denishawn dancers on a tour. Her mother would not permit her to accept. Carole was still undiscouraged.

At sixteen she had her first break in pictures. It came about through a fleeting resemblance to Constance Bennett. Fox signed her as a stock player.

She knew nothing about makeup, about dramatic technique. She had difficulty with her hands – she never knew just what to do with them. She listened to what everybody told her, making her mind a sponge to absorb every idea.

If she was not an actress – then she had to prepare herself. She had to remedy her shortcomings, of which she was so well aware. So she began the conscious program, that well-planned routine, which eventually bore splendid fruit. She joined a Little Theatre group, with whom she studied dramatics.

Carole learned her acting lessons in the most difficult school – the school of experienc.e At the end of the year she felt herself well prepared for better things than she had had. She proved that when the studio offered her a contract at the same seventy-five-dollars-a-week salary that she had been receiving before. She refused the contract.

She thought she could get a job easily. Perhaps she could have – but Fate intervened. Before she could even look for another opening, she was in a serious automobile accident that scarred her face and held her helpless on her back for a year. Possibly there is no greater testimony to her absorbing ambition than this fact – that even with the thought that the scar would never heal, even with the suspicion that another chance in pictures would be long in the coming, she never relaxed her determination to be an actress. Her defiance of Fate maintained her inflexible ambition.

There were no marks on her face and no marks on her body when she was finally able to work again. She took one of Hollywood’s severest tests of pulchritude. She went to Mack Sennett, applied for a a job as one of his famous Bathing Beauties – and got it.

Carole was now nineteen. In three years, which included that year of being an invalid, she had learned what to do with dangling and embarrassing hands, how to adjust the movements of her body to the fluid camera. During all of this time she was learning to be an actress, and now she began to make herself over physically.

From the Sennett Studio, she went to Pathé. An over-plump Carole. A girl who did not know how to highlight every physical advantage. With the help of expert trainers, masseurs and dieticians, she made her figure so exquisite that it might well fulfill a Pagan’s dream. She became newly clothes-conscious – realizing how the right clothes could enhance beauty and personality and intelligence. She set out to find what was right for her. She studied make-up and hair dressing.

With the coming of talkies, she continued her self-education. She studied voice, diction and placement. She determined that the microphone would not find her wanting – and it did not!

She won new opportunities, and acquired vision and balance – acquired them because she workd to have them if her ambitions were to be realized. She knew that there were no short-cuts.

Because of this concentrated effort and this unswerving purpose, she is what she is today, what she will be in that greater future certain to be hers – a self-made woman!