The Road to Glory by Michael Ceraolo from The Profane Angel

from The Profane Angel

          The Road to Glory

"I'm intensely interested in and

enthusiastic about everything I do,

everything"

"I give it all I've got

and I love it"

                      And

I did so for as long as I lived,

starting as a very young girl,

                                           which

led to me getting my first movie role

The prolific director Allan Dwan

spotted me either

taking boxing lessons from Benny Leonard

or playing baseball in the street

Or else he was told about me by someone

who had seen me doing those things

and he thought I would be perfect

for the part of the tomboy kid sister

in his upcoming movie A Perfect Crime

Or maybe he just wanted to help a fellow Hoosier;

who knows the true story at this point?

Whatever his reason or reasons,

he decided to approach me,

asking if I would be interested

in appearing in his movie

Of course,

                 I said yes

(I was already taking drama lessons),

                                                        but

he would need Petey's permission

Of course, she also said yes

Though being decently received

and me being decent in it

(and no known prints available

that could contradict my story)

it didn't lead to a career right away

But I now had the bug,

                                   so

I went back to school and bided my time

until I turned sixteen and could quit

And when I did so, there was

a Fox contract as a Sweet Sixteen present

The studio decided that my name,

Jane Peters, would have to go:

they wanted to steer clear of the

sexual connotation of the last name

and thought the first name was too ordinary

We brainstormed and came up with Carol

(sometimes with an e on the end, sometimes not,

until the e became permanent years later)

I came up with the last name Lombard

to honor some family friends

The life of a teenage flapper

(albeit and underage one):

                                        Charleston contests,

many against another aspiring starlet,

Joan Crawford,

                        dates, etc.

As a defense mechanism

I asked my brothers to teach me to swear

At first reluctant, they did such a good job

that I became so proficient at it

it later became one of my trademarks

I was in a number of features that year,

mostly supporting roles (some uncredited)

and I even had a starring role,

in a Western of all things,

with fellow Hoosier Buck Jones

It was when working on The Road to Glory

with director Howard Hawks

that the first setback occurred

I had recently turned seventeen

and was in a car accident where

the windshield shattered and the glass shards

sliced up my face in a few places

Plastic surgery:  14 stitches

done without benefit of anaesthesia

so as to minimize the scarring

Then having to keep my head still for months

to allow the healing to be complete

Imagine,

              me being still

                                    for that long

But I did what I had to do,

making the best of a bad situation

                                                     Though

it sure as hell didn't seem so at the time,

I realized not too long afterwards

that things could have been much worse:

"another inch,

                      half an inch maybe,

                                                    a turn of my head,

and my whole fuckin' career could have been over"