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Carole's Sunday best

The locally-produced Sunday newspaper magazine is rapidly becoming a relic in the industry, due to rising costs and staff cutbacks. But in the 1930s and '40s, nearly every large metropolitan daily worth its salt included one of those magazines in its Sunday edition. Color photography, particularly on the cover, was these magazines' stock in trade, and in that era, who made for better cover subjects than those larger-than-life gods and goddesses hailing from Hollywood? (Especially since motion pictures made in color were then a relative rarity.)

As one of the screen's top stars of the time -- not to mention the love, and then wife, of Clark Gable -- Carole Lombard was a natural cover subject for such sections, and here are a few pictures that enlivened Sundays throughout America (and often were later clipped out for scrapbooks or to hang on bedroom walls).

First, the cover of the New York Sunday News magazine from August 28, 1938:



We're not sure when this charming outdoor photo was taken, but it almost certainly graced a few Sunday magazine covers:



The Sunday News ran this seductive shot in July of 1941:



Finally, here's one with Lombard in fur (this may have been run posthumously):



Relatively few of these color pictures were produced, but they provide a nice complement to the array of black-and-white stills Lombard made.