In the late 1930s, Carole Lombard earned roughly five times the salary of the U.S. president and told the press she was happy to hand 80 percent of it back in taxes, a stance that earned her a handwritten thank-you from Franklin D. Roosevelt. This episode follows the life of Jane Alice Peters, born in Fort Wayne in 1908, a baseball-playing tomboy discovered in the street by director Allan Dwan at age 12, from a Fox contract at 16 to a windshield-glass scar in 1927 that seemed to end her career.

The conversation covers how Mack Sennett's slapstick shorts rebuilt her, the brief but formative marriage to William Powell, Howard Hawks telling her to stop acting on Twentieth Century, the Oscar nomination for My Man Godfrey, and the freelance profit-sharing deal that traded a lower salary for 20 percent of the gross. It also traces her romance wit ...