Both of them sat outside on a terrace, enjoying the stars and moonlight. “Awalk through the forest when leaves are turning,” he said. “The rain, the wind, a sunrise. Those things are real. What’s not real is Tinseltown. Hollywood is nothing if not superficial. All of us movie stars are applesauce. We deceive the public, and we get paid very well for it. Since I get paid extra special, I deceive the public extra good.”
She admitted to Hussey that she was a bit intimidated before going to bed with him. After all, he’d been seduced by world-class sirens like Tallulah Bankhead, Clara Bow, Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard, Marlene Dietrich, and Mae West.
“We’d had a few drinks by the time we moved on to the bedroom,” Lana confessed to Hussey. “He took off my blouse and brassiere. He borrowed a tube of lipstick from my purse and painted a face around my breast, making my nipple a nose. Then he made love to that breast. I later learned he’d picked up that trick from Lupe Velez, the Mexican Spitfire.”
“Gary was more man than boy,” Lana told Hussey. “What a guy! Now I know why he’s called the Montana Mule.”
Rumors about his sexual prowess had preceded him.
Clara Bow had claimed “he’s hung like a horse and can go all night.” Ava Gardner would later express the same sentiment. Carole Lombard told friends, “After hitting town, Coop learned he could do two things well: Ride a horse and fuck.”
Lana later learned that men were attracted to him as frequently as women. He’d sustained an enduring affair with Anderson Lawler, the tobacco heir, and also with Cary Grant, Randolph Scott, and Howard Hughes. When Edmund Goulding had directed Cooper in Paramount on Parade in 1930, the director was said to have “worshipped” him twice a day.
During his fling with Lana, Gary proposed getaways where the two of them might escape from Hollywood. He wanted to take her to Sun Valley, Idaho, perhaps inviting his friends, Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor. But on only one occasion did he introduce her to one of his friends or associates.
That was the night they dined with Charlie Chaplin, a sincere devotee of Cooper’s “natural” style of acting.
Chaplin had acquired the film rights to a story about a young millionaire who goes on a cruise to China, where, in a dance hall, he falls in love with a lovely White Russian. The Little Tramp wanted the movie to showcase his girlfriend (or wife), Paulette Goddard, with whom Lana would soon be co-starring in a film. “It’s a comedy with social implications,” Chaplin told them.
After deciphering the plot, Lana told Chaplin, “If Paulette doesn’t do it, I’m always available. I’d be great playing a White Russian.”
The movie was never made. After reading the script, Cooper turned it down.
Far away from the nightclub scene, Lana came to enjoy the precious few nights she spent alone with Cooper. Except for that time they dined with Chaplin, their dates invariably included just the two of them.
“One night, I asked Mildred to vacate the building and go out with the girls. In her place, I invited Gary for a home-cooked meal,” Lana told Hussey.
“I’m not the world’s best cook, but I tried. He arrived with these very ripe avocados, from which he made the world’s best guacamole. Lupe Velez had taught him how. I cooked veal chops, mashed potatoes, and a salad, which was fine with him. For dessert, we retired to bed.”
“He wore these expertly crafted Indian boots, which he asked me to remove.” Lana said. “When I’d taken them off and removed his socks, I was confronted with the longest, most awful feet I’d ever seen on a man. He wanted me to massage his feet, which led to a request for toe-sucking. I had never done that before, and I just know I’ll never do it again. But for Gary, anything.”
“Everybody has some annoying little habit,” she said. “For Gary, it’s his love of licorice. I detest it. It makes your teeth black.”
There was no goodbye, no final farewell. “We had a fabulous dinner, great love-making, and I fell asleep in his arms. In the morning, when I woke up, he was gone. He never phoned for another date. I guess he went home to Rocky.”
In 1943, she heard rumors that Cooper was involved in a torrid love affair with Bergman on the set of For Whom the Bell Tolls.
“It was tolling for Ingrid—not me,” Lana said. “In later years, I would encounter Gary at various functions. He was always gracious, always the gentleman, never a mention made of our previous affair.”
***
Henry Willson, Lana’s agent, received an angry, early-morning call from her. She demanded that he use all his influence to get her a meatier role than that “extra bit I did in The Chaser (1938) with Dennis O’Keefe. I want to be a movie star—not a god damn $10-a-day extra!”
He promised he would “empty oceans and topple mountains” to get her a better part. Through it had not resulted from his intervention as her agent, he learned that MGM had cast her as one of the four leads in Rich Man, Poor Girl, where she received fourth billing to Robert Young, Lew Ayres, and Ruth Hussey. Of course, when Will-son called her with the news, he took all the credit for getting her the role. Shooting was to begin at once, as the 72-minute film had been scheduled for distribution in August of 1938.
During her heavy period of “studio dating,” a photographer captured Lana with MGM contract player Alan Curtis.
Hedda Hopper was in the room that night and said “I can’t decide which one is the more gorgeous.”
In the meantime, Willson asked her to go out on a series of widely publicized dates with whatever star he was specifically promoting at the time—namely, Jon Hall and Alan Curtis. “They’re both gorgeous guys, with great bodies, and, most important, each is well hung. I know that’s a requirement for you, Lana. We both have the same expectations in men.”
“And how do you know how well-hung they are?” she asked provocatively.
“Never mind how I know,” he answered. “Henry knows.”
Both of the young actors, Lana was soon to discover, lived up to Willson’s advance billing.
The popular New York columnist, Walter Winchell, often flew to Hollywood for interviews with the stars he later wrote about. He later recalled a time in the late 1930s. When he’d attended a glittering star-studded night at the Trocadero, he had spotted Lana enter the club on the arm of Alan Curtis.
Although he didn’t print it, he told the manager that, “The Curtis kid is one good-looking hunk of male flesh, and Lana is a picture that could be used for masturbatory fantasies.”
During their dates together, Curtis and Lana seemed ideal for each other, except for one problem: In 1937, he’d married actress Priscilla Lane, a marriage that would end in a divorce court in 1940.
Lane, a native of Indiana, seven years older than Lana, was known for her role as Princess Aura in the original Flash Gordon serial (1936). Curtis married her after she became Miss Miami Beach. She was later to lose a leg when she served in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II.
Born in Chicago, Curtis was twelve years older than Lana, but didn’t look it. Willson had orchestrated a change in his name to Alan Curtis, since his real name, Harry Ueberroth, wouldn’t look good on a marquee.
Lana learned that he’d worked as a model before becoming an actor. “In Chicago, I posed for figure studies,” he told her. “Word got around. Soon the class was filled only with young men concentrating on only one part of my anatomy.”
He admitted that to get launched in Hollywood, he’d had to participate at the rate of about two dalliances a week on Willson’s notorious casting couch.
“He’s so repulsive physically,” Lana asked. “How can you manage?”
“I just close my eyes and imagine it’s Alice Faye doing the dirty deed down below.”
When she’d first met him, he was interpreting a secondary role in a Technicolor picture, Hollywood Cavalcade (1939), starring the blonde-haired Faye and Don Ameche.
As Lana later told Willson, “As you, of all people know, Alan is a dreamboat, and the sex is just great. But I think he’s more i
nterested in free publicity than in dating me.”
In spite of that assessment, Lana developed a friendship with Curtis that lasted for years.
She was pleased to learn that his big break would come in 1941, when director Raoul Walsh gave him the third lead in a film noir heist movie, High Sierra, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino. Curtis played “Babe Kozak,” a hardened criminal who arrives at a fortified mountain hideaway with a dance hall girl (Lupino).
In 1941, Lana was surprised when she read that Curtis had married Ilona Massey, the Hungarian film, stage, and radio performer hailed as “The New Dietrich.” One night three months later, he came over to Lana’s and wanted to spend the night. He’d been kicked out of the house by this temperamental singing star. They divorced the following year.
When Lana encountered him again, he’d replaced John Garfield in Flesh and Fantasy 1943), playing a ruthless killer opposite Gloria Jean.
It represented the biggest break so far in his career. An A-list picture starring Edward G. Robinson, Charles Boyer, and Barbara Stanwyck, it consisted of four free-standing segments that combined into an “anthology,” inspired by Oscar Wilde’s short story, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, originally published in 1891. Curtis appeared in the first of the four segments, interpreting the role of an escaped killer. Regrettably (for him), that segment was yanked from the “anthology” and never released.
In an attempt to salvage some of its footage, the studio expanded it into a full-length film noir entitled Destiny (1944). In it, a fugitive (Curtis) finds refuge with a blind girl (played by Gloria Jean) in a secluded farmhouse.
On rare occasions, Lana would sometimes go out with Curtis—who by then had become type-cast in hard-bitten roles—when they weren’t involved with other lovers or spouses.
Lana’s fling with Jon Hall was brief. To her dismay, she learned that he was an exhibitionist. “I knew he went around his house naked. But I didn’t realize he gave public performances.” She’d learned that Hall liked to strip down at parties, the guests forming a ring around him to watch him masturbate.
“I can’t understand,” Lana said. “He’s got me and he prefers self-satisfaction.”
“He needs the admiration of a room full of people,” Henry Willson said.
Curtis died in 1953 after a botched, but supposedly routine, kidney operation in New York City. “How sad for poor Alan,” she said. His career didn’t pan out the way he wanted. Or his life, either, for that matter. The Hollywood Hills are filled with stars, male and female, who never achieved their dream. I live in fear every day of becoming a has-been. I’m determined that it won’t happen to me.”
***
The movie star, Jon Hall, born Charles Locher in Fresno, California, had been reared in Tahiti by his Swiss-born father, Felix Locher. Jon was a nephew of writer James Norman Hall, the author of the novel, Mutiny on the Bounty.
In 1934, he’d married the singer, Frances Langford, but neither of them was faithful.
Although the virile but rather bland star had appeared on the screen under two names, Charles Locher and, later, Lloyd Crane, he achieved fame as Jon Hall when he starred in Hurricane with Dorothy Lamour, both of them wearing sarongs. Willson had taken Lana to see it.
“Jon has quite a following,” she said to Willson. “You should know. The men seemed to go after him more than the women.”
“It’s because they, like you, want to know what’s inside the sarong.”
“Does Jon, like Curtis, lie with you on your couch?”
“It’s mandatory,” he answered.
She abruptly stopped dating him. He went on to make movies with bombshell Maria Montez, the “Cobra Woman” from the Dominican Republic.
Lana was an avid reader of gossip columns, especially those by Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, and she always followed news about her lovers long after they’d separated.
It saddened her when she read that so many of them ended their life much too young and tragically. Hall, a star of silly adventure movies, was actually an inventor and highly skilled aviator.
But shortly before Christmas in 1979, after his doctor told him he had incurable bladder cancer, he went home, took out his gun, and committed suicide.
***
Reporting for work at MGM, Lana appeared on the set of Rich Man, Poor Girl, her next picture.
The first person she met was the German Jewish director, Reinhold Schünzel, who called over Lew Ayres, the co-star of the picture, to introduce them.
She would always remember the occasion and the romance that followed. He held her hand tenderly and kissed her on both cheeks. Their first encounter ended abruptly when Ayres was called to the phone.
After he’d left, she turned to Schünzel. “Mark my words, that good-looking devil is the guy I’m going to marry.”
“Perhaps,” the director answered. “After all, this is Hollywood, where marriage is but an afterthought. There is one problem. You’ll have to get rid of his wife. Ginger Rogers is bigtime competition. She dances better than you, but, then again, you’re more gorgeous.”
Chapter Four
Stardom at Last
For that “Ball of Fire,” Lana Turner
Her Ongoing Affair with Lew Ayres, Ginger Rogers’ Husband
Romping in the swimming pool, and later in bed, “bathing beauties” Robert Stack and Lana Turner had a lot of fun.
“In her heart, Lana is a total romantic,” he said. “Even when she claims she does, she doesn’t really want to settle down and raise a brood of kids. She thinks marriage should be like a romantic scene in a movie, a constant flurry of fun and courtship, not the day-to-day reality of a man and wife.”
“Even though she denies it, sex is of paramount importance to her. I don’t want to call her a nympho, but she confided to me, ‘I don’t get enough sex. I don’t know why Mother Nature designed men to give up after only one of two explosions. She played a trick on men, and women are the ultimate losers.”
Rich Man, Poor Girl (1938) was based on a 1925 Broadway play, White Collars, a satire on socialism. In 1929, it was turned into a Pre-Code comedy by MGM, The Idle Rich, starring Conrad Nagel and Bessie Love. The film was the first directorial effort of William C. de Mille, a former screenwriter of silent movies and the older brother of Cecil B. DeMille, who slightly altered the spelling of their last name.
The 1938 remake was directed by Reinhold Schünzel, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, who had been one of the better-known film stars in Berlin after World War I. In spite of his Jewish heritage, Josef Goebbels and Adolf Hitler had allowed him to work in films after they came to power.
But because of their constant interference in his scripts, Schünzel decided to escape from Germany anyway. Years later, he told Lana, “Hitler had the worst possible dramatic taste.”
In Hollywood, Schünzel continued to both direct and act. His most memorable film appearance was in the 1946 Alfred Hitchcock film, Notorious, co-starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman.
On the second day of the shoot, Clark Gable, a star Lana idolized, showed up for a working luncheon with Schünzel. Lana just happened to be standing next to the director when Gable approached.
“I was horrified,” she said. “For my role in the movie, wardrobe had given me the worst dress in the history of fashion. In a three-button suit, Gable had never looked handsomer, with a lock of hair falling over his forehead, very sexy. A photographer snapped a picture of the three of us. I was caught gazing up at him with star-dust in my eyes, but he doesn’t seem to know I exist. All the pretty gals were after him. In my wildest dreams, I never knew I’d be co-starring with him in the months ahead.”
On the set of Rich Man, Poor Girl, Lana met her screen idol, Clark Gable, for the first time. He had come to call on his friend, the film’s director, Reinhold Schünzel.
“Unfortunately, I was drably dressed for my role in the picture,” Lana said. “I looked like some waitress behind a soda fountain.”
In a nutsh
ell, Rich Man, Poor Girl was the story of a wealthy businessman (Robert Young) who falls in love with his secretary Joan Thayer (Ruth Hussey), who comes from a poor and eccentric family. Joan does not immediately accept his proposal because of the difference in their backgrounds. As a means of testing their compatibility, she proposes that he come to live for a while with her family. At their home, he meets her radical cousin Henry (Lew Ayres) and her starry-eyed sister Helen (Lana herself), plus the rest of the crazy clan.
At first, Lana had been told she’d be working with Franchot Tone. She planned to chase after him, since he’d been married to Joan Crawford, and she wanted to get even with Crawford, based on her flare-up over Lana’s dating of Greg Bautzer. But it was soon announced that Tone was out, and the lead role went instead to Robert Young.
“As a leading man, Young did absolutely nothing for me,” Lana told Rita Johnson, one of the stars of the movie. “He’s one of those solid family men types who marries one gal and stays married to her until the cows come home.”
[Lana was right about that. Young married Betty Henderson in 1933, the union lasting until her death in 1994.]
As Hussey’s “jitterbug sister,” Lana had one scene where she got to do the rumba, and another where she shows off her body in a scanty petticoat. She utters such lines as, “Love is wonderful but it can’t survive seven people [competing] for one bathtub.”
As part of their buildup to the release of the film, MGM billed Lana as “The Kissing Bug of Andy Hardy.” Around the same time, Variety would deliver faint praise, defining her as a “promising youngster.”
The first actor Lana dated was a Texan, Don Castle, who at the time was interpreting one of the film’s minor roles. She didn’t agree, but the press often mentioned his resemblance to Clark Gable. Many of her outings with Castle were configured, with aggressive input from the studio, as double dates with her girlfriend, Bonita Granville and her beau of the moment.
[In less than a decade, Castle would become the TV producer for Jack Wrather’s Lassie series. Wrather was married to Granville at the time.
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