His parents separated when their son was a year old.
When Lana first met Stack, he was an athlete, a polo player and “the world’s best skeet shooter,” winning two global records.
Back in Hollywood after his long adolescent sojourn in Europe, he decided to give acting a try. Through a connection, he was cast as the co-star of Deanna Durbin, that teenaged box office sensation who became the favorite singer of, among many others, both Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin. In First Love (1939)—a cinematic reprise of the Cinderella myth—Stack gave Durbin her first (and widely ballyhooed) onscreen kiss.
At the time, Jack Warner said, in reference to Stack, “I could make this kid a star, but he doesn’t need me—he’s not hungry enough.”
Briefly, at least, Lana thought she might be falling in love with Stack, but she soon realized how hopeless that would be. He was enjoying his “swinging bachelor” days, which would last until 1956, when he married Rosemarie Bowe and settled down.
Lana was known for retaining friendships with former dates and colleagues. Here, in 1944, years after their inaugural contacts, Robert Stack, to some degree as part of their morale-building efforts during wartime, teaches Lana how to salute.
He admitted to Lana that he’d lost his virginity when he was sixteen to “a petite redhead with big smiles and boobs to match.”
While dating Lana on and off, he managed to have affairs with such leading ladies as Diana Barrymore, Yvonne De Carlo, Judy Garland, Betty Grable, and even, in time, a too-young Elizabeth Taylor.
In 1940, his roommate was none other than a young John F. Kennedy, the son of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, during one of JFK’s visits to Hollywood. When he was introduced to Stack, libidinous JFK and Stack moved together into a cramped apartment, where they enjoyed a steady stream of starlets and even on occasion big name actresses.
Stack said, “Most of the great male stars in Hollywood passed through my life, including Clark Gable. Gable was a man’s man, but liked a lot of different women on the side. But he was nothing compared to Jack.”
“Jack was the only man in Tinseltown better looking than me, and all the hot tamales on the West Coast took notice. He really needed a date book. I’ve known him to have sex in the afternoon, sex at cocktail time, sex after dinner, and even a sleepover after midnight—each with a different woman.”
Lana wanted to meet him, but, although he kept promising an introduction, that didn’t happen until JFK returned from the battlefields of World War II in 1946.
Years later, Stack recalled one of his outings with Lana. In this case, it involved their joint involvement at the Ernest Belcher School of Dance in Los Angeles, where they were each pursuing a course in tap dancing, as mandated by the studio.
Stack’s original memoirs, entitled Straight Shooting and issued in 1980, included extensive sections on his interchanges with Lana. In advance of its publication, he gave her the privilege of reading it before publication. She phoned and politely requested that he remove the pages that addressed their long-ago romantic involvement. After her edits, he was left with only a paragraph or so, in which was revealed that during the heat of their early affair, he gave her his first skeet trophy as a “love bauble.”
Privately, however, Stack admitted that he never fell in love with Lana, although he did, for a while, idolize both Betty Grable and Carole Lombard, Gable’s wife at the time. “Betty made sex look like an American hobby everybody should enjoy, and about as illicit as apple pie.”
On dates with Stack, or at parties at his home, Lana met the cream of Hollywood royalty, some of whom she would know intimately, including Howard Hughes, Errol Flynn, and Robert Taylor. In passing, she was also introduced to Edward G. Robinson, Nelson Eddy, Will Rogers, Ernst Lubitsch, and Joe Pasternak.
After knowing Stack for several months, he invited her to a screening of his latest movie, The Mortal Storm (1940), co-starring Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart. In it, he played a young man who joins the Nazi Party. After the screening, she praised his performance, although admitting, “You are such an All-American boy. You’d be the last man I’d ever cast as a Nazi.”
She later recalled, “Robert never used rose-colored glasses when he looked at Hollywood.”
He told her, “Seldom does Hollywood shake off its self-satisfied superiority and remember its beginnings as a nondescript village of Nickelodeon salesmen. The surest road to distaste in Tinseltown is to know, or to be brash enough to remember, the humblest origins of our great leaders.”
Stack provided more insight about Lana to friends (Gable, Judy Garland, and others) than he revealed in his memoirs.
“There are two Lana Turners,” Stack said. “One Is a sex kitten with a pouty mouth, a kind of Baby Doll to cuddle. Another is a panther-like woman with an appetite that is almost insatiable. I’ll fuck her but I’ll never marry her. In fact, I don’t plan to marry for a long, long time. Right now, my phone rings off the wall. Even June Allyson called one night. No sooner had I come back to Hollywood than Joan Crawford was on the phone. She always wants to be the first to seduce the newest stud in town.”
Ann Rutherford was one of Lana’s most enduring friends and confidantes. Here she is, as she appeared as Scarlett O’Hara’s sister in Gone With the Wind (1939).
***
Lana had been in films for just two years when her favorite director (at the time), S. Sylvan Simon, phoned her. He’d received Louis B. Mayer’s permission to give her top billing for her next picture, Dancing Co-Ed.
She was pleased that she’d be working with her close friend, Ann Rutherford, again. And indeed, it was Rutherford (“Scarlett O’Hara’s sister”) who evolved into the best source for what really happened during the shooting of Dancing Co-Ed.
The film was conceived as part of a series of college-themed “programmers” in vogue at the time. Sometimes, at a different studio, a variation of this theme would focus on Betty Grable as the featured coed. Ironically, neither Grable nor Lana had ever been enrolled in any college or university.
Lana was informed that her leading man and love interest would be Richard Carlson, with whom she’d just finished her last movie, These Glamour Girls. Dancing Co-Ed’s third lead, she was told, would be the bandleader, Artie Shaw, who had sustained a smash hit with “Begin the Beguine,” earning him the title of the “King of Swing,” toppling Benny Goodman from his throne. On the fourth day of the shoot, Lana met the bandleader himself.
Richard Lamparski, in his memoir, Hollywood Diary, recorded how that footnote in Hollywood history transpired:
“Lana Turner entered and walked toward the bandstand. Shaw was facing his music makers and couldn’t see her, but within seconds, he was aware that someone of great interest was approaching behind him from the eyes of the musicians he was leading ‘The Sweater Girl’ on this day was wearing tight white shorts and two bandanas tied into a halter.
“The leader came down from the podium, and there was a brief exchange that concluded when Lana stood on her tip toes, tilted her head upward, and closed her eyes. Shaw bent down slightly and kissed her. As he did so, he ran his left hand appreciatively, slowly, over her ass. Then she turned and walked away and sashayed across the vast floor and out. The only sounds were of her sandals flapping. With the thump of the quilted door, Lana Turner and her ass were gone.”
After her exit, the boys in the band responded with a series of hoots, hollers, and wolf whistles.
Conditions changed by the third day on the set. Rutherford and Lana skipped lunch in the commissary and had sandwiches and cokes delivered to them on the set. They were sitting on a bench in back of the bandstand, where they could hear Shaw gossiping with Simon and two members of his band.
The talk was about “hot chicks.”
“Even though I detest Hollywood, I feel like a sultan in his harem here,” Shaw said. “The pussies out here come at you like gangbusters. To use another image, I feel like a kid who’s been given free run of a candy store.”
&n
bsp; “So far, the most beautiful girl I’ve found is Betty Grable,” Shaw claimed. “She’s got the most incredible body, especially those legs of hers. She wraps them around a man and doesn’t let him go until he’s satisfied her. There’s not much going on upstairs. She’s a total Hollywood creation. If movies did not exist, she’d be a waitress in some hamburger joint working for dime tips and getting offered five dollars for a quickie later that night.”
The arrogance of youth and beauty:
Then-ingenue Lana Turner, from the late 1930s, on the verge of becoming a major-league femme fatale, seductress, and vamp.
“She told me she soured on Jackie Coogan and got tired of him coming in at three in the morning and pissing in her bed,” Shaw said. “She also sold all their wedding gifts for ready cash.”
“What about Lana Turner?” Simon asked.
“From what little I’ve seen in talking to her, she’s more empty-headed than Betty,” Shaw said. “A bubblehead, but good for a quick fuck—nothing else. Nice ass, though. I think the first time I plow her, it’ll be through the back door.”
Enraged, Lana dropped her sandwich and stood up, taking Rutherford’s hand. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” she whispered. “What an arrogant prick that Shaw is! I’d never let that conceited bastard touch me if he were the last man on earth.”
Chapter Five
Lana’s Marriage to a Clarinet Player Warbles Off Key
America’s “Blonde Spitfire” Proves Too Hot to Handle
Call it “Scenes from a Marriage”: The four-month marital union of Artie Shaw with Lana Turner was not a match made in heaven. Instead, it’s best described as a union crafted somewhere in the darker regions of hell. From the beginning, she realized she’d made a horrible mistake in marrying him, but for a while, she was determined to stick it out.
A great deal of their conflict arose from his frequent charge that she was uneducated. He assumed the role of Pygmalion to her Galatea, loading her down with books to improve her mind. She never read any of them.
“We began a sort of love-hate relationship,” she said to listeners who included both her mother Mildred and Johnny Hyde.
A Metro-Goldwyn release, Dancing Co-Ed, Lana’s first starring film, was shot during the hot summer of 1939 as the world was about to go to war. It was a historic year in Hollywood, when studios were turning out some of their greatest and most enduring films. Contenders that year included not just Gone With the Wind, but Judy Garland’s The Wizard of Oz, Laurence Olivier’s Wuthering Heights, John Wayne’s Stagecoach, Greta Garbo’s Ninotschka, James Stewart’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Bette Davis’ Dark Victory, and Robert Donat’s Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
At the time she joined the cast of Dancing Co-Eds, Lana was in the “white heat’ weeks of her torrid affair with attorney Greg Bautzer. She had forgiven him for having dumped her for Simone Simon, whom he defined as “my brief fling with a French Fifi.”
The film’s director, S. Sylvan Simon, had assembled a cast of longtime pros in the business, along with a series of rising stars. Richard Carlson had the romantic lead, with bandleader Artie Shaw billed in third position. Two of the film’s uncredited players, Veronica Lake and Robert Walker, were each on the verge of stardom, and Lee Bowman, a credited player with a small part, would shoot to stardom during the war years.
It was only after shooting began that Lana learned she had been the second choice for the role of Patty Marlow. Her role in the Dancing Co-Ed had originally been offered to Eleanor Powell, who was not available.
Lana was aware that she’d have to rehearse and rehearse to succeed at the intricate dance steps demanded by the choreographer. It became immediately obvious, however, that she’d never be able to replicate the exhausting spins and rapid-fire clicking of heels that Powell had adopted as her trademark.
In the movie, Lana plays a professional dancer who enrolls in a Midwestern college as a pretense for garnering publicity for her involvement in a (rigged) college dance contest, part of a stunt dreamed up by a press agent, as portrayed by Roscoe Karns. Viewers were apprised that the movie’s dance contest wasn’t a fair fight. It had been determined in advance that the character portrayed by Lana would walk off with the venue’s first prize, and, consequently, get billed as the award-winning dance partner of Freddy Toman (as portrayed by Bowman).
The then A-list actor, Richard Carlson, was cast as the college’s newspaper editor, “Pug” Braddock, who uncovers the scam. Things get complicated for him after he falls in love with the character played by Lana.
Motivated by their embarrassing introduction, Lana tried to avoid Artie Shaw throughout the remainder of the shoot. She’d overheard the vulgar remarks that the bandleader had made about her.
“I remember that she sat at the opposite end of the sound stage from me,” Shaw recalled. “At our first meeting, I’d been able to kiss her. No more. She looked gorgeous, but she didn’t talk very much. I tried to break through to her by telling her that I was going to fuck up her music. I just was kidding, but she looked horrified, since this was her first chance in the number one spot in billing.”
She poured out her distaste for Shaw to Simon. “I heard he calls me the blonde savage, even though I’m a redhead. He thinks he’s so smart, and he says I’m untutored. God, I hate that son of a bitch. He’s all ego. I noticed he hogs the camera, and I hear he spends more time with his hairdresser and makeup man than Marlene Dietrich does. Frankly I don’t think he’s at all good looking. Hollywood is full of much handsomer guys.”
Before the end of filming, Shaw emerged as thoroughly disliked not just by Lana, but by most of the rest of the cast and crew, too. She agreed with her co-workers that the bandleader was “an intellectual snob.”
Shaw clearly demonstrated that appearing in a silly college drama was beneath him. He complained all the time and had arguments with Simon and his fellow performers. The crew came to detest him to the degree that they plotted to drop an arc light on his head. “He could have been killed,” Simon said. “Thank God it was just a threat.”
Artie Shaw with Lana Turner: “Call it ‘Young Man with a Horn,’” he said. “She got my horn...time and time again. Once I’d broken her in, she couldn’t get it enough.”
Shaw later told The Hollywood Reporter, “Dancing Co-Ed reeks of pig heaven. Everybody was against me, including its so-called star, Lana Turner. I don’t care. I was supposed to play myself. Simon had promised me he’d let me write my own lines. But he double-crossed me and went back on his word. The screenwriter, Albert Mannheimer, gave me stupid lines like ‘Hi-ho, lads and lassies!’ That was pure Rudy Vallee crap.”
During Lana’s second meeting with Robert Walker, who had been assigned an un-credited role as a student in Dancing Co-Ed, she interpreted him as a sensitive, troubled man. Dysfunctionally married at the time to the actress who would later change her name to Jennifer Jones, he seemed severely tormented. During one of their rare encounters, Lana noticed that he was drinking from a flask, later realizing that at the time he was beginning his long descent into acute alcoholism.
Lana became acutely aware of Veronica Lake during World War II, when Lake developed an enthusiastic fan base of her own, and competed with Lana and Betty Grable as the most-desired “Pinup Girl of World War II.”
One reason Lana might not have remembered Lake was that she was being billed at the time as Constance Keane.
Years later, when Lana was asked “Whatever Became of Veronica Lake,” she answered, “I heard she was working as a barmaid in a Manhattan cocktail lounge.”
“I got married thinking that it would fulfill this desperate need I have to be loved,” Walker had told her, “but that hasn’t happened. I don’t feel fulfilled. As a child, I wanted to escape from life, finding it too painful. I love my wife, maybe too much, but I find her self-enchanted.”
The petite actress with the “peek-a-boo” hair style, Veronica Lake, also made a (very brief) appearance in Dancing Co-Ed. Years later, in Miami,
she told this book’s author, Darwin Porter, “I was introduced to Lana Turner, but I don’t think the stuck-up bitch even remembered meeting me. When I met her, she didn’t even pay attention, and snubbed me. But I’ve always been an intuitive person, and I knew that she represented tomorrow’s competition.”
Reviews of Dancing Co-Ed were generally favorable, The New York Times declaring, “Miss Turner wears abbreviated dancing togs with what seems almost like originality.”
Billy Wilkerson, in The Hollywood Reporter, called her, “A new MGM star, one destined to reach as far in selling tickets as any this great company has ever produced. Dancing Co-Ed definitely makes Lana Turner. This little lady has been launched.”
***
Director S. Sylvan Simon must have contracted a case of Lana Turner fever. He cast the budding star as the lead of his third picture, Two Girls on Broadway (1940), billing her ahead of two more experienced show business veterans, Joan Blondell and George Murphy.
Although she was delighted with her billing, she had hoped for fresh and original material. To her chagrin, she learned that the script, based on an original story by Edmund Goulding, had been recycled. MGM had released its first talkie, Broadway Melody of 1929, starring Bessie Love. In spite of its flaws, it had won an Oscar as Best Picture of the Year.
In the film, Blondell and Lana played two stage-struck sisters, Molly and Pat Mahoney, newly arrived on Broadway from the hinterlands Both of them fall in love with a song-and-dance man, Eddie Kerns (Murphy).
When two sisters, Lana Turner (left) and Joan Blondell, each fall in love with the same man, hoofer George Murphy, something’s got to give.
Lana Turner Page 14