Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  Eventually Mildred’s point of view prevailed, and Lana returned to Shaw’s house on Summit Drive.

  He didn’t return home till well past midnight, with the scent of marijuana emanating from his breath and clothes. Instantly belligerent, he wanted sex, but she wasn’t willing. Eventually, he forced himself on her.

  WHO’S THE MOVIE STAR? Despite her miserable marriage and signs of an impending breakdown, Lana “made nice” in this MGM-staged publicity photoshoot.

  It portrayed her as a domesticated housewife who was subservient to the crushing emotional insecurities of her demanding husband.

  As she later confided to Greg Bautzer, “He was brutal. He hurt me, and then he raped me. When I resisted, he slapped my face really hard. Finally, he got off me. I ran into the bathroom and locked the door. Fortunately, he fell asleep and did not try to break down the door.”

  “That morning, without sleep, I preceded him into the kitchen and prepared his breakfast. When he came downstairs, he was very hostile, hardly spoke to me.”

  As he prepared himself for work, he turned to her and said, “What kind of wife are you? I looked in the closet at the shoes I own. All of them need polish. Take them to the shoeshine man down the hill. When I get home tonight, I want to see my reflection in each of them.” Then he stormed out, slamming the front door.

  Immediately, she phoned Bautzer. “I want you to start divorce proceedings at once. I don’t want to spend another night with this bastard.”

  “Pack your bags,” he told her. “I’ll be there within the hour, baby. You never should have married the shit. Greg to the rescue.”

  When Bautzer arrived, he held her in his arms, kissing her passionately. “My baby’s come back to me.”

  Then he drove her to Mildred’s, where he escorted her upstairs and put her to bed. Mildred agreed to nourish and take care of her.

  At 8PM, as promised, Bautzer returned and spent the night with her, presenting her with white roses, a signal that their romance had resumed.

  She didn’t hear from Shaw until about a week later, when he called her unexpectedly. She felt that he was phoning to protest her petition for a divorce, but what he wanted was a favor. He needed her to pose with him for press and publicity photos of his debut on the Burns and Allen Show. “I want you to pretend that we’re a loving couple.”

  She reluctantly agreed. Two hours later, she arrived at the Burns & Allen studio wearing a black dress inspired by Coco Chanel.

  He kissed her lightly on the cheek before they began the business of posing for photographers together. After a few shots, a reporter from Variety called out to her, “Give Artie a big kiss, Lana!”

  Impulsively, she shot back, “To hell with that. I’ve left him!”

  The word was out. The morning papers carried the story, “LANA TURNER TO DIVORCE ARTIE SHAW.”

  Later, as an explanation, she told the press, “I’m divorcing Artie because I’ve become tired of being spoon-fed Nietzsche.”

  ***

  Lana couldn’t sleep at night, and to an increasing degree was edgy, unhappy, and nervous. She phoned Louis B. Mayer at MGM and asked if she could meet with him. In his office, the following day, she pleaded with him to give her a few weeks’ off to recuperate from the after-effects of her break-up with Shaw.

  He agreed to send her on a cruise to Hawaii and told her why: “You’re about to appear in Ziegfeld Girl, a picture in which you’ve got to look your most beautiful. Your looks will be compared to those of Hedy Lamarr, and there are those who consider her the most beautiful woman in the world. You don’t want to look like a hag beside her.”

  Visible within the ranks of MGM during that era was Betty Asher, an MGM handler and troubleshooter, usually responsible for keeping the studio’s bad girls—especially Lana and Judy Garland—out of trouble.

  Lana’s cruise ship was scheduled to depart for Hawaii in four days. Unaware that Lana had moved out of Shaw’s home on Summit Drive, and with the intention of discussing details of her upcoming trip, Asher drove there when she couldn’t get anyone on the phone. She assumed that Lana was there, but that she wasn’t answering the phone.

  It wasn’t until Lana returned from Hawaii that she learned the events that had unfolded that afternoon after Asher rang the doorbell of Shaw’s house.

  According to Shaw, “I answered the door, and there stood Betty Asher, looking awfully good to me. The next thing I knew, I was in bed with her. She stayed for three days and nights before sailing away across the Pacific with Lana. We spent most of that time in bed. I got enough sex to last a month.”

  [As their time as shipmates passed, Lana learned more about her traveling companion. It turned out that Asher was a bisexual, having previously sustained an affair with another bisexual, a teenaged Judy Garland.]

  Alone and unhappy, and recuperating from the after-effects of her marriage to Shaw, during the days immediately preceding the departure of her cruise ship, Lana impulsively phoned Desi Arnaz and invited him to join her on the cruise. Arnaz had two weeks before he was to report to work at RKO on Too Many Girls (1940). He seemed eager to join her.

  In her memoirs, Lana “whitewashed” her link to Arnaz, writing that she met a group of college boys on board and “danced my way through the rest of the voyage, having the time of my life.”

  Only part of that statement was true, the part about having the time of her life. Her partying, however, didn’t occur in the company of “college boys,” but with Arnaz, in his cabin, night after night, during the ship’s eastbound transit to Honolulu. During the day, they spent time together, lounging on deck, followed by dancing at night. On a few occasions, Arnaz agreed to sing for the passengers.

  He discussed his childhood in Cuba. He claimed that when he was only fifteen, his papa had ushered him into La Casa Marino, a famous brothel in Santiago, Cuba.

  He also revealed details of his visits to the bordello run by Polly Adler, Manhattan’s most famous madam. “I didn’t leave her joint until I’d sampled all the women,” he confessed to Lana.

  With Lana, at least, Arnaz’s reputation as a sexual athlete had preceded him. She had heard plenty of stories about him from the boys in the band who played with Shaw.

  His friend, actor Cesar Romero, claimed, “Desi just loved sex and couldn’t get enough.”

  [Rumors had it that when a girl wasn’t readily available, Arnaz took advantage of Romero’s legendary skill at fellatio.]

  One of Shaw’s band members said, “Desi doesn’t know the difference betweensex and love. To put it bluntly, love to him is a good fuck. He can get that anywhere he goes.”

  A fellow actor, Roger Carmel, said, “Desi is a lech. Anything in a skirt from thirteen to thirty, he’ll go after.”

  After the ship docked in Hawaii, Arnaz phoned RKO and was instructed to return to Los Angeles in two days for the filming of Too Many Girls. After kissing Lana goodbye, he boarded a morning flight, with the promise that he’d rendezvous with her the moment she returned to California.

  Later that afternoon, Lana told Asher that she’d missed her period. An appointment was immediately scheduled with a local gynecologist/obstetrician. A pregnancy test revealed that she was pregnant.

  That evening, when she phoned Shaw at his home, an unknown woman picked up the receiver. When Shaw was summoned to the phone, Lana told him, “I’ve got wonderful news, darling.”

  His reaction to the sound of her voice was brusque. “Why in hell are you calling me?”

  “I found out today. I’m pregnant, and I’m coming back to you. I know I can make our marriage work. ”

  His answer infuriated her: “Who’s the father?” Gene Krupa? Tommy Dorsey? Buddy Rich? Or did Arnaz knock you up during that stupid cruise to Honolulu? I heard all about it.”

  “The baby is yours, you bastard!” she shouted into the trans-Pacific phone line.

  “Like hell it is. Maybe the kid belongs to some grip at MGM. Maybe even Louis B. Mayer!”

  In her memoirs,
she described how she then exploded. Before slamming down the phone, she called him a “no-good, rotten son of a bitch! You are the dirtiest, the lowest—I can’t even call you a man. You’re a creep. I hate you!”

  The moment she returned to Hollywood, she met with Johnny Hyde, delivering nothing but praise for Arnaz as a seducer. “He doesn’t just make love to a woman, he kisses and laves her body, driving her wild with excitement. Never before has any man attacked me like that. I can’t wait until my divorce comes through, so I can marry Desi.”

  “Did he propose?” Hyde asked.

  “Not exactly…but he will any day now.”

  She convinced herself that if Bautzer would speed up her divorce from Shaw, and if Arnaz would propose to her, there was still hope for a scandal-free birth of her child. As for the public at large, she and Arnaz, she told herself, could always claim that the birth of their baby had been premature.

  As events evolved, she’d be cruelly disappointed.

  ***

  After Arnaz reported to RKO for filming, he’d been introduced to Lucille Ball, who had just completed a fight scene with red-haired Maureen O’Hara during her filming of Dance, Girl, Dance (1940). Both O’Hara and Ball had been cast in that film as burlesque dancers.

  Arnaz later wrote in a memoir, “Ball looked like a two-dollar whore who had been badly beaten by a pimp, with hair all over her face and a black eye.” Her dress had been ripped.

  Based on her appearance, Arnaz was skeptical, he revealed later, about her ability to portray the ingenue in Too Many Girls.

  But when he met her again, three hours later, he thought she looked young and beautiful. “She caused a stirring down below.”

  “Hi, Daisy,” she said to him.

  “No, honey,” he answered. “Daisy is a flower. The first name is D-E-S-I, the last name Arnaz. You’d better learn to pronounce it, ‘cause you’re gonna become Mrs. Desi Arnaz.”

  The rest is Hollywood history, especially television history.

  As Lana told Hyde during her recitation of her pregnancy-related woes, “Desi said he prefers well-stacked blondes, yet I’ve heard that he’s suddenly engaged to a redhead with no tits, and he isn’t returning my calls.”

  “There’s only one way out for you,” Hyde told Lana: “Mayer doesn’t like his stars to have babies without a daddy. That’s strictly taboo. I hate to tell you this, kid, but you already know exactly what you must do.”

  ***

  A decision about ending her pregnancy would have to be made soon. One of Lana’s options involved salvaging her marriage to Shaw. Mildred suggested that for Lana, but she adamantly refused. “I want a divorce. That’s my final word.”

  Lana spent the next few days incognito and in disguise, wandering into undiscovered neighborhoods of Los Angeles where she’d never set foot before. She drove into the Hollywood Hills, and walked the lonely stretches of Malibu beaches. She wanted her baby, but to an increasing degree, she accepted the fact that giving birth without a husband would probably destroy her career.

  Mildred kept urging her to return to Shaw, but she could never reach him on the phone. Lana became convinced that even if she begged him, he wouldn’t take her back.

  At the Trocadero, Lana (left) has a roving eye, as Mildred looks on. Her mother was flattered when people mistook her for Lana’s sister.

  Finally, she woke up one morning and decided to make an appointment with an abortionist. Without telling Mildred, she drove to a seedy-looking private town-house in downtown Los Angeles. As she entered, she smelled something like burnt cabbage.

  She confessed in her memoirs that she expected knives “scraping away at my insides,” but that didn’t happen. The doctor, whom she defined later as a quack, injected some kind of fluid into her cervix.

  “The fetus will be aborted later,” he told her. “You’ll pass it like urine.”

  Still without telling Mildred what had happened, she returned to the home she shared with her and retired to her bedroom.

  As her mother was preparing a light supper for her, the pain began. “At first, the cramps were minor. Then they came like a giant hand gripping my insides,” she claimed.

  By the time Mildred ascertained the problem, Lana was doubling over in pain. “It came over me like an ocean wave, then receded again, coming back with more pain than before. One cramp after another. I curled up into a ball of pain.”

  Mildred got the abortionist on the phone, but all he could recommend was lots of black coffee and walks—“plenty of walking. It will pass if you walk.”

  Lana tried walking, but collapsed, almost immediately, onto the floor, crying out as sharp pains convulsed her body.

  She later asserted that she’d spent the most horrific night of her life, each hour saturated with impossible suffering. She sobbed and screamed and tried to walk as the doctor had instructed. By morning, she phoned the doctor. “My baby is still inside me. I can’t stand it anymore. I’m dying.”

  Since she was unable to travel, the doctor eventually came to her home, where he confronted her angry mother, who told him, “You’ve threatened the life of my daughter—I should have you arrested. You’re a bastard!”

  He pulled off Lana’s robe and without an anesthetic, he at last “scraped me out,” she later wrote. Mildred remained by her side, reacting to every painful move. At one point, she placed her hand over her daughter’s mouth to muffle her agonized screams.

  The white towels her mother had brought from the linen closet became soaked with blood. “I felt like he was removing my guts. When I could take it no more, I passed out.”

  When she regained consciousness three hours later, the doctor was gone, his lingering aura a nightmare. As a departing insult, he had presented a bill for five-hundred dollars “for services rendered.”

  “Your baby was not meant to be,” Mildred said. “Someday, with the right man as your husband, you’ll have kids.”

  “I never want to go through the agony of childbirth,” Lana answered. “That will never happen. I’ll see to that.”

  Mildred brought her some freshly made chicken broth and coaxed her into drinking it. “You’ve got to get your strength back. Mayer wants you to begin filming Ziegfeld Girl next week and he expects you to look your loveliest.”

  “For the first time, I’ll be facing the camera with my teenaged years behind me. I’ll be a twenty-year-old woman.”

  ***

  MGM’s plan at the time involved configuring Ziegfeld Girl (1941) as a sequel to The Great Ziegfeld (1936), a blockbuster that had brought a Best Actress Oscar to Luise Rainer, with whom Lana had worked during the filming of Dramatic School.

  William Powell had been cast in the original 1936 version as Florenz Ziegfeld, the flamboyant show-business impresario. Myrna Loy, Frank Morgan, and Virginia Bruce, who had been married to John Gilbert, rounded out the original cast.

  The Great Ziegfeld had won an Oscar as Best Picture in the year of its release. Robert Z. Leonard, who had helmed the original 1936 version, was hired by producer Pandro S. Berman for the sequel two years later. [The sequel would not include an actor attempting to impersonate Ziegfeld.]

  Before filming began, Lana studied long and hard with MGM drama coach, Lillian Burns. “This is my big chance, and I’m not going to fuck it up,” Lana vowed.

  Although she had never been drunk before, she was cast as a showgirl, Sheila Regan, who during the course of the film becomes an alcoholic. “I was known at the time as the Queen of Nightclubs, but I was no boozer. I went to the clubs to dance with handsome men, not to soak up liquor.”

  To prepare her for the role, Burns had Lana watch Bette Davis’ performance of an alcoholic in Dangerous (1935). “I sat through it eight times,” Lana said.

  By the time she showed up on the set for filming, Lana told Leonard, “I think I know Sheila’s every thought, how she walks, how she moves. I know everything about her, even how she feels at any given time.”

  As the weeks went by, the director appe
ared to agree with Lana. After seeing the rushes, he ordered scriptwriters Marguerite Roberts and Sonya Levien to expand Sheila’s role. In one scene, the writers added a bemused, bittersweet comment that became Lana’s all-time favorite line: “All the things I like are illegal, immoral, or fattening.”

  The original script of Ziegfeld Girl had been created by William Anthony McGuire. Although Flo Ziegfeld’s showgirls were showcased as the most important visual element of the film, and although his legend itself was celebrated as one of the pre-suppositions of the script, the showman himself never appeared.

  In 1938s proposed sequel, three leading male roles were cast with Walter Pidgeon, George Murphy (with whom Lana had worked before), and Frank Morgan. In 1940, these roles were awarded to James Stewart, Tony Martin, and Charles Winninger. However, before Stewart signed on, Leonard had asked Glenn Ford to play Sheila’s truck driver boyfriend, Gilbert Young, who later becomes a bootlegger and goes to prison. His bootlegging had derived from his passion for Sheila, and his intention of buying her the expensive baubles she demanded.

  When Lana was signed, Glenn Ford was still part of the cast. He called her and arranged a date, telling Leonard, “Ever since I saw those tits bouncing in They Won’t Forget, I’ve been wanting to fuck that broad. What knockers!”

  Lana, too, had been attracted to this handsome Québec-born actor ever since she’d seen him on the screen in The Lady in Question (1940), in which he’d co-starred with Rita Hayworth.

  Over the years, many of the top female stars in Hollywood would desire and win his affections: Margaret Sullavan, Bette Davis (in spite of her denial), Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, and even Marilyn Monroe.

  As Lana later told Johnny Hyde, “On three different dates, I got to know every inch of this gorgeous man. He liked to insert his thing in every orifice and between my breasts. He whispered sweet nothings in my ears. He’s great at pillow talk. If I have any criticism of him at all, it’s that he seems to be a character on the screen, not quite real. But his love-making makes up for that deficiency.”