Before he started going steady with Lana, there was an encounter at the men’s urinal in Los Angeles’ CBS Building with Artie Shaw, who was still in the process of divorcing Lana.
Shaw later revealed what happened that afternoon. “Tony and I were doing a show at the same radio network at the time Lana and I had decided to split.”
“I was already at the urinal taking a piss when Martin came into the room,” Shaw said. “There was a row of eight empty urinals, but he decided to stand next to me when he whipped it out.”
“Hi, Artie,” Martin said. It quickly became obvious that the two men were checking out each other’s equipment. “I say, would you mind if I started to data Lana since you guys have broken up? Out of respect, I wanted to ask your permission.”
“I didn’t like him asking me like that at the urinals with our two Jewish cocks hanging out. But then I figured that at least Lana with either of us wouldn‘t have to cope with foreskin.”
“It was more than just sex with Lana,” Tony Martin later said. “Many women I’d met when I was a member of the Stud Farm were good at that. She was a total woman. She was warm and tender and thoughtful and unselfish.”
“When you were Lana’s guy, you were king. She never looked at another man. She was always there ready to love you. While you were with her, it was as if she’d been put on earth for one purpose—to serve you and to love you.”
“Sure, do anything you god damn like,” Shaw told him. “It doesn’t make any difference to me.”
Lana was seen on two occasions lunching with Martin and her best friend, actress Virginia Grey, on the set of The Big Store (1941), a Marx Brothers comedy in which they were cast together as sweethearts. Later that afternoon, Lana heard Martin sing “Tenement Symphony” with a children’s choir.
During the white heat of their affair, Lana and Martin flew together to San Francisco, where he’d been scheduled to sing at the World’s Fair. It was here that he introduced the Jerome Kern song, “All the Things You Are,” which became a standard.
Judy Garland with her new husband, David Rose, joined Lana and Martin for dinner that night. Lana suspected that Garland still had a crush on Martin based on the way she gazed lovingly at him, annoying Rose.
After his first night in a San Francisco hotel suite with Lana, Martin ran into Victor Mature, the muscular actor, in the lobby. He had met him casually before. “Hi, Vic,” he said. “I didn’t know you were in town.”
“I decided to check out the World’s Fair,” Mature said.
No mention was made of Lana. Martin had heard rumors that she might be involved with this handsome hunk, who was new to Hollywood, but he had opted not to believe them. “Lana looked at me with those dewy blue eyes, and they were so worshipful, that I knew I had to be the only man in her life, past, present, or future. I had even proposed marriage to her as soon as her divorce from Artie came through.”
That day, from outside the hotel, Martin made several attempts to telephone Lana at their suite, but no one answered the phone. When he returned there at six o’clock, she still was not there and had left no note.
At around 8PM, she came in. He asked her where she’d been all day.
“A little sightseeing, a little shopping,” she said, although she carried no packages with her.
At the end of their holiday, when Lana and Martin flew together back to Los Angeles, he decided to drive directly to her home to spend a long weekend. As they pulled into her driveway, he spotted Mature leaving her home with two over-stuffed suitcases. Lana and Martin got out of his car, and Mature gave her a quick kiss on the lips. “Hi, everybody,” he said. It was an awkward moment.
She quickly retreated inside her house, leaving Mature and Martin to face off in the driveway. Mature quickly placed his suitcases into the trunk of his car and then pivoted to face Martin. “Well, old buddy—this is goodbye.”
“How’s it going?” Martin asked.
“Just fine,” Then, before getting behind the wheel of his car, Mature said, “Look, Tony, all I can say is that I want to wish you kids a lot of luck. With a war coming on, we’ll need it. Both of us will probably end up in the service. I’ll see you guys around.”
Then he drove off.
***
In her memoirs, Lana wrote, “After my breakup with Artie Shaw, I did go out a lot and with many different escorts. Victor Mature, I saw once, I think.”
In another memoir, Lana’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, stated things more accurately. “Both mother and Victor Mature did a lot of dating in 1941.”
In truth, the Kentucky-born actor, son of an immigrant Austro-Italian knife sharpener, had once moved in with Lana for a few weeks. At the time, he was already well-known in Hollywood for his dark good looks, his muscles, and his mega-watt smile.
Before meeting Lana, Mature had been cast as a fur-clad caveman in One Million B.C. (1940). His co-star in that film was Lana’s rival, Carole Landis, with whom he’d sustained an affair.
In her column, Hedda Hopper had described Mature as “a sort of miniature Johnny Weissmuller.”
“Hedda pissed me off by writing that,” he said. “There’s nothing miniature about me.”
In 1941, he co-starred once again with Landis, and with Betty Grable too, in the crime drama, I Wake Up Screaming. “I seduced both of these blondes,” he later boasted. “In the 1940s, I did quite a few blondes: June Haver, Veronica Lake, Betty Hutton, and Alice Faye, Tony Martin’s ex. I can’t help that I’ve got a powerful set of muscles, but I want to prove I’m something more. I’m tired of being nothing but a striptease act.”
In time, he would cut a romantic trail across the Hollywood landscape, marrying five different times, and seducing an occasional brunette such as Elizabeth Taylor and Gene Tierney. He even dated actress Wendy Barrie, the girlfriend of gangster Bugsy Siegel, when she was not otherwise engaged by the gangster himself or by Greg Bautzer.
Artie Shaw remembered the night he escorted his estranged wife, Lana, before their divorce to a Hollywood party where she ran into Mature.
“She had this technique,” he said. “When a stud entered the room, and he interested her, she would straighten her back, thrusting out her breasts like a pouter pigeon, and head straight to her target. I often knew who her conquest for the night would be before she did. When Mature entered the room, she glided toward him. An hour or so later, she was gliding out the door with him.”
Mature became famous in Hollywood for his endowment. So far as it is known, only one actress, the very promiscuous and very outspoken Liz Renay, described his penis in any detail. “Victor was very thick and measured six and a half inches soft, rising to 10½” when aroused. And that’s what I did to this magnificent hunk of beefcake. I aroused him time and time again. He hit the spot. What a man!”
“He told me he was a mean kid when growing up,” Renay said. “On the first day of school, he bit his teacher. He hit Hollywood with a stash of candy, which he sold to pay his weekly rent of $8 for a burnt-out garage in someone’s backyard.”
What Renay and Lana didn’t know was that during his first lean months in Hollywood, he hustled homosexuals along Hollywood Boulevard, charging them ten dollars for sex.
At one point in their relationship, Mature flew to Washington with Lana to attend one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wartime charity balls to raise money to fight polio.
She’d received a special invitation to visit the White House a bit in advance of the other guests there, along with some other stars (not Mature), she was ushered into the room where FDR delivered his fireside chats.
A limousine had transported Lana to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. For the occasion, she wore a silky white lace dress over a flesh-colored petticoat, her ensemble cloaked with a white fox fur.
When it was time to meet the president, who was seated behind his desk, she admitted, “I was trembling with fear.” He reached out for her hand, and she claimed, “I saw recognition in his eyes.”
“You are none othe
r than Lana Turner!” Roosevelt said.
“’Yes, Mr. President,’ I said. He looked me over, and I think he saw everything I had, at least when I opened by coat to show him how I was dressed. He gave me a long, wistful look, perhaps remembering an earlier day, before he came down with polio.”
“My, you are one beautiful young lady,” he told her.
“Thank you, Mr. President.”
“I predict you’ll be the belle of the ball tonight, dancing around the floor.”
“I don’t know—the competition is rough.”
Then he flashed his celebrated grin at her. “Oh, that I could be the one whirling you around.”
She later admitted, “I was choking back tears, and was made painfully aware of his semi-paralyzed condition.”
She wished him a happy birthday and gave him a light kiss on his forehead. “Here I was in the presence of the most powerful man in the world, far more powerful than either Hitler or Churchill.”
After exiting from the White House, outside its gates, she was mobbed by screaming fans, who tore at her white fox coat. She begged the mob not to tear it as it was being ripped from her shoulders.
According to Victor Mature, “When I hit Hollywood in the early 1940s, I was in such demand that my datebook was constantly filled. Lana Turner was among my first conquests.” She claimed, ‘Vic was my greatest thrill.’”
When White House security guards retrieved her coat, it was, indeed, ripped. “I hadn’t even paid for it yet,” she said.
That night, at the ball, she had danced not only with Mature, but with a number of top government administrators, including members of the Army brass.
***
Mature was “too big” a prize not to attract other Hollywood beauties. In My Gal Sal (1942), he was cast with both Rita Hayworth and Landis, who, along with Betty Grable, were Lana’s chief rivals for the title of Pinup Girl of World War II.
“For a while, I was kept busy satisfying both Rita and Carole, with not a lot of time off. But eventually, I settled for Rita.”
“Call it a wartime romance,” Hayworth said. “My shacking up with Vic really pissed off Lana Turner.”
In July of 1942, Mature attempted to enlist in the U.S. Navy, but was rejected because of his color blindness. He then enlisted in the Coast Guard.
During his stint in the Coast Guard, while lying nude and uncovered on a cot, with his cock dangling over the side of the bed, a picture was snapped of him and widely distributed through the underground. Among homosexual men, and based to some extent on that photo, Mature became the Pinup Boy of World War II.
When author Gore Vidal saw the picture, he wrote: “If the Nazis had seen that picture of Victor Mature, they would have surrendered much sooner.”
When Mature was away at war, Hayworth had promised to wait for him. But she didn’t. Along came Orson Welles.
When Mature returned home on leave, she told him, as justification for her shift in loyalties, “Wartime promises are rarely kept. They’re made on the impulse of the moment.”
Lana had reason to be jealous of Hayworth. When they’d co-starred together in Music in My Heart (1940), Hayworth had sustained an affair with Tony Martin. She’d also seduced Lana’s former lover, James Stewart, and she’d snared Lana’s all-time crush, Tyrone Power, when they had co-starred in Blood and Sand in 1941.
Despite Lana and Mature’s breakup as lovers, they continued as friends. In 1943, Lana released Slightly Dangerous, co-starring Robert Young. When it turned out that he was not available for the radio version, Mature filled in for him.
Lana also attended the premiere of Mature’s most famous movie, Cecil B. De-Mille’s Samson and Delilah in 1949. The seductress was portrayed by Hedy Lamarr. DeMille described the role of Samson as “a combination of Tarzan, Robin Hood, and Superman.”
Groucho Marx had another point of view. “I never like a movie where the hero’s tits are bigger than those of the heroine.”
Lana heard that Mature had imported a concrete imprint of his buttocks in a location just outside the entrance to his dressing room when he became annoyed that Grauman’s Chinese Theater had not invited him to leave an imprint of his hands and feet in the cement in front of their movie palace.
In 1954, when Lana was cast with Clark Gable and Mature in Betrayed, she celebrated a “working reunion” with two of her lovers from the early 1950s.
In 1960, facing a career in decline, Mature announced his retirement after filming The Tartars in Italy.
“Making movies wasn’t fun anymore,” he told the press. “I thought what the hell, since I was okay financially. I said goodbye to Hollywood. Let those jerks call me what they would—a ‘Technicolor Tarzan,’ a ‘Lush Lothario,’ an ‘Overripe Romeo.’ Fuck it all! I made money and I had a blast, and I screwed as many dames as I wanted to, from Lana Turner to Rita Hayworth. Not bad, wouldn’t you say?”
***
In 1940, Mildred knocked on Lana’s door as she was applying her makeup for another glamorous night on the town. “Joan Crawford is on the phone.”
At first. Lana was tempted not to take the call. Since she was no longer sleeping with Greg Bautzer, she wondered what new boyfriend of Crawford’s she’d been moving in on.
“Darling,” came Crawford’s voice over the phone. “I just heard that MGM is considering a remake of my 1928 silent, Our Dancing Daughters, with you in the lead.”
“This is the first I’ve heard of it,” Lana said.
John Carroll, the Clark Gable wannabe, ultimately struck out with Lana after a two-night fling, yet succeeded with another famous blonde, Marilyn Monroe, in 1947.
He and his wife, Lucille Ryman, head of new talent at MGM, took in this “stray waif and sex kitten.”
Carroll seduced her, the first of many times, when he found her walking around nude in his house while Ryman was away at MGM. After he’d finished, she wanted to know, “Was I as good as Lana Turner?”
Ryman later revealed, “At the time John and I took Marilyn in, she had been prostituting herself on Hollywood Boulevard in exchange for meals. Say what you want about the notorious Lana Turner—she never stooped that low.”
“Dear heart, you’re not good enough as an actress to lie to me. Of course, you know all about it. But I wanted you to know that if you try to replicate my role as ‘Dangerous Diana’ Medford, you might be laughed off the screen.”
“I never saw your movie,” Lana said, “and I know nothing about it. I was just a little girl when it was released. Mother didn’t let me go to filthy pictures.”
“In that film, I had to tear loose with one Charleston after another,” Crawford said. “The part requires tremendous skill as a dancer. Of course, I can pull it off, but from what I hear, you have to rehearse and rehearse to perform the simplest steps. Our Dancing Daughters made me a big star. Perhaps you can find some other vehicle better suited to your limited talents.”
“Miss Crawford, I really must go,” Lana said. “Thank you for your career advice. The next time I need such advice, I’ll phone you. Heaven knows, you’ve been in the industry long enough to know everything about it.” Then she slammed down the phone.
MGM eventually shelved plans to remake Our Dancing Daughters.
***
During his tenure as Lana’s agent, Johnny Hyde continually worked to get her the right movie roles.
Such was the case with the projected film, Little Working Girls. Based on a story by Bradford Roper, it was slated to be filmed with Lana and a handsome actor named John Carroll.
Born in New Orleans, Carroll was a mustachioed actor who had been making films since 1936, none of them memorable.
Lana had seen only one of them, Susan and God (1940), and that was because Joan Crawford had been its star. She’d played a flighty society lady who becomes entranced by a new movement in religious thought.
Carroll had been awarded fourth billing after Fredric March and Ruth Hussey. To her surprise, Lana had spotted Rita Hayworth interpreting a s
mall part in that film. “Tomorrow’s competition,” she told Mildred.
When Carroll learned that MGM had cast Lana in Little Working Girls, he phoned her and arranged a date. Having recently divorced his first wife, he was a bachelor-at-large.
As her escort, Lana found him courtly and attentive. He was one of several actors billed at the time as “the next Clark Gable.”
As Lana described to her friend, Virginia Grey, “Since I can’t get the real Gable, why not settle for merely the mock?”
Their first night out was spent together at Ciro’s. The next day was Saturday, and he invited her to join him at the home of his friend, actor Ben Lyon, at his beach house in Santa Monica.
It was at the beach house that Saturday afternoon that Lana’s “two-day affair,” (her term) with Carroll began. He confessed to her, “I’m famished for blonde goddesses, and in Hollywood, you’re the blonde goddess of them all—forget Betty Grable and Carole Landis.”
The following week, when Carroll phoned to invite Lana for another weekend at Lyon’s beach house, she refused to take the call, informing Mildred, “Tell Johnny boy I’m not in. I’ve got other plans.”
Since their previous weekend together, Hyde had called to inform her that MGM had shelved plans to film Little Working Girl. Lana had responded, “Leave all those shopgirl roles to Crawford. Get me something glamorous with Clark Gable or Robert Taylor.”
***
With the arrival of the 1940s and America’s entry into World War II after the December 7, 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, Lana was on the dawn of her greatest stardom.
America’s G.I.s, fighting on battlefields in both the Pacific and in Europe, named her, “The Girl We’d Like to be Stranded on a Desert Island With.” She was also called “The Most Gorgeous, Spectacular, and Pulse-Stirring Thing on High Heels.”
As America went to war, the 18th Bomb Squadron of the U.S. Air Force painted her image on the nose of one of its B-17s. In her honor, the flying fortress was nicknamed “Tempest Turner.”
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