Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  ***

  For years, Robert Stack remained Lana’s on-again, off-again lover. As he said later in life, “Occasionally, for old time’s sake, we made it but what emerged in our last years was enduring friendship. We started out as kids and eventually grew old in Tinseltown, where age most often is a liability, especially for women.”

  “In the late 1940s, I had a roving eye,” he said. “I seduced one Hollywood beauty after another, often with my friend, John F. Kennedy, when he was in town. Sometimes as a favor to Lana, I served as her ‘beard,’ covering up some affair she was having with a good-looking guy, especially during her marriages. My guest room was always available to her and her beau du jour.”

  One Sunday afternoon, Stack hosted a pool party and invited some of his friends, especially the girl of his dreams, Carole Lombard (Clark Gable was out of town). The guest list also included Ronald Reagan and his wife, Jane Wyman, as well as Andy Devine, Ann Rutherford (Lana’s friend), Bruce Cabot, and Dan Dailey. Stack’s guest list was short on women that day until Lana arrived with her best girlfriend, Virginia Grey, who, years later, remembered that hot, long-ago afternoon before Hollywood went to war.

  According to Grey, “It was the afternoon that Lana met George Montgomery.” [Fox had recently changed the actor’s name. Throughout the 1930s, he’d been billed as George Letz.]

  “Lana and I first spotted Montgomery poised on a diving board as he was about to make the plunge into Stack’s swimming pool. He was wearing a male bikini briefer than any I’d ever seen before,” Grey said. “How can I put this delicately? It was white and did little to conceal his ample merchandise. We watched him swim three laps before he came up. He emerged like Neptune from the waters. That white bikini, when wet, became almost transparent. That’s how he introduced himself to us. I think Lana stared at his crotch before looking into that gorgeous, masculine face. The man was a dreamboat. Even Jane Wyman was giving him the eye, much to the annoyance of Ronald Reagan. Lana told me that she and Reagan had gotten it on back in the late 1930s, when both of them were contract players at Warners.”

  One of the then-novel photographic innovations pioneered in Dr. Jekyll, a nightmare sequence with Bergman (left) and Lana.

  “For George Montgomery and Lana,” Grey continued, “it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  Born on a remote ranch in northern Montana, Montgomery was five years older than Lana. Rugged, soft-spoken, and incredibly good-looking, he was the youngest of fifteen children born to immigrants from the Ukraine.

  Ironically, during his early 20s, he had studied interior design while earning his living as a boxer, showing off his splendid physique. Stack told Lana, “George is the only guy I’ve ever heard of who was an interior decorator as well as a boxer, a stunt man, a cattle puncher, and a college athlete.”

  Tired of ranch duties in Montana, Montgomery hitched westbound rides that eventually landed him in Hollywood. Within a few days, he was working as a stunt man at MGM on a film starring Greta Garbo, Anna Karenina (1935). He continued as a stunt man in many westerns, including in Gene Autry’s The Singing Vagabond (1935). Autry used him in several other western films after that, too.

  Standing 6’3”, with a muscular, 210-pound body, he attracted attention from many Hollywood beauties and cut a streak through their boudoirs while fending off dozens of homosexual advances. When he made The Cisco Kid and the Ladies in 1938, he also had to fend off the sexual advances of its star, Cesar Romero.

  In the early 1940s, when many leading stars (including Henry Fonda and Tyrone Power) went off to war, Fox decided to transform the former George Letz into the leading man henceforth known as George Montgomery. He was cast in Cadet Girl (1940), starring Carole Landis, Lana’s rival. During the shoot, he spent a lot of time in her dressing room.

  Other Hollywood beauties were waiting in line to “audition” him, as news of his sexual prowess had by then surged through the Hollywood grapevine. He received the inevitable call from Joan Crawford, who wanted to be the first of the really big stars to seduce “Fox’s answer to Clark Gable.”

  At Fox, Montgomery co-starred with some of the leading actresses of Hollywood, and sometimes became their lover. These included Ginger Rogers, with whom he co-starred in Roxie Hart (1942), Gene Tierney in China Girl (also 1942), and Maureen O’Hara in 10 Gentlemen from West Point (in 1940, his peak year). Betty Grable, the biggest female star in Hollywood at the time, nailed him for Coney Island (1943), in more ways than one.

  Beside Stack’s pool, Montgomery wrapped a bath towel around his midriff and spent the rest of the afternoon talking to Lana. As the sun was setting, after Grey had exited with Bruce Cabot [perhaps for a communal rendezvous with Errol Flynn], Lana invited Montgomery to her home.

  Lana said, “God didn’t create all men equally. He created regular men, and then he conceived his masterpiece, George Montgomery. When he strips down, his socks are among the first to go. Then those shorts come down. It’s not only big but beautiful. I thought two sessions would be enough to satisfy him, but I woke up at 6AM when he piled on top of me for a divine encore. I can’t wait for a repeat.”

  The next morning, Stack and Grey were among the first persons Lana phoned. “I’ve met the man I’m going to marry,” she said, repeating the same line to each of them. “Should I propose to him, or should I wait for him to pop the question?”

  “The wonderful and most enduring thing about George, aside from the obvious, is that he doesn’t seem to realize just how good-looking he is, unlike every other male star in Hollywood who spends half the day looking at publicity pictures of themselves or else staring at their image in the mirror. George has a magnificent physique, although he told me he doesn’t go near a barbell.”

  “I think he wants to design furniture or be an architect more than he wants to star in films.”

  “He told me on those long, cold nights in northern Montana, he would stick by the warm stove in the kitchen whittling on a stick of firewood. He said his dream was to build his own ranch house and make all the furniture for it himself.”

  “During the days to come, George was often a breakfast guest,” Lana said. “I had to buy hominy grits and learn how to make them the way he liked. He taught me to play tennis. You should see him on the court in his white tennis shorts. Betty Grable’s legs—at least her left one—were voted the loveliest in the world. I disagree. George’s legs are the most beautiful in the world, especially that stunning third one.”

  Years later, on reflection, Lana said, “George and I might have made it, had not every other beautiful hussy in Hollywood chased after him. I would have married him had not the so-called ‘world’s most beautiful woman’ spotted him shirtless and then that singer came along to take him from me. But more about those ravenous bitches clawing his flesh some other day.”

  ***

  Montgomery, as well as Robert Stack, would each enter and exit, time and again, from Lana’s life throughout the 40s and 50s. Thankfully, for the sake of her career, neither Hedda Hopper nor Louella Parsons ever “uncovered” the ongoing nature of their secret trysts.

  ***

  Honky Tonk (1941) was the first of the Gable/Turner pictures, followed by Somewhere I’ll Find You (1942), Homecoming (1948), and Betrayed (1954).

  Jack Conway was one of Gable’s most trusted directors. The Minnesota native was both a director and film producer as well as an actor. Beginning with D.W. Griffith’s silent film stock company, he had more recently helmed Gable in Boom Town (1940), which had co-starred Spencer Tracy, Claudette Colbert, and Hedy Lamarr.

  Both Gable and Conway were great friends and heavy drinkers, spending a lot of time together. Lana feared that as the female lead (i.e, her role) might be sacrificed to show off more of Gable. “An actress has to think of such things,” she told co-star Claire Trevor.

  Lana worked smoothly with Conway. “He was not a creative genius, but very competent. He stayed within the budget and brought the picture in on time. When I
wanted more lavish costumes, he said no, citing budget considerations.”

  For Honky Tonk, Conway assembled a talented cast for the minor roles. The roster was led by Frank Morgan, who had recently interpreted the title role in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Other stars included Claire Trevor, Marjorie Main, Albert Dekker, Henry O’Neill, Chill Wills, and Vera Ann Borg.

  Gable was cast in the film as an engaging con artist, “Candy” Johnson, who arrives in Yellow Creek, Nevada, during the Gold Rush. On the westbound train, he meets Elizabeth Cotton (Lana), who takes a dislike to him…or is she secretly attracted by his roguish, masculine charm?

  Waiting to greet her at the railway station is her drunkard father, “Judge” Cotton (Morgan), who, unknown to her, is also a crook.

  In the film, at Yellow Creek’s town saloon, Gable hooks up with an old friend. “Gold Dust” Nelson (as portrayed by Trevor) who plays a hooker with a heart of gold.

  Trevor, a blonde from Brooklyn, was cast as Lana’s rival for Gable’s affections. “If they want to cast a hard-boiled blonde, they call me,” Trevor told Lana. “If they want a soft-spoken, beautiful blonde, they call Lana Turner.”

  In Honky Tonk, melodramatic complications become rife, as Gable tangles with Lana and gets involved in all sorts of intrigues that include gunfights, murder, and pregnancies. Love eventually wins out.

  In 1938, in the aftermath of Jean Harlow’s death and in the rush for her replacement, Louis B. Mayer had asked Gable to read out loud, with Lana, lines from the script of Red Dust, the movie he’d made with Harlow in 1932.

  At the time, Gable was filming Too Hot to Handle (1938) with his co-star, Myrna Loy. Mayer had the idea that the seventeen-year-old Lana could be groomed to replace Harlow on the screen.

  Lana was very nervous when she appeared for the reading with Gable. “I know I was very bad. I flubbed two or three lines. Clark was very kind to me, but I disappointed him.”

  When director George Cukor had suggested Lana as a possible Scarlett O’Hara, Gable had been disdainful. “Oh, yeah, the blonde Turner dame. She’s too cute for Scarlett. As for Tallulah Bankhead, Selznick must have been out of his fucking mind. Your best bet for Scarlett is Carole Lombard.”

  Scenes from Honky Tonk, each actor, both Lana and Gable, pumping up his or her allure.

  Months later, when Conway told Gable that he was going to co-star him with Lana in Honky Tonk, he asked, “Can’t you find someone better? She’s got the looks but she can’t act.”

  “I found out that Clark had never seen one of my movies, not even Ziegfeld Girl,” Lana said.

  “In our first scene together, I was determined to impress Clark—and apparently I did,” Lana said. “After I finished and returned to my dressing room, a box of yellow roses arrived from him. Through some source, he found out that I preferred yellow roses to red. The box included a note from him that read, ‘I’m the world’s worst talent scout.’ Later, he poked his head through my dressing room door and said, ‘Baby, you sure have learned a thing or two!’”

  Lana later spoke of her admiration for Gable during the shooting of Honky Tonk. “He was very kind and considerate to me. When I fluffed a line, he’d say, ‘That’s all right, baby. Now don’t you worry about it.’ Whenever I did that, he’d blow a couple of lines himself, so I wouldn’t feel inept. He also played practical jokes on me because he said I was a good sport. He would tease me and joke with me to put me at ease.”

  Lana had never been sexier on the screen. In some scenes, she paraded in front of the camera in black corsets, with diamonds in her hair, and black lace stockings. Almost evoking the rape scene of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, on their wedding night, Gable as Candy breaks down her bedroom door. He’s determined to have her.

  “From the moment we rehearsed our first scene together, there was a wonderful rapport between Clark and me,” Lana said during an interview. “The sexual chemistry was definitely there. We were very close without intimacy. I had a great love for him, but there was no affair.”

  But as she later told her co-star, Claire Trevor, “What else could I have said? Of course, you don’t believe the shit I throw to the press. Clark fucked me every chance he got during the making of Honky Tonk. He said I had feline sex appeal, and he labeled me his sex kitten. If I were a sex kitten, he was one hell of a tomcat.”

  Despite her coy and coquettish statements to the press during the shooting of Honky Tonk, journalists were speculating wildly about their possible affair.

  “Imagine the combustion at MGM when two powerful sex symbols come together on the screen, or off the screen,” wrote one reporter.

  Conway asserted, “Lana and Clark were instantly attracted to each other. To put it bluntly, they had the hots for each other. She had youth and beauty, and he had this powerful image of masculinity. Call it sexual chemistry. Love is not the right word. He loved Carole Lombard but that didn’t stop him from cheating on her.”

  “The electricity between our two screen lovers was so hot that it sizzled,” Conway continued. “It was definitely a physical attraction. On camera, they weren’t just acting…It reminded me of John Gilbert and Greta Garbo in Flesh and the Devil (1926).”

  Robert Stack was friends with both Gable and Lana. Once, after he asked why she found Gable so attractive, she answered, “I always had this fantasy of being violated by a lumberjack...in Gable’s case, a former lumberjack.”

  Conway later claimed, “Clark and Lana went at it every chance they got. When I asked him about it, he told me, ‘We are merely rehearsing our upcoming love scenes to make them more authentic, particularly where I tear down her bedroom door. I know that rape can’t be depicted on the screen, but we wanted to capture the spirit of it.’”

  “Oh, Clark,” Conway muttered skeptically…“Oh, Clark.”

  “During filming,” Lana said, “I learned that Lombard had gone ballistic when she heard that I’d been assigned as Gable’s co-star. She even appealed to Louis B. Mayer to fire me before shooting began. I understood that she and Clark had many fights over me, and that she threatened him that if she found out that he was screwing me, she’d come onto the set and kick ass.”

  “Lana Turner is supposed to play this sweet little Bostonian virgin,” Lombard told Conway. “But I hear the blonde bitch fucks anything in pants.”

  After meeting with Lombard, Mayer called Conway. “Except for the lezzies,” Mayer said, “Gable has fucked nearly every leading lady at MGM. Make sure he stays out of the hot pants of Turner. I don’t want any scandal or any trouble from Lombard. She’s threatened me that if Gable gets involved with Lana, she’ll mess him up so bad that he’ll stay home sick for a week or two, running up production costs.”

  In the middle of one of her love scenes with Gable, Lana looked up at the vindictive, disapproving face of Lombard, who had been hawk-eyeing them. When the scene was ruined and the cameras stopped, Lombard had addressed her harshly: “Don’t mind me, Lana,” she said. “Pappy’s not very good in the clinch.”

  “I became so flustered, I had to flee to my dressing trailer. I stayed there trying to pull myself together. Within the hour, Conway came to get me. He told me that Lombard had been kicked off the set and that shooting could begin again.”

  On several other widely witnessed occasions, Lombard had ridiculed her husband’s prowess as a lover. “If Clark had one inch less, he’d be the Queen of Hollywood.”

  When Lana heard about these remarks, she informed Virginia Grey and others, “Even Clark admits he’s a lousy lay. But that’s missing the point. Studs are a dime a dozen in Hollywood, but there’s only one Clark Gable. When you’re getting screwed by him, you’re not just getting Clark, but Rhett Butler, with all the fantasies that unleashes in a girl. I’m crazy about him. He makes me go to pieces. He’s like a dream come true. We really click. Lombard’s too old for him anyway. He wants a gal who’s young and vital. Like me. When he first seduced me, he told me he preferred blondes to brunettes. ‘Most brunettes look dirty to
me,’ he said.”

  As Gable’s biographer, Warren G. Harris, stated, “Lana bragged to friends that she was going to break up the marriage of Gable to Carole Lombard.”

  That statement was not as heartless as it seemed. Lana was emphatically aware that one of her best friends, Robert Stack, had occasionally seduced Lombard during periods when Gable was off on some other fling.

  “She’s not the doting, faithful wife she makes herself out to be,” Lana claimed.

  Before the release of Honky Tonk, billboards across the country read: “Clark Gable kisses Lana Turner in Honky Tonk—and it’s screen history.”

  Honky Tonk became MGM’s biggest grossing film for 1941, the year America entered World War II.

  Life magazine splashed Gable and Lana across one of its front covers and wrote: “The colorful Wild West is the setting for a series of sizzling bedroom scenes in which, in a variety of dress and undress, Clark Gable and Lana Turner make love. For Turner, now graduated from sweaters to nightgowns, it means the topmost rung in her meteoric four-year climb to success. For cinema fans, it means the birth of a hot new screen team.”

  ***

  On Gable’s arm, Lombard attended the premiere of Honky Tonk. As reporters noted, she was “touchy-feely” throughout the event, as if wanting to demonstrate that she possessed him. Once journalist referred to her behavior as “overly doting in public.”

  No reviewer seemed to think that Honky Tonk was a great film, but nearly all of them praised the on-screen charisma of its co-stars, Lana and Gable. Newsweekasserted, “Miss Turner never falters in her presentation of Miss Cotton.”

  Photoplay found that the movie “rambles and rambles but in its circling, it does manage to gather up Lana Turner and Clark Gable and give them a twirl in the usual sexy old merry-go-round.”

  Variety wrote that “Miss Turner, who is graced by tremendous sex appeal, proves that she also can act as well as turn the boy on. Gable and Turner click together in a lively, lusty Western that makes you wish you had been there.”