“It’s a date!” she answered. “I can just see the headlines: LANA TURNER GOES TO WAR!”
Chapter Eight
Wartime Lana
Servicing the Men in Uniform Who Won World War II
In their hit picture, Johnny Eager, Lana Falls for Robert Taylor On and Off the Screen.
During its promotion of Johnny Eager, MGM billed its co-stars as “HOTTER THAN T-N-T.” In years to come, movie buffs like Norman Lear, creator of TV’s All in the Family, would define its love scenes as “the sexiest ever performed on celluloid.”
Years later, Taylor shared with a reporter his impressions of working with Lana: “She wasn’t very career minded. She preferred men and jewelry over everything else. She should call her memoirs Hearts and Diamonds Take All, since that would reflect her main interest. Her face was delicate and oh so beautiful. I’ve never known such succulent lips on a woman.”
“Personally, I was never one to go that much for blondes—give me Elizabeth Taylor any day,” he said. “But Lana was the exception. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. There were times during our love scenes in Johnny Eager that I thought I’d…how shall I put this?…erupt. She had a voice like a breathless little girl. She couldn’t say ‘good morning’ without giving me a hard-on. There was a downside, though. She wasn’t as busty as I had been led to believe, since she had that reputation for being ‘The Sweater Girl.’”
When she wasn’t on any of the MGM sound stages or sets, looking blonde and gorgeous in front of cameras, Lana pursued aggressive romantic pastimes which she usually conducted at night. And it was those romances—launched during the intensely emotional context of the wartime 40s—which massively contributed to the Lana Turner legend.
It was an era marked by almost manic-depressive waves of hope, fear, and tenuousness, when millions of individual Americans endured some of the greatest upheavals in their personal and national history.
Lana’s staggering numbers of romantic and sexual conquests involved male movie stars who, within months, would either join the military; or future movie stars whose careers wouldn’t flourish until after their return from the battlefields. She also dallied with dozens of good-looking “civilians” (that is, non-movie stars) who, if they managed to survive the war, returned to towns like Lawrence, Kansas; Homestead, Pennsylvania; or Elkin, North Carolina, to spend the rest of their lives coasting on and boasting about one major claim: “I fucked Lana Turner.”
In these emotional and high-strung war years—before, during, and after her marriage to Stephen Crane—Lana allowed herself to be conquered by a string of virile young men, who with some justification were described by columnist Sheilah Graham as “the handsomest, sexiest, and hottest that America would ever turn out.”
At parties, with a glorious sense of cattiness, Graham remarked, “Lana is to be forgiven if she missed a few hundred men before they were shipped off to battle, yet she managed to seduce her fair share, giving many of them a farewell fuck before sending them off with a glorious memory of an American bombshell.”
Journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns observed: “The real Lana Turner is the same Lana Turner you see on the screen. She always wanted to be a movie star, and now she’s the Queen of MGM. Her personal life and her life as a movie star are one and the same. The same Lana Turner who gets up at 5AM to put on her makeup is the same Lana who, later in the day or night, crawls under the sheets with Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, or Robert Taylor.”
The last sentence was struck from her copy by a blue-nosed editor.
To Hedda Hopper, Lana pointed out the downside of fame. “The more famous an actress, the less she’s allowed to eat, unless she wants to play mothers in baggy clothes. Instead of exercise in a studio gym, you can burn off more calories between the sheets. Don’t print that. If you do, I’ll deny it.”
To Louella Parsons, Lana confessed her goal to become the most famous movie star on the planet, and “The Playgirl of the 20th Century.”
To her dear friend, columnist Sidney Skolsky, she shared a secret at Schwab’s Drugstore. “You may not know this, since you’re not a homosexual, but every man’s dick is different. I’ve never known one dick that is the same as another man’s. There are certain similarities among some men, for sure, but nothing identical unless they’re twins, I guess. I noticed the difference between a Jewish man and a Gentile. Take Artie Shaw or Johnny Weissmuller. It’s all a matter of a bit of skin at the end of the prick.”
Skolsky later told friends, “There’s a good reason that men in blue voted Lana as the most desirable woman on earth during World War II. Each of them had sampled the wares and knew what in the hell they were talking about.”
The Yellow Rose of Dallas” (Texas), Linda Darnell was two years younger than Lana.
Aggressively promoted by her stage-struck mother, the former Pearl Brown, Linda had been a child model, dreaming of movie stardom for herself. Her mother became committed to the belief that Linda was the only child she had produced with potential as an actress. Subsequently, while pushing and prodding Linda and her stage training, she virtually ignored the rearing of her other children.
When Linda was in her teens, a talent scout spotted her, which in time led to a contract with 20th Century Fox.
“One thing about Lana,” Parsons told her confidantes, “is that she never lets a marriage get in the way of her pursuit of outside male flesh. Having just one husband at a time has never been enough to satisfy her. No one man is adequate for the task. Lana is a hot firecracker. Ask Clark Gable. Ask Mickey Rooney. Ask Greg Bautzer.”
***
Lana didn’t devote all her time to making movies and men. She also developed dialogues and friendships with a number of girlfriends over the years, although Virginia Grey remained her most trusted confidante. “At least some women like me and weren’t too jealous,” Lana said. “Two of my best girlfriends in the early 1940s were Linda Darnell and Susan Hayward.”
Darnell’s sultry beauty appealed to Darryl F. Zanuck at Fox, who for almost a year and a half summoned her to his office, locking the door behind her, at 1PM every day.
A hard life had toughened Darnell, and Lana admired her fighting spirit when she met her at a party. “I’ve got more balls than most men do!” she told Lana. “If it’s anything I hate, it’s a weak man.”
Over the years, Darnell would sustain an unusual array of lovers, including Lana’s former beau, Donald (“Red”) Barry; Milton Berle; and even a chicken farmer, Rudolph Sieber, the estranged husband of Marlene Dietrich.
Darnell would not marry until 1944, when she wed J. Peverrel Marley, a studio cameraman. In the meantime, she dated a lot, even attracting the amorous attentions of the then high-flying aviator, Howard Hughes. “That was no distinction,” Lana said. “He’s been after all of us whenever he isn’t chasing after Jack Beutel.”
[Beutel was the handsome stud he’d cast as Billy the Kid in The Outlaw (1943) opposite Jane Russell.]
Lana concealed it rather well, but she was jealous of Linda who, almost from the beginning of her career, had been cast in pictures that co-starred Tyrone Power. “He was one man I dreamed about,” Lana said.
Darnell had originally been a strong contender as the female co-star with Power in Johnny Apollo (1940), but the role was ultimately assigned to Dorothy Lamour. However, that same year, Darnell was given the female lead opposite Power in Day-Time Wife, a light romantic comedy. That led to an affair with Power, which, between giggles, she’d reported to Lana. As a promotional quote associated with the release of that film, Life magazine pronounced Darnell “The most physically perfect girl in Hollywood.”
Lana bit her lip and only smiled when Darnell told her, months later, that she had also been slated to co-star with Power in three more films: Brigham Young (1940), The Mark of Zorro (also 1940), and Blood and Sand (1941). In the latter picture, in which Power made a striking figure clad in a bullfighter’s “suit of light,” she had to compete onscreen with Rita Hayworth.
&n
bsp; “Ty looked so dashing, so sexy, so romantic,” Lana said after she went to a screening of Blood and Sand. She never missed one of Power’s films.
Word spread that even though Power had married the French actress, Annabella, neither had remained faithful to the other. Louella Parsons, in private, claimed theirs was an arranged marriage designed to throw off an unsuspecting public to the fact that Power was bisexual. He might indeed, be known, underground, for sexual liaisons with Darnell, Hayworth, and Judy Garland, but he also had a reputation for sharing his bed with Hughes, Robert Taylor, and Errol Flynn, each—like himself—a bisexual.
***
One night, another contract player at Fox came into Lana’s orbit, a man who was attractive and beguiling enough to allow Lana to forget about Power—at least temporarily.
She liked to host parties back then, and to one of them, she invited Darnell, instructing her to “bring any man you want.”
She opted to invite John Payne, with whom she was appearing in the 1940 Star Dust, directed by Walter Lang.
“When Linda dated Payne, he was still married to the actress Anne Shirley, but that marriage was in its final stages. [Their divorce would become final in 1943.]
Two nights after she met him, Payne phoned Lana for a date, and she eagerly accepted. Because he was still married, he suggested a discreet dinner at some remote, out-of-the-way place.
John Payne, Fox contract player, posed for this “crotch shot,” which made him a pinup boy of World War II for horny women and gays.
“Tyrone Power may be the prettiest boy in Hollywood, but John Payne is the handsomest masculine male,” Lana said. “My friend, Linda Darnell, has all the luck. both men have had affairs with her.”
That night marked the beginning of a long and enduring friendship during the course of which, each would endure multiple triumphs and tragedies.
Payne had already studied drama and journalism at Columbia University in New York City, “where I lost my magnolia Virginia accent,” he said.
To support himself with his muscled and well-developed physique, he became a professional wrestler, billed as “The Savage of the Steppes.” Later, he morphed into “Tiger Jack Payne,” a quasi-celebrity boxer.
“Many of the gals in New York came to see me in a pair of boxing trunks,” he confided to Lana.
One night it was not just women who were impressed with Payne in his boxer trunks, but a homosexual talent agent for Samuel Goldwyn. After he “auditioned” Payne, he advanced enough money to allow Payne to take the train to Hollywood. There, he was given a screen test and later a contract from producer Samuel Goldwyn.
Among other jobs, he had been a radio singer in New York, and his smoother, harmonious tenor voice was spliced into such early movies as Tin Pan Alley (1940), co-starring Alice Faye (Tony Martin’s former wife). Payne also appeared in movies with two other blondes, each sexually voracious, Betty Grable and that ice-skating tramp from Norway, Sonja Henie, whom he described as “a nympho. She needed it seven times a day.”
As Lana reported to Virginia Grey, “John has a captivating voice, a strapping physique, movie star looks, and an eye-catching cleft in his chin. He stands six feet four, but it’s those other inches that he has which can thrill a woman, along with his broad chest and slender waist.”
In addition to his marriage and his ongoing affairs, Lana also learned that he’d been seducing Jane Wyman ever since they had appeared together in Kid Nightingale (1939).
“Jane told me my legs are more muscular and my chest better developed than Ronald Reagan’s.”
“That’s true,” Lana replied, “and I speak from firsthand experience.”
According to Lana, years later, “I would have married John, but he never asked me. Along came the war, but we continued to see each other for years to come.”
On October 13, 1942, Payne joined the military as a student aviator. For a while, he was stationed in Arizona. In 1944, still in the military, he returned to L.A., to a post at Ferry Command at Long Beach, California.
Lana saw him on rare occasions, from 1944 on, even though at the time, he was married to the actress Gloria DeHaven.
As Lana later told Darnell, “What’s a gal supposed to do? The best men are either in the Army or they join the Navy, the Air Force or the Marines. Uncle Sam gets the gravy, and we get the leftover mashed potatoes.”
“Dear Heart, you’ll manage to find the few gold nuggets left behind,” Darnell said. “Perhaps they’ll be classified 4-F for no other reason than color blindness or flat feet, but you’ll find ‘em.”
***
Whenever Hedda Hopper or Louella Parsons phoned a star for an interview, he or she usually came to their homes as part of the venue.
One afternoon, Hopper summoned Lana, and seemed eager for information about her experience with Clark Gable in Honky Tonk and her upcoming movie, Johnny Eager with Robert Taylor. She wanted a column that focused on Lana’s interactions with MGM’s leading men.
During that interview, Lana strenuously denied an affair with Gable. “After all, he’s married to Lombard. Likewise, nothing will happen with Mr. Taylor and myself on the set of Johnny Eager. As you, of all people know, he’s married to Barbara Stanwyck.”
Hopper listened impatiently, not believing a word Lana was telling her, but promising to give her “a vanilla writeup,” instead of blasting readers with a scandal-soaked exposé.
As Lana later told her mother, Mildred, “When a woman like Hedda has 32 million readers, we hasten to her door when she calls.”
After the interview, Hopper asked Lana to stick around, since she was hosting a small cast party for a film in which she had recently appeared, and she wanted Lana to attend.
[Before she became a gossip columnist, Hedda had acted in films. In the early 40s, her long-term friend, the director Cecil B. DeMille, assigned her a small role in the movie version of the novel, Reap the Wild Wind (1942).
In it, Paulette Goddard was cast as a fiery Southern belle, with Ray Milland and John Wayne fighting over her. The cast also included Robert Preston, Raymond Massey, Charles Bickford, Louise Beavers, and a fiery redhead from Brooklyn who had recently changed her name to Susan Hayward.]
That afternoon, the only person at the party that Lana knew was Goddard. Also among the celebrants were two of her future co-stars, Ray Milland and John Wayne. Lana spent time with each of them, and also with Hayward, with whom she formed an unlikely friendship, instead of a fierce rivalry.
After Hopper’s cast party, Lana and Hayward began to see each other on occasion, their favorite topic being men. The granite-hard Brooklyn-born actress gave Lana her opinion. “Men…I’d like to fry ‘em all in deep fat.”
Her toughness reminded Lana of Barbara Stanwyck.
As stated by Hayward’s first agent, Ben Medford, “Susan was a terrible actress, just terrible. Nobody liked her since she was a real bitch. But I saw hidden talent there, and in time, I would be proved right.”
Instead of playing Scarlett at MGM, Hayward ended up with a contract from Warner Brothers, where she was cast in campy, melodramatic Grade B flicks, a good example of which is Girls on Probation (1938).
A sexy, gutsy redhead, Susan Hayward, then known as Edythe Marrener, the daughter of a Coney Island carnival barker, had been born into poverty. As a girl, she’d hawked copies of the Brooklyn Eagle on street corners before graduating to employment in a stenographers’ pool.
In time, she became a photographer’s model and landed on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. It was seen by director George Cukor during his casting of Gone With the Wind (1939). He brought her photo to the attention of David O. Selznick, who agreed to test her for the role of Scarlett O’Hara.
During its filming, she met a handsome young actor, the heroic male lead, from Tampico, Illinois, Ronald Reagan. She fell in love with him, and they began a passionate affair.
That same year, he made Brother Rat, on the set of which he met another promising young actress on the rise
, Jane Wyman. She, too, fell for him.
The race for Reagan was on, and when both actresses went on a promotional tour that had been organized with (and nominally chaperoned by) Louella Parsons, they even fought over him. Eventually, Wyman got him, marrying him in 1940. Begrudgingly, Hayward moved on to other conquests.
Just a few weeks before Lana was introduced to Howard Hughes, Hayward told of her own experience with the aviator. His pimp, Johnny Meyer, brought Hughes and Hayward together for some vague conversation about making a film about Billy the Kid. [It eventually became The Outlaw (1943).]
“Howard was obviously looking for an actress with boobs, and I had those. And I was proud of them,” Hayward told Lana, who was also celebrated for her breasts.
Lana learned that Hayward had told Hughes that “redheads make better actresses than blondes because their emotions are much closer to the surface and better reflected in their faces.”
A lot of Hayward’s self-promotion didn’t work. As she related, bitterly, to Lana, “Then he met Jane Russell, a girl whose boobs were bigger than mine, and I lost the part.”
***
During a trip to New York in 1941, Lana became the victim of the most vicious rumor ever spread about her. It was so repulsive to her fans that no reporter dared publish it, although some hinted at it.
Biographers Joe Morella and Edward Z. Epstein vaguely aired Lana’s link to the Red Rooster nightclub in Harlem, yet released no details about what “Broadway insiders” were gossiping about.
News of her alleged indiscretion traveled along the grapevine from Harlem to Hollywood, where gossips found the tale a salacious delight, especially Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, who could not print it.
Finally, in the 1950s, a tabloid magazine alluded to it, again without releasing details of exactly what the scandal involved. Cryptically, the magazine published this enigmatic blurb:
Lana Turner Page 25