“Lana in the early 1940s visited Gotham. She would don slacks and dark glasses and scurry off on a nightly jaunt to the Red Rooster, a wild little joint in Harlem. She was known to take several trips to the club to hear the music of Billy Daniels, its owner.”
What is known is that when Louis B. Mayer heard that Lana, his profit-generating white goddess, was frequenting a notorious, fast-emerging nightclub in Harlem, he sent Johnny Meyer, a member of his security team, to escort her. [Meyer later became a pimp for Howard Hughes.]
Mayer had been Lana’s escort on the night the rumor had originated. Allegedly, a drunken Lana asked Meyer to stand guard at the entrance to the men’s toilet. She was said to have requested that he send the biggest and handsomest “bucks,” one by one, each of them black, into the toilet.
Before the night ended, and again, only according to an unsourced rumor, she was said to have fellated nine African-American men before she was seen stumbling out of the club.
Meyer later claimed that the rumor was true.
The rumor was given greater credence when an African American waitress, Fannie Pennington, who at the time was working at the Red Rooster, verified it. Later, she became a well-known activist, organizer, and fundraiser in the Civil Rights Movement, and a coordinator in Harlem for Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., then the most famous black congressman in America.
Pennington would eventually interact with such illustrious figures as Eleanor Roosevelt, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. In 2015, she was designated as one of the NAACP’s “History Makers.”
She claimed that the fellatio story about Lana and the black men was true, and that she saw the young studs coming and going from the men’s room where Lana waited inside for them. The rumor would have been long ago discounted were it not for the reliable credential of Pennington.
Billy Daniels, the club’s owner, was there on the night of the alleged incident, but he always refused to comment on the accusation. In fact, he became a friend of Lana’s, and the two of them would become embroiled in a scandal that was reported in Confidential magazine during Lana’s marriage (1948-1952) to Bob Topping.
Lana become enraptured by Daniel’s voice on radio in 1941, when she had heard him sing, “Diane.” His all-time greatest hit, “That Old Black Magic,” would not be recorded until 1948.
After the fellatio rumor became widespread, Lana radically curtailed her visits to the Red Rooster.
***
As reported above, MGM had appointed Johnny Meyer as Lana’s escort (some said “chaperone,” others said “security guard”) during some of her visits to the Red Rooster. But weeks later, he was hired by Howard Hughes as his pimp.
The son of a postmaster in Jacksonville, Florida, Billy Daniels was the product of a mixed heritage, part Portuguese, part Choctaw Indian, part African-American, and a direct descendant of that trail-blazing frontiersman, Daniel Boone.
Daniels had sung at various clubs before he was discovered by big band leader Erskine Hawkins, who made him his band’s leading vocalist. After long tours across the country, Daniels became a radio singer in Manhattan. His performances at a club in Manhattan on 52nd Street attracted the attention of such stars as Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, and Benny Goodman.
Meyer’s duties included setting up dates for Hughes with whomever he fancied in Hollywood. That included, in addition to Lana Turner, Veronica Lake, Rita Hayworth, and Ava Gardner.
In her memoir, Lana devoted scant attention to Hughes, presenting their relationship as relatively benign and harmless. Actually, it was far more complicated, not only her sexual liaisons with him, but his trysts with some of her girlfriends (notably, Susan Hayward, Ava Gardner, and Linda Darnell).
Meyer arranged for the introduction of Lana to Hughes when both of them happened to be passing through Chicago. Through Meyer, a dinner was arranged for them in Hughes’ hotel suite, with the understanding that she’d spend time with him there the evening before the departure of her train to New York the next morning.
As she confessed, “I found him likable enough, but not especially stimulating. He was also hard of hearing.” Their encounter included a bizarre incident that she didn’t write about.
Two hours after dinner, following pleasant but unremarkable conversation, he invited her into his bedroom. She assumed it was for the same reason pursued by dozens of other men. But Hughes was different. She was shocked to see a scaled-to-life rubber copy of herself lying nude on the bed. “It looked so real, I thought I was seeing double,” she later told Robert Stack, another occasional stud within Hughes’ roster of male lovers. “That thing had my breasts, and a reasonable replica of my vagina.”
She stood back in stunned disbelief as Hughes, face to face with the life-sized rubber doll, pulled down his trousers and produced an erection. “I want to show you what I do to this dummy of you, since I haven’t had the real thing.”
She watched for only about a minute as he mounted the rubber copy of herself. Then she fled from his suite.
After her return to Hollywood, she related what had happened in Chicago to Stack.
“It seems harmless enough,” he said. “Don’t be afraid of him. He’s not violent, and he has many troubles. But he’s a powerful figure in this town, and you’d be wrong to turn him down if he calls you for another date. He told me that one night, he plans to buy a big movie studio in Hollywood. If things don’t work out for you at MGM, you may want to reign as the queen of whatever studio he’s eyeing. I know he’s considering RKO.”
Howard Hughes dancing with Lana, avoiding the camera. This is the only known picture of them ever taken.
“Then perhaps I’ll reconsider,” she answered, primly.
“I’m having this pool party Saturday afternoon,” he said. “I’ll invite both of you. You’re to arrive separately, of course.”
Three days before the pool party, she set out to learn whatever she could. To her, Hughes was just another big and very rich name. She met with Hollywood columnist James Bacon, who knew Hughes quite well. He seemed to delight in sharing Hughes stories with her, revealing that he preferred divorced women such as Lana herself, referring to them as “wet decks.”
“Howard once told me that he’d lost his virginity to his uncle, Rupert Hughes, when he was only fifteen years old.”
In his capacity as a journalist, Bacon kept a dossier on Hughes’ lovers, dating from his early days as a movie producer. The list he had compiled was long and amplified with dates and circumstances of their sexual assignations and implications. (“I’d call Howard Hollywood’s greatest swordsman,” Bacon had gloated.) Names on his list included Carole Lombard, Bette Davis, Billie Dove, Olivia de Havilland, Paulette Goddard, Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn, Fay Wray, and Ginger Rogers. According to Bacon, he had also “dated” actors from the A-list, some of whom had included Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Tyrone Power, Robert Taylor, and Randolph Scott.
Stack later devised a plan that would render Lana more alluring to Hughes. With a sense of ironic self-deprecation, he said, “Imagine me telling the love goddess of Hollywood how to be more alluring.”
During the planning stages of this scenario, Stack informed her that “Howard is a man for boobs,” and with that in mind, they devised a plan.
Alluringly clad in a bathing suit, Lana positioned herself near Stack’s swimming pool for what seemed like a long time before Hughes finally arrived in a battered old Chevrolet. He was shabbily dressed, as usual, and would not appear in bathing trunks, probably because he was embarrassed by his skinny frame. He sat beside the pool sipping lemonade, closely observing both Lana and Stack, each of whom, clad in swimwear, looked movie-star and camera-ready.
It was time to put her plan into action. After executing a running dive from the diving board into the pool, the straps holding the upper half of her bathing suit “malfunctioned,” and came (deliberately) undone, exposing her breasts. Then she swam around a bit, later admitting, “It was hard to swim and keep my breas
ts covered at the same time.
When Lana emerged from the water, Stack (who had gallantly retrieved the top of her bathing suit from the waters of his pool) was waiting with the soggy garment and a large pink towel.
Her pre-choreographed striptease seemed to do the trick. Hughes invited her to get dressed and to have dinner with him.
The next morning, she phoned Stack to thank him for the party and to tell her friend—and sometimes lover—what she later recorded in her memoirs, “Hughes confessed a preference for oral sex, but I wasn’t interested.”
***
On other occasions, Lana asserted that she did not indulge in fellatio. However, many of her lovers—former and future—suggested otherwise.
[Some insiders suggested that her denial of fellatio was a demure attempt to squelch rumors about her “performances” within the men’s toilet at the Red Rooster in Harlem.]
Lana and Hughes began to date, but she downplayed her involvement with him. In her memoirs, she wrote, “I saw him from time to time, and occasionally, he’d come to the house just to sit and talk with my mother. She liked him and sympathized with his partial deafness.”
Having already dated such fancy dressers as Greg Bautzer, Lana had neverbeen escorted anywhere by a man as sloppily dressed as Hughes. During their shared outings to Trocadero, he’d arrive unshaved and wearing clothes he’d lived in for most of the previous week. He’d have a stubble of beard, and he wore shoes but no socks. His shirt, which he hadn’t removed in a while, usually had buttons missing and traces of body odor. He always wore a battered gray hat that looked like he’d purchased it in 1933. Before sexual intimacies, she’d insist that he shower.
Howard Hughes: There was always a problem with his shabby dress code.
She told Stack that Hughes revealed to her that he was the regular client of a Hollywood bordello populated with prostitutes who, in their dress, makeup, and clothing, evoked specific movie stars. Sometimes, Hughes maintained, the women had submitted to plastic surgery as a means of reinforcing their similarities to “the real thing.”
“If men can’t get the real thing, they settle for the mock,” he said. “You should be flattered: The most requested ‘working gal’ there is a Lana Turner lookalike,” he told her. “Next in line, based on the number of requests, is Betty Grable, followed by Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner. There aren’t that many requests for Hedy Lamarr, perhaps because the rumor still persists that she slept with the Führer.”
Once, when Hughes arrived, as planned, to escort Lana to dinner, he entered her living room but refused to sit down. Then he revealed to Lana and to Mildred that he’d ripped his pants.
Her mother told him to remove his trousers and that she would sew them up.
“I can’t,” he answered. “I never wear underwear.”
Consequently, after Mildred’s coaxing, he retreated to the bathroom, removed his pants, and returned to the living room with a towel wrapped around his midriff.
Mildred sewed up his pants.
Then, with the intention of procuring him some underwear, Lana went to one of her wardrobes and retrieved an old pair of Artie Shaw’s shorts, which she gave to Hughes. “You shouldn’t go around with dirty pants next to your body,” she lectured him.
Although Mildred professed to like Hughes, and urged Lana to marry him (“Think of those millions!”), behind his back, she called him “a strange bird.”
***
One night, inspired by her belief that there would be good roles in postwar films for women pilots, Lana asked Hughes to teach her how to fly an airplane.
Consequently, Hughes escorted her to an abandoned airfield outside Los Angeles, the same place where he had taught Katharine Hepburn basic lessons in flying. Taking time out from work he should have been completing on his experimental plane, the XF-11, he gave Lana lessons.
On another occasion, he picked her up in another equally old, equally battered Ford and drove her out beyond Culver City to an airfield, where one of his planes was waiting. As she later relayed to Stack, “Within the hour, we were flying to Las Vegas.”
“Lana doesn’t need a bed on which to make love,” Hughes confided to Stack. “The floor of my Sikos, while we were on autopilot at 12,000 feet, was bad enough. Call it an airborne fuck, apparently her first.”
On another occasion, Hughes flew Lana to New York, where he’d booked suites for them at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. It was later revealed that J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI instructed his G-Men to bug Hughes’ suite.
Their stay lasted for twelve days and nights. She remembered the occasion with fondness. “On the streets, the women were wearing their wartime finery, and most of the men looked gorgeous in their military uniforms parading up and down Fifth Avenue. Howard invited me to go into any store and buy anything I wanted. Although I loved diamonds, I felt it would be too brazen to take him into Tiffany’s.”
Years later, she told a reporter, “Those who walk the streets of New York today would never realize how glamorous it looked back them. There was an excitement in the air we no longer have.”
After their stay in New York, whereas she returned immediately to Hollywood, he flew to Louisville for the Kentucky Derby. He was soon back in New York, where he filed a $5 million lawsuit against the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America for interference in trade. They’d censored his movie, The Outlaw, starring Jane Russell. In Lana’s words, The Outlaw “introduced the breasts of Jane Russell.”
The press was filled with speculation that Lana and Hughes were going to get married. It was even reported that she had ordered that her new towels be embroidered with the initials of “H.H.”
Publicly, she denied any marital plans with Hughes. Likewise, Hughes told Johnny Meyer, “I’m not going to marry her. As for those towels, she can always marry Huntington Hartford.”
[Ironically, by the end of the war, Lana would be dating the A&P heir.]
***
After Hughes’ return to California, she waited and waited for him to call. But for eight months, he disappeared, and only a few trusted aides knew where he was. The whereabouts of this eccentric, mysterious, at times frightening, and always unpredictable man remained unsolved. In time, he would return and play a major role in Lana’s life.
***
Once again, Lana’s mentor, Mervyn LeRoy, was assigned to direct her in another picture, in this case, the crime drama, Johnny Eager. Developed and conceived as an MGM release for 1942, it was wrapped six weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941), playing in movie houses just as America had gone to war.
Like Honky Tonk, which had teamed her with Clark Gable, Lana once again was featured with one of her alltime “dreamboats,” the dashingly handsome Robert Taylor, who was billed at the time as “The Heartthrob of America.”
“From the first day I introduced Bob to Lana, love was in the air,” LeRoy said.
One of the claims in the title of Lana’s memoir contained the words, “The Truth.” Yet within its pages, she (inaccurately) denied having had an affair with Taylor during the shooting of Johnny Eager. She wrote, “Bob had the kind of looks I could fall for, and we were attracted to each other from the beginning. I’ll admit I flirted with him, but for me, it was no more than that, since he was married to Barbara Stanwyck.”
She also claimed, “Certainly our mutual attraction didn’t harm our love scenes. I wasn’t in love with Bob, not really. Oh, we’d exchanged romantic passionate kisses, but we’d never been to bed together. Our eyes had, but not our bodies.”
A son of Oklahoma, Heflin was one of the most talented actors Lana would ever work with. After Johnny Eager, she would co-star with him in two more movies, Green Dolphin Street and The Three Musketeers.
“Van is a reasonably attractive man,” Lana told LeRoy, “but he’s definitely not my type.”
That assertion was accurate during the first few days of the shoot, but as LeRoy later said, “By the fourth day, those two gorgeous c
reatures were really going at it. You could almost hear the sounds of love-making coming from her dressing room. I hated to interrupt them to call them back to the set.”
In the film, Lana portrays the adopted daughter of Edward Arnold, who was cast as John Benson Farrell, the crusading prosecutor who’s responsible for having sent Johnny to prison. Lana’s father is now the District Attorney, who at first is not aware of Johnny’s dog-racing scams.
As an actor, Lana worked smoothly with Arnold, who was a formidable character actor who had grown up in New York, the son of German immigrants. He’d made his first stage appearance at the age of 12. By 1935, he was cast in the pivotal title role of Diamond Jim (1935), a part he would reprise in 1940 when he starred in Lillian Russell.
He told Lana, “I gave up losing weight and went after character roles. The bigger I get, the better parts I receive.”
The best acting in the picture was executed by Van Heflin, who was cast as the drunken attorney, Jeff Hartnett, the only real friend Johnny Eager has. For his brilliant portrayal, he won the Oscar that year as Best Supporting Actor.
Heflin had made his film debut in 1936 in A Woman Rebels, with Katharine Hepburn. He’d later appear on Broadway with her in stage version of The Philadelphia Story, but he lost out on the role when it was adapted into a movie. His career would be interrupted by the war, when he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps as a combat cameraman assigned to the Ninth Air Force in Europe.
During their first week of shooting, LeRoy congratulated Lana on how she’d grown as an actress. “If you want to survive in this wicked business, you have to learn the ropes fast,” she said. “I had to hold my own against Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, and now Robert Taylor. A girl has to learn the tricks of the trade.”
Robert Sterling was cast as Jimmy Courtney, Lana’s high society boyfriend. In a few weeks, Lana would find herself working with him again on her next picture, Somewhere I’ll Find You with Clark Gable.
Lana Turner Page 26