“Hear this, Yankee soldiers,” she would announce to U.S. servicemen who had gathered around their radios, swatting away bugs in the sweltering jungle heat. “After the show, the boys in the band are making out with your girlfriends, even though they promised to wait for your return.”
As the war progressed and as Shaw’s USO tours through the Pacific continued, he suffered from (and was diagnosed with) exhaustion, and was subsequently shipped back to a Naval Hospital at Oak Knoll, California.
When Lana arrived to visit him, she saw that he’d lost a lot of weight and was looking weak and pale, enough to keep him in the hospital for three months. He’d picked up some “bug” in the South Pacific, he’d told her.
In 1944, he was discharged from the Navy, and there was some talk that he and Lana might remarry. But then into his life came Lana’s new best girlfriend, Ava Gardner, who, in 1945, married him herself, with disastrous consequences.
***
In October of 1942, the month it opened, Lana made her first conquest at the Hollywood Canteen. Her friend, Linda Darnell, had arrived with her at the Canteen that night.
“Robert Moseley was the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen in a sailor’s uniform,” Lana recalled. He told her that he’d become an apprentice seaman, having been assigned to the U.S. Naval Reserve Station in Los Angeles.
As she danced with him, she said, “Where are you from, sailor boy?”
She almost laughed at his answer: Pumpkin Center, California. Before the night ended, she also learned that he was a few months younger than she was.
From a faraway corner of the room, she pointed Moseley out to Darnell. “Don’t you think he’s a living doll? What a divine physique. I’ve already learned that he grew up on a ten-acre ranch, and that he was an athlete in high school.”
When she danced with him again, he told her, “I attended this junior college at Bakersfield, and the guys in the locker room called me the male version of Lana Turner.”
“I guess I should be flattered,” she said. “Or else you should be flattered. I think you should be in pictures, and I know just the right agent for you. I’m no longer his client, but we’re still good friends. His name is Henry Willson.”
Lana met the handsome Guy Madison at the Hollywood Canteen, suggesting that, based on his looks, he should be in pictures.
She warned him that with Henry Will-son as his agent, he might have to spend some nights on the casting couch.
“I’m no actor.”
“Darling, I’m no actress,” she said. “To be a movie star, you really don’t need to know how to act. You could light up the screen with your looks.”
Although it was against the rules of the Canteen, she invited him to her home that night. As she later told Darnell, “I was thrilled with his love-making.”
The next afternoon, she asked him to escort her to Willson’s Saturday afternoon pool party. Her homosexual agent was enthralled by Moseley, telling her, “I’ll have to change his name.” Then he rattled off about ten proposals for new names. Of them all, she preferred “Guy Madison.”
Alone, over drinks with the just-renamed Guy Madison, she explained to him, “Henry has this thing for men in uniform.”
“You mean, he’s that way?” he asked.
“Exactly,” she answered. “You’ve got that right. Actually, I think it’s only fair that handsome young men have to lie on the casting couch in Hollywood just like women have. How do you feel about that?”
“If this Willson guy can get me into the movies, I guess it’s okay,” he said.
Henry operates an Adonis factory,” she said. “When you get out of the service, I bet he can get you a contract with David O. Selznick.”
“You mean the guy who produced Gone With the Wind?”
“One and the same,” she said.
“Hot damn!” Being a star sounds a lot better than shoveling cowshit out of a barn on the family ranch.”
Before they left the pool party, Willson called Lana aside. “Thanks for introducing me to the newly christened Guy Madison. He looks like a real-life version of one of Tom of Finland’s wet dreams.”
She didn’t know who he was referring to.
[Tom of Finland was the pen name of the Finnish artist, Touko Laaksonen (1920-1991), who developed an international reputation for his erotic drawings of super-masculine males with monstrous endowments. Many of his homosexual fans referred to him as “the King of Beefcake.”]
Willson wanted Madison to remain behind, but Lana said, “He’s taking me to the Mocambo tonight. Ganymede is mine.”
“Ganymede? Since when did you start using such a classical reference?
“I learned it from Artie Shaw,” she said.
At the Mocambo, Madison was awed, telling Lana, “The decorations here make me feel like I’m inside a coffin.”
“You’re a hit,” she said. “When we walked in, more eyes were trained on you than on me.” Before the night was over, she’d introduced him to both Veronica Lake and Dorothy Lamour.
“You’re more beautiful than those hussies,” he told her.
Even during Lana’s second marriage to Stephen Crane, Madison became a reliable date whenever he visited the Canteen. When she personally rendezvoused with him, it was usually upstairs within one of Willson’s bedrooms. Also, during the course of his first year in the service, Willson also got to “audition” the young sailor several times.
For three years he served in the Navy, eventually moving on to the Transition Training Squadron of the Pacific Fleet in San Diego. At one point, he injured his back and was transferred to the U.S. Naval Special Hospital at Banning, California, from which he was eventually discharged.
Stardom, through Henry Willson, awaited him. As Lana recalled to Alexis Smith, who had met Madison at the Canteen, “Guy is the kind of young man who can satisfy both men and women in equal measure.”
In time, his fan clubs would dub him, “The World’s Most Desirable Male.”
Television’s future Wild Bill Hickock was on his way to stardom.
***
Scheduled for a 1942 release, Keeper of the Flame was a story about the pitfalls of hero worship. As its stars, Louis B. Mayer and director George Cukor cast Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.
One of the supporting actors was Forrest Tucker, a ruggedly handsome farm-boy who had arrived in Hollywood financed by a wealthy male “mentor,” in whose home he lived for several months.
Tucker was said to “ooze masculinity,” and his wavy blonde hair, his photogenic good looks, and his height of 6’4” soon attracted attention. At the age of 14, Tucker had entered show business, singing at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. He later worked at the Old Gaiety Burlesque Theater in Washington, D.C., where the big teenage boy created a “sensation:” among the burlesque dancers and the male drag queens.
In Hollywood, Tucker came to the attention of a talent scout at MGM, Wesley Ruggles, who ordered a screen test for him. “He’s a hunk all right. I thing he could be MGM’s answer to John Wayne.” Ruggles would soon direct Lana’s next big picture with Clark Gable.
Tucker came to Tracy’s attention when he appeared with his friend, Gary Cooper, in The Westerner (1940). Tucker has stood out in a fight scene. Within weeks, the bisexual Tracy became Tucker’s new “mentor”
During the filming of Keeper of the Flame, Tracy invited Lana to lunch in the MGM commissary. They had become friends since making Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde together, and would co-star with each other in the future.
Spencer Tracy introduced Lana to the studly Forrest Tucker. “We were going to dinner,” Lana told Susan Hayward. “But he never left my house all weekend. He calls that monster thing of his ‘The Chief.’ It’s his pride and joy, and does he ever know how to use it!”
In the weeks ahead, news of “The Chief” swept through Hollywood. George Cukor jokingly said that an impression of it should be pressed into wet concrete along Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.
She later confide
d to Susan Hayward that not since Sterling Hayden had she met such a “walking streak of sex. I went for Forrest in a big way, although I hope he has something left after Cukor and Spence finished with him for the day.”
Fortunately, Hepburn wasn’t at lunch that day. She’d had a fight with Cukor and had stormed off. Tracy told Lana about her blow-up:
Hepburn had been feuding with the movie’s scenarist, Donald Ogden Stewart, demanding that his script follow more closely I.A. R. Wylie’s novel. In that book, Steven O’Malley (the character played by Tracy), was depicted as an “impotent eunuch.”
In front of the cast, Tracy had ridiculed Hepburn’s suggestion. “You want me to play the role with no balls! No way!”
Hepburn was also angry that Cukor was devoting more time to getting Tucker’s scenes right than he was to her character. She noted that Tucker disappeared with the director for almost two hours every afternoon, bolting his door behind him.
During lunch, when Tracy was called to the phone, Tucker asked Lana for a date, and she accepted.
As Lana discovered, Tucker was not another John Wayne, but a man of sensitivity and feeling. He spoke of going to “the school of hard knocks.” His father had died of mustard gas during World War I, and his mother worked as a burlesque dancer. During the worst years of the Depression, he’d ridden the rails with other hobos looking for work, or at least food.
Lana had never seen Tucker on film, not even the movie he’d made with Gary Cooper. One afternoon, he arranged a screening for her at MGM of his 1941 release, Honolulu, in which he’d co-starred with the Mexican spitfire, Lupe Velez. She had once been married to the screen Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, Lana’s former flame.
After Tucker seduced her, the outspoken Velez had spread the word that “Before Tuck, I thought either Gary Cooper or Johnny were my greatest thrills.”
Three years later, Velez would commit suicide.
***
Lana and Lupe Velez were not alone in spreading the “big news” about Tucker’s self-styled “Chief.”
James Bacon, the Hollywood columnist, even wrote about Tucker’s endowment after he joined the Lakeside Country Club. Members there included Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Weissmuller, W.C. Fields, Mickey Rooney, and Humphrey Bogart.
Bacon wrote, “Tuck’s heavy endowment would become the chief tourist attraction at the club. As he lay passed out drunk in the locker room, a stream of members with guests would slowly and quietly file in. The towel would be lifted for an unveiling, and there would be many gasps.”
While Lana was dating Tucker, an even greater legend grew up around him. The comedian Phil Harris told Lana and countless others that one afternoon he was playing golf with Tucker at the club. “On the 7th hole, Tuck teed off, his ball hitting the green only a foot from the hole. I came within four feet of the same hole. Since he was so close to winning, he asked me if he could declare victory.”
“Hell, man!” he told Harris. “Even the Chief can hit that hole.”
“I bet you can’t,” Harris responded, reaching into his pocket and removing five $20 bills.
“You’re on,” Tucker said. He unbuttoned his pants and fell to a position on his hands, his knees above the turf, and “The Chief” scored a perfect bull’s eye. Word of that feat soon spread across Tinseltown.
In spite of his budding stardom, Tucker was drafted. He told Lana goodbye two days before he left for boot camp. He’d joined the U.S. Army, where in time he’d earn a commission as a second lieutenant.
After the war, she saw him periodically and only at parties. After he’d made The Yearling (1946) with Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman, he shot Never Say Goodbye with Errol Flynn that same year.
At a party in Flynn’s home, Tucker asked Lana if she’d retreat to Flynn’s bedroom with him.
“Not me,” she said. “He’s got a two-way mirror for voyeurs.”
“I don’t mind staging an exhibition,” Tucker said.
“Give me a raincheck, Tuck,” she said. “Some things are best kept private.”
After that, she was pleased for him for his big breakthrough role in The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) with John Wayne. She was mostly delighted with his role as Beauregard Burnside, the first husband of Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame, the biggest-grossing film of 1958.
***
All the gossip columnists, even those at The New York Times, wrote of the upcoming marriage of Hedy Lamarr and George Montgomery, although no specific date had been set for the ceremony. A Times writer reported, “For an ex-cow puncher, Montgomery isn’t doing badly at all. He recently sealed his intentions of becoming Hedy Lamarr’s next husband. What it all adds up to, in short, is that Mr. Montgomery has arrived.”
Lana wondered about his commitment to Lamarr. She had learned that he was slipping around and dating a beautiful MGM starlet, Kay Williams.
[As Kay Williams Spreckels, then best-known as a socialite, she would become the fifth and final wife of Clark Gable.]
As Lana told Virginia Grey, “I still have a special place in my heart for George Montgomery. He’s not the kind of man a gal gets over easily. All the papers, as you know, are filled with news of his engagement to Hedy Lamarr.”
“His nickname for her is Penny,” Lana said, “but I wouldn’t call her that. My nickname for her rhymes with witch.”
One afternoon, Lana encountered Lamarr at MGM. To judge from her talk, the Austrian star was unaware that Montgomery had ever dated Lana.
[At the time, Lamarr and Lana were still pretending a surface friendship.]
“I am so happy with George I’m dizzy,” Lamarr confided. “It is unbelievable that one girl could be so much in love. I have never been in love like this before. Last night, George gave me a $100 bottle of Shalimar.”
“That’s what I call true love,” Lana said, disguising the sarcasm in her voice.
“He also gave me a clay Popeye he’d won throwing baseballs at a fun arcade,” Lamarr said.
“That’s even better than a diamond ring,” Lana said.
“Don’t be catty, dear,” Lamarr cautioned her.
Three months later, Montgomery called Lana. “Penny [his nickname for Lamarr] and I are through. We broke off our engagement last night. You may not want to take me back, but I was wrong to leave you like I did.”
It was 1943 and he’d just joined the U.S. Army Air Force after he’d played the lead in Bomber’s Moon.
“Of course, I’ll see you,” she said.
He picked her up that night and drove her to a small Italian restaurant out in San Fernando Valley, far removed from the glitter of Tinseltown. They ate pasta and drank two bottles of wine by candlelight. He drove her back home, and she invited him in to spend the night with her before reporting for duty.
During the war, that penchant for “sending a soldier to war with a smile on his face” became a familiar routine for Lana.
Her rival, Carole Landis, remarked, “Lana Turner could always be counted on to give the boys a farewell fuck.”
When Lana heard that remark, she responded, “Unlike Landis, I don’t charge. Once a hooker, always a hooker.”
She never heard from Montgomery again, but read in the Hollywood Reporter that he’d been assigned to the Army Signal Corps and stationed in Alaska.
During his visits to Los Angeles, he didn’t call her, but had not taken up with Lamarr again either.
It came as a shock to her to read that in December of 1943, he’d married the singer, Dinah Shore. According to the report, she had staked him out as her husband the first day she’d met him.
But whereas Lamarr remembered Montgomery in her memoirs, Lana did not.
“George is one of the men whom I almost married,” Lamarr wrote. “Everybody thought I was going to marry him, and perhaps I should have. He was so versatile and handsome. When he went off to war, he was even more attractive in uniform than in any of his Hollywood roles. Once we had made some vows, but we both had a faculty for seeing through sham and hypocrisy. We couldn�
��t fool each other, and we both realized deep inside that we weren’t sure enough about each other.”
Jorge Guinle, a wealthy Brazilian playboy, didn’t look like the typical Hollywood stud, but he seduced some of the most famous stars in Hollywood, including Lana and Marilyn Monroe.
In his heyday, he ranked up there with Aristotle Onassis, Howard Hughes, Prince Aly Khan, and Porfirio Rubirosa (“Rubber Hosa”).
***
At a party at Errol Flynn’s home on Mulholland Drive, Lana was introduced to Jorge Guinle, the movie star’s house guest. He was the scion of Brazil’s richest family, called “The Rockefellers of Rio de Janeiro.” In fact, when Franklin D. Roosevelt once visited, the president of Brazil asked the Guinle family to house him, since their residence was the most spectacular in the country.
When Guinle visited New York, he was a guest of Nelson Rockefeller. During the war, Nelson had used his influence to get Guinle a “soft job” in Hollywood, reviewing scripts to ensure that the countries of South America weren’t wrongly depicted. In the middle of a war, the United States needed its good neighbors to the south.
Years later, Guinle would recall the first time he saw Lana enter Flynn’s living room. “She was all in white, furs, diamonds, high heels, and a white gown with plunging décolletage. She was a dream walking.”
Lana recalled that she was surprised at how short Guinle was, but was impressed with his penetrating blue eyes and his suave South American charm. He immediately won her over, and their brief fling would begin one weekend in Palm Springs.
She was not alone. His other conquests included Veronica Lake, Hedy Lamarr, and Jane Russell, Howard Hughes’ big-busted discovery and the star of The Outlaw.
During their courtship, both Lana and Guinle shared a fascination for jazz. He had, in his capacity as a very wealthy investor, already financed some of the recordings of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
When he wasn’t pursuing the most glamorous women of Hollywood, Guinle went nightclubbing with an array of male friends who included Orson Welles, Ronald Reagan, and Lana’s mentor, Mervyn LeRoy.
Lana Turner Page 28