Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  During a visit to New York, Guinle introduced Lana to another friend of his, Huntington Hartford, the A&P heir. Lana would begin dating him in 1945.

  At one point when she was dating Guinle, Lana learned that he was also spending some of his evenings with her girlfriend, Susan Hayward.

  In 1946, when Lana attended a party hosted by Hartford, she shared a reunion with Guinle. He described his experience on the night Paris was liberated. “I attended a party thrown by Elsa Maxwell,” he said. “Cole Porter played La Marseillaise, and I kissed and hugged Greta Garbo, Frank Sinatra, Charles Boyer, Maurice Chevalier, and Marlene Dietrich.”

  With the arrival of the 1950s, Guinle engineered new conquests, including Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe.

  Guinle lived to be 88 years old. Before his death in 2004, he told the press, “Thanks to Viagra, I’ve continued with my love making. I’m still floating and not sinking.”

  Along with his youth, through bad investments, his wealth had long ago disappeared. “The secret of living well is to die without a cent in your pocket.”

  “The days of all my old friends like Prince Aly Khan have gone. At times, I feel that glamor itself has disappeared from the world. On cold, windy nights when I’m alone, I relive my illustrious past. I seduced Lana Turner during the war and Marilyn Monroe in the 1950s. Not bad for a little short guy from Brazil.”

  ***

  After dumping George Montgomery, Hedy Lamarr wasted no time in linking herself to Jean-Pierre Aumont. He was a French Jew and had been forced to flee from his native France after its Nazi takeover.

  Aumont was a fast worker. As he later wrote in his memoir, Sun and Shadow, his affair with Lamarr began at a party at her wooden house, a building whose architecture reminded her of equivalent buildings in her native Austria. “She appeared, dressed in red, her black hair flowing. She was a vision of sensuality, with her nose upturned just enough to keep her from being too beautiful. During dinner, she pressed one of her knees, the lovelier of the two, against mine. The following week, we were engaged.”

  Later, as he would explain to Lana, the engagement ended when he was driving her home from a concert. “I braked a little too quickly. Hedy became hysterical, claiming that I had purposely tried to throw her against the windshield because I was jealous of her beauty.”

  The next day, their engagement was canceled.

  As was her custom, Joan Crawford had been the first to discover and seduce Aumont. In his own words, “During World War II, a young Frenchman who wasn’t bad looking, who owned a dinner jacket, and could babble a few words in English was received with wide open arms. Such was the case with Miss Crawford and myself.”

  “Everything about her seemed immense: Her eyes, her mouth, her shoulders, her greeting.”

  “The first night she invited me to her home, she didn’t let me go for three days. My agent, Charlie Feldman, finally figured out where I was and came to rescue me.”

  Lana once proclaimed the glories of the French actor, Jean-Pierre Aumont.

  “He was France’s great gift to the love-starved women of Hollywood-—perhaps in gratitude for their help in World War II. From Hedy Lamarr to Gene Tierney, he was much appreciated, especially by myself.”

  It was at a house party at Crawford’s that Aumont made his next conquest. She was Gene Tierney. “I was trying to flirt with her until Charles Boyer took me aside.”

  “Watch your step,” Boyer cautioned. “She’s a married woman. It’s simply not done here.”

  “What a strange country,” Aumont said.

  In the days ahead, he did not follow Boyer’s advice.

  Although Tierney was married to Oleg Cassini, the fashion designer, at the time, he was often away for design and fashion commissions in New York. Neither Tierney nor Cassini was faithful to the other, and Tierney’s affairs were wide-ranging. In addition to a dalliance with JFK, they included intimacies with Howard Hughes, Mickey Rooney, George Sanders, Victor Mature, Tyrone Power, and Darryl F. Zanuck.

  Before arriving to deflower Hollywood actresses, Aumont had seduced Vivien Leigh in London. Grace Kelly was another goddess who lay in his future.

  “Gene Tierney had skin made of gold,” Aumont claimed, “with green-blue eyes. Her hair came down to her shoulders, and it curled at the ends. Her shoulders were broad, but not so much as Crawford’s, and she spoke a bit with the Connecticut accent of Miss Katharine Hepburn, but far more seductive, of course.”

  “When I did get to talk to her, we spoke in French, since she’d learned how to speak it in Switzerland.

  “How very nice to meet someone who is civilized,” she said to him.

  Within days, their on-again, off-again love affair, had begun, especially when her husband, Oleg Cassini, was away in New York.

  Lana’s affair with Aumont had begun on March 29, 1943, when they had co-starred in the dramatization of Crossroads for CBS’s Lux Radio Theatre. After the broadcast, he’d invited her to dinner, which she followed up with an invitation to her home.

  Little is known of their brief fling, except for one detail, which she shared with Mervyn LeRoy:

  “Before Jean-Pierre gets excited, he needs his ass spanked. Apparently, he had developed this sexual fetish when he was enrolled in a boarding school in France. Every morning, he told me, his one-armed professor would order the boys to pull down their pants while he gave their bare butts a good spanking. Whether they did it or not, he spanked them for having masturbated the night before. From this punishment, Aumont seemed to have developed his fetish. After the spanking, he delivers the goods, and he’s really fantastic. It’s easy to understand why women are attracted to him.”

  Despite Aumont’s affair with Lana, he would marry Maria Montez that year. A native of the Dominican Republic, she had gravitated to Hollywood, where she became “The Queen of Technicolor” after making a series of pictures that included Arabian Nights (1942), Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944), and Cobra Woman (also 1944).

  Montez was in the Dominican Republic when Aumont was invited to Cole Porter’s much-anticipated annual Hollywood party, so subsequently, he attended without her. “I felt like I was on top of the world,” he said. “Everybody, including Lana, was congratulating me on my film, Assignment in Brittany (1943), in which I posed as a Nazi leader conspiring with the French Underground. The role had originally been slated for Robert Taylor.”

  “That night, Lana made me feel like I had invented the electric light bulb,” Aumont said. “I was the center of attraction, and Porter seated me between Gene (Tierney) and Lana.”

  “Everything was perfect that night…too perfect. The caviar followed the foie gras. Violins were playing Viennese waltzes. I was surrounded by beauties, riches. But my stomach was tied in knots.”

  “Here I was, enjoying the good life while my countrymen in France were starving to death or being killed by the Nazis,” Aumont said. “I suddenly got up and headed to the terrace without excusing myself.”

  Fearing he might be suddenly ill, Lana followed him into the garden trying to comfort him. “I just can’t go on living in this fake world,” he told her. “My heart is in France, and my country is bleeding.”

  He later told friends, “Lana was very tender to me, very loving, not some fake glamor queen. Apparently, she’d had much experience in sending men off to war.”

  Leaving the party, he drove her through the Hollywood Hills, where he found a secluded parking space at a belvedere. Both of them would remember that night’s breezes and the lights over Los Angeles.

  Holding on to her, he pleaded, “I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

  After a night with her, he told her the next morning that he’d made up his mind. He was going to send a telegram to Captain de Manziarly, the head of France Libre, and volunteer his services. [France Libre and Forces françaises libres were names for the government-in-exile spearheaded by Charles de Gaulle during World War II. Designated as an official ally of the UK and Britain after the collapse o
f France, it continued to fight against the Nazi governments of France’s Vichy régime and Germany throughout the remainder of the war. France Libre began operating from a base in London in June 1940 and organized and liaised, from their base in London, the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied France.]

  The day after that, Aumont visited Louis B. Mayer at MGM, informing him of his decision to fight with the forces of France Libre. “I’ll be spending some time in England,” Aumont said. “When I return, I’ll speak English better.”

  “Whatever you do, don’t lose your accent,” Mayer warned him. “It’s your major asset. I’d rather you come back without a leg than without your accent.”

  For his final visit to MGM, he went to Lana’s dressing room and remained inside for two hours.

  In New York, at the moment of his departure for the battlefields of Europe, it wasn’t Lana, but Maria Montez who bid him adieu.

  In North Africa, he joined the Free French forces fighting with the Allies to drive the Nazis out. In battle, he was wounded twice. For his bravery, he was made a member of the Légion d’Honneur and received La Croix de Guerre. [The National Order of the Legion of Honor (L’Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur) is the highest French order for military and civil merits, established in 1802 by Napoléon Bonaparte.]

  ***

  Even though it was against the policy of the Hollywood Canteen, Lana sustained a number of affairs with enlisted men before they were shipped to the Pacific. One of them was on the dawn of major stardom, and another, somewhat lesser-known, would become a leading man in pictures.

  Their names were Alan Ladd and Scott Brady.

  Born in Arizona in 1913, Ladd had grown up in the Depression era, as he and his mother had struggled to survive in a kind of Grapes of Wrath scenario. His father had died of a heart attack when he was four years old.

  Mother and son moved to California, where Ladd attended school, excelling in athletics in spite of his short stature. [He would eventually reach a height of five feet, four inches. Some of his future leading ladies, including Shelley Winters, would have to stand in a shallow ditch for their love scenes with him.]

  His schoolmates mocked him, nicknaming him “Tiny.” He perpetuated that name when, as a hard-working teen entrepreneur he opened Tiny’s Patio, a hamburger joint and malt shop across from his school.

  Along the way, he met Marjorie (“Midge”) Harrold when she was a seventeen-year-old senior in high school. They would marry in 1936 and give birth to Alan Ladd, Jr., who one day would become President of 20th Century Fox.

  Ladd’s early days in Hollywood evoked scenes from that haunting novel of Tinseltown, The Day of the Locust. In 1932, he signed with Universal, which cast him in bit parts. The title of his 1933 film, Island of Lost Souls, could have described his personality.

  He later described to Lana how Universal let him go within a few months. “I was told I was too short and too blonde. I was booted out the same day they dismissed another actor, Tyrone Power. He was told he was not masculine enough to be a leading man.”

  After that, Ladd got hired by Warner Brothers as a grip, getting an occasional bit part in films. In the 1939 Citizen Kane, he makes a brief, shadowy appearance playing a reporter at the end of the movie during its famous “Rosebud” scene.

  His life changed when he met actress Sue Carol, who had become his theatrical agent. When she first spotted the handsome, blue-eyed actor, she said, “He looked like a Greek god and was unforgettable.” She aggressively took over management of his career and married him in the after math of his divorce.

  Lana met Alan Ladd at the Hollywood Canteen before his career took off.

  “I usually go in for men tall in the saddle, but sometimes short men need love, too. Alan and I had just a brief fling, but June Allyson went ape-shit over him, even though both of them were married.”

  Carol was determined to make him a star, which finally came with the 1942 release of This Gun for Hire, in which he played a hired killer opposite Veronica Lake with her peek-a-boo hairdo. Although fourth-billed, he became the overnight sensation of the picture, enough so that Paramount would reteam him in other pictures with Lake. [In private, the duo detested each other.]

  The year of his first big success, 1942, was the year that Lana met him at the Hollywood Canteen. Fortunately for Lana, Carol had gone to New York for business meetings and would be away for a week.

  After dancing with him at the Canteen, Lana invited him home with her. He shared his dream of becoming a bigtime movie star. “I have the face of an aging choirboy and the build of an undernourished featherweight. If you can figure out my recent success on the screen, you’re a better person than I am.”

  As Lana would later relay to Susan Hayward, “Alan was filled with self-doubt, even after we did it. He asked me a question no man had ever asked: ‘Did I do it right?’ he wanted to know.”

  “I assured him that he did and was so convincing that he wanted to do it again.”

  During après sex, he shared memories of his past. The most traumatic occurred when his beloved mother committed suicide by swallowing large amounts of an over-the-counter insecticide then being marketed as “ant paste”.

  He said they’d had a hard time putting food on the table. “It was always weak soup and cheap cuts of mutton. Today, I can’t stand the smell of lamb.”

  Eventually, Ladd slipped away and paid a final call on Lana during February of 1943 before he left for service in the U.S. Army Air Force. Originally, he’d been classified 4-F because of a chronic stomach ailment. But he was eventually assigned to the Army’s Motion Picture Unit, and even starred in a U.S. military propaganda film, Letter From a Friend.

  For a while, Ladd was stationed at the Walla Walla Air Base, serving in their film unit, where he attained the position of Corporal.

  He was given permission to attend the March, 1943 Academy Award presentations, where he shared a reunion with Lana. By December of that year, he would be voted the 15th Most Popular Star in the United States. The New York Times wrote, “Alan Ladd has built up a following unmatched in the film industry since Valentino skyrocketed to fame.”

  After the war, Lana and Ladd remained good friends. She was often entertained at his home, with Carol present as hostess. It is not known if his wife ever uncovered their long-ago affair.

  Lana was amazed at the success of Ladd in films that included his memorable Shane (1953) with Jean Arthur. For a while, he and Marilyn Monroe were voted the most popular stars in the movies.

  Lana saw a lot more of the Ladds when all of them were living in Europe, taking advantage of the 18-month tax break the Internal Revenue Service granted to stars who lived and made pictures abroad.

  She recalled going to parties hosted by director Tay Garnett. “These parties were for homesick exiles,” Lana said. “One night, Clark Gable showed up with Ava Gardner and Robert Taylor. Ava rolled up her sleeves and cooked Carolina fried chicken for the gang.”

  In a talk between Gable and Ladd, Ladd revealed that he had been an extra in a Gable picture, They Met in Bombay, which was originally to have starred Lana as the female lead.

  “Clark and Alan represented the vagaries of Hollywood,” Lana said. “When he made that Bombay picture, Clark was the King of Hollywood. Now, years later, Alan was the leader in the popularity polls and at the box office.”

  In the years that followed, Lana saw less and less of Ladd as he sank deeper and deeper into depression and alcoholism. He also suffered from a gunshot wound that had been self-afflicted, although reported in the press as “accidental.”

  In his last picture, The Carpetbaggers (1964), he portrayed, with irony, a broken down former movie star.

  ***

  [Death came to Lana’s friend, Alan Ladd, on January 29, 1964. An autopsy revealed that his blood was saturated with a lethal combination of sedatives and alcohol.

  The funeral was scheduled for February 1. Fans and friends showed up within the solid stone walls of the Church of t
he Recessional in Forest Lawn Memorial Park.

  Her face partially concealed by large sunglasses, Lana appeared dressed in black, five minutes after the service began. Not wanting to be recognized or acknowledged, she left before the end of the service.

  The next day, she phoned June Allyson, who had been one of the great loves of Ladd’s life, even though he had been married to Carol throughout most of the duration of their affair.

  “I was shocked at Alan’s death,” Lana said. “At the funeral, so many memories came rushing back of life in the ‘40s and ‘50s. For the first time in my life, I felt old. From now on, what’s left for all of us?]

  “My fame in the boudoir spread like wildfire when I landed in Hollywood to stay,” boasted Scott Brady. “The first big star I seduced was Lana Turner. I met her at the Hollywood Canteen.”

  “When I returned from the service, my leading ladies went for me—take Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar (1954) and Anne Bancroft in The Restless Breed (1957).”

  “Hollywood gays also went for me big time, especially Rock Hudson at the Finlandia Baths. Before he became a bigshot movie star, Rock and I made two movies together—Undertow (1949) and I Was a Shoplifter (1950). All I would do is let him service me. Scott Brady is no fag!”

  ***

  Another up-and-coming star who Lana seduced after rendezvous at the Hollywood Canteen was the handsome and strapping Brooklyn-born Scott Brady. That was his screen name.

  Two years younger than Lana, he had been born Gerald Kenneth Tierney. His father had been the Chief of New York’s Acqueduct Police Force.

  Brady’s motivation for changing his name derived from the fact that his older brother, Lawrence Tierney, migrated to Hollywood before he did, and had already been indelibly associated with the name “Tierney.”

  Brady’s one-night stand with Lana might have faded from her memory had he not become a movie star after his service in the military.

  Before stardom, he’d been a prize fighter, a lumberjack, and a cab driver. When Lana met him at the Hollywood Canteen, he had already studied acting at the Beverly Hills Drama School.