In her living room that afternoon, Lana learned more about her husband during a brief chat with Hill than she’d ever heard from the man himself.
Overwhelmed with emotion and with information, Lana soon became eager to bring the confrontation to an end. “If you don’t mind, I prefer to keep your visit a secret. Stephen will be back tonight. If he wants to phone you, that’s entirely up to him. Now, may I show you to the door? It isn’t necessary to call on me again.” An ominous feeling came over Lana after Hill left. She sensed that more trouble, perhaps lots of it, would be coming from this stranger she’d married. In contrast, Sugar Hill seemed like only a minor annoyance.
Darnell later speculated, “By the time of her confrontation with Hill, Lana had been around Hollywood long enough to learn how we play the game out here. Instead of facing Crane that night and behaving like a jealous wife, she must have done some calculation. Crane’s screwing around gave her a license to make off with the next available guy who crossed her radar screen. She told me he could go off and have his fun, never telling her where he was. But she, at least, wasn’t going to wait for him in the kitchen baking an apple pie for the bastard’s return.”
***
Lana’s only major film release during that dreadful wartime year of 1943, when America’s young men were dying by the thousands, was a fluffy little comedy for MGM
At first, it was Lawless, before its name was replaced with Careless Cinderella. Then, before it finally opened in 1943 in theaters across the country, it was retitledSlightly Dangerous.
The director who cast her was Wesley Ruggles, who had just helmed Clark Gable and her in Somewhere I’ll Find You. He came by her home to discuss the script. Her first question was, “Who’s my leading man? I hope he’s someone as handsome as John Payne or George Montgomery.” Her face did not conceal her disappointment when he told her it was Robert Young.
“Don’t expect any hot love scenes like those I had with Bob Taylor and Clark. Young just doesn’t inspire me.”
“I admit that the movie is just a comic piece of fluff,” he said. “But it could be a milestone in your career. For the first time, you’ll have star billing—no more playing second fiddle to Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, or Robert Taylor. You’ll carry the film on your own box office power. Lana Turner billed over Robert Young.”
Young didn’t have the male beauty of some of Lana’s former co-stars, but she was impressed with his output of films and with such leading ladies as Katharine Hepburn, Margaret Sullavan, Joan Crawford, Luise Rainer, Hedy Lamarr, Greer Garson—even Helen Twelvetrees.
Between 1931 and 1952, although Young would appear in some 100 films, he became a more widely recognized name after his debut on TV in Father Knows Best. Lana had several talks with him, finding him different from his screen persona. He was bitter about the way in which he had, throughout the course of his screen career, been cast.
“When producers can’t get Gable or Taylor, or some other big star, they cast reliable ol’ Bob, especially if the part has been rejected by the biggies.”
Her lack of sexual chemistry with Young dated back to the 1938 release of Rich Man, Poor Girl, in which she had played a small role. Of the two leading men in that film, she had opted to pursue handsome Lew Ayres, husband at the time of Ginger Rogers
“I was never interested in Mr. Young. Nor did he ever show the slightest interest in me.”
In Slightly Dangerous, Lana was given the lead role of Peggy Evans, who first appears as a brunette when she’s a “soda jerk” at the luncheonette of a department store in the small town of Hotchkiss Falls, in the Hudson Valley of New York State. There, she tangles with Bob Stuart, her boss, as played by Young. She’s frankly bored with her job and longs for a more glamorous life. She boasts that she can make a banana split with her eyes blindfolded. Someone dares her, and she takes up the challenge and, with panache, succeeds.
The “Lana, blindfolded” scene involved many technical challenges. It was directed by Buster Keaton, a friend of Ruggles.
Keaton, of course, had been one of the most inventive comics of the silent screen before falling into the depths of alcoholism. She later claimed that the blindfold scene was the hardest in the film to shoot. “The bright lights kept melting the ice cream before I got it right. Buster was very patient with me.”
The customers treat Lana’s “blindfold act” as a charming conceit, and business increases as Lana perfectly executes her tasks, even with the handicap.
But Young, as the store’s newly appointed general manager, is not amused. He calls her into his office and fires her, prompting her to run away from him and out of the store. It’s instantly assumed by the other store employees that he had made sexual advances to her.
He, too, then loses his job, after Lana (as Peggy) writes what appears to be a suicide note and disappears.
Young, incentivized by wanting to bring her back to their small, gossipy town as a means of salvaging his reputation, will eventually track her down.
In Manhattan, Lana spends all her savings, $150, on a new wardrobe and a blonde dye job. As she is passing a newspaper office, an overhead maintenance man drops a bucket of red paint on her head.
Feigning amnesia, but in total control of her thoughts, she convinces the publisher of the local newspaper that she’s the long-lost daughter of Cornelius Van Burden, an industrial mogul played by Walter Brennan. He’s a veteran of many of John Wayne movie, and he becomes convinced that she is his long-lost daughter, Carol.
Young learns of Lana’s whereabouts and follows her to Manhattan. Since it’s a movie, the pair fall in love, and at this point, Brennan is so fond of Peggy that he doesn’t care if she’s his daughter or not.
Lana was “discovered” as a customer at a soda fountain.
Shown here in Slightly Dangerous with Robert Young, she reverses herself by actually playing a “soda jerk.”
Lana liked crusty, irascible Brennan, who usually played eccentric old-timers and had been nominated for Best Supporting Actor roles in 1936, 1938, and 1940.
Ruggles told the press, “Lana is the best replacement for the ‘It Girl,’ the label worn by Clara Bow in silent films.” He had directed the flapper in The Plastic Age (1925).
For his supporting cast, Ruggles assembled a team of what were arguably the most talented character actors in the movies that year (1943).
These included Dame Mae Whitty, Eugene Palette, Alan Mowbray, Florence Bates, Millard Mitchell, Ray Collins, Ward Bond, and Kay Medford.
Since the picture had been made during the deprivations and rationings of World War II, Louis B. Mayer ordered his photographer, Eric Carpenter, to “take some of the hottest cheesecake pictures of Lana ever shot. I want her pictures to compete with Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth. Let our boys abroad know what they’re fighting for!”
Lana was most cooperative, putting on her sexiest pout, moistening her lips, and sticking out her breasts. She wore revealing outfits that included a black sequined gown that became one of the most famous fashion statements of the war years.
Carpenter’s pinup shots of her became some of the most popular of World War II. American troops carried them inside their uniforms during some of their bloodiest assaults against the Nazis and the Japanese.
When Slightly Dangerous opened in theaters, author Anita Loos wrote, “Lana Turner is the vamp of today as Theda Bara was of yesterday. She doesn’t look like a vamp, however. She is far more deadly because she lets her audience relax.”
In the New York Daily Mirror, Lee Mortimer pronounced Slightly Dangerous as “thin on plot but saved by Ruggles’ directorial pacing and the talented supporting players’ ability to overcome any plot handicaps. When they falter, Lana Turner’s chassis does the rest.”
Family Circle evaluated Slightly Dangerous like this: “This new builder-upper for its No. 1 glamor gal should do just that for both MGM and Lana, if slightly less for audiences in general. The picture affords cash customers an opportunity to view Lana in rep
ose and in hysterics, in love and out, dark-haired and blonde, dressed and not dressed. Despite certain distractions, it must be conceded that the girl has the beginnings of the making of a trouper.”
Viewed through the sexually sophisticated lens of today, Slightly Dangerous had at least one ironically humorous and memorable line: Young tells Lana, “I couldn’t hate you, darling, not even if you turned out to be a female impersonator, and I bet my bottom dollar you’re not.”
***
In two other films released in 1943, Lana made only brief cameo appearances.
In The Youngest Profession, she joined other A-list stars also making cameos, including Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, Robert Taylor, and William Powell.
The star of the picture was the young actress, Virginia Weidler. Born in 1927, and only sixteen the year the film was released, she’d been cast as a star-crazed autograph hunter.
Other cast members in The Youngest Profession included Edward Arnold (one of the most talented of the lot), plus John Carroll and Jean Porter.
On the first day Lana showed up to work, Carroll made a final attempt to rekindle something by visiting her dressing room. She turned him down.
Lana made yet another cameo appearance in Du Barry Was a Lady (1943), starring Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, and Gene Kelly, along with Tommy Dorsey and his band.
In addition to Dorsey, singer Dick Haymes was another of Lana’s former lovers cast in the movie, but because of her own brief involvement in that film, she did not encounter him. “If you blinked, you missed me,” she said. “I think I was on the screen for only fifteen seconds, but I looked lovely.”
[For her cameo appearance, she wore a form-fitting white lace gown. It marked the first time she was presented in Technicolor.
As a footnote in Hollywood history, Ava Gardner, Lana’s future best friend, appears uncredited in that film as a character designated as “Perfume Girl.”]
***
Lana and Crane’s marriage started to unravel after only five weeks of marriage. She sometimes ran into him on the threshold of her house at 5AM as he was returning home from a night of revelry, just as she was rushing off to work at MGM.
One afternoon, as Lana recalled, “The news hit me like a ton of bricks. I know that’s a cliché, but a good one to describe how I felt.”
It was a windy day in the Los Angeles area on that fateful day in November when Crane entered the dressing room of her Brentwood home. “I don’t know where to begin,” he said. “Our marriage was a big mistake…a big one.”
“Is this your way of telling me you want a divorce?” she asked. “Who’s your new girl?”
“It’s not that. I was married before to a girl back in Indiana, a little brunette by the name of Carol Kurtz. We got a divorce, but I’ve just received a call from her. She’s read about our marriage. Trouble is, there’s a technicality. I’m a bigamist. The one-year waiting period for our interlocutory divorce has two months to go.”
During her brief cameo appearance in Du Barry Was a Lady, Luscious Lana made her Technicolor debut with Red Skelton, who would do about anything for a laugh.
She later revealed that she almost fainted. As she started to keel over, he caught her in his arms, but she revived and broke away, pounding on his chest.
“How could you do this to me? I can just see the headlines: “LANA TURNER MARRIES BIGAMIST.”
Eventually, after a lot of rending of garments, Lana agreed to a tense meeting at Kurtz’s apartment. It did not go well. At one point, Lana accused both Crane and Kurtz of collaborating in a blackmail scheme. Before the end of the afternoon, she agreed to give Kurtz a check for $5,000 if she’d keep quiet.
In defiance, however, the next day, Kurtz betrayed Lana and sold her story to the press. Despite her payment of $5,000, Lana was now confronted, publicly, with the embarrassing revelations.
Lana, looking luscious, in a publicity shot for The Youngest Profession.
Undoubtedly, one has heard of the oldest profession. But what is the youngest profession? According to the Lillian Day novel, it was the collecting of movie star autographs.
It was reported in the press that, “During her marriage to Stephen Crane, Lana Turner has been living in sin, so the saying goes. According to California law, the marriage does not exist, since Crane was already married. Lawyers may disagree, but some legal sources claim that in such a circumstance, there is no need to annul a marriage that never existed in the first place.”
Completely confused about what to do, Lana phoned Greg Bautzer and set up a meeting. The attorney advised her to kick Crane out of her home, change all the locks, and seek an immediate annulment.
Louis B. Mayer was furious, threatening to fire her for violating some of the morals clauses in her contract.
Around this time, she’d begun feeling nauseated most mornings, so she decided to visit her doctor. He confirmed her worst suspicion: She was pregnant. In her just-defined role as a co-bigamist in a now-illicit marriage, it meant that her hoped-for child would be born illegitimate.
On December 8, 1942, Lana announced that she was pregnant, telling Louella Parsons, “Both Stephen and I want a son.”
Crane, as the father, spoke to the press. “I deeply regret the unhappiness brought about by these circumstances. It was all a misunderstanding on my part. There was no attempt to deceive. Miss Turner is an innocent suffering through a legal tangle, of which she had no prior knowledge.”
On February 4, 1943, a red-eyed Lana, her eyes concealed by large, very dark sunglasses, appeared before Judge Roy B. Rhodes, who listened to her heartfelt predicament. After ten minutes of her testimony, he granted her an annulment and custody of “my unborn son,” as she referred to her unborn baby.
Outside the courthouse, reporters mobbed her. Each of them asked the same question: “Do you plan to remarry Stephen Crane?”
In every instance, she refused to answer. Two security men hired for the day pushed a path through the crowd so that she could get inside a waiting limousine.
The news that blasted across America indulged in mostly speculative reporting, asserting that she’d remarry Crane, “if only to legitimatize her child.”
When she reported to MGM, Mayer sent word for her to come to his office for another of his lectures. “I demand that you remarry the whore-mongering bastard. Since you locked him out of your house, I hear he’s been fucking everybody from Virginia Hill to Susan Hayward and Joan Crawford, maybe with Ann Sheridan thrown in as a sideline.”
Crane phoned her every day, urging her to remarry him so that he could become the father of their unborn child. “Remember, it is not just your child, but mine, too.”
Despite his pleas, she continued to resist him.
Five days after her annulment, Lana collapsed onto the floor of her living room. Mildred, who’d been in the kitchen at the time, rushed in to discover her, and immediately phoned for an ambulance. On the way to the hospital, Lana drifted in and out of consciousness.
After an examination, doctors discovered that her white blood cell count ”is so high you might die.” They diagnosed her condition as “anemia in the extreme.”
She was warned to have an immediate abortion as a means of preserving her own life. When she protested, her doctor said, “It is almost 99 percent certain that if you persist in giving birth, the baby will be a stillborn, and you may not survive childbirth.”
Despite that, and despite the hysterical urgings of Mildred to abort the child, she refused to follow his advice.
Four nights later, after she’d delivered yet another rejection of remarriage, she was awakened at 2AM by the sound of a loud crash outside her bedroom window.
Before leaving his apartment, Crane had swallowed a bottle of barbiturates and then positioned himself behind the wheel of his Lincoln coupé. He’d perilously maneuvered the car to Brentwood, going along the cliff-fronting road almost directly uphill from Lana’s house.
Suddenly, attempting suicide, he turned the wheel and ste
ered it off the un-fenced road. His Lincoln lunged forward, careening down the slope, stopping abruptly in the heavy underbrush that functioned like a big net to entrap his car. Hurled forward on impact, he was badly bruised, but without any broken bones.
In another incident, an emergency call came in from a nearby hospital, informing Lana that Crane had overdosed on sleeping pills as part of yet another attempted suicide. She rushed to his side, where she found him under supervision, guarded by nurses on a suicide watch.
Crane was finally allowed to return to Brentwood where, as Lana told Darnell, “He arrived with flowers and bushels of that old Crane magic. Even so, I refused to remarry him, although I did let him go to bed with me.”
“I just don’t feel I could go through another marriage ceremony. I didn’t tell him the real reason: I had stopped loving him. The sex thing was still OK. It was hot sex but cold love.”
A month after Crane was released from the hospital, he received his draft notice. Finally, for the sake of her unborn child not having a father, she agreed to drive to the seedy border town of Tijuana to marry him once again on March 15, 1943.
“I stood before this little man whose office sign read, ‘Legal matters adjusted,’” Lana recalled. “Once again, I became Stephen’s wife. He rounded up this Mexican on the street for a few pesos. He agreed to be our witness.”
As a wedding gift, he brought home a two-month old lion cub as a house pet. She was stunned. “I’ve got a baby on the way. We can’t have such a creature here. He’ll grow up to look like the MGM lion.”
She called security at MGM, and two men arrived that afternoon to take the lion cub away. She said, “I don’t know what happened to it.”
Crane reported to Fort MacArthur for a physical examination from an Army doctor. That night back in Brentwood, he complained to Lana about it. “The doctor was an obvious homosexual. He examined most of the guys and passed them on. Not so with me. He spent a lot of time juggling my balls and touched my dick several times. He was practically giving me an erection.”
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