Because of an old knee energy, and perhaps a back ailment, Crane was accepted into the Army as a noncombatant: That meant he would not have to be shipped overseas. Since Fort MacArthur lay close to Los Angeles, he could drive home most evenings.
During his gig at Fort MacArthur, Crane, almost every night, brought home Army captains and lieutenants to show off Lana to them. “It really increased my standing at the base,” he claimed.
He refused to wear the regular uniform, claiming that the rough material caused skin rashes. To deal with his needs, Lana ordered her dressmaker to design three new, custom-tailored uniforms for him in gabardine. “Stephen Crane was the best-dressed man in the U.S. Army,” Lana said.
Because of a knee injury, Crane was never sent abroad and was discharged after only six months of service. Louis B. Mayer may have used his influence to get him relieved of his duties.
With medical bills mounting, and with Crane draining her resources, Lana was almost broke. She needed work, and eagerly accepted the first job offer. It paid $5,000, and involved her participation in a radio broadcast for the Philip Morris Playhouse for CBS on October 1, 1943.
It was a televised re-dramatization of the 1942 movie, The Talk of the Town, a film that had originally starred Cary Grant and Ronald Colman. Lana was to reprise the Jean Arthur role.
In advance of her performance, Crane and Lana headed by train for New York City. But he wanted to stop first at his hometown of Crawfordsville, Indiana. What he really wanted to do, other than to share a reunion with his mother and grandmother, was “to show off my blonde bombshell of a wife to my fellow Hoosiers.”
After she arrived in Crawfordsville, at its railway station, Lana hired a local driver as their chauffeur. She fully expected to be taken to his ancestral home and to visit the tobacco factory to which he was an heir. Or so he had said.
She was terribly disappointed when the highlight of their stop turned out to be a dingy little cigar store attached to a rundown pool hall filled with shady characters. Then, the ancestral home turned out to be a modest, two-story frame house that looked like it hadn’t been painted since its original construction in 1903. Mother and grandmother were pleasant and friendly, looking like local factory workers in faded patterned dresses made from feedsacks.
Back in his hometown, Crane—who was known as “Joe” by the locals, based on his first name, “Joseph”—began a routine of bringing locals back to their “ancestral home,” to meet his beautiful movie star wife.
In desperation, she finally retreated upstairs to the bedroom that his mother had set aside for them.
***
During the seventh month of her pregnancy, she imminently feared either a miscarriage or a premature birth. She had painful contractions and was rushed once again to a hospital. She later wrote about spending an agonizing twelve hours on an examination table with a needle inserted into her spine. With fluid dripping into her, the pains eventually went away. Had they continued, her baby would have been born prematurely and stillborn, her doctor told her.
On July 24, 1943, Mildred and Lana went for a walk outside her home when suddenly her water broke. Clutching Lana, Mildred immediately returned to the house. Crane was at home at the time, and he hustled Lana into his car and, breaking speed limits, drove her to Hollywood Hospital.
She’d later tell Darnell that the next eighteen hours, as waves of pain kept shooting through her body, were the most horrific of her life. “I’ve never been stabbed, but it must be like I felt, getting stabbed and stabbed again without letup.”
The doctor gave her a spinal anesthetic and waited for the baby to come out. Although she experienced great pain, she was still awake as it emerged. “It’s a girl!” Lana heard the nurse say.
She later said, “The first thing I thought of was that Stephen and I had wanted a boy.”
Cheryl Crane “was the most anemic baby I’ve ever seen,” the doctor recalled. Amazingly, and true only in rare cases, the blood of the baby and the blood of its mother were not compatible.
Since the Hollywood Hospital was not adequately equipped to handle a case of erythroblastosis, the newborn was transferred to the Los Angeles Children’s Hospital three blocks away.
Lana’s Rh-negative blood was producing antibodies to destroy Cheryl’s Rh-positive blood cells. As Lana later wrote, “I was killing my daughter even as I was struggling to give her life.”
Blood transfusions were urgently needed, as it would be necessary to pump out every drop of Cheryl’s blood and then replace and reinforce them with transfusions. Riddled with needles, the baby survived the ordeal. She had entered the world weighing seven pounds, four ounces.
Lana herself had to remain in the hospital for nine more days. Before leaving, she was allowed to hold her endangered infant—so fragile and delicate—in her arms. Cheryl’s life remained in jeopardy. For two months, Cheryl hovered between life and death before she was appraised as healthy enough to join her mother in Brentwood.
For child care, Lana relied on the loving care of Mildred, whom Cheryl would later call “Gran,” and the expert wisdom of Margaret MacDonald, an older but still vital Scottish woman.
After the birth of her baby, on the nights Crane was away, Lana began to date other men at private residences or in secluded, out-of-the-way places.
Meanwhile, Crane was stationed at nearby Fort MacArthur. She was already aware that on many nights, when he might have returned to Brentwood to join her, he did not. That alone, to some degree, seemed to justify her intimacies with other men.
***
As a Civil Rights activist, Lena Horne, a star of stage, music, and film, had already blazed a trail for other African American performers, having broken down racial barriers from the 1940s and 50s. Eventually, she rose to the top of her profession, as part of a life filled with triumphs and tragedies.
Lana had heard of a hole-in-the-wall boîte “The Little Troc,” which had become the “in” place in Hollywood during the early 1940s. John Barrymore was a frequent visitor, arriving drunk. Marlene Dietrich for a while adopted the place as her nighttime rendezvous, sometimes appearing with her lover, Claudette Colbert.
Lena Horne: “Think of me as a sepia version of Hedy Lamarr.”
When Lana read that Horne was performing there, she asked Stephen Crane to escort her there one night. As an example of those quirky coincidences that were frequently swirling around her, she spotted her former husband, Artie Shaw, in the audience waiting for Horne’s act to begin.
When he saw her, Shaw jumped to his feet, kissed Lana and shook Crane’s hand, inviting them to sit at his table to watch the show.
Almost immediately, she sensed that her first husband was having an affair with the singer.
After the show, Shaw introduced Horne to Lana. Surprisingly, the two women didn’t seem jealous of each other—in fact, they began a friendship that would last for years and in time become the subject of some nasty rumors.
“Hello, darling,” Horne said, kissing Lana on the cheek.
Lana already knew that MGM had signed Horne to a contract. “I look exactly like every other gal at MGM, except I’m bronze,” Horne said, in an ironic observation of her skin tone.
“I read in Elsa Maxwell’s column that you’re a honeypot for the bees, and it seems that Artie here agrees.” Lana said.
“It’s nothing serious,” Horne said. “I’ve separated from my husband, Louis Jordan Jones, and Artie is a change of pace from Paul Robeson, Joe Louis, and Duke Ellington.”
At the age of sixteen, Horne, from her base in Brooklyn, had joined the chorus of Harlem’s Cotton Club. She’d made her film debut at MGM in Panama Hattie (1942), in which she’d performed her most memorable song, “Stormy Weather.”
Later, when Crane and Shaw disappeared together into the alley to smoke marijuana, Horne said, “Girl, let’s talk.”
She then preceded to relay some insight into her affair with Shaw: “What I like most about him is that he understands the obsta
cles I face as a black entertainer. As you know, he took Billie Holiday out on the road, so he knows what I’m up against.”
“The one thing about Artie is that he seems without prejudice,” Lana said.
“I fell for him when I heard his recording of ‘Star Dust,’” Horne said. “It was in June of 1941 at the Café Society in New York.”
“It appears that many women find my former husband irresistible,” Lana said. “Judy Garland among them. He’s also literary, hanging out with Hemingway and his ilk.”
Shaw later told Crane and others, “I’m trying to convince Lena that she is the most beautiful creature in the world, even more beautiful than Greer Garson, and, if I dare say so, more beautiful than Lana herself.”
“Don’t get THAT carried away,” Crane cautioned.
[Decades later, at the age of 94, a curmudgeonly Shaw talked with a reporter about his long-ago affair with Horne. “She was quite pretty and a lot of the guys were after her, both white and black, Frank Sinatra among them. I liked her looks, so I went after her. After all, some men can like both vanilla and chocolate. Her singing was okay, not great. At least she could carry a tune.”
“We did more than date. We fucked a lot. Our affair lasted for several months, and she was always pestering me to marry her. I warned her that such a marriage would destroy both of our careers.”
“Lena was always protesting the white man’s treatment of blacks,” Shaw said. “She screwed a few black guys, but I think she really went for the white men. If that sounds too racist, don’t print it.”]
One night when Crane had to (or chose to) overnight at Fort MacArthur, Lana arrived at the club with Virginia Grey. Horne introduced the actresses to her estranged husband, Louis Jordan Jones.
Horne later said, “Louis seemed enchanted by Lana, like she was the gal of his wildest dreams. I don’t know what happened at the club that night. I know he left after the show with both Lana and Virginia.”
It might have come as a shock to Lana’s fans, but in James Gavin’s definitive biography of Horn, entitled Stormy Weather, he reveals that Jones was a womanizer. Some of his movie star lovers included two blondes, both Sonja Henie, Crane’s former girlfriend, and Lana herself.
Jones was considered a highly desirable “catch” on the night he disappeared with Lana after Grey had retreated to her home. He was twenty-eight years old, working as a press and publicity agent for the Cleveland Indians. He was quite handsome, a light-skinned mulatto with straightened hair parted and slicked back. He frequently appeared in well-tailored, double-breasted suits and had a reputation as a playboy.
“At the time I took up with him,” Lana said to Grey, “I wasn’t really getting back at Lena for screwing my former husband. I was actually getting back at Stephen, because I learned that he was still dropping in at Joan Crawford’s house at least once a week.”
Lana later told Grey at one point she discussed Jones with Horne.
“I found sex with him very dirty!” Horne said. “He’s a god damn animal in bed.”
“Lena, darling, you must realize that what you view as dirty, another woman might find thrilling. Just because a man likes to do everything in bed—and I mean everything—doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s dirty.”
“That’s why they print menus, Lana, darling,” Horne replied.
Months later, when Lana encountered Horne, the singer told her the news. “Artie has dropped me and taken up with Jerome Kern’s daughter. But don’t feel sorry for me. I’m shacked up with Orson Welles. How about you, darling?”
“How much time do you have?” Lana said. “I’ll tell you, but it’ll take all night.”
***
During her last and final war bond tour, Lana made a secretive, off-the-record stopover in New Orleans. She’d been invited to visit the city by two former lovers, Victor Mature and Errol Flynn, who had booked a suite there, and—as a team—invited her there as their date.
Before the war, both men had seduced her, separately, and she had enjoyed their company and their love-making.
After her “before-the-war” affair with Mature, she had lost touch with him. She was aware, however, that during their filming together of My Gal Sal, released in 1942, he’d begun a torrid affair with its co-star, Rita Hayworth.
Mature had originally wanted to enlist in the Navy, but was rejected because of his colorblindness, even though he insisted, “I can see red, white, and blue.”
Finally, he ended up in the Coast Guard, patrolling the war-torn North Atlantic aboard the ship he’d been assigned, Storis.
By 1944, he’d been granted shore leave to star in the film version of the film version of the morale-boosting musical revue, Tars & Stripes, which—in addition to providing entertainment to sailors—had also been conceived as a recruitment campaign for the Coast Guard. As a film, it had opened in Miami in April of 1944, traveling through the States, playing at movie houses and old vaudeville theaters. During his time in New Orleans, Mature visited defense plants and shipyards.
Flynn, who was involved at the time with a war bond tour, was making some of the similar rounds when he ran into Mature. These two bisexuals had been sometimes lovers before the war, and Flynn invited Mature to share his hotel suite in New Orleans. The two handsome hunks didn’t emerge from the suite for twenty-four hours.
The following day, they encountered a war-based lack of transportation, as most of the buses and what had been taxis had been commandeered into the war effort.
Fortuitously, immediately across the street from their hotel, they spotted a used car lot, where a battered taxicab was available for $600. Agreeing to split the cost between them, they bought it.
Just for fun, Flynn also acquired the uniform of a taxi driver, complete with hat. Then he and Mature drove through the wartime streets of New Orleans, picking up horny, sweaty servicemen and inviting them back to their hotel suite for an orgy.
At the end of a war bond tour, Lana stopped off in New Orleans to share the beds of both Victor Mature and Errol Flynn (above).
“Why not?” she asked. “They’re the two hottest men in California...or elsewhere.”
Once in New Orleans, Lana was delighted to be reunited with Flynn and Mature, considering both of them among the most skilled of her lovers. Soon, she was riding around with them in their taxi, enjoying the sights, the jazz, and the cuisine of New Orleans, especially its gumbo dishes.
The Hollywood threesome, in the words of one restaurant owner, “consisted of the two handsomest men and the most beautiful woman ever to set foot in our fair town.”
It was wartime, and shortages were prevalent, but restaurateurs always made exception for Lana, Mature, and Flynn, slipping them special treats.
During the short time Lana occupied a suite with Mature and Flynn, champagne was on hand every night. It was a time not just to make love, but to talk about all the changes the war would rapidly bring to Hollywood and on the type of films it would produce.
“Victor Mature almost invented the word ‘beefcake,’” Lana said. “I’m not sure if I invented the word ‘cheese-cake,’ but I’ll take credit.”
When the men stripped down, Lana, one of the great judges of the male physique, noted that Mature was in his body beautiful shape, whereas Flynn, because of his dissipation, had developed a slight paunch.
In the three days she spent with the two actors, Lana was brought up to date on what they’d been doing.
She also discussed her crumbling marriage to Stephen Crane and the difficulties she’d had during childbirth. “I don’t think I’m cut out to be a wife and mother,” she confessed. “Here I am carrying on with two of Hollywood’s leading horndogs.”
“And enjoying every minute of it,” Flynn said. “Admit that it’s true, ol’ girl!”
“What red-blooded female would turn down an invitation for love in the morning, love in the afternoon, and love at night? You guys are sex machines!”
Flynn had just emerged from one of the worst orde
als of his life. Two under-aged girls, Betty Hansen and Peggy Satterlee, had hauled him into court on a charge of statutory rape. The tabloids had gone wild in tarnishing his reputation, creating a new term for the American vernacular: “In like Flynn.”
Lana had been impressed with Flynn’s defense by attorney Jerry Giesler, who had impugned the accuser’s character and morals, a tactic that eventually led to the star’s acquittal. Eventually, Lana would desperately need Geisler’s services for herself.
Flynn’s marriage to actress Lili Damita had ended in divorce in 1942. The following year, he’d married eighteen-year-old Nora Eddington, a worker at a cider stand.
Flynn had filmed Northern Pursuit (1943), directed by Raoul Walsh. He told her of the many fights he’d had with his director. In the movie, he’d been cast as a Canadian Mountie with “links” to the Fatherland in Germany.”
When Flynn was at the bar having a drink, Mature brought her up to speed on the gossip. Flynn’s co-star, Helmut Dantine, a dashing young Austrian actor, had fled to California after the Nazi takeover of his country. As a Jew, he had escaped just in time.
When making Edge of Darkness in 1943, Flynn had made sexual advances to him. The handsome blonde actor had declined, claiming that he was “saving myself for Tyrone Power.”
But with Power away at war, Flynn, according to Mature, finally succeeded in seducing Dantine during the making of Northern Pursuit. “If Flynn doesn’t succeed the first time,” Mature claimed, “he tries again and again until he gets his man. Of course, Flynn had Ty Power years ago. As for women, they stand in line for Robin Hood.”
When Lana returned to California, she told Virginia Grey, “Millions of women dream of going to bed with Errol Flynn or Victor Mature. Imagine me, little Miss Lana Turner, going to bed with both of them at the same time! I don’t want to make the gods jealous. They might punish me for having such luck.”
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