On the first day of work, Crane’s manly charms met approval from lusty Shelley Winters, a future movie star. She had just filmed a bit part in Hayworth’s Cover Girl, and had been cast in another minor role in Tonight as “Bubbles,” a ditzy show-girl.
When Winters published her 1980 autobiography, Shelley, Crane was still alive. Perhaps she didn’t want to embarrass him, since he was still married to Lana when Shelley seduced him. However, after his death in 1985, she became more outspoken.
“The first night Steve took me out, we went to Ciro’s and then later dropped into his apartment,” Winters claimed. “I knew we were going to make love, and I also knew that Lana was going to divorce him. So I figured, ‘Why not?’”
“I was pretty experienced at this time,” Winters continued. “I’d lost my virginity when I was fifteen. I’d used Southern Comfort and potato chips to seduce him.”
“Over the course of many years, Lana and I would share many of the same guys: William Holden, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Sean Connery, John Garfield, Howard Hughes, Sterling Hayden, Anthony Quinn—you name ‘em. I don’t know if she ever fucked Marlon Brando. We both got plowed by Frank Sinatra—that was before he got pissed off at me and denounced me as a ‘bowlegged bitch of a Brooklyn Blonde.’”
“Steve Crane was a real gentleman, very courtly and proficient in bed,” Winters claimed. “His equipment was similar to that of Lancaster. Our affair wasn’t really that. Call it a fling. It didn’t last long.”
“He soon discovered this shy little girl, very pretty. She used to hang around a lot at Columbia, watching us but not saying much. When she did speak, it was barely a whisper. She always wore halter dresses one size too small and carried around a big book like a dictionary or encyclopedia.” Winters wrote that in her first memoir.
“It wasn’t long before Steve discovered ‘Norma Jean something or other.’ He stopped dating me and took up with her. I ran into them one night at Schwab’s Drugstore, where Lana was allegedly discovered.”
[In time, Norma Jean renamed herself Marilyn Monroe. She not only had a brief fling with Crane, among others, but became Winters’ roommate.]
Eventually, the star of the picture, Rita Hayworth, discovered Crane’s seductive skills. Suddenly, they became “an item.”
“I don’t know the exact moment Rita took notice of Steve,” said director Saville. “But she sure did. It was the talk of the set. I suspected it might be Rita’s way of getting back at Lana, her main rival as pinup girl, during the war.”
“Rita had eloped with Orson Welles in 1943, but he was never around and still playing the field,” Saville claimed. “Rita’s affair with Victor Mature was over. She and Lana both went for him. Steve was just the tonic for Rita at that troubled time in her life.”
“After such dragon ladies as Joan Crawford and Sonja Henie, I found Rita a very nice lady,” Crane told Saville. “She was very kind, very loving. She should never have married Orson Welles…He led to disaster for her.”
“Rita’s figure wasn’t as great as Lana’s, though she had the world’s most beautiful breasts,” Crane said. “Her arms and hands were lovely, but her legs were a bit on the thin side. She had the cutest little belly, which her cameraman was ordered to conceal.”
“One day, she came to me,” Crane said. “She’d just been in the office of Harry Cohn [the notoriously abusive president of Columbia pictures], and he’d called her ‘a tub of shit.’ I brought her comfort. She needed love that night. Welles was away, and Cohn had made her feel worthless. I restored her to her throne as a love goddess.”
“My romance with Rita didn’t last long,” Crane admitted. “She was pregnant at the time [with her daughter, Rebecca]. On looking back, I think that Rita, unlike Lana, didn’t really want to be a movie star.”
“In her heart, she was just a simple dancing gypsy girl, who could have settled down with an average Joe and had children. I don’t know if Lana ever found out about my affair with Rita—perhaps she did. It was never mentioned.”
***
In August of 1944, Lana divorced Crane for the second time. “I was disillusioned during my second marriage to Stephen,” Lana told Linda Darnell, who had been her maid of honor during her first marriage ceremony to Crane. “He was always accusing me of keeping late hours, drinking too much, and whoring around.”
Before a judge, Lana presented her case in seven minutes. She claimed that Crane made her irritable all the time, and created nervous anxiety in her. She accused him of causing her to have frequent colds, and she blamed him for a drastic weight loss. “I’ve been forced to turn down important pictures because of the turmoil in my life,” she claimed in open court.
“My health has been seriously damaged because of him, and I’ve actually contemplated suicide,” she maintained.
The judge granted her divorce and awarded her custody of their daughter.
Lana gave her version of the breakup to Louella Parsons. “Stephen and I sat down for a heart-to-heart talk. We were no longer quarreling. We knew it was time to go our separate ways. I willingly gave my permission for him to visit Cheryl at any time.”
[That wasn’t exactly accurate: Crane had actually sued Lana for custody of his daughter, but lost in court.]
Lana and Crane remained friends even after their divorce, and many of their subsequent reunions concerned Cheryl. Insiders such as Darnell said that on rare occasions, they continued to have sex together.
As biographer Joe Morella wrote: “Lana’s reputation was growing, not only as an offscreen sex symbol, but also as a young woman who could more than hold her own with the hard-drinking Hollywood crowd and match their expletive-peppered vocabulary word for word. Magazine stories carried such headlines as LANA TURNER’S SENSATIONAL LOVES.”
Darnell said, “Rumors were rampant about Lana’s all-night revelries at clubs along Central Avenue, which was known as ‘The Harlem of Hollywood.’ Parties there were pretty wild, or so I heard. I never went there myself.”
Lana told her girlfriends, many of them envious, “Millions of men consider me the most desirable woman in the world. But my greatest moments, my greatest love affairs, my greatest thrills, lay in my future.”
Perhaps to erase memories of her troubled life with Crane, Lana sold her house and moved into a rental property. “I want a fresh start.”
In the meantime, Crane became one of the most sought-after bachelors in Hollywood, even taking Lana out on occasion.
The manager at Ciro’s reported that on three nights in a row, Crane showed up with Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, and Rita Hayworth. “It was amazing. What did this Hoosier boy have?”
The Intangible, Snake-Oil Charm of Lana’s Third Husband, Hollywood’s Lothario, Stephen Crane
Whatever Special Combination of Male Charm and Pizzazz Did He Have That We Don’t Know About?
Stephen Crane, on three nights in a row, dated Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, and his former wife, Lana. As a trio, they were known as the most desirable women inhabiting the planet. What special gift, one wonders, did he have?
Chapter Ten
How to Be a Hot Pants Movie Star
“I Can Fall in Love for Only One Night”
The manly endowments of John Hodiak had been widely discussed after his co-star, Tallulah Bankhead, seduced him during the filming of Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944). He’d started out being billed as “the next Clark Gable,” but didn’t get far with that moniker. He’d been classified as 4-F by the Army.
Lana, too, succumbed to the sex appeal of Hodiak on the set of Marriage Is a Private Affair, where he was somewhat wooden as an actor.
“He might have been wooden on the screen,” Lana told Virginia Grey, “but he’s wonderful in bed, and he has a formidable weapon indeed. Tallulah was right.”
During World War II, customers could walk into a drugstore and discover the glamorous face of Lana Turner on at least six or seven movie magazines on any given month. Commercial products, such as Woodbury Soap, co
urted her endorsement, whether she used the product or not. She was one of the most publicized blondes—along with Veronica Lake, Betty Grable, Carole Landis, and Betty Hutton—who adorned the screen during the war years, adding glamor to an otherwise dreary world.
James Robert Parrish, a Hollywood biographer, wrote: “With her voracious sexual appetite, Lana Turner dated incessantly. “I find men terribly exciting,” she once said. “Any girl who says she doesn’t is an anemic old maid, a streetwalker, or a saint.”
“If it were for a quick bedroom tussle, she wanted well-endowed beefcake,” Parrish claimed.
Turner shared her philosophy of a man and a woman. “A successful man is one who makes more than a wife can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man.”
An edition of Current Biography wrote: “It is said that Lana Turner has dated 150 members of the opposite sex, and she has been reported to have become engaged to marry five different men at the same time, and was actually on the verge of going to the altar with a dozen.”
Even so, she also got publicity about being a mother, with stories appearing under the headline of LANA’S LITTLE DIVIDEND.
The Hollywood Reporter wrote, “Whenever Lana is seen with her daughter, she seems very fond of the little one. But she isn’t particularly maternal by nature, by instinct (lots of women aren’t) or by circumstance. It takes a remarkable character to be a hot pants movie star and an adequate mother. Lana’s sex life was always sinning. She had all those troubles, plus her career, plus her own not-very-sound character to cope with.”
Lana reached the peak of her beauty in the mid-1940s. Even so, she considered Hedy Lamarr more beautiful than she was. “Blondes are more fun. They’re bubbly with personality and are pretty like Betty Grable and me, but brunettes are the really sultry beauties of the screen.”
She never went out of the house unless she was “camera ready.” She didn’t know what photographer was sneaking around to take her picture in what she referred to as “one of my off moments.”
She announced to advertisers, “I will sell only beauty products—not spark plugs like Rita Hayworth.”
Most of the men she dated were actors, or musicians, especially during her early days as a film star. Often, her dates lasted only for one night, perhaps dancing at Ciro’s. Sometimes, she continued an affair for three weeks to a month. On occasion, she took up with former lovers, getting together for “a reunion in my boudoir.”
“For the most part, I like men tall, dark, and handsome. I think I invented that phrase which became a cliché.”
“I was impulsive when it came to men,” she said. “I could fall in love for just one night. But then morning came and the man in bed with me didn’t look so hot.”
She concluded by saying, “My definition of love is believing in your dreams.”
***
The war years of 1941 and 1942 had been spectacular for Lana, playing opposite Robert Taylor and Clark Gable in Honky Tonk, Johnny Eager, and Somewhere I’ll Find You. They were followed by her 1943 release of Slightly Dangerous, which was like some warmed-over script in the late 1930s before America went to war.
Lana was not pleased, however, with her film output in 1943 and 1944. Her marriage to Stephen Crane, the bigamy charge, and a pregnancy that almost killed her and her child, had interrupted her career at the time when she was about to take the crown as Queen of MGM.
Now, after an eighteen-month absence from the screen, she was hoping that her newest film, set for a 1944 release, Marriage Is a Private Affair, would be big at the box office.
A pre-fame Tennessee Williams sits in a cubbyhole at MGM, trying to create “a celluloid brassiere for Lana Turner.”
She desperately wanted the script to be good, since she would be billed as the star, her name appearing before the title. Never before had she involved herself to this degree in the early creation of a script.
Her director, Robert Z. Leonard, who had helmed her in Ziegfeld Girl, had been assigned to bring Judith Kelly’s best-selling novel to the screen. In it, Lana was required to transition from a frivolous society girl to a wartime bride and mother.
She was disappointed to learn that MGM had signed an unknown writer, Tennessee Williams, to craft the adaptation. She had wanted an established, thoroughly seasoned Hollywood pro.
Williams had landed in Hollywood in 1939. The only job he could get was as a feather plucker on a squab ranch outside the city limits of Los Angeles.
As stated years later to his reporter friend from The Miami Herald, Darwin Porter: “My time of dread was when a group of young men, most of them boys, came over three times a week to commit mayhem in a place known as ‘The Killing Shed.’ Here, they would murder the squabs by slitting their throats with sharp knives. The poor birds would frantically twitch as these killers would hold them by their legs over a bucket to bleed them. My share of the squabs was delivered to me, along with my mostly Mexican co-workers. I had to pick the feathers off these dead birds. I was meagerly paid by the number of squabs I plucked.”
Tennessee was rescued from this bloody horror by his literary agent, Audrey Wood, who informed him one afternoon that she’d gotten him a job as a scriptwriter at MGM for a salary of $250 a week, the most money he’d ever received.
His first assignment involved adapting a romantic novel, The Sun Is My Undoing, for the screen. However, when he reported to work that Monday, he was informed that Pandro S. Berman, its producer, had reassigned him to adapt a different novel, Marriage Is a Private Affair, into a sort of “comeback” film for Lana Turner.
Here comes the bride, portrayed by an actress eventually associated with seven real-life husbands—not a particularly good role model for a virginally white wedding.
According to Tennessee, “I think that was one of the funniest and most embarrassing things that ever happened to me. That I should be expected to produce a suitable vehicle for this actress. I feel like an obstetrician required to successfully deliver a mastodon from a beaver. I’ve been assigned to create a celluloid brassiere for Lana Turner.”
Tennessee never understood the individualized allure of Lana, nor did he appreciate the spellbinding image she could bring to the screen, attracting millions of fans, not all of whom were men. “She couldn’t act her way out of her form-fitting cashmeres,” he said, referencing her nickname of “The Sweater Girl,” a moniker which she was hoping to live down at this point in her career.
Leonard sent him word that if the leading male role he was crafting were strong enough, it might also be used as a starring vehicle for Clark Gable’s return—after his service in the U.S. Army Air Force—to the screen.
A memo Williams read revealed that the character he was trying to create required twenty separate scenes, each infused with drama, plot advancement, and characterizations. It was clearly understood that during the course of these twenty scenes, she’d be glamorously clad in a different piece of couture—one of them a dazzling wedding dress, and each of them unique—created by “Irene.”
“MGM doesn’t want a movie script,” Williams complained. “They’re putting on a fashion show starring Lana Turner as the model.”
For the third lead, he was instructed to write a dramatic, non-dancing role for Gene Kelly, who wanted to try his luck performing in a drama. Running like a thread through all his communications with Berman and the studio chiefs was enormous pressure to get Marriage is a Private Affair before the cameras.
Surpassed only by Betty Grable over at Paramount, Lana continued to be the second most popular pinup girl of World War II. MGM’s mail department was deluged with fan letters, asking when Lana would return to the screen. Even though its script was still uncertain, Mayer had already announced that Marriage would be shown “in all the theaters of war around the world.”
Williams was also asked to write a short and cheerful prologue for Lana, with the understanding that it would be inserted early in the film as a morale booster for the troops. In reference to the prologue
he agonized over, he quipped to his gay friends, “I’ll suggest that both Lana and I will each be available to service the troops. But whereas Lana gets to seduce them with spotlights and makeup and razzmatazz, I’ll promise to service them with my oral talents after dark, in the fog, on the piers of San Francisco, before they’re shipped off to war.”
For days, Tennessee sweated and bled over her script, complaining loudly, “It’s not my kind of story.” He grew so frustrated that he once said, “I can almost hope that Lana Turner will die in childbirth.”
[The star was pregnant at the time.]
Late one morning, the lesbian film director, Jane Loring, showed up unannounced at Tennessee’s small office at MGM. She told him that she was assisting producer Pandro S. Berman, and that she’d come to check on the script. “Pandro wants me to help you invent some sexy situations that will pass the blue-nosed censors.”
“The dyke bitch, Katharine Hepburn, held me in utter contempt,” Lana said. “I made two movies with Spencer Tracy, and she accused me of making a play for him. That was true only when he was Mr. Hyde.
Let’s face it: He wasn’t getting anything from Miss Hepburn.”
Loring wore white flannel pants, a beret, and large aviator glasses—very mannish attire. “She did not conceal the fact that she was a lesbian,” Williams said. “I’d heard rumors that she was the lover of Katharine Hepburn. My suspicion was confirmed when I had lunch in the commissary with them.”
[Hepburn had arrived thirty minutes late and was introduced to Tennessee, who later recalled, “Back then, she regarded me as a little minnow in a fast-flowing stream. The women ignored me and talked about how difficult it was for them to work in a male-dominated industry called Hollywood.”
When Lana’s name came up, Hepburn flashed anger. “That god damn bottle of bleach practically threw herself at Spencer (Tracy) when they made that movie.”
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