Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  During a heated confrontation, Mayer met with Lawford, demanding that he submit to a radical new treatment. He claimed that several of his other male stars at MGM had already taken the treatment, receiving injections of extract from monkey glands…“And they never sucked another cock again.”

  Lawford never submitted to the treatments, and continued his status as the fourth member of a ménage à quatre consisting of Van Johnson, Keenan Wynn, and Robert Walker, all of them friends of Lana. They rode motorcycles, went on trips to the desert together, and were highly visible fixtures at all-night beach parties at Malibu.

  On many a night, Lawford drove Lana to the same moonlit beach at Malibu, or else he’d take her dancing at the Mocambo, which became their favorite hangout. The evening would end at her house, not at his. “My tarantula mother would eat Lana alive for getting her hands on her darling boy.”

  Lawford told his friends, “For such a big, glamorous movie star, Lana has simple tastes except for her love of diamonds. On some afternoons, when it wasn’t too hot, we’d play tennis, or else go riding along bridle paths in the Hollywood Hills. She told me that Ronald Reagan had taught her how to ride a horse.”

  One night, he explained to her why he never had to enter military service. At 14, he had severely injured his right arm when it went through a glass door. That injury and the irreversible nerve damage it had caused forever compromised the use of his hand and lower arm. As the years went by, he concealed that, at least from the camera.

  That injury was a boon for his career, since heartthrobs like James Stewart and Clark Gable were already off to war. In lieu of those bigger but faraway stars, Lawford was able to nab some romantic leads at MGM.

  As Lana’s daughter, Cheryl, wrote, “Lawford seemed to be more enamored of my mother than she was of him.” At the time, more or less liberated from her husband, Lana wanted to play the field. She did not want to tie herself to another man, especially to one as immature and impetuous as Lawford. Once, he proposed marriage to her. Ever so politely, she rejected his offer.

  Henry Willson, as a voyeur, wanted a “blow by blow” description of Lana’s affair with Lawford. He may have been among the first to learn that Lana was tiring of oral sex. She confessed to him that one night she exploded in fury, shouting at him, “God damn it, Peter. I want you to fuck me. If you want a blow job, call one of your beach boys.”

  As Lana’s eight-month involvement with Lawford was coming to an end, so was World War II, though it had a few more horrific months to go.

  “I like Peter and at times, he’s very entertaining,” Lana told Willson. “But he’s still a boy, and I want a man. Besides, I always wonder, when he’s in bed with me, whether he really wants to be in bed with Van Johnson.”

  Lawford wasn’t always fun-loving, as she soon discovered. He had a dark side. “I have these frightening depressions,” he confessed. “I have great days, then the dark days descend like the Bubonic plague. Why? I have everything. Good looks, Money, Fame. And my pick of any gender.”

  Keenan Wynn had such a crush on Lawford that he became jealous of Lana. One night, when Lawford’s car was parked in her driveway, he came by at around 3AM and let the air out of all four of the tires on Lawford’s car.

  One Saturday, when Lawford came by her house to pick her up for a date, Mildred was there to announce to him, “Lana is gone,” before refusing to provide any further details about her whereabouts.

  Only the day before, he had told Frank Sinatra, “Lana and I are really hitting it off. I am her man, and she is my woman.”

  Sinatra eyed Lawford skeptically. “Since when did a British fag like you become a man?” Then he grabbed his ample crotch. “Let’s face it, pal, this is what you really want.”

  “Frank, I love you dearly, but those put-downs, even if you’re joking, are hard to take.”

  During the frantic week that followed, Lawford could find no trace of Lana. No one at MGM knew where she was, since she wasn’t shooting a film at the time. Up till then, she and Lawford had been in daily contact, if not in person, then via phone.

  One night at around midnight, Lana phoned Lawford at his home. She was calling from Boston. He had angry words with her, but she remained calm. “I thought you’d been kidnapped. What in hell are you doing in Boston?”

  “It’s over between us,” she said. “But I want you to know that it’s been fun. I did care for you...at least a bit.”

  “It’s over? What in hell are you talking about? Only a few days ago, you made passionate love to me!”

  “I’ve fallen for someone else.”

  “Who is it now?” he asked contemptuously. “Some busboy with a big dick?”

  “Gene Krupa.” Then she abruptly put down the phone.

  ***

  Two weeks later, when Lana returned to Hollywood, she did not call him. Instead, he read in Louella Parsons’ column that she was dating the Turkish actor, Turhan Bey. Jealous and infuriated, Lawford, throughout the remainder of his life, referred to that actor as “Turban Bey.”

  The publicist, Milton Ebbins, who was Lawford’s greatest mentor, said, “Peter’s breakup with Lana changed the way he treated women. After that, he seemed to just drop them the moment he was finished with them. Take Judy Holliday, for example. He could be cruel, heartless. It was Lana who taught him that.”

  ***

  Bored and riddled with anxiety, Lana was anxious to return to work at MGM. She was smoking too much, drinking too much. Late one morning, she received a call from Mervyn LeRoy. She was delighted to hear from her former mentor.

  “Lana, my dear, it’s been too long,” he said. “I’ve come up with a fabulous new idea for casting you. After watching the final version of my latest picture, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), I realized that I’d directed three of your friends in it: Spencer Tracy, Van Johnson, and Robert Walker. Those guys are doing just fine, but I made a discovery. I think I’ve found a star of tomorrow! His name is Robert Mitchum, and he’s been kicking around Hollywood a bit, going nowhere until now. I think you two would make a dynamic screen team. I can just see the marquee now: LANA TURNER AND ROBERT MITCHUM STARRING IN…well, whatever.”

  “I like the billing. When do I meet God’s gift?”

  “First, I’d like you to come over to MGM tomorrow afternoon at three o’clock. I’ll arrange a screening of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) so that you can see what I’m talking about.”

  The next afternoon, she arrived on time and sat through the screening with LeRoy. It was a dramatization of the April, 1942 American bombing of the Japanese capital.

  She, too, was impressed by this “dynamic hunk of man,” as she called Mitchum.

  “Before I signed him, I put him through thirty screen tests,” LeRoy said. “I told him that he was the best actor I’d ever seen…or the worst.”

  The director set up a luncheon meeting with Lana and Mitchum the following day. LeRoy had intended to join them, but he was called away at the last minute to report to the office of Louis B. Mayer.

  That left Lana to eat alone with Mitchum, whom she found “amazingly appealing,” as she’d later report to LeRoy.

  [In 1940, Robert Mitchum married Dorothy Spence, to whom he’d been attracted since he met her when she was thirteen. She was pretty, slender, brunette, sweet and soft-spoken.

  Over the years, she must have been the most understanding wife in Hollywood, overlooking or forgiving her husband’s affairs not only with Lana, but with Rita Hay-worth, Ava Gardner, Lucille Ball, Anne Bancroft, Jane Russell, Jean Simmons, Sarah Miles, Jane Greer, Gloria Grahame, Carroll Baker, Shirley MacLaine, and, lest we forget, Marilyn Monroe, with whom he co-starred in The River of No Return (1954).

  Of all these women, only Marilyn gave him a bad review. “He’s a lousy kisser and should watch that bad breath.”

  “Bob—he told me I could call him that—is utterly fascinating,” she said. “Too bad he’s married.”

  “When did that ever stop you?” LeRoy quippe
d.

  “I hope you aren’t turned off by my looks,” Mitchum told Lana over lunch. “Some guy wrote that I look like a shark with a broken nose.”

  Despite his barrel chest and cleft chin, he was not traditionally handsome, but she found him sexy nonetheless. His hooded eyes became known as “bedroom eyes,” and he possessed an insolent gaze and fearless veneer, a look that seemed to say, “Baby, I don’t give a damn.”

  He spoke to Lana about his publicity build-up: “I don’t give a fuck what they write about me. Booze, brawls, and broads—I represent the three Bs of life.”

  In time, she’d learn about his background. Of all the actors she knew, his was the most colorful. He’d been a gang member growing up in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan. He was partially descended from Blackfoot Indians and, as a youth, had led a gypsy-like existence. As a homeless roustabout during the Depression, he’d ridden the rails with the other hobos, migrating from town to town.

  A series of thefts landed him in a chain gang in Georgia, from which he eventually escaped. One random job after another awaited him—boxer (“That’s where I got this broken nose”), beach bum, (“I rolled drunks”), ditch digger, dishwasher, fruit picker, stevedore, a ghost writer for Carroll Righter (Lana’s astrologer), stagehand, poet, an extra in Hopalong Cassidy Westerns, and a machine operator for Lockheed Aircraft.

  The afternoon he met Lana, he was on his way to becoming filmdom’s first hipster anti-hero. “I was one wild boy of the road,” he confessed. What he didn’t tell her was that when he’d arrived broke and hungry in Hollywood, he’d hustled homosexuals, including Clifton Webb, who for a time was his best customer.

  Lana would later tell LeRoy, “Bob has this sense of self-mockery. He told me that he started out as a sex fiend, but couldn’t pass the physical.”

  Later, Howard Hughes, their mutual friend, told Lana, “There’s not a dame around who won’t drop her britches for Bob. To make it worse, he doesn’t give a damn if they do or not.”

  “For me, it’s hard to articulate Bob’s sex appeal,” Lana said to LeRoy. “It’s there, just there, very immediate. You feel it the moment he looks at you.”

  As the afternoon wore on, she invited him to go home with her. “Even back then, he was a hard drinker,” she claimed. “But no matter how much he drank, he was still in control, still coherent.” For dinner, she ordered a lavish meal from Chasen’s, which was delivered to her doorstep.

  He told her amusing stories of his life, some of which had unfolded during his work with her friends on the set of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Some of the scenes had been shot at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida.

  “I got cruised in the communal shower and had to take a shit in group latrines. We stood in the mess line for rotten food.”

  Mitchum’s biographer, Lee Server, wrote that the actor “got a reputation for dropping his pants in front of officers and other dignified types.”

  The fake (Hollywood) soldiers and the bona-fide enlisted men invariably clashed. The crew from California was referred to as “Hollywood fags.”

  “A drunken sailor one night was beating the shit out of Robert Walker, and I stepped in,” Mitchum said. “I grabbed the son of a bitch and beat him so badly he had to be rushed to the hospital. After that, the guys let us alone.”

  “Mitchum spent the night with Lana. “He got on top and plowed and plowed,” she confessed to Virginia Grey. “What a man! I was definitely not his first time at the rodeo.”

  When she met again with LeRoy, she told him that she thought Mitchum would be ideal as her screen lover. “Or off screen as the case may be.”

  When she was offered the lead female role in The Postman Always Rings Twice, Lana lobbied for her director, Tay Garnett, to cast Mitchum as the male lead, but he rejected her idea. Instead, he preferred “bad boy” John Garfield for the part.

  ***

  On the set of Marriage is a Private Affair (1944), director Robert Z. Leonard grandly welcomed Lana. She was eager to meet her two leading men, James Craig and John Hodiak, neither of whom was there that day. She’d read in the papers that Hodiak was being positioned as “the successor to Clark Gable.” The Pittsburgh-born actor, of Ukrainian and Polish descent, was touted as the “one man who best could fill the shoes of ‘The King.’”

  His rival contender, also at MGM, was James Craig, a son of Tennessee, who had lost his Southern accent. Of all the Gable wannabees, he most resembled Gable, mustache and all.

  Louis B. Mayer had signed him to a seven-year contract, based to some degree on MGM’s understandable fear that Gable, after his discharge from the Air Force, would look far older than Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind (1939).

  Leonard told Lana that the success of this upcoming film rested entirely on her shoulders. She would be on the screen for 116 minutes, and that she’d have sole billing above the title.

  She was delighted that her favorite hairdresser, Sydney Guilaroff, had been assigned to her, and that the fashion designer, “Irene,” was preparing a vast wardrobe for her. Irene had long ago learned that Lana’s left shoulder and hip were higher than her right.

  Lana had been cast as Theo Scofield West, a society girl who “spends her winters in Palm Beach, her summers in Reno.” Actually, that description directly applied to the society actress, Natalie Schafer, who had been assigned to play Theo’s (i.e., Lana’s) mother in the film.

  Schafer’s character, the script revealed, had, by this point in her (screen) daughter’s life, already maneuvered her way through what seemed like an endless series of divorces.

  Natalie Schafer never revealed her age. However, when she died in 1991, it was learned that she’d been born in 1900. She gave Lana some advice: “Men come and go when a woman is young. But to comfort her in her old age, she needs to have collected diamonds.”

  She took her own advice. At the time of her death, she was a multi-millionaire, having made a fortune in real estate.

  Theo (as played by Lana) has no intention of marrying anyone—at least not at this point in her life—until she meets Lt. Tom Cockrane West, an Air Corps lieutenant.

  Without really taking time to get to know him, she accepts his proposal. During the period of adjustment that follows, a baby is born and Theo is embroiled in a matronly domestic life, yearning for a return to her status as a party girl.

  Along comes James Craig, cast as Miles Lansing, who is far more attractive and appealing than her husband. Theo had dated him before her marriage, and he seems to be carrying a torch for her.

  Lana would work with Natalie Schafer again. The veteran actress would become a household word when she later appeared (brilliantly) as the gadabout society matron, Eunice Wentworth Howell (aka “Lovey”) in CBS’s hit sitcom, Gilligan’s Island (1964-1967). She’d been married (1933-1942) to the famous actor, Louis Calhern, but had divorced him.

  Schafer would repeat her role as Lana’s mother twenty-five years later in a 1969 episode of The Survivors, a TV series.

  Until the last minute in the casting process, it had not been certain that Lana would star in Marriage. The script had been owned by Warners, but Jack Warner feared trouble with the censors. Especially provocative were the conversations it contained about abortion and adultery. He had sold it to Mayer, who originally intended it as a vehicle for Myrna Loy and Robert Taylor, with George Cukor set to direct.

  At the beginning of the film, as an introduction, and with the understanding that it would be shown to servicemen worldwide, Lana appears on screen to deliver a morale-boosting pep talk. “Well, here we are, having a world premiere of our picture for the Armed Forces overseas. And if you think this isn’t important, you’ve got another thing coming. But, seriously, you should see all the best pictures, and you should see them first because…well, because you’re you. Because you’re the first in our hearts, our hopes, and our thoughts. Thanks for coming to the show. I hope you like it. So long and good luck.”

  Marriage Is a Private Affair had its world premi
ere on September 23, 1944, at the Teatro Della Palme in the recently recaptured city of Naples, Italy. An Army newspaper wrote: “Miss Lana Turner’s fine points are revealed to advantage in a few idyllic sequences which suit the GI appetite. However, one scene in which the newlyweds are shown sound asleep in twin beds in the morning after the wedding drew some strange noises from the audience.”

  After the film opened in Los Angeles, a critic for The Los Angeles Times wrote: “This picture is unimportant except as a vehicle for Miss Turner, but it is effective as such, and it demonstrates her ability to act, to project a soft and appealing femininity, which, of course, comes with that pronounced loveliness which has always been hers.”

  A critic for The New York Times wrote: “Lana Turner is a lovely, appealing little thing, and mankind was fashioned primarily to make her happy and supreme.”

  ***

  In Marriage is a Private Affair, James Craig was cast as Lana’s former beau before her (onscreen) marriage to John Hodiak.

  Before Lana ever seduced Craig, he’d already been auditioned by some of the femmes fatales of Hollywood.

  Off screen, his conquests had included Marlene Dietrich during their filming of Seven Sinners (1940); Ginger Rogers during Kitty Foyle (also 1940); Lucille Ball during Valley of the Sun (1942), and Hedy Lamarr during The Heavenly Body (1944).

  On the set of Marriage, Natalie Shafer, cast as Lana’s mother, said. “Lana is such a darling, I just adore her. But as if Hodiak wasn’t enough, the dear thing also had to bed James Craig... Not that I blame her, mind you….”

  Craig had never planned to be an actor. On a chance encounter, he had met Oliver Hinsdell, a talent scout, who was struck by his resemblance to Clark Gable. Craig’s career got off to a slow start, as he drifted from one lackluster movie to another, from Paramount to Columbia, and on to Universal before landing at MGM.