Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  At MGM, she was confronted by Hedda Hopper who wrote, “Mr. Power has returned to Hollywood from Africa, and is determined to join Ronald Reagan, Clark Gable, and Robert Taylor in the battle against the communists infiltrating Hollywood. These Reds are the scourge of the world.”

  “Personally, Mr. Power and I have gone our separate ways,” Lana told the columnist. “At no time did we ever talk about getting married. We were just good friends.”

  “As you know, when I saw him very infrequently, he was married to Annabella, a fine lady and actress. I always steer clear of married men in spite of what the press reports.”

  “I read that his divorce is coming through and he will no doubt remarry, but not to me. The press invented a romance between us. None existed. I’ll carry my chin higher and get on with making movies. I have no serious romance in my life at the moment.”

  In an overview of Lana’s life, it’s clear that Tyrone Power became “the man who got away.”

  Years later, Lana said, “No man except possibly Ty took the time to find out that I was a human being. Not just a pretty, shapely little thing. That could have been my fault. I didn’t know myself back then. How could any man understand me?”

  ***

  It was heartbreaking for Lana to read about Tyrone Power, the lover who had abandoned her, and his new girlfriend, Linda Christian, whom she only vaguely remembered from having played her maid in Green Dolphin Street.

  Wedding Bell Blues: Lana wept uncontrollably when word reached her from Rome that Tyrone Power, the love of her life, had married Linda Christian.

  She was learning more and more about her rival every day, and Lana felt humiliated that a star of her stature would be jilted and that the cad who rejected her would then opt for the company and sexual favors of an even more notorious starlette.

  When Power first got involved with the then-23-year-old Christian, she was having a fling with Turhan Bey after Lana had dumped him. One night, Lana said. “Christian is taking my sloppy seconds.”

  When she heard that Power was stopping over in Rome, Christian flew there at once, also checking into the Hotel Excelsior where, on her first night there, she ran into him in the luxurious lobby. What happened after that earned her a place in the saga of Lana Turner.

  “Imagine taking a handsome devil like Tyrone Power from the famous, the celebrated, the luscious Lana Turner,” Christian said. “My friends said it couldn’t be done. Honey, I had him the first night.”

  The next day, after leaving the Excelsior for an appointment with a hairdresser, she told an unidentified female companion, “I’ve bagged Ty Power. He told me last night that he was once in love with his wife, and on another occasion, with a bigtime Hollywood movie star. I knew that he meant Annabella and Lana Turner.”

  The press dubbed Christian “The Anatomical Bomb,” because of her international affairs that had begun after Errol Flynn first discovered her in Acapulco and brought her to Hollywood. Soon, she was dating famous racing drivers, bullfighters, financiers, politicians, and playboys.

  The daughter of a Dutch engineer and his Mexican-born wife, Christian had learned seven languages, even “haphazard Arabic,” because of the nomadic lifestyle of her parents.

  Power’s biographer, Hector Arce, called her, “Madame Du Barry born two hundred years too late. All her life, she’d been trained in the ways of pleasing a man. She was bright and shrewd, fevered with a desire to be somebody. The chief blind spot in her makeup was her inability to distinguish fame from notoriety.”

  Lana certainly didn’t expect Christian to be faithful to Power. Word reached Lana that her former lover, Johnny Weissmuller, was dropping his loincloth for her when both of them were starring together in Tarzan and the Mermaids (1948).

  In time, the starlet would become the first James Bond girl when she appearedin the 1954 TV adaptation of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale.

  At long last, on January 26, 1948, Annabella divorced her husband. He told his friends, “The French bitch cleaned me out. I’m now flat broke and stuck with a monstrous alimony.”

  Much to Lana’s chagrin, the venue for the wedding of her former lover to Linda Christian took place in Rome. The assembly there of more than 10,000 fans degenerated into a riot.

  Theirs would become a marriage fragmented by enormous tension, many of them based on his serial adulteries with both genders, and their frequent separations based on their respective work commitments.

  During the months to come, Lana derided the marriage to her friends. “I hear that Ty is keeping her barefoot and pregnant all the time. It’s been reported that for most of their marriage, she walks around with a big belly. I know Ty. That’s a big turn-off for him.”

  Actually, Christian admitted herself that she had three miscarriages during the course of her marriage to the actor. Yet she eventually gave birth to two girls. In fact, she was pregnant in 1952 when Power first asked her for a divorce.

  [He did not divorce her until 1956. Yet three years before that, Christian became genuinely enraged when Power rejected an offer to co-star with Christian in the 1953 block-buster, From Here to Eternity. “It was my big chance, and Tyrone fucked it up for me,” Christian protested

  The roles eventually went to Montgomery Clift and Donna Reed, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance.]

  During periods when she wasn’t recovering from either her miscarriages or her childbirths, Power and his new wife became notorious in Hollywood for their pool parties, wherein both of them indulged in serial adulteries. The early hours of these parties were devoted to heavy drinking, but by midnight, guests were indulging in orgies or else pairing off and heading for the bedrooms upstairs.

  Since, as a bisexual, he seduced either gender, Power doubled his chances of conquest. Once, he was seen ascending the stairs with Rock Hudson. On another occasion, he and a former lover, Howard Hughes, competed for the affection of a handsome young actor, Robert Francis. [Later, Power used his influence to get Francis cast with him in his 1955 film, The Long Grey Line.]

  Christian would marry again, but not until 1962. The scope of her conquests was vast. “I’ve always been the pursuer,” she once told the press. “Only once did I fail to get the man I went after. Cary Grant. But I learned later that he was a homosexual.”

  She had affairs with Miguel Aléman, the president of Mexico, and with Prince Aly Khan, despite his marriage at the time to Rita Hayworth. When she met Mexico’s most famous painter, Diego Rivera, he said, “You will pose nude for me.” It was not a request, but a command.

  Lana, for reasons of her own, followed the almost daily reportage of Christian’s affairs, including with the playboy, Richard Schlesinger. When Schlesinger was hauled into court for nonpayment of a million dollars’ worth of jewelry he’d given Christian, she refused to return the diamonds, rubies, and emeralds.

  She proclaimed to all the world that the then-married Marquis Alfonso dePortago, the celebrated Spanish racing driver, was “the love of my life.” In 1957, at the Mille Miglia race, she was photographed kissing him. Minutes later, he crashed his Ferrari, dying instantly. The press, in news flashes that went around the world, dubbed it “The Kiss of Death.’

  [The Mille Miglia (aka the “Thousand Miles”) was an open-road endurance race between Brescia to Rome, round trip. Between 1927 and 1957, with an interruption during World War II, it took place in Italy twenty-four times, captivating the attention of millions of fans.]

  Christian also traveled the world with Francisco (“Baby”) Pignatari, the Brazilian millionaire, making an occasional film.

  During the shooting of House of Seven Hawks (1959), she seduced Robert Taylor, another of Lana’s former lovers.

  Christian went on to play Rod Taylor’s gold-digging girlfriend in The VIPs (1963) with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. During its filming, she slipped around and seduced Burton. When Taylor heard about it, she ordered that Christian’s best scenes be cut from the film.

  In 1964, dur
ing the filming of a documentary about bullfighting, Christian seduced Luís Dominguez. Even though his affair with Ava Gardner had ended before their encounter, Christian boasted, “I took away a matinee idol and a world-famous bullfighter from two of Hollywood’s reigning love goddesses, Lana Turner and Ava Gardner. Not bad for a little Mexican spitfire, wouldn’t you say? I must have something they don’t. There are things a man likes done to him that Ava and Lana just wouldn’t do. I will!”

  In the immediate aftermath of her abandonment by Power, Lana thought that her link to Linda Christian was over. To her rage and fury, it resurfaced again in 1955 in a most infuriating way.

  ***

  Although Lana never got involved with Power again, she followed his career and private life with avid interest. He was still in his early forties. Based perhaps on his high-drama affairs and his all-night partying in California and abroad, he was beginning to lose his matinee idol good looks. As he moved into middle age, the dissipation was reflected on his face as his smoking and drinking accelerated. He ignored his doctors, who warned him that, like his father, he had a weak heart.

  The last movie he attempted was Solomon and Sheba (1958), in which, on location near Madrid, dressed in heavy armor in record-breaking hot temperatures, brandishing a heavy sword during a dueling scene with George Sanders, he collapsed and suffered a fatal heart attack.

  It was November 15, 1958. He was only 44 years old. Bulletins immediately flashed the news around the world.

  News of his death reached Lana during a vacation in Acapulco as the guest of Ted Stauffer at his luxurious resort, the same venue that had sheltered her during her three-way with Power and Howard Hughes. Stauffer called her to the phone to hear about Power’s death.

  In her memoir, she recorded her reaction: “Tyrone, that beautiful, sensitiveman, so in love with life. I sat disbelieving and numb. I didn’t cry, not then, and not later, when the numbness wore off, and I realized that it was true. Tyrone Power was dead. My tears had been shed years before, when that door closed. Now it was truly closed forever. In my life, I loved other men, but Tyrone was special. He was the one who broke my heart.”

  ***

  At long last, MGM reteamed Lana with Clark Gable in a post-war film, aptly entitled Homecoming (1948) in which Louis B. Mayer hoped to replicate the success of their pair of pre-War movies, Honky Tonk and Somewhere I’ll Find You. Mervyn LeRoy, Lana’s long-ago mentor, was set to direct her once again. Although he had never directed Gable in a film, he’d also been a mentor to him when he first hit Hollywood.

  More than a decade earlier, the director had recognized Gable’s potential as a future matinee idol during his screening of The Last Mile (1930), wherein Gable interpreted the role of “Killer Mears.” Meeting Gable for the first time, LeRoy tried to get him screen tested, with hopes of configuring him as a contract player, but Jack Warner said, “His ears are too big. I think he’d become airborne in a head wind.”

  The director continued to try to open doors for the actor, and eventually Gable and LeRoy became close friends. Leroy had tried unsuccessfully to get the unknown stage actor cast in a role in Little Caesar (1931), and later, he urged his colleague, director Howard Higgin, to assign Gable the fifth lead in The Painted Desert (1931), a film that otherwise starred William Boyd and Helen Twelvetrees.

  Although LeRoy never directed Gable in a movie until Homecoming, he took pride in his discovery. He watched Gable become the King of Hollywood, the leading man to Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, Norma Shearer, Barbara Stanwyck, Helen Hayes, Claudette Colbert, and Hedy Lamarr. “I seduced most of them,” he confessed, “except for the lezzies.” He also starred with Loretta Young and Myrna Loy before landing the role of Rhett Butler in the classic, Gone With the Wind.

  Until Homecoming came along, both Lana and Gable had rejected scripts sent to them, finding none of them suitable for his post-war comeback film. In 1944, Sidney Kingsley had devised a drama, The Homecoming of Ulysses, specifically as a vehicle for Gable. In 1934, Kingsley had received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, based on his play, Men in White. It had been made into a movie starring Gable and Myrna Loy.

  Paul Osborn wrote the final screenplay for Homecoming. He had just written the screenplay for the highly successful The Yearling (1947), which had co-starred Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman.

  In the drama, cast in the role of Col. Ulysses Delby (“Lee”) Johnson, Gable plays a New York society doctor who’s married to Penny (Anne Baxter). He’s so caught up in the social whirl of Manhattan that he can’t help an old schoolmate, Dr. Bob Sunday (John Hodiak), tackle a malaria epidemic from decimating a tribal village. Gable’s character is eventually “converted” to good causes after his designation as a major in the Army Medical Corps.

  En route to Africa, Ulysses meets the very lovely Lt. Jane McCall (Lana; nicknamed in the film as “Snapshot”), who will become his inspiration and assistant. Slowly, amidst a torrent of bickering, the couple fall in love.

  During the course of the film, ostensibly during the infamous Battle of the Bulge, “Snapshot” dies from fragments of an exploding bomb. After the war, a chastised man, Gable returns to Penny, despite confessing his love for the dead nurse.

  It seems that Ulysses and Penny will patch up their differences and live happily ever after in post-war America.

  There was no chance of Lana reviving her long-ago romance with Gable. “He had moved on, and so had I,” she told Virginia Grey.

  Unlike Lana, Grey had already resumed her own pre-war romance with Gable.

  Stripped of her usual glamor girl wardrobe, Lana, as “Snapshot,” comes across as a kind, good-hearted nurse with quiet, sincere good judgment. No longer was she interpreted by moviegoers as the murdering Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Even without her usual accessories, Lana’s beauty still shined through.

  Lana related an embarrassing incident in her memoirs: To keep her mouth fresh, she chewed gum. During one of the takes, she stashed the gum away with her tongue, moving it into the recesses of her cheek. During her heavy kissing scene, the gum came loose and wound up sticking to Gable’s false teeth. No one was amused. “From then on, I used Listerine to keep my mouth fresh,” she said.

  Lana concealed her shock about how much Gable had aged. He looked heavier, more jowly, a much older and sadder man. Somehow, for her, at least, the sexual magnetism was no longer there, although they still held onto their easy camaraderie. No longer was she a starlet in the making. Instead, she had morphed into a full-fledged box office attraction in her own right.

  Lana and Gable between takes on the set of Home-coming.

  Ever the realist, Gable was very candid about his physical appearance, confessing that he was using hemorrhoid ointment to shrink the bags under his eyes. His jowls were pulled tight behind his ears with rubber bands.

  Lana shared a reunion with John Hodiak, but by now, he was married to Anne Baxter. A few decades later, at her home in Easton, Connecticut, Baxter told author Darwin Porter, “I knew Lana still had the hots for my John (Hodiak), so I watched her like a hawk. I didn’t trust the two of them alone for a minute. She knew what John was carrying around in his pants, and I can’t blame her for wanting a rematch. But it didn’t happen. I saw to that.”

  Likewise, during the early weeks of making Homecoming, Tyrone Power (who had not yet departed on his African Good Will Tour) visited the set.

  Lana was emphatically aware that Power had had an affair with Baxter when both of them had co-starred with Gene Tierney in The Razor’s Edge (1946).

  LeRoy described the sexual intrigue on his film set like this: “Anne Baxter was keeping Lana from John Hodiak, and Lana was seeing that Tyrone Power remained off limits to Anne.”

  In one of the ironies associated with changing partners and bisexuality in Hollywood, Lana learned through LeRoy that Hodiak had stopped “servicing” Cesar Romero, Power’s longtime lover.

  Leroy selected a strong supporting cast to back up his screen duo. Lana h
ad worked with Gladys Cooper (playing Mrs. Kirby) before, as she had with Cameron Mitchell (playing Sgt. Monkevickz). Once again, Mitchell told her, “I still want to fuck you.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “Ty put a chastity belt on me while he’s away.”

  Lana met and talked with character actor Ray Collins. Although he would appear in some 75 films, he became better known on TV for playing the irascible Lt. Arthur Tragg in the long-running Perry Mason series.

  One day, his best friend, Orson Welles, came to visit him. Welles had cast Collins in Citizen Kane (1941).

  Lana later told LeRoy about her introduction to Welles in her dressing room. “After Ray left, I was alone with him. Welles put his hand up my dress and I wasn’t wearing panties. He dug in deeper, and I had one hell of a time ejecting him. I don’t know how Rita Hayworth puts up with him. He’s outrageous.”

  ***

  In the words of newspaper columnist Lee Mortimer, “Homecoming is an exhibitor’s dream and a theater patron’s paradise.”

  MGM’s publicity department billed its cast as “The Team That Generates Steam.”

  Columnist Adela Rogers St. Johns wrote, “I thought Lana Turner gave one of her greatest performances ever. I was burned because I thought she did not get enough credit. I remember a gal named Clara Bow who every once in a while used to turn a heart-twisting bit like that.”

  Wanda Hale in the New York Daily News wrote: “Clark Gable and Lana Turner take up where they left off before the war. MGM’s big money team, their screen romance followed the routine—man and girl meet, they dislike each other on first sight, they fight, they hate each other, and then they fall in love. All of which was, and still is, thrilling to those who rate such a love affair higher than the story. Gable and Turner are Gable and Turner—and that’s all their fans want.”

  New York film critics described Homecoming as one of the worst films of 1948.

  Gable’s reaction? “A bunch of snobbish faggots.”