Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

By March, Lana was getting such bad press for her marital misbehaviors that she made attempts to soften the attacks by letting reporters interview her on one of the sets at MGM.

  One journalist had written, “Stuffing a black wasp-waisted gown that squeezed a good deal of Miss Turner out the top, she declared people can stop making wedding plans for her and Bob Topping because they have no plans themselves. She also denied being involved with John Alden Talbot, the wealthy Palm Beachite, whose wife has named Miss Turner in a temporary maintenance suit.”

  That was on March 5.

  On March 21, she issued a different statement, claiming “Now that The Three Musketeers is finished, Bob [Topping] and I plan to fly to New York.” She went on to announce that she was going to marry the tin plate heir and would in the future divide her time between Hollywood and the East, living in California only when making a movie.

  ***

  By mid-April, the national press was carrying stories about Lana’s upcoming marriage to Bob Topping, who was described as a “wealthy sportsman.”

  The press also revealed that the newly married couple would fly to London for the opening of his new midget auto-racing venture.

  [Midget cars (aka Speedcars), typically have four-cylinder engines, roll cages, and a very high power-to-pound ratio, usually with up to 400 horsepower and weights of only 900 pounds. They’re intended to be driven only on racetracks for short distances of no more than 25 miles at a time, at very fast and very dangerous speeds.]

  She objected to holding their wedding ceremony on the East Coast at Dunellen Hall.

  In lieu of that, Billy Wilkerson, the publisher and night club owner who had discovered Lana at a soda fountain years before, offered his luxurious home in Bel Air. As an extravagant gesture, Topping cleared out at least three florist shops, filling the Wilkerson home with gardenias, daisies, gladioli, and delphiniums.

  Lana was said to have spent $30,000 on a new wardrobe, including her wedding gown, which she described as “cocoa lace over nude satin.” The designer, Don Loper, described it more formally as “champagne Alençon lace from France over champagne satin.”

  She wore it while posing for this photo with Bob Topping.

  In addition to new suits, hats, coats, dresses, and shoes, she spent $5,000 on lingerie—panties, brassieres, and see-through nightgowns, including a half-dozen crafted from flowery chiffon—at an exclusive store in Beverly Hills.

  She chose Sara Hamilton as her maid of honor (the journalist hadn’t betrayed her yet), and Wilkerson was best man for Topping. Lana’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, was designated as the flower girl.

  On Wilkerson’s arm, Lana descended his curving stairway carrying a bouquet that contained four large white orchids. Mendelssohn’s wedding march was performed by a string band hired by Topping.

  A drunken Errol Flynn turned up with actress Anita Louise. When it came time to kiss the bride, he stuck his tongue down Lana’s throat and pinched her left nipple.

  A retired pastor, the Rev. Steward P. McLennan, officiated. Later, headlines blared: MINISTER IN LANA TURNER WEDDING FACES PRESBYTERIAN CHARGES. According to church law, he was not to officiate at the marriage ceremony of a divorced person until an entire year had passed since that person’s divorce had been concluded. In the case of Topping, his divorce from Arline Judge had just been finalized.

  The guest list at the reception that followed the Topping/Turner wedding was packed with A-list Hollywood. Greg Bautzer was invited, but Lana disapproved of him showing up with an uninvited guest, Joan Crawford. Louis B. Mayer and Eddie Mannix were there from MGM, and her director, George Sidney, also attended, as did George Jessel and Ben Cole.

  Albert (“Cubby”) Broccoli showed up. Later, he would become fabulously wealthy by adapting Ian Fleming’s James Bond “007” character to the screen.

  Unlike Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons had usually run friendly items about Lana. At the reception, Lana noticed Parson’s increasing deterioration. She was often drunk and rattled and would bring up perceived oversights in her past. “I will never forgive Clark Gable for not letting me have the scoop on his marriage to Carole Lombard.” Often, when she sat on a sofa drinking for a long time, she left a large wet spot “the size of Brazil,” according to Hopper, her arch-rival.

  At the reception, top chefs from L’Aiglon and LaRue’s opened lavish tins of Beluga caviar, served with exotic delicacies from America’s fields and streams, such as smoked salmon or roasted pheasant. Foie gras and champagne had been imported from France.

  Hedda Hopper had remained Lana’s least favorite columnist. Imagine her shock when she woke up from her honeymoon night in bed with Bob Topping to encounter the (uninvited) gossip columnist downing sausages, scrambled eggs, and caviar in the next room.

  “I’m beating Louella with the scoop,” she told Lana. “How was Bob in bed?”

  The Beverly Hills police was called out to control the crowds, who broke through the barricades to trample Wilkerson’s well-manicured gardens. It wasn’t until 3AM that the police rounded up the last of the intruders.

  By that time, Lana and her new husband had escaped to the most exclusive bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel for their honeymoon night.

  When they woke up the next morning, room service had delivered an elegant breakfast to their enclosed veranda. It was being devoured by Hedda Hopper, who had persuaded the manager to admit her to the public areas of the bungalow in advance of their emergence from the bedroom.

  Hedda desperately wanted to be the first reporter to receive an exclusive on the marriage. Lana and Topping cooperated, although she later told her new husband, “The bitch hates my guts.”

  Hopper’s first question was both insulting and provocative, “Are you just marrying Topping here for his money? Or are you on the rebound from Ty Power?”

  In her column the next morning, she criticized Lana’s “excessive dating and multiple marriages. This time she did it not for the man’s looks, but for his money.”

  The next day, Lana phoned Hopper and set up an appointment to see her at her home. When she got there, Lana protested Hopper’s continuing attacks on her over the years, and the scenario degenerated into an angry confrontation. At one point, Lana screamed at her, “Time to tell you the truth, you old bag! I detest you!”

  Hopper ordered her out of her house. The next day at MGM, Lana confessed to Eddie Mannix some of the details about what had happened. “I may be the only star in Hollywood with enough courage to tell Hopper off.”

  Mannix predicted an avalanche of critical columns, pointing out that Hopper had virtually destroyed the career of Ginger Rogers with her constant attacks.

  To everyone’s amazement, that didn’t happen for Lana. All she heard from Hopper was silence. However, that changed when Lana married Lex Barker, who Hopper “adored.”

  Her post-wedding column set off an avalanche of bad publicity, as reporters picked up the thread of Lana’s constantly changing partners or husbands. Pastors denounced her from their pulpits as a “Hollywood Jezebel.”

  When Life magazine published photos of her wedding, Lana flew into a rage. “The god damn photographer shot me at the worst angles. I look like Marjorie Main on a bad hair day, and as fat as W.C. Fields.”

  A reporter described her heavy coatings of pancake makeup, claiming that she was so nervous that her bouquet of white orchids trembled in her hands. For the next few years, she refused to cooperate with Life.

  Cheryl later wrote about the Life coverage: “Mother looked bovine, Papa Top-ping looked chinless, and I looked intense.”

  For their honeymoon, Lana and Topping sailed across the Atlantic aboard the SS Mauretania, arriving at the Port of Southampton where “the press was waiting to ambush me.” She greeted reporters in a sable furpiece and a sharkskin dress. The first question was, “Is that your real hair?” Her press coverage seemed to go downhill after that.

  Londoners had not recovered from the war, and vast parts of the city, especially the East End, la
y in ruins. Food was rationed. When Lana arrived with four large trunks of clothing, her arrival was written up as “vulgar and in bad taste,” and the Toppings were accused of flaunting their riches. Word leaked out that he’d had steaks flown in from Boston and delivered to the kitchen of the Savoy. Most of the U.K.-based journalists writing about Lana at the time were getting by on kidneys and stale mutton.

  Not only was Lana enduring a beating from the press in London, but several attacks on her appeared in America, too. “The bastards are threatening to destroy my image,” she complained to Topping. Word reached her from Eddie Mannix that the studio brass was “grooming” Ava Gardner to take over roles previously earmarked for her.

  Lana was putting on weight, some thirty pounds, and “the boys from Fleet Street” made a point of that in their unflattering coverage of her. “Why don’t they go after Rita Hayworth?” she fretted. “She’s fatter than me!”

  When she and Topping walked up Bond Street in Mayfair, many passers-by hissed at them.

  She appeared at the inauguration of Topping’s midget racing cars at the London Stadium. She was driven around the arena in an orchid-colored car, waving at fans, but generating a lot of boos. The Lord Mayor of London had agreed to introduce her. Before his address to the crowd, he whispered to her. “Tell me something I can say about you. Frankly, old girl, I’ve never heard of you.”

  The U.K. inauguration of Topping’s midget cars was a disaster. Many of them broke down on rough surfaces, the drivers’ faces pelted with cinders and small rocks. Even worse, their tires developed slits and went flat. As expected, the British press attacked, stridently defining midget car racing as “a lunatic American sport.”

  That trip to London signaled the end of Topping’s venture into midget cars. Lana remembered how, back in their hotel suite, he had to write $400,000 worth of checks, paying off his London debts and his backers in New York.

  “All in all, our honeymoon in London has been one big fiasco,” she told Top-ping. “Let’s escape to the French Riviera.”

  She was delighted to flee from England, heading for Paris. She vowed, at least temporarily, that she’d never return to London.

  In Paris, in her swanky suite at the George V, her mood improved, although Topping remained depressed because of his business failure.

  Three calls came in for her from Prince Aly Khan, but she refused all of them, even though he was an authentic prince and the world’s most famous playboy, a catch even more desirable than Porfirio Rubirosa from the Dominican Republic. Finally, on the fourth call, she accepted. He invited her to dinner.

  “Please, Mr. Khan, Your Highness,” she protested. “I’m a married woman on my honeymoon.”

  “Surely you can get away for one night. If you refuse, you’re missing out on something big. The press calls me the world’s greatest lover.”

  “Please, don’t call me again,” she said, putting down the phone.

  Within a year, he’d marry Rita Hayworth, attracting worldwide attention.

  After Paris, they were off to the Côte d’Azur, where Topping had booked suites for them at the Miramar Hotel in Cannes. Mildred and Cheryl were flown in to take over another suite.

  Lana’s spirits perked up considerably after Eddie Mannix called from MGM to inform her that Modern Screen had named her “Hollywood’s Number One Box Office Star.”

  At long last, she felt like she was on a honeymoon, enjoying the beach, dancing under the stars, lavishly dining on an exquisite cuisine, often lobster, and downing the best of French wines and champagnes. She also got to spend time with Cheryl, whom she had been neglecting.

  Topping had told her that he wanted to spend at least two months on the Mediterranean, yachting and simply enjoying life. But she was shocked one morning to learn that aboard their cruise he’d invited one of his best friends, Freddy McAvoy, a notorious international playboy. She wanted to conceal from her husband just how well she already knew McAvoy.,

  ***

  Born in Australia, Freddie McEvoy (aka “Suicide Freddie”) was Errol Flynn’s best friend. A sportsman and socialite, he was fodder for the tabloids because of his love for danger, both in his romantic, hell-raising life and in his devotion to daredevil sports.

  As a visitor to Flynn’s house on Mulholland Drive, Lana had already met the dashing racing driver, who was known for marrying heiresses. In 1940, he’d wed Beatrice Cartwright. Thirty years his senior, she was one of the heirs to the Standard Oil fortune. Although confined to a wheelchair, she had a ravenous sexual appetite and imported some of the world’s studliest studs to her home.

  McEvoy and Porfirio Rubirosa, the playboy of the Dominican Republic, were each celebrated for their “hideously large endowments.”

  When Lana met McAvoy, he was spending many evenings with Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress, in the immediate aftermath of her divorce from Cary Grant. Hutton rejected McAvoy’s proposal of marriage, but paid him $100,000 to arrange for her to meet Rubirosa, whom she eventually married, after his divorce from Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress.

  [Even though she didn’t marry McAvoy, Hutton told her friends, “He is the only man I’ve ever known who could give me an orgasm.”]

  When Tennessee Williams flew to Mexico during the shooting of the film adaptation of his play, The Night of the Iguana, he spent several evenings with Ava Gardner, who—with Richard Burton—was one of the co-stars of the movie. She told the playwright about how, during the roundelays that followed the promiscuities and marital shakedowns of Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton, “Lana got Freddie, and I got Rubi.”

  Lana’s relationship with McAvoy began the first night she met him at Flynn’s house. She was already aware that Flynn had previously installed two-way mirrors in each of his bedrooms, and that as such, they carried the risk of exposure, perhaps even to blackmailers. Based on that knowledge, she invited McEvoy to her home for further intimacies. After that, she slipped away with him whenever he visited Hollywood.

  Legendary roués at the same wedding: Errol Flynn and Freddie McEvoy (right)

  She modified Hutton’s assessment of McAvoy’s sexual prowess, claiming to Ava Gardner, “Freddie is the only man who has given me multiple orgasms.”

  During the war years, J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the F.B.I., kept both McEvoy and Errol Flynn under surveillance. When McAvoy appeared at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, he had become acquainted with the Nazi hierarchy, and he was later accused of smuggling weapons to the Nazis.

  To save Lana’s reputation, McAvoy, when Topping introduced him to Lana, pretended he’d never met her before.

  During their yachting vacation, McAvoy was the perfect gentleman and an amusing guest. But when Lana’s new husband had to abandon his yachting party and fly to Paris from Nice, Lana did not spend her first night alone. After the other guests had retired for the night, McEvoy discreetly knocked on her cabin’s door.

  Wearing one of her new see-through nightgowns, she opened it and he slipped in, leaving early the next morning. She not only found McAvoy “great company, always moving and charming, but a man with more staying power than any other man alive. I think he could go around the clock. Truly amazing.”

  Within a few years, tragedy struck McAvoy, and she was sorry when she read about it. In November of 1951, McAvoy married Claude Stephanie Filatre, a French fashion model. Off the coast of Morocco, they drowned together in a shipwreck.

  ***

  Back home in the United States, Lana settled into her life as a retired actress and the wife of Bob Topping. She was no longer a celebrated movie star, or so it seemed, but a “homebody.” She tried to fit into Topping’s lifestyle at Dunellen Hall, but felt more and more isolated.

  At the family manse in Greenwich, there was a constant round of parties, sometimes drawing as many as 150 socialites. Nearly all of the Toppings’ friends lived on inherited wealth. Often, all the bedrooms in the house were occupied, with guests sleeping in and around in various combinations, gay or straight.
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  As Topping told Lana, “Our grandfather made the money…now his offspring are spending it.”

  She could not help but notice that some of their houseguests would arrive late on Friday afternoon, and would often change partners before the end of the weekend. Bloody Marys were served en masse in the late morning, as guests tried to cure their hangovers from the night before. Most of them slept all afternoon, in anticipation of the evening’s bacchanals.

  Lana complained to her friends in Hollywood, “All these East Coast people do is eat, drink, party, and fuck all night!”

  Suddenly, Lana found herself pregnant again, although after Cheryl’s birth, doctors had warned her that—because of the Rh factor of her blood, a hereditary trait which had almost killed her first born and her, too—it would be dangerous to have more children.

  When her pregnancy reached its sixth month, doctors in New York told her, “Your child might not survive. There are complications.”

  On January 14, 1949, reporters emerging from Manhattan’s Doctors Hospital reported that Lana had suffered a miscarriage. Her baby boy had been stillborn.

  To help her recover, Topping suggested a Caribbean vacation. She later recalled, “This was the high point of my marriage. After that, our relationship was all downhill.”

  Back at the Topping manse, her spirits were enlivened when Dan and Bob Top-ping divided up their late mother’s jewelry between them. Lana was presented with several pieces of heirloom jewelry, including a diamond-encrusted watch and an exquisite pearl necklace.

  Bob seemed to be growing restless, missing out on all the changing partners and “switchhitters” that had punctuated his many house parties on Round Hill Drive.

  Without explaining what she meant, Lana, during a phone call to Linda Darnell, told her, “Some of Bob’s romantic suggestions are too erotic, too sophisticated for lil’ ol’ me.”

  What she omitted from her memoirs was a suggestion that her husband made to her one night: The inauguration of a three-way sex romp with his brother, Dan, and herself. He justified it with the assertion that, “We’ve done this before: Dan and I had many three-ways with Arline Judge.”