Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  “That’s different,” Lana protested. “At least both of you at one time or another had been married to her. My answer is a definite NO.”

  More and more, she was anxious to return to Hollywood to “get back into the movie business.”

  One afternoon, when she suddenly realized that the Topping fortune had its limits, that became less of a dream for her and more of a necessity.

  Topping had made a series of bad investments on the stock market, and the cost of running Dunellen Hall, with its extensive grounds and battalions of servants, had become too burdensome. The Toppings would have to sell off their land and perhaps the house itself. Topping even suggested that Lana might start making movies again “to bring in some extra loot.”

  Faced with a possibility of a comeback picture, she went on a rigid diet with the intention of losing thirty pounds. The strict cutback in her food intake made her nervous and irritable. Through her self-imposed famine, she plotted her return to the West Coast.

  Two weeks later, she packed her trunks, and he did the same, and together, they headed off to California.

  He had arranged for them to rent a 24-room Georgian style mansion on Maple-ton Drive in the perilously expensive neighborhood of Holmby Hills. Their next-door neighbors would include Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Bing Crosby, Alan Ladd, and Sonja Henie lived on the same street.

  The home required a staff whose salaries were paid by Lana. On the sprawling premises was a swimming pool, plus two tennis courts, a kennel, a greenhouse engineered for tropical plants, and a terraced garden.

  As she told Virginia Grey, “I married a millionaire, and suddenly, I find myself the breadwinner, just like I was when I was married to Stephen Crane.”

  She was spending more and more time in the library reading scripts. Topping was gone a lot, claiming, “I’m playing golf.” Often he returned home at 2AM, telling her, “I stopped off with the boys for some drinks.” It was the same pattern of deception she had experienced with Crane.

  Eddie Mannix phoned from MGM to inform her that according to the latest lists within Modern Screen, she was still the nation’s top female star.

  Late one afternoon, two policemen arrived at her doorstep, and she invited them into her living room. They looked grim when they told her that although they had recently arrested a man on an unrelated charge, it was learned from him that there was a plan afoot to kidnap Cheryl and hold her for ransom.

  Lana was horrified and phoned Greg Bautzer after the cops had left. He swung into action, hiring security guards, disguised as gardeners, to maintain a 24-hour vigil over her house.

  When word about it reached Robert Harrison, the publisher of Confidential, he ordered his writers to expose Lana’s dalliance with Billy Daniels.

  Harrison had published lurid stories about Lana before. One of them ran beneath headlines that trumpeted: WHEN LANA TURNER SHARED A LOVER WITH AVA GARDNER.

  Now, another exposé from Confidential hit the newsstands: THE NIGHT BOB TOPPING CAUGHT LANA TURNER WITH BILLY DANIELS.

  Although her private life had frequently been revealed in excruciating detail to the masses, the story brought a carload of new humiliations to Lana.

  Bautzer also rented attack dogs to patrol the grounds. Lana warned her staff not to let Cheryl out of their sight, insisting that most of the time she’d be under the direct care and attention of either Mildred or her nanny. “At all other times, she is to be strictly supervised,” Lana ordered.

  ***

  It seemed inevitable that Lana would get involved in some sort of scandal after her return to L.A. from her honeymoon in southern Europe.

  In spite of dwindling funds, Lana and Top-ping became known there for their lavish parties, on some occasions attracting more than a hundred guests.

  Frank Sinatra was a regular, and sometimes, the Bogarts dropped in from next door. Susan Hayward was a guest on occasion, as were Linda Darnell and Ava Gardner. Johnny Ray or Sammy Davis, Jr. would show up and even entertain the guests. Often, a drunken Judy Garland would sing, accompanied by Oscar Levant on the piano.

  The African-American singer, Billie Daniels, occasionally dropped in, too. Lana had heard him perform in New York in each of two different clubs along 57th Street.

  Daniels had left the Big Band scene to pursue a solo career. One night, when he arrived at one of the Toppings’ parties, he had recently recorded his signature song, a big hit entitled “That Old Black Magic” by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer.

  On this occasion, Daniels showed up with five other musicians. Topping had gone to bed shortly after midnight, but Daniels and his musicians stayed on site, making music until way into the morning.

  At around 3AM that night, Topping woke up and headed downstairs in his pajamas to look for Lana. He stumbled into the living room, where he heard noises. All the lights were out. Topping switched on the lights to discover Daniels fornicating with Lana on one of the sofas.

  Topping rushed to engage himself in a fight with Daniels, and kicked him out of the house. Returning to the living room, he socked Lana and gave her a black eye. She screamed at him, “Don’t injure my face, you bastard!”

  She immediately fled from the house and sought shelter at her mother’s apartment, where she remained for ten days. Topping phoned every day, asking her to forgive him. She did not ask him to forgive her for having sex with Daniels.

  Finally, Topping arrived at Mildred’s with more pieces of jewelry from his late mother’s heirloom collection. After examining the jewelry, she agreed to return with him to their home.

  Lana tried to explain her tryst with Daniels to Virginia Grey. “You know that ever since hooking up with Artie Shaw, I’ve had this thing for musicians.”

  She talked with several friends: Sinatra, Gardner, and Greg Bautzer. “I want to get revenge on Harrison. Hollywood stars should rise up and go after him, cripple him with lawsuits.”

  In his biography of Errol Flynn, David Brett reported that Lana eventually hired a hitman to kill the publisher of Confidential. According to the author, a marks-man was to assassinate Harrison when he went on a hunting trip.

  Details are unclear, but apparently, three shots were fired, but bounced off a large tree and never hit their mark. The hitman fled, and the publisher escaped with his life.

  No other evidence has surfaced to back up that claim, but even though it sounds unlikely, it might, indeed, have happened.

  As the columnist Sheilah Graham wrote, “In Hollywood, anything is possible, even the impossible.”

  ***

  Joan Crawford continued as a remote fixture in Lana’s life, “hovering over me like some witch on a broomstick.” [Lana’s words.] Their primary channel of communication was Greg Bautzer, although soon, there would be a newer connection too.

  Bautzer sometimes phoned Lana for “some intimate time” together, and she would slip out of her house to visit him, claiming to Topping that she was consulting him about a contractual issue with MGM.

  Yet when he wasn’t with her, Bautzer continued to seduce Hollywood beauties, including Joan Caulfield, and Merle Oberon. A new addition to his harem was the rising young actress, Marilyn Monroe.

  Occasionally, Crawford would throw a jealous fit and kick him out of her bed. After one particularly violent fight, she refused to see him for a month. But he kept calling until she relented. To welcome him back, she gave him a gift of matching “his-and-her Cadillacs.”

  Bautzer drove his new car for three weeks before crashing it into a lamppost and mailbox. The papers reported that he was not seriously injured. Some unknown blonde in the passenger seat was seen fleeing from the scene of the accident.

  Enraged, Crawford left Hollywood for a four-month stay at Manhattan’s Hampshire House. Bautzer kept calling her, trying to get back with her, but she refused.

  Crawford, in the meantime, began dating the very handsome British actor, Peter Shaw, who had already sustained an affair with Lana. Eventually, he would desert both Lana and Crawford
to marry Angela Lansbury. “This time,” he announced, “Angela is not getting stuck with a homosexual husband,” a reference to her previous husband, actor Richard Cromwell.

  Bautzer flew to New York and wooed Crawford back, at least temporarily. She had arrived at the Hampshire House with four densely packed trunks. But after Bautzer took her shopping along Fifth Avenue, especially to Saks, she left New York with eleven trunks.

  Back in Hollywood, the Crawford vs. Bautzer truce didn’t last. After he was seen dating Rita Hayworth, Crawford broke off from him yet again.

  Sheilah Graham wrote, “Crawford and Bautzer quarrel in Hollywood and make up in New York. They enjoy a lovers’ tryst in the Catskills, but have a big eruption in Malibu.”

  Crawford phoned Stephen Crane and invited him to her home. As he later claimed, “She took immediate possession of me.”

  One night, Crawford asked Crane to be her escort for a night of drinking and dancing at the Mocambo, still a number one spot in the area, especially for stars. By coincidence, Topping invited Lana that night to the same club.

  As she passed by their table, Lana was shocked to see her former husband nuzzling the neck of the grand diva, Joan Crawford. She walked on by without acknowledging them, and didn’t introduce Topping to Crane.

  Later, when Lana went to the powder room, Crawford followed her. As Lana was refreshing her makeup at a vanity table, Crawford sat down at the table beside her, “to apply more warpaint.”

  “I see that Greg Bautzer, Clark Gable, and Peter Shaw weren’t enough for you,” Lana said. “So, now it’s Stephen.”

  “I had no idea, dear, that Stephen still remained your personal property,” Crawford answered. “Before you got him, I considered him marriage material for myself, but ended up with Phillip Terry, who told me that he once fucked you. I figured it this way: If you can fuck my husband Terry, I can fuck your husband Crane.”

  “I do concede the point,” Lana answered.

  As Crawford was leaving the powder room, she looked back with a smirk at Lana: “I enjoyed attending your wedding to Topping. Let me know when you divorce him.”

  Columnist Adela Rogers St. Johns wrote that Crawford once again was back with Bautzer. At the Farmers’ Market, she removed a large pair of sunglasses, revealing “a big black shiner, a gift from Bautzer.”

  “She told me she’d broken up with Stephen Crane,” St. Johns said. “Joan liked to be treated rough, and she felt that Crane was too much a gentleman in the sack.”

  “Crane just doesn’t understand something,” Crawford said. “He told me he doesn’t go in for the rough stuff. He doesn’t get it that even a lady likes to be treated like a whore from time to time.”

  ***

  After her marriage to Bob Topping, Lana paid little attention to the affairs of Stephen Crane, even though he was the father of her daughter. She was usually not at home when he came by to visit Cheryl.

  After Columbia dropped him, Crane abandoned his hope of becoming an actor. “I was good looking, but not that good looking. Besides, the established stars had returned home from the war. Newer, younger male stars were also arriving in Hollywood daily. And many of them could act, which I could not.”

  Crane always managed to snare Hollywood beauties, not only Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth, but the French sex kitten, Corinne Calvet, and even Olga St. Juan, who was trying to become “the next Mexican spitfire,” following in the wake of the suicide of Lupe Velez.

  After drinking too much, and wandering around Hollywood for a year, he decided to launch himself into the restaurant business. He’d saved up some money from gambling, but he needed a partner. He found one in Al Mathes, a well-known gambler at the tables in Las Vegas. The ex-boxer suggested they open a restaurant called Lucy’s, across from the gated entrance to Paramount Pictures, close to RKO and Universal.

  Within weeks of its opening as a steakhouse, Lucy’s became a favorite watering hole for movie stars. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall became customers, and Judy Garland dropped in often, as did John Payne, Robert Mitchum, and John Garfield. On occasion, Peter Lawford showed up, even Nicky Hilton with Elizabeth Taylor. Regrettably, Nicky got into a serious altercation with Crane, who seemed to pay too much attention to Elizabeth.

  Frank Sinatra refused to patronize the joint, claiming that Crane “is nothing but a cheap gigolo.”

  Welcoming guests at the door, Crane turned on “my fatal male charm,” and quickly made a success of the place.

  Along came love. Lila Leeds, a budding starlet, and a Lana Turner lookalike, showed up one night. She’d styled her blonde hair and her dress as imitations of Crane’s former wife. Even columnist James Bacon noted the similarities: “She looks like Lana Turner—only cuter.”

  Coincidentally, Leeds had played a minor role in Lana’s Green Dolphin Street. She had been cast as a Eurasian who drugs the leading man and rolls him for his money.

  Crane took immediate notice of Leeds and began to date her, although the twenty-year-old was known as “Hollywood’s budding bad girl.” He soon discovered that she was addicted to marijuana, a drug unknown to most Americans at the time.

  Like Lana, Leeds, too, had been seduced by Jackie Coogan soon after she hit town. He was married at the time to Betty Grable.

  Robert Montgomery had assigned her a small role in Lady in the Lake (1947), a picture in which Lana, for a time, had been set to star. Montgomery had told Leeds, “You’re going to become the new Lana Turner.”

  One night at Lucy’s, another young starlet was “coming on too strong” with Crane. Leeds struck her, and a fight ensued, dubbed as “the battle of the blondes.” The other starlet was Marilyn Monroe.

  Lana visited Lucy’s one night with Topping. Crane had already presented Leeds with a three-carat engagement ring and a proposal of marriage. “This is Lila Leeds,” he said to Lana. “She’s going to become the stepmother of Cheryl, so you should get to know her.”

  When she met Lana, Leeds said, “Stevie here is my hunky lunky.”

  Lana reached for Topping’s arm and headed for their reserved table. “Perhaps some other time,” she said.

  At table, she turned to Topping: “This Leeds creature is merely the mock. You have the real thing.”

  ***

  On September 1, 1948, Leeds life was about to change. At Lucy’s, she had become friends with Robert Mitchum, both of them having already discovered their fondness for “weed.” She invited Mitchum to her home one night to smoke pot and to meet her female roommate. Unknown to the actors, her house had been staked out by drug agents who were planning a raid on it that night. Mitchum had walked into a trap.

  Both Leeds and Mitchum were arrested, as the newspapers revealed with blaring headlines the next morning. Each of them received a jail sentence of sixty days.

  Crane, not wanting to get drawn into the scandalous trial, made a deal with a friend to take over the administration of Lucy’s. That left him free to fly to away to Paris with his reputation intact.

  Ironically, Mitchum’s career actually got a boost from the arrest, since he was already known as one of Hollywood’s “Bad Boys.” But it ruined the budding career of Lila Leeds.

  Lana never heard of her again until she saw an item in Variety. In Chicago, in 1956, Leeds had been arrested for soliciting.

  ***

  Lana’s long suspension at MGM was lifted when she agreed to star in a melodrama, A Life of Her Own. Back on the lot, she got into an argument with its director, George Cukor, on the first day of filming. “You’ve chosen the wrong leading man. Under no circumstances can I pretend to be in love with that poker-faced Wendell Corey.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Another Divorce

  Lana Emerges as The Merry Widow

  She Becomes The Bad & The Beautiful

  To publicize her “comeback” picture, A Life of Her Own, Lana posed for this strikingly dramatic photograph. It was taken by Eric Carpenter, who was the chief photographer in MGM’s publicity department. It bec
ame Lana’s favorite photograph of herself, and she kept it prominently displayed in her living room for more than a decade.

  Lana’s return to the screen was in a black-and-white melodrama, A Life of Her Own (1950), for MGM, the story of an aspiring model who flees her small town in Kansas for the bright lights of New York to seek her fame and fortune. She finds that, but also experiences an ill-fated love affair.

  Disillusioned with her own marriage to Bob Topping, she was eager to return to the screen, fearing that her fans might desert her if she stayed away much longer.

  She and Topping now occupied separate bedrooms, and often, he didn’t come home at night. She had heard rumors that he was seeing another woman, an aspiring blonde starlet named Beverly Garland (aka Beverly Campbell). Four years younger than Lana, she had divorced her husband, Robert Campbell, and had not yet re-married.

  Ironically, Lana was shocked to learn that Garland had been cast in a minor role, identified as “Girl at a Party,” in A Life of Her Own. Previously, when Lana encountered Garland on the set at MGM, she had ignored her.

  Although the plot for her new movie was loosely inspired on the novella, The Abiding Vision, by the famous novelist Rebecca West, Lana’s film would be remarkably different in tone and texture.

  A Life of Her Own dealt with adultery, a theme which was virtually forbidden in films by those guardians of public morality, the Joseph Breen Office. After reviewing the script, the censors wrote to MGM: “It is completely unacceptable, shocking, and highly offensive with its portrayal of adultery and commercialized prostitution.”

  A revised and much toned-down revision was then submitted to the Breen censors, who came back within a week, citing the script as having “insufficient moral values.” Screenwriter Isobel Lennart was ordered to “show that adultery is wrong and that sinners must be punished.” It was recommended that Lana’s character of Lily Brannel James commit suicide before the end of the final reel.