Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  ***

  Among a different trio of bigtime movie stars, it was a week that began with violence and ended with violence. In this incident, in addition to Lana, the threesome also included Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner. Lana, of course, had seduced Sinatra before Gardner ever discovered his charms.

  “Frank can turn deadly on a moment’s notice,” Lana warned her friend. “Once, when I angered him, he threatened to have one of his gangster friends scar my face.”

  “I adored Ava, but she was a very strong-willed woman,” Lana said. “She didn’t take my advice about Artie Shaw, my first husband, and she went on to marry him. That marriage was a fiasco. And she didn’t take my advice about Frank and she married him, too. Another fiasco.”

  When Sinatra was on the East Coast, he’d heard rumors that Gardner had resumed her affair with Howard Hughes despite her many rejections of him. Sometimes, her interchanges with Hughes became violent. On one occasion, she threw a lamp at him, causing a concussion. Even so, he had never completely abandoned his attempts to entangle her in his web.

  “In those days, Frank had spies all over Hollywood feeding him information on Ava’s private life,” said columnist James Bacon. “Count me as one of them. I was always hoping for a scoop—nothing wrong with that.”

  When Sinatra flew back to Los Angeles, he headed immediately to a confrontation with Gardner, to whom he was married at the time. He thought he’d catch her with Hughes. Instead, he found her with her shoes off, her feet propped up on a coffee table, listening to his records.

  He quickly accused her of two-timing him with Hughes. She fought back, claiming that the aviator, who had spies of his own, had provided her with detailed evidence of his philandering with prostitutes in New York. She also admitted that it had been Hughes who had arranged for one of Sinatra’s mistresses to send her an embarrassing and incriminating letter the day before she married him.

  It was all too much for Sinatra. He’d been drinking heavily all day, and he wanted revenge on Hughes. In one of the worst rages of his life, he wrecked the living room, but didn’t physically attack Gardner.

  Then he grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniels from the bar and, with a .38 pistol in his jacket, he set out in a drunken rage to shoot Hughes. “I don’t want to wound him. I want to kill him.”

  Immediately after Sinatra stormed out of the house, Gardner phoned Hughes, urging him to fly out of town at once. The billionaire accepted that as good advice.

  Sinatra never found Hughes, and finally, at 3AM, he abandoned his search, spending the night in the home of a musician friend.

  Three weeks passed before Sinatra attempted a reconciliation with Gardner. In early October of 1952, he finally reached her on the phone. “I’m crazy for you, honey,” he said. She agreed to have dinner with him and, for two days and nights, as she related to her sister, Bappie, “We made love in every known position, even inventing a few of our own.”

  On October 18, they dined together at Chasen’s. Under the influence of a bottle of Jack Daniels, he undiplomatically raised the subject of Hughes once again. Their fight raged all that way back to the house at Pacific Palisades where they were staying. Once inside, she didn’t speak to him, as he fumed.

  She decided to take a bubble bath and was relaxing and easing her tension when all of a sudden, he barged into her bathroom, denouncing her as “nothing but a Tarheel whore.”

  She ordered him out of the house. “Okay, doll, I’ll get out. You can find me in Palm Springs. I’ll be there fucking Lana Turner.”

  “Fuck Minnie Mouse for all I care,” she answered, shouting.

  The previous week on the MGM lot, he had encountered his old flame, Lana herself. She had maintained her friendships with both members of the battling couple. “What’s up, doll?” Sinatra asked her.

  “I’m taking a week off in Palm Springs. I’m calling a realtor about a rental.”

  “Forget it,” he told her. “My place is yours. It’s available this weekend, since I’m tied up with work here in L.A.”

  “That’s wonderful, dear,” she said. “I’ll pay you what you think it’s worth.”

  “Come on, Lana,” he said. “We’re friends from way back. Come to my dressingroom. I’ll give you the key.”

  That weekend, Lana decided that she didn’t want to spend time alone in Palm Springs. Based on her recent experience with Greg Tolson and Ava Gardner, she knew that the best place to pick up a well-built young escort was at Scotty Bower’s gas station at Hollywood Boulevard at Fairfax.

  Desperate for non-judgmental male companionship, she drove her car to the gas station. The first gas jockey who approached her was good-looking enough, but she was more attracted to another well-built man, who sat on a nearby bench, seemingly waiting for a customer. He sat on that bench with his legs apart, his obvious sex appeal clearly visible—in pants far too tight.

  The negotiations that ensued were successful. Within an hour, they were naked together and inside her house, sharing a bubble bath.

  The twenty-year-old had been born in Minnesota and had served in the Marines during the war. She later defined him as, “a Guy Madison lookalike with blonde hair and a muscled body. He name was Don Johnson (not the future star of Miami Vice). He had come to Hollywood to break into the movies either as an actor or as a stage hand.

  She invited him to spend a week as her guest in Palm Springs, asking him to be her driver. It was just assumed that his additional duties would continue within in her bed.

  Feeling uneasy about spending an entire week with a strange man, she also invited her business manager and agent, Benton Cole.

  Either real or imagined, Confidential magazine, the leading scandal tabloid of its day, kept up with the indiscretions of both Lana and Ava Gardner when they were not otherwise writing about Marilyn Monroe.

  The plot began to thicken as characters moved onto the stage to play out one of the most scandalous dramas in the scandal-soaked history of Palm Springs.

  Before departing for the desert, Lana ordered her cook to prepare a large pan of fried chicken, with the intention of bringing it with them.

  Johnson, Cole and their communal hostess, Lana, arrived early enough in Palm Springs that day to enjoy an afternoon beside Sinatra’s pool.

  Thinking that she had the house entirely to herself and her guests, Lana looked forward to days of rest and recuperation as her nerves were frayed. She delighted in the beauty of bikini-clad Johnson by the pool. Cole was usually off-premises, taking care of business.

  Meanwhile, alone and fuming in Hollywood, Gardner began to stew over Sinatra’s threat to shack up with Lana over the weekend. She telephoned her sister, Bappie, announcing, “I’m gonna go to Palm Springs, where I’m gonna catch that bastard in the act.”

  One account has Bappie driving with her sister to Palm Springs; another report has her staying in Los Angeles and warning her sister not to go.

  Regardless, Gardner traveled to Palm Springs to a location near Sinatra’s house. Removing her shoes, she scampered over the six-foot chain link fence behind the Sinatra villa, even though she knew it might be infested with deadly sidewinders (rattlesnakes). The curtains of her husband’s house were drawn, but as a jealously obsessed “peeping Tom,” she tried to peek inside, hoping to catch Sinatra in a compromising position.

  One of the great scandals of Hollywood in the 1950s was what happened that weekend in Frank Sinatra’s villa in Palm Springs.

  Some of the most lurid gossip in the history of that resort was spun after Frank Sinatra barged in. What he saw erupted into a fight that prompted police intervention. They arrived with dome lights flashing.

  It was at this point that Cole exited through the Sinatra villa’s back door carrying a container of garbage. He was surprised to see Gardner, his client, lurking there and immediately invited her inside.

  Lana was startled to see her, too, explaining Sinatra’s invitation. Gardner was introduced to Johnson, and she appraised his body. Out of earshot of the yo
ung man, she whispered to Lana, “Buy me some of that, momma!”

  “I already have. From the gas station, of course.”

  “It’s gonna be a fun weekend, honey chile!” Gardner said.

  “No stranger to nudity, Gardner began shedding her clothes. “Let’s go skinny dipping like I used to do in North Carolina.”

  During this nude romp with Johnson and Lana, Gardner waved Cole away. He wisely retreated to his bedroom to read a book and to listen to Sinatra recordings.

  What happened after that only became known when Johnson later tried to hawk the details of the notorious weekend to Confidential magazine. Editors indeed published an article, but it was more or less “a vanilla account,” since the publisher, Robert Harrison, feared a libel suit.

  The hustler claimed that by 6PM, he was in bed with both Lana and Ava. “I was shocked that Ava had a lesbian streak in her. But most of the attention was focused on my best asset. They really worked me over. I was one lucky guy. Fortunately, I’ve always been known for my stamina.”

  “Later, we got out of bed and headed for Sinatra’s bar,” Johnson claimed. “All of us had had a little too much to drink, and we were feeling no pain. Cole wasn’t part of the action. He stayed more or less by himself. At one point, we got really hungry. That’s when Lana revealed that her cook had fried a mess of chicken. We headed to the kitchen. Needless to say, all three of us had almost nothing on. We finished off some chicken and two bottles of wine before heading back to the bedroom.”

  “About two hours later, Ava, Lana, and I were enjoying a daisy chain when suddenly the door was thrown open,” Johnson revealed in his report to Harrison. “I lost my hard-on…and fast. There stood Sinatra in the harsh light he’d flipped on. There was murder in those fierce eyes of his.”

  “Many stories have been published about that night, but almost no one has got it right,” Johnson continued. “I’m left out of most accounts. And Barbara Payton, that blonde actress who became a prostitute, later insisted that she was with Lana and Ava, and that she jumped out the window and ran when Sinatra barged in. Yeah, right!”

  [In her memoirs, Gardner revealed that Lana had invited a “boyfriend” to Sinatra’s house.]

  “Get out of this house, you fucking dykes!” Sinatra shouted at Ava and Lana. “And take this two-bit hustler with you!”

  “I’d heard that Sinatra always carried a gun, and I jumped out of bed and ran past the crazy fucker,” Johnson said. “I managed to escape with just a pair of jockey shorts. I was too young to die. Out on the main highway, I flagged down the first car coming. Was I in luck!”

  “A Cadillac stopped,” he said. “In the front seat sat two queens of the lisping variety. Instead of looking at my face, they eyed the bulge, and invited me to hop inside. I spent the rest of the weekend with them and emerged Monday with two suits of clothes and five hundred dollars in my pocket, plus a steady gig with them in the future. So my weekend in Palm Springs wasn’t a total disaster. At least Sinatra didn’t shoot me. By the way, I hate all his romantic mood music. I’m a Hank Williams fan.”

  With Johnson gone, Sinatra stood over Gardner, threatening to strike her. Trembling but defiant, she blurted out, “You want to fuck Lana Turner? There she is. Go at it!”

  “Are you kidding?” he answered. “I wouldn’t fuck this broken-down blonde if she were the last woman on earth.”

  In tears, Lana ran from the bedroom into the living room, where Cole waited with a coat to cover her nude body.

  At the sound of violence from the bedroom, they fled from the house. Unfortunately, Lana’s baggage remained in the master bedroom, where Sinatra and Gardner were battling.

  “Frank’s got a gun,” she warned Cole.

  Racing out into the night, they got into her car and drove to a small resort that rented villas by the week. Fortunately, one of them was available, and they made arrangements to stay there, planning to return to Frank’s house to retrieve her clothes later.

  Meanwhile, back in Sinatra’s bedroom, “with red face and blazing eyes,” he assaulted Gardner, kicking her in the rear as she darted from the bedroom into an adjoining room where she had stashed her clothing.

  “I want you out of this house…and now!” he shouted. “You fucking Tarheel dyke whore!”

  In Kitty Kelley’s biography of Sinatra, entitled His Way, Gardner was quoted as saying, “I’ll get the hell out of the house, but since this is also my house, I’m gonna take out everything that belongs to me. I started taking down pictures from the wall and Frank exploded. He grabbed everything I said was mine and hurled it outside onto the lawn. He was hysterical.”

  As the finale of his farewell to Gardner, he raced upstairs to the bathroom and filled her douche bag with water. Back out on the front lawn, he poured water from it over her. “Have a great time fucking Grace Kelly and Clark Gable in Africa, you slutty bitch.”

  [She had signed to film Mogambo (1953) with those two stars.]

  After checking into her rented villa with Cole, Lana feared for Gardner’s safety and persuaded him to drive back to Sinatra’s house with her. When they pulled up in front, they saw two police cars with dome lights flashing. Spotlights illuminated the villa.

  The front door was open, and Sinatra was tossing out Gardner’s possessions as well as Lana’s luggage.

  Lana remained inside the car as Cole identified himself and was able to retrieve Lana’s belongings. When Cole returned to the car, Lana asked him to give the policeman the address of the villa where they were staying, inviting Gardner to join them.

  To back up Johnson’s revelation about what transpired that night, an F.B.I. report released after Sinatra’s death mentioned an “unnamed young man who claimed that he had had sex in Sinatra’s house with both Ava Gardner and Lana Turner.”

  When Sinatra finally retreated into his house, bolting the door, Gardner found herself surrounded by her possessions on the front lawn. She was informed of Lana’s invitation as the policemen gathered up her belongings for transport to the villa where Lana and Cole had moved.

  Once there, Hollywood’s blonde beauty offered the sultry brunette a stiff drink—both of them needed one. Then it was off to bed for both of them. Cole slept in a motel nearby.

  “Poor Ava,” Lana recorded in her memoirs. “She was badly shaken, and after my own grim experience, I could sympathize with her humiliation. I also felt sorry for Frank. It was a bad time for him. His career had slipped badly…and he was losing Ava.”

  The next morning, headlines in the Los Angeles Times asserted SINATRA-AVA BOUDOIR ROW BUZZES. The Los Angeles Daily Mirror claimed BOUDOIR FIGHT HEADS FRANK AND AVA TO COURTS.

  Sinatra tried to reach Gardner, but she’d changed her phone number. He never found out that by now, Fernando Lamas, Lana’s discarded Latin lover, was warming her bed at night.

  Desperate to reach Gardner, Sinatra was a nervous wreck, and he often vomited. In desperation, he called Earl Wilson, his columnist friend, and begged him to print his plea for a reconciliation in the wake of the Palm Springs scandal. Wilson published the item under the headline FRANKIE READY TO SURRENDER, WANTS AVA BACK.

  Somehow, that won her over, and a reconciliation was arranged. When Lana heard about their getting back together again, she asked Cole, “How long do you think it will last?”

  “Oh, a few days, maybe weeks, perhaps months, I seriously doubt a whole year. Soon Frank will be on the stage in Las Vegas singing to his loyal fans his rendition of “The Birth of the Blues.”

  ***

  With Fernando Lamas out the door, Lana was primed for a new love affair, almost demanding it as her “divine right.”

  She surveyed the field of possible lovers. Her playing field was very large, and she was receiving offers almost daily.

  Late one afternoon, her maid called her to the phone. “Miss Turner, it’s the Ape Man. You know…Tarzan, who’s always swinging from a vine. He wants you. I wonder why?”

  ...and then, in Lana’s life, there was L
ex

  Lex Barker, also known as Tarzan and/or “The Perfect Specimen,” became the new man in Lana’s life. His most devoted fans consider him “the reincarnation of Adam created by God himself as the ideal male animal.”

  As noted in the February 7, 1949 review of Tarzan’s Magic Fountain, The New York Times wrote: “Johnny Weissmuller finally has swung down from his jungle throne after sixteen years. RKO is launching its new muscle king, Lex Barker. and score one for Mr. Barker. A younger, more streamlined ape-man with a personable grin and a torso guaranteed to make any lion cringe, he seems just what the witch-doctor ordered for this tattered series.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Tarzan, The Apeman, Swings into the Life of Lana Turner

  The Loincloth Hid His

  “Biggest, Deepest, & Darkest Secret”

  Lana found Lex Barker a male beauty, perhaps the sexiest man she’d ever met in Hollywood, all encased in a magnificent physique, an athletic, 6’4” sculpted frame.

  He never achieved his dream of becoming the leading matinee idol of the 1950s, but his magnificent body and striking physique have given him a cult following that exists even as the world moves deeper into the 21st Century. Today, gay men keep alive his memory and continue to collect pinup pictures of him, often decorating the walls of their bathrooms.

  His rival in love affairs was Fernando Lamas, hailing from Buenos Aires. Both of these hunks became embroiled in the lives of what was often called “the two most beautiful women in Hollywood: Flame-haired Arlene Dahl and the blonde goddess, Lana Turner. But whereas Dahl married both men, Lana only shacked up with Lamas before walking down the aisle with Tarzan himself.

  At the debut of the Eisenhower era in 1953, “Lex & Fernando,” although completely different types, were the two most sought after lovers in Hollywood. Women swooned over stories of their “fabulous endowments.”