Nevertheless, rumors of Lana sustaining an affair with Wayne made several of the gossip columns.
Before filming began, Ava Gardner sent Lana a good luck note: “I’m going to stay here in Europe, honey chile,” she wrote. “I can’t find any men in Hollywood who can go all night. Where is Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart? Of course, they’re getting long in the tooth and can’t quite cut the mustard like they used to.”
Lana boarded a plane for Hawaii, with Del Armstrong, her makeup man, and Moss Mabry, her costume designer. Leaving from San Francisco, they flew to Honolulu, where they took a smaller plane to the Kona region of the Big Island of Hawaii, where the cast and crew had already assembled.
Warners had booked accommodations for Lana in a two-room suite at the Kona Inn. She wanted the second bedroom to be assigned to Armstrong, her makeup expert, who would therefore be readily accessible for those early makeup calls.
To her distress, she discovered that the other bedroom, directly accessible through a connecting door, had been assigned, at his request, to Farrow.
His reputation as a womanizer was already familiar to her. Even before he’d met her, based entirely on her own reputation, he’d described her as “a man-hungry vixen hot to trot.” As he’d described to Wayne, “She’ll be easy pickings. I don’t plan to ever lock that connecting door between our bedrooms.”
Lana threatened to fly back to the U.S. mainland if she had to have Farrow as her “roommate.” He was soon replaced with Armstrong, as she had originally intended. He came into her suite every morning at 4:30AM to apply her makeup. What Lana had really wanted was a private villa like the one Wayne occupied with Pilar.
In the film, Lana is supposed to be engaged to Commander Napier (as portrayed by the English actor, David Farrar). After meeting the Englishman—voted the ninth most popular star in Britain—she told him, “You have Elizabeth Taylor eyes.” She was referring to their violet color.
He’d broken into films the same year she had. “I find him dashing,” she told Del Armstrong. “If I didn’t have Lex, I might make a play for him.” She was informed that he was still living with the wife he’d married in 1929.
One actor who relentlessly pursued Lana during the shoot was Lyle Bettger. She had recently seen him in the Oscar-winning film, The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). He was good looking and imbued with a strong masculine appeal, but she spurned all his sexual overtures, even though he told her, “I’m dynamite between the sheets.”
In the film, he played Chief Officer Kirchner, the villain of the piece. During are fueling stop, this pro-Nazi murdered three marooned seamen. He doesn’t tell his captain, who is later blamed by the British for the brutal deaths. Napier vows to bring Wayne to justice as a war criminal.
As Lana would later confess to Virginia Grey, “In those long, lonely nights away from that philandering husband of mine, I turned to James Arness, all six feet, seven inches of him. He’d wanted to be a pilot during the war, but was too tall.”
That was true. Arness instead served as a rifleman in the U.S. 3rd Infantry until he was severely wounded on the Italian beaches of Anzio. Of Norwegian and German ancestry, Arness was married, although that never stopped Lana.
Lana spent time off the set with Richard Davalos, cast as Naval Cadet Walter Stemme, a handsome, sensitive young man of Finnish and Spanish descent. The same year he appeared with Lana, he was cast in the role that makes him famous today, that of the older brother of James Dean in East of Eden (1955).
The Hollywood gossipy grapevine stretched all the way to the Hawaiian islands. Lana was enraged at the news she received. Rumors reached her that during her absence, Barker was dating other women, including a weekend spent in Palm Springs with Jayne Mansfield, the chief rival of Marilyn Monroe. Had word reached her that her husband was also seducing ten-year-old Cheryl, Lana would have flown back to the mainland at once.
Fuming and alone on Hawaii, she was determined to instigate what she called a “revenge fuck.” As a means of creating it, she turned not to Bettger, Davalos, or Farrow, but to one of Wayne’s best friends. James Arness had been cast as Schlieter.
“When I flirted with Jim Arness, I wondered how we’d fit together in bed,” Lana said to Grey. “I’m so short and he’s so tall. But we worked out an accommodation and what a thrill he was. Who said all actors are sissies? Incidentally, all his length wasn’t confined to his height, if you get my drift.”
The brother of fellow actor, Peter Graves, Arness was soon to become a household word, thanks to his performance as Marshal Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke, the hit TV series that ran from 1955 to 1975.
Lana’s conclusion about Arness. “In Minnesota, they grow some big boys, rearing them on corn-fed beef.”
***
Wayne had arrived on location some time in advance of the shoot, and during the interim, he had gone snorkeling. It resulted in a serious ear infection that causedhim constant pain. He was taking codeine to kill the ache, especially when his ear became so swollen that Farrow had to shoot him from one side. Often, he was in such pain, he could not remember his lines. At times, his eyes looked glazed. Off screen, Lana could be seen putting ice packs on his ear.
Tab Hunter had a dread of John Wayne, who was known for calling homosexuals “fairies.” But he liked the way Hunter was handling his role, even suggesting that he might buy out his contract with Warners and assign him to his own production company, Wayne-Fellows.
“I found Wayne a straight shooter both on and off the screen,” Hunter said. “However, he had little regard “for football jocks” and deplored “macho bullshit.”
Tab Hunter, cast as Cadet Wesser, had many chances to observe Lana and Wayne. Toward the end of the decade, this handsome, blonde-haired actor became big box office for Warners.
In a memoir, he wrote, “Sparks often fly between a leading man and a leading lady. Not so with John and Lana. I felt a layer of cool between them on screen. Wayne wasn’t like Bob Mitchum, who had that twinkle about him and was a devil with women. Wayne was more like Gary Cooper who was always very professional.”
Wayne’s biographers, Randy Roberts and James S. Olson, wrote that during filming, “Lana Turner was a deeply troubled woman whose recent years had been pock-marked by soured love affairs, migraine headaches, divorces, miscarriages, and a suicide attempt, plus problems with the IRS. She found solace by drinking herself into oblivion every night. Nursing disabling hangovers, she arrived late on the set not knowing her lines.”
When she didn’t show up for five morning calls, Farrow, the director, fired her. “Get Lauren Bacall on the phone and see if she’ll fly to Honolulu. She had wanted to do the film.”
When Wayne heard that Lana had been fired, he went to Farrow and finally persuaded him to give her a second chance.
After being humiliated by her firing, she showed up on time the following morning and for subsequent morning calls too, even though she continued to drink heavily at night. Her main concern seemed to be Barker. As she told Del Armstrong, “I wonder who he’s fucking tonight,” not realizing, of course, that it might be her underaged daughter.
Several writers had tried to fashion a script, none of which Wayne really liked. He told Lana, “Farrow took a great story and made a dime novel out of it. My role is that of an unromantic bore, just a cold, commercial guy.”
Behind the backs of Lana and Wayne, Farrow complained about them after watching the first rushes. “There is just no chemistry between them. The Duke is doped up on codeine, and Lana is drunk most of the time.”
Tab Hunter was a great fan of Lana Turner movies, and he’d later record his impression of her in a memoir: “She arrived on the floating set. She broke the ice by hunkering down in the tight space with all the rank-and-file actors. She was tiny, but every inch the radiant movie star. I was awed, just like John Garfield when he first sees her in The Postman Always Rings Twice, wearing those little white shorts and that white turban.”
“I said the stupidest thing a twen
ty-three-year-old could say: ‘I’ve been a fan of yours since I was a kid.’ She shocked hell out of me by reclining langorously across my lap, looking up at me with a teasing smile. I must have turned ten shades of red. I didn’t know what to do with my hands.”
That night, at a dinner party for cast and crew at the inn where they were staying, he found himself lured into dancing the hukilau, winning a coconut frond hat. “Impulsively, he placed a plumeria [a tropical flower akin to a frangipani] around Lana’s neck. “Her laugh was like champagne. She was sweet and funny and down to earth, and I couldn’t wait to work with her.”
Two days later, Farrow informed Hunter that his big scene with Lana had been cut. “As for Lana, I got so tongue-tied working with her that I flubbed a line, saying, “Thanks for looing my daundry.”
As shooting progressed, Hunter grew increasingly disenchanted with Farrow. “He made a big show of his conversion to Catholicism. But in spite of his marriage, he was a garden-variety lecher. He real interest during production was doting lasciviously on Lana. Farrow was creepy, with beady eyes like a pair of piss holes in the snow. I couldn’t work up any respect for him.”
Hunter went on to say that Farrow had a “lecherous quality. There was something seedy about him.”
Cameraman William Clothier claimed that Farrow “spent much of his time chasing after Lana.”
Paul Fix was a close friend of the Duke’s and observed what was going on. He said, “Lana Turner, hangover or not, was stunning. But she seemed insecure about her talent and the script. She compensated by becoming obsessed with her looks. I mean, talk about vanity in her love scenes with Duke. She said to him, ‘Don’t touch my hair,’ or ‘Don’t smudge my makeup.’”
Later, Duke complained to Fix: “How am I supposed to make love to a woman who won’t let me touch her?”
Fix claimed, “He had to make sure that when he held her, his hands didn’t go near her hair, and when he kissed her, he couldn’t make it too passionate out of fear of ruining her makeup. That’s why the love scenes in the film looked so false.”
During the final scenes of The Sea Chase, Wayne’s freighter pulls into the port at Chile, where he is welcomed as a hero by the German colony. But he learns that he is still being pursued by the Rockhampton for his alleged killing of those fishermen at that island outpost, although it was his chief officer who had committed the atrocities.
The Ergenstrasse sets said for Europe, where Wayne, as captain, devises some unrealistic plan to join anti-Nazi forces to defeat Hitler. By this time in the movie, Lana’s character of Elsa has fallen madly in love with him, and she sails from Chile back into the European war theater with a reformed Nazi at her side.
Eventually, Farrer, as Napier, catches up with the freighter and sinks it with British shells.
The film does not make it clear whether Wayne and Lana escape a watery grave. At the end, Farrar, as the narrator throughout, says, “We searched for survivors, but all that we found was a riddle of the sea. Had the ocean taken them, or had they reached a nearby shore, where the fjords of Norway could hide a secret? Who can say? There are only two people who can answer that, wherever they are. But knowing Karl Ehrlich as I did, I have an opinion.”
FADE OUT
***
During the filming of The Sea Chase, Wayne didn’t spend too much time fretting about Lana, as most of his thoughts were either on Pilar or on his ear infection. At the end of the shoot, on November 1, 1954, he would wed Pilar, his third wife, in the Hawaiian town of Kailua.
Lana was invited to the ceremony, but an hour after the shoot had finished, she left the set “in a huff,” boarding the next plane to California.
***
The Sea Chase opened to bad reviews, but was saved by the pairing of Lana and Wayne. In fact, it was among the top ten grossing films of 1955, where it was up against such competition as Oklahoma! and Mister Roberts.
The New Yorker wrote, “The novel by Andrew Geer was an exciting, straightforward bit of work. You’d never know that from this cinematic interpretation.”
A critic found the pairing of Lana with Wayne “the strangest casting of the year. John Wayne, that All-American hunk of man, is a German sea captain, and Lana Turner, that All-American hunk of woman, is a Nazi secret agent.”
Lee Rogow, writing in The Saturday Review, said, “Miss Turner boarded the Ergenstrasse with a cruise wardrobe that would have all lady spies in town asking their governments for more charge accounts.”
Bosley Crowther in The New York Times called The Sea Chase “a conventionally heroic and ideologically silly sea romance. Wayne plays it like he’s herding a herd of cattle up the old Chisholm Trail. Farrow and his writers have turned the MataHari of Geer’s yarn into a stiff-necked, mink-clad female spoil sport whose singular presence among all the men is about as exciting as would be that of an albatross. As played by Lana Turner, she is a gaudy but very dull bird. To see Miss Turner in oilskins—that’s the end of the rope.”
***
After her completion of The Sea Chase, Lana, with Lex Barker, flew to Acapulco, their favorite retreat in Mexico. For years, she’d rented a small cottage on the grounds of Villa Vera, owned by the former bandleader, Teddy Stauffer. His former wife, Hedy Lamarr, had long gone. The villa had been the scene for some of Lana’s trysts with Howard Hughes.
Barker, too, had developed a fondness for the resort, enough so that he and Lana decided to buy a strip of land that opened onto the water and a good, sandy beach.
She was overly committed financially, with bills piling up and thousands still owed to the IRS. To pay for the land, she asked her jeweler in Beverly Hills to sell the marquise diamond that Bob Topping had dropped into her martini in a Manhattan nightclub when he’d proposed to her. The sale of the ring was enough to purchase the beautiful strip of land where they planned to erect a “love cottage.”
During his time at the resort, Barker also purchased an adorable little German Shepherd puppy which he named “Pulco.” Lana didn’t really want to return home with this dog, but Barker insisted. “It was love at first sight between Pulco and Lex,” she said.
Back at the villa, Barker always paraded around in the nude, evoking the lifestyle (and exhibitionism) of Fernando Lamas. She found this disconcerting, because she was certain that the two Mexican houseboys hired by Stauffer were gay. “They seemed to devour Lex with their eyes,” she said. “I came to realize that Lex was an exhibitionist.”
One afternoon, when Barker went on a fishing trip with Stauffer, she stayed behind. Her friend and former agent, Henry Willson, had arrived in Mexico with one of his latest beefcake discoveries. Lana invited him over “for a girl-to-girl talk.”
Since Willson had already undressed Barker on that long-ago night of her first date with him, she felt that she could talk candidly with him. She shared her concerns about Barker, suggesting that if Sol Lesser had asked him to, Barker would have cheerfully appeared in those Tarzan films without the loincloth.
Willson had seen the two Mexican houseboys, and, using his gay radar, he told her that both of them were definitely homosexual.
“Lex lies nude around the pool, and the boys always find some reason to cluster around him. As you know, he’s very well hung, but he seems to fluff himself up around these boys, much to their delight. Actually, I think those kids are in love with Lex. They’d be his slave if asked.”
She also revealed that Barker was very oral, and he wanted her to reciprocate “in ways that I’m not prepared to do.”
“In other words, a tongue on his rosebud,” Willson said.
“Is that what you gay guys call it? I think that’s repulsive.”
“Actually, it’s quite enjoyable,” Willson responded. “I demand it from my stable of actors.”
Then, she shared her suspicions that whenever she was away from the villa, Barker got the boys to service him—“doing things I won’t do.”
“Well, dear one,” Willson said. “Men from Rock Hudson to Guy Mad
ison will be men. You can’t trust them out of your sight.”
“What should I do?” she lamented.
“Nothing. If someone has to do the dirty deed for Lex, just be grateful it’s not you. Let’s face it: You just don’t know what a great sexual thrill that is for some people, even certain women.”
“You mean, whores?” she asked.
“You’d be surprised how many ladies become whores in bed, or so I’ve heard.”
“You were seen around town with Margaret Truman some time back. Was that a torrid affair?”
“Oh, please!” I just took her out. Perhaps she was in love with me, I don’t know. The point is, I’m not in love with her…or with any woman, except you, my love. I positively adore you, but from a safe distance, of course.”
***
[In her memoirs, Lana recalled Pulco growing up, turning from an adorable little puppy into a ferocious, 75-pound dog who seemed to want to charge anyone who came onto the property. After he attacked the postman, he sued for damages.
“Pulco is starry-eyed whenever Lex pulls into the driveway,” Lana told Mildred. “He runs to his car and collapses in his arms. Let anyone else come around, and Pulco becomes vicious. He will attack if not restrained.”
The dog was allowed to roam the property, which was encircled with stone walls and chain-link fences. Their neighbors at the time were Judy Garland and Sid Luft, living in their house with Liza Minnelli, Judy’s daughter.
Cheryl and Liza became playmates. But one afternoon, young Liza crawled over the stone wall that separated the two properties.
The young girl fell a few feet onto Lana’s grounds. Pulco, with fangs bared, darted toward her, tearing into the flesh of her right leg.
In her kitchen, Lana heard the screams and rushed out the door to keep Pulco from devouring Liza.
Garland, in her bedroom upstairs, with the windows opened, had heard her daughter scream. She made her way downstairs and through the gate adjoining the two properties.
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