Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  “He was my lover—a strong, manly figure standing there in high heels and a dress. This was no joke He enjoyed this kind of thing. He was a cross-dresser.”

  He left early the next morning to report to the studio. During his absence, she discovered a secret closet and opened it to find lots of dresses, hats, négligées, and high-heeled shoes. When he returned home that night, he tried to explain his preference for drag: “I like to envision myself as a beautiful woman making love to another beautiful woman.”

  She admitted to having discovered and entered his secret closet. “I saw blouses with polka dots, dresses with polka dots, even hats with big polka dot bows. “Jeff, you’re too big for polka dots.”

  That was the last she ever saw of him.

  [Lana was dead when Esther Williams published her memoirs in 1999. She could have warned her about Chandler. At the end of the filming of The Lady Takes a Flyer, when he was sleeping over at her house, she had come home early and had gone upstairs to her bedroom. She found him trying to fit into her lingerie. He stood before her in a black négligée. He had applied a coating of lipstick.

  “Are you getting dressed for a night with Rock?” she asked. “I’m breaking our date for tonight. I’ve got a bigger offer from Chuck Connors.”

  She never saw Chandler again.]

  ***

  On screen, Chandler and Lana made a convincing pair of lovers, especially in a scene where he perches on the side of her bathtub, and in which she is indeed a bathing beauty.

  The New York Times defined The Lady Takes a Flyer as “surprisingly ingratiating,” though suggesting that the stars could have used a better script.

  In the New York Daily News, Wanda Hale found the movie “a pleasing, honest comedy. Lana Turner moves and expresses herself just right as the woman torn between being a practical mother and a sweetheart to her husband.”

  ***

  In 1955, Broadway audiences were stunned when the controversial play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, by Tennessee Williams, opened. Its stars included Ben Gazzara in the role of a repressed homosexual, Brick, playing opposite his young wife, Barbara Bel Geddes, cast as the sexually frustrated Maggie the Cat trying to maneuver and lure her husband into bed.

  Word traveled quickly to Hollywood that Williams’ play would adapt into a dynamic film, with the condition that censors weren’t so homophobic that they’d forbid any mention of “that perverted love” on the screen.

  Many actors and actresses wanted to play Brick or Maggie after MGM acquired the play’s film rights. Gazarra hoped to repeat his Broadway triumph, but he was curtly informed that an actor of more potent box office appeal was needed, instead. Bel Geddes received the same bad news.

  The moguls at MGM felt that Grace Kelly would be ideal for the female lead. But she had another idea and ran off with Prince Rainier to Monaco.

  Elizabeth Taylor’s husband, producer Mike Todd, took her to see the play on Broadway, and her eyes lit up. “I’d give my left nipple to sink my claws into Maggie the Cat.”

  At first, George Cukor was set to direct the film version. After he devised a proposal to cast Vivien Leigh as the female lead, Williams vehemently objected, claiming, “I just adored Viv in A Streetcar Named Desire, but she’s a bit long in the tooth for Maggie.”

  Cukor’s proposal for the male lead was Montgomery Clift, in reference to which he told Williams, “What could be more perfect? A closeted homosexual playing a closeted homosexual.”

  When presented with the role, Clift rejected it as “too close to home.

  Within two weeks, Cukor was ousted as the film’s director, the position going to Richard Brooks. He had recently helmed Lana in Flame and the Flesh in Italy, and thought she might be ideal as Maggie. During a phone conversation with her, he learned that she and Lex Barker had seen the play on Broadway months before their divorce. “I’d be perfect as Maggie the Cat,” Lana said, “and Lex claims he’d be the perfect Brick. He thinks as Brick in his underwear, and me in my petticoatwill generate long lines at the box office.”

  “File this under Believe It or Not,” Brooks said. “Elvis Presley went to see the play and then phoned me. HE wants to play Brick, so that he can prove to the world that he can act—and not just in the shit his manager, Col. Tom Parker, has cast him in.”

  “Can you imagine a marquee with Lana Turner and Elvis Presley starring in a Tennessee Williams play?” Lana asked. “It would be the biggest hit of the year.”

  “Perhaps,” Brooks said. “But we’d have to adjust the billing. It would have to read: ‘Elvis Presley and Lana Turner.’”

  Later that same day, Brooks learned that Marilyn Monroe had also seen the play, and she wanted to play Maggie, too. Brooks alerted MGM that both “Marilyn and Elvis want to do it. If they can, it will become the biggest hit of the 1950s.”

  But Monroe didn’t follow through, and Col. Parker called Brooks, telling him, “There’s no way in hell I’m gonna let Elvis appear in that faggot writer’s crappy play. His fans would storm the movie houses in protest. Elvis as a fag? No way!”

  The next time Brooks phoned Lana, telling her that MGM planned to cast Paul Newman as Brick. “Why don’t you let me set up a rendezvous with you guys? I’ll check out the sexual chemistry between the two of you.”

  “I can’t wait,” Lana responded.

  The next day, over lunch with Newman, Lana expressed a fear that she might be too old to play Maggie. “Of course, makeup and lighting can do wonders.”

  “You’re still beautiful and always will be,” Newman assured her. “You are a very sexy woman, perhaps the sexiest ever to grace the screen, you and Ava. What a pair”

  She leaned over the table and kissed him lightly on the lips. “Ever since I saw you in The Silver Chalice (1954), I’ve wanted to play opposite you. I think we’d make a great screen team. I’ve always regarded you as the heir apparent to those matinee idols—Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, and Robert Taylor. Of course, you’re different from them, more modern, a star of tomorrow. I predict that before the end of the 1960s, your reputation will be equal to those guys.”

  “Talk like that will make me fall in love with you,” Newman responded.

  “If you like blondes so much, I wish you’d married me instead of Joanne Woodward.”

  “But if I’d done that, I could never be myself, ever again. I’d be forever known as Mr. Lana Turner.”

  She dismissed such an idea. “You’re joking, of course. The world will be talking about Paul Newman long after Lana Turner is a forgotten memory, kept alive only by the soldiers who won World War II.”

  “I doubt that. You’re unforgettable.”

  “Of all the actors in Hollywood, you’re the one I most would want as a leading man.”

  “I’m flattered,” he said. “You were always my dream girl.”

  “And dreams do come true,” she said. “At least sometimes.”

  After lunch, driving his own car, he followed her Cadillac to a private villa that he later learned was owned by Howard Hughes. She planned to spend the weekend there and invited him for an afternoon swim, adding, “or whatever…”

  He didn’t know how the preliminaries would go, but, as he later told Brooks, “We got down to business right away. As soon as we were inside the door, she was in my arms.”

  “I think she’s desperate,” Newman said. “At one point, when we were in bed, I held her. She was trembling like a leaf. In a very plaintive voice, she said, ‘Please, don’t ever leave me.’”

  Within two weeks, Brooks phoned Lana with the devastating news that MGM had decided to cast Elizabeth Taylor instead of her as Maggie the Cat.

  ***

  Months later, Elizabeth Taylor was busy filming Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and was unable to accompany her husband, Mike Todd, on a hastily scheduled flight from California to New York. He departed from Burbank on March 2, 1958, and she would never see him again.

  His aircraft, the badly named “Lucky Liz,” crashed during a storm ove
r New Mexico.

  Taylor was distraught. She was so hysterically upset that there was speculation that she might commit suicide.

  When Lana learned through the gossip mill that Taylor might not complete the picture, she phoned Brooks: “I’m your Maggie the Cat.”

  “Not so soon,” he cautioned her. “I think Elizabeth will pull herself together and report back to work at some point. The girl is a real trouper.”

  “Perhaps,” she said. “But remember, darling, I’m only a phone call away.”

  Brooks was right. Taylor recovered and finished the movie, which became one of her all-time most memorable performances.

  Paul Newman, cast as a repressed homosexual, and Elizabeth Taylor in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

  Lana always regretted that she didn’t “get to sink my claws into the role of Maggie the Cat. At least I got Paul Newman before Taylor seduced him.”

  Even though she’d lost the lead role in Cat, Lana had not abandoned her desire to play a Tennessee Williams heroine. In her future, a role far better suited to her age and talent emerged after she popped into a Broadway theater one night for a performance of Sweet Bird of Youth.

  ***

  Lex Barker was gone from her life, and, as a divorced woman, Lana was determined to resume a role that was both comfortable and familiar to her: playing the field. As the 1950s moved to its conclusion, Marilyn Monroe had become the most talked-about blonde in Hollywood.

  Lana’s old rival, Betty Grable, was well on her way to being a forgotten face—and set of legs—of World War II.

  Carole Landis was dead, and Veronica Lake, that Peek-a-Boo Blonde, was a has-been.

  Grace Kelly had flown off to Monaco to live unhappily ever after with the prince of a principality that Katharine Hepburn had defined as “a pimple on the face of France.”

  Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren were trying unsuccessfully to move in on Monroe’s territory, terrain which she had previously “confiscated” from Lana.

  Lana was well aware of “what time it is,” as she said to Virginia Grey. “After a few summers, I’ll be forty, retirement time for most Hollywood Cinderellas.”

  She felt that men had an unfair advantage. Lex Barker, according to reports, was one of the most desirable men in Europe, sought out by starlets across the Continent. Stephen Crane, having recovered from brain surgery, was seen about town, either with Mamie Van Doren or with Terry Moore, who was alleged to have married Howard Hughes, Lana’s former lover.

  A fear of growing old and not being alluring to the new generation of handsome young men may have been the reason Lana was lured into the arms of a handsome young actor, Michael Dante. He was all of twenty-two when she launched their affair. In case her seductive powers weren’t enough to entice him, Lana promised Dante that she’d use her influence to get him movie roles.

  As director Richard Brooks said, “Lana was using a reversal of the old casting couch approach that Hollywood biggies had used for years with young women—Darryl F. Zanuck at Fox and Harry Cohn at Columbia were the best examples of that. ‘Sleep with me, baby, and I’ll get you in the movies.’”

  “Lana’s worst fear in dating Dante was that some waiter or hotel desk clerk would mistake him for her son,” said Virginia Grey.

  Hollywood biographer Edward Z. Epstein summed it up: “Handsome hangers-on have always been part of the Hollywood scene. Many clever young men, with no visible talents, travel in Hollywood’s highest circles, entertaining the lonely, vain, bored women who find excitement and diversion in them as they would with a new toy. So few of these men succeed. Most of them fade quietly into oblivion and are forgotten, as they are replaced by a newer, younger breed.”

  In spite of how it might look to some of her harshest critics, Del Armstrong claimed, “Even though she was much older than Michael Dante, Lana liked to be seen out on his arm, arriving at night clubs with him. It was like she was signaling the world, ‘I’m still young myself, still alluring, still able to capture a fresh hunk of male flesh new to the scene. After all, Joan Crawford had been pulling that stunt for years.’”

  In March of 1957, Lana invited her daughter, Cheryl, who was enrolled at Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy near Pasadena, for a weekend in Palm Desert at the Shadow Mountain Club. Other guests included Cheryl’s friend, Maggie Douglas, daughter of character actor Paul Douglas and Virginia Fields, an English star of “B movies.” Fields was the owner of the club, and it was understood that Lana’s guests, after transiting from other points across L.A., would assemble there.

  Lana showed up for the weekend with her latest boyfriend, whom Cheryl had not yet met, and as such, she was introduced to Dante. (His name had, until recently, been Ralph Vitti.)

  A strapping athlete as well as a bit part actor, he played shortstop for the Hollywood Stars baseball team.

  After the horror of the Barker scandal, still not known to the public, Cheryl wanted space between Lana and herself. As she wrote, “Newly divorced, nearly broke, her career in a slump, she was short-tempered and proud, not much fun to be with.”

  Perhaps jealous of her daughter’s youth and beauty, Lana, on the second day of what was supposed to be a recuperative weekend, confronted Cheryl. She was filled with accusations, charging the young girl with flirting with Dante, “Smiling that way, wiggling your butt, your arm slung possessively around his broad shoulders.”

  Lana was not just angry, but furious. In the most outrageous accusation she’d ever made against Cheryl, she said, “You’ve done this before, and you know just what I’m talking about.”

  When Cheryl ran away from home, it made headlines across the nation. When she was rescued, photographers were waiting at Lana’s home to capture her return.

  Looking ever so glum are (left to right) Lana, Cheryl, and her father, Stephen Crane.

  It was all too clear to Cheryl. She was being accused of flirting with Barker, leading him on, suggesting that in some way, she was responsible for his repeated rapes of her. To Cheryl, it seemed hopeless to deny any of these absurd accusations or implications. “You’re a boy-crazy slut” her mother charged.

  As time would reveal, Cheryl was not boy crazy at all. That would become clear, based on her eventual declarations about gender attractions.

  During their angry drive home, Dante and Lana were in the front seat, Cheryl in the back seat with her school chum Maggie.

  At Union Station in downtown L.A., Lana let the two girls off, with the understanding that from there, they’d board a bus for the twenty-minute continuation of their trip to their school in Pasadena.

  But after her mother’s departure with Dante, with a sense of independence and rebelliousness, Cheryl told Maggie she wanted to remain in the city, and that she should continue by bus to Pasadena without her. She had never before ventured into the seedy downtown neighborhood of Los Angeles, filled with hustlers, bums, beggars, perverts, and winos, who co-existed, densely among a coterie of respectable citizens going about their business.

  As Cheryl later revealed in her memoirs, she began to explore the area, carrying only an alligator case and $12 in her pocketbook. She had adopted Veronica Lake’s peek-a-boo hairdo. Along the way, she attracted unwanted attention. Three menacing young men followed her, perhaps for a gang rape in one of the many back alleys littered with garbage.

  She fled, but soon encountered a Chicano in his 30s who wore blue jeans and a windbreaker. He introduced himself as “Manuel” and asked if he could help her.

  To Manuel’s surprise, she got into his car, believing his promise that he’d drive her to a cheap hotel. Once inside the car, he didn’t seem to want to go anywhere, but just talked and joked with her, perhaps getting her to trust him.

  Then, instead of taking her to a fleabag hotel, he delivered her to Skid Row’s Hollenbeck Police Station. He escorted her inside the station, where she encountered other police officers who nailed her as a runaway.

  Finally, under pressure, she correctly identified herself
as Cheryl Crane.

  “My god, you’re Lana Turner’s kid”

  Unknown to Cheryl, Lana had been notified by a nun at Sacred Heart that Cheryl had not returned to the school with Maggie, and that she’d last been seen in the most dangerous part of Los Angeles.

  Based on the fear that she’d been kidnapped, bulletins had been broadcast across the city with her physical description, and instructions had been issued to the police to find and retrieve her.

  Within the hour, fighting their way through a mob of reporters and photographers, Lana, with Stephen Crane at her side, showed up at the station house to retrieve their daughter.

  The next day, a headline read: LANA TURNER’S RUNAWAY DAUGHTER CAUGHT.

  In her column, Louella Parsons publicly chastised Cheryl, praising Lana for being “a wonderful mother and strict with Cheryl.” Back at Lana’s house, Dante was waiting at the front door with a drink for her. Cheryl was ordered to her bedroom.

  But instead of going to her room, she entered Lana’s bedroom and opened a drawer in which she discovered a revolver and a bottle of Nembutal. She considered suicide as an option, preferring the sleeping pills to a violent end with a gun.

  But she finally decided against killing herself and fell asleep.

  ***

  In the mid-1950s, a young ex-Marine from Indiana arrived in New York wanting to become an actor. Like his rival, James Dean, he would morph into a major movie star, “the King of Cool,” Steve McQueen.

  [Details about McQueen’s rise to prominence and his tumultuous private life are best explored in the tell-all biography, Steve McQueen, King of Cool—Tales of a Lurid Life. Authored by Darwin Porter, it was published by Blood Moon Productions in 2009.]

  In 1956, McQueen would replace Ben Gazarra in Hatful of Rain on Broadway. But money was hard to come by, and the cash he brought in as an actor didn’t manage to pay his bills and expenses at the time.

  His chaotic finances and his turbulent path to stardom led to his meeting and getting hired as a male escort by Floyd Wilson, a pimp who had tried but failed to succeed as an actor himself. “Handsome, intelligent, with oodles of charm” (Wilson’s own appraisal), he established a high-priced escort agency that provided attractive men as escorts to rich, lonely women in and around Manhattan. His agency’s patrons included visiting Hollywood divas, who often arrived in town without a proper date. Wilson’s “Gentlemen for Rent” service flourished.