Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

One night, when Lana didn’t return home until around ten o’clock, and had not called, she and May got into an argument. Although she’d been drinking, she fled back to her Cadillac and took off into the night.

  Both of them were staying at her house in Malibu at the time. After two hours had passed, without a call from her, and worried for her safety since she was driving drunk, he drove along the Pacific Coast Highway in an attempt to find her.

  In the meantime, she’d pulled up at a bar called “The Cottage.” After more drinks there, she’d been attracted to “a dreamy man,” a very handsome blonde-haired, blue-eyed 22-year-old. Cody Ryan was a former cowpuncher from her native state of Idaho. She was turned on by his imposing physique, and agreed to wait around for him until he got off work at 1AM.

  They left the bar together, and in her Cadillac, she followed his battered Ford to his modest apartment up the coast.

  She braked in front of his apartment house, encountering the manager in the hallway and engaging in a dialogue. He even asked Lana for her autograph.

  Meanwhile, driving along the coastal highway, frantically searching from Lana’s car from the vantage point of his own car, May spotted Lana’s convertible parked in front of the cowpuncher’s apartment building. He went inside the apartment house and knocked on the manager’s door. With no sense of discretion at all, the manager told May that Lana and Ryan were in the building’s rear apartment.

  Pounding on their door, May heard rumblings inside. Lana, in bed with Ryan, hastily grabbed only her dark glasses and wrapped her mink coat around her otherwise nude body, fleeing through his rear kitchen door to the back of the building where she made her escape.

  In one of those strange coincidences, Mildred, too, was driving by en route to Lana’s Malibu house, and she spotted Lana driving off in her highly visible Cadillac. May later told his mother-in-law what Lana had done.

  In the days that followed, the would-be actor, Cody Ryan, peddled the story of his encounter with Lana to Confidential magazine. Since Lana had left her undergarments behind in his apartment, including a pair of pink silk panties, he sold them to “a Lana Turner fetishist.”

  In the aftermath of all this, May did not return to Malibu, but drove to his ranch instead. He phoned Lana and asked her to come for the weekend. It was a rather tense reunion that ended with him asking her for a $5,000 loan, which he agreed to pay back with interest. She them gave him a check for that amount.

  Two days later, when they were driving together to Del Mar, he stopped in front of a Cadillac dealership. She didn’t want to enter the store, but May insisted. Once inside, a salesman directed her to a white Cadillac with a large red ribbon tied around it. “It’s a gift from me to you,” May told her.

  She exploded, sensing that’s why he had wanted the loan. “I already have a god damn Cadillac, and I don’t need another one,” she shouted.

  That night exploded again. She later admitted, “In the middle of a Battle Royal, we broke up our marriage. I felt used. I felt cheated. I felt stupid. Maybe I was wrong to have erupted like that.”

  In September of 1962, a reporter discovered May living at a hotel in Santa Monica, although he claimed he visited Lana two or three times a week. Within weeks, Lana was on her way to Juarez, Mexico, for a quickie divorce. She was a free woman again, and was soon on the prowl, although later, she regretted divorcing May.

  For most of her life, she remained his friend, and they often talked on the phone. Eventually, he became the mayor of Malibu.

  He met an artist named Julie, and the couple settled into a seeming happy marriage that lasted until his death in 1994.

  In the wake of his divorce, May said, “Real life can’t be lived as if it were a movie script. And husbands and wives can’t exist happily every moment of the day as though a movie camera were turned on them.”

  Lana responded, “Yes people do learn from their mistakes. But their characters never essentially change.”

  ***

  “I started fucking when I was eleven years old. All I know is I get violent headaches if I don’t fuck every day.”

  —Robert Eaton

  Long before Lana met him, Robert P. Eaton was known around Malibu as “The Stud.” Like Fred May, he was a decade younger than Lana.

  He was a close friend of a handsome, rising young star, Clint Eastwood. It was Eastwood who introduced Eaton to Lana, and they chatted for about an hour on the sundeck at a cocktail party in Malibu.

  It was around this time that he had to get rid of his competition, a young man dating Lana who had been identified with different names. Currently, he was using “Carl David.”

  At Malibu, while Lana was waiting around for a good script, David had moved in on her during one of her “extended vacations,” spending her long days sunning, swimming, and entertaining an assortment of people she didn’t really know.

  According to Lana, “After only a week or so, Carl was running my life. He began inviting his friends for drinks every afternoon at five, and the partying often lasted past midnight.”

  As she told Virginia Grey, “He wasn’t very much in the romance department.”

  After he’d known her for a while, he asked her for a loan of $6,000 so that he could invest in a business in New York City.

  David was known to Eaton, who had learned that he was a hustler, working the bored, rich women of Beverly Hills and Malibu and also making himself available to wealthy homosexuals.

  As Eaton talked to Lana, he let her know that David was not in New York, but in Palm Springs, driving around in a shiny pink Cadillac, which he claimed that Lana had bought for him.

  When David returned to Lana at Malibu, she confronted him with Eaton’s revelation. Finally, he admitted it was true. In the bedroom, he packed his clothing. At the front door, he turned and looked back at her. “You’re a pathetic old woman. Out with Lana Turner, in with Alfredo de la Vega. Thanks for the Cadillac.”

  He slammed the door and disappeared from her life forever.

  ***

  Lana had met De La Vega, a wealthy Mexican real estate tycoon, at a party at the home of Nancy and Ronald Reagan. He was known as a serial seducer of handsome young men, and in the 1980s, would become the frequent escort of First Lady Nancy Reagan when “my Ronnie is too busy.”

  Lana felt grateful to Eaton for alerting her to what David was up to. She came together with Eaton at a New Year’s Eve party to bring in 1965.

  Actually, she did more than that. As Eaton later confessed, “She took me to her home, and I didn’t leave her bedroom for the next two weeks.”

  He suggested, but didn’t actually say so, that she was so turned on by his love-making that she didn’t want to let him go.

  As she told Grey, “We made love time and time again, day after day, night after night. What stamina! At least I’ve found a man who can keep up with me in bed!”

  It was sex, not love, that drove Lana into the arms of Robert Eaton, who at the time, was known as “The Stud of Malibu.”

  She also informed Grey that “Bob is definitely marriage material.”

  Her actress friend cautioned her not to enter into another marriage, “but Lana was in love. She didn’t know much about this guy, other than he was handsome and extremely well endowed. If he had any imperfection, she told me, it was one bad eye. But he’d soon have it replaced with a glass eye, which she paid for. She didn’t really know what he did to support himself, some vague thing about being in “film production.”

  As winter gave way to spring, which blossomed into summer, Lana journeyed with Eaton to Arlington, Virginia. There, on June 22, 1965, she married her sixth husband in the home of his father, a retired U.S. Navy captain who had seen action in World War II. The service was performed by a magistrate whose Southern accent, as she remembered it, “was so thick I thought he was spitting cotton.”

  Robert Eaton and Lana snapped as they are about to enter a restaurant.

  Although he was great in bed, he squandered her money and stag
ed orgies at her home when she was absent.

  Her dress was described as “peach-colored Italian lace over China silk.” Peach-colored carnations were laced into her honey blonde hair, and she was glittering in diamonds—earrings, a necklace, and a bracelet. Eaton placed a wedding band of Florentine gold on her hand.

  She told the first reporter she met in Virginia that, “Age to me is what I feel inside. I have no fear of growing old.”

  That statement was perhaps the second-biggest fib she ever told. The first was her declaration that, “Sex doesn’t mean that much to me,” and that from a siren who had devoted much of her time in Hollywood to the pursuit of sexual conquests, even dwarfing the affairs of Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, and Joan Crawford.

  In distinct contrast to his very famous wife, Eaton was unknown to the press, and when she was asked about what he did, she said, “Bob is going to head my film production company.”

  After marrying him, she began to hear stories about her roving playboy, who was known to Clark Gable, Gene Kelly, and even to her former lover, Greg Bautzer. It was rumored that Bautzer had been the one who previously introduced Eaton to Ginger Rogers.

  Like Lana, this aging, legendary star had fallen for Eaton’s good looks and his sex appeal, and had invited him to come to live with her, where she paid all the bills. When she caught him dating other women, she had kicked him out.

  Eaton was frequently seen on the Beverly Hills Tennis Courts, where he was sometimes mistaken for Robert Wagner. Eaton announced that this was his first marriage.

  A snooping reporter for Time magazine turned up a different story. He discovered that Eaton had no record in film production. Not only that, he’d been married once before, on August 11, 1956, in Las Vegas to a 26-year-old actress, Gloria Pall, who stood six feet tall. She divorced him the following year. In court, she testified that during their short marriage, she was his sole means of support.

  Perhaps “sole” was not the right word. She also claimed that “another woman purchased a Thunderbird for him.” That other woman was later identified as the sultry French actress, Denise Darcel, who in 1949 had co-starred with Van Johnson in MGM’s Battleground.

  For their honeymoon, Lana flew Eaton to Acapulco, her favorite vacation retreat, where she’d had trysts with Tyrone Power, Howard Hughes, Fernando Lamas, Lex Barker, and where Johnny Stompanato had beaten her.

  But there was evidence that she was tiring of the Mexican resort. At the airport, she was spotted by a reporter. She told him, “I didn’t enjoy Acapulco as much this time. The party crowd down here is even wilder than the jet set.”

  After her honeymoon with Eaton, they returned to Hollywood, where she knew she’d have to support him. But she was convinced that he’d succeed as a film producer.

  In the meantime, she wanted to improve his wardrobe. She was seen taking him to exclusive men’s stores in Beverly Hills, where he was measured for tailor-made suits. The scene evoked the famous episode in Sunset Blvd., where Gloria Swanson gets a gigolo, as portrayed by William Holden, outfitted with a new wardrobe.

  Robert Eaton (left) dines out with Lana and his best friend, the emerging young actor, Clint Eastwood.

  “After meeting Clint, I wondered if I had married the wrong man,” Lana confessed.

  Lana was a millionaire now, and she could afford it, thanks to her work with Ross Hunter. “Thank God for gay men,” she said.

  She even had Eaton’s bad teeth fixed, as well as that previously mentioned glass eye, and she bought a car for him as well.

  Lana and Eaton flew to New York en route to Miami Beach for the premiere of Madame X. In Manhattan, she spoke to Howard Thompson of The New York Times. An outwardly adoring Eaton was at her side. “Love is the only security there is,” she told the reporter. “Don’t let anyone tell you different. You know something? I’ve got real roots now.” Then she leaned over to plant a kiss on Eaton’s lips.

  In Florida at the premiere, with Eaton, she made a dazzling appearance in a floor-length white mink and a gown provocatively slit up one side, where you could see “all the way to Honolulu.”

  At a post-premiere party thrown by the TV talk show host, Ed Sullivan, Lana showed up drunk.

  Madame X was a big hit on Miami Beach, no doubt because of Lana’s appearance. But when it played across America, audiences diminished. A columnist, George Bourke, claimed, “The fabled career of ‘The Sweater Girl’ is now all but over. All that remains is for the corpse to be buried.”

  However, she flew with Eaton to Italy to accept the David di Donatello Award as Best Actress in a Foreign Film for her dramatic performance in Madame X.

  In Rome, Eaton and Lana dined with his good friend, Clint Eastwood. There was talk of forming a production company, in which Eastwood and Lana would co-star.

  She also met with producer Carlo Ponti, who suggested she should co-star in an Italian movie he was producing, with Marcello Mastroianni as her leading man. That never happened. The role went to his wife, Sophia Loren.

  Back in Hollywood, recovering from a mysterious virus, she was mentioned in Variety. It was announced that she and Gregory Peck would co-star in The Stalking Moon (1969), but the role was eventually assigned to another blonde, Eva Marie Saint.

  By January of 1966, she financed the opening of a lavish new office for Eaton in the 9000 Sunset Building on Sunset Strip, the same building where her former agent, Henry Willson, had an office.

  To call attention to her new production company, she called in the press, sitting on a desk and showing off her still shapely legs for photographers. As she’d once told Grey, “The legs are the last to go.”

  Lana told Variety, “I’m hoping to audition new talent.”

  Gossips ridiculed her remark: “Lana Turner has been auditioning ‘new talent’ ever since she got off the bus from Idaho.”

  During her marriage to Eaton, Lana would make only one film, The Big Cube.

  Bored with life in Hollywood, “where nothing seems to be happening, at least for me,” Lana agreed in the autumn of 1967, to go on a good will tour of Vietnam, entertaining the homesick soldiers, many fighting a war in which they didn’t believe. She had a mishap there, seriously spraining her ankle. As she put it, “I did that by jumping from trench to trench.”

  After her return to California, after three days in Malibu, while Eaton was at the office on Sunset Strip, Mildred came to her in tears. “While you were gone, Eaton turned your home into a madhouse. Nonstop parties day and night. They began the moment you boarded the plane.”

  She called the maid, who had saved the bedsheets as evidence. Lana was aghast at the sight of lipstick smears and semen stains on her linens. Within the hour, she phoned Eaton, demanding that he leave his office and return to Malibu at once. After confronting him with the evidence, she ordered him to leave her house.

  Eastwood’s biographer, Patrick McGilligan, wrote: “Clint and Robert Eaton, Lana Turner’s husband, were running-around pals, and when she was off on location, her house was open range.”

  As members of their “tight-knit” group, he named actors Brian Keith, Jim Arness, and Chill Wills.

  But after a few days in exile, Eaton, turning on all his charm, came back into her life with great apologies for his behavior.

  When Grey asked her why she’d taken him back, she said, “The sex is that good.”

  Her reconciliation with Eaton didn’t last. There were rumors that the marriage was deteriorating when Eaton flew alone to Rome.

  When asked about that, Lana told a reporter, “Bob is going over to talk about a co-production deal with Clint Eastwood. Maybe hooking up with an Italian film company.”

  Back in California, Eaton announced that he had formed his own company, Forum Films, and that his first picture would co-star Lana Turner and Clint Eastwood.

  Although he purchased a thoroughbred for her for Christmas, the Associated Press carried the headline—LANA’S SIXTH HUSBAND MOVES OUT.

  Columnist Sheilah Graham wrote:
“Lana Turner insists there is no hope for a reconciliation with her sixth husband, Robert Eaton.

  However, by February of 1967, it was reported “Lana Turner and Robert Eaton, or so it seems, are back together again. But how long will it last this time?”

  She spoke to the press: “Bob and I are still looking for a woman’s picture, which no one seems to be making anymore. It’s a man’s world: Steve McQueen, Paul Newman. Young actresses today think that making a movie is all about showing your bosom. As for me, I look twelve years younger than my actual age. People think I’m fifty because I’ve been around for so long. I arrived in Hollywood when I was in diapers. Doris Day and I are about the same age, and she’s still playing virgins being pursued by Rock Hudson or Cary Grant.”

  ***

  Harold Robbins was one of the best-selling novelists of all time, writing more than two dozen best-sellers, including the mega-hit The Carpetbaggers (1961), selling more than 750 copies in 32 languages. He was called “as much a part of the sexual and social revolution as The Pill, Playboy, and pot.”

  He often based his characters on actual people. The main character in The Carpetbaggers was a loose composite of Howard Hughes, Harry Cohn, and Louis B Mayer.

  “Harold Robbins was an over-sexed, overpaid, hack of a novelist, and I hated him for libeling me in his novel and film, Where Love Has Gone,” Lana said.

  “Now, I’m appearing in a TV series he’s conceived. You figure.”

  In the wake of the 1958 murder of Johnny Stompanato in Lana’s home, he wrote a 1962 novel entitled Where Love Has Gone.

  Lana was horrified when she read it. She later wrote, “He had turned the worst tragedy of my life into a cheap, mean, best-selling novel based on cruel fabrications.”

  Her hatred of Robbins grew more intense when a movie, also entitled Where Love Has Gone (1964), revived the Stompanato scandal once again. Amazingly, perhaps as an “enhancement” for this dark and provocative film, its director, Edward Dmytryk, and its producer, Joseph E. Levine, even offered Lana its lead role. “We’ve disguised your identity. Instead of an actress, we’ll make you a sculptor,” Levine told her.