Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  When she’d first met Dante, she was living at the Sheraton-Universal Hotel on the Universal lot. But by the time they started seriously dating, she had moved into a large rented home in Beverly Hills—“One that befits a movie star” (her words).

  Universal urged her to start granting interviews to help promote The Survivors, as the TV series “needed a blood transfusion.”

  A reporter and photographer from Life arrived to interview her. Her picture with Dante was taken beside her swimming pool. His arms are around her, and her own arms are outstretched to the sun.

  When Lana was asked about Cheryl, she responded that her daughter was now working for Stephen Crane, her father, and doing well in the restaurant business. “She’s a very successful business woman,” Lana said.

  On another occasion, another writer showed up and found Lana dressed in “flower power” garb, an aging hippie. She told the woman reporter, “My boyfriend, Ronald Dante, has thrown out all my Jean Louis designed gowns in favor of what I’m wearing now. My dress cost twelve dollars.”

  Yet another reporter, Terry Watson, showed up on her doorstep and found her intoxicated. “I tried to interview her, but she seemed in some far and distant place. I talked to her about her leading men. She remembered Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, but didn’t seem to know who Van Heflin and John Hodiak were.”

  He decided not to publish his interview because it would be too unflattering, too contrary to the Lana Turner image. Watson said, “Lana was turned down for the role of Alexandra Del Lago in Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth. Now, she is living the part. Ronald Dante is her Chance Wayne.”

  ***

  Just who was this strange new man who had become her seventh and final husband?

  She knew little about him, only what he’d told her. He said he had been born in Singapore and that he had a doctorate in psychology. He also claimed that he’d been a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marines, and that he was thirty-nine years old.

  He did not have a doctorate; he had not served in the military. Nor was heborn in Singapore. The city of his birth was Chicago, in 1930.

  To anyone who asked, Lana referred to her new husband as “Dr. Dante,” asserting that he was writing a book on hypnotherapy. In the days that followed, Lana, with Dante, was often seen dining in one of Stephen Crane’s restaurants, where her former husband never presented her with a bill.

  She was still a faithful reader of The Hollywood Reporter, whose publisher had discovered her decades before at a soda fountain. In a gossip column appeared an item that shocked her. “Is Lana Turner’s seventh husband, Ronald Dante, the same hypnotist—real name Robert Peller—who had such a messy annulment suit against him in Florida in 1963?”

  As it turned out, her new husband was indeed Ronald Peller. In Hollywood, Florida, he had married Clair Kisie, who a few weeks later asserted in court that he had hypnotized her and taken her $20,000 in savings.

  Her request for an annulment was granted, and the judge ordered him to return the money, or whatever was left of it.

  During the first weeks of Lana’s marriage, further embarrassments emerged for Dante. He called the police and claimed that he’d been shot at six times in a parking lot by an unidentified assailant wearing an “Aussie bush hat.” He went on to assert that he’d fallen on the ground, and the bullets had shattered his wind-shield. The police diagnosed him with cuts and bruises, but without any serious injuries.

  The item made the news. When it was broadcast, a policeman was listening and wondered if this were the same Ronald Dante for whom a grand theft felony warrant had been issued the previous year in Santa Ana.

  Despite his marriage to Lana, Dante still maintained a private apartment. By a strange coincidence, Cheryl worked at one of her father’s restaurants across the street. She had been drawn to the window to see the arrival of squad cars, as four policemen, two with their guns drawn, entered his building. Within twenty minutes, Dante, handcuffed, was escorted out and hauled off for questioning. Cheryl called her mother and reported what she’d witnessed.

  As it turned out, the owner of a boat company had accused Dante of breaking into his lot at night and hauling off $18,000 worth of boats in a rented truck. He was arrested, but allowed to post $12,500 in bail. He later jumped bail and never showed up for his court date.

  To get him out of jail this time, Lana phoned Greg Bautzer, asking him to handle Dante’s case, and even posted bail for him on this second charge. Somehow, Bautzer managed to have the charges against Dante dismissed.

  ***

  In August of 1969, Taylor Pero entered her life as her secretary/personal manager. He would remain for a decade.

  Lana had been invited to appear at a fundraising benefit for children in San Francisco at the Presbyterian Hospital Auxiliary. She flew north, with a publicist for Universal, Phil Sinclair, who had organized the event. Pero and Dante went with them.

  The highlight of the evening occurred when she was to be auctioned to the highest bidder, who would be awarded with a date with her.

  At the time, it would have been impossible for her to imagine that this was the last time she’d ever see Dante.

  Herb Caen, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, reported on her check-in at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, where she was mobbed by autograph seekers. Some of her most loyal fans turned out for the event. Because she was running late for the scheduled event, she was soon back on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, getting once again into a limousine.

  She was wearing a Nolan Miller original. [He had designed her wardrobe for The Survivors.] For her appearance, he’d created a red jumpsuit over which she wore a magnificent floor-length lace vest made of the most expensive Spanish lace.

  It was estimated that she was adorned with $250,000 worth of diamonds. She told a reporter, “I sleep with my diamonds. That way, if a thief breaks in to steal them, he’ll have to steal me, too.”

  Caen would later write: “Lana Turner may look her 49 or 50 years under close scrutiny, but she’s still every inch (or every other inch) the kind of movie goddess they don’t make any more. By turn regal and petulant, demanding and generous, temperamental and cuddly.”

  At the charity event, which included a fund-raising auction, in front of an adoring public, a richly dressed young man, who looked no more than nineteen, entered the winning bid for a date with her. After the auction, she was seen “smothering him in motherly kisses.”

  Before leaving, she arranged details of their upcoming date, with the understanding that it would occur two nights later, in San Francisco.

  Then Lana, with her tuxedo-clad husband, along with Pero and Sinclair, went to Finocchio’s, the most famous female impersonator club in San Francisco. It was here that Howard Hughes had once fallen in love with a drag queen but demanded that he submit to a sex-change operation, in Mexico, before bedding her.

  As the evening wore on, Lana was surrounded by her fans and by many of the drag queens who jealously evaluated her designer outfit, her jewelry, and her furs.

  After the show, Lana wanted to continue to party, inviting her guests to a flamenco club, Casa Madrid. At one point, she put a flower in her teeth and danced a drunken flamenco in the center of the floor.

  Back at the Mark Hopkins, Sinclair agreed to go out to retrieve some submarine sandwiches. For some reason, Dante wanted to accompany him. Both men set off together in the studio limousine, whose driver had not yet been dismissed for the night.

  It grew later and later. Finally, Sinclair returned from his errand and seemed reluctant to tell her what had happened. He reported, “Dante told the driver to stop, telling him, ‘I want to get out.’ Those were his last words. I saw him hail a taxi and disappear into the night, or whatever was left of the night.”

  Lana tried to make up excuses for him, expecting him to call. By mid-morning, when he still hadn’t called, she left the suite and toured San Francisco on Pero’s arm. She phoned the hotel repeatedly during her absence, but there was no
news of Dante.

  Eventually, she and Pero flew back to Los Angeles. Arriving at her home, they each noticed that Dante’s expensive, Italian motorcycle was missing from the driveway. Inside her house, they entered the bedroom, ascertaining that all his clothing had been removed from his closet. Only empty hangars remained. In her bathroom, he’d pasted a note, written on her personal blue stationery.

  It read: “It’s obvious that you have your thing to do, and I have mine, and I have to keep on doing it.”

  It was signed “Muggs,” her nickname for him.

  Pero reminded her that she’d transferred funds to him worth $35,000 for the launch of a real estate development he’d defined as “a stack sack.” Conceived as the lowest-cost housing in the area, it was to have been constructed with walls of cement bags.

  She phoned her business manager and learned to her dismay that he’d fraudulently written checks against this deposit to fictitious people for all but $1,000 of her original deposit. Fortunately, she was able to stop payment on most of these checks, all except for one, which had been made out to “Harry Firestone” for cash.

  As Pero observed, Lana then entered one of her worst periods. She’d lost her young husband, and her fading career was battered by the dismal ratings of The Survivors.

  Her nerves shattered, she asked Pero to accompany her to Palm Springs, where her interior decorator, Vincent Patere, had made his home available to her.

  ***

  In Palm Springs, at 3AM, Pero and Lana were asleep when he was awakened by the persistent ringing of the phone. He answered to learn that it was Dante calling, insisting that he urgently needed to speak to Lana.

  Pero aroused her from her bed, and she went to the phone.

  “I was thinking about you,” came his familiar voice. “I just had to hear the sound of your voice.”

  “At three o’clock in the morning?” she asked.

  He did not explain his sudden disappearance. He went on to tell her how much he loved her and how he wanted to come back into her life. She agreed to think it over later that morning.

  Before ringing off, he asked her, “How long do you plan to be in Palm Springs?”

  She told him, “three or four nights.”

  The next morning, she told Pero and Pastere, “There was something fishy about that call.”

  She learned just how fishy when she returned three nights later to her home. Pero went into the house first. Nothing seemed out of place until they entered the bedroom.

  It had been ransacked, her locked chest of drawers forced open. One drawer had contained a box with $100,000 worth of jewelry. A thief had made off with it.

  Fearing a scandal, she never phoned the police, although both of them knew it had been Dante. That explained his phone call to her in Palm Springs. He had planned to loot her jewelry while she was away.

  In December of 1970, she was in the divorce court once again, charging Dante with embezzlement of the $35,000. She did not mention the $100,000 in stolen jewelry.

  Her attorney presented her with a document containing her signature. The document stated that she had agreed to give Dante $200,000 in case of a divorce. She felt he had tricked her into signing this document through some subterfuge.

  The judge seemed to agree with her, and dismissed the document as fake. He went on to accuse Dante of “malice, oppression, and fraud.” He was ordered to pay her $25,000, plus another $10,000 in compensatory damages. Yet she obviously had no intention of pursuing him, fearing additional scandal.

  After her divorce from Dante was granted, Lana told a reporter, “Each one has its own individual hurt. I’m not bitter. You know to love and be loved are two different things. I always believed I was being loved for myself—and not just for the image of Lana Turner. But time and time again, I have been so god damn gullible. I’m sick and tired of being gullible.”

  She told friends, “Please do not speak of my marriage No. 6 or my marriage No. 7 ever again.”

  ***

  Whatever happened to the mysterious Ronald Dante? Four years after his divorce from Lana, on November 9, 1974, the Associated Press moved a story about him across its wires.

  “Ronald Dante, the nightclub hypnotist, was found guilty in Tucson, Arizona, yesterday of attempting to contract for the murder in San Diego of the widely known hypnotist and entertainer, Michael Dean, his chief rival. In the Pima County Superior Court, a jury found Dante, 53, former husband of Lana Turner, guilty of second degree attempted murder.”

  He was sentenced to five years in prison, but served only three and a half before his release. In the 1990s, he was also tried and convicted for what was called “the greatest diploma-mill scam in U.S. history.” He was granting doctorates from Columbia State University, which did not exist. This time, he served eighteen months.

  The last that was heard of him was in the summer of 2006, when J. Henry Jones, a staff writer for the San Diego Union Tribune, found Dante living in a modest mobile home in Pauma Valley, California. At the age of 86, although he claimed that $20 million had been stolen from him, he was surviving on a Social Security check of $450 a month.

  He was making extra cash by creating artificial flowers from napkins and toilet paper. “I’m suffering from cancer,” he told Jones. “Do you know I was the last husband of Lana Turner?”

  ***

  In 1982, Taylor Pero wrote a book, Always Lana, about his decade of service to her. In it, he said, “Dante had come into her life when she was at an emotional nadir. She could have been perfectly content to let him come home and spend the night and then dismissed him. But he proved too magnetic than that. He must have charmed the pants off her, for at first she acknowledged she felt very safe and loved by Dante.”

  Without any good reason, Lana dismissed Pero after his loyal and faithful service to her. His book reflected his bitterness. “Lana Turner is the ultimate user and manipulator of people. Accordingly, she discards people, friends, and husbands alike, when she has no further use for them.”

  EPILOGUE

  A heavy smoker for decades, Lana was diagnosed with throat cancer in May of 1992. “I’m going to fight this,” she vowed and bravely carried on. She never smoked another cigarette. In February of 1993, she announced, “I’m cancer free.”

  But by July of 1994, the cancer had returned to her throat and also to her jaw and lungs. It was now hopeless for her, and she knew she had only months to live. Not able to speak, she communicated by writing notes.

  Cheryl now stood to lose her mother. In February of 1985, Stephen Crane had died of cirrhosis. He’d made millions with his restaurants, but in the last months of his life, he sank into despair and alcoholism.

  On June 29, 1995, a bulletin went out across the wire services that the legendary Lana Turner, reigning screen goddess of the 1940s, was dead of throat cancer. She was to be cremated, her ashes turned over to Cheryl. She requested that there be no funeral.

  Tributes poured in from around the world from her beloved fans, many of them aging, although she’d discovered a new fan base, based on the television revival of many of her films.

  One headline read: THE LOVE GODDESS IS DEAD.

  Comments varied, one critic defining her as “a beautiful lie.”

  Another claimed, “Born a star, dies a star.”

  Yet another stated, “She downloaded her fabulousness onto us.”

  Months before she died, she was asked how she wanted to be remembered before the memory of Old Hollywood itself grew dim for future generations.

  “I want to be known as the dame who put tinsel into Tinseltown.”

  With Respect and Admiration and Affection to the Queen of MGM

  Lana Turner

  American Movie Star

  (1921-1995)

  One reporter described her as “The timeless beauty for the ages, a woman who brought passion to the screen and lived a turbulent life to the fullest, surviving countless love affairs, broken marriages, a murder, endless tragedies, suicide attempts, a
bortions, a failing career, and the first telltale signs of aging.”

  “She survived all the disasters until the final curtain. She must have said, ‘God, enough is enough!’”

  LANA TURNER

  Hearts & Diamonds Take All

  Its Authors:

  DARWIN PORTER

  As an intense nine-year-old, Darwin Porter began meeting movie stars, TV personalities, politicians, and singers through his vivacious and attractive mother, Hazel, an eccentric but charismatic Southern girl who had lost her husband in World War II. Migrating from the Depression-ravaged valleys of western North Carolina to Miami Beach during its most ebullient heyday, Hazel became a stylist, wardrobe mistress, and personal assistant to the vaudeville comedienne Sophie Tucker, the bawdy and irrepressible “Last of the Red Hot Mamas.”

  Virtually every show-biz celebrity who visited Miami Beach paid a call on “Miss Sophie,” and Darwin as a pre-teen loosely and indulgently supervised by his mother, was regularly dazzled by the likes of Judy Garland, Dinah Shore, and Frank Sinatra.

  It was at Miss Sophie’s that he met his first political figure, who was actually an actor at the time. Between marriages, Ronald Reagan came to call on Ms. Sophie, who was his favorite singer. He was accompanied by a young blonde starlet, Marilyn Monroe.

  At the University of Miami, Darwin edited the school newspaper.

  He first met and interviewed Eleanor Roosevelt at the Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach and invited her to spend a day at the university. She accepted, much to his delight.

  After graduation, he became the Bureau Chief of The Miami Herald in Key West, Florida, where he got to take early morning walks with the former U.S. president Harry S Truman, discussing his presidency and the events that had shaped it.

  Through Truman, Darwin was introduced and later joined the staff of Senator George Smathers of Florida. His best friend was a young senator, John F. Kennedy. Through “Gorgeous George,” as Smathers was known in the Senate, Darwin got to meet Jack and Jacqueline in Palm Beach. He later wrote two books about them––The Kennedys, All the Gossip Unfit to Print, and one of his all-time bestsellers, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis––A Life Beyond Her Wildest Dreams.