By now, Lana had sold her Los Angeles home and bought a condo in nearby Century City, choosing to simplify her existence. A 1984 trip to Egypt prompted an interest in reincarnation. In 1992, Turner—always a heavy smoker—was diagnosed with throat cancer. Told that radiation treatment could prolong her life, she refused, not wanting to lose her hair. When her daughter Cheryl intervened, Turner undertook the treatment and enjoyed a remission. In 1994, when the cancer returned, she became very religious. Nevertheless, the disease sapped her strength. Lana was invited to a film festival in San Sebastian, Spain, to receive a lifetime achievement award. She marshaled all her remaining strength to make this one last public appearance; she was wheelchair-bound for much of the trek. But the enthusiasm and love from the audience was a tonic for the dying Lana.
In her final years one of her chief companions was Carmen Cruz, who attended faithfully to the star’s needs. On the night of June 25, 1995, Lana said to Carmen, “I think that soon I will go.” Several minutes later, Turner, who was lying on a sofa watching television, began to choke. A few minutes after that, she was dead. Her daughter Cheryl Crane, who had moved into the condo about a month earlier, was by her mother’s side at the end.
The horse Jadaan at the memorial to his late master, movie star Rudolph Valentino, in late 1920 Hollywood.
Courtesy of Photofest
At Lana’s request, there were no funeral services. Her remains were cremated at McCormick Mortuary in Los Angeles, and the ashes were then given to Cheryl.
Truly, Lana Turner was a unique product of Hollywood’s golden era. Once, when asked who should play her in the movies, Lana snapped, “She hasn’t been born yet.”
Rudolph Valentino
[Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaelo Pierre Philibert Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla]
May 6, 1895–August 23, 1926
Hollywood fashioned Rudolph Valentino into the “World’s Greatest Lover,” the romantic idol of the silent cinema with his slicked-back dark hair, glowering eyes, and flaring nostrils. Yet in real life, the Sheik was an elusive, simplistic individual, always involved with dominating women (one of whom gave him a symbolic slave bracelet to wear), who played upon his ambivalent sexual orientation. (It was long rumored that Valentino had had an affair with another dark, handsome screen idol, Ramón Novarro.) Being adored by millions of swooning female fans caused Valentino to become a highly paid movie icon. Being scorned by envious, sneering men, who labeled him a “pink powder puff” and dandy, led him to constantly try to prove his masculinity to others and to himself.
The brevity of Valentino’s meteoric life—he died at age 31—allowed him to end his movie career in grand style, as it is highly likely that the advent of talkies and the public’s changing taste in films would have ruined his box-office standing. His “romantic” death ensured Valentino’s status as a legend, and the mass hysteria at his funeral quickly became a high point in the annals of movie lore.
Rodolfo was born in 1895 in Castellano, in southern Italy, the middle child of a clown turned veterinarian and a French schoolteacher. When Rodolfo was 12, his father died, and the family moved to Taranto. The undisciplined youth was sent to military school; he later dropped pre-med studies to try and join the military. But such dreams were too rich for his family to afford, and eventually, he was schooled in the science of farming. Nevertheless, Rodolfo went to Paris, where he sharpened his dancing skills and toyed with the chic Bohemian set. By late 1913, his mother had grown tired of his spendthrift habits and thrown him out of her house, but she agreed to pay for his voyage to New York—steerage class.
The dreamy young man with the swarthy good looks had new realities to face in the United States. This was a new land of opportunity, but he was only a penniless immigrant. For a spell he was an assistant gardener, then a busboy, and then a petty thief. He became a society gigolo, dancing the tango with rich customers, and then performed in vaudeville and had a few East Coast film appearances. He toured with a stage musical (The Masked Marvel) that folded in Ogden, Utah. Rudolph—as he now called himself—moved on to San Francisco.
Adept at quickly making useful friends, Valentino was persuaded by a new acquaintance to try Los Angeles. Two New York friends, actors Norman Kerry and Mae Murray, helped him find work as an extra in Hollywood. When these tiny parts weren’t plentiful, he did exhibition dancing in clubs. In 1919, Valentino married actress Jean Acker, but they quickly separated and were divorced in 1922. (She later said that their marriage had been a “horrible mistake.”) Always looking for a mother figure to replace his own parent (who had died in 1919), he became friendly with the scenarist June Mathis, who promoted him for the lead role in Metro’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). The epic film finally made Valentino a star, but it also left him more temperamental and self-deluded.
Meanwhile, the exotic Russian actress Alla Nazimova chose Rudolph for her love interest in Camille (1921). During production, he came under the influence of Nazimova’s close pal, Natacha Rambova—the former Winifred Hudnut—who was the picture’s costume designer. After leaving Metro in a salary dispute, Rudolph went to Paramount Pictures, where he was given the lead in the heavily romantic (but quite absurd) The Sheik (1921). The movie was tremendously popular; so was his next role as the love-crazed bullfighter in Blood and Sand (1922).
In May 1922, Rudolph and Natacha went to Mexico to marry, not realizing that his divorce from Jean Acker was not final. Valentino was jailed for bigamy and later released on $10,000 bail. In March 1923, the couple were legally married; his dominating bride insisted on making every artistic decision for her husband. When she alienated his studio bosses, the high-profile couple embarked on a cross-country dancing tour, and he published a book of poems, Day Dreams (1924). Eventually, a compromise was reached with the angered studio and Rudolph made the popular Monsieur Beaucaire (1924).
Rudolph Valentino as The Son of the Sheik (1926).
Courtesy of JC Archives
The possessive Natacha pushed him into doing such overly arty and melodramatic screen fare as Cobra (1925). Soon afterward, she stormed off to New York. Hoping to woo her back, he built an elaborate mansion, naming it Falcon’s Lair, on Bella Drive in Los Angeles. Instead, Natacha went to Paris, where she sued him for divorce in January 1926. To bolster his manly image, he began “dating” Pola Negri, the very exotic German actress Paramount Pictures had brought to Hollywood to play temptress roles.
Now working with United Artists, Rudolph made The Eagle (1925) and The Son of the Sheik (1926). The pictures did well; his studio contract called for him to be paid $200,000 a project and to receive 25 percent of its profits. But by the time The Son of the Sheik was released in August 1926, he was unwell. When he reached New York City for publicity work for his new movie, he was very ill and suffering from severe stomach pains.
On Monday, August 16, 1926, Valentino collapsed in his Manhattan hotel suite. He was admitted to Polyclinic Hospital for a perforated ulcer, and it was then discovered that his appendix had ruptured. By the time he went into surgery, uremic poisoning had spread throughout his body. Not realizing his critical condition, the star was looking forward to taking a long fishing vacation once he recovered.
By Saturday, August 21, the matinee idol claimed to be feeling better, although that afternoon his fever rose to 104 degrees. On Monday at 3:30 A.M., he was in such pain that doctors gave him an injection of narcotics to ease the distress. Valentino still refused to admit his perilous condition. At 6:00 A.M. on Monday, August 23, when Joseph M. Schenck (the chairman of the board at United Artists) visited him, the actor said, “Don’t worry, Chief. I will be all right.” But by 6:30 A.M., he was barely conscious. Occasionally, he revived to mumble something in Italian, while outside on the streets, thousands awaited the latest bulletin about him. By now, his temperature had risen to 104.5 degrees. At about 8:30 A.M., he fell into a coma. Two priests were summoned at 10:00 A.M. to administer the last rites. At 12:10 P.M., on August 23, 1926, the 31-year-old
star expired, surrounded not by loved ones, but by three physicians and two nurses. The cause of death was given as peritonitis and septic endocarditis. His manager reported, “The psychic drain of his emotional powers [from dealing with the bad press about his masculinity and his elaborate lifestyle] had even blunted his will to live.”
In death, as in life, Valentino generated tremendous public enthusiasm. He lay in state in a bronze coffin in the Gold Room at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home in New York City. More than 80,000 mourners stood in line outside to view the deceased star. In its eagerness to see him firsthand, the crowd pressed forward, breaking a plate-glass window and tramping on floral displays. As a result, more than one hundred people were injured. The publicity-conscious Pola Negri had rushed to New York, where she said of her late, supposed fiancé, “I loved him not as one artist loves another but as a woman loves a man.” She swooned repeatedly in front of the press.
Valentino’s coffin was shipped by train to California, after a stopover in Chicago for a public viewing. A service was held in Los Angeles; the resourceful Pola Negri wore a $3,000 gown for the occasion. Rudolph’s brother Alberto announced elaborate plans for a marble memorial to glorify the actor’s resting place at Hollywood Memorial Park. While these expensive plans were being drawn up (they were never realized because of a lack of money), Rudolph was laid to rest in a crypt that June Mathis had purchased. When she died in a fire in 1927, Rudolph’s body was transferred to a more humble crypt, which her husband had purchased. Later, Alberto bought the vault from Mathis’s husband, Sylvano Balboni, to ensure that Rudolph’s burial site would remain in the family. For years afterward, on the anniversary of Valentino’s passing, an unknown woman dressed in black and carrying flowers would make a yearly pilgrimage to his final resting place.
Having earned an estimated $5 million in his lifetime, Rudolph Valentino died with more than $200,000 in debts. His studio, United Artists, was the beneficiary of his $200,000 life-insurance policy.
It is Hollywood lore that the last dwelling place of the great Valentino is haunted by his restless spirit, and by the spirit of his favored guard dog, Kahar, who died within weeks of his master.
Loretta Young
[Gretchen Michaela Young]
January 16, 1913–August 12, 2000
One of Hollywood’s great leading ladies was the glamorous Loretta Young, who had one of the longest-lived careers in show business. Others grew older with the decades, but for a long time she seemed blessed with eternal youth. From 1917, when she made her first film appearance, to 1989, when she made her last (Lady in the Corner, a made-for-TV movie), she displayed a wide variety of skills on camera, winning an Oscar and several Emmys along the way.
In middle age Loretta became increasingly religious and prim in her outlook, but as a beautiful young lady in Hollywood she had turned heads and driven many admirers frantic (including Spencer Tracy). She costarred with Clark Gable in The Call of the Wild (1935), and they had an affair that many—including the child herself in a 1994 book called Uncommon Knowledge— said resulted in the birth of a baby girl, whom Loretta “adopted.”
In 1931, Loretta’s first husband, actor Grant Withers, labeled his spouse a “steel butterfly”—a characterization whose truth she would openly display as the years wore on. Loretta demanded complete control over what she was doing, on and off the sound-stages. It seemed that if Loretta wanted something to be a certain way, then wishing and prayers would make it so—and if they failed, she would not acknowledge the discrepancy.
Nonetheless, Loretta Young provided an amazing continuity to the entertainment world throughout the twentieth century. As she matured from screen ingenue in the 1920s to hardworking leading lady in the 1930s, Oscar winner in the 1940s, and on to a new role as the queen of 1950s television, she seemed a reliable constant—always ready to put in place a new version of the ongoing Loretta Young image.
The future star was born in 1913 in Salt Lake City, Utah, the daughter of John Earl and Gladys (Royal) Young. She had two older siblings: Polly Ann (born in 1908) and Elizabeth Jane (born in 1910). In 1915, her younger brother, John Royal, would come into the world.
In 1916, Gladys Young left her husband and moved her family to Hollywood to join a married sister. She borrowed $1,000 from a Catholic bishop in Los Angeles to open up a boardinghouse and support her brood. The next year, Gladys’s brother-in-law, an assistant director at Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount Pictures), got Gretchen a bit role in The Primrose Ring. More small parts in silent movies followed. In The Sheik (1921, starring Rudolph Valentino), all four Young children had tiny roles. Mrs. Young was opposed to her children having full-time acting careers, however, and had them schooled at Ramona Convent in Alhambra, California. In 1923, Mrs. Young married Los Angeles businessman George U. Belzer. They would have one child, Georgiana.
By 1926, the two eldest Young girls, Elizabeth and Polly, had convinced their mother to let them return to moviemaking. Elizabeth Jane chose the screen name of Sally Blane. One day late in the year, Mervyn LeRoy, an assistant director at First National Pictures, phoned the Young house to inquire if Polly Ann could do retakes for a Colleen Moore vehicle, Naughty But Nice (1927). Gretchen answered the phone and stated that her sister was working on another film, but would she do? With the striking family resemblance, Gretchen was hired for $80 to do the role. Soon she was under contract to the studio at $50 a week and had a new first name, Loretta. The very next year, the lofty MGM studio borrowed her for a starring role opposite Lon Chaney in Laugh Clown Laugh (1928). She made her talkie debut in The Squall (1929), proving with her performance that she would make a good screen ingenue in the new Hollywood.
Always in charge, Loretta Young confers with production manager Gordon Griffith on the set of The Men in Her Life (1941).
Courtesy of JC Archives
Loretta made eight feature films in 1929 and nine the next year. With her expressive eyes, high cheekbones, and self-sufficient demeanor, she was a perfect leading lady for the gritty city dramas and working-class romances being churned out by First National/Warner Bros. In the whodunit The Second Floor Mystery (1930), she was cast opposite 26-year-old leading man Grant Withers and a romance bloomed on the set. On January 26, 1930, the couple eloped to Yuma, Arizona, where they were married by a justice of the peace. Loretta’s mother and the family priest wanted the union annulled, but Loretta insisted that she and Grant were “going to stay married.” But mama evidently knew best, since less than a year later, Loretta returned to her mother’s home. On September 15, 1931, she had the marriage annulled.
Single now and ambitious, Loretta focused on her career. When she was loaned to Columbia Pictures for Frank Capra’s movie A Man’s Castle (1933), she and Spencer Tracy (then separated from his wife) had an electric romance. But, as Loretta announced, “Since Spence and I are both Catholic and can never be married, we have agreed not to see each other again.”
When former Warner Bros, executive Darryl F. Zanuck formed Twentieth Century Productions, Loretta joined the new studio at $1,700 a week, appearing in such projects as House of Rothschild (1934), Clive of India (1935), and the previously mentioned The Call of the Wild. When Zanuck later merged Twentieth Century with Fox Films, Loretta was part of the deal. In Ladies in Love (1936), she was paired with handsome Tyrone Power. The costars soon fell in love in real life as well. The pleasing team was reunited for Love Is News (1937), Café Metropole (1937), and Suez (1938). In The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939), Young used her box-office clout to have her three sisters cast as her siblings in the film. Loretta’s studio contract ended that same year and she did not renew, tired of one-dimensional decorative roles in historical epics. But by leaving Fox, Loretta had alienated the studios, and now it was tough to find new screen work.
Eventually, she signed with Columbia Pictures at half her usual $150,000 fee. Thereafter, the screen veteran negotiated better deals, appearing with Alan Ladd in Paramount’s China (1943) and another movie, A
nd Now Tomorrow (1944). Secure in her screen position, Loretta remarried in 1940, this time to producer, writer, and fellow Roman Catholic Thomas H. Lewis. The couple had two sons, Christopher (born in 1944) and Peter (born in 1945). Lewis also adopted Judy, the girl Loretta had agreed to parent in 1937 in the wake of The Call of the Wild.
For her portrayal of a Swedish farm girl from Minnesota in The Farmer’s Daughter (1947), Loretta finally won an Academy Award. It revitalized her screen career. In 1949, she had a miscarriage, but returned to health in time to make Come to the Stable (1949), in which she played a nun. She was again Oscar-nominated but lost the prize. Loretta was reunited with Clark Gable in Key to the City (1950), and in 1953, she made what would be her last theatrical feature, It Happens Every Thursday.
Sensing TV’s potential, Loretta moved over to the new medium in 1953 with The Loretta Young Show (a.k.a. Letters to Loretta). The weekly anthology series, whose gimmick was Young’s sweeping entrances onstage wearing a stunning new gown every time, proved a hit and endured until 1961. (By this time, Loretta’s devout Catholicism had led her to keep the notorious “swear box” on the set. If anyone cussed on the sound-stage, the person was required to put money in the box. When the fund grew large enough, it would go to St. Anne’s Maternity-Hospital for Unmarried Mothers in Los Angeles.) In the late 1950s, Loretta and her husband decided to separate. He had been coproducer of her show, but by 1958 he had sold his interest in it and relocated to New York. (Young and Lewis would officially divorce in 1969.) A second TV series in 1961-62, The New Loretta Young Show, misfired, but her autobiography (The Things I Had to Learn) appeared in 1961 and sold well.
The Hollywood Book of Death: The Bizarre, Often Sordid, Passings of More than 125 American Movie and TV Idols Page 35