Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  Her look, her taste, her fashion accessories, and her style were subsequently imitated by young women across America, many of them working in defense plants.

  She was not a mad egotist like Hedy Lamarr, who she considered more beautiful than she was.

  She told the press, “Jobs are landed in Hollywood through brains, ability, beauty, talent, hard work, or through a combination of features that stack up to a photogenic accident. I was one of the photogenic accidents.”

  Mervin LeRoy, the director who had discovered her, relinquished his personal contract with her to Louis B. Mayer at MGM. Thus, the way was paved for her to become the undisputed Queen of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She would sit on that throne for eighteen years.

  ***

  Following her divorce from Artie Shaw, and before her second marriage to Stephen Crane, Lana was plunged into the most promiscuous and randomly romantic period of her life.

  SMITTEN, this serviceman is, as were thousands of his counterparts, with the spontaneous charm of lovely Lana, at a Navy party in 1940.

  Chapter Seven

  Lana Romances

  Dr. Jekyll, Rhett Butler, Bugsy Siegel, & a Galaxy of Other Celebrities

  The Luscious Blonde Makes Music with The Boys in the Band

  Years later, Lana recalled the first time she walked onto the set of the 1941 film, Honky Tonk, her first really big starring role. In it, she’d appear with Clark Gable, The King of Hollywood.

  “I was intimidated, knowing that I would be the latest in a stream of his leading ladies who had already included Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Mary Astor, Joan Crawford, Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy, Vivien Leigh, Hedy Lamarr, Loretta Young, Norma Shearer, Helen Hayes, Claudette Colbert, Rosalind Russell, and Jeanette MacDonald.”

  Salesman, lumberjack, truck driver, telephone repairman, and newspaper reporter, Gable, a native of Cadiz, Ohio, became a bigtime movie idol in spite of his large ears. Jack Warner looked at one of his early screen tests and said, “Those ears will doom his career as a leading man.” In another test, his physique was defined as “not impressive enough to play Tarzan.”

  Gable, of course, was one of the major seducers of Hollywood, estimated to have “conquered” some of MGM’s biggest stars plus hundreds of starlets or women in other professions, such as carhops.

  Before Lana Turner started wildly dating almost a new man every night, Artie Shaw came back into her life. He was pleased that during their divorce, she had not asked for alimony.

  At the peak of her fame in the early 1940s, Lana reigned supreme as the cover girl of movie magazines. In one month alone, her glamorous picure appeared on the covers of eighteen magazines.

  It was Christmas Eve, 1940. After an exhausting road trip, he had returned to the home they had shared on Summit Hill in Brentwood. He turned the key in the front door, entered his living room and turned on the lights. To his amazement, a Christmas tree positioned in the center of the room was suddenly illuminated. Presents had been positioned around the base of the tree.

  Then, as if in a dream, a seductive Lana emerged from behind the sofa, wearing a sexy black lace négligée. “Merry Christmas, darling,” she said, even though he was Jewish.

  “What a surprise,” he said. “I’m worn out, but you’ve inspired me to new life.”

  She’d ordered a champagne dinner, which arrived at ten o’clock. That was followed by a night of lovemaking.

  He awakened at 11AM on Christmas morning, completely exhausted, but satisfied. “What a hot damn homecoming that was!”

  Over a late breakfast, she proposed a remarriage. “Let’s get back together. I’ve missed you.”

  “I’ve missed my blonde goddess. Let’s think about it.”

  Remarrying was not a decision that either of them wanted to rush. In the coming months, they saw each other only sporadically. There was no more talk about it. Eventually, plans to remarry were abandoned, buried as each of them were by heavy dating schedules, especially Lana. “Artie and I became friends,” she said. “Even the rolls in the hay stopped.”

  “There was a time I actually did consider remarrying her,” Shaw said. “But there was something preventing that. I couldn’t stand the thought of her one hundred pairs of shoes crowding me out of my closets.”

  There was another, even more serious reason. Before her 21st birthday, Lana went on a nymphomaniacal rampage, dating almost every handsome hunk who caught her eye.

  She shared the most intimate details of her adventures with Virginia Grey, who became intrigued with the graphic descriptions. In distinct contrast, Shaw himself never really wanted to hear about them.

  “Yet she filled me in whether I liked it or not,” he said. “Perhaps she was showing off, letting me know she could get on very well without me. She’d phone and say, ‘Guess who I did last night?’ She would then transmit the most intimate details of her latest conquest, even his penile measurements. She must have kept a ruler under her pillow. Virginia was much more intrigued by all these physical descriptions than I was. Frankly, I’m not turned on by men and could care less about their love-making techniques or their pillow talk.”

  “Without meaning to, I may have aided her conquests in an indirect way,” Shaw continued. “In those days, I went to a lot of movies. When we talked about them, I often mentioned an actor who I thought was going to get hot in films.”

  “Some of these guys were just making their debut in films. Others had been kicking around Hollywood for a while in the 1930s, but were suddenly becoming box office draws now that the former male stars had been shipped off to the Pacific or wherever. Guys like Sterling Hayden come to mind. Perhaps ‘come’ is the wrong word. Within a week or so after talking about an actor, I’d get a call from Lana.”

  “We did it,” she’d say.

  “’Did it!’ was the way she described intercourse. Then I’d hear a play-by-play description of her conquest. Many times, she never had these guys after their one-night stand. She was too busy in most cases for repeats. Of course, some of her lovers were already married. A few also had boyfriends—that’s pretty common in Hollywood.”

  ***

  Lana’s radically renegotiated MGM contract called for an increase in her salary to $1,500 a week. “I was on my way to being a big star. At that time, my salary was a heady sum for a twenty-year-old.”

  In her next three pictures, she would be co-starring with the three biggest box office attractions at MGM. Those stars, in descending order of the profits they generated at the box office, included Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, and Robert Taylor.

  To millions of her male admirers, she was acclaimed as “The Most Desirable Woman in the World.” Her star power not only extended to her roles at MGM, but to her private life, too. “Unless the guy was a homosexual, I could have virtually any man I wanted in Hollywood.”

  “Even if he’s married?” asked Grey.

  “Especially if he’s married,” Lana boasted.

  During the opening months of America’s involvement in World War II, Lana’s fame grew monthly to the point where she eventually evolved into the unofficial “Sweetheart of the Navy.” And although marines and soldiers in the Army dug her, too, she remained a special favorite with sailors throughout the duration of the war and for years after it ended.

  Life magazine published a poll of sailors aboard the S.S. Idaho, and Lana emerged the clear favorite. Minor votes were cast for runners-up Betty Grable, Carole Landis, Rita Hayworth, and Dorothy Lamour. Hedy Lamarr also garnered numerous votes, although the men seemed to prefer actresses with larger busts.

  Based on her new status as “The Queen of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,” Lana, along with Mildred, moved into a movie star mansion in Beverly Hills. For the first time in her life, she hired a staff of servants, including a housekeeper and a cook. As Shaw claimed, “Lana was spending every cent of her weekly paycheck.”

  ***

  At the beginning of the 1940s, Lana entered a romantic period of her life that daughter Cheryl Crane later cal
led “The Boys in the Band.” She’d met dozens of musicians through her link to Artie Shaw.

  Her favorite—“and the best looking and the best lover” (her words)—was Gene Krupa. The ninth son of Polish parents, Krupa had been born in Chicago and was thirteen years older than Lana. Although a hell-raising, drug-taking musician, composer, and bandleader, he was originally reared for the priesthood.

  He’d been playing drums since the 1920s. By December of 1934, he was a member of Benny Goodman’s band. During his time there, he became famous across the country. “No one could beat the drums like Gene,” Lana said.

  During the time she dated him, he invited her to the set of Ball of Fire (1941), starring Barbara Stanwyck, the wife of Robert Taylor. Stanwyck didn’t seem to want to have anything to do with her—“and I hadn’t even met her husband,” Lana protested.

  Stanwyck’s co-star was Gary Cooper. “I really don’t think he even remembered having an affair with me,” Lana said. “Imagine forgetting that you went to bed with Lana Turner! Of course, I was a bit young in those days.”

  Lana had a fling with sweat-soaked Gene Krupa in the 1940s. She had nothing but praise for his “boudoir antics. He pounded a woman like his tom-tom, even when he was high on what he called weed.”

  When Lana met Krupa, he was working with Glenn Miller’s swing band. Howard Hawks had cast Krupa in Ball of Fire. He performed an extended version of “Drum Boogie,” a number that Stanwyck, cast as a burlesque dancer, pretended to sing, her voice dubbed by “the songbird,” Martha Tilton.

  While Krupa was beating his drums on camera, Lana wandered off with actor Dana Andrews, who had the fourth lead in Ball of Fire. After studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse, he was just breaking into films, having earned his living as a gas station attendant. When she met him, he had just appeared in Tobacco Road, based on that controversial Erskine Caldwell novel. In Ball of Fire, he played the villain be-mused by Cooper’s timidity.

  Andrews looked very masculine, solid, and reliable, giving off a virility that seemed in some ways uninspired. Nevertheless, after the sometimes overly energetic Krupa, she was drawn to Andrews’ masculinity.

  At one point during their dialogues, he asked for her phone number, and she gave it to him. “It can’t be tonight,” she said. “I’m involved with Gene.”

  “I can see that,” he said. “But that’s subject to change.”

  She soon discovered that Krupa was heavily addicted to drugs and always seemed stoned on marijuana, even though it didn’t seem to harm his musical performances.

  During her brief marriage to Shaw, she came to believe that all musicians smoked pot. “Artie wasn’t an addict, but no day went by when he didn’t have a smoke or two. When Artie and the boys in his band got together, everyone was always going up in smoke.”

  Their romance ended long before Krupa was arrested in 1943 for possession of marijuana. His habits contributed to the breakup of his own band, and he later rejoined Benny Goodman’s Music Makers.

  ***

  It was through Krupa that Lana met a future lover, Benny Goodman. Another son of Chicago, Goodman was a clarinet player like Artie Shaw, and both musicians vied for the title of “The King of Swing.”

  Goodman was the ninth of a dozen siblings born to Russian Jewish immigrants. He was a boy—not even a teenager—when he made his professional debut during the early 1920s in Chicago, a city addicted to jazz at the time.

  “I will always say this about Benny Goodman,” Lana said. “He knew how to use his mouth in bed with a woman, perhaps from years of holding that mouthpiece between his front teeth and his lower lip.”

  One night on a date with Goodman, Lana was introduced to trumpeter Harry James, who had “a thing for blondes,” and even married one, Betty Grable. “He made a pass at me, but I didn’t receive it,” Lana said.

  “I loved dancing to Benny’s music,” she said, “especially the bebop and the cool jazz that America was listening to as it went to war. I think he was a greater clarinet player than Artie, but don’t tell my former husband I have that view.”

  “He was a smooth lover in bed,” she told Grey. She never admitted to Shaw that she was having an affair with his chief rival.

  Lana asked Grey a question: “Bennymight be a smooth lover, but does a woman really want a guy that smooth in bed?”

  Years later, in an interview, Lana claimed that both Goodman and Shaw were instrumental in removing racial segregation among black and white musicians. “When a drunk once approached Benny and me at the Trocadero, and asked him, ‘Why do you play with niggers,’ Benny stood up, threatening him.”

  “I’ll knock you out if you say that word around me again,” Goodman said to the racist drunk.

  “Although I admired Benny in so many ways, especially his talent, I had to move on,” Lana said. “To be really frank, my game back then was called ‘playing the field.’”

  ***

  Of all the boys in the band that Lana dated, Tommy Dorsey didn’t quite meet her demand for good looks in a man. He was charming and reasonably attractive to her, at least enough so that she dated him for a while. “Perhaps it was his smooth-toned trombone playing that won me over,” she recalled.

  Tommy Dorsey was always saying goodbye to Lana, as he headed out for another gig or else for a rest at his 21-acre estate in Bernardsville, New Jersey.

  One photographer snapped a picture of one of their goodbyes at the railroad station. She is glamorously dressed as he looks lovingly at her. But that very night, after their farewell, she fell into the arms of Buddy Rich. As she told Grey, “Why waste time?”

  Her daughter, Cheryl Crane, later wrote, “One of mother’s prized possessions was a trombone from Tommy Dorsey that read: “Lana, Happy New Year, The Boys in the Band.”

  The son of a bandleader from Pennsylvania, Dorsey was a master musician—jazz trombonist, composer, conductor, and one of the leading bandleaders of the wartime Big Band era. He was known as the “Sentimental Gentleman of Swing.” And he was the younger brother of another bandleader, Jimmy Dorsey. Tommy recorded one of Lana’s all-time favorite songs, “I’ll Never Smile Again,” with vocals by Frank Sinatra.

  Throughout his career, Tommy Dorsey worked with some of the biggest names in music: Glenn Miller, Dick Haymes (Lana’s former lover), Nelson Riddle, Paul White-man, the Pied Pipers, Buddy Rich (another of Lana’s lovers), and such female vocalists as Jo Stafford and Connie Haines.

  Sinatra achieved his greatest success as a singer in Dorsey’s Band, making eighty records from 1940 to 1942. The singer claimed that he learned breath control watching “Tommy play the trombone.”

  Lana was instrumental in getting Dorseyto hire her ex-husband (Artie Shaw) in 1942 when he broke up his own band. Dorsey employed Shaw and his string section.

  When Lana dated him, he was already married, but away from his wife, “Totts” Kraft, for weeks at a time. He was only 17 when he took the 16-year-old as his bride.

  Lana was quick to point out that she was not the cause of Dorsey’s divorce in 1943 from his wife, but it was his affair with singer Edythe Wright.

  ***

  Born in Brooklyn of Jewish-American parents, both of whom were vaudevillians, Buddy Rich grew up in the world of music. At the age of one, he surprised his father by keeping a steady beat with spoons. At the age of 18 months, he was playing drums on stage in his parents’ vaudeville act.

  In time, he became known as the greatest drummer in the world, celebrated for his virtuoso technique, power, and speed. He performed with Tommy Dorsey and Harry James, even with Count Basie, eventually conducting his own band.

  “For a while, I adored Buddy,” Lana told Grey. “When I dated him, I was making Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I soon learned that Buddy could have played both roles. That guy sure had one short fuse. He could be charming one minute, then Mr. Hyde the next.”

  “One night at this club, he accused me of making goo-goo eyes at Sinatra.” Lana said. “When Frank joined our table f
or a while, he and Buddy talked like old friends. Then Frank said something that pissed off Buddy, and he struck him. Frank didn’t hit him back, but two days later, two goons—no doubt Frank’s chums—beat up Buddy in an alley.”

  At one time, both Rich and Sinatra were members of Tommy Dorsey’s band. They frequently got into brawls even back then, but somehow managed to make up and be friends once again.

  “Buddy Rich was a very satisfying and most competent lover, but I had to be careful around him,” Lana said. “I never knew when I was going to piss him off and get struck by him. He frightened me, even though I was attracted to him.”

  “Finally, after a fight one night, I knew I had to end it with Buddy,” Lana said. “I told him, ‘I love your music and our love-making, but my face is my fortune. I fear that you might cause me real damage. So I’m out of here. Save your pounding for the drums!’”

  ***

  As the venue for his first date with her, Dana Andrews invited Lana to a cast party for the actors in the romance film Ball of Fire (1941). The party was hosted at Café Formosa. A favorite gathering place for actors, it stood across from the entrance to Goldwyn Studios.

  Lana liked being escorted by Dana Andrews, whom she felt was a strong, macho figure. Indeed, he would in time be cited as “film noir’s masculine ideal of steely impassivity.”

  She was a bit put off, however, by his excessive drinking, which made him stand out even in a heavy-drinking crowd.

  Its host was mobster Benjamin (“Bugsy”) Siegel, a Jewish-American gangster from Brooklyn, one of the founders of Murder, Inc.

  Lana had heard of the joint, but had never visited it.

  Set for a December, 1941, release, Ball of Fire had cast Gary Cooper as Bertram Potts, a professor who falls in love with Sugarpuss O’Shea (Barbara Stanwyck), a burlesque dancer.

  Andrews had been cast as the gangster, Joe Lilac, who is involved with Sugarpuss.