Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  In her memoirs, Lana devoted less than a page to co-starring with Gable in Honky Tonk. That caused columnist Sheilah Graham, the former lover of F. Scott Fitzgerald, to remark: “I wish movie queens would tell the truth or shut up. Reading Lana’s memoirs, I got the impression that she was a candidate for the convent.”

  Lana’s statements about her affairs, both during interviews and as published in her memoirs, have generally been discredited. In 1982, while on a tour touting one of her books, she constantly denied having had an affair with Gable. In a TV interview, she claimed, “I had a reputation for being a sexpot, but I never was one. In fact, I never had much feeling about sex at all.”

  This spectacularly disingenuous comment was greeted with “mocking laughter that echoed from the Hollywood Hills down to Laguna and north to Santa Barbara,” said catty Shelley Winters.

  Jimmy Fiddler, the Hollywood columnist, said, “It’s amazing to see stars like Lana Turner interviewed on television. Take the very suggestion that one of them might have had sex with one of their leading men. The likes of Lana Turner or June Allyson suggest that no handsome hunk ever crawled between their sheets. Although hundreds of eyewitnesses have testified to Lana’s affairs, she remains virginal between marriages, at least in a memoir.”

  As late as the early 1960s, Lana would agree with Marilyn Monroe’s assessment of Gable during the filming of what emerged as his last movie, The Misfits (1961): “When Clark kissed me,” Monroe said, “all I wanted was for it to go on and on and on. I got goose bumps. I’d have followed him anywhere, done anything. It was a miracle just to be in his arms.”

  ***

  During the filming of Honky Tonk, Lana joined a luncheon in the MGM commissary. Included in the venue were her friend, Virginia Grey, and one of the movie’s co-stars, Chill Wills. Also present was another MGM star, the studio’s Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller, impressively attired in a double-breasted suit. An ethnic German, he had been born in 1904 in what is now part of Romania.

  Although one day, Lana would marry a screen version of Tarzan, Lex Barker, she had never seen one of Weissmuller’s jungle adventures. She had heard that he was the world’s fastest swimmer, the holder of five gold Olympic medals. Still looking in topnotch form, he had been married to the notorious Mexican actress, Lupe Velez, and was currently wed to Beryl Scott, the San Francisco socialite who had been born in Canada. Gossip columnists speculated that the marriage was coming apart.

  As Lana would later tell Grey, “Johnny is not only an athlete and the King of the Jungle, but, except for Gable and Robert Taylor, one of the handsomest men at MGM”

  The lunch meeting had a purpose, as Weissmuller, Grey, and Wills had signed to star together in the Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942), the last of the Tarzan franchises at MGM.

  As Lana later stated: “I was expecting some muscle-bound lug, but discovered a romantic, kind, and considerate gentleman. He was imbued with chivalry and treated me like I was the Queen of Sheba.”

  There was speculation about how his fans would react to a movie where he appeared in a suit. Grey told him, “Men go to see you battle lions in the jungle, but women attend your movies to enjoy your magnificent body, hoping that loincloth will blow upward in the breeze.”

  He laughed at that, claiming, “That’s happened a few times already. One shows me in all my manly glory after I forgot to wear a jockstrap that morning. On my first day at MGM, I was given a G-string and asked if I knew how to climb a tree,” he said.

  Lana described to Virginia Grey her weekend with Johnny Weissmuller in Palm Springs:

  “He was everything I’d dreamed about in a man. Now I know why wardrobe designs that loincloth to hang low. I’ve never seen such an elongated foreskin on a man. But once his ‘charger’ bursts forth, it’s one of the greatest thrills a woman can know, a pounding, like the beat of a Tom-Tom. He’s a fabulous lover. At his climax, he lets out the Tarzan Yell.”

  Lana kept abreast of Hollywood gossip, and was aware that Joan Crawford, among dozens of other stars, had already seduced Weissmuller. The ever-indiscreet Tallulah Bankhead had widely boasted about her conquest. “Dah-ling,” she told him. “You’re the kind of man a woman like me must shanghai and keep under lock and key until both of us are entirely spent. Prepare for a leave of ten days.”

  Weissmuller, a gifted athlete, was known for seducing “lots and lots” of chorus girls, starlets, and barmaids.

  “What do you find most annoying about playing Tarzan?” Lana asked.

  “Every homosexual at MGM seems to want to take turns making me up as Tarzan and fitting me for my skimpy wardrobe. No one is satisfied until I’ve been fitted with at least a dozen jockstraps before they settle on the right one. I’m also tired of how every greeting I get tends to be the same: ‘Hiyah, Johnny, I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on!’”

  That afternoon, Weissmuller also said that he had met Elmo Lincoln, the screen’s first Tarzan, the day before. “He’s reduced to playing a minor role, a circus roustabout, in this latest version of Tarzan.”

  “I was there when they met,” Wills said. “Lincoln was not as impressed with Johnny as we are. He called him a sissy.”

  Wills said, in reference to his own role in Tarzan’s New York Adventure, “I play the good guy, but I get murdered.”

  Grey said that she had been cast in their upcoming film as a torch singer, Connie Beach. “My big scene is when I do this number, ‘I Must Have You or No One.’”

  In reference to the action/adventure aspect of his upcoming film, Weissmuller said, “I have to perform a number of stunts. In one scene—it’s faked, of course—I climb a skyscraper. In another, I’m shown jumping 200 feet off the Brooklyn Bridge. I told those jokers that they’d have to use a dummy for that scene. The funniest scene will be when I take my first shower with indoor plumbing. I keep my suit on, surprising Maureen O’Sullivan, who plays Jane.”

  After Wills and Grey departed, Lana remained at table in the commissary with Weissmuller. “This is a bit sad for me. Mayer is cutting off the series, and I’m moving over to RKO. Maureen told me that this will be the last time she’ll ever play Jane.”

  Lana reached for his hand. “What about me as your new Jane?” Then she paused. “At least off screen.”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” he said. “A friend of mine [Weissmuller never named him specifically] has this villa in Palm Springs with an Olympic-sized pool. I’m driving there tonight. I need to do a lot of laps to get into shape for the camera. I have to be back at MGM early Monday morning. Come with me. But I have to warn you: I swim in the nude.”

  “I have a feeling I’m in for a big treat.”

  On Friday, after twilight, Weissmuller headed east with Lana through the desert to Palm Springs. The following Monday, when Grey met up with Lana at the studio, she was eager for a play-by-play description of how their weekend together had been spent.

  “If we’d filmed it, it would be known as Tarzan’s Palm Springs Adventure.”

  ***

  Lana would later refer to “the most bizarre fan letter I’d ever received.” It had arrived at MGM in 1942.

  The letter had been postmarked in London, but, as was later revealed, it had been written in Germany and somehow passed to someone who had mailed it from a London post office.

  It was from a mysterious woman, Eva Braun, who had written its original version in German. It was accompanied by an English-language translation.

  Lana did not know who Eva Braun was, only learning after the war that she had been the mistress of Adolf Hitler and then, for a period of less than 40 hours, his wife before their joint suicide in April, 1945 in an underground bunker in Berlin.

  World War II had already ended by the time someone briefed Lana on the saga and symbolism of Eva Braun. Born in 1912 into a bourgeois German family and convent-educated, she had worked in Munich as a model and photographer’s assistant for Heinrich Hoffmann, who would become the official photographer for the Nazi Party. />
  It was at Hoffman’s studio that seventeen-year-old Eva met Hitler in October of 1929. He was a rising power in the National Socialist movement and 23 years her senior. Hitler enchanted the nubile, not particularly brainy Eva, and she became his mistress.

  When Hoffman saw that Hitler was fascinated by his assistant, he warned the leader, “Eva is a feather brain, interested only in clothes, sports, and the cinema.”

  Of course, at the time, it was beyond her wildest dreams to imagine Hitler as the dictator of Nazi Germany and a threat to the very foundation of Western Civilization.

  Although concealed from both the German and international press, Eva became the Führer’s official hostess at Berchtesgaden and an “up front and personal” eyewitness to some of the major events of the 20th Century. “There are frequent showing of movies at the Berghof,” Eva wrote. “We are avid movie fans.”

  In her letter addressed to Lana via MGM, Eva had revealed that the great dream of her life was to visit Hollywood “and become the next Lana Turner.” She had seen every movie that Lana had made. Even during the war years, many of them were smuggled into Berlin, perhaps by Goebbels himself, and many had been screened for the entertainment of Hitler’s entourage. Eva had been particularly “enthralled” with Ziegfeld Girl.

  [Originally, Eva had wanted to star in German films and, with that agenda in mind, appealed to Josef Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda. Hitler, when he learned of her intention, would not allow it.]

  In her fan letter to Lana, Eva had enclosed a picture of herself snapped during a picnic at Obersalzberg. Her pose evoked a cheesecake-inspired stance evocative of Betty Grable. The implication was that she was wearing a bathing suit, but her torso was coyly concealed behind a flower-patterned parasol.

  To Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress, Lana was an inspiration. Actually, she wanted to become “the Lana Turner of Nazi Germany,” but the Führer had other plans for her.

  According to Lana, in her letter, Eva stated that it would be “inevitable” that the Nazis, with their powerful, well-equipped armies, would one day subdue America. “There will be many persons slated for death, including the execution of the Roosevelts.” Eva’s letter continued with the prediction that “traitors” like Marlene Dietrich would also be killed, along with “all the Jews who had fled to Hollywood from Europe.”

  Eva went on to promise Lana that when the Nazi conquest of America was finished, “I will appeal to Wolf [her nickname for Hitler] to spare your life because of how much your films have meant to me.”

  Apparently, Eva had already screened a copy of Honky Tonk which had been smuggledinto Germany, and she’d found Lana’s scenes with Clark Gable “sizzling.”

  “Regrettably,” Eva had continued, “Wolf has horrendous plans for Gable. When he is captured, he will be stripped naked and exhibited in a cage that will tour throughout Germany.”

  [Ironically, with the understanding that the cage and its contents would be hauled across the Soviet Union, this was Stalin’s plan for Hitler, if he’d been captured alive.]

  Assuming that the bizarre letter had derived from some crank, Lana, after reading it, had destroyed it, recalling its contents after the war, when she realized who Eva Braun had been.

  Years later, she said, “I wish I had saved that letter from Eva Braun. Had I known who she was, I certainly would have. I bet it would be worth a lot of money today.”

  ***

  In 1941, Lana was slated for roles in movies than were never actually filmed and/or completed. Some of them never emerged from their talking stages; others had evolved into fully developed shooting scripts, but later abandoned for various reasons.

  In 1941, Louis B. Mayer met with Lana and told her that the studio was preparing a script specifically gauged and crafted for her. Its working title was The Flying Blonde. It called for her to play a female pilot who grapples with romantic adventures with a handsome pilot.

  Paramount had already signed Stirling [an actor later billed as Sterling] Hayden as the male lead. They were billing him at the time as “The Most Beautiful Man in the Movies.”

  “I think we could sex up this film by co-starring you in it as ‘The World’s Most Beautiful Blonde,’” Mayer said. “On screen together, you’d be dynamite. Paramount owes me a favor, and they’d actually make money by lending Hayden to us, since he’s contracted over there with a low salary. Before shooting begins, I want you to go out with him. Perhaps dinner together at Ciro’s, where we can get our photographer to snap pictures for the papers.”

  “Mr. Mayer, this is a project that really excites me,” Lana said. “I want to meet this gorgeous dreamboat. I suspect that Joan Crawford, as usual, has already phoned him.”

  “I’ve been in the business long enough to know that all actresses are hussies,” Mayer responded. “For most of them, anything in pants will do.”

  “Not really, Mr. Mayer,” she answered. “We do have one requirement. It’s how the man fills out those pants.”

  ***

  Based on Mayer’s directive, Hayden phoned Lana for a date. When she suggested the names of some nightclubs they might visit as a background for getting their names in the paper, he rejected the idea. She was struck by his fierce independence and his disdain for Hollywood.

  Edward Griffith, an executive at Paramount, although admitting that Sterling Hayden was “wooden” in his screen test, saw something of value in him.

  Even before his first picture, Paramount publicists set out to hype him as “The Most Beautiful Man in the World,” and as “The Blonde Viking God.”

  Then, after trysts with some of the leading ladies of gossipy Hollywood, word spread about his “stupendous package.”

  “I’m not some pretty boy who poses for pictures in a nightclub,” he said. “I’m a sailor. How about sailing over to Catalina for the weekend?”

  By then, she’d seen some of the publicity pictures of him released by Paramount. He did indeed look like a Viking god. She accepted his invitation and packed all-white sailing clothes. That afternoon, she talked with his agent, who told her, “Sterling was born in the wrong century. He should have been a sea captain in the 19th Century.”

  Born in 1916 into a working-class family in Montclair, New Jersey, Hayden as a boy haunted public libraries. There, he would sit for hours devouring such seafaring stories as Jack London’s Call of the Wild or Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Inspired by these adventures, he left home at age seventeen and was hired as a “ship’s boy.” That led to problems. The pretty boy attracted rough sailors who’d been at sea too long without a woman, and Hayden sometimes had to fight off their sexual adventures.

  His adventures on the oceans of the world were more improbable than any screenplay he would ever star in. At the age of 20, he become first mate aboard the Yankee during its around-the-world voyage. In 1938, when he was 22, he’d advanced to the role of skipper aboard a 90-foot square-rigged sailboat, the Florence B. Robinson, during its transit from Gloucester, Massachusetts, to Tahiti.

  Many of Hayden’s admirers suggested that he should monetize his towering physique and movie-star good looks and migrate directly to big-money acting contracts in Tinseltown. There, unable to find work, he posed nude for gay photographers. Nude pictures of Sterling Hayden are highly valued today as collector’s items. As one devotee said, “His god damn whopper hangs down all the way to Tijuana.”

  Their weekend odyssey to Catalina was remembered by Lana as “one of the most memorable of my life.” After her return to Hollywood and lunch with Virginia Grey, she had nothing but praise for Hayden.

  “He’s 6’5”, and if you add those two numbers together, you’ll get an idea of how long it stretches,” Lana said. “And oh, boy, is he great with a woman, treating her like a lady even as he devours her. I’m leaving next weekend unscheduled, waiting for him to call.”

  That weekend came and went, and Hayden didn’t phone. The gossip columns later revealed what happened to him.

  Even before L
ana heard that the script for The Flying Blonde had been rejected and shelved, he’d already learned other news from Paramount. He was told that he’d been hired as the star of his first movie, Virginia (1941), and introduced to its co-star, Madeleine Carroll, the classically cool blonde from England.

  She had already risen to fame as the heroine of two imported English thrillers, both directed by Alfred Hitchcock: The 39 Steps (1932), and Secret Agent (1936).

  After the actress rejected Hitchcock’s sexual advances, he never hired her again, referring to her as an iceberg.

  Hayden, however, managed to heat her up.

  When Lana heard that Hayden had been “coupling” with Carroll, she said, “Isn’t he old enough to be his mother?”

  [Carroll, born in 1906, was ten years older than Hayden.]

  As Lana lamented to Grey, “I thought Sterling and I had something cooking before Carroll got him. But with a war on, life is moving too swiftly.”

  “Carroll came along to lure him from me. As for me, Robert Taylor arrived on the set of Johnny Eager. After Clark Gable, he was the second leading matinée idol at MGM that I wanted to work with…and perhaps pursue other diversions. Of course, he is married to Barbara Stanwyck, but I wouldn’t examine that marriage too closely.”

  As it turned out, Lana would never work with Hayden, releasing him instead to such leading ladies as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. But they did meet again in 1952, when she was divorcing Bob Topping, and he’d been asked to replace Lex Barker [Lana’s future husband] as the screen Tarzan. He rejected the role.

  ***

  The next time Lana was called into Mayer’s office, he made a very different offer. “There’s a war on, and as you know, Hitler wants to gas Jews like me. I want my leading stars, when they’re not working—to join in the war efforts—war bond drives, volunteer work at the Hollywood Canteen, broadcasts on the Armed Forces Radio. I know you like to kiss men, and I’m sure men like to kiss you. Some of the stars are selling their kisses to raise money to buy war bonds. I want you to join them.