Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  As the film unfolds, when Johnny Eager’s childhood friend, Lew Rankin (as interpreted by Barry Nelson), gets fed up being a second stringer in the gang, and defies Johnny in an attempt to replace him, the gangster has him murdered without the slightest regret.

  One of the most dramatic moments in the film occurs when Johnny frames the character played by Lana for murder. He orders Julio (Paul Stewart), one of his underlings, to burst into their quarters and pretend to try to kill him. During the fake struggle, Julio drops his gun, only to have Lisbeth (Lana) retrieve it and shoot him in an attempt to save Johnny’s life. She is hustled out of the room before she can determine that the gun she used had been filled with blanks.

  Lana’s affair with Robert Taylor, both on and off the screen, was doomed. At the film’s conclusion, Johnny is shot dead in the street by a policeman, proving once again, that crime doesn’t pay.

  ***

  Both Lana and her closest friend, Virginia Grey, compared notes on the love-making techniques of Robert Taylor, as he had already been sexually intimate with each of them. His affair with Grey transpired before he met Lana. Robert Stack, another of Taylor’s lovers, was also kept abreast of Lana’s new affair.

  “A lot of women dream about finding a patient, totally giving lover like Bob, but they rarely find him,” Lana confided.

  Stack told her, “Bob is probably the handsomest man alive, and the least actorish actor, without any feeling of being the matinee idol that he is. What he looks like is not what he is. He’s just a guy who looks like a god with a widow’s peak.”

  Actually, his hair had originally “squared” in a straight line across his forehead, but Mayer had ordered makeup artists and hair stylists to give him his famous widow’s peak.

  Among his early seductions was a bit player on the set of his 1936 film, Small Town Girl, starring Janet Gaynor. In addition to seducing Gaynor, Taylor took the virginity of Thelma (“Pat”) Ryan long before Richard Nixon married her and, as Pat Nixon, she became First Lady of the United States.

  Taylor had also seduced Greta Garbo, with whom he’d appeared in the 1936 classic, Camille. Both Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor lay in his future.

  A bisexual, Taylor was known among Hollywood insiders for his sexual conquests of John Gilbert, Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, and Howard Hughes.

  “I had to have Lana Turner if only for one night,” Taylor told LeRoy. “A man would risk being sent up for rape for just one night with her.”

  When Louis B. Mayer heard this, he dispensed his MGM press agent, George Nichols, to tell Taylor “to keep it soft and in your pants.”

  Nichols later recalled, “Lana went from the bed of Clark Gable to the bed of Robert Taylor. I used to kid Clark and Bob for seducing some of the same women—Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer come to mind. Sometimes, Clark gave women’s telephone numbers to Bob when he wanted to dump some broad.”

  One day, unannounced and without warning, Taylor’s wife, Barbara Stanwyck, appeared on the set of Johnny Eager. Seeing her, Lana fled to her dressing room, an act that evoked the scene she was shooting with Clark Gable in Honky Tonk when his angry wife, Carole Lombard, suddenly appeared during one of his love scenes with Lana.

  This time, Lana refused to come out of her dressing room until LeRoy assured her that Mayer had ordered that Stanwyck be escorted away from from the lot.

  Lana’s role in Johnny Eager evolved into one of the most glamorous of her career. She was cast as a society beauty, Lisbeth Bard, who falls in love with the gangster, Johnny Eager, as portrayed by Taylor. Whereas he pretends to be a cab driver, reporting to a parole officer, he’s really running a murderous gang.

  One evening at midnight during the shooting of Johnny Eager, when Taylor had still not returned home, Stanwyck placed an angry call to Lana. He had left her home less than a half-hour before. As Lana described to LeRoy the next day, “That Stanwyck woman can curse like a truck driver. She called me everything bad that you can call a woman, from bitch to slut.”

  Many Hollywood biographers have suggested that the Taylor/Stanwyck union was a “a lavender marriage” with its participants committed to a relationship devoid of sexual intimacies. Stanwyck was known for having affairs with Marlene Dietrich and her dearest friend, Joan Crawford, each of whom was also a bisexual.

  It was rumored that Stanwyck harangued her husband so much about his secret status as a homosexual that he had become impotent, but only with her.

  Before that, he had told Gable, “Ah, that wife of mine…She always wants to run the fuck.”

  By mid-production of Johnny Eager, Taylor seemed to have fallen in love with Lana, enough so that he went home one night and informed Stanwyck that he was divorcing her to marry Lana. The next day, he told a (horrified) Lana what he had done.

  For four days, Stanwyck disappeared. It was later learned that after a suicide attempt [she slit her wrists] she’d checked into Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. She’d registered at the hospital under the pseudonym of “Sarah Bruce.” For days, Taylor didn’t know where his wife was or what had happened to her.

  ***

  Johnny Eager did well at the box office, and the reviews were fair, with lavish praise going to Heflin for his performance. Most critics cited Lana and Taylor for their star power and their on-screen chemistry.

  Johnny Eager had a “sock” ending, with Taylor planting a solid right on Lana’s chin, as if knocking some sense into her and paving the way for her to return to her society boyfriend.

  Photoplay wrote, “Frankly, we like Lana Turner better in ‘slitchy’ roles, but, even so, her performance here is proof that she can act.”

  One critic got carried away: “I’m not sure what this story about a cold-blooded gangster was about. All I know was that fans just wait for Taylor and Turner to make love on screen. His sheer male beauty and her luminous face are something to see. The love scenes lack subtlety, but who wants subtlety?”

  The New York Times wrote that Johnny Eager was “a tight tale of underworld horror that drives hard, even in the clinches, and though not a serious drama, the movie moves at a turbulent tempo. Taylor and Turner strike sparks in their distraught love affair.”

  Critic Emanuel Lewis complained that the plot failed to make any sense and that Heflin “stole every scene he was in.”

  Variety reported that, “Johnny Eager is an underworld meller [melodrama] with a few new twists to the usual trappings. But by and large, it’s the familiar tale of a slick gangster vs. an innocent rich girl.”

  Sometime in February of 1943, Taylor dropped in for a “drink” at Lana’s house that lasted for five hours. He had recently joined the U.S. Naval Air Corps under his original Nebraska name of Spangler Arlington Brugh.

  In the Navy, he had become a flight instructor, but by the time he was discharged late in 1945, he was a full lieutenant.

  During his first week back, he lunched with Lana in the MGM commissary, lamenting that in his absence, “all the good men’s roles had gone to Van Johnson, Peter Lawford, and Frank Sinatra.”

  She assured him, “You’ll come back bigger than ever.”

  ***

  On Sunday, December 7, 1941, “that date that will live in infamy,” Lana threw a party, inviting former lovers who included Tommy Dorsey and Buddy Rich, as well as a future lover, Frank Sinatra. She also invited two of her girlfriends, Susan Hayward and Linda Darnell.

  When Barbara Stanwyck saw this publicity photo of herself, she said, “That’s what I’d like to do to Lana Turner for fucking Robert Taylor during the filming of Johnny Eager.”

  The party lasted well past midnight, at which point her mother, Mildred, arrived home from a trip to San Francisco.

  She immediately chastised Lana and her guests for “partying at a time like this. Haven’t you turned on the radio all day? You fools don’t even know that the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor? Turn on the damn radio!”

  Lana and her guests gathered around the radio to listen to the latest news from Honolulu and
Washington. America was at war. In one way or another, each of them, including Lana, knew that the war would forever alter their lives.

  In the weeks ahead, she would say goodbye to many former lovers headed off to war, including Robert Stack, Robert Taylor, Wayne Morris, Victor Mature, Glenn Ford, and Spencer Tracy.

  When not making a picture, Lana volunteered for railroad tours, visiting town after town for rallies to sell war bonds.

  Every American in the 1940s knew what a war bond was, less so today. [In essence, a war bond was a debt security issued by the government to finance military operations and other expenditures.]

  During the tour, one of Lana’s first stops was Wallace, Idaho, her birthplace. The whole town turned out to greet their hometown girl who had gone to Hollywood and become world famous. The mayor gave her the key to the city, and she was escorted on a tour of familiar sites, including the house where she had lived with Virgil and Mildred.

  In October of 1942, Lana became a regular volunteer at the Hollywood Canteen at 1451 Cahuenga Boulevard, a club that would entertain servicemen until it closed on Thanksgiving Day in 1945, following the Japanese surrender that September.

  The canteen had been founded by Bette Davis and Lana’s future co-star, John Garfield, along with Jules Stein, President of the Music Corporation of America. During the war, Lana, during most of her visits to New York, also paid visits to the Stage Door Canteen, a venue with R&R for servicemen in mind, and the regular lair of such Broadway stars as Tallulah Bankhead.

  The Hollywood Canteen offered music, free food, and a chance to dance with a bevy of on-site movie stars, some of whom might on any given evening have included Lana, Bette Davis, Betty Grable, Marlene Dietrich, and Rita Hayworth.

  Not just movie stars, but industry grips, musicians, singers, comedians, writers, and other entertainment venues signed up as volunteers. Entertainers ranging from Dinah Shore to Bob Hope performed for the servicemen, including those in Allied armies in Europe and Canada.

  On any given night, a serviceman might be dancing in the arms of Lucille Ball or Ava Gardner, perhaps Carole Landis, while being served food by Errol Flynn and listening to songs by Peggy Lee.

  One night, Davis caught Dietrich and Lana in the kitchen together washing dishes. She shouted, “Get that Kraut and Turner out front dancing with the men. We can always get Ethel Barrymore and Cecil B. DeMille to wash the dishes.”

  On a few occasions, Lana was behind the grill, preparing her specialty—juicy porterhouse steaks smothered in onions. In cooler weather, Lana showed up in her most dazzling gowns and a mink coat. She told Davis, “The men expect me to look like Lana Turner, not Elsa Lanchester, the Bride of Frankenstein (1935).”

  Davis skeptically noted that Lana was free with her kisses, “especially if a guy were good-looking. The rules were that our volunteer women were not supposed to fuck the enlisted men. But Dietrich and Turner never followed the rules. Nor did Hedy Lamarr, for that matter.”

  Lana often encountered Ronald Reagan, who talked about the politics of the war. At the time, both of them were solidly behind President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  A special surprise awaited the millionth serviceman who checked in at the door of the Canteen. A Texan, he was kissed by the singing star, Deanna Durbin, Marlene Dietrich, and by Lana herself. The soldier reported, “Eddie Cantor was there, and gave me a big wet one right on the lips. I loved the kisses from the gals, but could have done without the liver lips of Cantor.”

  When the Canteen had been operating for some time, Artie Shaw showed up, and Lana went home with him. She told him that the men she’d met at the Canteen fell into two different categories. “A certain type of man has a brave heart, filled with courage as he goes off to war, to land on some god-forsaken island in the South Pacific where the Japs are waiting to shoot him.”

  “Or else a young man is afraid to die, not ready to give up his life. After spending a night with me, he wants me to hold him in my arms the next morning like a loving mother. Over an old-fashioned American breakfast prepared by Mildred, we both reassure him of a safe return. He wants to believe us.”

  ***

  During the war, Lana also performed in shows for the Armed Forces Network. Even before America entered the war, Lana, on September 22, 1941, had appeared on the NBN show, Salute of Champions, a special tribute to men serving in the armed forces.

  The cast brought her together for the first time with Rita Hayworth, who during the war would vie with her as the pinup girl most favored by GIs. Betty Grable remained the Number One favorite.

  After posing for photographs, the two screen goddesses had little to say to each other. Yet on many a night in the 1940s, “Lana & Rita,” as they were called, showed that they had the same taste in men.

  Lana had seduced Hayworth’s future husband, singer Dick Haymes, before she did. In addition, both Lana and Rita were each “deflowered” by many of the same beaux: Tony Martin, Peter Lawford, Robert Mitchum, Tyrone Power, James Stewart, and inevitably, Howard Hughes.

  Lana did not like to be compared to Hayworth, and was outraged at the remarks bandleader Fred Karger made. “When I first spotted Rita in 1939, I had never seen such a beautiful woman. She had tremendous magnetism about her, walking into a room, an aura really. Lana Turner was gloriously beautiful, too, but didn’t have Rita’s magic.”

  Karger would later become the mentor and lover of Marilyn Monroe. He would in time marry Jane Wyman, the ex-Mrs. Ronald Reagan, who would divorce him, then remarry him, then re-divorce him after realizing that their romance was a lost cause.

  At another rally before the war, in November of 1941, Lana arrived in New York for an appearance at Madison Square Garden, where Eleanor Roosevelt was the featured speaker, alongside an array of stars ranging from Groucho Marx to Danny Kaye. Lana found the First Lady “a warm-hearted, charming old soul.”

  Lana ended 1941 by appearing again on NBC Radio on the Chase & Sanborn Program starring Edgar Bergen and his talking dummy, Charlie McCarthy. Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were also slated to attend, but at the last minute, Costello caught the flu. Mickey Rooney, Lana’s former beau, filled in for him.

  She was still in New York for the New Year’s Dancing Party broadcast coast to coast, with Lana pitching the virtues of the USO.

  ***

  During the months ahead, Lana continued her rivalry with Hedy Lamarr, often for men or perhaps for the same roles. She resented her co-starring with Robert Taylor and Clark Gable. Mostly, she resented how Lamarr defined herself as “The Queen of MGM,” a title that Lana felt she owned.

  Movie stars such as Lana, Hedy Lamarr, and Carole Lombard were instrumental in promoting war bond sales. In one day, Lana raised $5 million for the government, even giving away a kiss for $50,000. Lamarr topped her, garnering $7 million in war bond sales, also in one day.

  The rosters of men who roared through each of their lives during the war, were similar: Errol Flynn, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Howard Hughes, John Garfield, and then Navy lieutenant John F. Kennedy, appeared on both lists.

  Lana had always considered Lamarr an empty-headed beauty. She was later shocked to learn that she also had a brain.

  Along with George Antheil, the composer and pianist, Lamarr had invented a secret communication system that was adapted into a radio-controlled torpedo guidance network.

  As detailed by Lamarr’s biographer, Ruth Barton, “The procedure involves sending a series of signals from a transmitter to a receiver in a manner that cannot be intercepted, thus allowing for a torpedo to be dropped remotely. It was crucial that the message cannot be jammed by a third party.”

  In June of 1941, Lamarr and Antheil formally registered their invention with the U.S. Patent Office. Today, it’s credited as an essential part of everything from military weapons to cellphones. Encountering Lana after news of her invention became widely publicized, Lamarr told Lana, “Just because a woman is beautiful does not mean she is stupid.”

  ***

  Lana remai
ned friends with Artie Shaw throughout most of the duration of the war. In fact, she spent her final night with him before the bandleader enlisted in the Navy, following the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was assigned to Staten Island in New York, where he was trained aboard a minesweeper.

  He wrote her every month, telling her he had been transferred to Newport, Rhode Island, where he had been promoted to the post of Chief Petty Officer. “Not only that,” he wrote,” but I’ve been given a band to lead, consisting of the world’s most untalented musicians.”

  Using the power of his famous name, he persuaded the military brass in Washington to allow him to recruit extremely talented musicians who had been drafted into the Navy.

  Lana, with Rita Hayworth, raising morale. Their joint appearances always seemed to spark debates about the relative merits of blondes vs. redheads.

  By the summer of 1943, he informed Lana that he was the leader of a “real band,” and would be sailing from Pearl Harbor aboard the battleship, USS North Carolina, touring the Pacific theater to perform for servicemen. He visited such outposts as New Caledonia and the Solomons. Venues for the band ranged from on-board concerts to makeshift stages hastily erected in jungles.

  When Shaw arrived on battle-torn Guadalcanal, there remained some pockets of Japanese resistance. “My tent was so full of bullet holes, it looked like Swiss cheese,” he said in a letter to Lana.

  He also described how he began the musical lineup of his concerts with “Begin the Beguine,” and that the boys had almost cried with glee to hear American music, “since they were homesick in this cesspool of horror.”

  Shaw learned via short-wave radio that his fourth wife, Betty Kern, the daughter of songwriter Jerome Kern, had given birth to a seven-pound boy. But they would soon divorce.

  He wrote to Lana that Tokyo Rose, the infamous Japanese propaganda broadcaster, often played recordings of his hits, asserting that the music was being broadcast live from the ballroom of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco.