Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  Lana had spent a night with Brady before he became a naval aviation mechanic overseas, serving aboard the USSNorton Sound. After the war, he returned to Hollywood, where he appealed to his brother (Lawrence Tierney) to help him break into pictures.

  By then, Tierney had evolved, through a series of well-publicized scandals, into one of Hollywood’s most flagrant bad boys. During the course of his career he would be arrested twenty times for drunkenness or assault. As one columnist phrased it, Tierney was a “rowdy screen actor who has been decisioned, knocked out, and fouled by John Barleycorn.”

  Brady also became reckless, cutting a path of seduction and scandal across Hollywood, although not of the sort to get himself arrested.

  Lana became aware of the rumors flying through Hollywood about these naughty brothers. One afternoon, during her filming of Mr. Imperium (1951) at MGM, Tierney managed to reach her on the phone. He sounded drunk. “My brother, Scott, still talks about that night he spent with you. I’m told that if a gal goes for one brother, she might also have the hots for his other brother, too.”

  “You’ve been misinformed, Mr. Tierney,” she said.

  “Perhaps not. Why not get together with Scott and me? Just ask Joan Crawford for a recommendation. The two of us can really show a gal a good time.”

  “The invitation sounds enchanting, but count me out. Why not give Marilyn Monroe a ring instead?” Then she slammed down the phone.

  ***

  Director Wesley Ruggles was the first to call Lana with the good news. “Mayer thinks reteaming you again with Clark Gable is as good as money in the bank.”

  “And what have you guys come up with for us?” she asked.

  “It’s a movie called Red Light.”

  “Are you kidding? That suggests a ‘Red Light ‘district. Will I play a prostitute?”

  “No way. You’ll play a newspaper gal.”

  “That sounds somewhat better.”

  After a long chat with her new director, Lana put down her white phone in her all-white bedroom with a sense of elation. She was thrilled that she’d be making another movie with “The King.”

  If only she knew of the tragedy looming.

  Chapter Nine

  How Many Affairs?

  Can a Married Woman Have?

  Hot Sex but Cold Love

  During its planning stages, Louis B. Mayer called Somewhere I’ll Find You, starring Clark Gable and Lana Turner, as “money in the bank.” Released after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it was a big hit at the box office, as America faced its darkest year of the war, with much of its Pacific fleet destroyed. Production was almost suspended when Gable’s wife, Carole Lombard,died in an airplane crash, and her husband, the film’s male lead, virtually collapsed in grief.

  After the film was wrapped, Gable delivered Lana a kiss on the cheek. “Someday, we may meet again...perhaps.” As she remembered later, “He had this sense of his own impending doom.”

  In mourning for his dead wife, and perhaps in the throes of a major midlife crisis, Gable left Hollywood, enlisting in the Air Force, where he progressed through the ranks and was appointed First Lieutenant. By 1943, he was serving in England with the 351st Bomb Group. There, he was promoted to the rank of Captain. He flew combat missions and was eventually awarded an Air Medal and Distinguished Flying Cross. At the time of his discharge from active duty in June of 1944, he’d achieved the rank of Major.

  One newspaper reporter nailed it: “Clark Gable is to Lana Turner as flint is to steel.”

  He was speaking of the recasting of the romantic team who had electrified Honky Tonk, Gable and Turner. He was also referring to what was then being discussed as their upcoming release, Red Light, a film that was later reconfigured, retitled, and released in 1942 as Somewhere I’ll Find You.

  Louis B. Mayer assigned Wesley Ruggles to direct it, knowing what a veteran he was. Ruggles had broken into silent films in 1915, when he was an actor working on occasion with Charlie Chaplin. Before Talkies, he made 50 forgettable films, most of which are lost to history. His best work was The Age of Innocence (1924), based on the Edith Wharton novel. His first acclaim came when he directed Cimarron (1931). The Edna Ferber novel was the first Western to win an Oscar.

  Ruggles had directed Gable before in the light comedy, No Man of Her Own (1932), co-starring his future wife, Carole Lombard. A year later, he helmed Mae West and Cary Grant in I’m No Angel (1933).

  In Somewhere I’ll Find You, both Lana (as Paula Lane) and Gable (as Jonny Davis) were cast as war correspondents. The plot was based on a magazine series that had run in Cosmopolitan. Marguerite Roberts had written the film scenario, which was filled with sexual innuendo.

  The movie would be Gable’s last before he enlisted in the Army Air Force during World War II. His absence from the screen lasted for three years.

  Cast as Jonny’s brother, Robert Sterling was Kirk Davis, who is in love with the character played by Lana. Jealous rivalries arise when Jonny begins pursuing Paula too.

  Somewhere I’ll Find You was one of the first pictures to use the December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as part of a movie plot.

  When Lana, as a war correspondent, is sent to the Pacific theater, she disappears, and both Sterling and Gable go in search of her. She’s located in the Philippines on the eve of its Japanese invasion, rescuing children from the battlefield and taking them to safety. The action ends up in war-torn Bataan.

  The script called for Gable to get the girl in the final reel, and as a plot device, Sterling’s character dies in action. The film closes as Lana and Gable are pounding away at their respective typewriters, filing correspondence from the battlefield, ending their dispatches with, “MORE TO COME.”

  Successful at the box office, the film was released during the darkest days for America in World War II, when the outcome of the war was uncertain.

  ***

  Before facing the cameras again, Lana had continued with her excessive nightclubbing and wartime dating, becoming a regular at the Hollywood Canteen. Her pattern of seductions led to inevitable disagreements with Mildred. They occupied the same house, but Mildred had been assigned (or banished) to her own wing, and Lana barred her from her part of the house at night.

  Almost on a daily basis, Mildred confronted her errant daughter, and their quarreling grew bitter. “You seem to bring home a different man every night,” Mildred scolded. “You’ll soon be known as the Whore of Babylon.”

  She also objected to Lana’s heavy drinking. “Well, lemonade, mother dear, does not quench my thirst.” The tension between mother and daughter grew so tangible that Lana eventually rented an apartment for her mother and moved her out.

  After script conferences, Gable began to meet secretly with Lana, arousing the suspicions of his sharp-tongued wife, Carole Lombard, who suspected they had resumed the affair they’d indulged in during their time co-starring together in Honky Tonk.

  During one of their arguments, Gable was said to have informed Lombard, “If my affairs outside the house mean nothing to me, why should they bother you?”

  Robert Taylor, Lana’s most recent lover and one of Gable’s best friends, said, “She is a very special lady. I knew Clark was nuts about her, but I knew he’d never divorce Carole to marry Lana. Clark just couldn’t help himself. He was a serial seducer.”

  The story of two brothers falling in love with the same woman had long been a theme in drama. In Somewhere I’ll Find You, Robert Sterling (left) and Clark Gable appear as foreign corespondents, Kirk (Sterling) and Jonny. This publicity still reveals who’s going to get Lana in the final reel.

  Ruggles agreed with Taylor. “I think Clark was falling in love with Lana. She was young and pretty, and he felt he was getting old. For a while, Lana seemed to give him a sense of renewal of his youth. He told me, ‘My old virility has returned.’”

  Filming on Somewhere I’ll Find You began in mid-January of 1942. Reporting to work on the first day, Lana met each member of th
e cast and graciously welcomed them to the picture. Gable did not show up that morning.

  The leading hairdresser at MGM at the time was a Londoner, Sydney Guilaroff. During his long career, he would dress the hair of stars in some 2,000 movies. Joan Crawford had insisted on him for almost every picture she’d been in.

  For Somewhere I’ll Find You, Guilaroff and Lana decided to “crown” her with a shorter hairstyle, a perky, more manageable cut which became known as “The Victory Bob.” MGM announced that Lana’s new hairstyle was better (and less hazardous) for women working in munitions plants, soon, “The Victory Bob” swept through America, and the style was even adopted by women working in factories in war-mangled Britain.

  [Their decision to shorten Lana’s hair had been influenced by the government’s request during the early months of the war that Veronica Lake get rid of her peek-a-boo hairdo. In imitation of her hair style, many women working in the war plants were getting their long hair caught, sometimes with disastrous results, in machinery.]

  In the movie, Kirk (that is, Robert Sterling) becomes part of a detachment under the command of Lt. Wade Hall (as played by Van Johnson). Their duty is to repel a Japanese amphibious landing. Johnson, a red-haired, freckle-faced, and somewhat naïve Rhode Islander, was new to films, and he and Lana bonded from the beginning of filming.

  Johnson would later emerge as one of the biggest stars at MGM in the late 1940s. Eventually, he would co-star with Lana in Week-End at the Waldorf (1945).

  Somewhere I’ll Find You was a milestone in Johnson’s life. It was there that he met and fell in love with character actor Keenan Wynn, who also, as his Hollywood debut, made an uncredited appearance in it.

  In sophisticated ways that evoked such actresses as Joan Crawford and Carole Lombard, Lana was one of the most indulgent actresses in Hollywood regarding homosexuals. Lana and Johnson became confidants, exchanging gossipy tidbits about their respective male lovers.

  He told her, “The moment I walked through the gates of MGM, I felt I’d arrived at my new home. I’m terrified having to do a scene with Clark Gable. As a star-struck teenager, I used to write him fan letters…well, they were really love letters. I’m terrified to have to play a scene with him, since I still have this big crush on Rhett Butler. I saw Gone With the Wind (1939) four times.”

  ***

  Shortly after the U.S. entry into World War II, Henry Morgenthau, the Secretary of the Treasury, assigned Howard Dietz, the Hollywood publicist, the task of promoting the sale of war bonds. To this end, it was understood that he’d enroll movie stars and other entertainers as a promotional tool.

  With that in mind, in advance of a major bond rally in Indiana, Dietz had invited Carole Lombard to appear. At the time, she was the most celebrated Hoosier in the world.

  He advised her to travel by train, thereby avoiding the risk of an overcrowded plane, most of which had been overbooked by the military anyway.

  Lombard pleaded with Gable to go with her, but Louis B. Mayer, preoccupied with the production of Somewhere I’ll Find You, refused to grant him leave.

  Soon after their wedding, newlyweds Clark Gable and Carole Lombard continued their bonding as part of Hollywood’s most publicized romances.

  On the day of her scheduled departure, Gable and Lombard had one of their most violent confrontations. She’d accused him of resuming his affair with “that blonde whore,” an unkind reference to Lana.

  “So what?” he’d shouted at her. “Maybe I want some young pussy for a change.” Then he’d stormed out the door, never to see her again.

  He’d be gone all day, meeting with military brass who wanted him in the U.S. Air Force, promoted immediately to officer status. Gable rejected their offer. “Thanks, but no thanks. I want to be a regular enlisted man, an average Joe, without any officer stripes.”

  Later that day, in lieu of returning to the home he shared with Lombard for the night, he remained at Lana’s throughout the evening and night, departing from her house early the next morning and heading directly with her for MGM.

  Sterling recalled what Gable had done that day. He’d gone to the special effects department at MGM with an order that shocked the staff.

  At around 6PM, he knocked on Sterling’s dressing room door. “Come on, Junior,” he said. “I want you to help me get this dummy into my car.”

  Sterling was flabbergasted to see a rubber dummy that resembled Gable except for its erect twelve-inch penis. [When she’d been drunk at parties, Lombard had continually told her friends, “I love Pa, except for his less than average prick.”]

  Sterling later informed his friends, “The dummy was amusingly vulgar. I helped him put this sex toy into his car, and he drove off. We were careful not to endanger the erect penis and those grapefruit-sized balls. When Carole returned, she would be in for a big surprise. Clark told me, ‘I just wish I had what that god damn dummy has. But with what god gave me, I’ve fucked every hot broad at MGM from Jean Harlow to Loretta Young.”

  After great difficulty, because of the war, Lombard finally reached Gable via telephone. “Ma & Pa,” as they called each other, made up. Once again, Gable denied that he was having an affair with Lana, lying to Lombard by maintaining that it was Sterling whom Lana had fallen in love with, and that they were having a torrid affair.

  In Indiana, the war bond rally was a great success, and Lombard was proud to learn that she had sold $2 million worth of bonds. Her mother, Elizabeth Peters, was with her at the time.

  Carole told her mother that she wanted to rush back to Hollywood as a means of ending her husband’s affair with Lana. Even though he’d denied it, Lombard had continued to surmise [with uncanny accuracy] that Gable was spending every night in Lana’s arms.

  Ignoring previous advice, Lombard decided to fly back to Los Angeles, taking her mother and MGM’s publicist, Otto Winkler, back with her.

  The doomed flight left Indiana, heading west for a refueling stop in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was here that military personnel asked Lombard and her two guests to relinquish their seats aboard the plane to make room for servicemen. [This was common practice during the war.]

  Lombard, however, manically applied a high-octane acceleration of her star power. She insisted that she’d just “scored a killing in Indiana, $2 million in war bonds. I think we’ve earned our seats.” Eventually, she won, and, with her entourage, she remained aboard the plane.

  Flying out of New Mexico, Transcontinental & Western Airlines DC-3, designated as Flight 3, set itself on a course to Las Vegas.

  Flight 3 landed at Las Vegas for another refueling before flying out en route to Burbank. On board were Carole Lombard, her mother, Winkler, and 19 other passengers.

  It took off at 7:07PM, Pacific Time, on its last flight.

  Lovely, foul-mouthed Carole Lombard. The blonde star was known in Hollywood as “The Queen of Screwball.”

  After a successful war bond tour, she lost her life in an airplane crash, becoming the first movie star victim of World War II.

  Twenty minutes later, the plane crashed into the arid, rocky side of Potosi Mountain, one of the six high points surrounding Las Vegas, about 30 miles west of the city. Its wreckage was scattered, and the bodies of the victims were buried in waist-high snow. Lombard’s body, it was later discovered, had been decapitated and then ignited in flames after the plane hit the steep incline of the mountain. Everyone aboard was killed.

  The ten-month-old plane had been piloted by Wayne Williams, at the time, one of TWA’s most experienced pilots.

  In his book, Fireball, Robert Matzen, a former contractor for NASA, convincingly argues that the plane crashed because of a combination of factors. “A slightly erroneous flight plan, a blackout of a warning beacon because of wartime restrictions, and the pilot’s vision being obscured by cockpit lights at a critical juncture during a black night.”

  Matzen writes, “Clark only learned how important fidelity was in his relationship with Lombard when it was too late. She kept tryi
ng to get through to him, including in that final flight. Then she did get through to him and proved how important this marriage was to both of them by dying in an effort to rush home to save it.”

  From his base in Burbank, Howard Strickling, head of publicity at MGM, had assembled fifty photographers and reporters at Burbank for the arrival of Lombard’s plane. Expected arrival time was 8:45PM. But in Nevada, miners working a remote hillsite west of Las Vegas reported a bright orange flash near the summer of Mount Potosi. The plane had flown seven miles off course and on a trajectory that was 750 feet below the summit of the mountain.

  Strickling was the first to hear the news. He chose not to call Gable, but notified Louis B. Mayer and his publicity assistant, Eddie Mannix, instead.

  He finally phoned Gable, but didn’t tell him what he already knew: That Lombard and everyone aboard had died. Aboard a hastily summoned charter flight, Strickling, with Mannix and Gable, flew to Las Vegas.

  Mannix’s telegram was flashed, sometimes as a newspaper headline, around the country: “NO SURVIVORS. ALL KILLED INSTANTLY.”

  Buster Collier, a close friend of Gable’s, later reported how “The King” received the news of Lombard’s death: “He put on the greatest act of his life, trying to keep everyone else from crumbling. He saw this old-time cowboy trying to eat a steak with no teeth. He gave him a hundred-dollar bill, ‘Get some teeth, cowpoke,’ he ordered the stunned man.”

  Returning to Los Angeles by train, Gable accompanied Lombard’s body back to her final resting place, along with the corpses of his mother-in-law and Winkler.

  Lombard has always been cited for her ability to charm, way beyond her glamour. Shown here, with Gable, chewing water-melon, she proves she’s just a Hoosier farm girl.

  Sympathy notes from around the world, everyone from Franklin D. Roosevelt to the King of England, flooded into MGM. Gable was inconsolable.