Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  Immediately, word spread that Lana had been the incentive for Lombard’s rush back to Burbank aboard what had evolved into a fatal flight.

  According to Ruggles, “Lana came to me in tears. She feared rumors would harm her career. She didn’t know what to do.”

  “I knew that Robert Stack had been screwing Lombard,” Ruggles continued. “So I advised Lana to throw off the bloodhounds by being seen constantly with Stack. I told her, ‘Go everywhere with him. Spend the night with him. Don’t hide your affair! Make it public!”

  From Stack, Lana learned that Lombard, in an attempt at revenge against her philandering husband, had also sustained an affair with Stack. She’d even arranged a role for him in her latest film, To Be or Not To Be (1942), co-starring Jack Benny.

  As Manzen wrote in Fireball, “By no coincidence, the presence of Stack—handsome as the devil—served as a constant reminder to Clark about how it felt to watch your spouse in close quarters with a younger and very attractive co-star for days on end.”

  Lombard and her mother, Elizabeth Peters, were buried at 4PM on January 21, 1942 in Forest Lawn’s Hilltop Church of the Recessional. Gable, wearing very dark sunglasses, conversed with no one and left after the service, disappearing into the back of a limousine that quickly hauled him away.

  After the funeral, Gable spent almost every night at the home of his longtime lover, Joan Crawford. She later described his condition to friends such as Barbara Stanwyck and William Haines. “He would come over and break down and cry. I’d never seen him cry before. He would drink almost a quart of booze before dinner, and then eat only enough to keep himself alive.”

  Crawford admitted that after two weeks of this, he turned to her for sex. “I tried to lure him away from the bedroom, because he’d be drunk and it offered little satisfaction for me. On at least three occasions, he called me Carole. It was an awful experience, but because I had always loved him, I endured this ghoulish form of sex.”

  “After every night he spent at my house, Clark would send me a dozen long-stemmed roses the next day,” she said. “For about four months after Carole died, Clark would stop in at my house every day, if only for a quick drink. He wasn’t the gay romantic I’d known in the 1930s when we made films together. He was no longer the easy-going Clark. He’d turned into a moody alcoholic who needed my love, support, and friendship more than he needed any hanky-panky. Unlike Miss Turner, I was there for him. She was there for half the men in Hollywood, especially those in uniform.”

  Shortly before her death, Lombard had signed to star in They All Kissed the Bride for Columbia Pictures, on a loan-out from MGM. In the aftermath of that plane crash, Crawford stepped in and agreed to star in the picture, donating all of her $125,000 salary to the American Red Cross.

  ***

  After only three days of shooting, production on Somewhere I’ll Find You ground to a slow pace, as only scenes without Gable could be shot. When Lana and their director, Ruggles, visited Gable at his home, they found him too drunk to appear on camera. He had to have more time to mourn the loss of Lombard before facing the cameras again.

  Mayer tried to keep Gable from enlisting in the Air Force. He even went so far as to announce an upcoming film in which he’d star, Shadow of the Wing. To lure him, he claimed that Victor Fleming, who had directed Gable as Rhett Butler, would sign on as his director once again. But Gable turned the mogul down.

  Word reached Lana that Somewhere I’ll Find You might even be shut down because Gable was such an emotional wreck he might not be able to perform. Since so little footage had been shot, MGM could suffer the loss without too many financial difficulties. It was also suggested that Walter Pidgeon might replace Gable as the romantic lead.

  But then, as a point of honor and as a dedicated professional, Gable announced that he would continue filming and finish the movie.

  Before he reported back to the studio, Mayer summoned Lana into his office. “When he comes back, it will be very trying for Clark. Be patient with him if he flubs every line or two. If he wants to work right through lunch, go for it. If he wants to have dinner with you at his ranch, accept his invitation and do what you can to comfort him.” Then he stared at her. “WITHIN REASON!”

  When Gable reported to work, Lana found that he looked pale and—other than an aggravated weariness—showed almost no emotion. “It was like a part of Clark had died with Lombard,” Lana said. “In many ways, he was a stranger to me. Some of the workers were afraid to go near him. I tried to offer what sympathy I could, but he didn’t want to hear it. He was filled with this inner tension I felt would burst out at any minute.”

  “Before Lombard’s death, he had this wonderful boyishness to him. But before filming of Somewhere I’ll Find You ended, I knew that the boy in Clark had died along with his wife.”

  “Clark was inconsolable throughout the rest of the shoot,” Lana said. “I feared he would not be able to complete the picture. He told me that it was all he could do to get out of bed and put one foot in front of the other. He was filled with rage and suffered from guilt. He was tortured over having argued with Lombard about me the last time he saw her.”

  Even during the peak of her bad-girl rivalry with Lombard, Lana still managed to steal magazine publicity from her and every other actress in La-La Land.

  “He became an aimless wanderer,” she said. “I heard he drove up the West Coast toward Canada all by himself,” she said. “He even bought a motorcycle and rode it at night, tearing up into the canyons.”

  Gable did invite Lana out for dinner one night. She later told Ruggles, “There was no talk of Lombard. We spoke about the picture, the war, his upcoming enlistment. There were long periods of silence.”

  “He showed me his gun collection. I always respected him, since he was the consummate professional and deserved to be called ‘The King.’ I just knew he’d pull himself together. I left early and was taken home in a studio limousine. I found Robert (Stack) asleep on my sofa.”

  At one point, Gable asked Lana if she would fill in for a live performance, broadcast over the radio that Lombard had committed herself to: a radio adaptation of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a movie, released in 1941, that Lombard had made with Robert Montgomery. Lana accepted, with delight. Errol Flynn would be her radio co-star.

  After the broadcast, she invited Flynn to spend the night with her. “But not at your house,” she told him. “Not with Bruce Cabot or David Niven watching us.”

  ***

  When Lana heard that Gable was back in Hollywood, she thought he might call her, but he didn’t. Their reunion lay in the future, when they’d once again co-star in the aptly named Homecoming (1948).]

  Gable later claimed, “I did not read the reviews of Somewhere I’ll Find You.”

  But Lana did, interpreting her second picture with “The King” as a career milestone.

  Photoplay praised the performances of both Gable and Sterling, adding, “Lana Turner, the beautiful corner of the triangle, looks too beautiful and continues to amaze with her seasoned performance.”

  Newsweek wrote, “Miss Turner stamps her part with passionate intensity and that unsmiling conviction which set her love scenes and dramatic high levels apart from those of any other screen actress.”

  Writing in the New Yorker, critic John Mosher claimed, “The sensuous tug and talk between Gable and Miss Turner is powerfully dramatic, and is counterbalanced with serious things, including life-and-death matters.”

  After hailing Gable’s performance, the critic for Time wrote: “Lana Turner is superbly toothsome for Gable’s masterful routines. She can tilt her chin that, in any posture, suggests that she is looking up from a pillow.”

  Variety hailed Lana as “the modern Jean Harlow of celluloid—a sexy, torchy, clinging blonde who shatters the inhibitions of the staidest male.”

  ***

  After Somewhere I’ll Find You was completed, Lana learned that MGM had no immediate plans for her next picture.

  She went on
another bond tour, riding the train to San Francisco, then continuing northward for war bond rallies in Portland, Seattle, Spokane, and Tacoma.

  Returning to Brentwood, she was clearly bored and restless. Many of her beaux had already been snared by Uncle Sam and shipped off to war. For a while, she quit visiting the Hollywood Canteen altogether.

  Late one afternoon, Johnny Meyer called. She immediately recognized his voice and braced herself for a solicitation of another date with Howard Hughes. But that wasn’t the case. Instead, he invited her for dinner at Mocambo’s with three of his business associates.

  At table with them a few nights later, their talk bored her. All of them seemed to work for Hughes, who was having trouble with wartime Washington about airplane production. She couldn’t have cared less.

  But as the band started up for the next dance, a handsome young man appeared at Meyer’s table. He ignored Meyer and the other male guests and instead, he focused intensely on her. “Hi, I’m Steve Crane, and my greatest dream in life would be to dance with the forever gorgeous Miss Lana Turner.”

  “You’re on, buster,” she said, rising to her feet. She was swept onto the dance floor, where they encountered Marilyn Maxwell with Frank Sinatra. Crane held her close, pressing his body intimately into hers. “I think he wanted me to get a feel of him, and I did,” she later told Linda Darnell. “He was terrific, and did he ever smell nice.”

  She never returned to Meyer’s table, but took a seat at the bar, where Crane stood close by her side. She learned that his full name was Joseph Stephen Crane III. [Lana spelled it “Stephan” in her memoirs.]

  He was vague about who he really was, but appeared to be some tobacco heir from Indiana, who had arrived in Hollywood to try his luck. To judge by his tailor-made suit, he appeared to be well off, although he had some vague dream of becoming an actor.

  After slipping out of Mocambo’s together, he drove her home, where she sat talking with him until 3AM. Since it was Saturday morning, and she hadn’t been needed at the studio in weeks, she didn’t mind the late hour. He made no move to leave. Finally, she stood up, announcing that both of them had better get some sleep.

  “One night across a crowded room, I met a handsome stranger (Stephen Crane),” Lana said. “But why did I fall in love with him and marry him, depriving Joan Crawford of his studly duties?”

  As she later told Darnell, “He kissed me passionately and slowly, ever so skillfully, and guided me into the bedroom. He even helped me out of my clothes before removing every stitch of his own. He was charming and ever so skilled as a lovemaker. So adorable and gifted by nature in all the right places. I could tell from his seduction that I was not his first woman.”

  [In Hollywood, Crane had just had an affair with the French actress, Simone Simon. There was a certain irony here. During the most heated weeks of her romance with attorney Greg Bautzer, he had put Lana on freeze while he, too, had run away with Simon.]

  For the next three weeks, Crane began to date Lana intensely, although he’d sometimes disappear for several hours, not telling her where he’d been other than that he had some business to attend to.

  It was only months later that Bautzer told her that when Crane had met her, he was having an affair with Joan Crawford—that is, when Crawford wasn’t occupied with Bautzer himself, or else with Phillip Terry, an actor whom RKO billed as “a combination of Clark Gable and Cary Grant.”

  [Crawford had married Terry in July of 1942.]

  Through his link to Bugsy Siegel, Louis B. Mayer had become aware, almost from the beginning, of Lana’s emotional involvement with Crane. Consequently, Mayer called her into his office at MGM and warned her to drop him, hinting that Crane had underworld connections.

  According to Lana, “I didn’t listen to Mayer because I was already falling in love with Stephen. At the time I met him, he was just coming down from an affair with that Norwegian ice skater. What is her name now? Oh, yes, Sonja Henie. I don’t go to her silly movies.”

  On July 17, 1942, Crane arrived with a dozen roses and an engagement ring. “I want to marry you. Elope with me to Las Vegas. We can’t get a conventional flight because everything is booked by the Army. So I’ve chartered a plane.”

  [Two weeks later, Lana got the round-trip bill for the private airplane he had chartered.]

  I’ll need a maid of honor,” she said.

  “That means you’ll accept?” Then he grinned, grabbed her, and kissed her passionately.

  Within the next thirty minutes, she was on the phone to Linda Darnell. “Drop everything! I want you to fly to Las Vegas at eight tonight with Stephen and me. We’re eloping. The press doesn’t know.”

  That appealed to the romantic in Darnell, who telephoned her boyfriend, Alan Gordon, a Hollywood publicist. Even though he had never met him before, he agreed to fly with them, even to serve as Crane’s best man,

  En route to Las Vegas, Lana sat in the airplane’s front row seats with Darnell, pinning pink orchids on themselves. Crane and Gordon chatted amicably in the seats behind them. Lana whispered to Darnell, “I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.”

  A tale that morphed into a legend was generated by the elopement. Lana was said to have been married by the same justice of the peace who had presided over her marriage to Artie Shaw. She was alleged to have told him, “Judge, this time tie the knot a little tighter.”

  She later denied that story as “a press agent’s invention. It was a different justice of the peace.”

  After a late dinner in Las Vegas, the party of four flew back to Los Angeles. After their plane landed, Crane drove them to Brentwood in his Lincoln coupé. The moment they walked into her home on McCullough Drive, they were greeted by guests who included Judy Garland and David Rose, Ann Rutherford, Bonita Granville, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Maxwell, Susan Hayward, and Robert Sterling. Mildred had arranged a champagne brunch for the newlyweds.

  “Stephen possessed charm by the bundle,” Lana told Susan Hayward. “He’s so debonair. He says he’s from a small town in Indiana, but he has such poise and grace that he’s almost like an American version of Jean-Pierre Aumont, Hollywood’s favorite Frenchman.”

  After the first three nights in a row that Crane spent in Lana’s bed, she heard from Darnell, who asked her, “How’s it going, you old married lady?”

  “I’m heels-over-chin, pinwheels-on-fire-in-love,” she answered.

  “What a quaint way of phrasing it,” Darnell said.

  When Lana first spoke to the press after her elopement, she said, “I’m lonely unless I have someone to love. Along came Mr. Crane.”

  ***

  The first weeks of summer, 1942 were among the most idyllic of Lana’s life. As she told her girlfriends, “I’m blissfully happy. Stephen is a great lover. But there may be problems in the future. We’ve agreed to share household expenses, but so far, I haven’t received any contribution from him. He doesn’t have a regular job, but seems to have plenty of money to spend. Maybe it’s from his tobacco inheritance.”

  Finally, six weeks into the marriage, she came face to face with the source of Crane’s finances: There was an unexpected knock on her door. When Lana answered it herself, she encountered Virginia (“Sugar”) Hill, the girlfriend of the notorious gangster, Bugsy Siegel.

  Lana herself had had an affair with the Mafia Don, and she feared that Hill had arrived to confront her, based on this indiscretion.

  Hill did not introduce herself, but Lana knew who she was, having seen her pictures in the paper. “Is Mr. Crane at home?” she asked in a voice frigid as ice. “I haven’t heard from him in days, and I’m getting worried.”

  “No, he isn’t,” Lana answered. “But I’m Mrs. Crane. May I help you?”

  “Can I come in? I’m not used to conducting my private business on doorsteps.” Then, without waiting for an invitation, she barged into Lana’s living room. There, she refused an offer of tea and didn’t want to sit down. “I’ll get right to the point. Your husband is my bo
yfriend…that is, whenever Bugsy isn’t around.”

  “That can’t be,” a shocked Lana protested. “He’s married to me!”

  “Listen, sweet cheeks, who in the fuck do you think pays his bills? I finance the gigolo with money I get from Bugsy. I even paid for his plastic surgery.”

  “He’s had plastic surgery? I wasn’t aware of that.”

  “He’s had his nose repaired, and been given a new chin, although that stuff is still in the experimental stage. In twenty years, when plastic surgery has been perfected, maybe you and me will be having it done to erase time.”

  Finally, Hill sat down for a girl-on-girl talk. Lana learned that Crane had arrived with his brother in Hollywood in 1933 to become an actor, but so far, no job had ever emerged. “Let’s face it. He’s charming but no Clark Gable. He even admitted to me that he’s a lousy actor.”

  Six years older than Lana, Hill, in Alabama, never owned a pair of shoes until she was seventeen. After running away with a stranger, she’d arrived in Chicago, where her beauty soon got her initiated into her new and very profitable life as agun moll.

  From the back roads of Alabama to the lavish boudoir of the trigger-happy gangster, Bugsy Siegel, Virginia (“Sugar”) Hill arrived on Lana’s doorstep to tell her that Stephen Crane was her “kept boy.”

  One newspaper reporter in Chicago described the bosomy would-be actress: “She is more than just another set of curves. She has considerable flair for hole-in-the-corner diplomacy, enough to allay the suspicions of trigger-happy killers. She remains close-lipped about gangland slayings.”

  Years later, in Hollywood, after Crane met Siegel, the gangster had liked him a lot, even trusting him to escort Hill out on the town in both New York and in Chicago. “Be her escort, and nothing else, or I will personally cut off your balls,” he had warned him.

  With Siegel’s money, Hill was known to spend anywhere from $3,000 to $7,000 a night at such clubs as the Mocambo or the Trocadero, ordering lots of champagne for her gangs of hangers-on.