Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  Lancaster had grown up on the tough streets of Manhattan’s East Harlem. His most traumatic experience had come when he was twelve years old. Six neighborhood toughs had overpowered him and repeatedly raped “the pretty boy,” as they called him.

  Lancaster might have been pretty, but he was also street fighter. Three months later, he trapped the gang leader in a back alley and slashed his face with a switchblade, but didn’t kill him. He was never arrested.

  He was also smart, winning a scholarship to New York University. Before joining the circus, he worked as a singing waiter.

  In 1942, as America went to war, he joined he 21st Special Services Division, a military group of talented young soldiers who provided the troops with entertainment as a means of keeping up morale. From 1943 to 1945, he served in General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army in Italy, as the Allies chased the Nazis north.

  Tall and muscular, Lancaster was a “babe magnet” before the term was invented. As a teenager, he posed for nude photos. One of them was later reprinted and widely distributed, eventually published in books and underground newspapers. He became the first movie star male pinup, though not nearly as widely distributed as his female counterparts, Betty Grable and Lana.

  “Burt and I were just kids starting out,” Gardner told Lana. “We were enjoying ourselves and discovering each other. Of course, I was married to Artie at the time, even though that marriage started to fall apart on our honeymoon.”

  She warned Lana, “You might be disappointed when Burt strips and exposes his uncut glory. Of course, his body is magnificent, but it appears that Mother Nature wasn’t too generous. But that’s only a first impression. He’s a grower, not a show-er.”

  She also revealed that producer Mark Hellinger had first tested Lancaster and her in a love scene. “His passion was real. I felt his erection pressing up against me. I knew then I had him, or soon would. Just to make sure that everything was in order, I slipped my hand down there for a good feel. I thought he’d climax right on the spot.”

  “He’s everything a lover should be,” she said, “both sensual and passionate. I’ll let you in on one of his sexual secrets. He likes his balls jiggled.”

  On his first date with Lana, Lancaster told her that he had been discovered in an elevator in Manhattan. “This guy got on the elevator with me, and kept looking at me with X-ray vision. It was like he was undressing me. I get off and this guy follows me. I turn around and grab him by the necktie like I’m going to choke him. I said, ‘Listen, you pansy, keep that up and I’ll beat the shit out of you!’ Then I head for this job interview in the next office, and this same guy puts in a call, telling me he’s a producer casting a play. And he wants me for an audition. I’d heard that line before. Turns out he was legit. That play eventually led me here to you tonight. Hollywood AND Lana Turner! What more could a man ask for?”

  On his first date with Lana, he took her to a boxing match, showing her to a front-row seat. She was dressed all in white and feared her outfit might get splattered with blood.

  That night in her boudoir, as she later reported to Gardner, “He was all you said with your advance billing…and a bit more. He also likes to nibble your toes, calling them ‘delectable morsels of shrimp.’”

  A writer for Cosmopolitan, describing Lancaster in The Killers, wrote: “It was an extraordinary debut for an unknown. Overnight, Burt Lancaster was a star with a meteoric rise faster than Gable, Garbo, or Lana Turner.”

  Over the next few years, Lancaster and Lana often encountered each other at parties. During the 1940s and early 50s, both of them had moved on to others, and Lana got married to Bob Topping.

  Lancaster’s longtime companion, Jackie Bone, told her, “Burt loves to take his leading ladies to bed, and he’s had quite a few of them, everyone from Yvonne De Carlo to Shelley Winters.

  Lancaster told Lana, “I know what you’ve heard about me, that I’m difficult to work with and grab all the broads. That’s not true. I’m difficult only some of the time, and grab only some of the broads.”

  Louis B. Mayer had not signed Lancaster, and one night at a party, he asked her how she would describe him. “He’s compulsive, dynamic, memorable. His friends call him a vulgar hot-head, yet he loves opera and the ballet.”

  “Funny that you should say that. I keep hearing that he’s a fag.”

  ***

  Lana had known Virginia Mayo for several years, ever since she and Ava Gardner had agreed to be cheerleaders for a charity baseball game, billed at the time as “Stars vs. Stars.”

  They had never known each other well, but occasionally, they ran into each other at premieres or at parties, when they “air-kissed” their way past each other.

  Lana had just seen Mayo in William Wyler’s drama, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), in which Mayo had played the unsympathetic gold-digger married to a returning war veteran, Dana Andrews, another of Lana’s previous “flings.” It would become the highest-grossing film in the United States since Gone With the Wind (1939).

  As a fellow blonde goddess, Lana was rather jealous of the victories Mayo had recently scored with the press. One fan magazine said “she looked like a pinup painting come to life,” and the Sultan of Morocco declared that her beauty “was tangible proof of the existence of God.”

  As Mayo related to Lana, she had a problem: During the filming of The Best Years of Our Lives, she had become involved with Steve Cochran, who had been cast as her sleazy boyfriend. Their affair continued after the filming ended. However, she’d met a minor B-list actor, Michael O’Shea, whom she would marry in 1947.

  After listening for a few minutes, Lana asked, “In other words, you want me to take this Cochran boy off your hands? I’ve already heard quite a lot about him. He’s dynamite.”

  “That he is,” Mayo answered. “In more ways than one. You won’t be disappointed. Joan Crawford, or so I’ve heard, hasn’t gotten around to him yet.

  During his first months in Hollywood, Steve Cochran had earned a reputation as a womanizer, and Lana’s gossipy girlfriends were touting his male assets. He was “The New Boy of Tinseltown,” and was already being referred to as “Mr. King Size” when he wasn’t otherwise being labeled “The Schvantz.”

  [Hollywood footnote: Crawford’s affair with Cochran would not begin until they co-starred together in The Damned Don’t Cry (1950).]

  Cochran, the son of a logger, had grown up in Laramie, Wyoming. During his teenage years, he’d had a number of run-ins with the police.

  Once in Hollywood, Cochran confessed that his ultimate dream fantasy involved being a Sultan controlling a harem staffed with girls aged 13 to 14.

  He arrived the following night at Lana’s house, and from her first observation, she realized that casting directors would interpret him as the ultimate “sleazy pretty boy” for film noir. She served him dinner, but halfway through the meal, he couldn’t wait, and dragged her off into the bedroom.

  The next morning, she called Mayo after Cochran had departed. “It was a big thrill all right. I’d hate to have been a virgin broken in by him. He’s a walking streak of sex, and he can go all night. But he’s far too violent for my taste. My body is bruised. I was afraid he might injure my face. It’s a good thing I don’t have to confront the camera tomorrow. After all, you and I get by on our looks. Neither of us is Sarah Bernhardt.”

  “Don’t worry about Steve,” Mayo answered. “I just heard that Mae West has contacted him and wants to audition him to go on a road trip with her in Diamond Lil.”

  [Cochran, in reference to West, later admitted, “I threw the stuck-up bitch a few mercy fucks. That was almost written into my contract. When was the broad born? No doubt in 1880.”]

  After Mamie Van Doren filmed The Beat Generation with Cochran in 1959, she described him in a memoir. Her experience with this rough guy was similar to what Lana’s had been years before: “He was the rough-hewn, sexy, perennial movie tough guy. What I discovered about Steve after we had been dating for a while was tha
t his behavior was frighteningly erratic. He had a violent temper reminiscent of my first husband. In bed, he became increasingly rougher, until one night he very nearly beat me up.”

  Many of Cochran’s conquests claimed that he pumped up his excitement by slapping a woman during intercourse, and spitting into her mouth.

  ***

  Eddie Mannix, from MGM’s publicity department, phoned Lana with a request. He wanted her to appear, accompanied by Peter Shaw, at the premiere of The Yearling (1946). Starring Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman, The Yearling was set in the early frontier wilds of Florida.

  “Who the hell is Peter Shaw?” Lana asked. “Never heard of him.”

  “He’s a Limey that we’re putting under contract. He’s even handsomer than Errol Flynn. Lately, he’s been going out with Joan Crawford.”

  “Leave it to that bitch to get him first,” she said.

  “Not only Joan, but he’s also been seen taking out Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner.”

  “For the new boy in town, this guy is sure devouring the frosting off the cake.”

  “From what I hear, Peter is an apt name for him,” Mannix told her.

  Lana agreed to the date, but phoned Gardner to see if Shaw were worth pursuing after the screening.

  “He’s an absolute doll in and out of bed,” Gardner claimed. “He’s not stuck-up at all. He even told me that as an actor, he can’t even act. MGM wants to market him as their new celluloid heartthrob. If he attends the premiere with you, looking absolutely gorgeous, the two of you are sure to hit the morning papers.”

  Then Lana asked about Crawford. Gardner said that she’d started dating Shaw after her divorce from Phillip Terry had been finalized. “But that’s over now. Peter told me that he’s too strong a man to be prince consort for the Queen of Hollywood.”

  “So now, Crawford—The San Antonio Beauty Queen of 1904—is the Queen of Hollywood?” Lana said, with strong contempt in her voice. “Who the fuck crowned her that?” [Lana was referencing the year and the birthplace of Crawford.]

  At the glittering premiere, Shaw and Lana, dressed all in white, made a spectacular appearance. There were immediate rumors of a romance.

  A highlight for Lana occurred later, at a private VIP reception associated with the premiere. There, she got to talk to the star of the film, Gregory Peck. She still wanted to date him, but somehow, had not found it possible, barring a full-frontal assault.

  Two views of Peter Shaw: (top photo), with Lana, with whom he did not find happiness, and (lower photo) with Angela Lansbury, with whom he (presumably) did.

  During their dialogue, she made overtures about seeing him alone, but he didn’t pick up on them. Treating her graciously, he moved on to talk to Wyman and then to Bette Davis.

  That left Shaw, and he lived up to Gardner’s advance billing as “being the most gorgeous thing walking on two feet.” He stood six feet three, with thick dark hair, broad shoulders, and narrow hips. “He did look a bit like Errol Flynn, but without his hangups,” Lana said.

  That night, and over the course of the two weeks that followed, she got to know this dashing young Brit who had gone to school in London’s Westminster section with another actor, Peter Ustinov. When England entered World War II, he’d joined the British army.

  Along the way, he’d met a model, Mercia Squires, and after some intense dating, had married her. When he left for Belgium in 1944, she was pregnant. In Hamburg, during the days immediately flanking the end of the war, he worked as an aide to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. News arrived that he was the father of a son named David.

  However, when Shaw eventually returned home to Britain, he found that his new wife was living with another soldier. Heartbroken, he wanted to leave England He found a theatrical agent who pitched his good looks and British charm to MGM. In a surprise move, he was awarded a contract and hired at $350 a week.

  After Lana’s first few nights with Shaw, she reported to Gardner about her latest beau. “The first night he stayed over, I woke up. It was a Saturday. He was not in the bed with me. A few minutes later, there was a rap on my door, and he entered with a breakfast tray. He’d cooked it himself and had even placed a red rose on the tray. My God, in addition to being a heavenly lover, he can cook, too!”

  “We’ll work out some arrangement,” Gardner said. “I need Peter at least two nights a week. The rest of the time, he can freelance.”

  “Ava, darling Ava. It’s more than that. Based on my first morning’s glow, I’m thinking of marrying this darling man.”

  “Tomorrow, you’ll feel different,” Gardner predicted.

  As it turned out, her words were prophetic.

  Shaw’s film career was slow to launch, as one producer after another told him that he looked “too much like Tyrone Power.”

  Then, instead of Shaw, the REAL Tyrone Power walked into Lana’s life.

  The British actress, Angela Lansbury, also had her eagle eye trained on Shaw, and, she too, considered him marriage material. By 1949, they had wed.

  When Lansbury learned that her future husband had seduced Lana, she cattily said, “Lana Turner is a good example of what an acting coach can do with completely incompetent material.”

  Lansbury had wanted the role of Milady De Winter in the upcoming remake of The Three Musketeers, but ended up cast in a smaller role as France’s Queen Anne instead.

  She later said, “Miss Turner got the coveted role. The film gave her a chance to show off her chest.”

  ***

  Lana had been a big hit throughout World War II, especially with the men who fought that war, but during the postwar year of 1946, with the soldiers returning home and Hollywood’s product moving rapidly into new arenas, she worried about her future. Would she become one of those over-the-hill blondes, like Veronica Lake or Carole Landis, whose allure ended with the peace treaty with Japan? Even her chief rival, Betty Grable, didn’t expect to retain her wartime fame as the leading pinup beauty.

  Would the boys who had returned from the battle fronts adore Lana as much as before? Every day, she studied her nude figure in a full-length mirror, searching for that first wrinkle, those first tiny sags of flesh. Both her hairdressers and makeup artists assured her that she was at the peak of her beauty. Eventually, she believed them.

  She was having numerous affairs and continued to do so, based on the slogan she had so often repeated: “So many men, so little time.”

  Anxious to learn what 1946 held, she arranged “readings” with two separate fortune tellers in Los Angeles. Somewhat generically, both of them predicted “great tragedy” looming in her faraway future.

  She couldn’t worry about that, as she was living for the here and now.

  But if either of the fortune tellers had been genuinely clairvoyant, they would have predicted that, indeed, BIG events lay in her immediate future:

  ONE:

  She’d have an affair with a young Naval lieutenant who would one day become the most powerful man on earth; and

  TWO:

  She’d meet the love of her life; and

  THREE:

  She’d make what many critics consider her finest motion picture, and

  FOUR:

  She’d enter into a loveless marriage, her third.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Postman Rings Twice for Lana

  And Then Again...and Again...and Again

  Tyrone Power Becomes the Love of Lana’s Life

  “If only one Lana Turner film could be placed in a time capsule to be seen by future generations, then I would select my role as Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice. At first, I had protested casting John Garfield in the role. I was wrong. I later learned in a motel room that a man didn’t have to look like Robert Taylor or Errol Flynn to be a great lover.”

  In most accounts, Lana’s brief fling in 1946 with the British actor, Rex Harrison, was not detected on the radar screen. However, her daughter Cheryl, in her memoirs, listed him as one of the men that Lana was seeing at
the time, along with several other beaux: Greg Bautzer (their affair never really ended); Tony Martin (who on rare occasions made an overnight stopover at Lana’s home); Peter Lawford (who slipped back into her good graces on three occasions after she’d dropped him); and Howard Hughes (making an unexpected appearance now and then). Even Huntington Hartford phoned her when he flew to Los Angeles one night.

  As she boasted, “These guys can’t seem to get Lana out of their blood.”

  Ever since Harrison had scored big in the U.K. on both the stage and on screen, Hollywood had been trying to lure him to its inner sanctums. Then, as he was weighing various offers, World War II began, and he joined the RAF.

  Finally, at war’s end, he was lured to Hollywood after being offered a contract at 20th Century Fox. Newspapers were packed with news of his arrival in Tinseltown.

  As a “young gent,” studying in Liverpool, Harrison had been introduced to sex by a black prostitute from Kingston, Jamaica.

  By 1934, he was seasoned for marriage to fashion model Collette Thomas, the union lasting until 1942. That didn’t stop him from adulterous affairs, including one with Vivien Leigh. In 1943, he married the German actress, Lilli Palmer, although he wasn’t faithful to her, either.

  The Australian actress, Coral Browne, nicknamed him “Sexy Rexy,” and the label had stuck.

  After her one-night stand with “Sexy Rexy” (Rex Harrison), Lana told her friends that she found him “dangerously attractive, but nothing but trouble for a woman.”

  One afternoon, Paulette Goddard phoned Lana and invited her to a dinner party. “My seating calls for man, woman, man, woman. I’ve invited Rex Harrison, and I need him to show up with a date to make my dinner seating come out evenly. Would you allow him to escort you to my dinner? Every guest is strictly A-list.”

  “I’d be honored,” she answered.

  “I’m looking forward to seeing you again. He’ll pick you up at 7:30. You and I have come a long way since we starred together in Dramatic School.”