Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  She rarely confronted Topping about the other women in his life, running up bills in her name, or his long absences from the house.

  When she did confront him, he often flew into an alcoholic rage, in some cases in full view of her guests when she was hosting a party. Kathryn Grayson once said something that antagonized him, and he picked up a lamp and threw it at her. It narrowly missed her head and face, crashing loudly into a mirror behind the bar.

  On one occasion, Topping disappeared for two weeks with no word about where he was. Eventually, a letter arrived from his attorneys in Manhattan, revealing that he intended to sue for a legal separation. Allegedly, he’d gone on an extended fishing trip to Oregon and might, after that, proceed to Alaska to fish for salmon.

  Lana phoned Greg Bautzer, asking him to begin divorce proceedings and to work out a settlement with Topping’s lawyers. After much bickering, Lana was allowed to keep the house in Holmby Hills, on which she was making the payments. Very reluctantly, she agreed to return the heirloom jewelry from his mother’s estate. She refused, however, to relinquish the marquise diamond ring he’d dropped into her martini glass at Manhattan’s “21” when he’d proposed marriage.

  On September 11, 1951, MGM announced that Lana and Bob Topping were divorcing. She was quoted as saying, “Bob wants me to give up my film career, but it means too much to me and my fans. I’ve worked too hard to become a movie star to abandon it at this point. I wish him all the happiness in his new life.”

  At the time of the announcement, Topping was shacked up in Sun Valley, Idaho, with Mona Moedl, an ice-skating instructor.

  What Lana defined at the time as “my fourth and last marriage” survived for 4½ troubled years. Cheryl was nine years old the day he left for good.

  He predicted trouble ahead for Lana. “Your daughter is dangerous,” he warned her. “You tend to believe her, but she’s full of complexes and prone to lie.”

  [Lana waited until the autumn of 1952 to start divorce proceedings. Before they could begin, she had to spend time in Nevada as a means of establishing residency in that state.

  In 1953, after the legalities of their divorce were finalized, Topping married Moedl. He continued to drink heavily, dying fifteen years later at the age of fifty-four.]

  ***

  Confronted with yet another failed marriage, and living in fear for her career, Lana admitted she’d wandered down a stairway to a dark gulf, and she wanted to escape from her emotional pain and anguish. Partly because she had adequately provided for both Cheryl and Mildred in her will, she left more and more of the day-to-day supervision of her daughter to her mother.

  At this point in her life, she sometimes contemplated suicide. As unbelievable as it sounds, she actually attempted it when both Benton Cole (her business manager) and Mildred were with her in the house.

  She went into her bathroom and locked both doors. “There was nothing else left for me to do,” she wrote in her memoirs.

  Then she opened her medicine cabinet, removed a bottle of sleeping pills, and swallowed every one of them. Fearing that that would be insufficient, she took out a razor and, in one sharp movement, she slashed her left wrist as blood spurted out. Within minutes, she passed out, collapsing onto the marble floor.

  Having heard the crash, and fearing that something was wrong, Cole pounded on the bathroom door. When he got no answer, he kicked it in, finding her unconscious in a pool of blood. As he applied a tourniquet, he shouted for Mildred to summon a doctor

  Dr. John McDonald, from his home nearby, rushed over and immediately carried Lana to his car and rushed her to the Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, where doctors saved her life by stopping the bleeding, sewing her up, and pumping out her stomach.

  After a suicide attempt and two days in the hospital, Lana, with her wrists bandaged, was released. She immediately faced an armada of reporters and photographers.

  To help prepare her for her exit, Mildred had hauled in an all-white wardrobe that included a babushka, slacks, and an ankle-length overcoat.

  Pictures of her in this outfit appeared on frontpages of newspapers across the country.

  The doctor later described her self-inflicted wound as “a jagged laceration across the lower quarter of her left forearm.” Two tendons had been cut, but only halfway through.

  She remembered lying alone in her hospital room, sobbing for hours in shame for what she’d tried to do to herself.

  MGM’s Eddie Mannix denied that Lana had ever attempted suicide. Although no one believed him, he announced that she had fainted in the shower and had fallen and cut her arm as it shattered a glass door. This was the same story that had been invented for Barbara Stanwyck a decade earlier.

  On her way out of the hospital, Lana denied that she had attempted suicide. “I plan to live to become the oldest woman in America,” she said.

  After her divorce from Topping, Lana greeted her new neighbor, Judy Garland, and was introduced to her husband, Sid Luft. “Judy had faced suicide herself,” Lana said. “We promised to keep each other from killing ourselves. I needed some strong feminine support at the time. Both Judy and I had pre-adolescent daughters to deal with. Liza Minnelli in her case. The question was, which daughter would cause her mother the most grief?”

  During her recovery, Lana began to throw parties with a ratio of guests that was eighty percent male, twenty percent female, “the latter as unattractive as possible.”

  ***

  In the course of Stephen Crane’s self-imposed exile in Europe, his daughter, Cheryl, learned that he had married actress Martine Carol, an elegant blonde goddess and one of the most beautiful women performing in films on the Continent.

  By the late 1940s, when she became Cheryl’s new stepmother, she had become the leading actress in French cinema. She would keep that reputation until the mid-1950s, when she was upstaged and more or less replaced by the “sex kitten,” Brigitte Bardot.

  During her father’s time away, Cheryl had been virtually out of touch with him, with almost no insights into the gilded life he was leading as a bon vivant on the Continent.

  As Crane’s memory had receded, one Sunday afternoon, Bob Topping had called out to Cheryl, summoning her to approach him. She was resting by the pool, and he was at the breakfast table on the patio. He immediately got to the point: “Your father is dead. Stephen died in a car accident in Paris.” He held up the Sunday newspaper with a blaring headline—LANA’S EX IN PARIS CRASH. That horrible news was highlighted with a photo of a sports car that had been demolished in an accident.

  “I am so very sorry,” Topping told his stepdaughter. “You’ve got to be brave. Stephen would have wanted that. This is not the time for you to fall apart. Please let Lana adjust to this in her own way, and not make it an issue to cause her more grief. From now on, you can call me Daddy, even though you’ve resisted doing that until now.”

  Cheryl had not seen her biological father in two years. The only mention Lana had made of him was when she’d told her, “Your father has married a French actress. You are not going to see your new stepmother.”

  In her memoirs, Cheryl noted, “There was little time to mourn.”

  This incident illustrates a strange gap, or “disconnect” in the life and times of Lana Turner. If Stephen Crane were indeed dead, why didn’t Lana talk about it with her daughter? Apparently, she did not. Neither did her grandmother, Mildred.

  Months later, when Mildred was shaking her granddaughter awake from a deep sleep, she said, “I have wonderful news for you, dear. Your father is back in California. I talked to him last night. He’s coming over to see you today.”

  Cheryl immediately became hysterical. “That’s a lie! He’s not coming! He’s dead!”

  In an attempt to calm her down, Mildred asked, “Where did you hear such an awful thing?”

  “Papa told me,” Cheryl answered. “My daddy died in a car crash in Paris. I’ll never see him again.”

  “You must have misunderstood,” Mildred said.


  Cheryl had not misunderstand, and she never knew why Topping had perpetrated such a lie. Having kept her grief to herself, she had never discussed Stephen’s (presumed) death with either her mother or her grandmother.

  That afternoon, another Sunday, Cheryl waited at the bottom of the steps for the arrival of her father. At 2PM sharp, he showed up, loaded down with presents.

  He looked as handsome as ever, but had “gray dustings around his temples. He walked with a slight limp from the time he’d wrapped his sports car around a telephone pole. He told her that he’d spent a month on the critical list in a Paris hospital, but that he had pulled through.

  She was anxious to hear about his life during his long absence. After tears of joy, hugs and kisses, he took her for a ride in his new limousine. Over a late lunch, he thrilled her with news of the glamorous months he’d spent in Paris, on the French Riviera and in north Africa. He had hung out with Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, King Farouk of Egypt, Prince Aly Khan (married to Rita Hayworth, with whom he’d had an affair), Prince Rainier of Monaco, and with Aristotle Onassis and his mistress, Maria Callas. She wondered how he could have afforded such a lavish lifestyle.

  He admitted that he’d smuggled contraband such as luxury products, into post-war France, which was trying to recover from the nightmare of its long occupation by Nazi armies.

  He discussed his new wife, Martine Carol, admitting that she had led a reckless life before meeting him. Her first love had been Geôrges Marchal, who had abandoned her, deserting her to go off with actress Dany Robin. Distraught, Carol had ripped off her clothes and jumped into Paris’ Seine river near the Pont d’Alma. A taxi driver had plunged into the river and rescued her.

  Stephen claimed that he had brought stability to her life as a movie star. For a while, they had lived in chic Monte Carlo near the villa of Prince Aly Khan and Rita Hayworth. Without admitting it, Cheryl may have gotten the impression that he had resumed his affair with the lonely Miss Hayworth whenever her errant prince was away in the arms of some other woman.

  His life sounded far more glamourous than Lana’s, now that she’d married Bob Topping.

  During the subsequent months, Stephen faithfully arrived to retrieve Cheryl, according to a pre-arranged schedule, for afternoon bondings. At no point did Lana ever appear to greet him.

  Years later, Cheryl recalled attending a pool party with her father and his friends. In a distant corner sat a beautiful blonde starlet who had recently signed with 20th Century Fox. Cheryl later found out that the starlet had recently changed her name to Marilyn Monroe.

  The leading actress in French cinema, Martine Carol, became the next Mrs. Stephen Crane. But which was she? “The next Lana Turner?” or “France’s answer to Marilyn Monroe.”

  Darryl F. Zanuck was at the party. After Cheryl was taken home, he’d seen Stephen return to the party, where he then escorted Monroe out the door. The couple disappeared for three days and nights.

  Zanuck said, “Marilyn not only wants to be the new Lana Turner, but she wants to seduce her ex-husbands as well. Her next conquest will probably be Artie Shaw.”

  Stephen, before and after his divorce from Martine Carol, would continue seducing the glamour queens of Hollywood. He was even rumored to have had an affair with another blonde beauty, Mamie Van Doren, who was often dubbed in the press as “a Marilyn Mon-roe clone.”

  ***

  After Crane’s divorce from Carol in 1953, he launched Luau, a Polynesian-themed restaurant on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. It quickly became a celebrity hot spot, known for its innovative décor and movie star clientele. Guests included an impressive roster of celebrities: Robert Mitchum, Joan Crawford, Loretta Young, Marlene Dietrich, Shelley Winters, Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, Bing Crosby, Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, Burt Lancaster, and William Holden.

  In time, he would expand his “Kon Tiki Empire” with theme restaurants stretching from Honolulu to Portland, Oregon, and from Chicago to Boston.

  ***

  There is a saying in Hollywood that a star is only as commercially valuable as his or her latest picture. In Lana’s case, that was not true. Her two previous pictures had each flopped at the box office. But based on her casting as the lead in a big Technicolor musical, The Merry Widow (1952), she was hoping for a triumph.

  On December 30, 1905, in beaux-arts, pre-World-War I Vienna, Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow) was performed for the first time. The operetta became the most famous creation of Franz Lehár, the Austro-Hungarian composer of light operas. Its theme song, “The Merry Widow Waltz,” became an international standard.

  In the decades that followed, interrupted by both World War I and II, Lehár’s operetta remained a witty, popular, and escapist vehicle on stages worldwide. In 1907, Broadway discovered the operetta, which opened with Donald Brian and Ethel Jackson—two big but now forgotten stars of yesterday—in the romantic leads. It reached the screen for the first time in a 1912 two-reeler starring Alma Rubens and the doomed actor, Wallace Reid.

  “My God, had I succeeded in commiting suicide, I would have denied myself the pleasure of kissing Fernando Lamas,” Lana said.

  “He had a wonderful technique, giving only a flicker of his tongue as a tantalizing prelude of more to come. I don’t mean that as a pun.”

  Its greatest exposure came in 1925 when the tyrannical film director, Erich von Stroheim, adapted it into a silent movie co-starring the self-enchanted Mae Murray and John Gilbert, the movie making him a matinee idol of the silent screen. Murray was cast as the dancer Sally O’Hara, with Gilbert playing the romantic Prince Danilo. Unknown to even some of their most ardent fans, Clark Gable and Joan Crawford each appeared in it as uncredited extras. She shot to stardom quicker than he did.

  The Merry Widow would be adapted for the screen four more times: In 1934, 1952 (Lana’s version), and again in 1962 and 1994.

  When Lana starred in the film, she had to wear heavy bracelets, gloves, or a fur piece to cover the scars of her recent suicide attempt.

  MGM cast a real singer into its ’34 version, Jeanette MacDonald, who starred in it opposite the French actor/comedian Maurice Chevalier, under the direction of Ernst Lubitsch, who made it a bit of a bedroom farce. Ironically, Una Merkel appeared in both this, the ’34 version of the film, and again, in the 1952 version with Lana.

  During her time filmmaking with Lana, Merkel told her, “In 1934, I played Queen Dolores. Now I’m cast as your handmaiden pouring your bath water. How the mighty have fallen.”

  The Hungarian-born producer, Joe Pasternak, announced that he was going to reconfigure The Merry Widow as “a love story with music.” Its stars would be Lana and Ricardo Montalban. In this latest version, scriptwriters Sonya Levien and William Ludwig took great liberties with Lehár’s original libretto and score.

  MGM wanted a Technicolor blockbuster, and raided Broadway for topnotch talent. Jack Cole, the dancer, choreographer, and theater director, known as “the Father of the Theatrical Jazz Dance,” got involved. Such glamour queens as Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable, and Jane Russell had worked with him previously. His most famous gig focused on the staging of Marilyn Monroe’s number, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. In Lana’s picture, Cole’s naughty can-can at Maxim’s, and his magnificent waltz finale, did much to launch the 1952 version of The Merry Widow as one of the hit movies of the year, luring viewers into theaters and away from their TV sets.

  A key figure in its eventual success was its musical director, Jack Blacton. In 1943, Rodgers and Hammerstein had tapped him to conduct Oklahoma!” on Broadway, and he would later conduct Ethel Merman’s two greatest hits, Annie Get Your Gun (1946), and Call Me Madam (1950).

  The German-born Curtis Bernhardt was designated as the film’s director. Before that, he had directed such stars as Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Jane Wyman before tackling Lana. For reasons he kept to himself, he dropped Ricardo Montalban as the male lead and substituted Fernando Lamas instead. />
  The strikingly handsome Lamas had been an established star in Argentina, where he was the secret lover of that country’s beautiful dictator, Evita Perón. In 1951, Hollywood signed him to compete with Montalban as the town’s Latin Lover. Born in 1920, he was younger than Lamas, who first confronted the world in 1915.

  Lana’s friend and confidante, Helen Rose, designed most of her spectacular costumes. Her Belle Époque accessories included peacock feathers, hourglass corsets, lavish ball gowns, stunning picture hats, and sexy négligées. As Lana told Rose, “Mae Murray may have been merrier, Jeanette MacDonald more melodious, butLana Turner’s stunning appearance will be the most illustrious of all. Wow! Just looking at myself in one of your gowns practically turns me into a lesbian.”

  Vienna’s (strapless) Belle Époque, replicated in Hollywood by costume designer Helen Rose, as interpreted by lovely Lana.

  As backdrops for Lana and Lamas, Bernhardt assembled an all-star supporting cast. Richard Haydn as Baron Popoff was known for playing eccentric characters. Before joining the cast, he had starred as the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland (1950).

  Thomas Gomez, cast as king of the mythical nation of Marshovia, played a variation of the oily, fleshy character he had developed for earlier films. Gomez became the first Hispanic American actor nominated for an Oscar for his performance in Ride the Pink Horse (1947).

  The English character actor, John Abbott, was a noted Shakespearean actor who had worked with such formidable British stars as Dame Sybil Thorndike, Vivien Leigh, and Laurence Olivier.

  Robert Coote, as the Marquis de Crillon, was already known to Lana, having appeared with her in The Three Musketeers.

  In the midst of the shooting, Spencer Tracy paid Lana a surprise visit. He congratulated her for signing a new and better contract with MGM. “They’re getting rid of most of us old-timers. We’re worn-out horses headed for the glue factory. We golden oldies belong to yesterday. But your future lies ahead of you. Your greatest roles are yet to come. Mine belonged to another day.”