Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  “Your character doesn’t say a word,” Bradshaw said to Dean. “Your face has to say it all. You’re to appear triumphant. You’ve stolen the man she loves from the most desirable woman in the world.”

  “I can do it! I can do it!” Dean shouted.

  Brackett warned that although the insertion of a gay context would make a great scene, he feared that the censors wouldn’t allow it.

  [As it happened, he was right.]

  Dean said, “MGM will be swamped with fan mail, asking “Who’s that boy?...namely, me.”

  At 9:30PM that same night, Lana arrived at Bradshaw’s apartment, having been driven there by an anonymous, shadowy male figure who all three men later agreed was NOT Fernando Lamas. He remained outside, behind the wheel of her car, throughout the course of her dialogue inside with Bradshaw, Brackett, and Dean..

  She explained that she didn’t want to bring her unnamed companion inside “because I know you guys will go ape-shit over him and try to take him away from Ava and me. We’ve got a date at her place later tonight.”

  Of course, all three men knew that she was referring to Ava Gardner. Lana accepted glowing tributes from both Brackett and Dean, each of them insisting that she was their favorite screen actress.

  “You probably say the same thing to Bette Davis and Joan Crawford,” she said.

  Then she expressed her dislike of the crop of young actors who had emerged during the early 50s, specifically naming Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando. “Give me Clark Gable or Robert Taylor any day, especially that handsome devil, Tyrone Power. Errol Flynn is a darling, or at least he used to be. Dare I mention Victor Mature with his sledgehammer?”

  At some point, she seemed to take notice of Dean, appraising him seductively. He would later tell Brackett, “She looked at me like a juicy piece of steak about to be devoured.”

  ***

  Without Brackett’s knowledge, Dean arrived unexpectedly the next afternoon at Bradshaw’s apartment with his shirt unbuttoned. After he was invited inside, he made the motivation for his visit clear. “I believe in repaying my debts,” he said. “One favor deserves another.”

  “Rogers is my best friend,” Bradshaw replied. “In Hollywood, a town of dishonorable people, I retain a sense of honor. I do not seduce the trick of my best friend. Now scram!”

  “Okay, I’m going,” Dean replied. At the door, he hesitated. “One more favor. Can’t you beef up my scene? Have Georgia Lorrison approach me later on and seduce me? It would be a revenge fuck, Georgia giving it to Shields for betraying her.”

  “That I know I can’t get away with,” Bradshaw said. “But I might deliver the real thing to you. I talked to Lana this morning, and she asked about you. Her exact words were, ‘Who was that divine young man last night? Does he fuck women, too?’”

  Bradshaw then continued: “If you want to meet her, it can be arranged. I won’t touch you, but Lana will. She devours young men. Rogers must not know.”

  “So your honor extends only so far?”

  “Of course it does. After all, this is Hollywood.”

  Bradshaw phoned Dean the next day, saying, “It’s all arranged for 4PM sharp this afternoon. I’ve got her address for you.”

  After writing down her address, Dean said, “Thanks, pal. I’ll owe you one when I bolt from Rogers. That’s in the cards, you know.”

  Arriving on time, unusual for him, Dean was directed to her swimming pool, where Lana, in a one-piece sunflowery yellow bathing suit, was sipping an iced tea.

  He never discussed in any detail what happened that afternoon. Lana, still madly in love with Lamas, certainly didn’t either.

  After midnight, Dean returned to Brackett’s apartment, claiming that he’d met some of his old school buddies and that he’d gone drinking with them.

  Months later in New York, Dean shared a reunion with his old friends, composer Alec Wilder and TV producer Stanley Mills Haggart.

  “I’m keeping a list of the famous men and women I’ve seduced in Hollywood. I need all this for the memoirs I’m going to write when I’m seventy-four. That list already includes Marilyn Monroe. I met her through my fuck buddy, Marlon Brando. To the roster of notables can be added one Miss Lana Turner.”

  Although Minnelli liked Bradshaw’s having written a “young man at the top of the stairs” into the script of The Bad and the Beautiful, Houseman rejected it as “too daring.”

  ***

  A second attempt by Dean to appear in a movie with Lana also fell through.

  Vincente Minnelli and his producer, John Houseman, were teamed together again for production of “a mental film,” (Houseman’s words). The movie, entitled The Cobweb and released in 1955, was set in a mental ward. As originally conceived, the director had cast the three leading roles with an amazing selection of two blondes, Lana and Grace Kelly, emoting with Robert Taylor. Dean was to have been cast into a secondary role. Later, it emerged that his studio refused to lease him.

  The final cast of The Cobweb starred Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall, Gloria Grahame, and John Kerr, making his screen debut in the role briefly targeted for Dean.

  Even though Dean never got to work with Lana, his fascination with her continued. Months later, when he was searching for a place to live, a local landlord, David Gould, showed him a fully furnished house (at 1541 Sunset Plaza Drive) that had once been occupied by Lana.

  Gould directed him to the master bedroom, the first room Dean wanted to see. Gould pointed out an elegant four-poster. “Lana slept in this very bed, but never alone, night after night.”

  “You’ve convinced me. I’ll sign the lease. Tonight, I’ll be sleeping in Lana’s bed…and never alone!”

  ***

  Right before Lana reported to work on the set of The Bad and the Beautiful, rumors reached MGM that both Lana and Ava Gardner were about to become the victims of an exposé in the upcoming edition of Confidential.

  According to the grapevine, Gardner had stopped off for gasoline at a notorious filling station in Los Angeles at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard at Fairfax. After serving in the Marines during World War II, Scotty Bowers, a handsome, strapping ex-Marine, pumped gas at the station. In time, he developed a scheme for the employment of other good-looking, well-built ex-military men who had returned from World War II to a landscape with no jobs.

  He began to arrange “dates” among these men and members of L.A.’s burgeoning gay population. Walter Pidgeon, one of Lana’s co-stars in The Bad and the Beautiful, was one of Scotty’s first and best customers.

  Scotty and members of his crew also serviced women. Their conquests included Vivien Leigh and occasionally men in drag, one of whom was J. Edgar Hoover of the F.B.I. Ostensibly, the other gas jockeys at the station were also for rent.

  When Gardner pulled into the station, her tank was filled by Greg Tolson, a 6’4” former paratrooper with bulging muscles and tight pants. He immediately attracted Gardner’s hawkeye. There wasn’t much time for small talk as the pair got down to some fast negotiations. They led to Tolson’s arrival at Gardner’s house that night at 10PM. Fortunately, her very possessive lover, Frank Sinatra, was out of town that night, performing in front of an audience in Las Vegas.

  According to rumor, Tolson left Gardner’s house at 10AM the following morning. Right before noon, she placed a call to Lana, with whom she often “traded” men, even a shared husband (Artie Shaw).

  She apparently went into lavish praise of Tolson as a lover, telling Lana, “He’s the kind of guy who comes into a woman’s life only once in twenty-five years. Better take advantage now. The likes of him will not come again.”

  Intrigued, Lana, looking her most glamourous, arrived that night at Gardner’s home, where she was introduced to Tolson.

  “Seeing was believing,” she reported later to Virginia Grey. “If he were a book, he’d be a bestseller.”

  Word of Lana’s sharing of the gas jockey with Gardner reached Dory Schary’s office, along with news about the upcoming expos�
� of the scandal in Confidential. He summoned both actresses into his office for a severe reprimand.

  “If you don’t give a god damn about your reputations, think of MGM and its reputation. Think of the morality clauses in both of your contracts.”

  After a stern and humiliating lecture about “cleaning up your acts,” he dismissed them.

  On her way out, Gardner turned back. “Don’t worry, honey chile,” she said. “Even if Confidential exposes us, who’s gonna believe it?”

  ***

  Lana was eager to work with Kirk Douglas, her co-star in the upcoming The Bad and the Beautiful. She told Minnelli, “I think we’d make a dynamic duo on the screen, perhaps generate as much body heat as John Garfield and I did in Postman.” She’d been impressed with the actor ever since she’d seen him star opposite Barbara Stanwyck in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946).

  Born Issur Danielovitch, the Russian Jewish actor, with his powerful build, expressed his relentless spirit through his cold, fierce eyes. He was a sort of virile anti-hero in post-war America, his cleft chin familiar to American audiences through such hits as the grim prizefighter in Champion (1949), or “The Gentleman Caller” in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie (1950).

  After the first week of shooting, Hedda Hopper arrived on the scene, interrupting a conversation between Douglas and Lana. “I hear you kids may have a potential hit on your hands.”

  Then she turned to Douglas. “But I still think you’re a son of a bitch.”

  “I’ve always been a son of a bitch,” he answered. “But what about Lana here? Who is she?”

  “Drop of ‘son of’…and you’ve nailed her,” Hopper said, before turning her back on the stars of the picture and walking away.

  ***

  Long before Lana met Douglas, his reputation had preceded him. Early in his career, he’d auditioned for Mae West as a member of her stage revue. She insisted that actors who wanted to appear with her model for her in skimpy, form-fitting briefs that made their manly assets (or lack thereof) obvious. After giving Douglas a thorough appraisal, she rejected him for her backdrop of musclemen. “Buster, you just don’t make the grade,” she told him.

  Then she turned to the next actor in line. “What’s your name, kid? Steve Cochran, I heard. Is that a pistol in those briefs of yours—or are you just glad to see me?”

  Evelyn Keyes had already revealed to anyone who wanted to hear that “Kirk is just parlor-sized.”

  Commenting on his own erection, he once told a reporter, “An erection is a mysterious thing. There’s always the fear that each time one goes, that you won’t be seeing it again.”

  Whether a great Romeo or not, Douglas would go one to seduce some of the stellar lights of Tinseltown: Lauren Bacall, Pier Angeli, Rita Hayworth, Marlene Dietrich, Gene Tierney, Patricia Neal, Ann Sothern, and Princess Safia Tarzi of Afghanistan.

  Lana also appears on those lists of Douglas’ seductions, despite denials from each of them that they never had an affair during the filming of The Bad and the Beautiful.

  When he met her, he had only recently recovered from a case of pneumonia, the result of overexposure during the filming of his previous film, The Big Sky (1952).

  During his recovery, he was visited often by Marlene Dietrich. “She would come over and cook soup for me, cuddle me, affectionate sex. But that was less important than the mothering. Marlene is an unusual person. She seemed to love you much more if you were not well. When you became strong and healthy, she loved you less.”

  Over lunch with her in the MGM commissary, Douglas amused Lana with stories of his life. As a young man, he’d worked as a bellhop at a summer resort owned by a rabidly anti-Semitic woman who was unaware that he was a Jew. All summer long, he had tolerated her racial attacks on the Jews.

  Near the end of his tenure at the resort, right before he departed, she summoned him into her suite, and seduced him. As he confessed to Lana, “Right as I was about to climax, I whispered in her ear, ‘This is a circumcised Jewish cock inside you. I am a Jew. You are being fucked by a Jew.’”

  Rumors became so rampant in Hollywood about their alleged affair that Lana placed a call to Louella Parsons, who had suggested, in print, many times that Lana tended to seduce her leading men. “I never see Kirk after we close down the set for the day. Yet items keep appearing in the press about us having an affair. I’m in love with Fernando Lamas, and no other man means a thing to me.”

  Douglas also denied any affair with Lana. “Lamas was going with her. He was terribly jealous. Always on the set hanging around, guarding her like a hawk. Nothing happened between Lana and me. I liked her a lot and she did one of her best acting gigs in our film.”

  Were Lana and Douglas telling the truth? After all, she regularly denied affairs with Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, and many others.

  Witnesses on the set, including Minnelli and such observers as co-star Dick Powell, claimed that she did have an affair with Kirk Douglas “What Lana told Parsons was true: i.e., that she never saw Kirk after working hours,” Minnelli said. “But what about those long visits to her dressing room with its pink satin sheets, when they weren’t needed on the set by me? Esther Williams always seemed to have that empty glass against the wall of Lana’s dressing room. She said they did have an affair, but one far more subdued than the rowdy sex with Lamas.”

  As a ruthless producer, Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) turns an alcoholic, self-destructive extra, Georgia Lorrison (Lana) into a super glamourous movie star.

  Her mistake is to fall in love with him.

  ***

  Minnelli was known mainly for directing big-ticket musicals such as Meet Me in St. Louis, Gigi, and An American in Paris. On occasion, he liked to tackle drama, too.

  Lana had long been aware that her director was gay, perhaps bisexual. When she had co-starred with Gene Kelly in The Three Musketeers, she learned that Minnelli was in love with him. From 1945 to 1951, he’d been married to Judy Garland. The union had produced a daughter, Liza Minnelli.

  Minnelli’s biographer, Emmanuel Levy, wrote, “He was openly gay when he lived in New York. But when he came to Hollywood, he made a decision to repress that part of himself, or to become bisexual.”

  Before directing Lana, Minnelli had been told, “She can’t act.”

  “I soon discovered that wasn’t true,” he said. “I found she had great imagination. She could do things I had no idea she could do. She had great depth and color and rose to the part.”

  Some of the scenes at the beginning of The Bad and the Beautiful were among the most difficult. Lana had to play the depressed, alcoholic, chronically hostile daughter of a great actor.

  Her role was clearly based on the tragic life of Diana Barrymore, whose dingy apartment walls were covered with pictures of her late father, once known as “The Great Profile.” But the voice heard in the background, a recording of her supposed father, was actually that of Louis Calhern.

  Early in the filmmaking process, the Breen Office had objected to at least ten scenes in the script, most of them involving sequences of Lana portraying Georgia. They were labeled as “too explicit” by the censors. However, Minnelli decided to defy “these blue noses” and filmed the scenes anyway. His move was a major decision in the long-term goal of reducing the role of these censors. By the end of the 1950s, their power had begun to erode.

  Once again, Lana faced one of the most talented rosters of supporting actors with whom she’d ever worked. In his interpretation of a hard-boiled Hollywood producer, Walter Pidgeon had aged considerably since she’d last worked with him in Week-End at the Waldorf. She later told her hairdresser, Helen Young, “Walter and I have one thing in common: We both go for the boys.”

  Originally, Dick Powell had been assigned the role of the director, Fred Amiel. But he didn’t like the part, preferring the role of the easy-going, pipe-smoking, tweedy professor, James Lee Bartlow, whose character, the plot reveals, wrote a best-selling novel purchased by Hollywood. The r
ole of the director went to Barry Sullivan.

  Lana had never worked with Powell before, but she had co-starred with two of his wives, both Joan Blondell and June Allyson. Lana told Minnelli, “Dick is a nice guy and very talented, but frankly, I never saw him as a leading man, neither in those silly 1930s musicals or even as the hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe. Critics wrote about his ‘gosh-and-golly ebullience,’ but I prefer a man who is ‘Wow!’ or ‘Oh Boy!” more suited to my taste.”

  In The Bad and the Beautiful, sultry Gloria Grahame, playing Powell’s wife, defined herself as “Los Angeles born and bred. All the rest of you guys in the cast are carpetbaggers.”

  Blonde and seductive, with bee-stung lips, Grahame could speak volumes with her arched brow. She immodestly told Lana, “Except for you, I was the sexiest thing in film noir.”

  In the film, she played Rosemary, a social-climbing Southern belle whose life ends in a scandalous tragedy when she runs off with Gaucho (Gilbert Roland), the Latin Lover of the movie. Minnelli instructed Grahame to interpret her role “with cutesy-pooh mannerisms.”

  Barry Sullivan kept cropping up in Lana’s films as her would-be suitor, who struck out notably in Mr. Imperium and A Life of Her Own. She would co-star with Sullivan once again in Another Time, Another Place (1958).

  “When will I get lucky?” he asked Lana.

  “You’ve tangled with Bette Davis and Jane Wyman, so why do you need me?” she asked. “Surely Joan Crawford at least lies in your future.”

  As a movie star, Gilbert Roland, cast as Gaucho, had seen bigger and better days in the movies. He was the original Latin Lover until Ricardo Montalban and Fernando Lamas came along.