Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  She met with another director, John Huston, who also had flown in from Africa, where he’d directed Mogambo. He had tantalizing tales to tell, claiming that Gable had spent more nights with Grace Kelly than he had with Gardner.

  In London, he escorted Lana to party hosted by Gardner, who prepared “Tarheel fried chicken.” Its guest list mostly included U.S. expatriates.” The hostess claimed she had no taste for English cooking, “especially that steak-and-kidney pie with overboiled Brussels sprouts.”

  Lana appeared in Flame and the Flesh with Carlos Thompson, billed as “the Argentine Heart-throb.”

  As she confessed to the director, “I’ve already seduced the first Argentine heartthrob, Fernando Lamas. Now I’m falling for the second export from a country known for its beef.”

  Gardner had rounded up a party of American exiles that included not only Gable, but Alan Ladd, Errol Flynn, and Robert Taylor. “My God,” Lana said to Huston. “What is Ava trying to do? Round up a posse of my old lovers?”

  “Well, I know one you’ve not done,” Huston said. “Bogie told me he never had the privilege.”

  “Truer words were never spoken,” she said.

  While registered in London in a suite at the Dorchester, Lana did get some phone calls for dates, notably from Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Richard Burton, and Peter Finch, but she turned them down.

  Even without a lot of heavy romancing, “Lana & Ava” appeared in the London tabloids as “two funtime glamour pusses exiled from Hollywood.”

  The Duke of Manchester invited them to a party. The next day, reporter Harrison Carroll wrote: “These two Hollywood glamour queens caused the biggest talk in London since Margaret Rose’s famous can-can. Ava and Lana harmonized ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game,’ and then went into their terpsichorean routine that sent more famous names than you can shake a stick at into hysterics.”

  Lana missed Barker desperately and talked to him on the phone nightly. She was eager to rush back to his arms.

  While in London, she reportedly remained chaste, even though Errol Flynn visited her suite one night and didn’t leave until the next day.

  As she reported to Gardner, “For the first time ever, Errol didn’t seduce me. Time seems to have passed our ‘in-like-Flynn’ boy bye-bye. This is not 1942. He tried to perform, but was so drunk he passed out.”

  [After leading a life of dissipation, the legendary actor, his days as the dashing Robin Hood on the screen only a distant memory, died of a heart attack on October 14, 1959. In spite of predictions to the contrary, Flynn had, indeed, lived to be fifty.]

  ***

  Before the release of Flame and the Flesh in the U.S., Pier Angeli flew to New York to promote it. Lana learned that the designer, Oleg Cassini, was spending nights in her hotel suite. That made Lana doubly surprised when just weeks later, Angeli married the singer, Vic Damone.

  When Flame and the Flesh opened in limited distribution, it did not, in general, receive good reviews. Many critics noted that the bylaws of the American Production Code limited Brooks from crafting the neo-realism Italian film he might have desired, a film in which Lana and Thompson might have been “unleashed” in their lovemaking.

  One reviewer in Rome wrote that “Brooks could not ignite the flame in Flame and the Flesh. Actually, the role of the Neapolitan tramp just screams for Sophia Loren.”

  Newsweek stated that Flame and the Flesh “was only for unreconstructed and patient Turnerphiles. Helen Deutsch’s script is chiefly an opportunity for Miss Turner to ogle the boys. There are many fine views of Vesuvius, but the star herself does most of the smoking.”

  Writing in the New York Herald Tribune, Otis L. Guernsey, Jr. said, “Lana Turner has done the chic thing—she has made a movie in Italy, and she plays a loose woman in it. Director Brooks concentrates on making Miss Turner look sexy in all kinds of settings from cabarets to stuffy bedrooms.”

  The New York Times labeled the film “a potpourri of passion, Weltschmertz, and true confessions, displaying some flesh but no flame. There is more talk than action, more play-acting than emotion. In the movie, Miss Turner is not allergic to men—any man.”

  Ruth Waterbury of the Los Angeles Examiner was the only critic who gushed: “Sex, sacred and profane, Flame and the Flesh was filmed with honesty and realism and imbued with compassion and tenderness. It’s a tale of a beautiful strumpet, who pinches the fiancé of a sweet girl-next-door. In the end, the girl gets her man back from the clutches of this scarlet woman. The film is a combination of sin and sacrifice against a realistic background of Neapolitan slums, rubbish in the streets, bare bedrooms, and streetwalkers.”

  ***

  [Years after wrapping Flame and the Flesh, Lana referred to “those two doomed lovers,” a reference to Carlos Thompson and Pier Angeli.

  In September of 1971, Angeli was found dead in a Beverly Hills home, the victim of a barbiturate overdose. She was only 39.

  In October of 1990, in Buenos Aires, Thompson’s body was discovered at his apartment. A gun was found beside his body, a bullet in his head. He had committed suicide at the age of 67.]

  ***

  Positano, on the Amalfi Coast, had also been used for some exterior shots during the filming of Flame and the Flesh. Lana rented a vacation villa to slip away whenever possible, to be alone with Barker. Each of them could sunbathe in the nude. The former Tarzan told her, “I don’t like tan lines.”

  On at least four different occasions, he proposed marriage, but she kept turning him down. Actually, his divorce from Arlene Dahl had not come through. His two children from his first marriage were staying with their mother, and Cheryl was looked after by Mildred.

  One afternoon, Kirk Douglas phoned, inviting Barker and Lana to the Cannes Film Festival for the European premiere of The Bad and the Beautiful. Longing for more glamour in her life, she accepted. Barker was also eager for the exposure, hoping to meet Continental film directors and producers there.

  On the Côte d’Azur, “the world’s most glamorous couple,” as the press dubbed them, flew in. The paparazzi went wild in photographing them, and their pictures were splashed across front pages in Europe and America. They were labeled as “Hollywood’s Blonde Goddess and Tarzan.”

  It was hardly a secret that they were living and traveling together as part of a relationship “not sanctified with marriage.” Many in the press condemned their “immorality.” In her memoirs, she speculated that she might not have married Barker were it not for the moral climate of the 1950s that virtually compelled her to do it.

  As the pressure that urged her to marry him mounted, she finally agreed to a wedding. After the French Riviera, they retreated to a villa he had rented fifteen miles from Turin, the capital city of the Piedmont, in northern Italy. Their luxurious villa stood on a hillside overlooking the River Po and its fertile, enveloping valley.

  The Villa Primo Sole (“First Daylight”) became the setting for the first meeting of Cheryl with her new half sister and brother, Lynn, age 10, and Alexander, 6. In the beginning, Lynne and Cheryl were a bit leary of each other. The children had a hard time adjusting at first to this new family that seemed to have been created artificially overnight.

  The wedding day arrived on September 8, 1953, and although Barker and Lana tried to keep it a secret from the press, the paparazzi swarmed the city. He had to fight to clear a pathway to get Lana into Turin’s 16th Century Town Hall for a civil ceremony.

  Their honeymoon night was spent back at the villa with the children down the hall. She wanted at least a two-week honeymoon, but MGM notified her that she was overdue in London for wardrobe fittings for her upcoming picture, Betrayed. [Eventually released in 1954, it was, at the time, still entitled The True and the Brave.]

  Quietly, without alerting MGM as to her whereabouts, she abandoned the Villa Primo Sole for the island of Capri, where a rented villa awaited her and her new husband.

  Meanwhile, MGM became frantic as Gable waited impatiently at the Dorchester Hotel in Lond
on.

  Eventually, it was Ava Gardner who succeeded at reaching her on the phone, alerting her about what was going on: “Dore Schary is frantic. No one knows where you are. Honey chile, you’d better get that beautiful ass of yours to London…and pronto! MGM is talking right now about replacing you in the role with me. If not me, then Jennifer Jones.”

  There had been casting changes during pre-production: Gregory Peck had originally been offered Gable’s role. When he was not available, Kirk Douglas was slated. Victor Mature’s role was to have gone to Richard Widmark.

  Saying goodbye to Barker, and what Lana called “His power weapon of love,” she journeyed from Capri to Rome and took the next plane to London.

  The next day she showed up at Balmain’s for wardrobe fittings. There was a problem. The role called for a blonde. She was still a brunette. Permission came from the director, Gottfried Reinhardt, allowing her to keep her hair dark.

  Gottfried was the son of the fabled Austrian theater director, Max Reinhardt. The son had gone to Hollywood, where he became an assistant to director Ernst Lubitsch. He later directed Greta Garbo’s last movie, Two-Faced Woman, in 1941. During the war, he joined the U.S. Army, and later, he worked on the previous Gable/Turner film, Homecoming (1948).

  It was fully understood that after inaugural conferences and rehearsals in London, shooting for Betrayed would begin in Holland, based on a script by Ronald Millar and George Froeschel. Each of the supporting players had at last been signed, with the noteworthy inclusion of Lana’s friend, Louis Calhern, cast as General Ten Eyck.

  Betrayed (1954) would be the last of MGM’s Turner/Gable vehicles, which up until then had included Honky Tonk (1941), Somewhere I’ll Find You (1942), and Homecoming (1948).

  After twenty-three years at MGM, it would be Gable’s last picture for the studio that had made him “The King of Hollywood.”

  Betrayed was a cloak-and-dagger story set in Nazi-occupied Holland in 1943, with Lana and Gable back in combat suits and steel helmets. It required fewer love clinches than their other pictures.

  She was shocked at Gable’s appearance. He had grown paunchier and looked older than his age of fifty-three.

  There was not a lot of romance on the screen, and absolutely none off the screen, either. Gable was in poor health, and at times, she saw him shaking. He was more worried about his career and his private life than he was in seducing Lana.

  Mature, her former lover from the early 1940s, had found this blonde-haired Dutch secretary, age 22, to spend nights in his bed, and was thus otherwise occupied.

  Gable was cast as a Dutch intelligence officer, Pieter Deventer, who manages to escape the Nazis, with the aid of “The Scarf” (Mature), who is leading the Resistance in Holland.

  Lana’s role of Carla Von Oven was somewhat mysterious. Carla had collaborated with the Nazis and was anxious to live down her reputation. Deventer is ordered to recruit her as a British spy, but he wonders if she can be trusted. He has his doubts, even though falling in love with her.

  In contrast, she wonders if “The Scarf” can be relied on, or else is he working for the Nazis? Nearly all of the resistance movement’s raids have been ambushed, apparently based on advance tipoffs to the Nazis. Who, within the Dutch Resistance, is the traitor who’s collaborating with the Nazis?

  Victor Mature, cast as “The Scarf,” expresses love for Lana (top photo). But when things go wrong in the espionage game, his violence toward her comes out (see below).

  [In case you missed the movie, the collaborator, as it turns out, was indeed “The Scarf,” as portrayed by Mature. Before he can be hauled away, he jumps from a window, committing suicide as atonement for his evil deeds.]

  When Betrayed was released, critical reaction was bad. The film was viewed as the weakest of the Gable/Turner movies. Newsweek called it “a clumsy over-slow piece of wartime adventure. Lana Turner and Victor Mature go about their spying and resistance leading to no great conviction. The story seems artificial.”

  The Hollywood Reporter critiqued Gable and Turner as “a bit sexless this time around in their espionage puzzle. Seeing Gable without sex is a good deal like seeing Ben-Hur without the horses.”

  One critic wrote, “Clark Gable kisses Lana Turner like a husband with a hangover.”

  Many reviewers found that Mature stole the picture, cutting a dashing figure with a silk scarf around his neck, as he goes about killing Nazi soldiers, dynamiting Holland’s bridges, and having a ball as the villainous traitor. One of his lines articulated his sense of cavalier bitterness: “I’m in this strictly for the laughs.”

  Holding a revolver, Lana, as Carla Van Oven, looks uncertain, lacking the authority that Barbara Stanwyck displayed with a gun in her hand in film noir.

  Jeanine Basinger encapsulated the utter lack of chemistry between Gable and Turner: “They look at each other with dull eyes, their former secret twinkles and sense of mutual fun depleted. He’s no longer the tomcat on the prowl, and she’s not the cute kid with kittenish qualities. Alas, they don’t even seem to be Clark Gable and Lana Turner. They look like two people who just want to get it over with, put their feet up, and have a cup of coffee.”

  Lana expected her usual attack from Bosley Crowther in The New York Times, and indeed, with a style that fulfilled the worst of her fears, the acerbic critic wrote: “By the time the picture gets around to figuring out whether the betrayer is Miss Turner or Mr. Mature, it has taken the audience through such a lengthy and tedious amount of detail that it has not only frayed all possible tension, but it has aggravated patience as well. Miss Turner and Mr. Gable have many long-winded talks; Mr. Mature has thumped his chest like Tarzan and bellowed his boasts a score of times. An excess of espionage maneuvering has been laid out on the screen. The beauties of the Netherlands have been looked at until they pall.”

  ***

  Before the requisite eighteen months of expatriation had passed, Lana and Barker decided to return to California, the timing of which would prevent them from what was needed to reduce their Federal income taxes.

  Then the duo decided to remarry, since their Italian marriage had technically violated clauses in that country’s matrimony laws. [The requisite delay between Barker’s divorce from Arlene Dahl and his subsequent marriage to Lana had been shorter than that mandated by the Italian courts.]

  Consequently, life resumed at Holmby Hills for their “reconstituted” family, i.e., Lana, Lex, Cheryl, and his son and daughter. Although he had signed a contract with Universal, they had no movie role slated for him right away.

  One afternoon, he found himself alone in the house with Cheryl. That afternoon would forever be embedded in her memory. He came into her bedroom attired only in a rather formal red Sulka dressing gown which Lana had given him.

  At first glance, this could have been a scene of domestic harmony with Cheryl (left), Lana, and Lex Barker. The former Tarzan was Cheryl’s new stepfather and Lana’s latest husband.

  Cheryl would record in her memoirs what happened next: “Tarzan’s hair fell forward to hood his face. I could see that his lips were set in a grisly smile. He reached inside my nightie to fondle my breasts. He was stroking my legs. I stifled an urge to scream. Suddenly, I felt a frightening jab. I sprang up, arms thrashing. The nightie was pulled away, my knees yanked wide, and with a bolt of pain, he heaved his 200 pounds into the core of my loins. The pain was more than I have ever known.”

  She wrote with such conviction that her account rang true. However, many of Barker’s loyal fans discounted his violation of her virginity. His former wife, Arlene Dahl, interviewed on national TV, also disputed the claim. “Lex’s package was just too big. He would have split open a young girl.”

  After the rape, Barker threatened her, claiming that if she told anyone, especially Lana, she’d be sent to a prison for young girls, fed a diet of bread and water, and locked away for the rest of her life, never to see Lana or Mildred again.

  One week later, Lana was due in New York to promo
te MGM, and she flew there alone. Barker stayed behind.

  Once again, he forced himself onto Cheryl, and the assaults were said to have continued, often, for three years. As she wrote, “I did not even own my insides. My stepfather did.”

  ***

  In 1955, Lana became pregnant again, and wanted to have Barker’s child. But after seven months of pregnancy, the child was stillborn. This was the third time she’d suffered the loss of an unborn baby.

  She didn’t want to press to know it, but she suffered from endometriosis [a painful disorder in which tissue—the endometrium—that normally lines the inside of a woman’s uterus—migrates and grows in locations outside its confines. The syndrome usually encompasses abnormalities associated with the ovaries, fallopian tubes and the tissue lining the pelvis.]

  Lana’s predisposition to the syndrome required her to submit to a hysterectomy late in 1956. After that surgical procedure, she knew, finally, that she would never give birth again.

  As high priestess, Samarra presides over human sacrifices.

  In one of the most dramatic scenes, a strikingly handsome male Adonis, scantily clad George Robothan, is brought before her. In her capacity as the love goddess, Lana plants a kiss on his forehead before he’s plunged to his death into a pit of fire.

  ***

  MGM announced plans for a Biblical epic, The Prodigal (released in 1955), a saga about a young Hebrew who abandons his fiancée and family [albeit clinging to the battered remnants of his Jewish identity] for a rowdy set of adventures and carnal pleasures among the pagans. In the city of the infidels (worshippers of Baal and other gods), he is corrupted by Samarra, the high priestess of Astarte, the pagan goddess of love, sex, and reproduction.

  After many near-death encounters and “wallowing in sin,” Micah the Prodigal Son returns home to his loved ones.

  The picture was originally envisioned as a star vehicle for Edmund Purdom, Ava Gardner, and Vittorio Gassman. Although Gassman and Gardner later dropped out, Purdom steadfastly remained to play the Prodigal Son. [His character was inspired by the saga of betrayal, loyalty, and redemption that’s outlined in the New Testament book of Luke, Chapter 15:11-32.]