Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  Del Armstrong was often at Lana’s side, listening to her marital woes and, on occasion, doing her make-up. “Lex is getting home later and later every night,” she told him. “On some nights, he doesn’t show up at all. He never tells me where he’s been, and I never ask. Perhaps I don’t want to hear.”

  Often, when he did come home, she fought with him about money. Her salary at MGM had been larger than his, but now her paychecks were no longer delivered by the postman, who didn’t even ring once.

  “I knew my star status threatened him. He left the Tarzan pictures to become the leading male star of the 1950s. Now Rock Hudson seemed to be taking over. There was also an array of pretty boys who were ascending: Jeffrey Hunter, Robert Wagner, Tony Curtis, Tab Hunter, Tony Perkins, Troy Donahue, Paul Newman, and John Derek. Warren Beatty would be lurking around the corner in the near future. Lex didn’t seem to fit in with these male beauties. He had been born in 1919, and these guys were hatched yesterday.”

  One affair of Barker’s particularly infuriated Lana when she heard the gossip coming from the set of The Girl From the Kremlin (1957). In this picture, the star was her old rival, Zsa Zsa Gabor.

  “If God did create Adam, as rumor has it, and a director wanted to make a film about the guy, Lex Barker would be my top choice for the role,” gushed Zsa Zsa. “He is living proof that all men were not created equal. He is the greatest physical specimen. Coming from me, dahlink, that’s quite a compliment, since I’m the best judge of male flesh.”

  She was cast in a dual role in the movie, her most improbable character that of Greta Grisenko, the nurse of Josef Stalin. Her less malevolent twin, Lili, hires an O.S.S. agent (Barker) to locate her sister in Moscow.

  “During the shoot, Lex was a man after my own heart,” Gabor said. “I was expecting to meet some Tarzan beefcake, but I encountered a cultured, refined man who came from a society background and had gone to Princeton.”

  A cinematic quickie, The Girl From the Kremlin was shot in just ten days during February of 1957 on a budget of $300,000. In movie annals, it’s listed as one of the worst films ever made, standing alongside They Saved Hitler’s Brain (1963).

  It flopped at the box office and was lambasted by critics, at least by those who had nothing else to review the day it opened. The San Francisco Chronicle defined it as “the most absurd motion picture of the year. Variety headlined its review: IF JOE STALIN DIDN’T DIE, THE GIRL IN THE KREMLIN SHOULD.

  Later in life, gossipy Zsa Zsa said, “Lana Turner and I sometimes had the same men as Eva (her sister) and I did. To name a few: Richard Burton, Sean Connery, Conrad Hilton, Clark Gable, Howard Hughes, John F. Kennedy, Peter Lawford, Dean Martin, Tyrone Power, Frank Sinatra, Robert Taylor, and even that doomed gangster, Johnny Stompanato. I was especially fond of Lex’s ‘third leg’ as Marilyn Monroe dubbed it.”

  ***

  As early as the autumn of 1956, rumors appeared in the press about the rift Lana and Barker were facing in their marriage.

  Bob Thomas of the Associated Press confronted Barker about this. He wrote: “Lex Barker is perplexed by rumor mongers. Recently, he was absent from Lana Turner, his wife, for five weeks, mostly on location, and partly to visit his stricken father in the East. While he was gone, the rumors flew.”

  James Bacon reported that Lana was cavorting with a bullfighter in Tijuana. Another columnist claimed that she would remarry her second husband, Stephen Crane, after she divorces Barker.

  “Lana likes bullfighters,” Barker said. “While I was away, she went to see the fights in Mexico, visiting with some of her friends. A bullfighter happened to be in the party—and that was all there was to that. As for the Crane remarriage, he is the father of my stepdaughter, Cheryl, and he visits the house to see her. His many entanglements do not include Lana.”

  ***

  The last Christmas that Lana, Lex Barker, and Cheryl spent together had been in Acapulco in 1956. At her favorite retreat, Villa Vera, she learned that her quarters had been renamed “The Lana Turner Suite.”

  It was not a happy time, with a lot of bitter accusations of infidelity exchanged between the “Battling Barkers,” as Del Armstrong labeled them. “I think Barker just wanted to pick a fight so he would have a chance to storm out of the villa for one of his off-the-record adventures with that great Mexican beauty, Dolores Del Rio, whose beautiful face looked like it had been dipped in porcelain. Not that I blame him. She was a kind of timeless wonder.”

  Lana recalled it as “a miserable Christmas. I knew I couldn’t go on with Lex much longer. The only thing I liked about him is his sheer physical beauty and sexual prowess. As for his personality, he’s a son of a bitch—selfish, egotistical, exasperating, devious, and thoroughly rotten.”

  She revealed that, “There was a lot more going on that I didn’t know about. Some sort of secret life. A friend told me that he was seen dining one night at Chasens with Cary Grant. Why didn’t he mention that to me? Cary Grant, for God’s sake. Perhaps he was afraid to name drop.”

  “He was always receiving expensive presents. When we returned from Acapulco, some of those presents had been delivered to my house. But he didn’t open them there, and refused to tell me who was supplying such lavish gifts. Was it a woman? Or a man? Perhaps women? Perhaps men like Grant. I know that Clifton Webb, when he didn’t have his tongue out panting for Robert Wagner, gave Lex one of the most expensive watches I’d ever seen.”

  “I didn’t find out until after our divorce that he kept a secret apartment in West Hollywood for his assignations,” she said.

  Back home again, the unhappy trio—Lana, Barker, and Cheryl—continued with their dreary lives. One afternoon, Lana left her house for a meeting with Greg Bautzer about legal steps needed to set up her own film production company in the future.

  A lot of stars, including Burt Lancaster and Humphrey Bogart, were doing that, and she wanted to get in on it, hoping to retain most of the money from films she’d independently produce, if she could find the financing. During her absence, as she later learned, “Lex seized the day…or, put another way, seized poor Cheryl.”

  That day, Cheryl, as she later confessed in her memoirs, was violently assaulted by Barker

  He wanted sexual gratification. When Cheryl resisted his advances, he smashed into her face with his muscular forearm, which had been so amply on display in his Tarzan films. He held her down, and, as she claimed, tightened his powerful grip on her delicate throat. As he raped her, he denounced her, calling her, “You little bitch”!

  At times, as she’d later write, she felt he was killing her, that she was choking her to death. The question peppering her brain was, “How long could she continue to endure these unbearably painful assaults from her stepfather?” At the end of his assault, she claimed, “His orgasm brought an ecstatic hiss of rage that died off in waves.”

  These repeated attacks shattered her, both emotionally and physically. He was such a big brute of a man, and she was such a vulnerable teenager with a body still undeveloped for his raging desires. He would leave her bed as she lay crying in pain, feeling that her insides had been ripped apart.

  In the meantime, Lana continued to remain unaware of all of this.

  Bowing to Barker’s threats, Cheryl believed him a first, that if she didn’t keep silent, she would be sent away to some reform school. But in only a few short months, she began to realize that she would not be the one sent away. It would be Barker himself who’d be sentenced to jail, where he might be the one held down and gang raped.

  One aspect never explained was why Barker turned to the young girl for sex in the first place. He was bombarded daily with fan letters from love-starved women and gay men whose wildest sexual fantasies were to be seduced by Tarzan. Why he didn’t take advantage of these countless offers is not known. Why then would he turn to an underaged girl whose body had not fully matured?

  Lana may have provided the answer later on, telling Virginia Grey, “One night, Lex and I, after intercourse,
were just lying awake in the moonlight talking about our sexual fantasies. I was surprised to learn that nearly all of his fantasies were about deflowering young girls. At no point, fool that I was, did I make that link to Cheryl, realizing that she fit the description of one of his fantasies.”

  As this dark and murky drama was unfolding within the Turner/Barker residence, Louella Parsons, not always the most reliable source, printed an item about them in her column. “Lex Barker is good for Lana Turner. They have a happy home life that she has never had in any of her former marriages, beginning with band-leader Artie Shaw, then going on to Stephen Crane (now a successful restaurant owner), and ending with Bob Topping, the tin plate heir from back East.”

  ***

  During the final months of their marriage, the fights between Barker and Lana grew more hostile, each partner accusing the other of infidelity. He seemed to suspect that every man she was seen with was her lover, even though most of them were business associates. Actually, he was accusing her of what he was secretly guilty of as a serial seducer.

  Gradually, Lana, as she relayed to Del Armstrong, “began to wise up to what he was accusing me of.”

  He was gone for long periods of time, making such movies as The Deerslayer (1957), or The Girl in the Black Stockings (also 1957).

  George Nichols, a press agent at MGM, said, “I think both Lana and Barker were playing around. He was on location most of the time, and I know for a fact that Lana, who never wanted to be left alone, was doing the night club scene, like she did in the early 1940s. I don’t think at that point in her life, she could get along without a man…any man, it seemed. She went a bit wild.”

  Armstrong often escorted her to the Trocadero or the Mocambo. “She had an eye out for any hot guy, and Hollywood had more per square foot of them than any other place on the planet. They arrived daily from Kansas, from the Panhandle of Florida, from the shores of Maine, all with the same goal: To become a movie star.”

  “She’d even go for a waiter or a bartender if he were good-looking and muscular,” Armstrong said. “She never made the pitch herself as far as I know. She had me do it for her. She almost never got turned down unless a guy was gay. Even some of the gay guys fucked her because she was THE Lana Turner. All these guys hoped she would use her influence to get them cast in movies. In all cases, they were disappointed. Lana was having enough trouble relaunching her own career.”

  “Lana thought she had a chance with young Robert Wagner, because she’d heard that he’d been living with Barbara Stanwyck, certainly an older woman.” Armstrong said. “He’d been in her movie, Titanic (1953), which had also starred Clifton Webb, who wanted Wagner for himself. Lana’s former agent, Henry Will-son, represented Wagner for a time, having met him when he was only nineteen. He may have been the one who brought Wagner and Lana together. I don’t know.”

  Wagner was getting a great press. Willson loved his charms at the studio. He raved about his clean-cut, All-American look. The gay agent proclaimed, “The face of boyish Robert Wagner can mirror every thought and word. He’s got a bright personality that really comes across on the screen. He has that casual, relaxed quality that girls go for. I don’t think he’ll miss.”

  Lana went on to tell Armstrong that Wagner had seduced her. “Perhaps it was the other way around. All I know is, she gave him a rave review without going into a blow-by-blow description. She told me, ‘The boy has everything I had dreamed about…and more He’ll go far in this town.’”

  ***

  Late one afternoon, Lana was sitting alone in her living room chain smoking. She heard the phone ring in the hallway. Was it a film offer? A man calling for a date?

  She lifted the receiver to hear the smooth screen voice of Gregory Peck, with whom she’d already chatted several times. Was he calling for a date? She’d first met him when he was having an affair with Ingrid Bergman during their filming together of the memorable Spellbound in 1945. In 1952, he’d been scandalously exposed in Confidential for having an affair with the hot-to-trot blonde, Barbara Payton, his co-star in Only the Valiant (1952).

  Lana had long wanted to seduce Gregory Peck, whom she put at the top of her list of desirable males in Hollywood

  “His deep, modulated voice could cause a woman to have an orgasm on the spot,” she said. “Oh, yes, and he was impossibly handsome.

  She was aware that Peck’s first marriage to Finnish-born Greta Konen had ended in divorce in 1953. But she’d also read that he had married a Paris news reporter, Veronique Passani. He’d met her on his way to Rome to film Roman Holiday (1953) with Audrey Hepburn, with whom he also had had an affair.

  The “date” she envisioned was not exactly what Peck had in mind. She agreed to go with him to Summit Ridge Drive in Brentwood, to see a house for sale there for $95,000. During the course of her marriage to Artie Shaw, Lana had lived there, and now it was on the market.

  He told her he wanted to visit the house with her before buying it. “You don’t really know a house until you live in it. I thought you might tell me any drawbacks to it that I’ve overlooked.”

  “Its main drawback is that Lana Turner no longer lives here,” she said, flirtatiously.

  She stood with him in the carpeted living room, in front of the fireplace, perhaps hoping he might make a pass at her. “Gre was the perfect gentleman,” she told Armstrong. “I flirted. He was polite. What was a girl to do? I know that Barbara Payton, that whore, was the aggressor. I decided to follow in her footsteps.”

  “I’ve always wanted to ask you something,” she said, “but never had the courage to bring it up.”

  “What’s that?” he asked. “To star in a picture together?”

  “That, too, but for the present time, it’s something else I had in mind. Something of a more personal nature.”

  “You want me to fuck you?” he asked.

  As she’d later reveal to Virginia Grey, “I was startled at his directness.”

  “I’ve always wanted to get it on with you,” Peck told her. “After all, you’re the most beautiful woman in Hollywood, and I’m a mere mortal. But I considered Tarzan a tough act to follow. I haven’t had much training in jungle tactics.”

  “None needed,” she said. “Artie and I used to get it on right here on this very carpet in front of the fireplace. Why not you?”

  “I’m unbuckling my belt this very moment,” he said.

  When she told Grey about this, she invariably asked the question, “What was it like?”

  She discussed her adoration for Peck, whom she considered “about the handsomest man ever to set foot in Hollywood. He has a quiet, unassuming sex appeal.”

  “Let me put it this way,” Lana told her. “Without going into too much clinical detail, I will tell you this. Greg had me nibbling on his big ear before the deed was done. One ear is bigger than the other, and I took the big ear.”

  Grey asked her if she planned any repeats. “That’s up to him. I know he is happily married. I also know that even the most happily married men, at least in Hollywood, like to get something on the side.”

  “He told me that in the future, I had a choice. Either a ‘milkman’s matinee’ [i.e., a morning session in his dressing room], or a ‘sneak away’ for love in the afternoon at the Château Marmont.”

  “I told him a milkman’s matinee suited me just fine, providing he brought the cream.”

  “Oh, Lana, my dear, since marrying Lex Barker, you’ve become such a vulgar lady.”

  “You finally noticed,” she quipped.

  ***

  Without warning, having decided she could endure no further assaults from Lex Barker, Cheryl made a choice to reveal everything, not to Lana, but to her grandmother, Mildred, whom she still affectionately called “Gran.”

  In February of 1957, in the wake of that awful Christmas in Mexico, she sat with Mildred and told her the whole story. She first had a look of disbelief, then of horror. Mildred’s face would be a memory that would not fade.

 
In her apartment, convinced that her granddaughter was telling the truth—the story was just too vivid with details—Mildred went to the phone to summon Lana. She picked up the receiver to hear her mother’s command: “Get over here at once. It’s Cheryl. I don’t want to tell you over the phone. And don’t bring Lex Barker! Come alone. You’ve got to hear this.”

  Alarmed, from inside her house, Lana did not press for any further details. Barker had already retired upstairs, a bit drunk. Both of them had just attended a party at the home of Jack Benny. On the way back in the car, he’d confessed to Lana that when he asked Benny where the bathroom was, the comedian had accompanied him. “The fucker came on to me,” he claimed. “I know he plays gay in those comedy skits, but he’s not just play-acting. All he got to see was me haul it out to take a horse piss—nothing else.”

  Slipping out of her house without alerting Barker, Lana drove to Mildred’s apartment, where she found the two of them sitting on the sofa, Mildred’s arms wrapped around Cheryl, who was sobbing.

  Within the next few minutes, Lana heard the entire story of the assaults on her daughter. Her mother and daughter each witnessed Lana’s face stiffen, at first in stunned disbelief, before fading into an acceptance of a reality that had escaped her, “even though it’s been going on right under my nose.”

  At first she wanted to chastise her daughter for not revealing these assaults much sooner. At this point, she had not decided how she was going to confront Barker. The only move she knew she was going to make, even though it was a Sunday, involved taking Cheryl to her doctor later that morning. “He’ll open the office for me.”

  It was decided that Cheryl would spend the night with Mildred. “I don’t want her to have to face that man ever again.”

  Back in her Cadillac, she drove home alone, not certain about what steps to take. She came into the house and ascended the steps to her bedroom. The light was on, the TV set on “snow,” with no programs being broadcast.

  Barker lay on their bed, asleep, his powerful genitals looking more menacing than ever. As she’d confided to Del Armstrong later that morning, “Flashing on his using such a powerful weapon on such a tender young girl was unbearable. For a moment, I was crazed.”