Infamous Scandals

by Anne Williams

  ‘The sweater girl’

  While she was at the café, she caught the eye of the publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, William R. Wilkerson. Wilkerson and his wife were struck by Lana’s outstanding beauty and curvaceous figure. They introduced her to talent agent Zeppo Marx, who in turn took her to see film director Mervyn LeRoy. She made her debut appearance in the 1937 film They Won’t Forget. In this film, she famously wore a very tight sweater and her highly alluring appearance created a sensation. After this, she was known as ‘the sweater girl’ and became a pin-up. Following this performance with equally glamorous film appearances throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Her most memorable film was the 1946 film noir classic, The Postman Always Rings Twice. She continued to make films during the 1950s, but by the end of the decade her popularity was starting to decline, in part due to a huge scandal that had broken out about her private life.

  A rocky relationship

  The scandal involved Turner’s relationship with Johnny Stompanato, a man she had met during the spring of 1957 after ending her marriage to Lex Barker. She had divorced Barker because her daughter Cheryl, by a former marriage, claimed that Barker had repeatedly molested and raped her. She now became involved with Stompanato, who was good looking and apparently a great lover. However, after learning of his links with the gangsters of Los Angeles, in particular, Mickey Cohen, Lana decided to break off the relationship. This proved difficult to do: Stompanato did not want her to leave, and the pair continued to fight, sometimes violently, occasionally reconciling their differences.

  Stabbed to death

  Towards the end of that year, Turner travelled to England to star in a film with Sean Connery. Stompanato was worried that she was amorously involved with Connery and stormed on to the film set waving a gun, intending to put a stop to the imagined liaison. As the story goes, Connery leapt dramatically to Turner’s defense and punched Stompanato in the mouth, also managing to take away the gangster’s gun. On this occasion, Stompanato was arrested and deported back to the United States.

  However, that was not the end of the sordid affair between Stompanato and Turner. On 4 April 1958, the couple started to argue violently in her house on Bedford Drive, Beverly Hills. By this time, Turner’s daughter Cheryl was aged 14. Fearing that her mother’s life was in danger, Cheryl took a kitchen knife and ran to help her. In the fracas that followed, Stompanato was fatally stabbed.

  Not surprisingly, the incident caused a huge furore in the press. Many theories were advanced as to what had happened, but of course no one other than Turner, Cheryl and Stompanato had been present at the time of the killing. Some believed that Turner was in fact guilty and called her testimony in the witness box at the trial ‘the performance of her life’, and undoubtedly, she brought her dramatic skills into play while giving her evidence. But whatever the truth of the matter, in the end Cheryl was thought to have committed the act, and it was judged to be a justifiable homicide. Neither mother nor daughter were charged with the murder.

  Married eight times

  In typical style, Turner managed to rebound from this horrifying episode, and went on to rebuild her career, havinge some of her biggest hits shortly afterwards. Indeed, the notoriety she gained from the Stompanato affair seemed to enhance her popularity. In 1959, she starred in Imitation of Life, a film directed by Douglas Sirk, which was a remake of Ross Hunter’s classic. Turner made a fortune from the film, since she had elected to take a share of the box-office receipts instead of a fee. One of the most dramatic elements of the film was that it dealt with the issue of a single mother and her troubled teenage daughter, which closely resembled Turner’s own situation in her private life. This was also the case with another of her films, an adaptation of the novel Peyton Place.

  Turner was famous for her sexual allure, and was married eight times, remarrying the same man once. This in itself caused constant scandal and rumour about her private life, though not on the scale of the Stompanato murder. Her first husband was bandleader Artie Shaw, whom she eloped with on their first date when she was only 19 years old. The marriage lasted only four months. Like many of her other romantic involvements, her relationship with Shaw was characterised by dramatic arguments and reconciliations.

  Next up was actor-restaurateur Josef Crane. This marriage was annulled when it became clear that Turner’s previous divorce to Shaw had not come through. The couple separated, during which time Crane attempted suicide. They then remarried as Turner had given birth to their daughter, Cheryl.

  Diamond ring in martini

  Turner’s third husband was millionaire playboy Henry J. Topping, and legend has it that he proposed to her by dropping a huge diamond ring into her martini. However, although both of them were extremely rich, Topping managed to run through their joint income at an alarming rate, making foolish investments and gambling heavily. When the money finally began to run out, Turner divorced her spendthrift husband.

  The next three husbands did not last much longer. Actor Lex Barker, whom Turner married in 1953, received his marching orders only four years later, when Turner’s daughter Cheryl accused him of molestation and rape. Subsequently, Rancher Fred May found himself out on his ear after only two years of marriage, between 1960 and 1962. The next husband, writer Robert P. Eaton, married Turner in 1965 but by 1969 the relationship was over. Eaton did, however, salvage something out of the marriage; his novel The Body Brokers, about the sordid truth behind the Hollywood myth, featured a character called Marla Jordan, who bore more than a passing similarity to his former wife. The final husband was Ronald Peller, also known as Ronald Dante, a nightclub hypnotist whose short period of tenure was between 1969 and 1972.

  By the 1970s and 1980s, Turner’s years on the silver screen as a sex siren were over, but she continued to act in television. A heavy smoker throughout her life, she died of throat cancer in 1995, at the age of 74. She left some of her estate to her daughter Cheryl and Cheryl’s lesbian life partner Joyce LeRoy, whom Turner had accepted as a second daughter. The bulk of it, however, was left to her maid, Carmen Lopez Cruz. Today, Lana Turner is remembered as one of the legendary Hollywood stars, whose turbulent private life provided her adoring public with a never-ending supply of gossip, rumour and scandal.

  Rudolph Valentino

  Silent film actor Rudolph Valentino was given the nickname ‘The Great Lover’ and was a Latin sex symbol and a popular heart throb in the 1920s. Perhaps the label of a great lover was a little hypocritical, as the question of his sexuality reared its ugly head from time to time and many of his relationships ended in misery. Valentino became involved with a scandal that involved people of high society, after which he resorted to changing his name to avoid losing his reputation.

  Rudolfo Alfonzo Raffaelo Pierre Filibert Guglielmi de Valentina d’Antonguolla was born on 6 May 1895 in Castellaneta, Italy. His mother, Marie Berthe Gabrielle Barbin was French and his father, Giovanni Antonio Giuseppe Fidele Gugliemi was a veterinary practitioner from Castellaneta. He had three siblings, an older brother, Alberto, an older sister Beatrice who died at in infancy and a younger sister, Maria. Despite being raised in a loving family, Valentino was spoiled and became a troublesome child. From an early age his dream was to leave the restraints of Castellaneta and see the rest of the world. His father died in 1906 and despite being sent to the nearest town, Taranto, to further his education, Valentinto could not settle. He became very disruptive at school, failed to concentrate in his lessons and constantly pleaded with his mother to allow him to leave Italy. By the time Valentino was 18, his mother had had enough and gave him the money his father had put by for his education. The excited young man set sail for the United States with stars in his eyes.

  It was 23 December 1913 when Valentino set foot in New York. At first he stayed with some friends of the family and made his living by taking menial jobs. He struggled hard with the language and persevered to try and improve his English. After obtaining a job as a gardener on an estate owned by a millionaire, Vale
ntino started to see how the rich and famous lived and vowed that one day he himself would be among the elite. However, due to his daydreaming and delusions of grandeur, Valentino neglected his duties and was fired.

  After being sacked, Valentino was down on his luck for a while taking a stream of low-paid jobs, and with nowhere to live his dreams turned to that of suicide. However, his luck was about to change after he took a job as a helper in an Italian restaurant. Amid his chores of clearing dirty dishes, setting tables and helping the waiters, Valentino started to learn about the excitting world of cabaret and dance halls. One of the older waiters took the young man under his wing and taught him how to dance. He seemed to have a natural aptitude and was soon employed as a full-time dancer at the restaurant, thrilling the crowds with his spectacular tango.

  Desperate to earn more money, Valentino played on his good looks and became a gigolo. He soon learned what pleased women and he became adept at the art of seduction.

  involved in a scandal

  In 1915 Valentino became the main attraction at a high-class dance club in New York called Maxim’s. He was a big hit with people of high society and in particular one woman, Blanca de Saulles. Blanca, an heiress from Chile, was already married, albeit unhappily, to a prominent businessman by the name of John de Saulles. Although it is uncertain whether Valentino and Blanca actually had an affair, one thing that was in no doubt was Valentino’s feelings towards her. When Blanca told Valentino that she had decided to start divorce proceedings, he said he would be prepared to stand up in court and give evidence about her husband’s infidelities. In particular, the affair he was having with Valentino’s dancing partner, Joan Sawyer.

  John de Saulles was furious when Valentino turned evidence against him and, once the divorce was granted in December 1916, he used his political connections and had Valentino arrested along with a known ‘madam’ of a brothel, Mrs Thyme, on vice charges. Although the evidence against Valentino was very flimsy, the police demanded a $10,000 bail, which was later lowered to $1,500 when they realised they had too little evidence.

  The scandal hit Valentino hard and he felt thoroughly degraded. No one seemed prepared to hire him and most of his old friends simply turned their back on him. Even Blanca showed no gratitude for his testimony and had very little contact.

  the murder

  After the divorce Blanca and John were given joint custody of their son, but Blanca was refusing to accept the court’s decision. On the evening of 3 August 1917, Blanca drove to her ex-husband’s house in Roslyn, New York. When she arrived she found him sitting on the porch and a violent argument broke out. Blanca reached into her handbag and took out a gun, which she pointed at John’s head, demanding that he immediately handed over their son. When he tried to take the gun from Blanca, she lost her control and shot him five times from close range. John was rushed to the nearest hospital, but they failed to resuscitate him and he died at 10.20 p.m. of his gunshot wounds. Blanca, rather than try and run, had waited at the house for the police to arrive and she was taken into custody having admitted that she had fired the shots. She was charged with first-degree murder and held in Nassau County Jail in New York, to await trial.

  The trial turned out to be a sensation and lingered on for months, making headline news despite the fact that war was raging in Europe. Blanca became the darling of the court and portrayed herself as a victim of a very male chauvinist society. Blanca was unanimously acquitted of all charges and was released on 1 December 1917.

  rise to stardom

  Despite the fact that Valentino had had nothing to do with Blanca since her divorce, his name got dragged through the courts and once again he became the victim of scandal. To try and free himself of the bad reputation he had received, Valentino changed his name at this stage from Rodolfo Guglielmi to Rudolph Valentino and headed off to Hollywood to see if that would change his luck. His first role was as a dancer in a film called Alimony, and once again his agility and natural aptitude for dancing caught the eye of a movie star, Mae Murray. She asked Valentino to play the leading role in her next movie, The Big Little Person, which was followed by another leading part in The Delicious Little Devil. The union between Valentino and Murray was to be short-lived because Murray’s husband became jealous of the steamy love scenes, and so the association came to an end.

  Murray had given Valentino the opening he needed and he was approached to lead in two more films, A Society Sensation and All Night, both of which were box office successes. At last Valentino had achieved his dream – he was rich, famous and always had an attractive woman on his arm.

  unlucky in love

  In 1919, following his two successes, Valentino met a woman named Jean Acker. Acker was just a small time actress who got her parts due to her lesbian relationship with the Russian film star, Alla Nazimova. This was a relationship that Valentino apparently was completely unaware of. The three of them became close friends, but Acker was in a difficult predicament and wasn’t sure how to get out of it. She was caught in a love triangle with Nazimova and another lesbian by the name of Grace Darmond, both of whom threatened to destroy Acker’s career if she left either of them. Seeing her chance to get out of the situation without damaging her reputation, Acker agreed to marry Valentino.

  However, the marriage was a sham and was never consummated. Valentino’s new wife locked him out of their hotel suite on their honeymoon night and later fled into the arms of Darmond. Valentino followed her and begged Acker to give him another chance, but she wasn’t prepared to listen and he went away with his tail between his legs.

  Valentino soon pulled himself together and his star was to rise once again. In 1921 he was cast in the coveted role of Julio in The Four Men of the Apocalypse. He capitalised on his good looks and exotic dance moves and wowed the hearts of his audience, earning himself the title as the ‘Great Italian Lover’.

  By the time Valentino starred in The Sheik, also in 1921, Valentino had become the first real Hollywood male sex symbol. With his graceful style and seductive blend of passion, he literally had women fainting in the aisles. To them this handsome young man represented forbidden eroticism fulfilling their dreams of illicit love. Unfortunately, Valentino was not so lucky with love in real life.

  Valentino and Acker remained legally married until 1921, when he met a rather domineering woman by the name of Natacha Rambova. She soon took over as Valentino’s adviser and in fact manipulated him for the remainder of his life. She demanded to be present on all the film sets and frequently caused disruption with her unreasonable demands. Despite this, Valentino was desperately in love with her and asked her to marry him. The couple were married on 13 May 1922, but Valentino had not waited the allotted time for his divorce to be finalised and was subsequently arrested for bigamy. However, after telling the courts that his first marriage had never even been consummated and that he had been deserted on his wedding night, the charges were dropped and Valentino was free to go.

  Determined to make things right with Rambova, the couple remarried the following year and honeymooned in Europe. But the passion was to be short-lived as Rambova stormed out one night after a violent argument and went to live with her mother. Rather than let the failed marriage get him down, Valentino threw himself into his work and got a part in a 1925 film called The Eagle, which firmly placed him firmly on top of the Hollywood ladder. The Eagle and The Son of the Sheik, which followed, were two of Valentino’s most critically acclaimed and most successful films. A single man once again, Valentino embarked on a lifestyle of wild parties and womanising, repairing many of the friendships that had been ruined by Rambova.

  However, the lifestyle proved to be too much for Valentino and on 14 August 1926, after attending an all-night party, he was found writhing on the floor in excruciating pain. He was rushed to hospital and underwent surgery for acute apendicitis. Valentino never really recovered from the operation and after various complications, the Great Italian Lover died on 23 August 1926, at the young age of 31. />
  insecurities

  There is no question that Valentino’s life was clouded by a number of scandals that took their toll and left him full of insecurities about his own identity. His masculinity was frequently slandered by the media, which made him very sensitive about the way other people saw him. Although women adored him and dreamed of having him as their lover, men felt threatened by his sexual allure and would frequently walk out of his films in disgust. His sexuality was frequently the subject of speculation and it has even been suggested that he had several homosexual relationships, but there is no real evidence to prove this point. It is thought that most of the rumours spread because of the company he kept – many of his theatrical friends had quite low morals when it came to their sexual exploits.

  In 1926 Valentino was the brunt of another defamation of character when he was dubbed the ‘Powder Puff’. This came about because of a vending machine dispensing pink talcuum powder being placed in the washroom of a high-class hotel. The newspapers had a heyday, questioning the masculinity of American men and blaming Valentino and his sheik movies for feminising his gender. Valentino challenged the writer of the article to a duel and then a boxing match, but neither challenge was ever met. The powder puff comment continued to bother Valentino, and it was something he could not get out of his head. It is alleged that even on his death bed he referred to the incident: