Modern Screen (Dec 1949 - Nov 1950)

lana turner's fight for happiness , (Continued from page 37) themselves a ! new house. And in all that time you ,! could count on the fingers of one hand, I and have a pinky left over, the times I they have poked their famous faces out in public, the last occasion to a premiere . and after that one drink and one dance Jl at Mocambo — then silence again, from the playboy-playgirl pair whose wedding rocked Hollywood and the world with || champagne, chi-chi, expensive glitter and fuss not much more than a year ago. ji In all those long months, too, there jl wasn't even a stick of real Turner news out of MGM — only rumors. Lana would j make this — then that — no, she wouldn't — not yet. Her last picture, The Three Musketeers, was finished two full years ago, and still there was no definite go-ahead green light on Lana's career after a honey|| moon stretching over 19 months in Europe, I New England, New York, Florida and the Bahamas — and now in Hollywood itself. leading questions . What happened, anyway? Had Bob tamed Lana, or Lana tamed Bob, and how and why and what goes on? I had a collection of questions as long as my arm about the Toppings. Was it true she was scrapping unreasonably with her studio? Was she overweight and out of condition for the camera? Was she back in Hollywood to stay? Was she happy? Was she changed? Was Bob contented away from his old playboy haunts? Was he a good |j| husband to Lana, a good dad to her < daughter, Cheryl? Had the Toppings | laughed off the outrageous, embarrassing , publicity punches they'd had from the I very start of their marriage, or had they been left groggy and unsteady? How j stood the union, the union which a skep. tical world, knowing both partners and , their pasts, refused to take seriously? I wanted those answers to these and more, 1 straight from Lana herself. ] But when I called MGM I got, "Lana's at home." When I called Lana there, I got, |] if I got her at all, "We're house-hunting |] day and night," and later, "Hedda, I'm i up to my ears in painters and paperj hangers." Lana had flitted by my house j once, then breezed on fast, flinging, "Gotta ] pick up Cheryl at school." I was beginj ning to wonder why the heck Bob and j; Lana came back to Hollywood at all if they just were going to vanish like a pair j of Garbos — when my phone rang one Sun■ day morning and Lana asked, "Hedda, can , you sit on a packing case and like it?" J "Honey," I told her, "I've sat on lots worse things than that, and had the time ! of my life!" | "Good," she said. "Because I'm so j thrilled — we're in our house and you've : just got to see it! No furniture to speak of, but Bob's family things just arrived from Greenwich, and they're simply wonderful. Such lovely china, silver and laces, Bob's baby portrait, his high chair , and — " "Hold it, hold it!" I said. "I'll be right j over. I can hardly wait — to start all over again figuring out Lana Turner." Which is what I'm having to do. But, believe me, it's a pleasure, j Because the minute I stepped inside her I door I found a girl I could, at long last, thoroughly admire. At 28, Lana Turner is finally mature, sure of herself, getting down to responsibilities and looking life ; straight in the face. Now Lana knows what she wants — and she has it. That old troubled look is gone I glimmering. "If the cameras could only bend down on you right this minute!" I said. "You never looked prettier." "Thanks," Lana smiled, "and I'm hoping they will, soon as all this script trouble is ironed out. But meanwhile," she said with a serenity I never knew Lana Turner could possess about anything connected with Hollywood, "I'm not worrying. In fact, I couldn't be more relaxed. What comes first with the Toppings is us." "Even before a career?" Lana nodded. "I've learned how to live," she said simply. "I've got a home at last and all that goes with it. And you'll never know what fun and quiet peace there is in that." Lana's home and all that goes with it — which means her Bob and baby girl, Cheryl — perches on a sloping threeacre hill above Sunset ■ Boulevard where it winds through the rolling Holmby hills. It's a big, gray Norman-style mansion with those six television antennae sticking like a stack of crossed hairpins, straight into the sky. "KTOP" Bob calls it for a joke. Next door live Charlie Correll (who's Andy of Amos 'n' Andy) and his five kids; up the street are Joan Bennett and Walter Wanger with their brood; arid right across, oddly enough, is the old house of Sonja Heme's, who used to be Bob Topping's sister-in-law. "I want the dollar tour," I warned Lana. "I want to see everything and hear all about it, and why you two beautiful people are hugging your hearth like a pair of stuffed owls." she's a honey she's jeanne crain on the april cover of modern screen on sale march 10 "You'll see," she laughed. "But let's get Bob in on the act — he's my pard now, you know. Papa!" Well, I never thought I'd hear Bob Topping answer to "Papa" — and like it! But Bob obviously does. He came out of the den in shorts and a flowered sport shirt and seconded everything Lana told me by his easy-going, contented, happy-husband countenance. I like Bob Topping. He hunts fun out of life and luckily he can afford it. The main fun he's having right now is trying to make Lana happy, showing her things she never knew about before, waking in her old too-Ho'llywood self the realization that she's a person, not just a painted doll, and that there are a lot of good things in life she's missed which he wants her to taste and thrill to. Take the house I was visiting for the first time: that was Bob's idea. "He wanted me to come back to Hollywood, all along," said Lana. "Bob knew I'd be happiest here. It's not his country — he's an Easterner. But he knows all about me and what my life's been." Lana fingered the gold medallion of Saint Genesius, patron saint of actors, pinned, to her dress. "He knows I've got to keep on acting. But he also knows I've got to live a new life. We both do. This" — and she indicated the big rooms before us empty of furniture, but already warm and lived in — "is our start." Lana and Bob were so eager to get into their new home that they moved in before a carpet did, "rattling around," laughed Lana, "like a pair of dice." Lana robbed her old house on Crown Drive in Brentwood for a bed to sleep in and a breakfast set to eat off — and almost up until the day I looked in, that and the TV set were all the furniture they had. Even now in the big drawing room there was only a babygrand piano — piled high with Lana's knicl: • knacks fresh out of packing boxes. After we'd seen everything to see in the Toppings' new house clear down to Lana's mirrored powder-room (Bob calls it her "mad room"), I settled for the den — the only room you could yet call furnished and the smallest in the house. Her thousands of records crammed it, aud Bob's family books lined the walls. A recording machine sat on one table and on another — natch — a TV set. "From 6:30 to seven nobody speaks to anybody in this house," Lana said. "That's Beanie time." Beanie I discovered, is a television puppet show that started for kids and now has half of Hollywood's stars racing home from the studio to catch up on the rag doll's adventures. Bob and Lana are no exception. Cheryl started them off. fond stepfather . Lana's little girl is six-and-a-half now, growing like a weed. She started school at St. Paul's in nearby Westwood, where Bob likes to pick her up in the afternoons. Bob's awfully fond of Lana's daughter, and he's done all a stepdad can to make her life merry and give her the sense of security a fatherless child lacks. I know how grateful Lana is for that, because her own dad died when she was only 10. Lana's a member of the St. Paul's parents' council and she takes her family life, her real life, seriously. About the Hollywood life she's just as serious maybe, but definitely not frantic about it — even though right before I saw her the script of A Life of Her Own had finally been tossed out and no picture whatever loomed ahead. I can recall when a career stalemate like that would have had Lana nibbling her fingernails to pieces, acting up impetuously on all sorts of bad advice from all sorts of people. But not now. "I'm not fighting with MGM," she answered my question. "I don't fight with anybody now that I'm married — not even Bob," she laughed and he nodded agreement. "Life's too short and there's too much else in it, too many nice things. I said I'd come back and make a picture when they wanted me. They said they did last summer and out I came. It's just a case of scripts that didn't work out and nobody could be nicer about it. They'll get the right one soon and I'll get back to work and give it everything I have. Meanwhile — as you can see — I've been too busy to fret. But not having made a picture for so long, I'm afraid I won't be getting one of those again right away," said Lana ruefully, pointing up at the mantel to Modern Screen's silver cup for having been voted 1948's most popular actress. (A few days later she was to be informed she'd duplicated the honor for 1949!) "But here's something else I'm proud of." And she yanked down two gold statuettes parked beside it. Statuettes of fish, of all things! "Cat Cay Club," they both read, "International Tuna Tournament." Lana's was marked, "Third Place" and Bob's "Seventh Place." "What in the world do you know about fishing?" I wondered. "Not much," Lana grinned, "but I had the best teacher in the world — Bob." That's true enough. Bob has fished for giant bluefin all the way from the Caribbean to Nova Scotia — and those pictures you saw of Lana last spring parked beside a minnow three times her own size were not the Hollywood publicity kind. She caught it herself.