“My life has been a series of emergencies.”
With a busty figure that earned her the nickname the “Sweater Girl,” Lana Turner was signed by MGM six months after the unexpected death of Jean Harlow. She quickly became the studio’s go-to sexpot. Turner was discovered as a teenager in a diner (not, as legend has it, in Schwab’s Pharmacy), while she was skipping class at Hollywood High, and was given a small role in Mervyn LeRoy’s They Won’t Forget (1937). Her acclaimed performance in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) marked her arrival among critics as a serious actress. But her private life was constant tabloid fodder, alternately fueling and overshadowing her professional success. She was married eight times (beating Rita Hayworth by three), including to musician Artie Shaw and actors Stephen Crane and Lex Barker. Her abusive relationship with mob bodyguard Johnny Stompanato ended when Turner’s teenage daughter, Cheryl Crane, stabbed him to death (ruled “justifiable homicide” during the subsequent trial). Turner was fired from MGM in the mid-1950s as her box-office numbers headed south, but she bounced back with Peyton Place (1957), for which she received an Oscar nomination, and the Douglas Sirk melodrama Imitation of Life (1959), the biggest commercial hit of her career. Turner’s final starring role was Madame X (1966), although she appeared on several episodes of the soap opera Falcon Crest during the eighties.
SURE, HE WAS A millionaire, but nobody would ever accuse him of being a gentleman. And certainly not after “the left hook that unhooked Lana Turner from Bob Topping.”
Sometimes called the “nightclub queen,” Lana Turner always seemed to have a different man on her arm. Confidential declared her “the jilted-est girl in Hollywood,” with an “uncontrolled urge for high living, liquor, love, and late hours.” If a relationship failed, they wrote, it wouldn’t be long before her “glands got to working again.” Habitually married, eight times to seven different men, Turner once said, “My goal was to have one husband and seven children, but it turned out to be the other way around.”
Soon enough, even “respectable” publications got in on the act. In 1948 Life ran an article on Turner’s impending wedding to East Coast playboy Henry “Bob” Topping—the headline, LANA TURNER’S FOURTH AND POSITIVELY LAST TIME. The article went on to say Topping was considered a talented man in Hollywood and New York because “he inherited $7 million and plays a fine game of golf.”
Turner was fresh off a breakup with actor Tyrone Power, and Topping had just left his previous wife, actress Arline Judge—who, the press also gleefully noted, had previously been married to Topping’s older brother Dan (owner of the New York Yankees). Supposedly, Topping proposed to Turner by dropping a diamond ring into her martini. There were more to come—both diamonds and martinis—and soon she lost interest in acting. Mostly, Turner just partied. It wasn’t uncommon for the couple to have a hundred people at their house on any given weekend.
So it was that sometime in 1951 that Turner and Topping found themselves on a pub crawl with group of friends from the East Coast. They wound up at the Mocambo, where singer Billy Daniels (best known for his hit recording of “That Old Black Magic”) was performing. Turner ate his performance up, and when the show was over, Topping invited Daniels over to their table for a cocktail. When the Mocambo closed, he invited him back to the couple’s Holmby Hills mansion for a few more. There they sat around the fire drinking, Daniels serenading Turner all the while.
Eventually, Topping grew tired and stumbled off to bed. His friends followed. Apparently, that left Turner and Daniels alone together in the living room for almost enough time to have sex. Because just minutes after he left, Topping wandered back in, wearing his pajamas—and found the pair in a compromised position. Allegedly, Topping belted Turner first, with a left hook to the jaw, and then turned on Daniels. Hearing all the commotion, the friends returned and broke it up.
At least, that’s the story that appeared in Confidential. Turner’s biographers are split in regard to whether it actually happened or not. As for the celebrity gossips who hounded her, to them Turner’s personal life was little more than an ongoing joke anyway. Besides, soon enough they would find gangster Johnny Stompanato, stabbed to death in Turner’s bedroom—and by her daughter no less.
LIKE SO MANY STARRY-EYED men and women before him, comedian Dave Chasen took the plunge in 1930: He went all in on an acting career. Relocating from New York to Los Angeles, he was leaving behind a mildly successful career in vaudeville. But there was a difference between Chasen and most other aspiring actors: pragmatic self-awareness. So it only took him five years, as opposed to the requisite twenty, to conclude that it wasn’t really working out, and probably never would.
Chasen threw in the towel on acting, and then took an equally big risk in opening his own restaurant—a move based exclusively on the raves he drew from friends when he’d cook dinner for them. When he mentioned the idea to one of those friends, New Yorker editor Harold Ross, Ross advised him that 97 percent of restaurant owners went bankrupt. “But three percent didn’t,” Chasen shot back.
With investments from Frank Capra (the director of his first film) and the now-convinced Ross, Chasen opened the Southern Pit Barbecue on Beverly in 1936. Originally limited to six tables and little more than a dozen stools, its menu revolved around chili and ribs. The place proved so popular that within a year he greatly expanded, with a full waitstaff serving thirty-five different items to two dozen tabletops. He also renamed it Chasen’s.
A boisterous saloon-type atmosphere, the food was hearty and the drinks were strong. But what Chasen’s lacked in elegance, it more than made up for with an insider, clubhouse mystique. It was where Jimmy Stewart, at a party celebrating his marriage to Gloria Hatrick, was served a main course of two “midgets” in diapers atop a silver platter. It was where Bob Hope claimed to have showed up for a meal on a horse that he rode straight into the dining room. Sure he did.
Chasen’s was where Ronald Reagan, at his favorite booth, proposed to Nancy Davis, his favorite girlfriend. Elizabeth Taylor craved the chili so badly she had it flown to her on the set of Cleopatra, in Rome. Alfred Hitchcock was such a valued customer that a fish entree was named after him. Little Shirley Temple, out dining with her parents, requested a nonalcoholic cocktail and, voilà, the Shirley Temple was born. At its peak, Chasen’s served three hundred a night, and eventually augmented this with a booming business catering parties and banquets.
As with all things, age and the whims of taste eventually shuttered the iconic restaurant, but it didn’t go down without a fight. It managed to stay in business sixty-five years, until 1995—and again as with all things, its greatness was soon reborn as nostalgia: Orhan Arli, a twenty-year veteran of Chasen’s kitchen, has kept many of its signature dishes (including the chili) alive, offering them as options in his own catering business.
