That time Ava Gardner & Lana Turner had a very sapphic threesome with a blonde bombshell
"It's like being in bed with a woman"
Mark
At some point in the early 50s, Ava Gardner went out to dinner with her close friend Lana Turner and another up-and-coming actress.
The three were quietly enjoying their meal together when Frank Sinatra—Ava’s husband at the time, who had also dated Lana previously—passed by their table. He’d clearly been drinking, and was in the mood to bait Ava into one of the many rolling bickering festivals that defined their marital life. But Ava wasn’t taking the bait. She tried to ignore her belligerent husband.
He wouldn’t back down, however.
Eventually, he started shouting at the three of them: “Lesbians! You’re a bunch of goddamned lesbians! All of you! Lesbians! Lesbians! Lesbians!”
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Sinatra kept screaming “lesbians” as he left the restaurant, presumably to wait angrily for Ava to return home. The story, as recounted in Lee Server’s biography Ava Gardner: Love is Nothing, is notable for just how bizarre it is, and how it seems to have come out of nowhere.
But did it, or could Frank back up his cries of “lesbians” with actual fact?
Rising starlet Barbara Payton had the answer, and later in life, she released the receipts.
Both Ava Gardner and Lana Turner were “messy bi queens,” as TikToker @vintageincolor explains, though none of it would come out until later. While Gardner seemed to hint at lesbian relationships in her autobiography, she eventually confessed to a number of bisexual encounters in private conversation, and her close friendship (and likely more-than-friendship) with fellow rising star Lana Turner was much whispered about during their early days at MGM.
In 1951, Sinatra arrived at the Palm Springs home he shared with Gardner to find Turner topless in the pool. He freaked out, and the incident made the papers, much to the dismay of MGM.
A year later, Sinatra and Gardner had a very public fight in front of Turner. But one scandalous moment found Payton, Turner, and Gardner in flagrante delicto by Sinatra when he returned home earlier than expected.
“We three were in Palm Springs together,” Payton wrote in regard to the messy affair. “We were drinking and laying around with not many clothes and talking about things. Ava was married to Frank Sinatra in those days. He was screaming crazy about her. Well, he didn’t approve of the way we were carrying on like that and one night he came in and caught us all together. Well, I jumped out of the window and into the bushes but he caught Lana and Ava together and he was mad as hell. It got into the gossip columns and contributed to the end of their marriage.”
To be fair to Payton, the marriage had already started to crumble long before the poolside discovery—but it certainly didn’t help matters. Sinatra made no secret of his jealousy over Gardner’s previous affairs with men and women.
Gardner, however, was a free spirit. Before getting together with Sinatra, she’d frequented gay bars, lesbian clubs “red-light zones, and brothels all over the world,” according to Server. Payton, for her part, wanted to be “where the action [was],” and where Ava was, action certainly followed. D
During the filming of Mogambo, she and co-star Grace Kelly had several fun nights out, and Gardner was able to coax the normally prim Kelly out of her shell.
Payton, though, did not need much coaxing. Her autobiography was aptly titled I Am Not Ashamed, and when it came out in 1963, it set Hollywood spinning with its lurid tales of licentious 50s nightlife. She dished on everything from her gay-for-pay affair with a female casting agent (“She knew I wanted that part and she knew the price…[the studio heads] just thought we liked having lunch together. They should have known what we had for lunch!”) to her many male conquests. She swore that “every word is true…I ’m too old to b*llshit the public.”
Gardner and Turner were slightly more louche when it came to dishing on their lesbian affairs, but with Payton, it all came out in the wash. Not that Gardner seemed to mind all that much. Throughout her life, Gardner had had lesbian friends in her entourage—including Minna Wallis, sister of film producer Hal Wallis. Her bisexuality wasn’t scandalous to her, though the studios she worked for definitely preferred to keep her affairs under wraps.
When it comes to Gardner’s sexuality, of course, nothing says more than what she told Artie Shaw—onetime husband of her girlfriend Lana Turner—about her sexual relationship with Frank Sinatra in 1953, during a period when the two were on the rocks. Shaw told Gardner he thought Sinatra was some “big stud.”
“No,” Gardner responded. “It’s like being in bed with a woman.”
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