His Wabash classmates knew he was going places, but few could have predicted just how far Joseph Stephen Crane would go.
His boyhood friend Jack Alexander ’37 recalls that even at a young age, Joe Crane was “something else…a big-time Charlie from the time he was in the fifth grade.”
Charming and drawn to the limelight, Crane was voted “Most Attractive” his senior year in Crawfordsville High School and starred in the school’s theater productions. At Wabash he was stage manager for the College’s Scarlet Masque productions and a member of Sigma Chi who majored in business, but his Wabash peers remember him best for his extracurricular activities.
Alexander recalls how Crane would fool the girls at the Indiana Ball Room:
“There was a big grand piano and you would hear somebody playing the first half of a dozen chords of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude C Sharp Minor and you knew damned well that it was Crane because he knew the first five, six bars of that, and that’s all he knew…He’d get up and slam the lid shut…the girls would come up and say, ‘Play more. Play more.’ [Crane would say] ‘No, no, I’ve had enough. Too many people here.’ He’d grab the first available girl and bring her out on the dance floor with him.”
R.J. Moore ’37 wasn’t surprised when Crane moved to Hollywood after a short-lived marriage to Crawfordsville local Carol Ann Kurtz and a brief stint managing his father’s Stephenson Crane Cigar Store. Crane had bought a Maxwell convertible while at Wabash and told Moore he was “driving to Hollywood to marry an actress.”
But it was a chance meeting at a West Hollywood nightclub that fulfilled Crane’s promise and changed the trajectory of his career and life.
AS STEPHEN CRANE (the name he preferred after graduation) polished his image by purchasing expensive suits and making connections with writers and agents in Hollywood in late 1939, Lana Turner was starring in films with Lionel Barrymore, Judy Garland, and Mickey Rooney. By 1942, she was one of the most glamorous, sought-after stars in Hollywood.
One night at the Mocambo club, Turner was having dinner with friends when Crane approached. As Turner explains in her autobiography, “his looks and manner charmed me instantly…by the time he took me home, I was ready to fall in love. With my weakness for a certain kind of good looks, coupled with witty charm, I took him at face value.”
The Wabash grad and Hollywood actress were married on July 17, 1942. But Crane’s divorce to his first wife had not been finalized, and when Turner found out, the marriage was annulled. Months later, though, after Crane’s divorce was finalized, gossip columnists reported that Crane and Turner were back together. In March 1943, the couple remarried in Mexico. Their child, Cheryl Crane, was born that summer.
The Crawfordsville native was eager to show his wife around his hometown, and in October 1943 the couple stayed at his mother’s house for a few days. The trip was a huge event. The Journal-Review proudly hailed Lana Turner’s visit on its front page. The couple visited the family’s tobacco store, and Stephen showed his bride off at the Sigma Chi house at Wabash College. Although Crane had himself recently earned a Columbia Pictures contract, his hometown focused its full attention on his more famous wife. In The Bachelor on October 16, 1943, members of Sigma Chi overlooked their former pledge but recalled Lana Turner’s beautiful hair and sweetness and declared that she looked “exactly the same” as she did in movies.
Although Lana put on a good front for the locals, she was angry at her husband. Crane had suggested to new acquaintances in Hollywood that he was in the tobacco business (most news outlets referred to him as a “tobacco heir”) and he exuded a confidence that implied he was a man of wealth. Imagine Lana Turner’s shock when the wealthy tobacco heir turned out to be a small-town Hoosier with a family cigar store!
Perhaps Crane’s insistence that the couple visit his hometown betrayed his desire to reveal to his new bride his true background. In any case, it is clear that Crane adored Lana. In photographs from the 16th Academy Awards ceremony in 1944, Crane is joyfully beaming alongside Lana, actress Gloria De Haven, and Frank Sinatra (who happened to be an ex-boyfriend of Lana’s and never liked Crane).
But if Crane thought that introducing Lana to his actual roots would strengthen their bond, he was wrong. The visit to Crawfordsville would irrevocably damage the couple’s marriage, and they would be divorced on August 21, 1944.
His marriage ended, Crane tried his name in movies. He was featured in three films in 1944 and 1945 as a contract player at Columbia Pictures. The Crime Doctor’s Courage and The Cry of the Werewolf were B-pictures, at best, but Crane’s third film was the Oscar-nominated Tonight and Every Night in which he had a supporting role opposite Rita Hayworth.
Still, Crane realized a movie career was not for him. “To be honest, I was a very poor actor,” he admitted to an Associated Press reporter in 1967.
But he was an astute businessman. Crane quickly traded in his failing movie career for the restaurant business, buying Lucy’s, a popular Hollywood restaurant.
Then scandal drove him out of the country: In 1948, Crane’s fiancee, Lila Leeds, and actor Robert Mitchum were infamously arrested for possession of marijuana. Surprised by his fiancée’s arrest and hoping to avoid further scandal and negative publicity, Crane quickly moved abroad without definite plans.
While living in France, Crane met and married the French sex-symbol Martine Carol, later called “the French Marilyn Monroe.” Intent on funding Carol’s career in Hollywood, Crane brought his new bride home to America, but the two were divorced in 1953, most likely due to Carol’s infidelity.
That same year, Crane would reinvent himself once again and become both a millionaire and restaurant legend.
Crane created and designed the Luau, a Polynesian- themed restaurant, located on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. He both owned and actively hosted it, and the Luau quickly became the hotspot for celebrities and maintained its status for more than two decades.
Through his company, Stephen Crane Associates, Crane transformed the ghoulish designs of other Polynesian-themed restaurants into a whimsical style all his own. For example, Crane’s salt and pepper shakers featured grinning gods with their thumbs up and the restaurant’s name printed on their backsides. Crane designed the dinnerware and tableware based on his lighthearted view of Tiki gods.
Crane enjoyed success through the 1950s, but his fame became a burden on April 4, 1958. He was hounded for statements and photographs after his 14-year-old daughter, Cheryl, stabbed and killed Lana Turner’s abusive boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato. A hearing that cleared the juvenile of murder and awarded temporary custody to Lana’s mother was sensationalized in the press, and Crane found himself fodder for gossip columns and tabloid newspapers.
Hoping to gain guardianship of his only child, Crane vied for custody at the hearing. Cheryl, desiring to live with her father but not wanting to hurt her mother, asked to live with her grandmother instead. In her autobiography, Cheryl Crane recalls her father with fondness and recounts their close and supportive relationship. In the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the father and daughter would become business partners and strengthen their bond of friendship.
In 1958 Crane undertook one of the most ambitious and profitable projects of his career: He opened the first location in his chain of Kon Tiki restaurants. The Kon Tiki chain, situated in Sheraton hotels, included restaurants in Montreal, Cincinnati, Chicago, Portland, and Boston, while a second chain of Ports O’Call restaurants were in cities such as Dallas and Toronto. Classmate Moore met with Crane at the Chicago Kon Tiki in the 1960s and recalls that Crane “was very much the same person, happy to be in the restaurant business, happy to be making a good run of it…he was very nice.” Boyhood friend Jack Alexander also met Crane there and recalls that he had “calmed down a great deal as he got older. He was much less showy and more serious and had made quite a name for himself.”
Even before he retired in 1978 at the age of 62, Crane seemed nostalgic about his past. He donated to Wabash’s Sigma Chi building fund and personally wrote to the College requesting a Wabash College seal plaque in 1960. After his death in 1985, and according to his wishes, Crane was buried beside his parents at Oak Hill Cemetery in Crawfordsville.
While he had a brief film career and married two glamorous actresses, Joseph Stephen Crane’s legacy lies in the history of his restaurants, especially the Luau in Beverly Hills. Music manager and Ruthless Records CEO Jerry Heller illustrates Crane’s impact best in his memoir Ruthless: “Everybody was trying to make a name for themselves. And where do you go to make a name for yourself? To Hollywood. For a brief shining moment in the mid-1960s, the Luau was Hollywood.”
Emily Griffin is a reference librarian at the Crawfordsville District Public Library, where her research on Stephen Crane was exhibited earlier this year.
