Old school Hollywood glamor queen Lana Turner apparently took a pie in the face in a Hollywood bowling alley (?!?) back in 1942. Apparently the house band at the bowling alley was known for "throwing things at the customers."
There are really no more details about the incident to be gleaned from the 1942 Hollywood rag where I read about it (see first image below). I've also included some pics of Ms. Turner to give you some idea about just how gorgeous a pie target she would've been.
Hey, fantastic detective work--I love this stuff! "Sweater girl" Lana Turner would certainly have been THE pie target of the 1940s--as long as the pie was a decent one, this would have been one for the ages if some newsreel crew had chanced to be present at that bowling alley at just the right time (and if the studio hadn't suppressed the film to protect their glamourous star's image).
There are rare references to "extra-curricular" pie throwing sprinkled about here and there in the pages of some of the movie magazines of this period. One of my favorites is an account of the filming of "The Shocking Miss Pilgrim" starring Betty Grable and Dick Haymes--during filming, a good-natured "prank war" was instigated by Betty, who surprised Haymes with a couple of pies before the actor finally got revenge by smashing a cream pie in the face of "The Girl with the Million Dollar Legs" and #1 Poster Girl of the World War II era. Boy, what I would have given to have been the prop man on THAT movie!
Incidentally, there's a picture of Joel McCrea just opposite this story--this is rather ironic, because McCrea was himself the target of one of the messiest pies to come out of the studios in the early 1930s. It happens in a pretty bizarre 1932 film called "Rockabye," and is very sudden and TOTALLY random (the movie turns into a really weak melodrama almost immediately after the pieing). The pie is thrown by a flirtatious Constance Bennett and is CLEARLY presented as a playful form of sexual foreplay, which makes the scene even more appealing. Unfortunately Constance does NOT get a messy comeuppance in the scene, though the pieing does lead to some heavy petting on the kitchen floor! For the curious, the scene can be found at about 42:30 at this link:
Although I'm not the biggest fan, I feel like this would be the best time to use AI. We will probably never see any pictures of the event, so AI it is!
And while we're at it, might as well use AI to pie other beautiful women from the 40s, such as Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, Donna Reed, and Ingrid Bergman!
Love you, too
