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‘Beverly Hills: Noir’ Author Reveals Celeb Scandal That Inspired an Oscar Best Picture

In the new true crime book “Beverly Hills Noir: Crime, Sin & Scandal in 90210,” author Scott Huver — a seasoned entertainment journalist who began his career on the crime beat in Beverly Hills — explores some of the chic city’s most sensational cases, including a long-forgotten love triangle between a respected film producer, his glamorous movie star wife, and her influential talent agent that took a scandalous and violent turn, later inspiring one of the most beloved dark comedies of all time.

“Extra” has an exclusive sneak peek at the chapter “The Reckless Moment.”

On December 13, 1951, veteran film producer Walter Wanger waited calmly in the parking lot of the gorgeous white Colonial-style headquarters of the Music Corporation of America.

Alamy Stock Photo
Walter Wanger and wife Joan Bennett, in full femme fatale persona, convene on the set of the 1947 film noir “Secret Beyond the Door.”
Fifty-seven, silver-haired, polished and patrician, Wanger, fifty-seven, looked every inch the epitome of Hollywood success. The Music Corporation of America was the most powerful talent agency of its day, representing a lengthy list of top-tier performers, including Wanger’s beautiful wife, actress Joan Bennett, a screen star of over twenty years and still radiant at forty-one. It was a locale the producer visited countless times to broker deals for his long and enviable list of prestigious film projects.

But despite the often-intense professional enmity that could arise between producers and agents — where negotiating tactics sometimes resembled all-out war — Wanger had never come to MCA literally armed.

Until that day.

His .38 still warm in his hand, Wanger greeted two warily approaching Beverly Hills police officers with a succinct summation of his business at MCA that afternoon: “I’ve just shot the son of bitch who tried to break up my home.”

Despite the lack of a body, the officers took Wanger at his word and escorted him to the police station — about fifty paces across the street. This was the fallout of a classic love triangle gone wrong, a star-studded variation on one of the oldest stories known to civilization, with all the requisite ingredients of a true crime of passion: a faith betrayed, a reckless act and a smoking gun.

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Walter Wanger lived a seemingly charmed existence since his entry into the film industry, with prominent stints as an executive at a string of top movie studios — during the 1930s he shepherded now-classics including “Queen Christina,” “Stagecoach” and “Foreign Correspondent” to the screen and guided the careers of early stars like Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow and the Marx Brothers — and a respected stint as the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, eventually venturing out on his own as a then-rare and enviably successful independent producer.

Along the way he met and married Joan Bennett, the latest generation of a long-standing acting dynasty with not one but two movie star sisters; she specialized in playing sweet-but-bland blonde ingenues, until Wanger engineered her dramatic transformation into a sultry, raven-haired, cold-hearted femme fatale who raised temperatures in a series of film noirs from one of the genre’s masters, director Fritz Lang. The Wangers were one of Hollywood’s reigning power couples throughout the 1940s, living together with their children in a gorgeous Holmby Hills mansion and mingling at the center of Hollywood’s glamourous social circuit.

But in 1948, Wanger’s good fortune waned when his expensive epic “Joan of Arc” bombed at the box office after audiences were aghast at the film’s star Ingrid Bergman’s highly public adulterous liaison with Italian director Roberto Rossellini. The film’s flop began a period of intense financial stress, frustration and career peril for Wanger, who by 1951 was at risk of losing everything, including their home.

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Jennings Lang
Bennett, still radiant enough in middle age to play Elizabeth Taylor’s mother in “Father of the Bride,” became the breadwinner, which added strain to their marriage. As tensions mounted, she found herself turning to her agent at MCA, handsome — also married — Jennings Lang, who made inroads for her in the theater and on television, for comfort, until they launched into a full-blown affair; Bennett routinely drove into Beverly Hills to take “meetings” with Lang, adjourning around the corner to a modest apartment rented by one of Lang’s underlings for another client, a young New York actor just beginning to venture into Hollywood: Marlon Brando.

Their recklessness grew, along with the frequency of their trysts. The neighbors noticed. MCA colleagues noticed. In Hollywood, secrets spread quickly.

Long suspicious of his wife’s lingering getaways, Wanger drove to MCA headquarters, which coincidentally sat directly across the street from the Beverly Hills City Hall, housing the headquarters of the local police department. Wanger arrived at the serene setting toting a small suitcase full of damning reports from private eyes — and his pistol.

Wanger spotted his wife’s Kelly green 1946 Cadillac convertible unoccupied in the MCA lot. Returning an hour later to find the car still parked there, he parked his own car in the lot, reached into a box in the back seat, and pulled out his gun. For two hours, he remained in place, awaiting the arrival of Joan Bennett and Jennings Lang.

Finally, after the sun had set, the two lovers arrived in Lang’s car. Wanger watched intently as Bennett exited Lang’s vehicle and slipped into the driver’s seat of her Cadillac. Lang, who’d been out of town until the previous day, leaned casually against the driver’s side door as she started the car. Gripped by a jealous rage, Wanger revved his engine and raced up alongside the convertible. Gun in hand, he leapt out of his car and strode purposefully toward the couple.

A tense war of words followed. Lang, in fine agent tradition, tried to finesse the situation: “Don’t be silly, Walter,” he urged, hands raised in submission. But Wanger, who later said he didn’t hear Lang’s words because “he was in no mood for listening,” had always been able to recognize a dramatic moment, and slowly, deliberately, almost hypnotically leveled the gun at Lang.

“Don’t, Walter! Don’t!” screamed Bennett.

Wanger squeezed off two shots, close enough to leave powder burns on Lang’s Shetland gray suit. When Lang crumpled to the ground, Wanger dropped his gun. Wide-eyed with horror, Bennett reached out to comfort her newly ventilated lover and tossed the gun into the back seat of her car while, as if in a trance, Wanger said nothing and simply stared at his handiwork as the Cadillac roared away.

The Everett Collection
Walter Wanger, questioned at the Beverly Hills police station after shooting Jennings Lang, confers with attorney-to-the-stars Jerry Geisler, one of the shrewdest legal minds of his era.
Wanger remained immobile in the parking lot, as if waiting for a punishment he knew could not be avoided. Eventually, however, eyewitnesses and passing motorists alerted the police, and two officers were dispatched to see what had caused all the commotion. They were greeted by a shaken but remorseless Wanger, who admitted he’d taken a shot at the man who cuckolded him.

The officers were left scratching their heads. Although they had an apparent murder confession on their hands, they were missing two key pieces of the puzzle: the weapon and the victim.

Several years after the shooting, filmmaker Billy Wilder and his screenwriting collaborator I.A.L. Diamond were attempting to crack a new project. In the wake of Wilder and Diamond’s sexy, boundary-pushing and wildly successful film “Some Like It Hot” with Marilyn Monroe the duo found an ideal hook within scandal that had rocked Hollywood in 1951 and Lang and Bennett’s use of the unoccupied Brando apartment for their secret rendezvous.

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Jack Lemon and Shirley MacLaine in “The Apartment.”
Building their scenario around a lowly employee lending out his apartment as a transactional act of professional ambition, Wilder and Diamond devised a dark comedic gem: “The Apartment,” starring Jack Lemmon as the ladder-climbing corporate drone who lends his flat to his philandering boss (Fred MacMurray), only to discover the executive is cheating with the sweet but gullible elevator operator (Shirley MacLaine) Lemmon is smitten with himself. The film received ten Academy Award nominations in 1960 and collected five Oscars, including Best Picture.

But in 1951, Walter Wanger was in no state to envision a future in which his Hollywood love triangle inspired an award-winning film. The burning question on his mind after he was escorted into the police station was far simpler. “Did I hit what I was aiming at?”

For much more of the story, as well as other “only in 90210” true crime tales from throughout the history of the one-of-a-kind city, read “Beverly Hills Noir: Crime, Sin & Scandal in 90210,” available from booksellers everywhere October 1.

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