May 11

Lex Barker dies of a heart attack in New York City, 1973. Barker figured heavily in one of the more dramatic parts of Detour, the autobiography by Lana Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane. In Crane’s book, she relays her experiences of sexual abuse at the hands of the actor, who was Turner’s fourth husband at the time. In movies, he was the tenth official Tarzan, playing the primitive man in five films. A number of westerns followed before he headed to Europe to make movies there, the most notable being Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960).