Fifty five years ago yesterday – December 13, 1951 – Hollywood was rocked by the news that Walter Wanger, respected producer, had shot successful agent Jennings Lang, and in a delicate area, no less.  Why?  Wanger suspected his beautiful wife, actress Joan Bennett, of having an affair with Lang (her agent), and evidently private detectives had confirmed his worst fears.  Bennett and Lang had been spotted together too many times for mere coincidence, and the private eyes delivered proof that they were discussing more than just her next career move. 

Though the Wangers and the Langs had often double-dated at swanky nightclubs, and Walter and Jennings were fast friends, Walter’s marriage was at stake.  He waited for Joan and Jennings to return from a late afternoon rendezvous, and as the couple sat in Lang’s car, Wanger marched up and fired two shots.  One hit the protruding tail fin of the enormous Cadillac automobile; the other bullet went straight into Lang’s testicles.  Ouch!      

Wanger, 57 years old at the time of the shooting, had been working in Hollywood since the end of the 1920s, with a string of producing credits which ranged from class acts like Queen Christina to (ultimately) 1963’s near-miss Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor.  In 1950, Wanger was still recovering, financially and reputation-wise, from the disastrous public reception of his 1948 epic Joan of Arc starring Ingrid Bergman, who had offended traditional mid-century American morality after her affair with director Roberto Rossellini.  Audiences boycotted the prestigious production and it flopped, a hurtful blow to producer Wanger.  His wife Joan Bennett’s career was in a very good place, though, with substantial roles in such audience-pleasers as Father of the Bride (1950) and its sequel the next year putting her in solid leading lady territory.  

The scandalous shooting changed all that.  Wanger was arrested then released on bail; the 36-year-old Lang, whose injuries titillated gossip columnists – who referred to the wounded area delicately and vaguely simply as “the groin” – eventually completely recovered, helping Wanger’s attorneys to get his attempted murder charge reduced.  Just in case, though, Wanger had enlisted the services of famed Hollywood lawyer Jerry Geisler, the same guy who had helped Errol Flynn beat his rape charges nearly a decade earlier.  Wanger nixed a jury trial and fell on the mercy of the court, which, taking Lang’s fully-healed cojones and Wanger’s contrite behavior into account, sentenced the disgraced producer to four months at the Castaic Men’s Honor Farm, just outside Los Angeles.  The press delighted in photos of the once-urbane Wanger getting fitted for prison blues and being treated just like one of the other cons.  (It was his time behind bars that prompted Wanger to produce the hard-hitting 1954 feature Riot in Cell Block 11, an expose of the prison system corruption which he had evidently witnessed firsthand during his brief correctional sojourn.) 

Protestations of innocence to the contrary, Bennett’s movie career immediately dried up after the hubbub and she returned to New York stage work and roles in the burgeoning medium of TV. Walter Wanger and Joan Bennett’s marriage was kaput, but they didn’t officially divorce until 1965.  Wanger went on to produce the aforementioned Riot in Cell Block 11, along with other classic titles including Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and I Want to Live (1958).  He died at age seventy-four in 1968.  Joan Bennett had a gratifying cult success with her role in the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows during the mid-to-late 1960s; she died in 1990.  Agent Jennings Lang switched from being a 10-per-center to producing, becoming a mainstay at Universal Studios during the 1970s, with movies like the blockbusters Earthquake (1974) and Airport ’77 to his credit.  He passed away in 1996. 

A spurned lover’s wayward bullet has seldom caused such a ruckus as the one that Walter Wanger sent Jennings Lang’s way, way back in 1951.  A dirty limerick about the shooting’s been circulating since then (I couldn’t find out the whole thing, darn it!), but failing that, I love the admonition that Joan Bennett allegedly screamed at Wanger as he approached, gun in hand, the caught-red-handed Lang:  “For God’s Sake, Walter, he’s only an agent!”  And that was plenty.