The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  * Zanuck needed such handsome, preferably dark-haired, leading men to play opposite his famous “studio blondes.” Not only Power, but also Don Ameche, John Payne, Victor Mature, Cornel Wilde, Richard Greene, and Dale Robertson were all Fox male stars who had to play male foils in musicals. The nonmusical Power nevertheless worked well in these movies, playing either a bandleader (as in Ragtime) or a gangster hanging around Broadway (Rose of Washington Square [1939]).

  * It was released early the next year.

  * Not appearing on the list doesn’t mean a star wasn’t influential or popular or even the top draw at his or her own studio. But appearing on it does mean popularity. The lists reveal at what year stars “arrived” and at what point they began to fade. They are also surprising. Some great names don’t appear at all, and many one-dimensional stars do. For instance, Sonja Henie, an Olympic champion ice-skater, was a top-ten-ranked draw in 1937, 1938, and 1939. She was cute, pert, and obviously could ice-skate. (She had three Olympic gold medals and ten world championships.) She had, in fact, revolutionized the sport of ice skating while still a very young girl. In putting her under contract, 20th Century–Fox bought themselves a ready-made star. All Fox had to do was build on top of the success Henie had already built for herself. The Fox theory was that Henie could make money for them only until the public tired of the skating novelty—and that would probably be long enough to warrant their investment. Since they didn’t have to spend to create her, they didn’t have to worry about casting her as anything but an ice-skater—and forget genre flexibility or longevity. (Henie definitely paid off.)

  † Three of his movies for 1938 would be chosen by Film Daily as among the year’s ten best (In Old Chicago, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, and Marie Antoinette). In 1938, he had made the Box Office Top Stars of the Year list, in last place. In 1939, he would be the second-most-powerful star at the box office for the year, behind only Mickey Rooney and ahead of both Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable (in that order). He would be fifth on the list in 1940, and these three years would be the peak of his box office popularity for his entire career.

  * Myrna Loy, in a presentation at New York’s Town Hall in the 1970s, said Power “was a lovely gentleman with a great quality of imagination.” She said he told her that if he could be anything in the world he wanted to be, he would be “the wind.”

  * Everybody had their Johnny Apollos. Power’s time as a gangster in the story is akin to the period of time in a woman’s film in which the woman is given the power she will later renounce for marriage and motherhood. He gets to behave badly and then he reforms himself. Lamour, looking cheap and delivering her lines with an excellent tough-as-nails quality, delineates his bad side. Down on her luck, she tells Power, “I’m starvin’ to death in a mink coat.” Later, she, too, will reform.

  * Power’s back-to-back releases—The Mark of Zorro (November 1940) and Blood and Sand (May 1941)—are famous remakes, the first of a Douglas Fairbanks Sr. hit and the second of a Valentino success. Only Tyrone Power had the qualities of male/female, active/passive it took for one actor to re-create movies made by two such different stars.

  * To prove how serious the film was for Power, it introduces him in pitch darkness. Power meets his true love on a village street during a blackout. For a few minutes, he cannot be seen. It is tantamount to making the statement: And it won’t be Power’s good looks that define this character. Later, to emphasize the point, he is told that he is merely acceptable looking because his “ears stick out a bit” and his face is “slightly off angle.” Since the audience is looking at Tyrone Power during these comments, the result is less than effective.

  † The Black Swan was shot on a large body of water behind the Fox studios that had been named Tyrone Power Lake in his honor.

  * Crash Dive was an exciting movie that combined romance (with Anne Baxter) and combat, including a tense commando raid.

  * Attempts to generate Tyrone Powers continued and included both John Payne and Dale Robertson. Even Tony Curtis, a Universal contract player in the 1950s, was in the mode of Power. Curtis turned out to be an original, however, and carved his own famous stardom. At first a pretty boy, Curtis, a fine actor and a man of wit and intelligence, went on to claim the serious acting roles that had largely eluded Power. John Derek was also referred to as “Powerish,” as was the French star Alain Delon, who had smoky blue eyes, thick eyelashes, and Gallic charm.

  * Wilde’s fame today lies in the remarkable movies he both acted in and produced, such as The Big Combo (1955) and the distinctive films he also directed, such as the harrowing combat film Beach Red in 1967. Wilde found a way to beat the system that Power never found.

  † Shortly before he died, Power was promoted to major, a fact that has never much been publicized. All his life, Power retained his love of flying and made a celebrated public relations junket with his friend Cesar Romero. He piloted his own plane, named Saludos Amigos, around Central America and South America, to promote goodwill and sell American movies.

  * “Nightmare Alley will lose at least five hundred thousand dollars, in spite of the fact that it was cheaper than many of the other Tyrone Power pictures …” was Zanuck’s later word on the subject (April 27, 1948).

  * Miller even suggests that the idea Power had to beg for the part may be a myth. He believes that the studio spread the story around to build advance audience sympathy and interest in seeing Power in something different.

  * Because of his extraordinary looks, Power was one of the few male stars to have repeated cover appearances. Covers for men were fairly rare. Some others who were real cover boys were Bing Crosby, Alan Ladd, and Van Johnson. Two surprise multiple cover boys were Cornel Wilde, a Power “replacement,” and Ronald Reagan.

  * Power went freelance, but his first feature of his own choice didn’t break new ground for him. It was Mississippi Gambler, with Power still in beautiful period costumes, still dueling with a rival … because that was the only type of role the freed Tyrone Power could find financial backing for.

  † He also had a big hit in The Eddy Duchin Story, which might just as well have been called The Tyrone Power Story.

  * Their son, Tyrone William Power, was born January 22, 1959, a little over two months after Power’s death. He would later be known as Tyrone Power IV. Power’s other two children were from his marriage to Linda Christian: Romina, born October 2, 1951, and Taryn, on September 13, 1953.

  † Although the movie had been more than half finished, Power’s footage was scrapped, and he was replaced by Yul Brynner. The final film was released to poor reviews.

  DISOBEDIENCE:

  LANA TURNER AND ERROL FLYNN

  Lana Turner and Errol Flynn both ended up in the courtroom—not exactly the place their “buildups” were supposed to take them. It’s one thing to become a household name. It’s something else to become notorious. Turner and Flynn were ideal products of the star machine—two people who were so glamorous, so exciting, so full of life, and so willing to drive in the fast lane that they generated their own publicity. The problem was they generated too much, and in the end it affected their careers in a bad way. They found themselves unable to play anything on-screen except what the public thought they were offscreen. They were typecast, all right, but outside the machine’s control and locked into their worst personal mistakes—all because they just wanted to have fun.

  LANA TURNER

  Lana Turner

  Lana Turner was never once in the annual Motion Picture Exhibitors of America list of the top ten box office stars, and yet her name, the deliciously seductive “Lah-na,” is still famous ten years after her death and nearly thirty years after she made her last movie. Her stardom was not of the moment. Born a star, she died a star. This is particularly significant since her fame was based on glamour and sex, which means that she had to be very much of her time. She was and is, yet she endured. Lana Turner is the epitome of Hollywood machine-made stardom. She got to the top at a time in movie history when t
here were many beautiful young hopefuls to triumph over, but she entered the system and rose up through it like a rocket. And then something went wrong.

  Although she was a top professional with an uncanny camera instinct, Turner’s opportunity to develop as an actress passed after a series of sensational events in her private life. Her screen roles began to reflect these personal scandals, and, with three or four exceptions, the movies she played in were drivel. Because no one would take her seriously, no one would give her a serious part. She found herself speaking lines like “I would be loved as a woman—not as a goddess” and “Do you think I should put in an elevator [to the bedroom]?” A good director could have used her raw emotional power and guided her to a stunning performance, but she lost the opportunity to work with such directors. The little girl who was a fizzy vanilla soda became a champagne cocktail and then a frozen daiquiri. She was a star too often hitched to a wagon.

  After her first years in the star machine, a personal and professional transformation took place. The lovely young girl became a glamour queen, wise to the world, even cynical. She became the kind of woman whom men most desired, dangerous in a thrilling way, but safe and companionable, too. In Lana Turner the public found the thing they like best in a movie star: ambivalence, a mysterious mixture of good and bad. Her image was undeniably one of glamour, satin, furs, and diamonds, but it was sitting on a drugstore stool. She was the perfumed boudoir, but also the ice cream parlor. She was glamorous, but also girlish. She was a tigress, but also a kitten. At first, she was wholesome and good, with just a hint of the bad. Later, she wasn’t all bad; she had a hint of the good. She had come from nowhere and nothing, but she got it all. And then she had to pay dearly for it.

  Turner stayed the course but let herself be used. It was what she had been taught to do by the studio system. She accepted limited roles and became a true sex symbol—an actress who played roles in which the meaning of the character came from a source other than the script, her own private life. She was cast only in roles that were symbolic of what the public knew—or thought they knew—of her life from the headlines she made as a person, not as a movie character. Thus, Lana Turner reversed the usual pattern of star development. She began to act out her own life on the screen, making a myth and ritual out of herself. This ritualization isolated her from her natural talent. Her person became her persona.

  Adela Rogers St. Johns once said, “Let’s not get mixed up about the real Lana Turner. The real Lana Turner is Lana Turner. She was always a movie star and loved it. Her personal life and her movie life are one.” It’s a great tribute to Turner’s glamour, and to the fact that she may indeed be the ultimate definition of the term “movie star.” But how could anybody really believe it? Are we supposed to assume that Turner was never really a person? That she had no feelings, no pain, no failures? That she was born on film? What it says is that Lana Turner’s greatest performance was in the role of movie star, and that she was so good at it that no one could think of her as anything else.

  There is a chilling moment that verifies Turner’s born-on-film life. In the 1960 movie Portrait in Black, not one of her better movies, there is a striking finale. The gorgeous Lana, no longer a kid, is photographed looking out of an attic window. Her face is anguished (although her hairdo is first rate and her makeup perfect). Suddenly she is frozen in what becomes an unfriendly frame. The beautiful blond, blue-eyed, expensively gowned star we all know and recognize fades into a black-and-white image, all color drained from her. The new drab, colorless image itself then fades down into a negative. Like the process of evolution in reverse, Lana Turner is taken backward through the camera process. She’s reduced to film stock, seeming to verify the St. Johns concept: Lana Turner is not real. She’s an image—nothing more, nothing less. Born not in a trunk but on film stock. Not just photogenic, but also photogenetic. The fact that the movie would present her this way can’t help making a viewer wonder, Who is Lana Turner? Where did she come from?

  When Turner first started in films, she was more of a little girl than Shirley Temple ever was, because her performances were less calculating. Some of her early film roles present her with an upswept hairdo, dressed in white fur and long gloves, looking like somebody’s little sister out on a blind date trying to pass herself off as a grown-up. When she first came into the studio system, she was like a kid who went to the party where they ran out of cake and ice cream before they got to her. She started looking for her own share, with an appetite that wasn’t going to settle for a little of anything.

  Lana Turner’s real life is the tragic version of what people think of when they imagine the story of how a star is born. It’s full of disaster, poverty, and legend right from the beginning. She was born Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner in a little Idaho mining town in 1920. An only child, she was called Judy. Her mom was a teenager and her dad a smooth-talking gambler. In a crime that went unsolved, he was bludgeoned to death sometime around Christmas 1930, his body abandoned in a tough San Francisco neighborhood. His left shoe and sock, where he was known to stash his winnings, were missing. Turner said later that this murder was both a shock and a dominant influence on her life. Her mother had to work (in a beauty parlor), so she boarded Judy out to a family that badly mistreated her. (“I was a scullery maid, a cheap Cinderella with no hope of a pumpkin,” Turner said.) When Mrs. Turner discovered the abuse, she took Judy back, but times were bad for them. Mom had no education, no family support, and it was the Depression. They kept themselves alive, and used the movies—it’s always the movies—as their best shared escape from reality. Finally, they took a chance on changing their luck by moving to the fantasy capital of the universe: Hollywood. Turner’s mother got a job at the Lois Williams Beauty Salon, and Judy was packed off to school. Hollywood High School. And yes, there really was such a place.

  Judy Turner was no student. She had moved around from school to school, never learning much of anything and never finding a teacher who could help her. No one ever suggested that Lana Turner was stupid (except about men), but she was never a scholar. School bored her, and she felt no connection to it or anyone in it. Whenever she found the opportunity, she would cut class and run out, usually across the street to Currie’s Candy and Cigar Store.* There, when she had the money, she liked to sit up on a stool and grab herself a quick Coke and maybe a peek at the movie magazines. One day in January 1936, about a month before she turned sixteen, a man named Billy Wilkerson spotted Turner there. He was the editor of the movie trade paper Hollywood Reporter. Turner was young, beautiful, and had a luscious body. Wilkerson couldn’t take his eyes off her, so he invited her to come to his office to discuss the possibility of a movie career. Her mother went with her, and Wilkerson sent them over to Zeppo Marx, the unfunny brother who was a top-notch Hollywood agent. Marx looked Turner over once and signed her immediately.

  This story, with the poverty somewhat sanitized, was Turner’s original “star bio.”† Then it became her legend, and then the prototype legend for all movie stars—the unexpected discovery of a youngster sitting in the candy store, or running an elevator, or ushering at a movie house, or driving a truck. In Turner’s case, as in all cases, the real story had to be inflated and dramatized. Currie’s Candy and Cigar Store? Nah, nobody’s heard of it. Make it Schwab’s Drug Store, the Hollywood landmark. A Coke? Nah, too ordinary, no zing. Make it a chocolate malted. Standing and thumbing through movie magazines? Nah, makes it sound too calculating—we want her to be just a little schoolgirl with no thoughts of fame and fortune. How about we put her on a stool, just sipping that soda like she was, well, like she was one of the audience. Exactly when the stool and the soda were larded into the legend isn’t clear, but it may well have been after the public first really focused on Turner in a movie prophetically called They Won’t Forget (1937). In it, Turner sat on a stool in a drugstore and sipped a soda. Which came first in Lana’s legend, the chicken or the egg?

  After Turner was signed by Marx, she was taken
around the studios. David O. Selznick liked her looks and gave her a bit part in his big budget movie of the year, A Star Is Born (a title to feed her legend). She made her debut in a racetrack scene, but she spent nearly another year still making the rounds. She was rejected over and over again because of her youth and inexperience and because she really didn’t know how to act. (“I didn’t say she could act!” her agent is supposed to have bellowed at one casting agent. “I said she could be a movie star.”) Turner tried out for everything available, including the role of Scarlett in Gone with the Wind and the mousy little wife in Rebecca (1940). Her screen tests for these Selznick pictures still exist. In them, it’s clear that she’s little more than a child. She has no poise, very little ability, and no self-confidence. Yet her voice is distinctive, soft and alluring. She has big beautiful eyes and is pretty. Furthermore, the camera likes her. More to the point, she likes the camera. Right from the start, Turner had a unique relationship with the camera. There is one significant childhood photograph—the one that’s always published, as if it were the only one ever taken. (It might well be the only one. Turner’s childhood was every bit as unstable and deprived as Marilyn Monroe’s, but unlike Monroe, Turner elected not to make it an issue.) In this picture, the little girl’s hair has been frizzled to a fare-thee-well (presumably by the loving hands of her mother). Her smile is radiant. She has drawn her coat around herself in a perfect copy of a mannequin’s studied grace, spreading it open to reveal the dress underneath. One foot is set perfectly in front of the other, showing off shabby shoes and little rolled stockings. Hands clasped, jaunty as can be, the child has struck a pose. She has given the camera what it was looking for—a willing presence, a little touch of personality, and a lot of cheesecake. Lana Turner at least always had an idea that she might be Lana Turner, and she reached for the glamour at a young age.