The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  Turner’s big break came when she was taken to see film producer-director Mervyn LeRoy, one of the big names of the late ’30s and early ’40s. (He had directed such hit movies as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, 1930’s Little Caesar, and Gold Diggers of 1933.) LeRoy was preparing to direct a tough little film adapted from the novel Death in the Deep South by Ward Greene, which was based on a true-life incident. The film, to be called Murder in the Deep South, would star the excellent actor Claude Rains, and LeRoy needed just the right young girl to play the role of Mary Clay, who would be raped and murdered early in the movie. The role was small, but it was key. Everything depended on finding someone who was pretty, young, and—here was the hard part—both innocent and sexy. LeRoy knew that whoever he cast had to leave a definite impression on the audience. In only twelve minutes of running time, this pretty young thing must be unforgettable, powerful enough to keep the audience remembering, so they would feel the tragedy of her murder. And, just like the characters in the movie who mourn her loss enough to lynch the man they think murdered her, the audience needed to want her to be avenged. All of this LeRoy saw in the nervous little girl in his office. In Judy Turner, he knew he had found exactly what he wanted. She was still a kid, but she had sex appeal in abundance. As he looked her over and assessed her for physical problems in the usual manner, he saw she would be easy to photograph, having no bad angles, no slight casts in one eye, no poor posture or strange figure faults. She was no “fixer-upper,” and she was young and malleable. When he offered her the part, she said, “I’ll have to ask my mother.”

  Mom, no dummy, said yes, and falling into the hands of Mervyn LeRoy was one of Turner’s best pieces of career luck. LeRoy actually was a mentor to her, and not a “mentor.” He was a good person, highly respected in the film industry, and he protected and guided the unskilled girl. His decency and experience ensured her future. LeRoy knew what he had when he signed Judy Turner, so he himself directed her early steps through the star machine process. First, of course, her name had to be changed. Turner was okay, but Julia Jean Mildred Frances wasn’t going to cut it on marquees, and Judy seemed too childish. After long deliberations, Judy herself is said to have suggested the name Lana. It was supposed to be pronounced “Lah-nah,” but over the years it was usually given a flatter sound. Either way it didn’t matter to Hollywood, but for Turner it was always an irritation not to hear it as she thought it should sound, as she had first romantically imagined it.

  LeRoy, a talented pro, knew that Turner must be costumed provocatively yet honestly, for They Won’t Forget (the movie’s new title). Her original wardrobe test shots show her dressed modestly, in a polka-dotted dress with a white lace collar, little buttons down the front, a black sash at her waist, and a simple black-and-white hat. She looks fresh and innocent. The sash draws the eye away from her bosom, and the hat tilts backward to reveal a naïve but charming face. Mervyn LeRoy personally changed this outfit. “Sweaters and schoolgirls are synonymous,” he said, and “it was very important that the girl in our story have what they call ‘flesh impact’ … I figured a tight sweater on a beautiful girl would convey to the audience everything we couldn’t say outright.” Turner was re-dressed. In the film, she wears a tight black skirt topped off by a clinging short-sleeved sweater with an open V-neck and a little scarf. A small thin belt circles her waist, making the outfit even tighter and ensuring that the audience will look at her full bosom, now emphasized and on display. She wears a perky little tam set at an insolent angle. These clothes were still believable as what an ordinary person might wear, but the new outfit totally changes her look from a sweet small-town girl to a saucy baggage who knows the impact she has on men and is willing to let it happen.

  In They Won’t Forget, “Lah-na” Turner more than fulfills the demands of her brief scenes. She doesn’t do it through any particular acting skill but through her remarkable physicality. She has three opportunities to grab the audience. She’s first seen in a business college classroom. Turner still has her natural dark hair color, and she flashes her dimples at a flustered male teacher, seductively asking him to help her with her schoolwork. It’s obvious she knows how to flirt and is aware that men like her. In her next scene, she’s totally comfortable in front of the camera as she climbs up on a stool at an ice cream shop and smartly orders the gaping soda clerk to “make mine a chocolate malted and drop an egg in it as fresh as you.” Finally, her really big moment—and one that appears in almost any compilation film about Hollywood—is her famous walk from the soda fountain, down the street, and back to the school building, where she will be raped and murdered offscreen. Lana Turner walking down the street in a seventy-five-foot tracking shot had all the “flesh impact” anyone could possibly hope for. She was a beautiful young girl with a free-swinging walk. She was natural, comfortable with herself physically, seeming even to have a delicious thrill in her own beauty, a joy in the simple act of walking down the street and knowing all eyes were on her. Her hips swayed, her buttocks jiggled, and her breasts bounced. Shoulders back, head held high, Turner sashayed down the street and into stardom. Later, at MGM, this walk would be polished into an acceptable one for the censor, but one of Lana Turner’s greatest assets would always be her confident, graceful walk that commanded every eye in the house. LeRoy said, “When Lana walked down the street, her bosom seemed to move in a rhythm all its own. Later, when I added the musical score to the picture, I made sure the composer emphasized that rhythm with his music.” In only a few minutes, Lana Turner carved a lifetime career.

  Lana Turner in her original costume for They Won’t Forget (originally titled Murder in the Deep South) … and in her redesigned, sexier outfit.

  They Won’t Forget was released in June 1937. Turner’s first fan mail started coming in, referring to “the girl in the sweater.” She was too new for audiences to know her name, and the studio publicity agents decided to capitalize by dubbing her “the Sweater Girl,” a nickname she hated. In her later years, Turner took pains to remind people that the legend of her having been discovered on a soda fountain stool was wrong, and that the real place she was spotted was far less glamorous. They Won’t Forget proves her wrong. Her real discovery took place in that drugstore on that stool. Sitting at the counter, dimpling away, flirting, and coyly confessing, “You know I can’t stay mad,” Lana Turner captured the attention of the true discoverers of movie stars—the American moviegoing public. The legend can stand.

  After her “discovery” in her “debut” film, Lana Turner had earned the chance to try to become a real movie star. The studio (Warners) began to work her steadily, looking for her type and testing her audience appeal through the usual star machine process. She appeared in a bit part in Warners’ The Great Garrick (1937) and was loaned to Samuel Goldwyn for The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938). By 1938, when she was only eighteen years old, she was earning a steady income for herself and her mother ($75 a week). She made a short (Pictorial Review # for Vitaphone) about horses used in movies. She was taken out to the Kellogg Ranch (where Arabian horses were raised), tricked out in boots, jodhpurs, a perky man’s hat, and, of course, a tight sweater, as if she were to the manor born and rode horses every day of her life. Still with dark hair, Turner is filmed alongside another equally gorgeous-looking young would-be star, Ronald Reagan, who really did know about horses.

  Turner had two mentors. Billy Wilkerson constantly “planted” her name in the Hollywood Reporter, and Mervyn LeRoy watched over her and protected her professionally. When LeRoy was lured away from Warner Bros. by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1938, he asked if he could take Turner with him and Jack Warner told him to go ahead. Warner thought LeRoy’s little girl, unschooled and naïve, would never amount to much, and even if she did, Warners didn’t make the kind of movies that were going to be suitable for her.

  Young Lana Turner moved into the right place at the right time in the right way. At the peak of the studio system, the doors of the number-one studio for developing glamor
ous stars opened to her, and she entered them on the arm of an important man. Mervyn LeRoy arrived at MGM as King of the Lot, as big a name as there was in those years. LeRoy’s decision to move his studio and take his protegée along shaped Turner’s life forever. MGM was the studio she was born for, with its roster of famous movie actresses, its prestigious presentations, and its devotion to the star system. LeRoy immediately “sold” her to Benny Thau, one of Metro’s most important star makers, who went to work at once to shape and promote her through the established machine system.

  Under the careful guidance of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer personnel, Turner was put into all of MGM’s “star” classes and, because she was still a kid who hadn’t finished school, she was enrolled at MGM’s famous “little red schoolhouse” with her fellow students (or, as they viewed it, her fellow inmates) Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, and Freddie Bartholomew. She underwent the usual buildup process. (“They brought us along slowly,” she later said. “I posed for the dumbest Valentines!”) She was given the usual lessons about filmmaking itself—finding her marks, learning her lines, practicing her diction, knowing where the camera was and how to play to it, et cetera. Since her actual previous moviemaking experience was limited, MGM put her into a short, Rhumba Rhythm, paired with Chester Morris. The two of them sit at a ringside table in a nightclub, and Turner, photographed in sepia, is wearing one of the exotic turbans she later made famous. This type of short film chattel work in which she was little more than a clotheshorse helped to put her name and face forward, gave her filming experience, and kept her working while she was being developed.

  The studio then put Turner’s feature film plan into place. First, she was to be cast in one of MGM’s most reliable and successful low-budget “series” films, the Andy Hardy movies. Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938) was a big test. Turner was being given her main chance in a juicy role: “that redheaded vampire, Cynthia Potter.” The part was small enough that if it had been played by someone with less oomph it could have gone unnoticed. But Turner, whining and pouting, dimpling and winking, teases Andy Hardy almost out of his pants. She wrinkles up her nose. She puts her arms around her full bosom to give herself a hug. She gives out with a delicious little giggle and puckers up for Andy’s kiss. After she kisses him, she makes him show off for her, ignores him, torments him, and finally ditches him. Turner is in heady company. Mickey Rooney was a scene stealer par excellence, but she holds her own with him. She’s relaxed, easy, and sexy beyond her years. She seems to know that she’s got it, and she makes the most of it.

  As a beginner, Lana Turner had a light touch, and MGM recognized it. Properly developed, she might have become an elegant comedienne, not unlike Carole Lombard. She had the humor, and she had the class. Following the usual star development procedure, however, MGM tried Turner out in all kinds of roles. Sensing her unusually high level of glamour, they thought of her as more than a comedienne. They wanted to see how much drama she could do, how far they could stretch her into melodrama or tragedy. Because she was so young, they figured they had plenty of time to work with her and mine her potential.

  Turner moved forward rapidly under Metro’s guidance. Between her Andy Hardy appearance in 1938 and her first real A picture starring role in 1941 in Ziegfeld Girl, she made eight movies. Although all were more or less “programmers”—a low-budget form of an A movie—she was the leading lady, and the definition of what her stardom would be was being measured. Her last small part was in 1938’s The Chaser, and her last supporting roles were in two movies from the same year, Rich Man, Poor Girl (playing the daughter in a poor family) and Dramatic School (co-starring Luise Rainer and Paulette Goddard, with Turner playing the wise-cracking Ginger Rogers–type role in a Stage Door rip-off). These were unchallenging opportunities for audiences to see her while she gained experience. Turner is a real eye-catcher but not yet the glamorous creature she would become. Her sexuality hasn’t yet been fully exploited in a mature way by Metro. That first happens in 1939, in another one of Metro’s popular series movies, Calling Dr. Kildare, in which Lana Turner received her first grown-up role as a sex object. She played it to the hilt.

  Set at the fictional Blair Hospital, the Kildare films delivered audiences a beloved set of familiar characters originally created by the writer Max Brand. There was the cranky old curmudgeon Dr. Gillespie, chewed up to the highest emotive level by a wheelchair-bound Lionel Barrymore, and the noble young medic Dr. Kildare, well played by Lew Ayres. Their relationship was the stuff sitcoms would later be made of: testy but affectionate and respectful. Barrymore wheeled his chair around at top speed, yelling, “Get out of my way, you congenital idiots,” at his staff, and everyone loved him for it, while Kildare always did the right thing, except when the plot required otherwise. Turner played the sister of a gunshot victim Kildare illegally treats (in fact, he performs a blood transfusion in a slum basement using his own blood, a feat that probably qualified him for the Nobel Prize in Medicine). Turner is allowed to be cheap for the first time. She’s heavily made up but still lovely, and it’s obvious that she has total confidence in her sexual magnetism. Lighting a cigarette in her wet mouth and handing it over to the hapless Kildare, she casually stops her car in Central Park and seduces him. (Told she has a beautiful name, Rosalie, she sarcastically replies, “Well, it ought to be pretty. I paid five dollars for it.”)

  Metro now knows it’s got more than an ordinary beautiful ingenue in Turner. Lingering close-ups, superbly lit, give the audience time to do more than study her. They can moon over her—forget the plot. Turner plays a luxury- loving bad girl—a role she inhabits easily and that she’ll be repeating often. (“She’s a bad little girl and you should have known it,” Gillespie snaps at Kildare.) Turner does what a star has to do. Saddled with a role that isn’t very well written and is at best a cliché, she defines it with her own presence. She embraces the look of the ripest young floozy on the block, and gives it that extra something, the x factor that defines stardom. After Kildare, she was never again anything but the leading lady in every film she made. MGM had learned a lot about Turner. She could wear any type of clothes beautifully, and her hair looked good in any style or any color—blond, platinum, red, brown, or black. She was relaxed and easy, with movements that were naturally sexy. She could back away from a man, look him over with a twinkle in her eye, and move right back in on him. She understood a certain look in a man’s eye, and she put that knowledge to work. She could respond to it in an actor or duplicate it for herself.

  Since MGM made successful musicals, it was logical that studio heads would consider Turner’s possible future as a musical star. In These Glamour Girls (1939), she’s a dime-a-dance girl, and in Dancing Co-Ed (1939) she’s a hoofer who pretends to be a coed, hoping to land a role in a movie about college girls. These movies show Turner in transition—still young, looking fantastic but without her own specific definition. She’s being shopped around for movie type, and both these films give her a chance to do a little dancing. In These Glamour Girls she has a showcase moment. Mistakenly invited to a college weekend by a drunken college boy (Lew Ayres again), Turner shows up happy and excited, only to be ridiculed by his rich friends. She triumphs over them by admitting she’s a taxi dancer, then challenging the boys to fork over their dimes to dance with her. Naturally, like the fans in the audience, they are more than willing to pay for a few moments with Turner. She’s a knockout in slinky black when she takes the floor and does an impromptu dance that’s one of the highlights of her early movies. Relaxed, full of life, and naturally graceful, Turner releases her innate sense of fun and warmth. When she flashes her gorgeous smile at her dance partner, it’s a moment to mark in her climb to fame. The success of these two musicals inspired MGM to start her out in 1940 in another one, Two Girls on Broadway, with George Murphy and Joan Blondell, and this time she really dances, particularly in a big production number with Murphy.

  Turner was untrained, but she danced well. She could easily have become a dancing star,
particularly with the sort of instruction Metro could provide. She didn’t sing at all, but then other Metro musical stars didn’t sing and were always dubbed (Cyd Charisse and Vera-Ellen, among others, as we’ve seen). But in thinking it over, MGM bosses asked themselves: Why make Lana Turner into a musical comedy star when we already have Judy Garland, Eleanor Powell, and Jeanette MacDonald? (And they would soon be developing Kathryn Grayson, Cyd Charisse, June Allyson, Esther Williams, Jane Powell, Ann Miller, and others.) Turner’s looks and her sexy qualities gave her a dimension of danger and drama that other musical stars didn’t have. It was logical for the studio to pull her out of musicals and try her in more dramatic roles.*

  Her next movie for 1940 was We Who Are Young, a Depression-era story about a young couple who marry, have financial troubles, and almost lose their love for each other. It paired her with the lackluster John Shelton, who was himself under the “can he be a star?” scrutiny. This was his big chance, but he was weak and totally eclipsed by Turner as she has her furniture repossessed, gives birth in a charity ward, keeps her chin up—and, incidentally, passes her drama test with flying colors.

  At the end of 1940, MGM reassessed their investment. Turner had been under development for two full years. She was well liked. She was popular with film crews and co-stars, and her reputation as a hard worker was solid. She had been cooperative. She had played leads in weak pictures, meaty roles in stronger pictures, and supporting roles in series films. She had willingly posed for stills, granted interviews, and appeared whenever and wherever she was told. Her distinctive vocal quality, her obvious good looks, and her casting flexibility marked her for full stardom. She seemed ready. The question was, Could she handle the next step? MGM decided to move her up a notch and give her a chance in a big-budget A production. She was put into a movie to be called Ziegfeld Girl, and she was billed fourth after James Stewart, Judy Garland, and Hedy Lamarr (in that order). (When Metro said they had “more stars than there were in the heavens,” they weren’t kidding. In 1941, MGM was a studio where Lana Turner had to be billed fourth.) As shooting got under way, the day-to-day schedule was carefully scrutinized by the studio bosses, and almost immediately they saw that Turner not only could handle an A-level role, she could eat it alive. Her part was expanded, and the publicity department started pushing her even harder: “The public will soon see Lana Turner in the best role of the biggest picture to be released by the industry’s biggest company within the next few months.” It was official. The studio had told the public that Lana Turner would be a star. They had anointed her.*