During the 1970s, Turner was asked to discuss the “why” of her success in the star system. She said, “There were girls who were prettier, more intelligent, and just as talented. Why didn’t they make it? It’s a question of magic. You have it or you don’t, I guess, and the lucky ones have had it.” Soon enough, MGM would realize that Turner would be a big star, not just a star, and ultimately, they would learn there was only one Lana Turner.
Turner would make a total of four major movies in 1941. Today such a thing is impossible. A star might have two movies released in the same year, maybe a third if it were a low-budget indie made earlier and held up for release. But without the efficiency of the studio system, movies don’t get written, financed, made, and released that quickly. At least not movies of the lavishly produced MGM variety like the four Turner appeared in in 1941: besides Ziegfeld Girl, there were Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, co-starring her with Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman; Honky Tonk, with Clark Gable; and Johnny Eager, with Robert Taylor and featuring Van Heflin in an Oscar-winning supporting role. The MGM machine had worked for Lana Turner, and 1941 was the year she became an unqualified star, a “hot property.”
Ironically, Ziegfeld Girl was a story about three young girls who become stars—or is that human chandeliers?—in the Ziegfeld Follies. Apart from Turner, Judy Garland, and Hedy Lamarr, three “hot properties” in one single film, and Stewart (making his own way up the ladder), the movie features Dan Dailey, Tony Martin, Eve Arden, Charles Winninger, Philip Dorn, Jackie Cooper, as well as delightfully crazy musical numbers from Busby Berkeley. It’s a kind of musical Grand Hotel, with interwoven plots going in different directions, but with Lana Turner assigned the major dramatic role. It was her first truly demanding performance. “I’m two people,” her character says, “neither of them any good.” She looks tough and wise one moment, innocent and appealing the next.
MGM, realizing she had first caught the public eye by taking a long walk down a small-town street, cleverly assigned her another long walk—this time down a grand, sweeping staircase in the lobby of a Ziegfeld theatre. It’s the film’s greatest dramatic moment. A showgirl who’s let fame go to her head, now down-and-out, sick and desperate, Turner’s character, Sheila attends the opening of the newest Follies, a show she might have headlined if she hadn’t ruined her life with booze and high living. Forgotten, she sits alone in the balcony, but her “illness” forces her to leave. She starts walking down the stairs just as her music floats out. (The song, “You Stepped Out of a Dream,” had been her big number.) Pulling herself together like an old soldier hearing the cry to arms, she walks slowly, regally down the stairs in time to the music, dragging a luxurious fur behind her (being down-and-out at MGM doesn’t mean you have no furs). Every inch the perfect showgirl, Turner then suddenly collapses and falls down the stairs to a dramatic death (after a little conversation with some of her co-stars). One big moment like this is all anyone needs, and Turner knew it. By walking along and letting herself bounce in They Won’t Forget, she had earned herself a chance to become a star. By coming down the stairs in a kind of royal defeat in Ziegfeld Girl, she secured top stardom. Throughout Turner’s lifetime, she would be written about and discussed, usually in relation to some big scandal. What people usually forgot to write about was that she was a total pro. Whatever the moment, whatever the disaster, whatever the applause or lack of it—both offscreen and on—Turner squared her shoulders and stepped right into it. She rose to the occasion and gave the public what they wanted, all the glamour and excitement it expected. She always went on. If that’s not a definition of “star,” what is?
After Ziegfeld Girl, Turner’s salary was raised to $1,500 a week. Life magazine did two major layouts on her within less than eight weeks, and her fan mail was pouring in so fast the studio had to hire extra help. Her luscious beauty easily guaranteed her lots of fan magazine plants and layouts, including, ultimately, the coveted pride of place—her face on the cover. Lana Turner, who loved to pose and was always willing to do it, appeared on as many fan magazine covers in the 1940s as any female star other than Betty Grable. MGM knew they had a big-time movie star they could put in almost anything as long as the sex and glamour were there somewhere. Moviegoers saw in Turner a powerful sex appeal coupled with a basic generosity and kindness. It was best reflected in Clark Gable’s description of her: “A man can like her as much as he could love her.”
As Lana Turner rose to stardom, she was also getting older. Not necessarily growing up, but getting older. And richer. And more spoiled. Lana liked to have fun, she liked men, and her love life got off to a flashy start. Even in Hollywood, the land of gorgeous and available girls, Lana Turner was exceptional. Men flocked around her. It was inevitable that a serious affair would happen, but no one was quite prepared for her elopement one week after her twentieth birthday.*
Dragging her fur behind her, Lana Turner swept down the stairs and into top stardom in Ziegfeld Girl … just before she fell to her death in the plot.
She met her first husband, Artie Shaw, the lecherous bandleader who also wed Ava Gardner, Kathleen Windsor, and Evelyn Keyes, among others, on the set of Dancing Co-Ed. At first she hated him. Then she accepted a date with him and married him that same night. He was her first, but she was his third. The marriage lasted a whole four months and seventeen days, and forever after, Lana Turner referred to it as her “college education.” After this first disastrous marriage, Lana really started kicking up her heels. She went out every night and was soon labeled “the Queen of the Nightclubs.” She dated everyone. Liberty magazine claimed that between her first and second marriages she “dated, conservatively, 150 members of the opposite sex, was engaged to be married to five different men, and actually was on the verge of going to the altar with a dozen.” The fan mags pictured her with Tony Martin, Robert Stack, Howard Hughes, Victor Mature, Tommy Dorsey, Buddy Rich, Turhan Bey, Robert Hutton, and others. “The poor, lovely dear had so many men after her,” observed actress Marsha Hunt, who had also appeared in These Glamour Girls.*
The MGM publicity department now realized that no plants were needed to get Turner into the papers or fan mags. She was more than able to do that for herself. Turning the pages of any Photoplay, Modern Screen, or Screenland magazines from 1942 onward, one can always find Lana Turner—posing for stills from her movies, modeling the fashions of the day, sharing her recipes, giving out her beauty secrets, conducting canned interviews with hack reporters, being seen with GIs, reading scripts at radio shows, but most of all, dressed up and out on the town. Lana Turner understood glamour and embraced it in her private life in a way few other stars did. In dozens of photos taken at Ciro’s, the Mocambo, the Brown Derby, or the Cocoanut Grove, Turner looks sensational. She never wears her hair the same way twice. It may be long and flowing, upswept and severe, rolled into buns over her ears, or in a chignon at the base of her neck, but it’s always different. She also never wears the same dress twice and always has fabulous jewelry: the big scatter pins popular in the era, diamond chokers and bracelets, earrings, finger rings. Just when it seems there’s nothing left to show off in her jewelry box, she shows up with a simple little black velvet ribbon tied around her neck and upstages herself. She wears hats and gloves and furs and fishnet hair snoods and big cabbage roses and orchids in her hair. Since none of this had to be faked, invented, posed for, or planted, the MGM publicity department loved her—at first.
Meanwhile, Turner received rave reviews for Ziegfeld Girl. The film’s plot set a pattern that would recur often in her career. Ziegfeld Girl meshed what the public knew was going on in Turner’s private life with the fictional role she played on-screen, a fusion between real and non-real that would haunt her for life. On-screen, Turner portrayed a playgirl whose life is full of money, fame, and glamour. Offscreen, she appeared to be living the same life. Just as she was seen in the local neighborhood theatres dancing and drinking and saying, “I don’t care,” wearing mink down to her toes and up to her eyeb
alls, she was also photographed for real in nightclubs dancing and drinking and wearing furs—and looking very happy about it. It was an intersection of time, place, screen role, and property. At the beginning of the new decade, the public was ready for a new movie face to bring them new movie excitement, and Turner played a big role in a big movie that was a story about a beautiful young girl going wrong. The public watched her self-destruct on-screen in her hit movie and sat around waiting for the offscreen shoe to drop.
Lana Turner, posed to be pinned up and savored.
It would drop, but not yet. In the meantime, Turner’s stardom was made.
MGM rushed her into Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde opposite Spencer Tracy, but oddly cast her as the Victorian ingenue. (It was the last mistake like that they would make.) The sexy part—the barmaid, Ivy—went to the lustrously beautiful young Ingrid Bergman, who played it to perfection. Turner seems out of place in her bland character, but at least the point of her role was that Dr. Jekyll wants to have sex with her, so he has to turn into Mr. Hyde and do it with Ingrid Bergman. Turner’s other two films were blockbusters, both showcasing her by teaming her with two of MGM’s biggest male stars of the day, Clark Gable and Robert Taylor. It was the final proof that the star machine at MGM knew—and valued—what it had in Lana Turner.
First was Gable. Honky Tonk (1941) was a period piece set in the American West of the late 1800s. It’s supposed to be about American frontier empire building, but it’s really only about sex. (The censor must have been out to lunch.) Turner, holding her own in the frame with the King, is a sight to behold, wearing black corsets, diamonds in her hair, and black lace stockings, parading around in front of a leering Gable. In the big scene where Gable breaks down Turner’s bedroom door (à la Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind), a look of childish delight flashes over her face, full of virgin expectation and excitement. The next morning, just like Vivien Leigh in GWTW, Turner wakes up happy in bed, luxuriating and stretching her arms. But where GWTW made an audience think about what Gable had done for Leigh, Honky Tonk made an audience think what Turner had done for Gable.
For Johnny Eager (1941), MGM went all out to promote Turner’s sexual magnetism. They hit the public with a lurid advertising campaign: “T-N-T … TURNER N’ TAYLOR … they’re dynamite in Johnny Eager.” Turner plays a young girl who falls in love with a gangster. She’s on the screen a minimum of time, but her presence haunts the scenes in which she doesn’t appear. Every time a door opens, one hopes she’s out there, waiting to come in. Her long blond hair, her full-breasted body, her wet parted lips—who cares about plot? Turner stands around swathed in mink, with her hair spread out all over the fur in masses of curls, and she steals the movie.*
Turner co-starred with Robert Taylor in Johnny Eager (they were billed as “T-N-T”) … and (below) with John Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice, one of her most iconic roles.
Offscreen, Turner lived up to her image as sexy and glamorous … and reckless. Less than two years after her divorce from Shaw, Turner met a handsome young man at a nightclub. Before she had known him long—some sources say a month, some say nine days, but Turner herself claims four months—she had eloped with him. It was back to Las Vegas to the same justice of the peace who had wed her to Shaw and who allegedly greeted her with a cheery “Welcome back, Lana!”
No one knew much about this young man, Steve Crane—not even Lana. It was first reported he was a Chicago stockbroker. Then it was said he was a rich tobacco heir, or a Hollywood actor on the make, and finally a young Los Angeles businessman. Turner said afterward that she didn’t know what Crane did for a living and she didn’t care: “I married him without thought, and even if I had pondered for a long time, for ten or fifteen minutes even, I’d have married him anyway.” To her it didn’t matter if he were a tobacco heir or a cigar store Indian; when Lana Turner was in love, details were unimportant. Which turned out to be just as well when Steve Crane was finally discovered to be a young man from Crawfordsville, Indiana, who had at that time what might be termed “limited prospects.”
There was one detail that turned up later, however, that did turn out to be important. Shortly after Lana announced she was to become a mother, she learned that Crane had been married before. Furthermore, his marriage had not been dissolved officially at the time he wed Lana Turner. With a baby on the way—and already quarreling with her second husband—Lana Turner found out she wasn’t legally married. She was forced to annul her hasty marriage, but because she was pregnant, hastily remarry! It has been said that, had she not been expecting a child, Lana Turner would never have remarried Steve Crane. In her eyes, their marriage was already hopeless, but under the circumstances, she felt she had little choice.
Turner’s description of this second wedding is pathetic: “Six months with child, in as drab a ceremony as was ever performed, in the heat and squalor of Tijuana, I stood before a little man whose office sign said ‘Legal Matters Adjusted’ and again became Steve Crane’s wife. We called a Mexican off the street for a peso or two and made him a witness.” Like some small-town high school girl in trouble, the allegedly spoiled movie star suffered the humiliation of going through with what she knew to be a hopeless deal. Crane had lied to her, and she had fallen for it. Making matters even more dramatic, Turner’s only child, Cheryl Christina Crane, born July 26, 1943, was an Rh-negative baby who required special blood transfusions to survive. More headlines and more trauma for Lana.
Most actresses could go a lifetime on a string of publicity like this, but for Turner there was much more to come. By April 1944, she was divorcing Steve Crane. She had married him, annulled him, remarried him, given birth to his child, and divorced him within the space of two years. She was twenty-four years old, a movie star, a mother, and a three-times-married woman with two exes. Even for Hollywood, this was sensational, and MGM wasn’t afraid to capitalize on Turner’s personal problems. Using the headlines she had made from mid-1943 through 1944, they ruthlessly cast her in a romantic movie titled Marriage Is a Private Affair and sat back to enjoy the jokes and gibes—all at Turner’s expense—that would make them money and keep the Turner name out there. Since MGM couldn’t control her or her bad publicity—and since the public obviously ate it up and wanted more of her—the studio just let it happen. They found a way to use it, exploiting her tragedies (or bad judgment) in the process.
No one fully realized how this might impact Turner’s career in the long run. After all, she wasn’t the first high-steppin’ female star Hollywood had ever seen. And she was young and healthy, and no matter how late she stayed up, she still got to work on time, lines learned and ready to go. Turner was a pro; she did her job. She was known to be a hard worker. She kicked up her heels at night, but not on the set. She wanted fame. She wanted approval. The publicity department—and her bosses—worried about their investment, but even bad publicity is good publicity, right?
By 1944, MGM no longer felt it necessary to pair Turner opposite big-name male stars. They could now use her to promote men they had in the star machine’s grooming process. Thus, Marriage Is a Private Affair co-stars her with two minor leaguers, James Craig and John Hodiak. Compensating for no-name male stars, MGM ensured audience pleasure by giving Turner no less than thirty costume changes. They let her carry the movie, which would be her job from now on. MGM had invested in her. Now she would pay them back. From 1941 to 1946, Turner made a string of hit movies from Johnny Eager through Ziegfeld Girl and onward through Somewhere I’ll Find You, Slightly Dangerous, Keep Your Powder Dry, Weekend at the Waldorf, and two “guest appearances”—in The Youngest Profession and DuBarry Was a Lady. “Guest appearances” were often unbilled, and they were the proof of the top rank of stardom. In a gushing little movie about mindless gaggles of young autograph hunters, The Youngest Profession (1943), Turner appeared as herself (along with Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, William Powell, and Robert Taylor) as the incredibly kind, generous, and patient movie stars they were—stars who not only
give the youngsters their autographs, but also spend time with them sipping tea and helping solve their problems.
Turner’s movies were all well mounted, and she was dressed and coiffed as carefully as any star. Yet overall, her career isn’t full of first-rate films. It is, however, full of great moments, and her next film, The Postman Always Rings Twice, was going to give her another scene to rank with her two walks. Lana Turner’s entrance in Postman is one of the iconic showstoppers in motion picture history. John Garfield, her co-star, sits alone at a lunch counter while behind him a hamburger sizzles. He hears the noise of something being dropped, and looks down to see a lipstick rolling across the floor toward him. The camera tracks back to find its source, locating Lana Turner’s open-toed white pumps as the camera leers up her tanned legs to just above her knees. When the film cuts back to Garfield, he’s stunned and sucks in his breath. A return cut then shows the audience what he can see, all of Lana Turner in her prime, framed in the doorway, wearing very short shorts, a V-neck halter top with a bare midriff, and her trademark turban. Everything she wears is white—stark white against her tanned skin—and she’s holding her compact and waiting for him to deliver her lipstick. He picks it up, but makes her walk to him to retrieve it. Then she turns her back on him, slowly goes back to the door, turns to the side, and sensuously, tauntingly, smears her lipstick on while he watches. She shows him what she’s got, then walks out, slamming the door behind her. During this scene, there is one cut to Turner in medium close-up, sparkling with all the youth, glamour, and sex appeal any actress could have, and she lets the audience know she sees what he sees and knows what he wants—and she’ll use it. When Lana Turner preened in front of John Garfield, an entire nation drooled.
The Star Machine Page 27
