The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  Postman was loaded with as much hot sex as the studio felt it could get away with in the 1940s, and the on-screen chemistry between Turner and Garfield generated real heat. When they play Latin music on the jukebox and dance close on a steamy summer night, the shadowed room lit only by an outside neon sign makes anything—including murder—seem not only possible but downright necessary. The link between sex and violence that MGM had exploited innocently enough in Honky Tonk and more specifically in Johnny Eager (and which would be later fully associated with her private life) is disturbingly explicit. In a stunning scene in Garfield’s room, Turner lures his hapless character into murdering her husband. She is presented in a close-up that is an image of Satan as a beautiful woman, electric with evil. Eyebrows arched with tension, mouth half parted, voice seductively whispering, Turner is photographed with a silvery magnetism that adds glamour to the shock of what she is saying. The kittenish girl of her earlier career is nowhere in sight.

  Postman took her to a new level. Like Betty Grable’s pinup photo and Rita Hayworth’s “Put the Blame on Mame” number in Gilda, Lana Turner’s first appearance, all in white, in Postman made her a legend in her own time. She went beyond MGM’s plans for her. She became more than a movie star. She became part of America’s culture. Linking her fully ripened sexuality to her lurid offscreen publicity through roles like Cora in Postman, MGM had elevated Turner into one of the greatest sex symbols of the 1940s. Now it was no longer a case of a business creating roles for someone they had developed to be typecast. It was a case of dealing with a phenomenon who was deeply associated with sexual allure, danger, and a level of glamour few movie stars could acquire. The combination of her private life, with all its peccadilloes, and her role as a temptress pushed Turner over the top.

  It was now 1946. Lana Turner had been a star since 1941. Whenever the movies wanted to invoke a symbol for their own particular brand of sex appeal (whether the movies were made by MGM or a rival studio), it was Lana Turner’s name that was used. She is mentioned in Cairo (1942), Lucky Jordan (1942), Meet the People (1944; a boat is named the Lana Turner), Anchors Aweigh (1945), and even Tom and Jerry cartoons. In Goldwyn’s Wonder Man (1945), a girl on a park bench justifies her looks by saying, “Some people think I look like Lana Turner.” In Without Reservations (1946), directed by her old mentor, Mervyn LeRoy, for RKO, her name is mentioned so often it’s as if she had stock in the picture. (“Lana Turner?” says a character. “That’s a glandular attraction.”) She herself was asked by MGM to make a cameo appearance to bolster a little joke they created for Red Skelton in DuBarry Was a Lady (1943). Skelton does a musical number entitled “I Love an Esquire Girl” which has the line, “and if Lana Turner doesn’t set your brain awhirl,” and to his surprise, Lana herself takes his arm and walks him off camera. This popularity made Lana Turner a national treasure during World War II. A GI allegedly wrote to his mother that “somehow it is better to be fighting for Lana Turner than it is to be fighting the Greater Reich.” It was a sentiment even the Germans could understand. President Franklin D. Roosevelt invited her to his annual birthday ball, and when she left early to go dancing elsewhere, he was heard to sigh, “I wish I were going along.” Everybody in those years had the “Lana Turner Blues,” a silly song written by two soldiers: “I get the morning papers bright and early / I gotta know where I can see that girlie / ’Cause since that night at the corner movie, I’ve got those Lana Turner blues.”

  Turner was also everywhere in print: newspapers, newsmagazines, women’s magazines. She inspired purple prose outside the hype of the business itself. Writing in Cosmopolitan magazine, Geoffrey McBain gushed, “What is a Lana Turner? Who is a Lana Turner? Lana Turner is a name in lights on a thousand grubby Main Streets. Lana Turner is a long, low libidinous whistle on the wetted lips of America … She is the pickup a guy will never stop hoping to make until senility overtakes him. She is the girl a girl can always think she is until the house lights come up. She is love with a stranger; the girl you didn’t marry; the chapter Havelock Ellis forgot to write; and she is yours whenever you want her, for forty cents plus tax … She is, in short, a Hollywood press release come to life.” It was a lot for an uneducated, untrained girl from Idaho to live up to.

  Of course, Turner was still an employee under contract and had to keep on working for MGM to continue the professional bargain she had made when they turned her into a movie star. Next she went into Green Dolphin Street (1947), a film set in the 1800s on an island in the English Channel and in an untamed New Zealand. It is Gone with the Wind epic: big, sprawling, and telling so many stories at once that the audience is exhausted as well as entertained. Lana Turner and Donna Reed play sisters Marianne and Marguerite, like a beautiful Tweedledum and Tweedledee (“Bless my soul if they aren’t a pretty pair of fish!” comments one observer). Turner’s character (Marianne) is a modern girl, bold, scheming, determined to take over the family shipping business and even, by her own admission, “not quite nice.” By now, Turner’s reputation demanded this aspect of all her characters.

  Green Dolphin Street contains enough events to fill five movies: an earthquake (during which Lana gives birth), a tidal wave, a native uprising, and a flood. The big earthquake sequence features trees uprooting and crashing on native heads, geysers gushing, earth cracking, opening, and swallowing people—and Lana screeching her head off in childbirth. If a faint tinge of the mechanical creeps into her performance from time to time, it’s no more than the script deserves. The real excitement associated with this movie was generated offscreen. During its filming, Turner made headlines when she suspended production to fly to Mexico to visit her current lover.

  If she had been jaunting off to visit some ordinary guy, the press might have given it a couple of inches in the back of the paper. But this time, as much as with any of her boyfriends, they grabbed hold and revved up the boldface headlines. This was because Lana’s lover was Tyrone Power.

  Lana Turner and Tyrone Power were the female and male equivalents of the studio system’s basic concept of “movie star”: the perfect figures to create the swoon, the loyal fan club, the interest of moviegoers of all ages, and, of course, the comforting sound of hard cash dropping into the coffers. In the world of the drop-dead gorgeous, Lana and Ty dropped audiences deader than practically anyone else, partly because their looks were exceptional but not overly exotic. They weren’t Greta Garbo or Rudolph Valentino. They could be the prettiest girl and handsomest boy in town—elevated to the highest physical level, but still with at least a touch of reality about them.

  Lana and Ty (or Ty and Lana) were a union of movie god and movie goddess, the perfect casting of a blond-blond glamour girl and a dark-haired, sensual leading man. If a movie star had a romance with another movie star, the studio machines could really go into high gear, because usually a movie star took up with a lesser actor (Joan Crawford and Phillip Terry), a boring doctor (Claudette Colbert and Dr. Joel Pressman), or someone too unphotogenic, too outspoken, or just plain too something that would be hard to make work in the fan magazines. There were some minor nuggets for the flacks: Betty Grable married her equal in the bandleader power of Harry James. Marilyn Monroe would marry another genuine legend, sports star Joe DiMaggio (and then playwright Arthur Miller), and lesser light Laraine Day married Leo “the Lip” Durocher. Sometimes there were show business couples who were balanced in mid-level glory—Ida Lupino and Howard Duff, June Haver and Fred MacMurray, Lucy and Desi before TV. But not often did star power unite with other real star power. Exceptions were the original show business couple and grand champions, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford; Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck, a couple who tried to keep out of the news; and Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, a marriage that ended all too soon when she died in a plane crash. But a Turner-Power romance for the 1940s gossip columnists and movie flacks was high wattage. Their respective studios smelled money, and as nervous as the union made their bosses in terms of incompatibility, longevity, common s
ense, and potential arguments over which studio would get to put them together in a movie first, they backed the romance all the way.

  Lana and Ty … Ty and Lana … out on the town at the Mocambo (above) … and (right) at the peak of their red-hot affair, behind the scenes while he was making Captain from Castile.

  Naturally, Ty and Lana knew each other. Hollywood was a small town in those days, and neither was the stay-at-home type. More than once they probably bumped into one another on the dance floor or saw each other across a crowded room. They did not, of course, see each other during the working day. Turner was sequestered at Metro and never loaned out during her heyday, and the same was true for Power, who was at Fox. (Power’s one loan-out to Metro, for Marie Antoinette in 1938, preceded Turner’s arrival.)

  How and when they first began “seeing” each other has never been documented, although differing opinions have been put forth. In his biography of Power, Fred Guiles says, “Evie Wynn had brought them together, even though they had been acquaintances for many years.” In her autobiography, Turner wrote, “I had always been attracted to him, but I kept my distance because he was married. One night he invited me over for drinks.” (She discreetly adds, “What an evening!”) Turner discusses their romance fully, but in that maddening way that movie stars who write about their lives inevitably share, doesn’t pinpoint the time in which they were together. (In a star’s mind, time is a flowing river that everyone else is responsible for keeping straight, and besides, a date spelled out is a possible revelation of one’s age.)

  What everyone knows is that sometime after World War II—before Power made Nightmare Alley, according to Turner—and mid-August 1946, according to Power, and during the months of January 1947 to November 1947, according to the fan magazines—Tyrone Power and Lana Turner began a much-publicized romance.

  Fan magazines in those days had a long lead time—three months or more. This often left them with considerable egg on their faces as stars could marry and divorce in that time, much less conduct an affair. The mags did their best, but their coverage was a bit late, vague in the early stages, and behind the times when things ended. (This makes it even harder to figure out what happened.) The magazines carry no mention of Lana and Ty from the middle of 1946 almost to the end of the year. Some after-the-fact chroniclers say Lana was shooting Postman when the romance began, others say it was Green Dolphin Street or Cass Timberlane (1947). (One definite fact is that she left the set of Green Dolphin Street to fly to Mexico to visit Power on the set of Captain from Castile.) Any information in a gossip column is subject to suspicion, and the differences between shooting dates and release dates for movies often cause historical confusion. However, in the January 1947 issue of Photoplay,* their affair was obviously on the burner. “Inside Stuff,” the magazine’s gossip column, written by the anonymous “Cal York,” carries an item that says Power and Annabella have announced their divorce because he “likes the simple life” and she is a “woman of the world” who prefers “big parties and gaiety.” The magazine says rumors about Power’s love life “clutter the Hollywood grapevine,” but that “Gene Tierney is the girl” according to the uninformed. Not considering himself a part of the uninformed, “Cal York” lets everyone know that this rumor is untrue and that the true rumor is “Lana Turner is the girl in Tyrone’s life.” Hedging his bets, the columnist adds, “Don’t ask us to predict—not on this one!” The combination of the much-sought-after Power and the volatile Turner was one no experienced writer on the Hollywood scene was going to risk a reputation on. As soon as the news broke, the fan magazines went flat out warp speed. Everyone was off and running to write it while it was hot. Louella Parsons was out in front, telling everyone that Lana and Ty were an item, “an unbelievably handsome pair” that “had so much to give one another, Ty with his gentleness and well-bred ways, Lana with her verve, her loveliness, her almost childlike sensuality.”

  The year 1947 was full of the Lana-Ty romance. On a single day, May 5, 1947, these items were released to newspapers by the studio publicity mills, the various gossip columnists, and various press agents about town: “Ty Power and Lana Turner are coming out in the open and were seen having dinner at the Chanticleer … Lana Turner gave Tyrone Power a birthday party Monday night, and believe me, this romance seems to grow stronger … Lana Turner and Ty Power created a sensation when they walked into the MGM commissary together. Ty spent all day with Lana on the Cass Timberlane set … Lana Turner and Tyrone Power continue to be the most romantic couple in town … LT and TP at Pebble Beach … LT in love with TP …” Their photographs were in every magazine and newspaper, and breathless articles on them as individuals, as a couple, and as mates for others were rushed into print. Lana and Ty in full nightclub regalia were, obviously, a photo op to top any other photo op available. There they were dancing at Ciro’s, Lana dressed all in white with diamonds in her hair, Ty in a tuxedo, holding her in his arms. There they were at the racetrack, both in tweeds, and at the Brown Derby, heads together over big salads. They were photographed at movie premieres, the skating rink, Mocambo’s, and on the sets of their various movies. As Lana steps out of a limo with Ty’s help, she’s suited up in full star glamour, with white fur, open-toed high heels, and jewels dripping. Ty is right behind her, wearing top hat and tails. They were all over the place and all over each other. Someone in Hollywood once defined “the most beautiful sight he had ever seen” as his view of Lana and Ty, both wearing white bathing suits, deeply tanned, and full of delight and energy, chasing each other down a stretch of Malibu beach. Looking at the photographs of them today, surrounded by hordes of autograph seekers, her white furs sliding off her shoulders as she scribbles and his arm around her while he accepts his own proffered paper for signature, one is struck by how they truly look like characters in a movie about Hollywood. No one even remotely believed in their undying love, of course. They were alone in their fantasy. The poor babies look so happy in their photos, and they don’t even know that their romance was over before it started.*

  And then came the beginning of the end of Ty and Lana (or Lana and Ty). The November 1947 issue of Modern Screen has two spectacular photos of Lana on its cover, wearing one rare orchid (on a white, slim satin gown) and posed behind a gigantic blow-up of another one. The article, entitled “Golden Girl” and written by Kaaren Pieck, is a complete chronicle of Lana’s various loves. Accompanying the final photo—one of Lana and Ty (in black and white, no longer worthy of full color)—the first ominous caption appears: “Something new has been added (a reduction of Power to the latest in a long line of other beaus), and insiders are betting this time Lana means it when she says she loves Ty Power.” This was fan mag double talk for “as we all now know, this is just another romance no matter what she says.” By April 1948, the same magazine carries an article called “If this isn’t love … the story of Tyrone Power and Linda Christian.” Lana Turner’s name is nowhere mentioned in the piece, which predicts that Power and Christian will wed. (They did.)

  What went wrong? No one knows, but there are many rumors: Lana was even more possessive than Annabella, and Ty couldn’t stand it. Ty was easily bored, and his eye roved on to others. Lana was addicted to amphetamines, and Ty hated that. Ty was cruel to Lana and made her abort their child. Et cetera. The only facts everyone can agree on have to do with the highly publicized “surprise” visit Turner made to Ty in Mexico. Turner took a big risk by flying down to see her lover, since she was heavily into production on Green Dolphin Street. If anything happened, she would hold up production and cost her studio thousands of dollars. But Lana being Lana, she risked all for love, seizing a weekend to have an overnight tryst. Something seems to have gone wrong during or after this visit—possibly before, which might have been why she made the effort. At any rate, soon afterward, the big romance was over.

  Their romance was the twilight of the movie gods, but while it lasted, it was a glorious moment in movie star history. Other movie couples that followed them�
�Debbie and Eddie, Tony and Janet—were examples of those “down-home,” “we’re just real people” movie stars. They had kids and posed with baby strollers and diapers while rustling up some eggs in the kitchen. They consciously removed themselves from the hothouse stardom of Lana and Ty. By the time the last really big star love affairs hit, the system that fostered the glamour of Lana and Ty would be dead. As for today’s lot—the J-Los and Bens, even the Brads and Angelinas—they are definitely Kmart couples compared to Lana and Ty. (Even Liz and Dick, who wrote the book on the category, don’t count because they were stalked by paparazzi outside the old studio system.)

  It was left to Turner, who outlived Power by thirty-seven years, to write a version of their story. In her autobiography, Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth, Turner said the love she had always longed for she found in Tyrone Power, “the most gentlemanly, enchanting man I have ever known.” All her life, Turner remained convinced that had Power been able to settle his divorce quickly enough, they would definitely have married. Her account of their romance has a suspicious women’s-film quality. She writes a movie for them: “An electric current flowed between us. You had only to look at us to know we were in love. And we made a breathtaking couple.” According to her, they shared a love of “music and books” and planned to make a film together based on Mildred Cram’s romantic novel Forever.