The Star Machine

by Jeanine Basinger

  The poor films weren’t all of it. Alas, Lana Turner’s penchant for unfortunate marriages continued. Her personal life could only be described, even by those who loved her, as a mess. It was a decade of confusion for her, particularly during Cheryl’s difficult years of adjustment. Turner wed and divorced both Fred May and Robert Eaton, but outdid herself with number seven, a nightclub hypnotist she had known only three weeks. He, too, forgot to mention a former marriage, as well as to give his right name (Ronald Peller).* After Turner’s seventh husband attempted to kill a fellow hypnotist somewhere in Arizona, and after their marriage of six months—her shortest since Artie Shaw—Lana Turner separated from number seven.

  With the hypnotist, Lana Turner had reached the bottom. In late 1969, she brought suit against him, accusing him of defrauding her of $34,000. In addition she received the gloomy news that a television series she was appearing in, The Survivors, would not itself survive. This show, launched in September, had been one of her hopes for a new lease on her career. She didn’t need money—besides the income from her films, she owned land and several winning racehorses—but she did need something to do professionally. (“I need activity,” said Turner. “Oh God, how I need activity.”†)

  The last years of Turner’s stardom, from 1957 to 1976, illustrate what is left to a female movie queen who is aging and locked into roles that reflect her own life after the system that built her, nourished her, supported her, and defined her throws her out—and then itself collapses and disappears. Turner makes thirteen movies in twenty years where she once made nineteen movies in ten years. Two of these movies are among her best ever—Peyton Place, her Oscar-nominated film, and Imitation of Life, the film that most people know her by today. Yet neither of these movies led to anything. She was too old (thirty-seven in Peyton Place) and too famous as “Lana Turner.” As she accepted assignments, producers and studios that hired her tried to use her own personal life as fodder or to imitate Imitation of Life. Her career as a movie star was one of the biggest and best known of her era, but it had ultimately come to being just that: the career of a movie star. Not an actress. Not even a personality. She was a star who played a star. And even if she played an airplane pilot, she was playing a star airplane pilot. In 1976, the story of Lana Turner could be summed up: By the end of 1937, Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner had become Lana Turner. By the end of 1973, Lana Turner had become Lana Turner Shaw Crane Crane Topping Barker May Eaton Dante … and the latter had consumed the former. Her glamour ate her up. Her offscreen life, or what people thought it was, became the only role she was allowed to play. She was indeed “bigger than life.” Although in the beginning, her career seemed as if it would be a model example of star machine success, her case was one of the machine going berserk when she was fed into it.

  Lana Turner was not the first movie star to create romantic scandals. The difference for her was that she was never officially forgiven for her peccadilloes. She lived through them and finally lived long enough to live them down. Ingrid Bergman was ostracized—even denounced in Congress—when she bore Roberto Rossellini’s child, but she was publicly forgiven and welcomed home with open arms that held an Oscar in each fist. When her sins were revealed, Marilyn Monroe was said to be a product of her wretched past, more victim than victimizer. Ava Gardner, whose high living made international headlines, was called a modern playgirl and cited as a liberated woman who used men as men had once used her. Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky was said to be too beautiful to be responsible for anything—and, besides, she was sickly. Lana Turner, however, suffered both scandal and humiliation. She was made to pay.

  After her retirement, Turner lived a life of luxury, granting an occasional interview and sometimes telling listeners about one of her earliest childhood memories. Sometime in the ’30s, she said, an old beat-up Star automobile (the only car on the market cheaper than a Model T) drifted down a California highway, headed toward San Francisco. In the backseat, sound asleep, was a dark-haired young woman. Up front at the wheel, but also sleeping, sat a handsome man. In his lap, steering for all she was worth was a little girl with a pink hair ribbon—Miss Judy Turner.

  “I believe that such incidents in early childhood have a great bearing on what you are like and how you behave later in life. I was applauded for taking over in an emergency. I learned that was the thing to do.”

  The question is: Did it ever really happen? It seems possible that the event might be a recurring nightmare of a little girl whose father was murdered and whose mother was forced to board her out with strangers. Or even of a teenage kid who had to support her family with her sex appeal and good looks. While she was still too young to be in charge, before anyone had taught her what she needed to know, Lana Turner found herself up front in the spotlight, driving the car as best she could: “Almost from that day my life has been a series of emergencies in which I have had to take the wheel without knowing where I was going or how to run the machine.”

  At the end of her life, Lana Turner had figured out and accepted the realities of her goldfish bowl life: “When a small-town girl makes a mistake, her family covers up for her. But me, nobody covers up for me.” She realized that this was a price she had to pay for stardom: “We are unconscious of what Hollywood may do to us. At the same time, it is unfair to blame this on Hollywood … I know, of course, that my love affair with Crane, my quick remarriage because of my child, and then a divorce—I know these matters must have seemed hilariously funny, the irresponsible antics of Hollywood people of no character. I can blame no one.”

  She was always known to be vulnerable: “Why do people want to hurt me? I can’t understand it.” She kept that softness because she was a kind person basically, but she finally worked out her own private rules to live by: “Never look back is my philosophy. What’s past is past, and I can’t let it destroy me … I must continue working. The fact is that it’s the only thing I know.”

  Lana Turner never did look back. She had always had youth on her side, as well as a basic resilience and a durable constitution. Although she may have led a disastrous private life, she had always kept going. Turner was always looking ahead, watching for that “something good just around the corner” that usually turned out to be a pie in the face or worse. She never whined to the press about how tough things were when she was young. She didn’t kill herself. She didn’t end up waiting tables in a small-town beanery. She wasn’t found down and out in Bellevue. Unlike the high priestess in The Prodigal, she refused to leap into the flames, and she ended up a wealthy legend.

  Comparing Turner to other female movie legends—Elizabeth Taylor, for instance—it is clear that where Taylor was spoiled and dependent on men, Turner was spoiled and independent of them. She just happened to like them a lot. And she happened to make a lot of bad choices. For this—and for her liberated lifestyle, which did not recognize the double standard—Lana Turner was publicly denounced.

  It was inevitable that a girl with Turner’s looks wasn’t going to stay poor and unknown. She had to end up jeweled and gowned. Lana might have become a little girl with no daddy but a sugar daddy; instead, she earned her own living. Early in life she became accustomed to being the boss at home—she was the person who paid the bills. She knew it was her looks and her talent that brought home the dollars. She began to take the role of aggressor in relationships, without feeling the slightest bit self-conscious. After all, she was Lana Turner. Why hang back and wait for the man to decide? She picked her own men, and she could have her pick. Although totally feminine, Lana Turner was one of the first film stars to openly take the male prerogative for herself. She was less a slave to sex than she was its master.

  Originally, Metro thought Turner might inherit Joan Crawford’s roles. Like Crawford, Turner had behind her the escapist daydreaming of a lonely and poverty-stricken little girl. In the early stages of her career, they cast her as a commoner trying to make it across the tracks. But Turner, growing u
p in Hollywood, took too much of Tinseltown into her pores to be believable in the hash house. After a certain point, she looked too rich, too polished, too elegant, too much the girl from Orchid City to bring off a rags-to-riches role. Furthermore, whereas Crawford could suppress her glamour and reach into herself to find the memory of her humble origins, Turner appeared to cut loose her past and believe in her own glamour. For her audiences, she was truly a movie goddess, born and raised on film for their pleasure. She became a star, the thing most dreamed of, while she was still herself a dreamy girl. She survived by accepting the dream as her reality. The life she took up in Hollywood was a fantasy life, both on-screen and off. Instead of being a person who had to develop an image, Turner was an image who had to develop as a person, to grow up. For her this was a long, painful process that took place on the front page.

  Lana Turner is both a typical product of the system and one that, against all odds, survived it and finally outlived it. Its machinery taught her how to be a star, and she believed everything it taught her. In her later years, she took real pride in having survived the star machine and lauded the process. “Nowadays, young actresses and actors make one picture and they are billed as stars. Why, when we were at MGM, we worked years before anybody called us stars. I don’t consider those years as bondage. I’m very grateful for them. I like to think they gave me a basic foundation.” In the end, Turner became something of a glamorous recluse, but she was glamorous. There’s a real sense of justice in that. She was smarter than everyone thought she was. And her fans were more loyal. Without anyone realizing it, and with no official recognition of the fact, Lana Turner had taken the final step due her as a movie star of the golden age of Hollywood. She had been elevated to legendary status. In April 1975, the Town Hall in New York invited her to appear on their stage in person to discuss her career in a series called “Legendary Ladies.” (Others had been Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy.) No one knew exactly what would happen on Turner’s night; nobody thought she was a Davis or Crawford. But the evening was a sellout, including standing room. A packed audience quivered in anticipation, and when she walked out onto the stage, dressed all in white, looking every inch the glamour girl, she received a prolonged standing ovation. She was introduced as “star of screen, radio, television, and stage” and she dimpled, charmed, sparkled. Lana Turner was still Lana Turner. Her career might have been over,* but she now had a new one: living legend.

  Lana Turner in her later years, posing with her younger self with no fear of comparison.

  Occasionally, Turner would appear onstage, in documentaries, interviews, and television biographies, but having become a legend, she more or less did what legends do, which is be legends. And just to authenticate her absolutely “movie star” life story, she was allowed to go out on the very top, onstage, in full star regalia, and with the sound of applause roaring, as, once again, she walked forward for her admirers. Shortly before she died of throat cancer on June 29, 1995, she pulled herself together and, ill though she was, flew to Barcelona to accept a tribute from the Spanish Film Festival. She took the stage dressed to the teeth, small and thin but looking absolutely fantastic. It was her final walk before her public, and she gave it everything she had. She received a thunderous standing ovation.

  Once asked what she would like to be remembered for, Turner said, “I just want to be remembered as a sensitive woman who tried to do her job, that’s all … I would like to think that in some small way I have helped preserve the glamour and the beauty and the mystery of the movie industry.” Her final statement on the subject could have been written by a studio flack, and it reflects what MGM had taught her—do your job, be grateful for it, always look your best, and stay loyal to the machine. To her death, she was an A student, a PhD of the studio system’s rigorous schooling, and a survivor of its horrors.

  ERROL FLYNN

  Errol Flynn

  Errol Flynn had everything it took for movie career longevity except one thing: stability. Flynn led a flamboyant private life that, despite the efforts of his home studio (Warner Bros.), could not be kept off the front pages. Maintaining a long career required discipline and self-denial, two things Flynn had no time for. Flynn played, and he played hard. Like Lana Turner, he slipped out of the control of the star machine in his offscreen life. He began to be defined by fistfights, drunkenness, love affairs, and excess that ended in a trial for statutory rape. It was all very glamorous in its way—at least it made him into a mythical Don Juan figure. Also like Turner, he ended up living an imaginary self linked to his movie self via his notoriety. Flynn seemed “gentlemanly,” but it was a quality he used when he wanted it and tossed over his shoulder when he didn’t. He gave his fans what they wanted, taking on an offscreen lighthearted spoof of “Errol Flynn,” claiming not to care but alleviating his pain through alcoholism and drug addiction. Underneath his devil-may-care surface was an embarrassment about being an actor that caused him to destroy first his reputation, then his career, and ultimately himself. For most male stars, performing in movies was their profession. They were actors and proud of it. Flynn was a movie star and ashamed of it.

  When his private life first began to come under unsympathetic scrutiny, Flynn had a Scaramouche-like answer to his critics: “I allow myself to be understood abroad as a colorful fragment in a drab world.” It’s an elegant and bravura statement—and a pretty good definition of what a movie star is supposed to be—but Flynn also said such things as “I want to be taken seriously” too often for his life not to seem ultimately tragic. (His third wife, actress Patrice Wymore, said Flynn had a “divine discontent” within him.) He wasted too much. Yet he was so charming, so full of life, so genuinely dashing and just plain fun to watch, that Flynn never needs to be pitied like a John Gilbert or even a John Barrymore. His star shone as brightly as any, but sadly he went down early and ugly, dying at the age of fifty, a bloated alcoholic.

  Flynn always presented himself on-screen with dash and style, and he was that useful player who could move from genre to genre. In the year 1938 alone he appeared in The Adventures of Robin Hood (an adventure film), Four’s a Crowd (a screwball comedy), The Sisters (an out-and-out women’s film), and The Dawn Patrol (a war combat movie). He could play comedy or drama, action or melodrama, and he could easily have had much greater longevity had he taken up a less destructive lifestyle. However, it’s easy to shortchange the strength (and even the length) of Flynn’s career. He made more than fifty movies in only twenty-five years. Flynn fulfilled the investment Warners made in him when they dumped him into their star machine. Despite his playboy life, Flynn was a pro, and he could be counted on to fit anywhere the studio put him.* The problem was the places he put himself in his offscreen life.

  Errol Flynn’s stardom is defined by four things: (1) his athleticism, which extended his range into action movies; (2) his lesser ability to support female stars—with some he was compatible (Olivia de Havilland and Ida Lupino) but with many he was not (Bette Davis); (3) his scandalous private life; and (4) the fact he was totally a product of the star machine.

  When Flynn arrived in Hollywood in the 1930s, he was noticed immediately and swept up into the social scene. People who knew him then have said he was even more charming in person than on film. He was reputed to be witty, full of mischief, and a real athlete. He could swim, box, ride horses well, sail, fence, and dance with graceful ease. Unlike the majority of the male movie stars of his era, Flynn was actually a big man: six feet two inches tall, just under 200 pounds. Yet he was never awkward and seemed to be completely comfortable inside himself. The first thing one notices about him is his fabulous smile—one that both charms and cons. This duality connected him directly to his viewers. He flashes his charm inside the movie story, following the dictates of the plot, but flashes the con outward to the viewer, setting up a warm secondary level of communication, creating intimacy between himself and his audience. It’s impossible to believe anything he’s saying in a movie because it’s
impossible to believe he believes it. Yet it’s also impossible not to believe in him as Errol Flynn, a swell fella, letting us in on the secret universe he inhabits as star. Many of the leading men of Flynn’s era had this quality: William Powell, Clark Gable, Jimmy Cagney, Cary Grant. It’s a form of male apology for being actors, and it perhaps made them more comfortable with the roles they were playing and the money they were making. They all have a built-in quality of “don’t believe this is the real me” to their playing that both denies stardom and locks it into place.

  Flynn’s stardom is grounded in the sense of naughtiness that hangs about him.* He’s the bad boy in school who livened up the classroom for the rest of us cowards. (And that quality was not something invented for him, as the world later learned; he really was a naughty boy.) Such characters need a straitlaced society to play against. They are rule breakers, so they need rules. An Errol Flynn type of role is one that operates against the rules, but in a safe format, a reassuring one. Rather than being really dangerous or menacing—a Cagney or a Robinson or a Karloff—Flynn became the character who menaced stuffiness, a welcome breath of fresh air that blew across the dining table as well as across the forces of tyranny. He was a comfortable kind of rebel for audiences of the 1930s. He always acted his roles with simple dignity. He knew how to deliver a line, any kind of line—to toss it off if it was a clinker or to hammer it down if it mattered. (He possessed a lovely voice, something that’s seldom remarked on.)

  Flynn’s mischief emerges in any kind of role, no matter how serious. (Perhaps the exception that proves the rule is his appearance as Soames Forsyte in That Forsyte Woman.) On-screen he seems willing to try anything. He’s the epitome of “devil may care.” This quality worked for him in comedies and, when added to his good looks, made him a perfect romantic leading man. Add in his adventurous, athletic self, and the sum of his stardom is defined: comedy plus romance plus danger. Few actors can give an audience all that in one package. In this regard, Flynn was the heir apparent to Douglas Fairbanks Sr., one of America’s most popular silent film stars. Audiences saw in Flynn the spirit of Fairbanks—he had the same humor, joie de vivre, and casually adventuresome dash. Before he became “Errol Flynn,” moviegoers welcomed him to the screen as a suitable replacement for their beloved Fairbanks.