Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  The soda jerk at the Top Hat came over to Lana. “That gentleman over there would like to meet you. It’s not a come-on. He comes in here every day for lunch and works down the street as a newsman. Can he introduce himself?”

  She looked at him squarely for the first time, finding that he wore a dark business suit, had a pencil-thin mustache, and his head was crowned with brilliantined black hair graying at the temples.

  She signaled to him that it would be all right if he approached her.

  “Hello, young lady,” he said to her. “I’m Billy Wilkerson, the publisher of The Hollywood Reporter. Forgive me for using what usually is a pick-up line, but I think you should be in pictures.”

  “I don’t know about that,” she answered. “I’ve been told I can’t act.”

  “I should clarify my remark. I said you should be in pictures. You could be a movie star. With your looks, you wouldn’t have to act.” Then he handed her his business card.

  “I’d have to talk it over with my mother,” she said. “She makes the big decisions for me.”

  “I want your mother to call me, and both of you to visit me at my office down the street. I think I can hook you up with the right people.”

  “Well, maybe,” she said, sounding both thrilled but strangely hesitant.

  “Goodbye,” he said. “I hope to hear from your mother in the morning. By the way, what is your name?”

  “Judy Turner.”

  ***

  [That drugstore encounter on that October afternoon became one of the most enduring legends in the history of Hollywood. But the facts got distorted over the years.

  The first article about Lana’s discovery was more or less accurate, appearing in the December 23, 1940 edition of Life magazine. It correctly identified the venue as the Top Hat Café.

  However, by the mid-40s, when Lana was reigning as the Queen of MGM, the venue of her inaugural meeting with Wilkerson had morphed into Schwab’s Pharmacy at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Laurel, two miles from Hollywood High.

  Many of the girls at Hollywood High were jealous of the future Lana Turner—not only for her looks, but because all the boys were in pursuit of her. Nearly every reasonably attractive girl in school wanted to be a movie star, if not Carole Lombard, then perhaps Barbara Stanwyck.

  Opened by the Schwab brothers in 1932, the drugstore in time became the hangout of young actors, male and female, dreaming of stardom. Its most famous client was the popular columnist Sidney Skolsky, who used Schwab’s as his unofficial office, conducting his interviews there and even picking up his mail there.

  In his memoir, Don’t Get Me Wrong—I Love Hollywood, he wrote that almost daily, he encountered some young wannabee actress who asked him which stool was it that Lana Turner sat on when she was discovered by a talent agent.

  “I’d direct her to this one stool where the poor girl would sit there in vain all day waiting to become the next Lana.”]

  Back home that evening, Lana showed Mildred and Gladdy the business card that Billy Wilkerson had given her. Her mother dismissed it as some come-on by an aging Hollywood wolf lusting after a young girl, but Gladdy wasn’t so sure. She had heard of Wilkerson, who was quite famous in Hollywood because of his newspaper and nightclubs.

  Billy Wilkerson, founder of The Hollywood Reporter and “discoverer” of young Lana Turner, in 1939.

  Finally, Lana persuaded Mildred to accompany her to the office of The Hollywood Reporter after a call was put through to Wilkerson.

  He turned out to be legitimate and was a friend of the Hollywood elite, including Louis B. Mayer and Nicholas Schenck, with whom he often played poker. He was also a nightclub impresario, having founded the Café Trocadero in 1934. In a few short years, Lana herself would be a regular at his other celebrated clubs, including Ciro’s in 1940 and LaRue of Hollywood in 1943.

  [William R. Wilkerson would also become a controversial figure in Hollywood history—and not just for having discovered Lana Turner. In 1946, the year after World War II ended, he began to publish a series of columns in The Hollywood Reporter called “Billy’s List,” in which he printed the names of alleged Communist sympathizers.

  In time, and with a lot of help from the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, “Billy’s List” became the infamous Hollywood Blacklist, which destroyed the careers of directors, producers, and screenwriters such as Dalton Trumbo.]

  Wilkerson was frank that he himself could not advance Lana’s career, but he could introduce her to a man who might. He agreed to set up an appointment with his friend, Zeppo Marx, who ran a successful theatrical agency, which in time specialized in handling the careers of married couples, including Clark Gable and Carole Lombard and Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck.

  [Born in 1901, Zeppo (aka Herbert) Marx was the youngest of the five Marx Brothers. From 1929 to 1933, he appeared with his brothers in their films. They included Duck Soup and Monkey Business. Eventually, he distanced himself from their filmmaking agendas to become a theatrical agent and an engineer, the latter pursuit of which made him a multi-millionaire. In the late 1930s, he invented a type of fastener, a “Marman ring,” a heavy-duty band clamp that allows the butt ends of tubes or pipes to be interconnected and subsequently “fast-disconnected” whenever necessary. An adaptation of his invention was used to hold “Fat Man,” an atomic bomb inside the B-29 bomber that flew over and subsequently demolished Hiroshima.]

  An appointment was arranged with Zeppo, who asked Lana, in front of her mother, “Raise your dress. I wanna see your legs.”

  Lana looked over at her mother, who nodded her approval. “I’m not putting the make on you. This is standard in the business. You’ve got a beautiful face, but you can’t become a show girl with ugly legs.”

  She raised the hem of her dress and Zeppo approved. “You’ve got the body of a nineteen- or twenty-year-old.” He was very frank, telling her that he had time only for his A-list clients.

  He’d assign her to his assistant, Henry Willson. “He’s great at developing hotyoung males, his specialty. But occasionally, he devotes some time to a gal. I’ll call him and set up a time. And don’t worry, Mildred, your daughter’s virginity will be safe with Henry Willson.”

  Zeppo’s parting remark to Lana was “From now on, kid, you’re eighteen years old. Got that? Eighteen. Not a day younger.”

  ***

  Talent agent Henry Willson always boasted, “Regardless of what you read, I was the fucker who really discovered Lana Turner and made her a star.”

  A day after meeting Zeppo Marx, Mildred, accompanied by Lana, found herself sitting across from the cluttered desk of Willson, an ugly man with a fatty figure who—although he occasionally took on a female client—specialized mainly in booking actors with perfect physiques.

  Years later, he recalled, “Only twice in my life did I ask an aspirant actor or actress to read a page or two of dialogue for me. Both of them gave a disastrous reading. I mean, really awful. They had no talent at all. Minus zero. But they had something else, and that was this intangible thing called sex appeal. That young man and young woman who read for me were renamed Rock Hudson and Lana Turner.”

  When Willson met Lana, she was still known as Judy Turner. “Her mother, Mildred, brought this underage girl in to see me. Zeppo had sensed something about her and turned her over to me, the future starmaker. Mildred had dressed her like a jailbait hooker—a cheap fur stole—rather ratty, paste jewelry, hair piled on top of her head, and enough makeup to cover eight chorus cuties. I cut our meeting short and asked her to come back the next morning with no makeup and dressed like a schoolgirl at Hollywood High.”

  Over coffee with Lana the next morning, Willson confirmed that Billy Wilkerson had not put the make on her, as he had so often with his other “discoveries.”

  “I don’t know how you escaped. When he’s not losing money gambling, he sleeps with every gal not named Mrs. Billy Wilkerson.”

  Henry Willson, depicted here with an effigy of Uncle Sam, used th
e infamous Hollywood casting couch, but with a male-dominated twist. In the case of this talent agent, only handsome, well-built men were sent to the sofa for a workout.

  He liked Lana’s schoolgirl look and the fact that she combined innocence with sex appeal. “Men go home to fuck their wives out of duty, but what the bastards really want is to bed a gal who looks like you.”

  In the next two months, Will-son and Judy, as she was still being called, would see a lot of each other. He took her from MGM to Paramount, from Columbia to RKO, but to no avail. Some casting directors had a certain appeal, and some commented on her beauty, but he heard the line repeated endlessly: “Henry, you of all people, know that Hollywood is flooded with beautiful girls, or, in your case, pretty boys.”

  One director at 20th Century Fox had a role for her but on one condition: “She’s got to let me fuck her—or else it’s no way, José!”

  Willson, as a go-between, asked Lana if she’d be willing to cooperate, but she rejected the offer.

  It’s not going to happen,” Willson told the director. “But if you’re horny, I’m good for a quickie.”

  “Get the fuck out of here, faggot!” the director responded.

  Gradually, Lana began to find out who Willson really was, not so much from him, but from gossipy members of the entertainment industry.

  A native New Yorker, born in 1911, he drifted to Hollywood, where his first major job was that of a talent scout for producer David O. Selznick. “Most of my job involved getting beautiful gals for his casting couch,” Willson recalled.

  While doing that, Willson as a talent agent maintained a casting couch of his own. Only well-built men need apply. It was said that in time, he practically invented the word “beefcake,” as opposed to the girly, then-more-widely accepted term, “cheesecake.”

  “I was a connoisseur of male flesh,” he admitted. “Talent didn’t matter so much if these guys looked great without their shirts.”

  In time, he would become known as “The Man Who Created Rock Hudson.” He also gave his discoveries catchy names that went over well in the 1950s, including “Tab” and “Rock.” In his stable were such well-built, good-looking guys as Guy Madison, Rory Calhoun, Tab Hunter, Robert Wagner, John Derek, Troy Donahue, Clint Walker, John Saxon, and so many others. None of them, however, attained the top box office appeal of Hudson.

  “Willson’s hands-on lechery gave new meaning to the proverbial casting couch,” Selznick said. “His couch was even more active than that of Harry Cohn over at Columbia. It was rare, but Willson did help launch the careers of a few women, including Lana Turner, Natalie Wood, and Rhonda Fleming, that Queen of Technicolor.”

  “Most fans thought Lana was an overnight sensation,” Willson said. “That was far from the truth. She was turned down again and again. She needed money when she wasn’t making the rounds of the studios with me. She went to school and worked at this lingerie shop on Hollywood Boulevard for $12.50 a week.”

  Lana had told Willson that she knew how to dance, although he never put her through the test. He arranged for RKO to test her for a possible role in The New Faces of 1937, at first known as Young People. She arrived at the studio with a familiar face, Mickey Rooney, who, it was understood, would accompany her on the piano. Perhaps he’d taught her some dance steps, as he was an expert dancer.

  But the casting director abruptly canceled, without explanation, her audition, and she left the studio frustrated and disappointed.

  When the film was released, Lana went to see it. “I would have been out-classed,” she admitted. “There were dozens of talented young dancers in that film. Hell, the lead number, ‘New Faces,’ was danced by none other than Ann Miller. Who could compete with her? Perhaps Eleanor Powell—and that was about it.”

  ***

  True to his promise, Willson managed to get her a job in a movie produced by his associate, David O. Selznick. It was A Star Is Born. Released in 1937 it starred Janet Gaynor and Fredric March, two leading stars of the 1930s. Each of them would eventually be nominated for a Best Actor and Best Actress Oscar for their respective performances.

  Its plot focused on an aspiring Hollywood actress whose star is about to ascend. She marries an egocentric actor whose Hollywood stardom (and life in general) is fading and falling apart. Its plot was said to have been (discreetly) based on Barbara Stanwyck’s disastrous marriage to the closeted Frank Fay.

  [Seventeen years later, in 1954, A Star Is Born was remade into what is arguably Judy Garland’s most dramatically successful movie. Much of Hollywood asserted that she should have won the Oscar for Best Actress in 1954 after it was awarded instead to Grace Kelly for her role in The Country Girl.

  In 1976, Barbra Streisand made a stab at the by-now-overworked theme of A Star Is Born, an remake that was relatively unsuccessful.]

  Ironically, although Lana was already being hailed for her beautiful face, only the back of her head, wearing a silly cap, appeared in the 1937 version of the film’s final cut. She appeared in a crowd scene at the Santa Ana racetrack. In that scene, the characters portrayed by Fredric March and Lionel Stander had a fight, attracting a crowd, a member of which was the (anonymous) character played by Lana.

  Lana, as she looked in her first role in a movie. She was hired as an extra in the 1937 A Star Is Born, starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March. “Everybody told me how beautiful I was, but the bastards only showed my back.”

  Also making her debut in a very small role was blonde-haired Carole Landis, who would in time become Lana’s rival for screen roles and World War II pinup popularity. “She was also the girl who chased after some of my boyfriends,” Lana said, referring to Tony Martin, Victor Mature, and Ronald Reagan.

  The two aspirant actresses, Lana and Landis, had hamburgers for lunch in the commissary. Lana was surprised at how candid Landis, a native of Wisconsin, was. She admitted to having been a call girl in San Francisco, and claimed that she planned to sleep her way to the top through “performances” on one casting couch after another. She named some of her latest conquests—Charlie Chaplin, Hal Roach, Jr., and Darryl F. Zanuck.

  Lana differed, telling Landis, and so many others, “I plan to get ahead on my looks—not by sleeping with studio bosses.”

  ***

  Girls at Hollywood High tended to shun Lana, perhaps out of jealousy. There was one exception: Born in British Columbia, Alexis Smith had migrated south to grow up in Los Angeles. Unlike Lana, she had been trained as a dancer, and made her debut as a ballerina at the Hollywood Bowl when she was only thirteen.

  She soon deserted The Dance and dreamed instead of becoming a movie star. She wasn’t discovered by a Warner Brothers talent agent until 1940, when she was in college.

  Her first featured film role was Dive Bomber (1941), in which she’d starred opposite Errol Flynn. In time, she’d make other movies with Flynn and also appeared opposite such leading men as Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Charles Boyer, Ronald Reagan, Bing Crosby, and Burt Lancaster.

  One Saturday, Alexis invited Lana to a matinee to see Sylvia Scarlett (1935), starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Alexis insisted that they sit in a remote section of the balcony, an area of the theater that was virtually empty at 2PM.

  Twenty minutes into the movie, Lana felt Alexis’ hand on her knee. At first, she dismissed it as just a friendly gesture. But soon, that hand began a northward trek. At the time, a shocked Lana knew very little about lesbianism. She rose abruptly from the seat, and, in tears, made her way toward the exit. She wasn’t really certain about what women did to satisfy each other sexually.

  Her budding friendship with Alexis ended abruptly in the movie palace that afternoon, although the two actresses would meet socially on other occasions. No mention was ever made of that long-ago encounter at a matinée.

  While still in high school, Lana received her first lesbian advance from another young actress, the bisexual Alexis Smith, who was dreaming of becoming a ballet dancer. She and Lana were the same age. Her
e, she appears in The Constant Nymph (1943).

  However, Alexis did make a comment about Lana to an editor at a movie magazine: “She had a glorious look about her in high school, a really beautiful girl, a face made for the Silver Screen. She could have had anybody she wanted. And from what I’ve heard, she has.”

  That last line was censored, and never appeared in the magazine’s “final cut.”

  ***

  What teenaged Lana wanted was a boyfriend, and one afternoon she found him. He was in the hallway of Hollywood High, putting his books and a duffel bag into his locker. She recognized him at once: He was a movie star.

  Jackie Cooper, child star and Young Rascal, in School’s Out (1930)

  Jackie Cooper, a year younger than she was, had been a child star, and had been the youngest performer at that time to be nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor for his role in the 1931 movie, Skippy.

  He had appeared in his first film in 1929 at the dawn of the Talkies, and had starred in the Our Gang comedies produced by Hal Roach, Sr.

  Cooper had also been in movies with crusty old Wallace Beery, including The Champ (1931). Lana later learned that the two actors, a perfect match on the screen, detested each other.

  When Lana encountered Cooper, it seemed an instant attraction. Before her English class began, he’d asked her out on a date, and she accepted, giving him her phone number.

  She had met him at a critical point in his life. Facing a dilemma encountered by most child actors, even the most successful, he was having trouble getting cast into parts that portrayed adolescents on the brink of manhood.

  Since he was not yet old enough to drive, he asked his mother to hire a chauffeur to drive them around throughout the course of their evening together. He made an impressive entrance at Gladdy’s home and was introduced to Mildred, who complimented him on his screen performances.