Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  Lana found the Los Angeles native, John Shelton, “very handsome in a bland sort of way. He wanted to join the ranks of Tyrone Power, Robert Taylor, and Clark Gable, but lacked the charisma of super-stardom,” she said.

  “I liked John, and the sex wasn’t as vanilla as I thought it might be,” Lana confided to Grey. “He has passion that rises to the surface.”

  On the set, the most sparks were generated between Lana and Dick Haymes, the singer from Buenos Aires. She would get to know him far more intimately when she became involved with such singers and musicians as bandleader Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra. Haymes had married Edith Harper, but their marriage was being annulled. “I’m free as a bird,” he told Lana. “We don’t have to sneak around.”

  As Lana confided to Grey, “Dick is good in bed, very satisfying. He whispers dirty stuff in your ear as he makes love to you. I find him irresistible.”

  Lana and Paulette Goddard [eventually the wife, or mistress of Charlie Chaplin], one of her co-stars in Dramatic School, maintained a superficial friendship for many decades. They would occasionally encounter each other at parties or at special events such as Oscar night. When they would come together, they would air kiss and exchange compliments, which always included an assessment of each other’s looks, “You look absolutely stunning, darling.”

  ***

  In 1937, Paramount had released Internes Can’t Take Money starring Joel McCrae in the role of Dr. Kildare. The movie was a financial success at the box office. Later, MGM picked up the option for a series of low-budget melodramas, the Dr. Kildare series, each of which highlighted the struggles and travails of a heroic, highly principled doctor.

  Bad girl Lana, playing a shameless adventuress, taking advantage of Lew Ayres as the very eligible Dr. Kildare. Only eighteen, she plans to seduce him.

  MGM cast Lew Ayres as Dr. Kildare in many of them, the first of which was Young Dr. Kildare (1938). Ayres would go on to churn out nine more of them until his pacifist stance during World War II made him unpopular. The studio eventually replaced him with actor Philip Dorn.

  A Londoner, Harold S. Bucquet, would direct many of the Dr. Kildare movies. For the second such movie with Ayres [Calling Dr. Kildare], he cast Lana in the “sexy role”; Lionel Barrymore as the wise old Dr. Gillespie, his mentor; and Laraine Day as the second female lead, a nurse, Mary Lamont.

  Lana had continued her affair with Ayres, but they had to be discreet, since he was still married to Ginger Rogers. Lana, enamored with him at the time, was delighted to be working with him again.

  On the set, during the first day of shooting, she told Bucquet, “I can’t imagine that little Miss Lana Turner of Wallace, Idaho, would one day be working with one of the great Barrymores.” Although she didn’t specifically mention how delighted she also was to be working with Ayres, Bucquet and the rest of his staff eventually became aware of their affair, based on her frequent visits to his dressing room.

  Lana became extremely nervous whenever she filmed scenes with Barrymore, a longtime and widely acclaimed star. Despite her lack of experience, she managed to pull them off.

  Her scene with Barrymore called for her to shed tears, and to come apart before his eyes. She knows she’s been a bad girl, but vows to reform and make a fresh start, “if I’m going to amount to something.”

  On camera, Barrymore assures her, “Well, you’re young,” holding out a hopeful promise for her future.

  According to the script, Dr. Kildare and his mentor, Dr. Gillespie, have had one too many arguments, and his mentor dismisses him from his duties at Blair General Hospital. Gillespie, however, remains interested in his younger protégé, and as a means of keeping tabs on him, he assigns Nurse Lamont (Day) as a secret spy. Soon, she reports that the young doctor is emotionally entangled with this sexy blonde, Rosalie (Lana), and that the younger doctor (because of his involvement with Rosalie) is also implicated in the cover-up of a murder.

  Barrymore gives Ayres some fatherly advice of the type Jude Lewis Stone provided for Andy Hardy. “Rosalie (Lana) is a bad little girl, and you should have known that. Books could be written about her.”

  Lana viewed her seduction of Phillip Terry, Joan Crawford’s wartime husband, as a triumph over her nemesis. Crawford and Lana often competed for the same men.

  Crawford referred to sex with the studly actor as “going to heaven.”

  Lana countered, “Phillip and I only made it to the clouds in the sky.”

  Playing the sultry femme fatale, Lana had just turned eighteen when shooting began.

  One reviewer defined her as “a baby doll.” As Rosalie, she was asked to deliver such lines as “I’m city people. I like great big shiny limousines and orchids in a vase. I love the cold wind whipping around a skyscraper—and a sable coat to keep it out.”

  As Bucquet quipped, “That girl could probably raise a hard-on from cantankerous old Lionel.” Years later, Lana could hardly remember Barrymore except to claim that, “Every time I encountered him, he was in his cups” (i.e., drunk).

  One day on the set, she was introduced to an actor about eleven years older than herself, Phillip Terry. Born to German Americans in San Francisco, he was known as a Hollywood Romeo, a legend he’d been developing since his bit part in Mannequin (1938), starring Joan Crawford. During the shooting of that movie, he’d made frequent visits to her dressing room. He would later become her wartime husband.

  In this publicity still for Young Dr. Kildare, Laraine Day (left) looks on in a disapproving rage at the growing bond between bad Lana and the impressionable, morally upright Dr. Kildare (Lew Ayres).

  This is not just acting on Day’s part: She thoroughly loathed Lana, who detested her as well.

  Together, they would adopt their first child, Christina, a decision that Crawford would later bitterly regret. Fortunately, Crawford died before the publication of her daughter’s notorious memoir, Mommie Dearest, a vengeful rant that was later adapted into a film starring Faye Dunaway impersonating Crawford.

  Terry had built up an impressive set of muscles, in part because of his background as a football player and roustabout in the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma.

  For a while, he had studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London.

  Lana began to date him during the making of Dr. Kildare. As she told Ann Rutherford, “Terry must have put a smile on Crawford’s face. He might have been a roustabout in the oil fields, but he has culture, too, and seems well read. He pronounces certain words with a British accent, no doubt from his studies in London.”

  As a sex object, he was eagerly pursued by both men and women, but it would be years later that Lana would learn that he was bisexual. It turned out that both Terry and Lana were dating the same man at the same time, the matinee idol, Robert Taylor, another bisexual married to a bisexual, Barbara Stanwyck.

  Socialite Elsa Maxwell wrote, “Joan Crawford weeps openly when the violinist at L’Aiglon plays her favorite classical piece. Lana Turner likes torch songs; Rita Hayworth prefers gypsy music, and Hedy Lamarr likes waltzes.”

  What she didn’t print but knew: “All of these ladies desired Phillip Terry, as do Robert Taylor, Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, and Cary Grant.”

  MGM aggressively promoted Calling Dr. Kildare, suggesting that viewers “watch these exciting new beauties—Laraine Day and Lana Turner.” But it was probably Lana who aroused the most intense sexual interest among men in the audience. The film was the first of seven in which Day would appear as a player in the Dr. Kildare series. As nurse Mary Lamont—in distinct contrast to Lana, who was interpreted as a “siren”—she was frequently cited for her wholesomeness.

  In the publicity department’s build-up, they distorted her background, claiming that “Lana Turner was educated in San Francisco and was a model and designer before her discovery by Mervyn LeRoy.”

  Bucquet said that Laraine didn’t like Lana, and that Lana didn’t like Laraine. “When those two came together, an Arctic wind blew in. I thin
k Lana also resented Laraine getting billing over her, because she considered her own role flashier and more important.”

  “At first, Lana feared Laraine, but by the time they made Keep Your Powder Dry (1945), it was Lana who was the Queen of MGM, Laraine a second-stringer.

  Day eventually gained a distinct new fame of her own when, in 1947, she married Leo Durocher, the manager of the New York Giants baseball team.

  After working with her, Lana later wrote: “Many people found her a cold and rigid woman.”

  Reviews for Lana were good, Variety claiming that she was “a fine type as the gal who nearly leads Dr. Kildare astray.”

  Eventually, in reference to Calling Dr. Kildare, Billy Wilkerson of The Hollywood Reporter wrote, “Lana Turner was a bit uncertain in early scenes, but she warms to her work and registers with excellent effect in later chapters.” Even Family Circle wrote, “Lana goes glamorous on us, and she needn’t take a back seat to any of the other glamor girls.”

  ***

  At long last stardom—or at least a minor version of it—came for Lana as a result of her casting as the female lead in These Glamour Girls (1939) by its director, S. Sylvan Simon and its producer Sam Zimbalist. She would appear in it with her sometimes lover, Lew Ayres.

  Simon had wanted to work with her before, and now was his chance to direct her. During the second week of the shoot, he told the press, “I venture to predict that in another year, Lana Turner will be one of the biggest stars on the screen.”

  And how right he was.

  Once again, she was teamed with Ann Rutherford, with whom she continued to confide details of her romances. After surveying the attractive men in the cast, Lana told Rutherford, who that year was appearing as Scarlett O’Hara’s sister, “I could go for Tom Brown, Richard Carlson, or Peter Lind Hayes, at least when Lew isn’t around. As for Don Castle, I’ve already made two films with him—and know him quite well, if you get my drift.” She was referring to her involvements the year before in Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938) and Rich Man, Poor Girl (also 1938).

  When Lana showed up for work, she found that even though she’d been designated as the film’s female lead, she had nonetheless been assigned to a communal dressing room. She quickly surmised that in marked contrast, the film’s other (male) stars had each been assigned private dressing rooms.

  The next morning, as part of a campaign to change all that, she showed up with a maid and a small dog on a leash, announcing “I am a star!”

  Word quickly spread around the studio. That afternoon, she called Louis B. Mayer, demanding her own dressing room. He did not protest. When she arrived the next morning, she was, indeed, shown to a room that had been hastily designated as hers, the first of many others to come.

  It was not as luxurious as she’d wanted, but at least she’d have some degree of privacy and a spot to “audition” in quarters that she controlled.

  “The dressing room was one thing,” she claimed. “But I didn’t know I was a real star until the commissary named a salad after me. It was the ‘Lanallure’ Salad, and I ordered it every day for lunch.”

  The writer, Anita Loos [not to be confused with Anita Louise, an actress who also appeared in These Glamour Girls], compared Lana’s role of the dime-a-dance girl, Jane Thomas, to that of a young Clara Bow, the silent screen vamp. The writer found that Lana had some of the quintessential flapper quality of Bow, who was known for her cupid bow lips, her bobbed hair, and devil-may-care joie de vivre.

  About a decade before, Bow had been publicized as “The It Girl,” and MGM heralded Lana for bringing “It” back to the screen.

  Originally, it had been Jane Hall who devised the plot, formatted as a story for Cosmopolitan magazine, of social snobbishness at an East Coast college.

  One drunken evening, a rich college boy, Philip S. Griswold (as played by Lew Ayres), meets a taxi dancer (Lana) and invites her as his weekend date for a heavily scheduled round of loosely chaperoned fraternity parties.

  [Taxi Dancing was a social phenomenon that reached its peak during the 1930s. Taxi dancers were (in theory at least) young women who were paid to dance with male patrons, who would typically buy dance tickets for ten cents each, and then maneuver their partners of the moment around the floor with varying degrees of lechery, sometimes as a prelude to prostitution.]

  The character played by Lana accepts his invitation, even though when she arrives on campus, he’s forgotten all about her.

  Ayres was obviously too old to play a college boy, and although Lana—who was still a redhead at the time—was the right age to be a college girl, she was too young to have been realistically cast as a taxi dancer in a seedy dive. Makeup made her appear older than her years.

  In the film, when Ayres wants to get rid of her, knowing she would not fit in and realizing that the other upper-class girls would probably snub her, she refuses to leave the campus. And predictably, when the young women learn that her profession was that of a low-end taxi dancer, they alternately mock and snub her.

  Nonetheless, her character remains steadfast at the Kingsford Prep School (where the unwritten norm is “champagne for breakfast, two-timing for lunch) for the duration of the weekend. Amid these steamy inequities, love affairs go awry, but somehow, Lana’s ill-conceived coupling gets rectified before the end of the final reel.

  Lana’s character eventually gets some pithy advice from her taxi driver, who tells her, “There’s only one way to get a college boy to look up to you—climb a ladder.”

  On the dance floor, Lana looks stunning in a black satin gown as she pretends to emulate the dance skills of Ginger Rogers. Within minutes, young college men flock around her, adoringly, as snobby, brittle debs look on with jealousy and dismay.

  One of the most dramatic visual episodes in the film occurs in a funhouse with distorted mirror images. Did Orson Welles steal that idea for his film, The Lady from Shanghai (1948), starring Rita Hayworth?

  In the end, Lana, as the vindicated taxi dancer, triumphs over the other less attractive debs and walks off into the sunset with Ayres, the most sought-after young man on campus.

  Off screen, he and Lana argued when he told her that as a pacifist, he would not participate in military service.

  She objected, saying that if American men or women didn’t fight if attacked, “the Japs and Nazis might invade the United States, capture us, and turn us into slaves. We’d no longer be free.”

  “You’re just a teenager,” he said, dismissing her concerns. “There are larger issues.”

  ***

  MGM had been billing itself as “having more stars than there are in heaven,” and many of its budding starlets and starlettes, both male and female, were showcased in These Glamour Girls.

  Lana met an aspiring young actor, Robert Walker, and she dated him, but only briefly. He would appear with her in her next film, Dancing Co-Ed, during the filming of which they became better acquainted. Their friendship, which sometimes involved sex, stretched over many years, even during his subsequent affairs with her future best friend, Ava Gardner, and the MGM starlet Nancy Davis (who later changed her name to Nancy Reagan).

  When he first met Lana, Walker wasn’t looking for love outside the marriage bed. He had recently married another aspiring actress, Phylis Isley, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on January 2, 1939.

  [In a few years, Phylis would become world famous as the actress Jennifer Jones.]

  The other desirable male in the cast included Richard Carlson. The son of a lawyer, this former school teacher had just moved to California and had been cast in a secondary role in the David O. Selznick comedy, The Young in Heart (1938). “He was handsome enough, and quite charming, but he’d married Mona Carlson that year and she had him pretty much bound and gagged.” Lana said.

  In one sequence of These Glamour Girls, Lana, the out-of-place taxi dancer, twirls around the floor with Peter Lind Hayes in a “clear-the-floor” sequence.

  A bevy of beautiful young women was cast in the film as the snob
by debs. They included Lana’s friend, Ann Rutherford, playing the bubble-brained Mary Rose Wilston.

  Mary Beth Hughes was cast as the dizzy blueblood, Ann Van Richton. The Illinois beauty was significant in Lana’s life in that one afternoon, she introduced her to her agent, Johnny Hyde. He would soon become Lana’s agent, too. Hyde, of course, later became famous for the pivotal role he played in the career and tragic life of Marilyn Monroe.

  The Hollywood-born actress, Jane Bryan, was cast as a poor socialite whose family had lost its money. She was hoping to marry a rich man.

  While filming These Glamour Girls, Lana posed for a publicity picture, part of MGM’s campaign to segué its ingenue into a full fledged vamp.

  Boxoffice wrote “Young blades especially may be expected to do nipups over a ball of fire named Lana Turner.”

  One day, Ronald Reagan, with whom Lana had “flamed briefly,” appeared on the set. At first, Lana thought that he had come to see her, but instead, he smiled and shook her hand before inviting Bryan for lunch in the commissary.

  The New York Times wrote, “We like everything about These Glamorous Girls, and we like Lana Turner. The film is the best social commentary of the year.”

  ***

  In her coffee table book, Lana Turner: The Memories, the Myths, the Movies, Lana’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, accurately stated that Peter Lawford and Robert Stack were her mother’s “dancing partners who might be called fill-ins between more serious relationships.”

  An exceedingly handsome man, Stack had been born into a rich family in Los Angeles two years before Lana. He would meet her when she was seventeen. He joined her crowd, whose other members loosely included Linda Darnell, Bonita Granville, Ann Rutherford, Jackie Cooper, and “that adorable nut,” Mickey Rooney. Frequently, Stack functioned as Lana’s date whenever her crowd went on a fun trip, perhaps to a beach picnic at Malibu.

  Stack had grown up in Europe and been reared by his mother, Mary Elizabeth, who had long been a member of the Hollywood elite. [She had attended Rudolph Valentino’s wedding party.] Stack’s father, James Langford Stack, was a wealthy advertising executive who created the slogan, “The Beer That Made Milwaukee Famous.”