Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  She saw him on three separate nights, when he preferred to be alone with her.

  When Grey wanted more specifics, Lana was forced to admit that it was his personality that drew her to him. “The sex isn’t all that great. He prefers to lie on his back. I suspect he’s in some sort of pain. He’s very fond of oral sex. But once he’s done, things come to an abrupt end, with him heading off to the nearest phone, talking either to Boston or to Washington.

  “One thing I found out, Jack’s a funny man. He doesn’t pinch, but he pats like crazy. I nicknamed him, the ‘Pat-a-Cake Man.’”

  ***

  In the years to come, Lana would make herself available to JFK whenever he phoned, perhaps in New York, but more often in California.

  Once, when he was President, and when Jacqueline was away in Virginia horseback riding, he arranged for the Secret Service to slip her into the White House. “That night, he seduced me in Abraham Lincoln’s bed. At first I was afraid to lie down on it, but he made me feel comfortable. I think it wasn’t the first time he’d used Lincoln’s bedroom for sex. It was a big, intricately carved rosewood bed. I bet Lincoln turned over in his grave that night.”

  “Before he left that morning, he told me that legend had it that if I made a wishon Lincoln’s bed, it would come true. He wanted to know what I wished, but I never told him.”

  Actually, as Lana related later to Grey, “I wished that he would divorce Jackie and marry me so that in his second term in office, I’d be First Lady.”

  ***

  During a phone call to Lana, director Tay Garnett led off with his best opening line. “Lana, dear, I want to cast you in what is sure to be the role of your lifetime, the female lead of Cora Smith in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946). Years from now, your unborn fans will idolize you for your glamorous interpretation of a murderess.”

  “I’m not sure what a postman has to do with this story,” she said. “Do I go for him instead of the milkman?”

  “No, silly, this is the part of a seductress who’s involved in a loveless marriage. After she falls for a roguish drifter, she plots her spouse’s murder.”

  “Some hardboiled crime writer named James M. Cain wrote it as a novel in 1934, and Louis B. Mayer acquired its movie rights for $25,000. But because of those god damn blue-nosed censors, no one has touched it for more than a decade.”

  “MGM tried to film it with Jean Harlow, but the Breen office rejected the script, interpreting it as ‘thoroughly objectionable.’” But when the same author [James Cain] wrote a crime thriller called Double Indemnity and adapted it into a film with Barbara Stanwyck, it ushered in a new era of film noir. And that’s not all that Cain devised: Warners recently adapted his roman noir called Mildred Pierce into a film with Joan Crawford, and it’s set for a release soon.”

  “In this Postman caper, who will play the drifter?” Lana asked.

  “John Garfield,”

  She did not conceal the disappointment in her voice. “C’mon, Tay, why can’t you find some attractive male? Someone who looks like Burt Lancaster or James Craig. And I bet that if you could borrow him, that Robert Mitchum would be ideal. I’d look forward to doing torrid love scenes with any of those hunks. I’ve already auditioned each of them.”

  Carey Wilson, the writer-producer of Postman, had worked with his screen-writers Niven Busch and Harry Ruskin, and had devised what Garnett thought was a script that could get a pass from the censors.

  [Before Postman, Wilson had written screen plays for Ben-Hur (1925), starring Ramon Novarro, and Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) with Charles Laughton and Clark Gable. He would eventually write the screenplay for Lana’s historical melodrama, Green Dolphin Street (1947). He was one of the thirty-six Hollywood pioneers who had founded the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1927, and he had also collaborated with Jean Harlow on her novel, Today is Tonight.]

  Although it had been interpreted as too sizzling for a Hollywood film during the 1930s, the plot of Postman was acceptable for Broadway, where censorship standards were more lenient. In 1936, a stage adaptation of Postman opened in New York. It starred Richard Barthelmess and Mary Philips, who had been married to Humphrey Bogart.

  [As a novelist whose works were in vogue for filmmakers, Cain even became popular abroad. In 1939, in one of the last French films made before the Nazi takeover of that country, Le Dernier Tournant (based on Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice) was released. It starred Fernand Gravet, Michel Simon, and Corinne Luchaire.

  In a brazen move in 1943, in the middle of World War II (supposedly when an armed belligerent didn’t care about trespassing a U.S. copyright), the Italian director, Luchino Visconti, ignored Cain’s copyright and filmed Ossessione, starring Massimo Girotti, Clara Calamai, and Elio Marcuzzo. Since the film rights belonged to MGM, the studio prevented prints of the movie from entering the United States. Critic Arthur Knight called the Visconti film “a true masterpiece.”]

  After reading the script for Postman, Lana was reluctant to play Cora, claiming, “It will blemish my screen image.”

  In a meeting with Mayer, he urged her to accept the role. “You need to alter your screen identity. You’re no longer ‘the Sweater Girl.’ With this film, you can be as glamorous as ever, but it will show the world you’re also an accomplished actress. I see an Oscar in your future.”

  She accepted the role after Garnett assured her, “I’ll order Irene to dress you sexily in virginal white.”

  Shooting began in May of 1945, as victory was declared by Allied forces at the surrender of Nazi Germany. Before filming began, Irene had designed a wardrobe for Lana that Life magazine would later predict “would become historic.” Her hair had been dyed a snowy white.

  Garnett said, “The world didn’t have ‘hot pants’ back then, but you couldn’t tell that by looking at Lana.” Except on two occasions, including at a funeral, Lana wore white throughout the movie.

  The revised plot, toned down from the novel, depicts a drifter, Frank Chambers (Garfield), who stops at the Twin Oaks roadside diner for a hamburger. It advertises a chicken dinner for $1.25. In the window, Garfield spots a MAN WANTED sign.

  He meets the affable late middle-aged owner of the café, Nick Smith (Cecil Kellaway).

  But it is the appearance of Cora Smith (Lana) who fascinates him. Her entrance in the film is viewed as the most stunning of any other actress in the 1940s. She drops a tube of lipstick, which rolls across the floor of the diner. The camera then opens onto her open-toed white high heels and follows upward to encase her perfect figure, beginning with her shapely tanned legs and taking in her white shorts and white halter top to showcase her insolent but stunningly beautiful face that’s offset with a white turban.

  Lana’s entrance ignited a fashion vogue around the country of women wearing shorts and, on occasion, turbans.

  As Garfield takes in her image, she says, “You won’t find anything cheap around here.” She also tells him, “The harder the wind blows, the hotter it gets.”

  Critic Hollis Alpert labeled her “the quintessential sex object—the woman to be had at any cost.”

  Gone was the kittenish Lana Turner of those late 1930s films. This is Madame Satan herself, with arched eyebrows, half-parted succulent lips, protruding breasts, and a body oozing with sexual tension. Her silvery magnetism would shock post-war movie audiences.

  Almost from the first, Garfield becomes obsessed. He accepts the low-paying handyman’s job that had been advertised in the window, and assists in the day-today running of the diner.

  Soon, he and Cora are locked into an adulterous love affair, which really heats up when she suggests that they could find happiness together if only her husband were out of the way.

  As the plot unfolds, Nick is hit over the head with a wine bottle and pushed off a cliff in his car. The lovers are booked on a charge of murder, but a clever lawyer gets them off. Cora discovers that she is pregnant, and marriage is contemplated.

  Back from making love
on a moonswept beach, she gets into a car to drive back to the diner with Frank. En route, they are involved in an accident, which kills her.

  The last we see of Cora in the film is at the site of the fatal car crash. Her dead hand reaches up, dropping that tube of lipstick we’d seen during her dramatic entrance at the debut of the movie.

  A trial ensues, and Frank is convicted of her murder, which, ironically, had been an accident. He is sentenced to die in the electric chair and stoically accepts his fate, realizing that justice has been carried out, even though he’s about to be electrocuted for the wrong murder.

  He contemplates what happens when a person is expecting a letter. He feels it is no concern if at first the postman only rings the doorbell once, because he will always ring it a second time.

  Lana and Garfield, as the protagonists of Postman, were backed up by a well-chosen supporting cast, notably Cecil Kellaway in the third lead. Although the character she played detested the character he played on screen, she said that off-screen, between takes, she “adored him.”

  Born in South Africa in 1890, he was usually cast as a jovial, stocky, silver-haired character, with a kindly speaking voice. Before meeting him, she had seen several of his films, notably Wuthering Heights (1939), with Laurence Olivier, and The Letter (1940), starring Bette Davis.

  Hume Cronyn, the husband of actress Jessica Tandy, was cast as Arthur Keats, a slyly sleazy and unscrupulous criminal lawyer, with Alan Reed cast as Ezra Kennedy in the role of a “gumshoe.”

  Leon Ames, who had starred with Lana in Week-End at the Waldorf, had a very different role in Postman. As Kyle Sackett, he was the local prosecutor who suspects Lana and Garfield of murdering her husband.

  Another blonde, Audrey Totter, was no rival for Lana. She was cast as Madge Goland, Garfield’s cheap pickup girlfriend, and was one of the best of “the tough-talking, hard-edged broads” of film noir in the late 1940s. Her career faded in the early fifties when that style of dame went out of fashion.

  In her memoirs, Lana revealed that Garnett almost didn’t finish the film. Trying to shoot the beach scenes in Laguna, the cast and crew encountered day after day of heavy fog. Although their director had been “on the wagon” for three years, the pressure from MGM and the long delays caused him to sink into deep bouts of alcoholism where he often became violent, even threatening, at one point, to beat up Garfield.

  An iconic star in an iconic role

  “No one could control him,” Lana wrote. “He was a roaring, mean, furniture-smashing drunk. The girlfriend he’d brought with him stayed for a while, then gave up.”

  MGM sent nurses to tend to him, and Garfield tried to get him to sober up, but to no avail. He told Lana, “The bastard was so drunk, he didn’t even know who I was.”

  Lana herself intervened, begging him (and eventually prevailing) to enter a clinic in Los Angeles for a quick rehab. Garfield and Lana resisted a proposal for MGM to assign another director, because they’d seen the rushes and felt that he’d wangled a “dynamic performance out of us.”

  Miraculously, the day Garnett returned to the set from Los Angeles, the fog lifted and shooting resumed. At the end of filming, Lana presented Garnett with a fur-lined jockstrap. “Don’t let anyone say to you that you don’t go first class.”

  As 1946 came to an end, Lana was named one of the highest-paid women in America, earning $226,000, a staggering amount at the time.

  The Postman Always Rings Twice opened at Manhattan’s Capitol Theater on May 2, 1946, as both a critical success and as a box office hit. Lana had never received such glowing reviews.

  The New York World-Telegram wrote, “One of the astonishing excellences of this picture is the performance to which Lana Turner has been inspired.”

  In the New York Post, Archer Winsten wrote: “Before Postman, all Lana had to do was look good in front of the camera. If it is possible not to be dazzled by her beauty and pile of taffy hair, you may agree that she is now beginning to roll in the annual actresses’ sweepstakes.”

  In this movie still from Postman, John Garfield in the back seat is about to knock out happy Cecil Kellaway with a wine bottle. Lana’s face reflects the impending doom of her husband.

  Newsweek reported, “Within the limits of movie medium, the film is as explicit as it can be.” Life critiqued it as “a catalogue of the seven deadly sins. We recommend that the faint of heart stay away.”

  Time weighed in, too: “The hideous story of The Postman Always Rings Twice features reptilian bits of legal chicanery, characters as amoral as zoo exhibits, and dialogue paced and keyed like an erotic discussion between a couple of cats.”

  Writing in The New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther said, “Too much cannot be said for the principals. Mr. Garfield reflects the crude and confused young hobo who stumbled aimlessly into a fatal trap. And Miss Turner is remarkably effective as the cheap and uncertain blonde who has a pathetic ambition ‘to be somebody,’ and a pitiful notion that she can realize it through crime. Cecil Kellaway is just a bit too cozy and clean as Miss Turner’s middle-aged spouse.”

  Critic Stephen MacMillan Moser, no great fan of Lana’s, credited her with being a star, but not necessarily an actress. However, he pronounced Postman “a stunner—a cruel, desperate, and gritty James Cain vehicle that sorely tested her skills. But she succeeds marvelously, and from the first glimpse of her standing in the doorway in her white pumps, as the camera travels up her tanned legs, she becomes a character so enticingly beautiful and insidiously evil that the audience is riveted.”

  Years later, the Saturday Evening Post asked Lana who her favorite character had been in all the films she’d ever shot. She chose Cora. “Playing a wicked woman makes the audience more aware of you as an actress. The role gave me something to work with. Cora was not the usual heroine. I thought I understood the odd, twisted reasoning that made her yearn for a small piece of property out in the hills—for what she considered respectability and security—and yet, at the same time, led her to do things which ruined her chance of getting what she wanted.”

  ***

  As John Garfield, Lana’s highly promiscuous co-star in The Postman Always Rings Twice, candidly admitted, “I was in Hollywood for a full week before I got laid. I don’t know—that may just be a record.”

  Artie Shaw, Lana’s first husband, told a reporter, “He loves being John Garfield because of all the pussy and the perks.”

  Garfield’s list of seductions was long and impressive, ranging from A-list starsto cheap pickups. The more distinguished women he bedded included Hedy Lamarr, Ann Sheridan, Anne Shirley, singer Margaret Whiting, Shelley Winters, Frances Farmer, Ida Lupino, Eleanor Parker, and, surprise, even the legendary French singer, Edith Piaf.

  To that list could be added dozens of script girls, extras, starlets, and “all the female students at the American Laboratory Theatre in Manhattan (at least he claimed that).”

  Author Truman Capote once said, “He was one of the nicest people I’ve ever known. My mother saw him just once and tried to get him into bed with her. She did not succeed. But I did.”

  Tough, edgy, street-smart, and cynical, Garfield grew up in the 1920s on the streets of the Bronx and Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Born Julius Garfinkle, he was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His father was a clothes-presser and part-time cantor.

  “In the streets of New York, I learned all the meanness, all the toughness it’s possible for kids to acquire. If I hadn’t become a movie star, I would probably have become Public Enemy Number One.”

  As he matured, he became a gang leader in the Bronx until he contracted scarlet fever, an affliction that left him with permanent heart damage.

  Film critic Lou Valentino wrote: “John Garfield and Lana Turner depicted in this beach scene, worked surprisingly well together. Her blonde, angel-faced sexuality contrasted brilliantly with his dark, brooding features, and they created one of the most exciting star combinations of 1946.”

  Gradually, he drift
ed into acting, eventually migrating from New York to Hollywood. When the war came, he was rejected for military service because of that heart condition. Along with Bette Davis, he helped found the Hollywood Canteen. Long before she became intimate with him, Lana knew him during the war because of her own involvement with the Canteen. “I left the dirty dishes for the other stars and danced with the servicemen.”

  She had protested the casting of Garfield in Postman because she did not find him attractive as a male animal, and feared they would not have the sexual chemistry that the script demanded. She obviously underestimated his male allure, as the first rushes of Postman revealed.

  After seeing those rushes, Garnett said, “There was a special chemistry between my two stars. I don’t know if they had anything going on the side, but on film, you were rooting for them, even though they played murderers. John had his share of girls, but he had a bad heart and that might have frightened Lana off. He teased her about sex, which tends to make me believe that nothing happened. They sizzled on the screen, though.”

  John Garfield should have kept his eyes on the road—and not on Lana. In this pivotal scene, Lana, as Cora, is about to meet her tragic ending.

  During those long days and nights at Laguna Beach, waiting for the director to sober up and for the fog to lift, Garfield knocked on Lana’s door one night. Lonely and bored, she invited him in. The next morning, he was seen leaving her suite. They spent the following day together, waiting for the cameras to roll, and he spent another night in her suite, and then another and another.

  At the time of their affair, Lana and Garfield had to be very discreet. After all, he had been married to Roberta Seidman, a member of the Communist Party, since 1935.

  After being seduced by the actor several nights in a row, Lana had to agree with the assessment of columnist Sheilah Graham. “He made love like a sexy puppy, in and out, huffing and puffing in quick gasps.”