Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  When Marilyn went to work for Columbia in the spring of 1948, Harry Cohn, the studio executive, hired her because he wanted to groom a possible replacement for Rita Hayworth, should she prove unreliable. Makeup men went to work on Marilyn, raising her hairline through electrolysis to emphasize her widow’s peak. In the aftermath, she looked more like Lana than Rita Hayworth.

  That was the year she gravitated into the orbit of Johnny Hyde, who had been Lana’s agent before she dumped him. He took Marilyn under his wing, demanding sex from her daily, with the promise that he was going to turn her into the next Lana Turner.

  Keith Andes and Marilyn Monroe were lovers in the 1952 Clash by Night. But it was the star of the picture, Barbara Stanwyck, who actually put Marilyn on the casting couch.

  Hyde was able to get Marilyn cast in MGM’s The Asphalt Jungle, in which she was a success in a minor role. He tried to get Louis B. Mayer to give Marilyn a contract, but he turned him down, informing Hyde, “We’re already grooming other blondes to replace Lana. We don’t need another one.”

  In his book, The Private Diary of My Life With Lana, Eric Root, her longtime companion later in her life, wrote how Marilyn first approached Lana. She sent her two rare photographs of herself, requesting that Lana autograph them on the back and return them. “Your signature will be immortalized in my heart.”

  Lana didn’t return the pictures, but Marilyn had included her phone number, so Lana phoned her and set up a meeting that following afternoon.

  Marilyn dressed as sexily as she possibly could. She’d heard rumors that Lana had a lesbian streak in her and that she was the possible lover of Ava Gardner.

  Joan Crawford had already made a pass at Marilyn, and Barbara Stanwyck had seduced her when they’d co-starred together in Clash by Night. Marilyn figured that Lana also might be sexually attracted to her.

  Arriving at the designated time, Marilyn was graciously received by Lana. There would be no sexual come-ons. Instead, with the understanding that Marilyn desperately wanted to be a movie star, Lana decided to offer some beauty tips.

  Lana didn’t mean to hurt Marilyn’s feelings, but she pointed out that her makeup was all wrong, “unless you’ve been cast as a streetwalker along Santa Monica Boulevard.” Lana also objected to the way Marilyn dressed, interpreting her outfit as vulgar. “You’ve also got to get rid of those unfortunate bulges.”

  She promised Marilyn that she’d be allowed to visit her again. According to Root, Lana agreed to teach her “how to walk, how to act, what to say, and what not to say.”

  During the coming months, although Lana had very little time to coach Marilyn in the art of becoming a movie star, she spoke to her on the phone whenever she could.

  As Marilyn’s fame grew, Confidential began to link Lana, Marilyn, and Ava Gardner as “the unholy trio of Hollywood.” Each of the three women were exposed in one scandal after another, either real or invented.

  At first, Lana did not realize what a legend Marilyn would become. She’d grouped her with Jayne Mansfield, Mamie Van Doren, and the British bombshell, Diana Dors. “They all copy me,” she told Root. “They all have the same toner in their hair like I do, and use the same bleach. But there’s only one Lana Turner, and that’s moi.”

  In time, however, Lana sensed that Marilyn was different from the rest, although she could not quite understand what made her so. She told Virginia Grey and others: “I don’t know what it is, but Marilyn has this certain quality. She’s one of the few Hollywood blondes who might become a really big star like me. All the other blondes can only imitate me.”

  In time, though, Lana became disillusioned with Marilyn: “I gave men a hard-on by wearing a sweater,” Lana said. “Marilyn posed for nude pictures that are all over town. She and Mansfield dress so sexily that their tits are spilling over.”

  Ultimately, Lana grew jealous of Marilyn, especially after she seduced some of her former lovers (Frank Sinatra, Howard Hughes, Peter Lawford, Robert Mitchum, and Rory Calhoun).

  After Marilyn’s mysterious death in August of 1962, Lana was flabbergasted by the publicity it generated, the books and articles written, even fictionalized films of her imagined life.

  She was also amazed at how Marilyn’s sexual liaisons with John F. Kennedy became familiar to millions. “I had an affair with Senator Kennedy, and no one knew it at the time,” she told June Allyson, who had also had an affair with the future president.

  One night over drinks, Lana told Virginia Grey, “I think the secret of becoming a blonde movie legend like Jean Harlow and Marilyn is to die young. Had I succeeded when I tried to commit suicide, I’d be a much bigger legend.”

  ***

  After filming A Life of Her Own, MGM ordered Lana to star in Mr. Imperium (1951) with the celebrated opera singer, Ezio Pinza. After reading the script, she reported back that, “It’s stupid. I don’t want to star in it.” She had heard that Greer Garson had already turned it down.

  Her attack on the script proved embarrassing to her. It had been written by Don Hartman, who was slated to direct it. He would later become the head honcho at MGM. His co-writer was Edwin H. Knoff, who eventually emerged as its producer.

  Because she needed the money, Lana accepted the role. What she didn’t tell MGM was that she was three months into her second pregnancy, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to work for some time. Her doctor gave her a series of injections which he said would help save the baby, but warned her “these shots are going to hurt like hell.” Because she desperately wanted her second child, she agreed to endure them.

  Lana and opera star Ezio Pinza seemed filled with love, joy, and delight when they posed for this publicity still.

  Privately, she called him, “Old Garlic Breath. He made me sick.”

  Production began on a hot summer day, June 18, 1950. It was the story of a European prince, Alexis, who falls in love with an American nightclub singer while vacationing in Italy. He learns that his father, the king, has died, and he must now rush back to his country to be crowned as its king. After their burgeoning romance is sabotaged by affairs of state and members of his political entourage, the presumptive king disappears from her life for twelve years.

  When he’d first met her, she’d been Frederika Brown, a charming but run-of-the-mill nightclub singer. Now, a dozen years later, she has now blossomed into a major-league movie star, Fredda Barlo. Reunited with her in Palm Springs, the king realizes that he is still madly in love with her. In the meantime, her producer, Paul Hunter (Barry Sullivan), has fallen in love with her, too, and also wants to marry her.

  Fredda and Mr. Imperium, now a king on the verge of exiling himself because of his love for her, enjoy a weekend tryst in Palm Springs. The movie ends when, with tenderness and shared expressions of ongoing loyalty, he departs from her life once again, assuring her that he’ll return for her one day.

  An Italian opera star, Pinza was known for his rich, smooth, and sonorous voice. For nearly a quarter of a century, he had been a star at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House.

  His biggest Broadway success involved his co-starring role with Mary Martin in the 1949 stage version of Rodgers & Hammerstein South Pacific. In it, he introduced his hit song, “Some Enchanted Evening,” which helped transform him into a matinee idol and a national celebrity.

  Eddie Mannix, from MGM’s publicity department, had billed Pinza as “The Great Lover,” but he later regretted it. According to Mannix, “I think he came to believe his own publicity.”

  Pinza told Mannix, “I hear Lana even propositions handsome men from among the film crew, inviting a stud to her dressing room. I bet she’s going to be an easy conquest for me.”

  After Lana met him, she later complained, “He treated me like a tramp. He seemed to want to sleep with every woman involved in the film, including me. He made all these florid attempts to woo them, along with myself, into his bed.”

  Based on her scenes with him, she nicknamed him, “The man with the Roquefort teeth. Before coming on
to the set, he downed all these cheese pastries and endless cups of espresso.”

  In her pregnant state, she found the odor so offensive that she often had to run to her dressing room and vomit. Not only that, but at one point he openly groped her. “He was one crude beast,” she claimed. “He even tried to rape my pretty stand-in, Alyce May, who had to fight him off.”

  From the beginning, she complained to Hartman that she and Pinza as screen lovers could not be convincing. “I’ve got to do love scenes with my grandfather.” At the time he made the movie, Pinza, born in Italy in 1892, was already fifty-eight years old. “If Greer Garson had accepted the role, she would have been more convincing,” Lana said. “After all, she was born in 1903, which makes her only two years younger than Clark Gable.”

  Lana had to sing one song in the movie, part of a nightclub act, “My Love and My Mule.” MGM hired singer Trudy Erwin to dub her voice.

  Pinza was given three songs, “Let Me Look at You,” and “Andiamo,” both by Harold Arlen and Dorothy Fields. His third was the standard, “You Belong to My Heart,” which British exhibitors used as the title of the movie when it was released in that country. [They objected to the title, Mr. Imperium.]

  Reunited with Barry Sullivan, after having finished A Life of Her Own with him, he was most cordial, using his most seductive voice. “I tried to get lucky with you on our last picture. What about this time around?”

  “You’re a very attractive man, but I’m spending all my nights in the arms of Mr. Garlic Breath.”

  “Yeah, right,” he answered. “We’ll meet again.”

  Sullivan was right about that. He would be her co-star in The Bad and the Beautiful.

  The distinguished English actor, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, was cast as Bernand, the manipulative prime minister of Pinza’s mythical kingdom. He told Lana, “I believe that God felt sorry for actors, so he created Hollywood to give them a place in the sun and a swimming pool. The price they had to pay was to surrender their talent.”

  The only bright spots in the finished product were the appearances of Marjorie Main, as Mrs. Cabot, the owner of a resort hotel, and her meddlesome helper, Gwen, played by Debbie Reynolds. This marked the beginning of the long friendship between Reynolds and Lana.

  “Many of the MGM glamour girls I worked with liked their sex rough,” Reynolds said. “Elizabeth Taylor liked it rough. So did Lana Turner, who often came to the makeup room with bruises or a black eye. Sometimes, they would have to reshoot things after one of her boyfriends knocked her around.”

  Reynolds was also aware of the violent fights between Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner. “Once, Ava shot Frank. Lucky for him her aim was lousy. She hit him only in the leg.”

  Reynolds remembered Main as “so much fun,” and also as a performer who had trouble with her bladder. In the middle of a take, she’d suddenly bolt for the toilet. “Between Marjorie’s pee breaks and Lana’s fighting with Pinza, it was a pretty tense set,” Reynolds wrote in a memoir.

  Without pre-screening it in advance, executives at Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall, had pre-booked Mr. Imperium for a long-term run. But when they were finally allowed to screen it, they canceled their commitment. Overall, the film was a flop.

  Reacting to the gloom that prevailed in the aftermath of Mr. Imperium, Lana feared that she was slipping and that her contract at MGM would not be renewed. Adding to her humiliation, many movie houses that presented it as part of a double feature positioned Mr. Imperium in the second slot—a first for a Lana Turner movie, especially one with big production values and Technicolor.

  Nonetheless, Lana’s contract was renewed only two months after Mr. Imperium opened. Even though dozens of other big stars under contract to MGM were fired, MGM, even under Dore Schary, still believed in her box office appeal.

  As anticipated, critical reviews of Mr. Imperium were terrible. The New York World Telegram wrote, “Mr. Pinza had better stay away from Hollywood unless he takes his own writers with him next time.”

  Photoplay struck an especially sour note: “Despite the grandeur that sweeps from the Mediterranean shores to Palm Springs’ gardens, the story itself never jells. Lana Turner, who is seldom given material worthy of her, looks beautiful and does more than her share to tote this bale of nonsense. Pinza is just another middle-aged actor, trying to prove himself as far as this film is concerned. Certainly, his magnificent voice is woefully neglected. The few songs given him are far below his vocal ability.”

  One critic wrote that “the man who decided that pickles and ice cream made a delightful combination must have cast Lana Turner with Ezio Pinza. He is themusical version of Edward Everett Horton.”

  The New York Times found that “Lana Turner and her wardrobe were beautiful, but it’s hardly likely that anyone would ever envy her dialogue.” Other critics found that the much older Pinza in his love scenes with Lana came across as “a dirty old man.”

  MGM thought so little of the movie that in 1979, it did not renew the copyright. Subsequently, the film entered the public domain.

  ***

  For Lana, it was not a question of if she would divorce Bob Topping, but when? She was finding it costly being married to a millionaire, both financially and personally. Because of problems with the Topping estate, he had been reduced to receiving only $1,000 a month, leaving her to pay all the bills. “My god!” she told Benton Cole, her business manager. “Bob will bet $2,000 on a god damn golfing putt!”

  She’d had to make the $35,000 down payment on their $100,000 house in Holmby Hills and then stay current with the mortgage payments. At dizzying speed, Topping had already decimated his personal fortune, running up big gambling debts, which perpetually went unpaid despite the fact that his creditors were practically pounding on his door. Some of them contacted Lana with personal death threats.

  Frank Sinatra warned her, “When you run up big gambling losses to the boys in Vegas, they get paid one way or the other.”

  She became worried for her own safety and for that of Cheryl, fearing once again that she might be kidnapped and held for ransom.

  On top of everything else, MGM was deducting a hefty chunk of her paycheck every week for payment of her ongoing back taxes to the IRS.

  Every business venture that Topping launched ended in failure, beginning with his midget racing car venture in England. He ended up losing the remainder of his personal fortune in an ill-fated attempt to manufacture fiberglass boats.

  One afternoon, right before Christmas, he took her to one of the most expensive and exclusive jewelry stores in Beverly Hills. Optimistically, and for the first time, she began to suspect that one of his investments had paid off. He had her inspect a series of diamond necklaces until she selected one that she particularly liked. It just happened to be the most expensive.

  She eagerly waited until Christmas morning when she gathered with Topping and Cheryl to open their presents. As his gift to her daughter, he’d presented her with a black French poodle, which she named “Tinklette.”

  Lana opened her carefully wrapped gift, expecting the necklace. Instead, she found only a little gold pin. Trying to mask her disappointment, she turned around as Tinklette ran into the room barking. Around his neck was the diamond necklace she’d admired. “It was a joyful Christmas,” she recalled, in spite of Topping’s morbidly heavy drinking throughout the course of the holidays.

  To her chagrin, within the month, a bill arrived from the jewelry store in Beverly Hills. She painfully learned that he had charged the necklace and didn’t have the funds to pay for it.

  The more her bills piled up, the more collectors hounded them, and the more Topping drank. When she saw him hitting the bottle at eight o’clock in the morning, she knew he’d become a chronic, wildly over-the-top alcoholic. She became afraid every time he took the wheel of her car.

  She admitted to Mildred that she’d married him not for love, but for financial security—and now she had neither. “My dear,” Mildred said. “You have to face f
acts. You can no longer afford to keep a millionaire.”

  Lana knew she had to cut down on expenses, and with that in mind, she began to eliminate all but the most essential servants.

  Coupled with her own financial problems, her career at MGM was in jeopardy.

  In 1951, Mayer was fired from MGM. Bitterly, he packed up his belongings and—without a goodbye to Lana—left the studio that he’d co-founded.

  Dore Schary took over as president. But whereas Mayer had favored splashy, wholesome entertainment, Schary was promulgating dark, post-war “message pictures,” grim movies like Battleground (1949) and The Red Badge of Courage (also 1949).

  The rise to power of Dore Schary also marked MGM’s decline and the rise of its new enemy: Television. Little black boxes were being installed in living rooms across the nation. Americans were staying home watching it, abandoning their once deeply entrenched habit of going to the movies two or three times a week.

  Schary was not impressed with MGM’s stable of glamour queens: Lana, Ava Gardner, and swimming star Esther Williams. Williams defined him as “rude, cruel, and even more imperious than Mayer.”

  After he assumed power at MGM, Schary told his aides, who passed the word down the line, that he was tired of MGM’s glamour girls of the 1940s, including Ava and Lana, and that he was banking on new talent, such as the emerging femme fatale, Elizabeth Taylor.

  On Lana’s homefront, Topping increasingly disappeared for long periods of time, returning after prolonged absences with no explanation of where he’d been.

  She hired a private investigator to trail him, and within days, he reported back to Lana. Topping was seeing not only other women, but attending a series of stag parties where failed starlets, out-of-work Las Vegas showgirls, and unemployed and broke young women had been hired as short-term companions and prostitutes.

  Tragedy struck again in October of 1950 when Lana slipped on a polished floor at her home and suffered her second miscarriage. It had resulted from complications associated with her Rh blood factor. She had hoped that a new baby might save her marriage, but now, she saw how hopeless that was.