Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  He admitted that his performance in The Bad and the Beautiful was “self-parody, like the role I played in that Cisco Kid series.” He told Lana that he’d wanted to be a bullfighter, but that he’d been lured to Hollywood, where he’d seduced a string of glamourous women who included both Clara Bow and Norma Talmadge. Eventually, he married the screen’s cool, serene beauty, Constance Bennett.

  ***

  Playing a bit part in The Bad and the Beautiful, Steve Forrest immediately attracted Lana’s attention.

  He looked so enticing as a male animal that Lana invited him into her dressing room, where he got to interact with her celebrated body on her pink satin sheets. She was so thrilled with his technique as a seducer, that she “summoned” him back on two more afternoons. It was only later that she learned that he was the younger brother of the more established actor, Dana Andrews, with whom Lana had also had a fling.

  On the set of The Bad and the Beautiful, Lana—a skilled seducer of handsome young actors—spotted a tall, ruggedly masculine newcomer, Steve Forrest.

  He had only a small, insignificant part in the film, playing a role defined by the script as “Leading Man.”

  In fact, until he appeared in Lana’s movie, Forrest had been billed as William Andrews. He didn’t want the same last name as his more famous brother.

  When Virginia Grey visited her friend on the set, as was her custom, Lana described her latest discovery and his relationship to Dana. “Until Steve screwed me, I thought brothers always had very similar cocks. Not in this case. They’re very different.”

  “Which one gives the most satisfaction?” Grey asked.

  “Steve, of course,” she answered. “He’s marriage material.”

  [When Lana met Steve Forrest, he was already married to Christine Carilas. He’d wed her in 1948 and was still married to her when he died in 2013 at the age of 87.]

  Lana got to appear with Forrest again in 1954 on Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town, broadcast on CBS Television. It was an hour-long tribute to MGM, celebrating the studio’s 30th anniversary. As part of the tribute, Forrest joined fellow actors Edmund Purdom, Richard Anderson, and John Ericson as her backup, as she performed the “Madame Cremation:” number introduced by Judy Garland in Ziegfeld Follies (1946).

  Lana invited him for a “sleepover,” which he willingly accepted after they’d finished their filming. She never hooked up with him again, but she followed his career, as he played Jane Wyman’s son in So Big (1953).

  ***

  The most dramatic sequence in The Bad and the Beautiful occurred when Lana, as the rejected Georgia Lorrison, becomes hysterical, while driving her car, in the wake of a revelation about Jonathan Shields and his infidelities.

  As she pleads with him for a private party (just the two of them), Elaine Stewart, as the ambitious starlet, appears at the top of his stairwell. Kirk Douglas, as Shields, kicks Lana, as Georgia, out of his house.

  Albert Johnson in Film Quarterly said it best: “Lana Turner emerges from the mansion in white ermine and drives away. Her sobs soon build to hysteria, and lights of cars send flashes across the windows as she reaches a moment of unbearable frenzy. She releases the steering wheel entirely, and screams in emotional agony. Her foot presses the brake. One hears only her screams, the honking of passing auto-horns, and, suddenly, it’s raining.”

  “The car bumps along uncontrollably for a second, then comes to a standstill. Turner falls over the wheel, still sobbing uncontrollably as the sequence fades. It is superb theater, one of the great moments of human despair shown in cinematic terms and a prime example of the coordination of actress, director, and cameraman which can create a perfect moment of dramatic poetry upon the screen.”

  What emerged on celluloid became one of the most iconic scenes in motion picture history.

  In preparation for its filming, Minnelli had wrapped every other scene in the picture, with the exception of Lana’s near-fatal car ride, where she’s screaming, thrashing, and sobbing hysterically behind the wheel of a moving car. Minnelli allowed her three weeks off before he was ready to bring her back to the studio for the filming of that scene.

  By then, Kirk Douglas had moved on to other projects, shooting The Story of Three Loves (1953); and Sullivan had departed for the filming of Jeopardy (also 1953) with Barbara Stanwyck.

  After sobering and cleaning her up, Shields (Douglas) is determined to make Georgia (Lana) into a major star. Here, he is seen directing “a movie within a movie.”

  This setting on a theatrical balcony is a testament to the visual compositions of director Vincente Minnelli.

  As part of her three-week holiday, Lana invited Fernando Lamas to accompany her to Acapulco, where a rented villa awaited them. During their time there, Lamas spent most of his time walking around the house and its pool area fully nude.

  “Fernando gave the three Mexican houseboys, all of whom were gay, a real treat,” Lana said.

  In his own less-than-modest appraisal, Lamas told her, “If I had gone for boys instead of girls, the line would have formed outside my door.”

  At the end of her holiday, she returned to MGM, where Minnelli directed her to a car raised up on a contraption that simulated speed and motion. A crew stood by, some of them wearing heavy yellow slickers, with buckets of water, spray nozzles, and oversized sponges.

  “Exactly what am I to do?” she asked Minnelli. “Give me some guidance.”

  “I don’t have any,” he admitted. “I really don’t. You have to get into that car and pretend to drive away, gradually growing hysterical, knowing that Shields has left you for a younger woman. I have faith in you as an actress that you can pull this off.”

  Once seated behind the wheel of the car, she decided to draw upon her own life experience as a means of validating the scene. “It was my first stab at Method acting. Was I to become the female Marlon Brando or not?”

  She later recalled that for inspiration, she drew upon the painful moments from her past when Tyrone Power had deserted her for Linda Christian. “Emotion welled up inside me as I pretended to drive. The water from a mock rainstorm began to hit my windshield. I was blinded through that, and my tears which came gushing were echoed by the gush of water against the windshield.”

  “Lana pulled it off in one take,” Minnelli later asserted.

  ***

  MGM didn’t mind sounding a bit sleazy in its advertising of The Bad and the Beautiful. Included among its headlines was: NO HOLDS BARRED IN THIS STORY OF A BLONDE WHO WANTED TO GO PLACES… AND A BIG SHOT WHO GOT HER THERE THE HARD WAY!

  In a pivotal scene at the end of the movie, Barry Sullivan (left), Lana, and Dick Powell eavesdrop on a phone conversation that producer Walter Pidgeon is having with Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas).

  Although the director has betrayed each of them in separate ways, it is sort of obvious that they are going to agree to be sucked into his whirlpool again—and work on his latest film.

  After The Bad and the Beautiful was released, producer David O. Selznick was seen sneaking into a movie house in Pacific Palisades. He wanted to learn if he should sue Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for libel.

  As he sat through the movie, he did indeed recognize himself in the character of Jonathon Shields, including his habit of kicking off his shoes. John Houseman had also suffered working for Selznick, and in some respects, Selznick inter preted it as Houseman’s revenge. “For John, it’s payback time.”

  David Thomson, Selznick’s biographer, wrote, “He huffed and puffed, not sure whether to be flattered or offended. After thinking it over for several days, he decided not to sue MGM.”

  One critic defined the movie as “The most exacting detailed study of the dream factory ever presented in the movies from the grand homes of the stars to the funeral of Shields’ father, where he pays mourners to show up.”

  One of her most consistently negative critics, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote: “Lana Turner is an actress playing an actress and neither one is real. A
howling act in a wildly racing auto—pure punk—is the top of her speed.”

  Many other reviewers disagreed, claiming that Lana’s car scene was one of the most exciting sequences for a picture in a decade.

  Author Jeanine Basinger wrote: “None of the sex symbols who have been touted as actresses—not Rita Hayworth or Ava Gardner or Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe—have ever given such a fine performance as Lana did in The Bad and the Beautiful.”

  The Los Angeles Times wrote: “The film is What Makes Sammy Run? and has the bitter flavor of Sunset Blvd. and All About Eve and, like the latter, is told in flashbacks by Shields’ victims.”

  ***

  The night before the Academy Award nominees were announced, Lana threw a party to celebrate The Bad and the Beautiful. She staunchly believed that it, along with her performance within it, would be nominated for Oscars. “I’ve waited a long time for this,” she told Lamas and others.

  But after the nominees were announced, and she was not included among them, she sank into despair. The other nominees included Lana’s friend, Susan Hayward for With a Song in My Heart, as well as Joan Crawford for Sudden Fear, Bette Davis for The Star, and Julie Harris for The Member of the Wedding. Shirley Booth would ultimately walk off with the Oscar for her role in Come Back, Little Sheba.

  Kirk Douglas had seen her before the nominations were announced. Whereas he’d been nominated as Best Actor for his performance in The Bad and the Beautiful, he lost the award to Gary Cooper for High Noon. The other nominees included Marlon Brando for Viva Zapata!; Alec Guinness for The Lavender Hill Mob; and José Ferrer for his stunning portrayal of Toulouse-Lautrec in Moulin Rouge.

  The cast and crew of The Bad and the Beautiful had high hopes that it would be nominated for Best Picture of the Year, but it wasn’t. That year’s Best Picture was eventually awarded to Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, starring Betty Hutton, Cornel Wilde, James Stewart, Dorothy Lamour, and Gloria Grahame. Grahame did win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, not for the circus picture, but for the character she portrayed in The Bad and the Beautiful.

  The picture did, however, win a number of minor Oscars: Robert Surtees for Black and White Cinematography; Helen Rose for Best Black and White Costume Design; Charles Schnee for Best Adapted Screenplay; and Cedric Gibbons, Edward Carfagno, Edwin B. Willis, and Keogh Gleason for Art Direction and Set Decorations.

  Lana complained to Minnelli and Houseman, “We might at least have been nominated, but Dore Schary was against us from the beginning. He doesn’t think much of me as an actress, and he did absolutely nothing to sell our picture to the Academy, whereas other studios were wildly promoting their selections. It’s not fair!”

  ***

  In 1952, the gala event of the year in Hollywood was the big spectacular that Marion Davies, former mistress of press baron William Randolph Hearst, gave in honor of the gay crooner, Johnny Ray. [Hearst had died in August of 1951. In the wake of his death, Davies had married Horace Brown.]

  During her preparations for the party, Davies had transformed her Beverly Hills mansion into five different nightclubs with an orchestra for each. Guests could choose which mock nightclub they wanted to sit in. They included replicas of New York’s Stork Club and the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles.

  Esther Williams attended the party with her husband, Ben Gage. They awaited three guests who were to be seated with them. Finally, they arrived: Fernando Lamas with Lana on one arm, and with Ava Gardner on the other. This helped fuel the persistent rumor that their communal friendship had evolved into a three-way. Gardner’s husband, Frank Sinatra, was appearing in Las Vegas at the time.

  As Williams later revealed in a memoir, “The grouping that night may still hold Hollywood’s alltime record for musical chairs and tangled libidos.” Gardner had been the former lover of Lamas, and in time, Esther would marry him.

  When Lamas excused himself to go to the men’s room, he came back with a smirk on his face. “Guess what? Our guest of honor, Mr. Ray, followed me into the men’s room.”

  “I trust you put on a good show for him?” Lana said.

  “The biggest and the best.”

  During the course of the evening, although Lamas didn’t exactly ignore Lana—he invited her to dance twice—he paid more attention to Gardner and to Williams. He said, “Too bad there’s only one of me and three of you hot tamales.”

  Perhaps to get even with Lamas for this real or imagined slight, Lana provocatively eyed the entrance into Davies’ party of the handsome, virile Lex Barker, Hollywood’s most recent incarnation of Tarzan. Barker was immediately surrounded by five beautiful women. Although still married to the raven-haired beauty, Arlene Dahl, he’d come alone to the party.

  “No wonder Lex was cast as Tarzan,” Lana said. “I bet he has muscle in all the right places.”

  “It’s not a muscle, darling,” Gardner said. “If it was a muscle, it would grow bigger by exercise. That means Frankie’s would stretch around the block.”

  Lamas, who heard Lana’s off-color remark, looked furious but said nothing.

  About half an hour later, Barker approached their table, temporarily deserting his colony of female admirers. Ignoring Lamas, he asked Lana to dance.

  What this picture doesn’t show is how handsome, muscled, well-endowed Lex Barker, the screen Tarzan, hugged Lana up close. He’d unzipped and invited her to “take a feel.”

  On the floor, he held her in a tight embrace, a style not unlike that of Lamas during his courtly waltzes with Lana that appeared at the beginning of The Merry Widow.

  Back then, in his capacity as the film’s director, Curtis Bernhardt had intervened. “Lamas, you’re supposed to be doing the waltz with Lana, not fucking her. Move apart a bit.”

  Now, years later, having observed Barker and Lana dancing sensuously together, Lamas began raging to both Williams and Gardner: “Jungle Boy is fucking her right on the dance floor.” Then, in anger, he rose from his seat and headed toward the couple. When he reached them, he grabbed Lana by the shoulder and spun her around. He then turned angrily onto Barker. “WHY DON’T YOU JUST TAKE HER OUT INTO THE BUSHES AND FUCK HER?” he said. His voice was loud enough to be heard by several of the dancing couples, who stopped dancing and stared at them.

  Lana became instantly furious, slapping Lamas as hard as she could.

  “You fucking cunt!” he yelled at her, giving the impression that he was about to strike her.

  She rushed from the dance floor, nearly tripping, and headed for the exit after grabbing her mink. Lamas was on her trail.

  As he descended the steps of the Davies mansion, a starlet, Jane Denier, surveyed the situation and reactively threw her arms around Lamas, telling him what a handsome stud he was. “You don’t need Lana Turner,” she said. “You look divine and you’ve got me.” Then she tried to kiss him, but he picked her up and tossed her into the swimming pool.

  A photographer was on the scene, and he shot the actress emerging—soaking wet, furious, and humiliated—from the pool. The picture appeared in the tabloids the following day.

  [Denier would later play Dulcinea in one of the Broadway productions of Man of La Mancha.]

  With Lamas behind the wheel, the couple’s ride home was in silence. Once inside Lana’s foyer, he slapped her so hard that her diamond earring shot across the hall. She tried to deliver a kick to his groin with her sequined shoe, but before it landed, he grabbed her right ankle and sent her sprawling across the marble floor.

  With his fiery temper unleashed, he kicked her several times in the ribs before bending over her and striking her face twice, bloodying her nose. She raised her hands to protect her face from his blows.

  Before he could inflict any more damage, he stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind him—never to return. The next day, someone came by for his clothes and possessions.

  The next morning, Lana arrived at MGM badly bruised. Production had already begun on Latin Lovers, a movie, eventually release
d in 1953, that she’d been filming with Lamas as her co-star.

  She put through a call to Benjamin Thau, head of MGM’s casting, asking him to come to her dressing room. Sensing serious trouble, Thau was there within fifteen minutes, finding Lana a mess of bruises and scratches.

  She burst into tears, sharing all the trauma of her bitter fistfight with Lamas. “He said the most vile things to me that anyone has ever said in my life,” she sobbed. “He told me my pussy’s been used so much it’s like a limp dishrag. He accused me of being a lousy lay and claimed that he had to jack off to achieve orgasm since I couldn’t do it for him. Crap like that.”

  She finally delivered an ultimatum: “I will not do the picture with Lamas. Go back to your original choice: Ricardo Montalban.”

  Under the circumstances, Thau acquiesced.

  In her column the next day, Louella Parsons wrote: “I assume Lana Turner was shocked, as all of us were, at some of the things that Fernando Lamas said to her last night.”

  Shooting was delayed for ten days. During that interim, Montalban agreed to co-star with Lana. MGM announced that he would be replacing Lamas in the movie.

  Lamas’ days at MGM were now numbered. It wouldn’t be long before Dore Schary “pink-slipped” him.

  In October of 1952, Lana spoke to the press about the breakup. “It was just one of those things, like a Cole Porter song. We’re still friends, but as far as romance is concerned, that’s out. From now on, I’m interested in only one person—and that’s Lana Turner.”

  For Sinatra, before there was Ava (the love of his life, lower photo), there was Lana (upper photo.). He was not the only man “shared” by the two Love Goddesses.

  Lamas spoke to the press, too. “I am an ordinary man with the ordinary defects and faults. I am human, thank God. I suffer, I love, I hate. About Lana, I have nothing to say. Because there is nothing. It is over! You read a good book, a beautiful book. You come to the end. You close it. That’s it! The end!”