Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  Also in 1959, she released her titular role of Gidget, a teenage comedy. In 1960, she married singer Bobby Darin and would go on to fill in the role of Tammy created by Debbie Reynolds in two sequels for Universal.

  Cast against type in Imitation, Troy Donahue played a thug who beats up Susan Kohner when he learns she is a mulatto. In a pivotal scene, Donahue once struck her so hard, she ended up in the hospital. Hunter sent her flowers with a note: “Yellow roses for blue bruises.”

  In private life, Donahue was known to beat up on women, which, in one case at least, led to threatened legal action that was later settled out of court.

  To Lana, Donahue didn’t strike her as a sex symbol, even though he was called “The Blonde Cobra of Sex.” The move magazines cited him as being the most worshipped young male star in pictures. Girls screamed hysterically whenever he appeared in public.

  “I assumed he is bisexual,” Lana said to Hunter.

  “He certainly is,” the producer said. “Right now, both of us are competing for Rock Hudson.”

  Donahue also became known for orgies staged at his open house. “One night he invited me, but I turned him down,” Lana said. “first, I thought I’d be the oldest person there. Second, I feared his notorious parties would be raided by the police. All I needed was to end up on the frontpage in another scandal.”

  Robert Alda was cast as Lana’s agent, with Dan O’Herlihy as her playwright.

  The son of an Italian barber, Alda became the father of two actors, Alan (famous for his involvement in, among others, the TV serial M.A.S.H.), and Antony. Before becoming a Broadway star, Robert worked in vaudeville and burlesque, appearing with such stars as Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, as well as Phil Silvers. He won a Tony Award for starring in Guys and Dolls (1950).

  O’Herlihy was no great admirer of Lana. “She was very much the star,” he said. “Playing a love scene with her was hell. She was always worried about her makeup. I was afraid to touch her. Goddesses are only to be admired from a distance, not mauled. ‘Don’t smear my lipstick. Don’t mess my hair.’ Sirk had made an anti-Nazi film, but I think he learned directing from Josef Goebbels himself. He was always barking orders at me that sounded like a Hitler rant, throwing me off my mark.”

  An Irishman, O’Herlihy appeared as Macduff in Orson Welles’ Macbeth in 1948, his first American film. In 1954, in Luis Buñuel’s Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, he’d won an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. He would later co-star with Lana in The Big Cube (1967), playing her husband.

  Her fabulous wardrobe in Imitation was designed by the Parisian, Jean Louis, who had also created Rita Hayworth’s famous black satin strapless gown in Gilda (1946) and Marlene Dietrich’s celebrated beaded soufflé stagewear for her cabaret world tours. He’d also designed clothes for Ginger Rogers, Vivien Leigh, Joan Crawford, Julie Andrews, Katharine Hepburn, and Judy Garland. In time, he’d be nominated for thirteen Oscars for costume design. In 1993, he married an aging Loretta Young, who was long hailed as the best dressed actress in Hollywood.

  When Lana sat through the final cut with Hunter, she turned to him. “It’s a four-handkerchief tear-jerker.” She also told columnist James Bacon, “This is how old Louis B. (mayer) used to make movies before MGM kicked him out on his fat ass.”

  Bosley Crowther in The New York Times echoed Lana’s point of view, labeling it “the most shameless tear-jerker in years.”

  Time magazine called the remake “still a potent onion.”

  Struggling financially, Universal was rescued by its release of Imitation of Life, which became its alltime biggest grosser at the box office.

  John Cohan has been a celebrity psychic to the stars for more than three decades. He was a soulmate to both Lana Turner and Sandra Dee during turbulent times in their roller-coaster lives.

  ***

  Two blondes from different generations—Lana Turner and Sandra Dee—made two movies together, Imitation of Life followed by Portrait in Black.

  They were completely different personalities, and had little in common. Ross Hunter, their producer, believed that Lana was jealous of Sandra’s bubbling youth and beauty. Her star was rising on the Hollywood sky as Lana’s sun was setting.

  There was one factor in both of their lives that each of the stars had in common: celebrity psychic John Cohan.

  At various times and through different periods, both actresses found comfort, support, and good advice from this kind, loving man.

  Over the years, his other clients read like a Who’s Who in the entertainment world, including Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Rock Hudson, La Toya Jackson, Lucille Ball, and Julia Roberts, among many others.

  Cohan was introduced to Lana through a family friend, actor Ray Danton. Her former agent, Henry Willson, once suggested that he thought Danton and Lana would make the ideal screen team. “his raven-black hair and your blondness would make a vanilla and chocolate image on screen.”

  Danton was known not only for his hair, but for his intense good looks with a distinctive cleft chin evocative of Kirk Douglas.

  Willson helped launch the career of Rory Calhoun by sending the dark-haired actor on dates with the blonde goddess, having warned her not to date men as blonde as she was.

  Danton and Lana, in spite of Willson’s wish, never made a picture together. However, she was impressed with his virile image when she’d seen two of his pictures: The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960), and The George Raft Story (1960). As arranged by Willson, the movie gangster had been one of her first lovers when Lana arrived at Warner Brothers in 1937.

  Cohan was particularly helpful to Lana during her decline in the 1980s. As she admitted herself, “I was on a serious downhill slide, in terrible health, and suffering a weight loss to the point of emaciation.” She wasn’t eating properly, but drinking too much and chain smoking, too. When she appeared in New Orleans in the early 1980s in Murder Among Friends, she often could not go onstage and had to send out her understudy as a replacement.

  Sometimes, she and Cohan talked about her previous lovers. As she claimed, “All of them were unfaithful. My heart was broken into so many pieces I never thought I could put it back together again.”

  He tried to arouse her survival-sharpened instincts and instill in her a love and respect of self, giving her the will to go on. Or, as she put it, “to face the final curtain. I know that’s a cliché. But, like most clichés, it’s true.”

  Over the course of his relationship with Lana, he had a brief fling with her. “She was desperate for love,” he recalled. But that fleeting romance turned into a deep friendship which led to her calling him “my soulmate.”

  Cohan also brought comfort and love to Sandra Dee after her film career started to flicker and die in the late 1960s. Universal didn’t renew her contract. Her divorce from Bobby Darin came through in 1967.

  Cohan was there for her during the years she suffered from poor health and lived as a virtual recluse. For many years, she battled depression, anorexia nervosa, and alcoholism, and also had to cope with a drug problem.

  He acknowledged that Sandra “was the love of my life” on the dedication page of his revelation-laden memoirs, Catch a Falling Star, published in 2008.

  In that book, he described how, on five or six different occasions, Sandra had urged him to marry her, but that did not come about.

  He spoke to her on the phone in January of 2005, a month before she died. As he had so many times before, he talked about her health and heating habits. She revealed her desire to make a comeback, perhaps as a host on NBC’s The Today Show.

  He promised he’d be in California by the spring of that year, but by then, it would be too late. Sandra was gone.

  As he remembered it in her desperation, she shared a dream with him that Darin had reached out his hand from above, beckoning her to come and join him, as a kind of “See you in Heaven,” offer.

  “I told her that Bobby wants you to stay here and live life to the fullest,” Cohan said. “
But she was ready to go. I loved and adored her. She will be missed.”

  ***

  With lines forming around the block for Imitation of Life, more film offers poured in for Lana. For various reasons, many of them fell through. Projects were either completely abandoned, or else she rejected roles which were then assigned to another actress.

  Ever since he had cast Forever Amber, the tyrannical director, Otto Preminger, had wanted to star Lana in a picture. But the studio had insisted on Linda Darnell. Even before that, Lana had wanted to star in the director’s Laura, but that role had gone to Gene Tierney.

  Preminger had already cast James Stewart in Anatomy of a Murder when he approached Lana and asked her to take the female lead. She read the script and liked the role, since it evoked memories of her starring role as Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice.

  She was concerned that the title of the movie, Anatomy of a Murder, would revive recent memories of the fatal stabbing of Johnny Stompanato at her home. She told a reporter, “I wish I could have learned these things another way, but what’s past is past. I can’t let it destroy me, and I want to move on. It’s a terrific role, and I want to do it.”

  Lana signed a contract to co-star in Anatomy of a Murder, a taut suspense thriller directed by the ferociously undiplomatic Otto Preminger, who’s depicted above.

  A bare-knuckled dispute over Lana ‘s wardrobe demands (“couture, and only by Jean Louis!”) led to screaming arguments and a bitter parting of their ways.

  The problem arose over wardrobe and her appearance. Preminger took her to be fitted for the wigs she’d wear in the film. “She objected to everything,” he told his staff. “This woman, I fear, is going to drive me crazy. I’m having second thoughts about casting her. To begin with, I think she’s too old for the part. I should have gone with a younger actress.”

  Hope Bryce, the costume coordinator, made an appointment to meet Lana at a western shop on Rodeo Drive, then waited two hours for her to show up. The plan involved purchasing off-the-rack clothing for her, perhaps slacks, Capri pants, or Western pants à la Dale Evans.

  Since she didn’t show up, Bryce bought some outfits in her size and drove to her home for fittings.

  But when Lana saw the selection, she refused to even try them on. “I want the clothes I wear in the film to be designed by Jean Louis!”

  When Bryce informed Preminger of her rejection, he exploded: “I, and nobody else, determine what my actors are to wear. Her character is a junior officer’s wife living in a trailer. How in hell can she afford Jean Louis? it’s ridiculous to dress her up and turn her into a glamour puss. This is not Imitation of Life.”

  He ordered Bryce to assemble “some cheap, sleazy clothes that a slut in a trailer camp would wear. Even some plastic shoes.”

  When Bryce presented Lana with this apparel, it was her time to explode. She immediately called her agent, Paul Kohner, and ordered him to present her costume demands to Preminger.

  Kohner called Preminger with Lana’s demands and objections.

  “Fine,” the director said. “Send me a letter stating that she wants to cancel the contract she signed with me unless her clothes are designed by Jean Louis. Once I get the letter, I’ll release her at once.”

  That night he’d been drinking heavily, fuming about Lana. He phoned her and, in his thick Viennese accent, began to denounce her. In her memoirs, Lana referred to the vile expletives hurled at her, without mentioning the actual words.

  In his final screech, he shouted “CUNT! CUNT! CUNT!” into the phone right before she put down the receiver never to speak to him again.

  “I can’t possibly work with this beast,” she told Kohner. “I hope my family is never so hungry that I would have to be in a picture he directed. Too bad, though, as I would love to have co-starred with Jimmy Stewart again.”

  ***

  Portrait in Black, Lana’s only film release for 1960, was once again produced by Ross Hunter from a script that had gone dusty on the shelves at Universal International for thirteen years.

  Hunter told his director, Michael Gordon, “Lana turned down scripts for Luanne Royal and for The Chalk Garden, but at last she’s found something she can sink those painted claws of hers into. A murderess.”

  Gordon answered, “It’s type casting, Ross old pal, A murderess playing a murderess.”

  “Don’t let her hear you say that,” Hunter cautioned.

  The play by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts had opened on Broadway in 1947, running at the Booth Theatre for sixty-one performances, starring Clair Luce, Sidney Blackmer, and Donald Cook.

  After seeing the play, producers Jack Skirball and Bruce Manning acquired the screen rights. Sir Carol Reed, famous for his 1949 The Third Man, was set to direct, with Joan Crawford in the star role. The project didn’t get off the ground, and the rights were sold to Universal but the studio let it languish until 1960.

  Portrait of a cinematic murderess, Lana Turner, starring in Portrait in Black.

  Her role, and the publicity it generated, traumatized Lana with comparisons to the recent, spectacularly controversial, death of Johnny Stompanato.

  As a follow-up to Imitation of Life, Hunter wanted an all-star cast and crew. Gordon had just directed Pillow Talk (1959), one of Hunter’s most successful movies, starring Rock Hudson and Doris Day.

  In the early 1950s, during the McCarthy era, Gordon had been blacklisted and was persona non grata in Hollywood. Ironically, in 1950, he’d just directed Jose Ferrer in his Oscar-winning performance in Cyrano de Bergerac.

  Lana insisted the Jean Louis once again be tapped to design her fabulous wardrobe. Music would be by Frank Skinner. The original playwrights, Goff and Roberts, had revised their script. Russell Metty, who had photographed Lana so beautifully in Imitation of Life, was also hired for Portrait in Black. Richard Ried had won an Oscar for his art direction of Pillow Talk, and he was hired. Photography would be in EastmanColor.

  Portrait in Black would be a murder/blackmail mystery filled with some gaping holes that Hunter would try to conceal with a glamourous décor and offbeat casting, including Anthony Quinn as her leading man. When the role was first presented to him, he told Hunter, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  He would be cast as David Rivera, a doctor who falls in love with mink-clad, diamond-laden Sheila Cabot (Lana). He’s treating her ailing husband, shipping magnate Matthew Cabot (Lloyd Nolan). The couple have a stepdaughter, Catherine Cabot, played by Sandra Dee, who had been Lana’s daughter in Imitation of Life. Unable to get a divorce, Lana plots with the doctor to murder her husband by injecting an air bubble into his veins.

  Once again, she was plotting with a lover to murder her husband, evoking The Postman Always Rings Twice.

  “This will be my first role as a drawing room menace,” Quinn told Kirk Douglas, who had recently co-starred with him in Last Train from Gun Hill (1959). Knowing that he was miscast, Quinn signed on anyway, telling Douglas, “It’s the money, comrade, money, money, money.”

  As it turned out, Quinn was right: The role was wrong for him. As Time magazine noted, “His speech was oddly strangled, and his general acting was that of a beaten prizefighter who routinely protests a decision he knows to have been fair.”

  Before he had established himself as a Hollywood star, Quinn had played an Indian, a Mafia don, a Hawaiian chief, a Filipino freedom fighter, a Chinese guerilla, and an Arab sheik, among other varied roles.

  [Quinn was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, to a Mexican mother with Indian blood and an immigrant father from Ireland. The family later came to the U.S., where as a young boy, Quinn picked walnuts in El Paso, harvested tomatoes in San Jose, and, as a “Chicano,” ran with gangs in the Mexican slums of Los Angeles. For a time, he played the saxophone at the street corner rallies of Aimee Semple McPherson, the most famous evangelist of her era.

  In just a few years, he’d be in Hollywood, hanging out with John Barrymore and “fucking Mae West” (his words). She’d cast him as a Latin gig
olo in her play, Clean Beds.]

  Lovers colluding and trapped in the murder of her inconvenient husband.

  Above, Lana, as an haute diva (“I am a movie star!”) draped in mink, with Anthony Quinn, spruced up as a society doctor who kills.

  When he got to know Lana, he told her, “Back then, I wanted to be Napoléon, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Picasso, Martin Luther, and Jack Dempsey—all rolled into one body.”

  By 1937, he’d married Katherine DeMille, the adopted daughter of Cecil B. DeMille. Regrettably, their little son, Christopher Anthony, drowned in the swimming pool of W.C. Fields.

  When Lana began emoting on camera with Quinn, and as he nuzzled her neck, she was well aware of his reputation in Hollywood as a master seducer of movie stars, ranging from Carole Lombard to Shelley Winters. While making Blood and Sand with Rita Hayworth in 1941, he’d seduced her, too, and also agreed to lie on the casting couch of the gay director, George Cukor, who later boasted about the size of Quinn’s penis.

  As Evelyn Keyes, “Scarlett’s O’Hara’s Younger Sister,” said, “There was simply too much of Tony—yes, down there, too.”

  Quinn’s manly charms did not fail to attract the attention of Lana. Ross Hunter said, “Before the first week of filming, Quinn was making visits to Lana’s dressing room. I even asked her if Quinn had exaggerated his sexual prowess, as so many men do. I should know! She assured me he’s hot as a firecracker.”

  On the set, Quinn introduced Lana to Anna May Wong, who had emerged from retirement after eleven years to play her mysterious maid, “Tani,” in Portrait in Black.

  Lana asked her why she’d been absent from the screen for so long.

  “My father told me not to be photographed too much or else I’d lose my soul.” After a long and distinguished career, Portrait would be her last film role, as she died the following year (1961).

  Wong and Quinn were old friends, having worked together before, co-starring in such movies as Daughter of Shanghai (1937) and Dangerous to Know (1938).