Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  Although born in Los Angeles, Wong became the first Asian American actress to gain international renown and was labeled as “the first Chinese American movie star.”

  Lana still had enough star power to make demands, and she successfully urged Hunter to cast her dear friend, Virginia Grey. He gave her the small part of “Miss Lee,” and the actress made the most of her role as a secretary.

  Lloyd Nolan was cast as Lana’s husband, Matthew Cabot, a dying shipping magnate lying in a hospital bed stroking his Siamese cat. He’s still trying to hold onto his shipping empire with the help of Howard Mason (Richard Basehart), his lawyer.

  Sandra Dee had played Lana’s daughter in Imitation of Life, but in Portrait, she was her stepdaughter, Catherine Cabot. Behind Dee’s back, Lana told Grey, “She’s the new blonde on the block. Hollywood’s getting a new crop. As strange as it seems, Marilyn Monroe in a few years is going to be forty.”

  In 1960, just minutes before the explosion of “flower power” and the hippie movement, Sandra Dee—portrayed above in Portrait in Black—was critiqued for dressing like a young nubile twenty-something who never evolved from the tastes and fashion aesthetics of her cinematic mother and the Eisenhower era.

  Over lunch, Dee told Lana, “The last man I’m going to marry is a man in show business. They’re selfish, unreliable, and make lousy husbands. A Hollywood type marriage is not for me.”

  The next time Lana heard of Dee’s marital status was when she read in the newspaper that she’d married singer Bobby Darin, who definitely was in show business. The press dubbed Darin and Dee as “the dream lovers”—that is, until reality set in.

  When Lana met Richard Basehart, he was just ending his marriage to the Italian actress, Valentina Cortese. She found his deep, distinctive voice and good looks appealing, but, according to Grey, she made no attempt to go after him. “Actually, I was the one who went after Richard, but he turned me down.”

  An Italian American born in Brooklyn, John Saxon was cast as Blake Richards, a tugboat owner who is the fiancé of Lana’s stepdaughter.

  Henry Willson had seen a picture of the handsome Saxon on a magazine cover and had contacted him with a familiar line, “Do you want to be in pictures?”

  Willson went after him, promising him to get him a movie role. Meeting him for the first time, the agent said, “He looks like a male Sophia Loren, age twelve.” Saxon was seventeen at the time.

  Portrait in Black was filmed against the dramatic backdrop of San Francisco. As usual, Lana made a glamorous screen presence, especially in one scene where she is shown wearing a big white orchid on her black sequined gown and adorned with her favorite diamonds.

  In the film, in the aftermath of Nolan’s murder, the homicidal lovers, Lana and Quinn, think that they’ve gotten away with it. Then, anonymous letters arrive, nailing them as the murderers.

  Suspicion falls on Nolan’s daughter (Dee); his lawyer (Basehart); and the Chinese housekeeper (Wong). Lana and Quinn finally decide that Basehart is sending the threatening letters and that he will also have to be eliminated. Basehart is murdered, this time the suspicion centering on Saxon.

  Even with Basehart out of the way, the letters keep coming. Near the end of the film, Quinn manages to make Lana confess that she is the one sending those letters. She believes that she can hold onto him based on their shared guilt and their murderous dark secret.

  Dee eavesdrops on their dialogue wherein their collaboration in the murder of both her father and his lawyer is expressed, and Quinn goes after her. She eludes him, and he falls to his death from a window ledge. That leaves Lana to face the grim reality of a lifetime in prison, or possibly the electric chair.

  ***

  Before the release of Portrait in Black, Hunter sent most of its cast, including Lana, on a publicity tour through key cities which included New York and Chicago. It became a box office success, although critics, for the most part, blasted it.

  Variety attacked it as “a contrived murder melodrama with psychological character interplay that is more psycho than logical.” Cue magazine pronounced it “Highly polished and generally incredible. The high-class killings are done amid the lushest settings and the most expensive costumes.”

  An unusual appraisal came from a critic on London, where Portrait in Black had once served as a stage vehicle for Diana Wynyard, a famous actress in the West End.

  Susan Mann, writing in Women’s Mirror, said: “There she is in Portrait in Black, Lana Turner, as ravishing and wildly improbable as ever. The moment she slipped her mink coat carelessly around her shoulders and rushed out to meet a secret lover, leaving her bedridden husband behind, I breathed a sigh of luxurious relief. To me, she’s the grande dame of tormented heroines. She used to turn up in film after film; so did Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Neither Joan or Bette have been filming lately. So Lana Turner has taken over as the top representative of my favorite species of celluloid Queen Bee.”

  ***

  Lana had lost out on playing the role of Maggie the Cat in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. That part had gone to her friend, Elizabeth Taylor. In competing for the role, she’d had a brief fling with the film’s co-star, Paul Newman.

  Once again, she made a final stab at appearing as a Tennessee Williams heroine in Sweet Bird of Youth. There weren’t that many good roles for an actress of a certain age, and she wanted to see why the play was generating such excitement on Broadway.

  The play had opened on March 10, 1959 at the Martin Beck Theatre in Manhattan, with Geraldine Page starring as Alexandra del Lago and Paul Newman as the hustler, Chance Wayne.

  Lana came back into Newman’s life when she became one of the many actresses who flocked to see Tennessee’s new play.

  She phoned the playwright and agreed to meet him for a drink at Sardi’s before the curtain went up. They laughed about his long-ago attempt [described in Chapter Ten of this book] to write “a celluloid brassiere” for her, a reference to her movie Marriage Is a Private Affair.]

  He spoke about his dismissal, and she chimed in, “MGM and I parted ways, too. There was no one to show me to the gate. But if they buy the screen rights for Sweet Bird, maybe I’ll return to the studio.”

  That night at the performance, Tennessee noted that Lana studied Page’s every movement and expression “like a hawk. She was already rehearsing for the movie version.”

  Geraldine Page, an aging actress, pays for the sexual services of a younger man, Paul Newman, in the film version of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth.

  One can only wonder how Lana, as an older actress, might have fared in her place?

  After watching the play, Lana suggested that it might have to be “cleaned up for the screen.”

  She was all charm and grace when Tennessee escorted her backstage for a reunion with Newman. Right in front of the playwright, she kissed Newman. It was a long and lingering, open-mouthed kiss that forced her to repair her makeup in the mirror of his dressing room.

  “I’m all alone in New York,” she told him in front of Tennessee. “I’m so dependent on a man. But aren’t most women like me?”

  “I can definitely assure you that most women aren’t like Lana Turner,” he said.

  It was agreed that Tennessee would take both of them to dinner at Sardi’s before he had to go elsewhere. Lana wanted to go dancing later, and Newman agreed to escort her.

  Later at Sardi’s, all heads turned as the famous trio made their entrance. Newman seemed indifferent to all the attention, but Lana and Tennessee basked in the glow.

  Over dinner, Tennessee appeared drunk or drugged, and he made a startling revelation: He was going to Cuba.

  “You’d better stay out of there,” Newman warned him. “You could be kidnapped and held for ransom.”

  “If that’s what it takes to come together with Fidel Castro, I’ll take that risk,” he assured them. “I dream at night of getting raped by him. I’m willing to take the risk.”

  Lana told him t
hat she found a rape by Castro a ghoulish idea, and she feared for his safety. “We need you to write dramas for Paul and me in our future.”

  After dinner, Tennessee told them farewell, and tottered off into the night. “I have a date with a hustler,” he confessed. “The most expensive in New York. Five-hundred dollars a night instead of the usual twenty-five.”

  At a nightclub uptown, a hush fell over the patrons when “the most beautiful couple in Manhattan” entered. She looked gorgeous sheathed in a body-clinging white gown that was slit high up one side and low down the front. Her blonde hair was cropped short.

  Dancing in Newman’s arms, she told him, “Everybody is looking at us. We’d make a fabulous pair on the screen.”

  “Everybody is looking at YOU,” he corrected her. “To attract attention, I’ll have to take off my jacket, shirt, and undershirt.”

  “Later, darling,” she whispered to him.

  He never shared the details of what happened to them later that night. But he took her back to her suite and didn’t leave until the following morning.

  He did admit to Tennessee two nights later, “I found her clinging and desperate. The next morning, as I was heading out, she delivered a shocker.”

  “You may not know it now, but one day in the not-so-distant future, you are going to be my next husband.”

  Of course, that never happened. Neither did her chance to play Alexandra del Lago in Sweet Bird of Youth. Both Newman and Geraldine Page repeated their stage roles on screen.

  ***

  Lana was excited to learn that she was being offered the lead role in By Love Possessed (1961), whose script would be adapted from the best-selling novel by James Gould Cozzens. It had won the William Dean Howells Award “as the most distinguished work of fiction published during the last five years,” although Time magazine labeled it “the worst good novel of the past decade.”

  Lana was paid $300,000 to star in the movie, plus a percentage of the profits. As always, she wanted to know who her leading man would be, and was told that Robert Taylor had been offered the role of her lover. She anticipated working with him again. It had been a long time since the two of them had made love on and off the screen in Johnny Eager.

  She was also told that the scenario had been written by Charles Schnee, the Oscar-winning writer of one of her three most famous films, The Bad and the Beautiful.

  He’d been given the awesome task of dramatizing Cozzens’ 575-page novel, which was mostly filled with “twenty-five years of soul-searching among its characters. Much of the novel had been revealed through flashbacks and introspections, not ideal material for film-making.

  The final script spun around rape, suicide, embezzlement, and sexual unfulfillment, the movie drawing comparisons to Peyton Place.

  Lana invited the director, John Sturges, and the producer, Walter Mirisch, to her home to discuss the upcoming film. It was to be a joint venture of Mirisch Pictures and Seven Arts, with distribution by United Artists.

  Director Sturges had just completed The Magnificent Seven (1960), starring Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen. In time, it would become a film classic. He’d also directed Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), for which he received a Best Director Oscar nomination.

  Born to a Jewish family in new York, Mirisch had founded Mirisch Productions, an independent film company that would win three Best Picture Academy Awards—The Apartment (1960), West Side Story (1961), and In the Heat of the Night (1967). His film version of the mammoth James Michener novel, Hawaii (1966), was nominated for seven Oscars.

  The good news was followed by some bad news. Sturges called to tell Lana that Robert Taylor had dropped out because of other commitments. She tried to conceal her disappointment when he told her that he had been replaced by Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. He was hardly a name she knew, or a career with which she was familiar. She set out to learn what she could about him.

  Born to Russian Jewish parents in New York, the handsome young actor had gone to Yale, later serving in the U.S. Army during the war for five years, during which time he’d won the Purple Heart.

  He’d made his Broadway debut in The Rugged Path, starring with Spencer Tracy. By 1956, he’d landed at the gates to Warner Brothers, where he signed a contract. After that, he’d made both feature films and performed in TV roles, starring with James Garner in the hit series, Maverick.

  Lana had already sized up “the sexual potential” of her leading man. But in spite of his good looks and seductive appeal, Zimbalist seemed off limits to her predatory eyes. She was told that he was “quite spiritual,” having converted to Christianity.

  Lana “possessed” by then-newcomer Efrem Zimbalist Jr.

  Even before rehearsals began, Lana was informed that Sturges had not liked the scenario written by Schnee and had employed three “script doctors”—William Roberts, Isobel Lennart, and Ketti Frings. When Schnee read what this trio had done to his scenario, he threatened to sue to have his name removed from the credits. A compromise was reached: Upon the film’s release, he was identified as “John Dennis.”

  In a quiet New England town, there are three partners in the local law firm: Zimbalist as Arthur Winner; Jason Robards as Julius Penrose; and Thomas Mitchell playing Noah Tuttle, the aging senior partner.

  Winner is a solid citizen married to Barbara Bel Geddes (Clarissa) until he develops a passionate affair with Lana in her role as Marjorie Penrose, the wife of his law partner, Julius.

  He is impotent because of a car accident, but he won’t give his wife a divorce. He tells her, “Go find what you want somewhere else. Just don’t tell me about it.”

  It all works out in the end, as the errant spouses return to their respective mates. However, the film never answers the question: What is a hot-to-trot love-hungry female like Lana going to do for sex?

  During the first week of rehearsals, Lana met her strong supporting cast, headed by the third male lead, veteran actor Jason Robards, Jr. He had recently married Lauren Bacall, the widow of Humphrey Bogart.

  Cast as the wife of Zimbalist in the film, Bel Geddes was reduced to a very minor role. In her heyday, she’d starred as Maggie the Cat on Broadway in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Two of her greatest films had been I Remember Mama (1948) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).

  Once again, Lana was cast with Susan Kohner, the daughter of her agent, having recently completed Imitation of Life. Lana praised her for her talent and predicted a great future for her in film.

  That did not happen. In 1964, she married John Weitz, the writer and menswear designer, and retired from the screen.

  Thomas Mitchell had played Scarlett O’Hara’s father in Gone With the Wind (1939), and had won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, cast as the drunken Doc Boone in Stagecoach (1939) with John Wayne. He had become the first actor to win a triple crown: Academy Award, Tony, and Emmy.

  In the film, he played a fading, aging lawyer, Noah Tuttle, who is guilty of having embezzled funds from the firm to repay “a debt of honor.”

  A native of Tennessee, the perpetually suntanned George Hamilton was growing tired of hearing reporters claim that he resembled Warren Beatty. When he met Lana, he had starred in the romantic comedy, Where the Boys Are (1960). Before that, he’d starred in a more serious film, Crime and Punishment U.S.A. (1959), a re-imagining of the Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel, his performance winning him a Golden Globe.

  Hamilton was assigned the role of Warren Winner, Zimbalist’s son, a Harvard Law School graduate forced to enter his father’s law firm. He becomes sexually involved with Kohner’s character, Helen Detweiler.

  In his memoir, Don’t Mind If I Do, he described her character as a “virgin orphan heiress client.” After he deflowers her, she commits suicide by drinking a can of cleaning fluid.

  In that same memoir, hamilton recorded his impression of working with Lana. “she was the most notorious woman in America right then, coming off the murder of gangster Johnny Stompanato. All the rumors were that Lana had stabbed him to
death and gotten her teenage daughter to take the fall.”

  “But those rumors were never spoken anywhere near the Great One,” Hamilton wrote. “Not that Lana and I hung out. Instead, she hung me out, forcing me to do at least thirty takes of a scene in which all I had to do was help her on with her mink coat. The idea was to slide the mink to her neck, then let it drop away. Having learned from the master of the game, I thus became adept at putting an endangered species on an endangered species. I had a future in cloakrooms if all else failed.”

  By Love Possessed opened in Manhattan in July of 1961. It also made another debut, becoming the first movie ever shown on the regularly scheduled first-class flights of Trans World Airlines.

  Reviews for the most part were poor, critic Brandon Gill writing in The New Yorker, “By Love Possessed contains few traces of filmable material. It’s a very talky affair.”

  Robert Freund, in a review in Fort Lauderdale, cited Lana “for playing her usual role—and doing it well, the dame with surface elegance glossing a wanton brassiness.”

  ***

  Since the 1950s, Lana and Bob Hope had been friends, and had worked together on television, but never in a feature film. She was surprised when he phoned her and asked her if she would co-star with him in the romantic comedy, Bachelor in Paradise, to be released in 1961, which would mark her second picture that year, following in the wake of By Love Possessed.

  “What’s the problem?” she asked. “Lucille Ball not available?”

  Talking it over with Hope, she decided to accept the role of Rosemary Howard, a single woman living among married couples in suburbia.

  There was another reason she wanted to do the film, and that was for business purposes. It would mark her return to MGM, a studio that had not renewed her contract back in 1956.

  The casting of the new screen team of Bob Hope with femme fatale Lana struck many columnists as a mating of “an odd couple.”