Lana Turner Read online

  In the late 1950s, I began my life-long fascination with the blonde film icon, gathering my own material. Boxes and boxes of data later, I finally got to meet the still-beautiful Love Goddess.That happened in the 1970s, when I was working in Los Angeles, a city I documented in a travel guide for Simon & Schuster.

  Sometimes Lana liked to talk about her illustrious, even scandalous, past, including “the good stuff” (her words) that she chose not to record in her official memoirs.

  But, of course, I didn’t rely on just her revelations alone. Over the years, with every chance I got, I spoke about Lana to producers, directors, makeup men, hairdressers, fashion designers, talent agents such as Henry Willson, and especially the actors and actresses who worked with Lana on each of her pictures.

  She certainly made lasting impressions. Everyone who had come into contact with her, including her many lovers, had an opinion about her. Many times, they were loving and understanding about what had driven Lana and her passions to do what she did. In other instances, the images that were remembered were not favorable.

  To list all the people over the years who contributed to this biography would fill twenty-five pages of print. But to all of them, living and dead, I express my gratitude for helping me complete the mysterious puzzle that was Lana Turner.

  Often, when I could not contact people directly, I relied on the hundreds of interviews these people gave to newspapers and magazines. Sometimes, I got only a paragraph, but it was revelatory.

  On one point, her friends and foes agreed: Lana Turner truly deserved an unvarnished memoir that would present her attributes, including her flaws; a bio that would eulogize her beauty, praise her too often underrated talent, and show her as a living and imperfect woman whose major flaw involved searching for love in all the wrong places.

  Darwin Porter

  February, 2017

  New York City

  A Word About Phraseologies:

  Since we at Blood Moon weren’t privy to long-ago conversations as they were unfolding, we have relied on the memories of our sources for the conversational tone and phraseologies of what we’ve recorded within the pages of this book.

  This writing technique, as it applies to modern biography, has been defined as “conversational storytelling” by The New York Times, which labeled it as an acceptable literary device for “engaging reading.”

  Blood Moon is not alone in replicating, “as remembered” dialogues from dead sources. Truman Capote and Norman Mailer were pioneers of direct quotes, and today, they appear in countless other memoirs, ranging from those of Eddie Fisher to those of the long-time mistress (Verita Thompson) of Humphrey Bogart.

  Some people have expressed displeasure in the fact that direct quotes and “as remembered” dialogue have become a standard—some would say “mandatory”—fixture in pop culture biographies today.

  If that is the case with anyone who’s reading this now, they should perhaps turn to other, more traditional and self-consciously “scholastic” works instead.

  Best wishes to all of you, with thanks for your interest in our work.

  Danforth Prince

  President and Founder

  Blood Moon Productions

  Prologue

  In the little mining town of Wallace, Idaho, it had rained all night before the dawn of February 8, 1921. That date would have faded into oblivion, were it not for the birth of a beautiful baby girl—Julia Jean Turner. She would be called “Judy” until she went to work in Hollywood.

  From this modest beginning, the newly dubbed Lana Turner became America’s “Sweater Girl,” a pinup of World War II, and ultimately, the movie star goddess of the Silver Screen, a femme fatale linked to scandal and sex.

  No role she ever played, from The Postman Always Rings Twice to The Bad and the Beautiful and Peyton Place, ever matched the soap opera of her real life.

  In satins and white fox furs, she carved a trail through the boudoirs of Hollywood, collecting diamond rings from seven husbands, including Lex Barker, the screen version of Tarzan.

  She seduced two future U.S. Presidents (Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy), and a host of Hollywood hunks, often her leading men: Clark Gable, Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, James Stewart, Spencer Tracy, John Garfield, Richard Burton, Victor Mature, Fernando Lamas, Sean Connery, and Frank Sinatra. Her great love was Tyrone Power, “Hollywood’s handsomest matinee idol.”

  She was labeled Hollywood’s party girl, and her boss, Louis B. Mayer, excoriated her as amoral. “If she saw a stagehand with tight pants and a muscular build, she’d invite him to her dressing room.”

  Her most notorious episode included the fatal stabbing of her gangster lover, Johnny Stompanato. Cheryl Crane, her teenage daughter, took the blame, but Hollywood insiders suspected it was Lana herself who was the murderess.

  She not only enchanted men, but was the object of adoration from other beautiful women, notably such bisexuals as Ava Gardner. Evita Perón, the dictator of Argentina, was obsessed with Lana, as was Eva Braun, the mistress of Adolf Hitler.

  Robert Taylor said, “Lana Turner virtually invented the Hollywood blonde bombshell, and was the inspiration for Marilyn Monroe.”

  How did Lana view her own incredible life?

  “I did what other women only fantasized about doing, but lacked the courage. I actually lived out my wildest dreams. Yes, even those!”

  She expressed her sentiment about Tinseltown as she was dying in the 1990s: “Once upon a time, there really was a Hollywood. It was called the Dream Factory. It’s gone today, but let it be known that for one moment long ago, I was its dream girl.”

  Glamorous Lana, clad in ermine at at the peak of her beauty and popularity during the deprivations of post-Depression America, greeting her adoring fans in 1941.

  Chapter One

  Hollywood’s Future Blonde Venus

  “Getta Load of That Kid!

  Whatta Pair of Tits!”

  According to a long-enduring legend, Lana Turner was discovered sipping a soda at Schwab’s Drugstore. The soda-sipping part was true, but the drugstore wasn’t Schwab’s.

  The legend was reinforced when she was depicted in a grisly thriller as an innocent sixteen-year-old, enjoying her last moments alive before she dies in a “sex murder.”

  “I’ve never known what it is I was supposed to have had. Something, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t have had so many fans. I wouldn’t have survived so long on the screen. All I do know is that sex appeal is not make-believe. It is not the way you look or the way you walk or the way you smile. It’s the way you are!”

  —Lana Turner

  As suggested by her porcelain skin, young Lana was of Irish, English, and Scottish descent on her mother’s side; Dutch on her father’s side. Born in 1896 in Montgomery, Alabama, into a family with eleven other brothers and sisters, John Virgil Turner spoke with a very thick Southern accent. Once, he’d entered an Amos ’n’ Andy sound-alike contest. [At the time, they were the two most famous African-American entertainers of their day, starring in a popular radio show.]

  At the age of twenty-four, Virgil had returned from World War I, where he had served as an infantry platoon sergeant.

  Who could have predicted that this little eight-year-old, raggle-taggle schoolgirl, walking the streets of San Francisco, would in a few short years morph into “The Love Goddess of Hollywood?”

  Ruggedly handsome, he had a muscular build, blonde hair, and sparkling blue eyes. He also possessed slim hips and broad shoulders.

  “From the picture or two I have of my father, I looked like him and also had his temperament,” Lana recalled years later. “He had a sense of humor and a devil-may-care attitude.”

  Back home in Alabama, he tried his luck as an insurance salesman, but sold no policies, so he told his family goodbye and headed west, perhaps to Dallas.

  However, he ended up in the little town of Picher, Oklahoma. It was a Saturday night, and he was directed to Picher’s Roof Garden Restaurant, whic
h hired a dance band once a week. Tonight was the night, and he was looking for a good time. He liked, in this order, sex, gambling, and dancing. He was a skilled dancer and had a good singing voice. It was rumored that he had once appeared in vaudeville in Birmingham, Alabama, before he went off to war.

  It was to this very restaurant that Mildred Frances Cowan was headed with her father, a mining engineer. Born in Lamar, Arkansas, in 1904, she had accompanied her father to Picher on a mining inspection tour. Her mother had died during childbirth, owing to complications from the Rh blood factor, a problem that would also plague Lana for most of her life.

  Mildred Turner and her only daughter, then known as Julia Jean, posed for their first photograph in 1924.

  Mildred had just turned sixteen, and Virgil found her the prettiest girl in the room. He went over and asked her to dance. Her stern father, Henry Cowan, didn’t want his young daughter taking up with this older man, whom he didn’t trust.

  He would later warn her to stay away from Virgil, but she was a strong-willed teenager. After he’d held her close on the dance floor, she had just “folded into his arms.”

  She’d later tell her daughter, “For both of us, it was love at first sight.”

  In Picher, despite her father’s objections, she slipped away and saw Virgil while her father toured the mines. Within five days, he’d asked her to run away with him and get married. She knew very little about him, but she wanted to be his bride.

  [Picher, Oklahoma, now a ghost town, is among a small number of communities, worldwide, to be evacuated and declared uninhabitable because of environmental and health damage caused by the mines the town once serviced.

  Humble origins: Picher, Oklahoma, circa 1917, a few years before 16-year-old Mildred would elope with Virgil to eventually produce Lana Turner. Thriving as a mining center, Picher was later evaluated by the EPA as an environmental disaster and eventually abandoned, forcibly, as a region prone to birth defects and cancer.

  Once a thriving community in Ottawa County, Oklahoma, Picher—in addition to its role as the venue for the romance that eventually sired Lana Turner—was once a major center for the mining of lead and zinc. Generations of unrestricted subsurface excavations dangerously undermined most of the township’s buildings and left enormous mounds of toxic debris piled in fields and vacant lots.]

  With Virgil, years before anyone ever knew about the toxic after effects of its mines there, Mildred fled north from Picher in a pickup truck. He’d met someone in Wallace, Idaho, who had offered him a job running a little dry cleaning store there, and he’d accepted.

  Mildred recalled in horror her wedding night. She was a virgin. He caused her great pain because of the size of his endowment, and she had bled a lot. She had locked herself in the bathroom at the motor court where they were staying. When she emerged that morning, he was waiting for her, and he raped her again. “He would never take ‘no’ for an answer,” she told Lana. “He could never get enough—sometimes four times a day. I thought all husbands demanded that. Boy, did I find out differently. I came to dread sex and avoided it whenever I could.”

  “As time went by, I was relieved when he started sneaking off with other women.”

  Before reaching Wallace, the couple ran out of money. Mildred said that her new husband had the tightest pair of pants she’d ever seen on any man. “At least two sizes too small. They practically showed everything he had.”

  En route to Idaho, they stopped off at a little town where he took her to a honky tonk with live music and hamburgers. She recalled that when Virgil had three beers and had to go to the men’s room, two men from the bar rose from their seats and followed him. Then she saw him disappearing into the back alley with the two men. He seemed gone for a long time. Eventually, he returned about forty minutes later with $15 in his pocket, which paid for the motor court and gas.

  “I was very innocent in those days,” Mildred said. “I’d heard of men paying whores for sex, women whores. But I didn’t find out until months later that homosexuals would pay certain virile men for sex, too. Whenever Virgil had to get money for us, he knew what to do.”

  Depicted above In a rare photograph, Lana’s father, handsome, studly, blonde-haired Virgil Turner, used his “best asset” to make money for his family during lean times.

  Shortly after their arrival in Wallace, the dry-cleaning establishment that had embraced Virgil into its fold went out of business. Not too many locals needed any of their clothes dry-cleaned.

  Out of a job and with a family to support, Virgil went to work in the local mine.

  Straddling the rugged terrain of Idaho’s northern panhandle, Wallace had been nicknamed “The Silver Capital of the World.” It was the largest and busiest of the half-dozen towns within the Coeur D’Alene silver-mining district, which produced more silver than any other mining district in America.

  [The townspeople there still cite Lana Turner (1921-1995) as its most famous former resident.]

  Lana remembered Virgil coming home all grimy from working in the mines. After a bath, he often put a record on their old phonograph and danced with Mildred. A young Lana tried to join in. Her father’s favorite song was “You’re the Cream in My Coffee.” Sometimes, he would win at poker, and Lana remembered that he always kept his money in his left sock. “That was his bank. But as soon as he got some dough, he wanted to spend it.”

  “Money is to be spent, not hoarded,” he’d always say.

  It was in Wallace that Lana made her first public appearance. She was only four years old. An attractive woman, Mildred had been asked to model some furs at a local fashion show.

  Lana went backstage and watched from the wings as her mother modeled. Wanting to imitate her, she picked up one of the fur garments (in this case, something made from fox), wrapped it around her body, and tottered out onto the stage. The women in the audience burst into wild applause. “From that day forth,” she later half-jokingly recalled, “I knew I was going to be a star.”

  ***

  In Wallace, Virgil ran up $500 in gambling debts without the money to pay for them. Most of his debts were owed to a native of Boulder, Colorado, a 40-year-old, 300-pound bully named Sam Waters. The gambling kingpin of Wallace, he was known for his violence, his main goal involved separating miners from their paychecks. If a gambler didn’t pay up within a certain deadline, he’d often find himself badly beaten up in a back alley with a broken bone or two.

  Mother and daughter (Mildred and Lana) would in the 1940s become “fashion plates” in Hollywood, but not when this picture was taken in 1924.

  Adding to Virgil’s problems was the fact that he had also been arrested for bootlegging liquor down from Canada. Within three days, he was scheduled for a confrontation with a judge who was likely to put him in jail.

  Using the popular expression of the day, he told Mildred, “It’s time to get out of Dodge,” meaning that the time had come to flee. A month before, he’d purchased, secondhand, a battered old Star.

  [The Star, aka the Star Car, was a brand of low-priced automobile assembled between 1922 and 1928 by the Durant Motors Company as a usually less expensive competitor of the Ford Model T.]

  Lana and her parents fled from Virgil’s gambling debts in Wallace to wide open new terrains in the undeciphered West in a car like this—a Star Car, manufactured by the Durant Motor Company as an alternative to Henry Ford’s Model T.

  Discreetly, and in the middle of the night, he packed up the family’s meager belongings and headed west toward the promises of San Francisco. The year was 1927.

  Their trip over mountainous terrain was rough, and the scorching hot weather was mitigated only with torrential downpours. At one point, the road ahead had been washed away, forcing them, for a period of ten boring days, to camp beside the highway, sustaining themselves with hot dogs cooked over an open fire. Back on the road again, Virgil gave in to Lana’s demand to sit on his lap as he drove so that she could handle the steering wheel.

  At aroun
d three o’clock one hot afternoon, with Lana sitting on his lap and behind the wheel, and with Mildred asleep in the back seat, he dozed off. For about ten miles, the seven-year-old (presumably with no control of the accelerator or brakes) steered the Star herself until Virgil was suddenly awakened by a bump in the road.

  Later in life, Lana told boyfriends that she had been driving a car since the age of seven.

  As part of some mysterious trip, Virgil had previously visited San Francisco, and he told Lana about the glories of that city by the Bay. She was enthralled when he spoke of the Golden Gate Bridge, thinking it was real gold. At the approach to the city, she was bitterly disappointed to learn that the bridge was not made of actual gold.

  The heart of San Francisco also turned out to be a disappointment, too, because they could find no place to live within their meager budget.

  He drove the Star to a little suburb, Daly City, where they rented a dreary room in a rundown motor court for $3 a night. Accessible from the hallways were cubicles with toilets and segregated showers for men and women. It turned out that the roadside dive was used mostly by married men who took hookers there for “hot bed” sessions before driving back into the city.

  There was a hotplate in the room, where Mildred cooked skimpy meals for her family for a week.

  Finally, Virgil got a job as a stevedore working on the docks of the Pacific Steamship Company. With his first paycheck, he filled two paper bags with groceries and brought them home, along with a $2 red-and-white polka dot dress for “my little girl.” Lana was thrilled with it and also glad to eat a pork chop for supper. “There’s a time limit on how long a growing girl can hold out on soda crackers and milk,” she recalled, years later.