With his next paycheck, Virgil rented a little apartment in Stockton with what Mildred called “hot and cold running rats.” After one trip down into the building’s cellar, she never went there again.
In the meantime, he installed a still and invited Lana (that is, Judy) down into the cellar to show off his strange contraption: a large copper vat with rubber tubes.
He told her it was a still from which he would make moonshine to sell in Mason canning jars, swearing her to secrecy.
He was always running short of money because of his addiction to gambling. Whenever he was in trouble, he put on those too-tight pants and headed to San Francisco to pick up extra cash.
One afternoon, Lana was playing with three girls who lived in the modest homes nearby. Each was bragging about how successful their fathers were. Not wanting to be outshone, Lana said, “My daddy has all your daddies beat. He has a still and makes and sells his own liquor.”
Apparently, one of the girls told her parents that night, and the next morning, two policemen arrived on the doorstep to destroy the still and pour out the moonshine. Virgil was locked up for three nights and had to pay a $100 fine.
He didn’t always go into San Francisco to earn money. Sometimes, a strange man, perhaps two or three men, would arrive in a car and drive off with him for five or six hours. He told Mildred he was trying to make a business deal with some men from San Francisco.
After three months, Lana arrived home from school one afternoon to learn that Virgil had deserted them. He’d gone to live with a 73-year-old insurance executive on Nob Hill. Virgil promised to send them money every week. On most weeks, he kept his promise, sometimes giving them as much as fifty dollars. On other weeks, he seemed to forget about them.
To supplement the family’s income, Mildred went to work in a beauty parlor in San Francisco, where she washed hair and swept the floor, occasionally bringing coffee or tea to the patrons from a little café across the street.
She also learned to style women’s hair. Through some connection, she was offered a better paying job in Sacramento. She took Lana out of school and enrolled her in a Catholic school run by Dominican sisters in Sacramento, even though Lana wasn’t Catholic, and had been baptized a Methodist.
The sisters were kind to her and, after the first month, urged her to grow up to become a nun and “the bride of Jesus.”
She seemed swayed by the idea until she learned that the nuns had to cut off all their hair. She thought she had beautiful hair and would never do that.
That hair proved to be a problem. She became aware that “little bugs” had infested her head and went home crying to her mother. Mildred examined her head and discovered that she had picked up lice in school. She rushed to the drugstore and purchased a bottle of Black Mange Cure. Returning home, she lathered Lana’s head. For three days, she kept a towel wrapped around her head (perhaps a precursor of the turbans in which she’d be famously photographed later), repeating the treatments until all the lice were gone, and she was sanitary once again.
Mildred worked mostly for tips, and some weeks there was almost nothing left to buy food after she’d paid the rent. Lana remembered she and her mother survived for one week on three bottles of milk and a box of soda crackers.
One day, Mildred was abruptly fired and told Lana that she’d been dismissed after being accused of stealing money from the cash register. She denied having taken the money, but had an unexpected $75 in her purse, money she used to put Lana and herself on a bus heading back to San Francisco.
Once there, Mildred moved in with two other beauticians who immediately objected to living in the cramped apartment with a growing little girl.
One of the women knew a family in Modesto, where Lana could stay, and Mildred drove her there. She met the Hislops, who had a daughter, Beverly, who was two years older than Lana. She was to room with the older girl in her bedroom.
Every Sunday, she attended Catholic services with the Hislops. Eventually, she was christened. Her original name had been Julia Jean, and she chose to be christened “Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner,” borrowing two of the names from her mother.
For two years, she lived with the Hislops, which she later characterized “as the most miserable years of my life.”
“Beverly was very mean to me, and Mrs. Hislop treated me like a scullery maid. I had to do most of the work around the house. I did the wash on Saturday, the ironing on Sunday. I did all the housekeeping. One time, while doing the wash, I got my hand caught in the wringer of this old Maytag and my fingers were nearly crushed.”
“I was just a cheap Cinderella with no hope of a pumpkin,” she said.
Mildred visited her once or twice a month, and sometimes brought her a new dress or some underwear. Virgil almost never showed up. When he did, he often had candy for her. He never spoke of his new life, but he appeared well dressed, so she assumed that he had a very good job. She was surprised by his choice of clothing, as he tried to dress like a much younger man. He’d dyed his golden blonde hair platinum, telling her, “It makes me look younger.”
One afternoon, he asked her what he could bring her on his next visit. “I want a bike, Daddy. Pretty please!”
“Okay, I’ll get you one,” he promised. “A nice shiny red one.”
That was the last time she ever saw him.
Her mother arrived at the Hislops unexpectedly and told the family she had to take her daughter back into San Francisco. The date was December 15, 1930, in the midst of the Depression.
As Lana remembered: “At first, I thought she was going to tell me she was pregnant, because I had learned that she was dating a lot of different men.”
In the city, Mildred told her the bad news. Virgil had been murdered the previous evening. It turned out that he’d had a winning streak in a poker game in the basement of The San Francisco Chronicle. As he left the game, he’d told the other players that he was going to buy a bicycle “for my little girl” with his winnings. The next morning, his badly beaten body was found at the corner of Minnesota and Mariposa Streets. He’d been bludgeoned with a blackjack. His shoes were found near his body, but his left foot was bare—his sock had been removed. Both Mildred and Lana knew that he kept his money in his left sock.
Lana screamed when she realized the importance of that news. “I killed him!” she shouted at her mother. “If I hadn’t asked for that bike, he’d be alive today.”
That same day, Mildred escorted Lana to a funeral home, where she lifted her up to stare into the coffin holding her dead father. She remembered his face as looking like a wax dummy. Mildred asked if she wanted to kiss her dead father, but the thought of kissing a corpse horrified her. She begged to be taken away.
The next afternoon, mother and daughter attended Virgil’s funeral at Presidia, where five uniformed soldiers fired their rifles into the air in a final salute paying homage to Virgil’s heroic war efforts in 1918.
Mildred later summed up her feelings at the time to both Lana and her friends: “My life has been wayward,” she said, “moving from place to place like a vagabond. I was always searching for something, but never found it. Whatever joy I felt with Virgil was just temporary. It would soon disappear as disappointment and disillusionment set in. Because of the rough life I’ve endured, I think I should be forgiven for any mistakes in my future, including my failure as a mother.”
After the funeral, Mildred drove Lana back to the Hislops in Modesta, a place that Lana loathed. But she’d be forced to live there for nearly another year. One day, what Lana later called “my months as a slave” came to an end. It was a Sunday, and Lana, while ironing, burned Mrs. Hislop’s favorite dress. When the woman found out, she’d exploded into a rage and beat Lana so severely, she had to go to the hospital.
Mildred heard about this and rushed to the bed of her daughter, who shared the room with two other patients. She inspected her daughter’s black-and-blue body, and the doctor told her that Lana had also been hit on the head, suffering a
concussion.
Upon her release, Lana thought that she was going to be allowed to live with Mildred again. But her mother said no. Lana suspected that Mildred was living with some boyfriend who didn’t want her to move in.
Instead, through some connection, she found lodgings for Lana with a large Sicilian family in Lodi, outside San Francisco
Unlike the Hislops, the Sicilians became almost foster parents to Lana. The house was small but big enough to sleep mama, papa, and three of their sons and two daughters, one of whom was Lana’s age. Her name was Pier, and she shared a bedroom with the newcomer. In exchange for housing and feeding her daughter, Mildred gave the family $20 a week.
Once again, she was enrolled in a Catholic school, which she attended five days a week with Pier. She enjoyed the family meals—pasta every night—and learned to drink wine, which was always weakened with water. “Italians don’t believe in making children wait until they’re eighteen before tasting vino,” Lana recalled.
She also remembered that if she had any complaints at all, it was from papa, insisting she sit on his lap for long periods of time. “He was just a little too friendly, if you get my drift,” Lana later said.
On Sunday nights, the family gathered around the piano for sing-alongs, mostly Sicilian favorites. Lana learned some of the songs so she could join in. The family liked her voice so much, they urged her to audition for The Major Bowes Amateur Hour, a popular radio show broadcast from San Francisco at the time.
“I performed a number ‘The Basin Street Blues,’ but I was no Lena Horne,” she recalled. “I not only lost, but some of the real singers made fun of me. I decided then and there that stardom was out of the question for me. I was not a performer. I might begin to dream of becoming a dress designer, not only designing and making my own clothes, but for other stylish women as well.”
Finally, Mildred came for her daughter and moved her out of the Sicilian family house and in with Chila Meadows, with whom they shared an apartment in San Francisco’s Richmond district. A kindly woman, Chila had a son, George, and a daughter, Hazel.
“They became the brother and sister to me that I never had,” Lana recalled.
She was enrolled into Presidio Junior High School, and it was here that Lana captured her first male heart. A tall, slim, blonde-haired boy, William Gerst, developed a passionate crush on her, falling madly in love, or in “puppy love” with her.
For Valentine’s Day, she was the only girl in her class who received a heart-shaped red box filled with creamy chocolates. For years, Lana kept that empty red box as a remembrance of her first love.
Her greatest thrill at the time was not boys, but the handsome young men on the movie screen. She and her mother tried to see every romantic feature playing at the local Bijou. Mildred admired Kay Francis, especially her fabulous wardrobe. She even styled her hair like Francis did.
But for Lana, it was always a Clark Gable or Robert Taylor movie which thrilled her. She saw Gable in Manhattan Melodrama, Forsaking All Others, The Call of the Wild, and Mutiny on the Bounty. She tried never to miss a Robert Taylor movie, including Society Doctor, Small Town Girl, and Magnificent Obsession.
“I saved the nickels that mother gave me for lunch until they added up to a quarter. Then I would rush off to the movies to see those beautiful men on the screen.”
“When I saw Tyrone Power in Lloyd’s of London, I could not believe that any man could be that gorgeous. The first time he appeared on the screen, I swooned. Never in my wildest dreams did I realize that in a few short years, I would not only be making love to both Robert and Clark on and off the screen, but in time, I would meet Tyrone, the love of my life.”
When Lana entered Washington High School, she became a cheerleader. “She wore a white skirt and sweater with our school colors of red and gray,” said Willie Edmonds. “All the boys were crazy about her, when she jumped up and down and showed off her gams. She was really hot, but the word was that she didn’t put out, unlike some of the other girls. I guess she was saving it for some guy.”
On the home front, Mildred was finding it harder and harder to make a living during the Depression. She was a widow with a single child to support. She missed many days of work at the beauty parlor because she was prone to respiratory ailments. She came down with what is known as “the San Joaquin Valley Fungus,” a lung ailment, which meant she coughed a lot. A lot of the patrons didn’t want her to work on their hair because they told her boss that they feared she was infected with something contagious.
In a doctor’s office, she was told that the frequent fogs of San Francisco were bad for her lungs. He advised her to move to a drier climate, like Los Angeles.
“Mother had a friend in Los Angeles, Gladys Heath,” Lana recalled. “Shephoned Gladys, whom she called ‘Gladdy.’ She had a spare room and could accommodate us in her apartment.”
“Come on down,” Gladdy said.
The next day, Mildred packed all their possessions and agreed to split the gas bill with a fellow beautician, Stella Tiffin, who was driving to Los Angeles to attend to her ailing mother.
There wasn’t much room in the car for all their possessions, so Mildred tied their suitcases to the top of the car with a rope. Lana remembered that Stella was a chatterbox with a fondness for stepping on the brake all the time. She was a nervous driver with a tendency to panic whenever another car approached. One afternoon, as they neared the town of Paso Robles, the rain began to pour down heavily. Approaching a truck, Stella slammed on the brakes. The road was slippery, and, as she braked, she lost control of the car. It skidded off the highway and into a large drainage ditch, where it flipped over.
Stella escaped with minor injuries, but Mildred suffered two cracked ribs and had to go to the emergency room of the nearby hospital. Lana ended up with a bump on her forehead, the size of a large egg, and a severe cut on her right arm from a shard of shattered window glass.
That night, they found lodgings in a rundown motor court. “It reminded me of the place where Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable landed in It Happened One Night,” Lana said.
The car was pulled from the ditch and, although it was caked with mud, it was still in running order.
All bandaged, Mildred sat in the front seat, Lana in the back, as Stella headed south to Los Angeles once again. “Her car shook, rattled, and rolled all the way there,” Lana later said. “We looked like one motley crew.”
Stella wanted to be rid of Lana and Mildred and dumped them at the intersection of Highland Avenue and Sunset Boulevard. Mildred put through a call to Gladdy, who drove over to pick them up. “We must have looked like the saddest mother-and-daughter refugees in L.A.,” Lana said.
Gladdy had a little Andalusian-style house on Glencoe Way. Mildred and Gladdy occupied the two bedrooms, and Lana was assigned a cot in the utility room, where the ironing was done.
The next week, Mildred found work at the Lois Williams Beauty Salon, which was only an eight-block walk from their little house. The beauticians made it known to their patrons that they’d be capable of crafting, on demand, replicas of the hair-dos of their favorite movie stars—Jean Harlow, Kay Francis, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, whomever.
School had already begun when Lana enrolled at Hollywood High School.
Within a month, her life would change for all time.
***
In September of 1936, Lana Turner (then known as Judy) headed for Hollywood High School, near the corner of West Sunset Boulevard and North Highland Avenue. Founded in 1903, it had begun as a two-room schoolhouse. In time, it became the most famous high school in America because of all the movie stars who were enrolled there, none more legendary than Lana Turner and Judy Garland.
Lana never pretended to be a good student, and simply could not comprehend mathematics at all. Her mother urged her to take a class in typing, thinking that she might find a job as a secretary. “I’d rather be a dress designer,” Lana countered.
One day in late October, Lana decid
ed to skip out on the typing class since at the last session, she’d broken a fingernail. She headed across the street to the Top High Malt Café, where she had a nickel to spend on a Coca-Cola.
She had become well aware of her looks. A classmate, Nanette Fabray, remembered her. “I had never seen a more beautiful girl, and Hollywood High was filled with beauties, most of whom, or so it seemed, wanted to become a movie star. When Judy strolled down the hall, the other girls just stopped and stared at her, mostly with envy. The boys often whistled. I know this sounds like a contradiction, but her face was innocent yet reflected a know-it-all look. Even her teachers predicted stardom for her.”
There was a problem: Lana couldn’t act. She tried out for a school play, but was rejected. The drama teacher gave her lines to read, and she was asked to play a scene that was charged with emotion. But during her performance, “her face was carved in stone,” according to the teacher. “She read her lines like reciting a recipe in a cookbook.”
There was another problem, too. She couldn’t sing or dance, except a few steps Virgil had taught her.
In vivid contrast, her classrooms were filled with talented boys and girls, often the children of movie stars. Fabray herself had performed in vaudeville as a child and would later enjoy a big career as an actress, singer, and dancer in the musical theater of the 1940s and 50s.
At Top Hat, Lana sipped her coke, acutely aware that some middle-aged man at the end of the counter was staring at her. “I felt he was undressing me with his eyes. I wore this white sweater, and he kept looking down at my breasts.”
At the time, she was worthy of attention. Her measurements were 35-24 ½-34 ½. At the age of fifteen, she stood 5’3”, with perfectly formed breasts. Large blue-gray eyes were set in a beautiful face crowned by silky auburn hair. She had a peach-colored complexion that was free of any imperfection, and her skin was so porcelain smooth she could have advertised a skin-care product.
[Indeed, by the early 1940s, she would appear in ads in magazines across the country, promoting the glories of Lux Toilet Soap. The ads cited her as having “the world’s most beautiful complexion.”]
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