Jackie Cooper (center), a decade and a carload of sexual experience later, in 1940, with budding (and competing) ingénues who included, left to right, Judy Garland, Bonita Granville, his girlfriend (Lana Turner), and Robert Stack, Lana’s future lover.
He and Lana were driven to a movie palace, where they sat in orchestra seats, unlike her experience with Alexis Smith, who had sought out a remote balcony perch.
They’d come in late for the movie, but when the lights went on, many fans in the theater asked Cooper for his autograph, an experience that Lana herself in a few short years would experience, and would continue to experience throughout the rest of her life.
Later, they were driven to a hamburger joint serving greasy food. As she nibbled on French fries, she discussed dreams for her future. Mostly, however, he wanted to talk about himself. She was soon to find out that talking about one’s self was the favorite conversational pursuit of most Hollywood actors.
Cooper was a young man who kissed and told. He boasted of his experience as a lover, having been seduced by Kathryn, a twenty-year-old chorus girl who lived across the street from him in Ocean Beach. At the time, he was only thirteen.
His friend, Bill Smith, who once caught Cooper in bed with an older vaudeville actress, said, “Coop was one smart little son of a bitch. He could always get the broads.”
Lana was fascinated by Judy Garland, and had read that she and Cooper had dated. She was eager for details, and he seemed flattered that she was viewing him as a young man of the world. He told her he’d met Judy, who was nine months older than him, when they appeared on a radio show hosted by Wallace Beery.
“Our romance began with a walk on the beach one night,” he said. “A kiss, another kiss, and the inevitable happened.”
In many ways, Lana envied Garland who, as a young girl, seemed to be having experiences usually associated with women far older than she was.
“Judy is very fickle,” Cooper said. “After three months, she dumped me for another actor, Billy Halop.”
On their third date, the young actor asked their driver to divert his rear-view mirror. He made a play for Lana, trying to feel her up. But she wasn’t yet ready to relinquish her virginity. She later admitted, however, that she gave in for some “heavy petting.”
He unbuttoned his trousers to present her with an erect penis. She’d never seen a man with an erection before.
Some wag later joked, “After Jackie Cooper, Lana Turner never saw a man without an erection.”
Like Garland, Lana dated Cooper for only about three months before she took up with another actor about her same age. And although Cooper’s glory days as an actor seemed to be receding, her new boyfriend was on the dawn of a spectacular career, and about to become the biggest box office attraction in Hollywood.
He was Mickey Rooney.
Subsequently, she broke off her romance with Cooper, with the promise, “Let’s be friends.”
***
Christmas of 1937 was rapidly approaching, and Lana was busy. She wasn’t emoting before the camera, but selling lingerie at a fast pace in the shop where she worked on Hollywood Boulevard.
Except for that day’s work on A Star is Born (1937), no other job had surfaced, although a photographer had approached her about posing for some nudes. She turned him down, although the blonde who would later “replace” her, Marilyn Monroe, would eventually say “yes” to an equivalent request.
One day, during one of those chance encounters that often happens in Hollywood, Solly Baiano, a former tennis champion representing California in competitions, came into the dress shop to purchase lingerie for his girlfriend.
At the time, he was working for Henry Willson, and he recognized Lana from the 8” x 10” glossies that Willson kept of his mostly shirtless male clients.
He introduced himself to Lana, and was struck by her beauty. “If only she would take off fifteen pounds.”
Baiano, in his capacity as a talent scout, often “hustled the flesh” of unknown newcomers to casting directors at various studios. For the most part, the orders transmitted by the studio bosses, through him, were usually the same. “Walk for me, turn around, lift your skirt.”
With Willson, Lana had made many calls on various studios. So far, every casting director had told Willson, “Don’t call us, we’ll get back to you.” Of course, they never did.
Seeing Lana in the flesh gave Baiano an idea. His best friend was Barron Polan, an assistant to director Mervyn LeRoy. He’d heard that LeRoy had been unsuccessful in casting “the right girl” to open his latest drama, Murder in the Deep South. He thought Lana might be just what LeRoy was seeking.
That evening, he phoned Polan, who agreed to set up an appointment with the director at Warner Brothers the next day. Lana agreed to call in sick for work at the lingerie shop that day, even though it was the Christmas rush, and the store was mobbed.
In the meantime, Lana spent her night learning, “Who in the hell is Mervyn LeRoy? Never heard of him.”
She may not have heard of LeRoy, but ninety percent of Hollywood had. Although he would go on to greater glory as a director, Mervyn LeRoy was known at Warner Brothers for making mostly taut, punchy, and socially critical films such as Little Caesar (1930), starring Edward G. Robinson and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) starring Paul Muni. His latest film was based on Ward Greene’s novel, Death in the Deep South, a social melodrama about prejudice and corruption at the trial and subsequent lynching of an innocent man.
One of the most astute and talented directors at Warners, LeRoy had helped launch the careers of a young Ginger Rogers (with whom he had an affair) and Loretta Young.
LeRoy wanted Gable for the role of Massara in Little Caesar (1930), but Jack Warner laughed at the screen test. “Look at the ears on that jerk. You wasted $500 on testing him. Give the role to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.”
LeRoy had launched his career as an actor himself, but later switched to producing and directing. In time, he would make 75 movies over a period of four decades, boasting, “I never repeated myself, and I never made a flop.”
Director Mervyn LeRoy always took the credit for putting that schoolgirl sweater onto the newly emerging Lana Turner.
She would become known as America’s “Sweater Girl,” increasing sales of that garment across the nation. “I wanted her to have a ‘flesh impact,’” as he called it. “As inexperienced as she was, she pulled it off like a pro.”
Among his greatest future successes were “Madame Curie (1943); Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944); and the religious epic Quo Vadis? (1951). He also produced The Wizard of Oz (1939), starring Judy Garland.
Before he met Lana, LeRoy estimated that he had interviewed at least thirty young women, finding none of them suitable for the role of Mary Clay. “I wanted a girl who was very sexy, but very clean and wholesome. None of the girls I saw were right for the part until Judy Turner walked in. I knew from the first minute that she was right. Fortunately, she was wearing a high school sweater. The role called for the girl to be a knock-out in a sweater. Judy (later, Lana) sure had the right equipment.”
“I was shuffling through papers on my desk when she walked in. At first, I didn’t look up, expecting another disappointment. When I did look up, I saw this girl with dark hair standing in the doorway, her nervous hands shaking. She had on a blue cotton dress. Her hair was impossible looking, as if she’d never run a comb through it. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, and she was so shy, she could hardly look me in the face. Yet there was something about her I knew was right. She had tremendous appeal. An audience would respond to that.”
When LeRoy stood up from behind her desk, she found him almost as short as she was. Out of the corner of his mouth extended a large stogie. “You’re quite pretty. Tell me what experience you’ve had?”
“Not a thing,” she said. “No acting class. No elocution lessons.”
“I see,” he answered. “Wait outside, if you don’t mind.”
She s
at in his outer office for at least a half-hour while he conferred with Baiano, whom he had summoned
Then LeRoy emerged from his inner office, walking toward Lana and reaching for her hand. “The role is yours. It’s a small part: Off camera, you get raped and murdered at the beginning of the flick. The part pays fifty bucks. Are you ready to sign a contract?”
“I’ll have to ask my mother,” she answered.
That night, Mildred agreed and on February 12, 1937, Lana signed her first movie contract, the debut of many more to come. It wasn’t a contract with Warner Brothers, but a personal contract with LeRoy.
It called for her to begin at the starting salary of $50 a week, twice what Mildred earned at the beauty parlor.
LeRoy met with her two days later in his office. “I don’t like the name Judy Turner. It’s not special.”
“My full name is Julia Jean,” she answered.
“That’s even worse. Turner’s okay, very American. But we need a first name, something glamorous.”
They went down through the alphabet from Anne to Betty and on to Irene and Joan before halting at the Ls. “Perhaps Leonore. Loretta has already been taken. Lurlene, no. Lulu is too much.”
Suddenly, Lana, or so she recalled later, asked “What about Lana? Pronounced Lah-nuh.”
LeRoy thought for a minute. “Sounds sexy to me. Lana Turner it is!”
Years later, the actress recalled, “At the time, I didn’t know that Lana in Spanish meant wool.”
LeRoy later disputed her claim, saying that he named her Lana after one of his old girlfriends.
The next day, she appeared in the wardrobe department for a fitting of her one outfit, a skirt, a blue sweater, high-heeled pumps, and a saucy beret.
Contrary to legend, she did wear a brassiere beneath her sweater. Lined with silk, and with no uplift, it allowed her breasts to bounce freely up and down.
Over the years, it was assumed that her walk along a street was her only scene in the movie. But actually, there was another scene at a soda fountain, where she orders a malt. She tells the soda jerk, “Drop an egg in it as fresh as you are.”
She later recalled, “That may explain the legend of my being discovered drinking a malt at Schwab’s.”
In addition to that, an opening scene in a classroom shows her seductively asking her flustered male teacher (Edward Norris) to help her with a school assignment.
After exiting from the drugstore, she is seen walking down the sidewalk, a scene that would become one of the most iconic in movie history until Marilyn Monroe did “that walk” in the 1950 film, Niagara.
“Lana’s debut didn’t require great screen acting,” LeRoy said. “All she had to do was walk, and, boy, did she know how to do that. I had the music scored to match the up-and-down movements of tits and ass.”
In a long, 75-foot tracking shot, the camera followed her, not just her breasts bouncing, but her “rotating buttocks” too. Throughout the scene, she held her shoulders back and her head high.
Lana had about eighteen lines of dialogue, but never was the word “rape” uttered, since it was forbidden by the censors of that era. In fact, her rape and murder are suggested—but never depicted—on the screen.
By the end of the shoot, Lana was informed by LeRoy that he’d changed the title of the picture to They Won’t Forget.
Lana had no scenes with the other actors in the movie. However, after the shoot was finished, she hung around the set for the next few days, wanting to see how movies were made. The star of the film was the venerable actor Claude Rains, who had been born in London and had vast stage experience. She had seen him in The Invisible Man (1933). He had been cast as an ambitious and immoral Southern lawyer in They Won’t Forget.
The only other actor of note was Otto Kruger, who played the lawyer for the accused. His character of Gleason is skilled enough to save his client from the electric chair, but not from a lynching.
Once a leading matinee idol on the stage, Kruger had made such films as Chained (1934), with Joan Crawford and Clark Gable.
Another newcomer like Lana, Gloria Dickson (as Sybil Hale) was widely heralded in movie magazines before the picture was released. She was written up as “New Star of the Year,” but when They Won’t Forget was shown, Lana got all the media attention.
Edward Morris played the doomed teacher, Robert Hale, who is falsely accused of the murder. He’d married Ann Sheridan that year and brought her to the set. Sheridan complained to Lana about how much she detested being billed as “The Oomph Girl.”
Soon, Lana would be labeled “The Sweater Girl.”
In a few short months, both Sheridan and Lana would be considered for the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind.
Lana and Sheridan would have another bizarre link because of a so-called scientific survey by Dr. Joseph Catton, a Stanford University psychiatrist. Based on his survey, he rated the three sexiest actresses in Hollywood, giving Marlene Dietrich 90%, Lana 86%, and Ann 85%.
***
LeRoy didn’t let Lana and Mildred see the rushes, but they attended a preview at the Warner Brothers Hollywood Theater. The moment Lana did “the walk” on screen, a man in the back yelled out, “Get a load of that kid! Whatta pair of tits!”
His remark was met with hoots and whistles.
Lana later said, “Mother and I scrooched down in our seats, covering our faces. This Thing with the bouncing bosom came on the screen. Not only that, but her ass was undulating. I was beyond embarrassment.”
In tears, Lana fled from the theater and hailed a taxi with Mildred. They rode to Gladdy’s home in silence. “I was so self-conscious, I tried not to bounce in the back seat of the taxi.”
The next morning, she phoned her agent, Henry Willson. “Oh, Henry,” she cried out. “I almost died watching myself. Men were screaming obscenities about my breasts. I hope I don’t look like that girl up there on the screen.
“Fortunately, you do!” Willson said.
Billy Wilkerson of The Hollywood Reporter wrote the film’s first review. “Short on playing time is the role of the murdered schoolgirl played by Lana Turner. It is worthy of more than passing note. This young lady has vivid beauty, personality, and charm.”
The National Board of Review named They Won’t Forget one of the best dramas of the year in its depiction of prejudice and corruption. Life magazine put it on its list of American film classics. Writing in The New York Herald Tribune, Howard Barnes pronounced it “a vivid work of art.”
Frank S. Nugent in The New York Times labeled the movie “a brilliant sociological drama and a trenchant film editorial against intolerance and hatred.”
In 1987, the same story was dramatized in a four-hour TV miniseries called The Murder of Mary Phagan, written by Larry McMurtry and starring Jack Lemmon and Kevin Spacey.
As soon as the film was released, Warners was swamped with fan mail. “Tell us more about that girl in the sweater.” Within the month, Lana had become America’s “Sweater Girl.”
She hated the label. “It took years of hard work to get rid of it,” she said.
Henry Willson went with a handsome young actor to see They Won’t Forget.
When he left the movie palace, he told his lover, “Tonight there’s another star that has risen in the firmament. She’s Lana Turner.”
Few movie fans at the time of ingénue Lana’s propulsion into fame as the shy and relatively awkward “Sweater Girl” could have imagined the cinematic heights she’d eventually climb.
When Lana began “The Walk,” in a tight skirt and dangerously high heels, she could have no idea that she was walking into screen immortality, shooting one of the most famous scenes in Hollywood history as the innocent Mary Clay.
With her breasts bouncing up and down, “She was a flower waiting to be deflowered,” in the words of one critic. Another wrote, “A girl as tempting as Lana Turner would definitely bring out the rapist beast in men that lurks deep within their dark desires.”
Ch
apter Two
So Many Men, So Little Time
Lana Dates a Future President
When Lana Turner and Ronald Reagan were both struggling contract players at Warner Brothers, they posed for publicity pictures, which led to their dating. The picture above, with the young stars in riding outfits, was taken at a ranch.
“He taught me how to ride a horse before getting in the saddle himself. Did I say that diplomatically?”
He told his close friend, Dick Powell, “Lana was one of my greatest conquests, a flamboyant feather in my cap.”
Later, she denied having an affair with him, perhaps because of her burgeoning friendship with MGM starlet Nancy Davis. “She guarded him like Fort Knox,” Lana claimed.
After signing her first contract—partly for fun and partly as a career-building device—Lana set out to become the “Queen of the Night.” She was seen dancing at all the hot spots of Los Angeles: Ciro’s, the Trocadero, Palladium, Mocambo, the Clover Club, and invariably, Cocoanut Grove. She was attired in form-fitting designer gowns borrowed from wardrobe at Warner Brothers.
Thus began a series of dizzying romantic encounters with some of Tinseltown’s handsomest actors. She was later said to have invented the tagline, “So many men, so little time.”
Depending on the night and their schedule, she was spotted with, among others, handsome, blonde, and beefy Wayne Morris (“my first big crush”), or Ronald Reagan (“he showered before and after our encounters”).
She also dated western star Don (“Red”) Barry (“only two inches taller than me but he made up for those inches elsewhere”), and George Montgomery (“before Dinah Shore snared him”).
Some young studs had a more lasting impact: Victor Mature (“my biggest thrill), attorney Greg Bautzer (“he took my virginity”), or singer Tony Martin (“he always hit the high note—never failed”).
Along the way she also found time to allow herself to be wooed by some of the biggest marquee names on the Silver Screen—Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, James Stewart, and Mickey Rooney (“he knocked me up”).
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