In an attempt to add a sweeping kind of grandeur to the clunky script, Goldwyn had signed a cast of 5,000 extras, and Lana felt lost among the hordes. On her first day on the set, she was introduced to him.
He shocked Lana when he informed her that he had instructed the makeup department to pluck her natural eyebrows and to apply fake ones, glued on each morning and yanked off at the end of every day of filming.
Each morning, any new growth of her eyebrows was stripped away, a rather painful process. She also had to wear a Chinese-inspired black wig that had to be glued around her face with spirit gum. Regrettably, after weeks of punishment, her real eyebrows never grew back, and throughout the remaining years of her life, she had to pencil them in.
“Samuel Goldwyn in The Adventures of Marco Polo miscast me as an Oriental siren,” Lana said. “Instead of vamping Gary Cooper, I ended up with an unappetizing Chinese war lord (Alan Hale). Not only that, but makeup plucked my eyebrows to make me look Chinese. They never grew back.”
As dictated by the script, Marco Polo falls madly in love with the Princess Kukachiun, who is betrothed to the King of Persia. Goldwyn had cast Sigrid Gurie as the Princess, and was giving her a massive publicity buildup as “Norway’s Answer to Greta Garbo,” and as “The Siren of the Fjords.”
Lana never got to meet her screen idol, Gary Cooper, who played Marco Polo in the film until the end of the shoot. She introduced herself to him while he was having lunch in the commissary, and was surprised that this entire meal consisted of Sauerkraut. “It keeps you regular,” he told her. He was leaving that afternoon for a vacation in Idaho.
“Mr. Cooper,” she said. “I’m your greatest fan. I think you are the most beautiful man in pictures. No one can top you. I even dream about you.”
“I think you’re a right pretty girl,” he said. “But jailbait. Just how old are you?”
“I’m about seventeen,” she answered.
“I’ll make a deal with you,” he said. “Call me on your eighteenth birthday, and I’ll give you the thrill of your life.”
“That’s a promise I’m going to hold you to,” she said. “You are more of a dreamboat offscreen than on, and you’re pretty special on screen, too. What a man!”
“Grow up soon and get back to me, girl,” he told her. “I can’t wait.”
The Adventures of Marco Polo bombed at the box office. A critic for The New York Sun wrote: “In spite of the elaborate settings and the presence of Gary Cooper, it never quite lives up to its promise.”
John Mosher of The New Yorker called the film “a big disappointment, the dialogue having the swing of a bad libretto.”
The movie lost $700,000 at the box office, a monstrous sum in 1938.
When the film was re-released in 1945, Lana was at the peak of her career. The Goldwyn picture was advertised as “starring Gary Cooper with Lana Turner.”
***
Lana Turner’s days at Warner Brothers were numbered, as were Mervyn LeRoy’s. Under personal contract to the director, Lana was said to view him as a father figure, although she denied that. “He was more of a mentor,” she said. “I turned to him for guidance in my career. He taught me how to act, even how to dress.”
In his first appraisal of her outfits, he had compared her to a hooker, especially in her choice of imitation jewelry, a component of which included a large glass ring with rhinestones. “Don’t wear all that flashy fake jewelry that only Barbara Hutton could afford if it were real. You’re going to be a genuine movie star, the real thing, not some imitation. When you’re making the big bucks, you can afford genuine stones.”
“I took his advice,” she said. “When I became Queen of MGM, I bought my own diamonds, or else had my beaus—or husbands, as the case may be—buy diamonds for me, which is preferable, of course.”
During her brief stint at Warners, she met the studio mogul, Jack Warner, only once. He was used to working with such icons as Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, and George Raft. Abrupt, staccato, and ruthless, the film tycoon was not impressed with Lana, and predicted no future for her in movies.
In league with his brothers, Jack had been working in film production since 1910, and he had a cocky attitude when he came to judging future stars. “Gals like the Turner dame are a dime a dozen in Hollywood,” he told LeRoy.
When LeRoy informed Warner that he was going to shift over to better working conditions at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner responded, “Since Turner is under contract to you, take her along—and good riddance. All she’s got is a pair of bouncing boobs—no talent whatsoever.”
***
On the night Greg Bautzer was bedding some other movie star, Lana dated a number of beaus. She referred to them as “mere flings while I wait for the right man to give my heart to.”
Don Barry, who was about her same height, came into her life. He would soon be widely known as “Red” Barry after appearing in the highly successful 1940 film, Adventures of Red Ryder. A Texan from Houston, Barry had red hair to match his nickname.
“Mildred liked him because in some ways, he reminded her of Virgil,” Lana said. “She encouraged me to date him.”
Their first major public outing was at the 1937 premiere of The Life of Émile Zola at Graumann’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. Wearing a satin gown and a fur borrowed from wardrobe, Lana made a stunning appearance. Broadcasting from the lobby, George Jessel hailed her as “the beautiful Lana Turner, a rising young Hollywood star.”
During Barry’s dating of Lana, “he got lucky just one night,” she told Ann Rutherford. But during their brief romance, he gave her two bottles of expensive French perfume and a jeweled vanity case. Two weeks after she broke up with him, she got the bills for those two items.
Joan Crawford also dated Barry, and had a similar experience with him, although he presented her with more expensive presents—a white mink coat and a diamond necklace. Later, the merchants came to reclaim the items because Barry had not paid for them.
“Try me on for size,” Don Barry said when introduced to Lana. He was the shortest man she ever dated, vying for him with Joan Crawford. “He wasn’t my type, but a lot of fun...for a while. Actually, he preferred orgies.”
***
Another cowboy star, Tim Holt, briefly flitted in and out of Lana’s life during this period of intense (some said “promiscuous”) dating. Although he’d been born in Beverly Hills, he seemed completely at home on the range. The son of actor Jack Holt, Tim had dreamed of becoming a star of movie westerns ever since he was a boy.
At the time Lana met Tim, he was under contract to producer Walter Wanger. Against type, Orson Welles later cast Holt in his 1942 The Magnificent Ambersons.
***
Many suitors, some of whom were on the Hollywood A-list, pursued Lana, but not all of them were successful. A case in point was William Powell, born in 1892, the star with the sensually drooping eyelids. Dapper, suave, and ever so self-assured, he had a pencil mustache and slicked-back hair like George Raft. A true gentleman, he evoked a member of a turn-of-the-century barbershop quartet.
Lana had a brief fling with the cowboy star Tim Holt, pictured above. “Holt came and went from my life like a tumbling tumbleweed,” she said. “After he made love to me, he’d walk up and down the hall stark naked, practicing drawing his six-shooter. No, not that one!”
A major star at MGM, he would in time make fourteen Thin Man movies with Myrna Loy, based on the Nick and Nora Charles characters created by Dashiell Hamett. They were sophisticated sleuths always ready with a smart ass line as well as a bucket of ice for their dry martinis.
When Lana met Powell, he’d already been nominated for two Best Actor Oscars, one for The Thin Man (1934) and another for My Man Godfrey (1936), in which he had co-starred with his former wife, Carole Lombard.
Lana was introduced to him at the home of Mervyn LeRoy.
Well past his prime, he was in a rather shaky condition. In 1935, he had co-starred with Jean
Harlow in Reckless and had fallen in love with her. They had planned to be married. But at the age of 26, the platinum blonde goddess had died from uremia at the peak of her career.
He became morbidly depressed after learning of her death. To compound his misfortune, he’d undergone surgery, an experimental radium treatment for cancer which had greatly slowed him down.
He met Lana on the first night he’d ventured into the world again. He seemed enchanted with her, and she was awed by what a great star he was. Ironically, within a few short months, with her hair dyed blonde, she would be billed as “the new Jean Harlow.”
Powell called her for a date the following morning, and she accepted. He did most of the talking, even sharing his concept of what formed the perfect union between a man and a woman. “The man should be older, and the couple should be diametrically opposite each other.”
“Are you talking about any couple we know?” she asked, provocatively.
Powell was a charming suitor with impeccable manners. But the following day, she told her girlfriends, “Bill lacks sex appeal, at least for me.”
He sensed that, and on a subsequent date, he touted his other qualities, promising to guide her in her career and to help her fine-tune her acting.
He urged her to drop Henry Willson as her agent and to sign instead with Myron Selznick, the brother of producer David O. Selznick. “Myron is the best agent in the business and can do wonders for your career.”
“The Thin Man,” suave and dapper William Powell was well suited to any Art Deco café society of the 1920s or 1930s. “But I refused to become a replacement for Jean Harlow in his life,” Lana said.
On their third date, he took her to the home of his closest friends, Ronald Colman and Richard Barthelmess. As a trio, the men seemed to have bonded into something of a cultural clique, and she, a high school drop-out, often didn’t understand what they were talking about.
On their fifth date, he tried to seduce her, but, as she later told her girlfriends, “It didn’t work out. I had these painful menstrual cramps.”
As their dating proceeded, he was getting serious, calling her two or three times a day. She was drifting away. Although she admired his mind, sex was too important to her, and that’s why she turned once again to younger, more virile men.
As a gift, he sent her a lovely glass cabinet about five feet tall with mirrored shelves. In a note, he told her that the shelves were suitable only for holding the most expensive French perfumes.
She composed her thank-you note to him as a “kiss-off.”
“My dearest Bill, what a beautiful gift and how very thoughtful. But I fear those shelves will hold perfume purchased for me by other suitors. I’m so sorry. But I wish you all the best and thank you for the good times. Love, Lana.”
***
As Lana admitted in her highly unreliable memoirs, Greg Bautzer finally taught her what the female orgasm was. Her first with him would become one of thousands she’d experience in her romantic liaisons to come. “I did feel passion for him, and eventually, I did achieve orgasm,” she wrote. “But what I really wanted was to have Greg hold me, keep me safe in his arms.”
After Lana and Bautzer returned from a romantic holiday in Palm Springs, they learned that Bautzer’s mother had died.
Her death transpired on February 13, 1938. Blanche Bautzer Smith was fifty-four at the hour of her unexpected death. Lana attended the funeral of her lover’s mother at the Little Church of the Flowers at the Glendale Forest Lawn Mortuary.
In tears, Bautzer, twenty-seven years old at the time, told her, “No other woman will ever replace what my mother meant to me. No one!”
***
When he recovered a bit from his mother’s death, Bautzer started dating and seducing her again. A favorite nightclub of theirs was La Conga, where both of them, after some lessons from a teacher, became the best rumba dancers among the patrons.
To publicize both himself and Lana, Bautzer fed items to Hedda Hopper about his dating of Lana, which she published in her column in the Los Angeles Times. Bautzer ignored her rival, Louella Parsons.
Of course, in exchange all this free publicity, Hopper expected a series of expensive gifts above and beyond the fresh flowers that arrived at her doorstep from the attorney every morning.
At one point in their relationship, Bautzer and Lana made a pact. Should either of them tire of each other, one or the other were to send a box of red roses to the other’s home as a signal that their affair was over.
Bautzer had to fly to Chicago for two weeks to defend a client in a lawsuit. Before rushing to catch his plane, he called his florist and asked him to send Lana a dozen of the most beautiful white roses he had in stock. When the box arrived, Bautzer was airborne. She opened the box and burst into hysterical tears when she saw a dozen red roses.
During his time in Chicago, Bautzer was very busy. When he did try to phone her, he could not get through.
Two weeks went by, during which she regretted his loss. Then one afternoon, he phoned after his return to his home.
When Lana came to the phone, Bautzer spoke to her in his most seductive voice, “My darling, I’ve missed you so. Dreamed of you every night.”
“You mean, we’re on again?” she asked.
“We were never off,” he protested.
“Your damn florist sent me a box of red roses. I’ve been devastated ever since.”
“That fucker! I’ll fire him! I ordered WHITE roses as a token of my love.”
That night, as Lana later confessed to Ann Rutherford, “Greg gave me the greatest sex of my life. Three orgasms before the rooster crowed.”
***
“Every time I get involved with an actor at Warner Brothers, I find that Jane Wyman got to the guy before me,” complained Lana over lunch one day with actor Alan Hale, who had co-starred with her in The Adventures of Marco Polo. Such was the case with Wayne Morris, on whom she had had a really big crush.
Ever since she saw Wayne play this boxer in Kid Galahad (1937), she had wanted to date him. That was the film that made him a leading man. He played a former bellhop turned boxer in a Warner Brothers picture that also starred Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis, and Humphrey Bogart.
The first time she was ever alone with Morris was when she maneuvered to get him to invite her to lunch in the commissary. Naturally, they talked about movies, especially those at Warner Brothers.
“Before I got into the business I wasn’t much into films,” he said. “I liked going to movie palaces, however—not so much to see what was showing. The upper balcony was a good place where me and a girl could make out.”
He had high hopes for his career, telling her he’d heard from director Michael Curtiz that Jack Warner had thoughts of grooming him to become the next Errol Flynn. “That hellraiser might go too far, and I’ll be ready to step into parts slated for him.”
“Flynn is just getting started,” she said. “Isn’t it a bit early to be grooming the next Errol Flynn?”
“That’s how it goes in this town.”
“Don’t tell me that the next Lana Turner is being groomed while I’m still at the starting gate.”
Speaking with a slow drawl, Morris, unlike most stars, had actually been born in Los Angeles. Growing up to become a handsome, tall, muscular blonde, he had played football at Los Angeles Junior College before getting a job as a forest ranger.
He studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse where a Warners talent scout had spotted him, That led to a contract in 1937. It wasn’t a very good contract. In Kid Galahad, he was paid only $66 a week, as opposed to Robinson who got $50,000 for the picture.
“When we made the movie, Davis kept inviting me into her dressing room, and I kept rejecting her come-on. I asked Bogie how to get this hot-to-trot mama off my back. I told him ‘I’m not into mothers this year.’”
“Wayne Morris was blonde and I hadn’t become one yet,” Lana said. “When I started dating this handsome stud, Jane Wyman vied for him. She
praised his ‘football player physique and virility,’ but I was more awed by ‘jumbo.’”
[At the time, Morris said this, he was 23 years old, Davis only 29.]
“Bogie suggested I throw her a mercy fuck, but I still refused, earning her undying animosity. I like ‘em young. Sweet sixteen like you, Lana baby.”
“Davis wanted me so bad, she even went to Michael Curtiz, the director, and urged him to have the screen writers insert a passionate love scene between us. But Curtiz, thank god, refused.”
During the course of Lana’s brief fling with him, Morris invited her to spend the weekend with him at a rented villa in Palm Springs. “I didn’t know what I was getting into,” she confessed to LeRoy. “I was carried away with the magic of Palm Springs. It conjured up images for me of those silent screen stars like Valentino and Theda Bara, who came here for ‘off-the-record’ weekends. I liked the desert atmosphere of palm trees and sipping cocktails around a swimming pool.”
But, as she admitted, it didn’t work out that way. Once they settled in, Morris stripped off all his clothes. “He was justifiably proud of this dangling thing he called ‘Jumbo,’ and really showed it off.”
He didn’t bother to get dressed, even when his guests arrived. She was expecting he might know some movie stars, but his friends were on the fringe of the industry—grips, technicians, cameramen.
Within the hour, all the guests, male and female, had their clothes off, frolicking in the pool. Lana refused to strip down and retreated to one of the villa’s bedrooms.
Three hours later, Morris joined her. “His idea of seducing a woman is to jump on her and pound for dear life, asserting his masculinity. His technique is to overpower with brute strength.”
“Needless to say, my big crush on him ended that weekend,” she said.
Wayne was a genuine exhibitionist.
He told Lana that, “In Hollywood, it pays to advertise your assets, like you did with those bouncing boobs in They Won’t Forget.”
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