“One thing led to another, and a talent scout from Warners discovered me. I sailed to New York in November of 1934 aboard the SS Paris.”
“In New York, I asked this Warners’ publicity agent to take me to Harlem. I wanted to see Harlem more than any other place. In this seedy dance club, I met this exotic beauty, a real African princess—or so I thought. I quickly slipped away with her to a darkened part of the balcony, looking forward to some really hot action. But within minutes, I discovered that ‘she’ was a ‘he,’ but I was too far gone then to protest. Surely, she had the most talented throat in all of Harlem.”
After the cruise, back in Hollywood, Lana supplied very few details about what actually happened during that long weekend in Catalina. “It was total debauchery, with nothing off limits, not my scene at all. I was too well bred as a young lady for some of the stuff going on. People, I learned, go crazy snorting cocaine.”
“At times, when he was sober, I realized that Errol was not only attractive and charming but well read. He was far more intelligent than the rest of the crew and could even talk about Shakespeare, stuff like that. He had read everything Rudyard Kipling had ever written.”
“Unlike nearly all actors I would meet in the future, he was not ambition-crazed. He believed that a man should live for the moment and let tomorrow take care of itself.”
“His drinking, or so I feared, would lead to his self-destruction, but he brushed aside my concerns. I told him he should lay of the booze at least until sunset.”
He answered, “Look at it this way. By starting to drink early in the morning, I’ll have a head up over the other blokes. For me, I will be ready for party time all day long and into the night. I don’t want to be a sucker who goes to his grave without ever having lived.”
***
The call came in right before midnight on a Tuesday. It was from Mervyn LeRoy with big news.
“I’ve just returned from the home of Louis B. Mayer. He made me an offer I can’t refuse. Six thousand dollars a week. A salary like that is almost unheard of.”
“Wow!” she said. “That sounds great. Can I go with you?”
“As my discovery, you’re part of the deal. Mayer knows about you and, unlike Jack Warner, he thinks you have potential star power.”
“That’s terrific,” she said. “MGM has my favorite male stars, Clark Gable and Robert Taylor.”
“I got a salary increase for you. A hundred big ones a week.”
“That’s a lot of money.”
“There may be problems,” he said. “Mayer will want you to give him a blow-job, and your first picture will be with that runt, Mickey Rooney, and you’ll have to fight that midget off.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “After Greg Bautzer and Errol Flynn, I sure know how to handle men.”
Starlet Lana Turner arrived on the lot of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, little knowing that within months, she would reign as its queen.
Chapter Three
Damn You, Scarlett O’Hara
Mickey Rooney (aka Andy Hardy) Knocks Up Lana Turner
It seemed inevitable that the actor hailed as “Hollywood’s most glamorous male star” and Lana Turner, heralded as its “most glamorous female star” would come together (no pun intended).
Later in his short life (1909-1959), Errol Flynn claimed he’d seduced from 12,000 to 14,000 “people.” He racked up that number by having sex with four or five at once, often in his dressing room while filming.
Lana never made siuch a claim for herself, perhaps settling for 150 conquests.
Hardened to some degree after her inaugural stint at Warner Brothers, Lana Turner arrived, upbeat and enthusiastic, at the gates of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the “Tiffany of Movie Studios.” It was home to such superstars as Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Spencer Tracy, John and Lionel Barrymore, Hedy Lamarr, and that nightingale, Jeanette MacDonald. In time, it would develop, nurture, and promote such future stars as Grace Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland, Ava Gardner, and Esther Williams.
It would be at MGM that Lana set out on the road to worldwide fame and glory. It would be from a base within MGM that she’d become a benchmark for Hollywood glamor during the war years when American GIs made her one of their most desired pin-up girls.
Although in years to come, snobby film critics would deride her acting, her presence on the screen was electrifying.
As she emerged as a rising star at MGM, young women across America were already padding their bras in imitation of her “Sweater Girl” look from They Won’t Forget.
Twelve days after turning seventeen on February 20, 1938, she signed with MGM. On her first day at the studio, Mervyn LeRoy told her that her debut picture would be Love Finds Andy Hardy, in which she would co-star with two future legends, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, the two most talented young performers in Hollywood.
Enabled by her new $100-a-week paycheck, Lana and Mildred moved into a rented house on Kirkwood Drive, high up Laurel Canyon. Built on the side of a mountain the house was reached after a climb of seventeen steps. Each of the women had a bedroom of her own, and there was also a separate bedroom for guests, and a working, marble-framed fireplace in the living room.
Lana wanted all the furnishings and walls to be in white. Sprawled before the fireplace was a white bearskin rug still attached to the animal’s skull, still with its ferocious teeth, the furry face of the bear trapped in its death agony.
With her new riches, she put a down payment on a fire-engine red roadster. “The car attracts attention from guys,” she said. “Then they take in who’s behind the wheel. I’ll even give a good-looking guy a lift from time to time, so to speak.”
As her time became increasingly monopolized by MGM, Lana dropped out of Hollywood High and enrolled in the studio’s Little Red Schoolhouse, where she would eventually earn her high school diploma. Under the supervision of a state-approved teacher, Mary MacDonald, she often did her homework right on the set of whatever movie was being filmed at the time.
In the classroom, she sat next to Mickey Rooney, the star of her next movie. As he wrote, “I assumed full gazing rights. The teacher often caught me in fervent contemplation of Lana’s bosom and other parts, enough so that I was often called out.”
“Lana’s body said it all,” Rooney continued, “and I got the message loud and clear. Her auburn hair, her deep green eyes, her long lashes, the tip of her nose, her pouty lips, her graceful throat, the curve of her shoulders, her tiny waist, and, yes, the nicest knockers I’d ever seen.”
Her fellow pupils included Jackie Cooper, whom she’d previously dated, and Ann Rutherford, one of her best friends and confidantes, especially when it came to gossiping about boys.
Of all the students, London-born Freddie Bartholomew was the most polite and sensitive, the ultimate Little Lord Fauntleroy, the title of his hit movie. Three years younger than Lana, he shocked her when he asked her out on a date. He assured her that he would not seduce her, and that he had something else in mind.
When Lana first met the young British actor, Freddie Bartholomew, she found him “polite and sensitive, almost like a character in a Charles Dickens novel.” That is, until she got to know him. “I learned his favorite form of sex was toe-sucking. He said that while George Cukor directed him in David Copperfield (1935), “I made him suck my toes for about an hour before I’d let him suck anything else.”
In the photo above, Bartholomew appears as the 12-year-old juvenile lead in Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936).
“I want to suck your toes, give tender loving care to them from the big toe to the little toe. I can suck toes for hours.”
Ever so politely, she turned him down.
She was always asking MacDonald if she could be excused to go to the bathroom. “The teachers must have thought I had weak kidneys. Exactly what I was doing was having a quick smoke outside the courtyard. From my teenage years and on, I was almost a chain smoker.”
During her first week a
s an MGM starlet, she met the studio’s greatest star, Greta Garbo, at an afternoon tea hosted at the home of Mervyn LeRoy. She was astonished to find the great Garbo sitting alone in a corner of the living room.
“I was too intimidated to go over and speak to her, but I kept staring at her,” Lana said. “I was wearing a white sweater that showed off my tits, and my bosom was repeatedly noticed by Miss Garbo. I felt she was undressing me with her eyes. In spite of her affair with John Gilbert, MGM buzzed with rumors that she was a lesbian. With that penetrating Garbo gaze, I believed she was.”
Back at the schoolhouse, she finally decided to accept Rooney’s barrage of invitations for a hot date. “He wasn’t really my type. But since he was becoming the biggest box office attraction at MGM, and was the star of my next picture, I finally gave in to him, even though I prefer men at least six feet tall. I just hoped he wasn’t small all over.”
In his memoirs, Rooney wrote, “I soon found out that Lana was as oversexed as I was, warm, passionate, soft, and moist in interesting places.”
He claimed that together, in the front seats of his convertible, parked high on Mulholland Drive, he could make her breathless.
Thus began a series of seductions that would have dire consequences.
As Lana was soon to find out, the real Mickey Rooney was very different from his on-screen portrayals of the relatively innocent All-American Andy Hardy. As authors Richard Lertzman and William Birnes described the star in their biography, The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney, he could be abrasive and vulgar.
“He would brag to anyone within earshot about his masculine prowess and the girls with whom he’d had sexual relations. He was on a tear, and the people he boasted to were shocked by the crude way he spoke. His close friends, however, were amused by his frankness and brand of braggadocio too soon a man in the body of a child, now boozing, chasing women with fervor, and cursing like a stagehand in burlesque, as his hormones and lack of impulse took over.”
It didn’t take long before both Lana and Rooney became Party Girl #1 and Party Boy #1 in Hollywood, where the competition was stiff.
During her first weeks at MGM, Lana began affairs with Rooney, and with many other men, too.
She also evolved into the leader of a separate clique of young, soon-to-be stars. Chief among them was Robert Stack, with whom she would begin an on-again, off-again affair that stretched over many a year. Jackie Cooper, whom she’d once dated, was part of her circle of friends, as were three beautiful starlets: Gene Tierney, Ann Rutherford, and Linda Darnell.
Pint-sized Mickey Rooney stumbles into Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938) when he was cast opposite two rising stars, Lana Turner and Judy Garland. More than 200 starlets were interviewed for the role of the erratic, feather-brained vamp of Carvel High.
Lana won out. On screen, Rooney didn’t seduce her. Off-screen was a different matter. “To my regret, I found out that Mickey didn’t practice safe sex.”
Their favorite restaurant was the Beverly Hills Tropics. After Lana appeared on the cover of Life magazine, management even named a lethal drink after her. It was called “Lana Untamed.”
Choreographer Jack Cole, who knew Lana during her early days at MGM, gave a blunt assessment. “She really liked men a lot. She just liked to fuck a lot.”
With an exception here and there, she preferred good-looking men with exceptional endowments. “I liked the boys, and they liked me. The gal who denies that men are exciting is either a lady with no corpuscles or a statue,” she said. “It’s the physical that attracts at first. If you get to know a man’s heart and soul, call it icing on the cake.”
All this gossip and press attention about both Lana, Rooney, and their wild escapades were bound to come to the attention of MGM mogul, Louis B. Mayer. One afternoon, when they weren’t needed on the set, he ordered both of his young stars into his office.
Mayer had recently learned that in addition to Lana and countless other conquests, Rooney, age sixteen, was having an affair with Norma Shearer, the 36-year-old former Queen of MGM, and the widow of Irving Thalberg, Mayer’s former right-hand man.
“You’re Andy Hardy!” Mayer shouted at Rooney. “You’re the United States! You’re the Stars and Stripes! Behave yourself! You’re a symbol!”
“As for you, Lana, you seem interested in only one thing,” He stood up from his desk and grabbed his crotch. “That’s what you seem to want from any man you meet. You’re getting a bad reputation. At the rate you’re going, you’ll soon be pregnant. If both of you continue as you’re doing, your days at MGM may be numbered.”
Mayer desperately wanted Rooney’s Andy Hardy pictures to represent a wholesome (fantasy-based) interpretation of the American family, “even though I’ve got three young whores in the lead roles.” He was, of course, referring to Lana, Rooney, and Judy Garland.
“I want Judge Hardy, the patriarch of the family, to be a paragon of wisdom and fatherly virtue,” said Mayer. “I want Andy to be not too serious, but filled with energy, a wholesome boy who is charming and engaging and always willing to turn to Judge Stone for advice when he gets into a jam. Andy Hardy movies should stand for God, Motherhood, Respect for one’s father, and apple pie.”
The young stars were directed in the series by George B. Seitz, a Boston-bred playwright, screenwriter, and film actor born in 1888. He’d helmed his first movie, Perils of Pauline, back in 1914. At this point in his career, he was deeply familiar with Rooney’s antics.
During the filming of the Andy Hardy movie, Lana’s private life became the subject of gossip, even in the press. Louella Parsons “scolded” her in her column. “If Lana Turner will behave herself and not go completely berserk, she is headed to a top spot in motion pictures.”
When Lana met him, she was surprised by his odd style of dress. He wore a blue suit with yellow accessories that included his tie, shirt, and gloves. His head was crowned with a wide-brimmed Panama hat, and he also wore purple socks and yellow shoes with chartreuse shoelaces.
“I know this is supposed to be wholesome fare,” Lana said to him. “But how sexy am I to be?”
“Just be yourself. You couldn’t look anything but sexy.”
At home, Mildred joined in attempts to get Lana to cut back on her heavy partying, but to no avail. All that Lana had to do was to curtly inform her mother that she was now the breadwinner of the family for the pressure to stop.
Feeling that he needed reinforcement, Mayer also summoned Mildred to his office. “Your daughter comes on like a romantic teenager and then turns into a feverish, passionate tiger who can’t get enough. She’s only seventeen, and reporters are calling her the Queen of the Night. This is hardly the clean, all-American image that we promote at MGM in our pictures. We abide by the rules that society dictates. If some jailbait like Lana gets knocked up, she might be shown the door. Do you understand me?”
***
Cast as Cynthia Parker, the small town flirt in Love Finds Andy Hardy, Lana plays the ingénue who tempts and tangles with Andy. She wants to kiss him, but he already has a girlfriend, Polly Benedict, as portrayed by Ann Rutherford.
Andy’s attempt to resist Cecilia causes him to question his own masculinity. He turns to his father, Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone). “D’ya think there’s anything wrong with a guy that don’t want a girl to kiss him all the time?” Andy asks.
A very young Judy Garland plays Betsy Booth, the helpful (and romantically available) girl next door. Befriending Andy, she sympathizes with his problems. At the prom, as the film’s musical climax, she’s persuaded to sing three jazzy numbers, winning the hearts, once again, of Judy fans on and off the screen.
Rooney later claimed that Judy was terribly jealous of Lana’s beauty.
Lana felt at ease in the role of “that red-headed vampire. “I was a juvenile femme fatale. I’d rather kiss than kibbutz.”
One writer observed that during the course of the film [Love Finds Andy Hardy was selected for preservation in the United States National
Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”] “Garland sang, Rooney mugged, and Stone pontificated, while Lana was whining, pouting, dimpling, and winking.”
By now, Lana was skilled at evaluating camera angles, making her almost as adept as Joan Crawford. “I taught her what I knew about acting, and she was a fast learner,” Rooney said to Busby Berkeley. “Privately, I taught her how to make love to a man’s balls.” She’d never done that before. And, as the Mexicans say, I’ve got a big pair of cojones in spite of my small size.”
The kissing scenes between Rooney and Lana, as innocuous as they might be, encountered some minor trouble from movie censors. Rooney denounced “These blue noses. Lana and I were like a couple of aging virgins. The scenes were left in the final cut and appear harmless today.”
At the end of the film, Lana suggested a title change. “Call it Andy Hardy With a Hard-On.”
***
Lana’s long friendship with Judy Garland, which over the years would wax and wane both hot and cold, began on the set of Love Finds Andy Hardy.
The friendship had hardly begun when both of them embarked on the pursuit of Artie Shaw, each of the young starlets wanting to marry the dashing bandleader.
When Garland and Lana first bonded, Judy said, “You and I have something in common. From what I hear, each of us lost our virginity at age fifteen. Word gets around.”
The same could be said of Rooney. “We were just teenagers, but Lana, Judy and I were doing what comes naturally.”
Gossip was also spread that Garland and Rooney were having an affair. “At least that’s what the gossip columns of that day reported. They keep saying that about Mickey and me,” Garland said. “They must have me mixed up with Lana. The gossip upsets me, it really does, because there’s not a bit of truth in it. Mickey and I are swell friends, and he’s full of fun. I enjoy working with him and playing with him. Outside the studio, we rarely see each other. We’re pals—that’s all!”
Lana Turner Page 9