Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  Richard Hart played a dashing naval captain, William Ozanne, who arrives unexpectedly one day in port. Both of the Patourel sisters fall instantly in love with him, although he prefers Marguerite, perhaps finding Lana’s character of Marianne too strong for his tastes.

  Later, while serving in the Royal Navy in China, he hooks up with Timothy Haslam (Heflin). Together, they plot their future and decide to travel to New Zealand and launch a lumber business.

  One night, a drunken William writes to Marguerite, asking her to come to New Zealand and become his wife. In his stupor, he addresses the letter to Marianne instead.

  Imagine his shock and surprise when Lana, instead of Reed, arrives in New Zealand, as instructed. The irony of the plot is that Timothy (i.e., Heflin) has been in love with her since his boyhood days in St. Pierre, but now sees her slipping off for marriage to his best friend.

  As the plot unfolds, Lana (as Marianne) becomes a strong and powerful wife, virtually the backbone of her husband through all his triumphs and tragedies. As for poor Donna Reed (aka Marguerite) left back in the Channel Islands, she enters a convent.

  A handsome Rhode islander, Richard Hart, who spent much of his acting career on a stage, would appear during the course of his career in four films.

  During lunch with Hart and Lana, Donna Reed told them, “No one who watches this film is going to believe that you’d fall in love with me—and not with Lana.”

  [In 1951, at the age of 35, like so many actors with whom Lana worked, Hart died young—in his case, of a heart attack.]

  Many of the exterior shots were filmed beside the banks of the Klamath River in Oregon. In a bit role, starlet Linda Christian was cast as Lana’s maid, “Hine-Moa.” She would later tell the press that Lana off-screen was very abusive to her.

  Lana countered, “I hardly remember the girl and certainly was not abusive to her. I treat all my fellow actors with respect.” At the time, she could not have conceived what a major and disastrous role Christian would play in her future.

  As was her style, Lana worked well with the supporting cast, who included Edmund Gwenn, cast as her father, the wealthy Octavius Patourel. The oldtime London-born actor had immortalized himself that year playing Kris Kringle in the Christmas film, Miracle on 34th Street, which had garnered him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

  “In his role of Timothy Haslan, Van Heflin is secretly in love with me,” Lana said. “Our hardest scene was that god damn earthquake sequence where he heroically comes to my rescue.”

  Reed had just finished making It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) for Frank Capra. James Stewart played the male lead. [This picture is taken out of mothballs every year and reshown during the Christmas holidays.]

  Generating fair to good reviews, Green Dolphin Street eventually emerged as MGM’s biggest hit of 1947.

  Leo Miski, writing in the New York Morning Telegraph, described the movie’s elephantine approach and treatment, claiming that it was impressive by its sheer weight more than anything else.

  In the Los Angeles Times, Edwin Schallert praised the beauty of both Lana and Reed as well as the costumes of Walter Plunkett, but he noted that the film “screamed out for Technicolor.”

  Cecilia Ager in PM said: “No matter what the century Miss Lana Turner is assigned to, she brings her own firm-fleshed contemporary glamor. Wherever she is, she stands out as Lana Turner, unquestionably photogenic, one of Metro’s most glittering productions all by herself. In a movie dedicated to ponderous production values, Miss Turner right or wrong is eminently right.”

  ***

  In 1945, the closing year of World War II, Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) released a novel, Cass Timberlane, a saga of husbands and wives and a May-to-December romance. It was a meditation on themes that included love, marriage, trust, heartache, and redemption in a small town in Minnesota. Although Lewis had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, most critics pounced on Cass Timberlane, defining it as “second rate.”

  Even so, Louis B. Mayer purchased its film rights for $150,000, with the intention of adapting it into an MGM feature for a 1947 release.

  Arthur Hornblow, Jr. was designated as the film’s producer and George Sidney its director.

  Sidney was an odd choice, based on his previous association with the Our Gang shorts, the Crime Does Not Pay series; and Pete Smith’s popular comic specialties. Later, despite a reputation as a third-rate director, Sidney was assigned the job of helming the MGM musical hit, Anchors Aweigh (1945), casting Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly as sailors. When Lana met Sidney, he had just directed Judy Garland in The Harvey Girls (1946). He would not only helm Lana in Cass Timberlane, but later, he’d be her director in the Technicolor extravaganza The Three Musketeers (1948).

  In the beginning, it was not at all certain that Lana would be assigned the lead in Cass Timberlane. Ava Gardner had made a pitch for the role, but was rejected. She later complained “MGM already has a sex symbol [she was referring to Lana], and those guys don’t know what to do with another one.”

  For a brief time, Vivien Leigh and Jennifer Jones were also under consideration. In the end, Sidney, with Mayer’s blessings, decided to cast Lana in the role, based on her previous acting in The Postman Always Rings Twice.

  She interpreted her acquisition of the role with a certain irony: “Vivien took Scarlett O’Hara from me, not that I really had that role, and Jones made off with Madame Bovary (1949). Now I’m taking something from those two.”

  Spencer Tracy was cast as the highly respected Judge Cass Timberlane, an ethical man moving deeper into middle age. Up to that point, he’d been viewed as in-corruptible. The most controversial thing he ever did involved taking Virginia (“Jinny”) Marshland as his young bride. Lana got the role.

  Sinclair Lewis, in his novel, had described her character as “a half-tamed hawk of a girl, twenty-three or -four, not tall, smiling, lively of eye.”

  Jinny was definitely from the wrong side of the tracks, and she shocked the judge’s more conservative friends.

  As the male lead, Sidney toyed with the idea of casting Walter Pidgeon. But that didn’t work out.

  [Actually, Pidgeon did make a surprise cameo appearance in Cass Timber-lane, encountering Lana’s character at a party in Manhattan. MGM had a custom of casting some of its major stars in brief, sometimes unexpected cameos. Lana had been pleased with the casting of Pidgeon because the two of them had performed so well together in Week-End at the Waldorf.]

  Sidney phoned her late one afternoon to announce that Spencer Tracy had accepted the lead role, and that Zachory Scott would be playing the second male lead. [She had not only worked with Tracy in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but had had a brief fling with him then as well.]

  When she lunched with Tracy one day in the MGM commissary, he complained about the choice of directors, not wanting Sidney. “I preferred either my pal, George Cukor, or that other fag, Vincente Minnelli, but was voted down. Maybe Sidney will turn Cass Timberlane into another Our Gang comedy.”

  The scriptwriter, Donald Ogden Steward, was known at the time for his golden age comedies and melodramas. He was brought in to devise a film script based on the Lewis novel. His big hit had been The Philadelphia Story (1940), starring Katharine Hepburn, Tracy’s companion.

  In spite of Steward’s credentials, Sidney wasn’t pleased with his final script. He complained to Lana that although he had strengthened Tracy’s role as the judge, he had reduced her character’s presence. Subsequently, he brought in scriptwriter Sonya Levien to beef up the role of the young bride.

  Lewis was known for exposing the hypocrisies of Main Street America. In the script, Lana’s marriage to the judge, as hawkeyed by everyone in town, doesn’t run along an even course. As Jinny, Lana encounters disapproval from Tracy’s staid friends, usually older couples, with one exception. His best friend is lawyer Bradd Criley, the role that Zachory Scott would play.

  Joan Crawford had already spread the gossip among the women stars and starlets at MGM th
at Scott was a closeted homosexual, despite his recent marriage to Elaine Anderson. [She would later divorce him to marry John Steinbeck.]

  Scott and his wife were frequently seen in public with Angela Lansbury and her husband, Richard Cromwell. Lana picked up more gossip: Cromwell was Howard Hughes’ sometimes lover, and, it was also said, that Scott and Cromwell were engaged in a torrid love affair behind the backs of their wives. Lansbury later publicly admitted that her husband was a homosexual, as she’d learned painfully.

  Finally, Lana learned more scandalous information about Scott during her reunion with her friend, Tom Drake, who’d been cast in Cass Timberlane in the small role of Jamie Wargate, and with whom she’d worked on Week-End at the Waldorf. He brought her up to date on all the latest gossip about Van Johnson and Peter Lawford. Over more than a few drinks, Drake confided that he had only recently begun an affair with Scott himself.

  On the sets of many of her pictures, she had often pursued her leading man, but in this case, she didn’t mind that Scott was off-limits. Her current lover, Tyrone Power, was a frequent visitor to the set during filming.

  Ever since Zachory Scott had co-starred with Joan Crawford as her sleazy love interest in Mildred Pierce (1945), Lana had been intrigued with what she described as Scott’s “lizard-like appearance, the perfect villain.”

  The year she worked with him, he’d been voted the “third most promising star of tomorrow.”

  In Cass Timberlane, Lana’s hair was dyed blonde again. Bored with her existence in this small town, Lana is intrigued with the charm of Bradd Criley, who is the town’s most handsome, most charismatic playboy. He helps her relieve her boredom, especially when she goes to New York to lighten her spirits after her baby dies during childbirth.

  She wants to remain in Manhattan, but her husband, the Judge, refuses. Defiantly, however, Bradd agrees to show her the town.

  During filming and on at least two occasions, Tracy visited her dressing room and pressed her for sex, but each time, she refused.

  Cameron Mitchell, the son of a Pennsylvania pastor, played a minor role of Eino Roskinen. Lana became very impressed with him as an actor, telling Sidney, “I think you’ve cast the next John Garfield.”

  One slow afternoon, Cameron had consumed a few beers during his wait for the next take. When Sidney informed him that there would be another delay, he whispered to Lana, “Wanna fuck?”

  She whispered back, “Wanna not?”

  In the years ahead, she watched Mitchell star in so many movies that she wondered when he ever slept. Today, audiences see him on the late show playing an incognito millionaire in pursuit of a gold-digging Lauren Bacall, in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) with scene-stealer Marilyn Monroe.

  Both Green Dolphin Street and Cass Timberlane were released in October of 1947, and Lana found that she was competing with herself for movie audiences. She need not have worried, as each of them emerged among MGM’s high grossers of that year.

  Many of the reviews for Cass Timberlane were tepid, but that didn’t seem to affect movie attendance. Lana herself, in several cases, got better reviews than the movie itself.

  Kate Cameron, writing in The New York Daily News, said: “There is no doubt about it. Lana Turner screens more beautifully than any other blonde in Hollywood. She literally illumines the screen with a glow that is soft, warm, and altogether feminine. That she is able to hold the spotlight while Tracy is on the screen is a test of her ability as an actress and a charmer.”

  Many critics felt that Lana and Tracy improved on Sinclair Lewis’ original characters, making the judge and his young wife warmer, more human, and more likable than they’d been in the original novel.

  Tracy phoned Lana a few days after their picture was released. “I’m pissed off at you,” he said. “I just read a review of Cass in Variety. The asshole who wrote it claimed that in scene after scene, you stole them from me, and I came across as wooden. What did you do? While I was emoting, did you pull out one of your tits behind my back? I used to be a friend of Sinclair Lewis. I knew him well enough to call him ‘Red.’ He’s seen our movie. Now he refuses to take my calls.”

  ***

  During the long weeks that Tyrone Power spent in Africa on his Good Will Tour, Lana used her coded message to tell him that she’d aborted his child, a baby she had desperately wanted to keep. The secret codewords they’d developed privately had been necessary, based on their fear that an overseas operator would listen to their conversations and break the news of their aborted “love child” to the press.

  During Power’s tour, she didn’t disguise the contempt in her voice when she told Ava Gardner, “Good Will for whom? Certainly not for our relationship.”

  During Power’s absence from Hollywood, columnist Harrison Carroll wrote, “Lana Turner was seen nightclubbing at Ciro’s with her old flame, Peter Lawford.”

  Later, when Carroll ascertained that Power would not return to Hollywood until November 10, he wrote, “I still wouldn’t make any bets that he and Lana will ever make it to the altar.”

  On October 8, 1947, columnist Sheilah Graham reported that Lana had abruptly canceled her trip to join Power in Africa. When he decided to stop over in Rome during his transit back to New York, there was speculation that she’d fly there to meet him. Graham later revealed that Lana’s trip to Italy had been canceled for reasons unknown.

  Later, in advance of Power’s flight from Europe back to New York, Lana flew to New York to meet him there. Checked into the Waldorf-Astoria, she received a call from Frank Sinatra, who had flown East for a performance in New Jersey. He, too, had checked into the Waldorf, and invited her for a drink “for old time’s sake.”

  The next morning, a room service waiter delivered two breakfasts to Lana’s suite. Later, for fifty dollars, the waiter tipped off columnist Walter Winchell. The news of Lana’s reunion with her former lover made the international gossip circuit.

  During the weeks that Power spent in Rome, the Italian capital was fast becoming “Hollywood on the Tiber,” and no doubt, the news of Lana’s sleepover with Sinatra reached him.

  She made several attempts to contact Power in Rome at the Hotel Excelsior on the Via Veneto, but could not get through, even though she called at random hours of the day and night. Again and again, she was told, “Mr. Power is not available to take calls.”

  She finally got him on the phone and chastised him for being out of touch. She informed him that she’d wait for him in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria, ready, willing, and able to receive him the moment he arrived at Idlewild Airport.

  In Manhattan, perfumed and accessorized, she waited and waited. Still no Power.

  Finally, she was informed that he had shuffled his westbound flight to avoid a stopover in New York altogether, and that he’d transited to Kansas City. From there, after refueling, he flew directly to Burbank in California, arriving there on November 25.

  From New York, Lana placed an urgent call to his home, and this time, her call was connected right away. “What in hell happened?” she asked, not disguising the anger in her voice.

  He explained that he had urgent business on the West Coast and that he had to get back to Los Angeles immediately. He’d been gone too long, he informed her.

  “I’m taking the next plane to L.A.,” she said. “I’ll cable you my flight number and its expected arrival time, and I want you to pick me up at the airport. It’s been far too long for me, too.”

  When her flight landed in Los Angeles, he was not at the airport to meet her. She waited around for an hour for him to show up. Finally, he did.

  Driving her home, he was almost silent throughout the ride. She invited him in for a drink. Inside, the tension was obvious.

  As she would later tell Ava Gardner and others, “I finally got enough courage to ask him what had gone wrong between us. At last he confessed. He said that during his stay in Rome, he’d met Linda Christian and had had an affair with her. “We’ve fallen in love,” he said. “We may e
ven get married. I’m sorry. You may remember her. She played your maid in Green Dolphin Street.”

  “I remember the bitch all right,” Lana screeched at him. “An international whore. I can’t believe you’d fall for such trash like that. She’s fucked everybody from Errol Flynn on down.

  “She’s really a sweet girl,” he protested, “when you get to know her.”

  “Like hell I’ll get to know her,” she yelled at him. “I don’t even know you anymore. Get the hell out of my house. And stay out!”

  He slammed his drink down on her coffee table and quickly headed out. At the door, he paused. “Let’s be friends. I’ll invite you to my wedding.”

  “Get out!” She picked up his cocktail glass and threw it at the door, narrowly missing him.

  It was over.

  ***

  After Power left, she phoned Virginia Grey, asking her to come over at once. She’d later recall, “Lana was suicidal when I got there, or at least I thought she was. I agreed to stay over with her because I seriously believed she was ready to do herself in. She would hardly eat for three days and nights. All she’d do was drink and smoke. At one point, in a drunken stupor, she fell down the steps. Fortunately, she didn’t injure herself. Just bruises and stuff. I phoned a doctor, who heavily sedated her. I stayed there like a nursemaid for a week. I don’t know where her kid was. I think she’d been shipped off to her grandmother’s, but I’m not sure. I didn’t ask.”

  The following week, Lana spent hours working on her looks before appearing in public again. On December 2 came the announcement from MGM publicity that Lana and Power had ended their widely publicized romance. The release claimed, “They met over the weekend and decided to relegate their romance to the vault of sweet memories.”