MGM’s studio chief Dore Schary later admitted that he “hustled” Lana into accepting the role because she needed the money. According to Schary, “The truth is that I liked the script by Maurice Zimm, based on a scenario by Joseph Breen, Jr., and Samuel James Larsen, set in old Damascus in 700 BC. Lana had presented me with various scripts sent to her, and she wanted to work with Ava Gardner or Lex Barker as her co-stars. I turned down every one of them, wanting to make this Biblical spectacle to lure the yokels from their god damn TV sets and back into movie houses.”
Lana claimed, “Lex was physically the best lover I ever had. Not simply because he was well hung, which, my darling, he was, but because he was incredible at oral sex. I often prefer the oral route to conventional sex because I was always too tight.”
“I thought it would draw a big audience,” Schary continued. “What I overlooked was that Cecil B. DeMille had exclusive rights to the Bible, or so it seemed. Poor Lana swayed her way through the film, but it was a hopeless task. Onscreen, the script came off as lifeless.”
As inspiration for Lana’s role as the pagan temptress, the scriptwriters were later accused of borrowing liberally from the silent film, The Wanderer (1926), which had co-starred William Collier, Jr. and Greta Nissen.
For her performance, Lana dyed her hair blonde again, which was the way most of her fans preferred her. No film role before or after required her to appear so scantily clad. As Samarra, in her first appearance in CinemaScope and Metrocolor, she displayed ample expanses of flesh.
Theater critic for The Miami Herald, George Bourke, wrote: “The role is the most form-fitting Lana Turner has had since she first sashayed before the movie camera in a memorable sweater in They Won’t Forget.”
Though tame, perhaps, by today’s standards, Lana’s skimpy costumes, designed by Herschel McCoy, created a scandal in the uptight 1950s. She was even denounced on Sundays by priests and pastors from their pulpits, who attacked Hollywood as “a viper pit of degenerates and shameless Jezebels.”
McCoy had already designed the costumes for such “sword and sandal” epics as Quo Vadis? (1951), starring Robert Taylor. As Lana said when she saw that movie, “I even know what Bob looks like without the armor.”
On the set of The Prodigal, she got along well with producer Charles Schnee, still grateful for him for having written the script of The Bad and the Beautiful.
Before Micah (Purdom) can win her love, he has to squander his inheritance to buy her the world’s most valuable pearl. When it is stolen from him and he cannot pay for it, he is thrown into slavery.
In another dramatic scene, he is stripped and flogged in public. In the book, Lash The Hundred Great Scenes of Men Being Whipped, the Purdom episode ranks as No. 66.
The director, Kansas-born Richard Thorpe, had a long career at MGM. Hehelmed his first silent film in 1923 and went on from there to direct some 180 movies. He’d dealt with pagan themes before, directing Last of the Pagans (1935) starring Ray Mala.
When Lana signed to do the film, Gardner phoned her with a dire warning: “It’ll be a flop, honey chile. Don’t go there. My advice? Go on being your pagan love goddess off screen—not on.”
“But you got to be a goddess,” Lana said. “Why not me?”
[She was referring to Gardner’s role in One Touch of Venus (1948). Hollywood’s other love goddess, Rita Hayworth, had played Terpsichore in Down to Earth (1947).]
Despite his many successes, he is remembered today more for his failures than for his triumphs, especially for episodes associated with his role as the first director of Judy Garland’s The Wizard of Oz. In the early stages of the film’s development, he had put a blonde wig on her and ordered makeup men to give her a cutsey baby doll look, not the innocent thirteen-year-old Kansas farm girl later portrayed. Thorpe was fired after only two weeks.
Thorpe had worked with Purdom before in Athena (1954), starring Jane Powell, and again in The Student Prince (also 1954) after Mario Lanza had been fired.
Thorpe sometimes directed Lana’s former lover, Robert Taylor, in such movies as Ivanhoe (1952), with Elizabeth Taylor, and he’d go on to helm two Elvis Presley movies, Jailhouse Rock (1957), and Fun in Acapulco (1963).
Lana’s leading man, Purdom was English. In London’s West End, he had played in Shakespeare plays, most notably, Romeo and Juliet. On Broadway, he was part of the company formed by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. When Lana heard this, she quipped: “I bet both Viv and Larry seduced Purdom.”
Lana didn’t detest Purdom as much as she had Ezio Pinza in Mr. Imperium, although she labeled both of them “Mr. Garlic Breath.”
“Purdom had a high opinion of himself. His pomposity was hard to bear. My lines were so stupid I hated to go to work with him in the morning.”
“When Purdom stripped down for his flogging scene, I found his body disappointing, but then, I was used to the world’s most perfect physique, Lex Barker. In spite of Purdom’s unimpressive chest, he was very good looking.”
During the making of The Prodigal, Lana discovered a secret about his sex life. In a way, she was delighted to hear this bit of gossip. He was having an affair with Mrs. Tyrone Power (aka, Linda Christian), the Mexican actress who had captured Power’s heart, leading him to dump Lana.
In a call to Ava Gardner, Lana said, “I’m a walking goddess adorned with baubles, bangles, and beads, really, I mean, an astonishment of beads and jeweled G-strings. I even wear a brassiere of faux snakes. Men, while devouring my flesh with their lusty eyes, should bring their overcoats to movie theaters so they can jerk off.”
After learning that, Lana became much friendlier with Purdom, because she wanted to know more details about his affair with Christian. “It’s really not that much of a secret from Power,” he told her. “In fact, she confessed our affair to him.”
“How did he take it?” she asked.
“He took it very calmly and even delivered a bombshell of his own. He said he’d fallen in love with a young girl in New York, and was also having an affair with her. Linda’s affair with me was okay by him, as long as it made her happy.”
[Linda Christian divorced Tyrone Power in 1956, but waited until 1960 to marry Edmund Purdom. Her second marriage lasted only a few months. After divorcing Christian, Purdom waited thirty-seven years before re-marrying.]
Lana’s truce with Purdom didn’t last long. In the movie, she tells him, “I can never belong to one man. I belong to all men.”
After he’d filmed that scene with her, he asked her: “Are you delivering a line from the movie—or one from your own life?”
She turned her back on him and walked away.
The most dramatic scene in her entire career came at the end of The Prodigal. When her once-devoted worshippers turn on her, throwing stones and rotten tomatoes at her, she stands on her tower near images of Astarte and Baal. Realizing that she may be stoned to death, she jumps from the tower to a horrendous death in a flaming pit, or cauldron, the site where she had sent so many sacrificial victims before.
Two weeks into the filming of The Prodigal, Schary asked to see the rushes. After he’d watched them, he turned to Thorpe. “I think the studio has become mired down in quicksand. I’m going to ask production how much it’ll cost us if I shut down the film.”
That afternoon, he learned that MGM would suffer a considerable hit. Already $200,000 had been spent, lavish sets had been constructed or were under construction, expensive costumes designed, and contracts with stars had been negotiated and finalized.
“Our loss would have been $1.2 million, perhaps a hell of a lot more. I ordered that the picture be completed and speeded up. I told Thorpe to cut costs wherever possible. As it turned out, The Prodigal was the biggest and most embarrassing failure, the worst movie I ever supported.”
Edmund Purdom’s role in The Prodigal somewhat mirrored his leading role in The Egyptian (1954). He had been assigned that part in the dreary Biblical epic after Marlon Brando wisely turned it down. Purdom st
arred in that ponderous, often unintentionally funny, Biblical soaper, tangling with another femme fatale, Bella Darvi.
Now he was with Lana, playing the besotted suitor to her persona as a lascivious pagan sex queen.
Throughout the troubled shoot, Lana found comfort, reuniting with old friends and meeting new stars. Her longtime friend, Louis Calhern, had the third lead, playng Nahreeb, the sinister high priest of Baal, who conspires to destroy Micah because of the impertinence of his sexual interest in Samarra. Critics would later compare his costume to an “overly decorated Victorian lamp-shade.”
Lana had two lunches with her jovial friend, Cecil Kellaway, cast as the Governor. He rushed to greet Lana, and she embraced him. “You seem very much alive. I thought John Garfield and I finished you off in The Postman Always Rings Twice.”
Other than Lana herself, the scene stealer of the picture was Francis L. Sullivan, cast as Bosra, the wily and unscrupulous moneylender. The English film and stage actor was a heavyset man with a striking double chin and a deep voice. He’d filmed works by every author from Shakespeare to Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw, working with such stars as Hedy Lamarr, Ingrid Bergman, Robert Donat, and even Bob Hope. In failing health, he would die the year after The Prodigal’s release.
At the beginning of the film, Micah deserts his beautiful Jewish fiancée, Ruth, with the intention of traveling to Damascus to pursue the pagan love goddess. Born in Ireland, Audrey Dalton was cast as Ruth, perhaps hoping for bigtime stardom.
The Prodigal garnered some of the worst reviews of Lana’s career. Douglas Lemza, a film historian, claimed, “The Prodigal is something not even Carol Burnett could parody. This sort of nonsense requires Cecil B. DeMille.” Another critic wrote, “Lana Turner gives the film all her glamour but none of her talent as an actress.”
Bosley Crowther, writing in The New York Times, continued as Lana’s main critic. “The Prodigal is pompous, ostentatious, vulgar, and a ridiculous charade. Miss Lana Turner conducts the rituals as though she was ‘Little Egypt’ at the old Chicago World’s Fair.”
Variety claimed, “Metro has filled the movie so full of scene and spectacle that Richard Thorpe’s direction is hard put to give it any semblance of movement or to get life and warmth into the characters and incidents.”
One critic pounded away at the weakness of this epic, but had praise for thestunning Metrocolor beauty of Lana. Newsweek called the movie “a Biblical pot-boiler, a combination of an old Ziegfeld Follies and a traveling carnival.”
Columnist Sidney Skolsky, who had remained Lana’s friend, wrote: “The long walk Lana takes through the Temple of Love is the best reason for seeing the picture…pure poetry in motion.”
Playboy labeled Lana as “the Pinup Queen of Hollywood—move over Marilyn!”
In the Cleveland Plain Dealer, W. Ward Marsh wrote: “Lana Turner, glorifying the flesh, also exhibits plenty of her own glorification. I have never seen her walk better in her life, as she parades around, sometimes with a candle in her hand, as the Goddess of Samarra.”
Since its initial release, The Prodigal has gained a cult following in the wake of several television screenings.
When Lana was last asked about it, she quipped, “It should have played Disneyland.”
***
Warner Brothers tapped John Farrow to direct The Sea Chase (1955), a World War II drama about the German sea captain of a fugitive freighter with a strange cargo that included a beautiful blonde-haired Nazi female spay. The studio paid $10,000 to acquire the rights to this thriller by novelist Andres Geer. The film was to be a vehicle for John Wayne as the anti-Nazi sea captain, but who would play the Mata Hari type spy?
Farrow couldn’t seem to make up his mind, offering the role first to Grace Kelly and then to Joan Crawford. Both of them were less than thrilled to play “second fiddle” to Wayne.
Speculation in Hollywood grew about who might best execute the role. For a while, attention focused on Deborah Kerr, although she would be about the last actress that audiences at the time might even remotely associate with a Nazi spy. Later, it was Susan Hayward, who might have been more believable, but not really. What about the Irish lassie, Maureen O’Hara? No, she was out. Gene Tierney and Arlene Dahl were also considered.
Finally, Hedda Hopper, in one of her columns during September of 1954, announced that the role had been assigned to Lana Turner and that she’d be a most unlikely choice as a Nazi spy, and that such bizarre casting would be a bit of a stretch for her.
At the time, Lana was one of the few bigtime stars still under contract to MGM. Dore Schary decided he wanted to get the most out of her before her contract expired, as he didn’t plan to renew it. He was paying her $5,000 a week, but could make more money on her by “leasing her out” to other studios.
By the mid-1950s, both John Wayne and Lana had evolved into living legends, although Wayne had an advantage based on the number of tickets his name tended to sell at any box office.
They certainly were not equal in height. Even when she wore what were known at the time as “Joan Crawford fuck-me high heels,” she rose only to a height of the Duke’s shoulders.
Finally, for her collaboration in their newest movie, The Sea Chase, Warners agreed to pay MGM $300,000 for her services.
Audience acceptance required a leap of imagination about the “odd couple” casting of Wayne with Lana before settling back into their seats to enjoy the latest Wayne adventure story. With his distinctive voice and much-imitated walk, Wayne, often cast in Westerns as a misogynistic, machismo-soaked cowboy, would not even try to imitate a German accent. Nor would Lana.
Roughly based on a true event, The Sea Chase is the story of the German-born Captain Karl Ehrlich, who despises the Nazis, who have taken over his Fatherland. When Germany invades Poland in September of 1939, England declares war. Fearing that his vessel will be confiscated by the Australians, who are allied with the British, he hastily embarks on a mission to move his rusty, 5,000-ton freighter, the Ergenstrasse from Sydney to Valparaiso, in Chile.
His mink-clad passenger, Lana, playing Elsa Keller, comes aboard as a passenger. She, too, must escape from Australia before she is arrested and jailed as a Nazi collaborator and spy.
Off they sail, with a British man-of-war, the Rockhampton, in hot pursuit. Ironically, as part of a subplot that could only happen in Hollywood, Elsa is engaged to Jeffrey Napier (David Farrar), commander of the pursuing Rockhampton.
As the film unrolls, Wayne is as American as cowboy boots. Maybe Marlon Brando in his future movie in 1958, The Young Lions, could get by masquerading as a German, but Wayne is the same man he was in Red River (1948) directing a cattle drive.
As might be predicted during their race across the ocean, the captain falls in love with the lovely, immaculately groomed spy. Lana used her own wardrobe and chest of jewelry during her characterization of the role.
She would later say, “Most of my part was that of a fashion mannequin standing around wondering where all the sharks went.” She also appeared with a revised hair color, called “coralescent blonde,” invented by Myrkl Stoltz, whose choice was “inspired by a coral reef shimmering in the phosphorescent sea.” For the first time, Lana applied coral-colored lipstick, abandoning her usual “Victory Red” lipstick used as part of her look in the films she’d made during wartime.
Even aboard a rusty, dilapidated freighter, Lana—thanks to an army of hairdressers and a wardrobe that would NEVER fit into a cabin—had to appear glam.
For The Sea Chase, Lana was returning to the studio, Warners, which had first discovered her in 1937, featuring her in They Won’t Forget with that by now immortal walk that earned for her the label “The Sweater Girl.”
John Farrow seemed to have been the ideal director. He had only recently directed Wayne in the successful Hondo (1953), in which the star had been cast as a tough, wily cavalry officer who must deal with a pending Apache uprising.
Farrow was firmly established in Hollywood as
a director-producer and screenwriter. In 1942, he’d been nominated for an Oscar for his direction of Wake Island, starring Brian Donlevy and Robert Preston. In his immediate future, he would also be nominated for an Oscar for best screenplay for writing the 1957 Around the World in Eighty Days for producer Mike Todd, then married to Elizabeth Taylor.
Ironically, Farrow had been born in Sydney, where The Sea Chase opens. Not only that, but as a young man, he had run away to sea aboard an American barquentine, “sailing all over the Pacific and fighting in revolts in Nicaragua and Mexico.” During World War II, he joined the Royal Canadian Navy, working aboard anti-submarine patrols until he contracted typhus.
When Lana met Farrow, he was married to the actress Maureen O’Sullivan, with whom he would have seven children, including a future famous actress, Mia Farrow.
Lana was known for seducing her leading men on many a film. But she had never viewed Wayne as a sex object. He had famously said, “Women scare the hell out of me. I’ve always been afraid of them.”
Director William Wellman told her at a Hollywood party, “Wayne walks like a fairy. He’s the only screen hero in the world who can get away with that.” At another party, Joan Crawford, on the rare occasion she spoke of Lana, claimed, “GetWayne out of the saddle and you’ve got nothing.”
Wayne had proclaimed that Marlene Dietrich, his co-star in Pittsburgh (1942), “was the best lay I ever had.”
When Dietrich heard that, she lit a cigarette and said, “How very strange. All I did was give him a bit of fellatio.”
Besides, Wayne was already in love with the Peruvian starlet, Pilar Palette Weldy, and planned to take her as his third wife at the conclusion of shooting The Sea Chase.
Lana Turner Page 64