To Lana, she appeared drugged when she tried to attend to her daughter. Fortunately, her maid summoned an ambulance, which rushed Liza to a hospital. There, she had to submit to twenty-one stitches to her leg before she was allowed to go home.
That night, when Sid Luft returned home, he wanted to file a lawsuit against Lana until Garland talked him out of it.
Lana urged Barker to get rid of Pulco, but he adamantly refused, reminding her that she’d been receiving a lot of threats, and that it was necessary to have an attack dog on the premises in case some prowler crawled over the walls or fences at night.
She relented, and let Pulco stay in her house. However, within a few months, she’devict the dog and Barker, too.]
***
When Dore Schary informed the English actor, Roger Moore, that he been given the third lead in Lana Turner’s latest picture, Diane (1956), he was delighted.
Later, in the MGM commissary, he met up with his friend and fellow Englishman, Edmund Purdom, who had recently made The Prodigal with Lana. Moore shared his good news with his friend, who didn’t seem all that delighted. Purdom frowned, saying, “I guess that’s all right if you don’t mind a lot of booze and sex in Turner’s dressing room.”
[Moore thought that was an ungracious response to his big break until he learned that Schary had first assigned the male lead in Diane to Purdom, who then lost the part after Lana announced to Schary that she refused to make another movie with him.]
Around the same time, Schary summoned Lana to his office to inform her that she’d been cast in another picture, a 16th Century saga titled Diane, based on Diane de Poitiers
She protested, “Not another costume picture after we bombed with The Prodigal. And who is this Diane?”
He gave her a fast lesson in Renaissance French history, explaining that Diane de Poitiers (1499-1566) was a French noblewoman and the courtesan of Henri II, King of France. Her bitter rival was Catherine de Medici, the jealous and temperamental wife of the king. He went on to explain that Diane was “the most cultivated woman of the French Renaissance,” though sometimes evaluated as “a silken, 16th Century tramp.”
“Naturally, I get another tramp role,” she said. “By the way, who is my leading man?”
“Roger Moore,”
“I know of him only because I saw him in Interrupted Melody with Eleanor Parker and Glenn Ford, a role originally intended for me. I don’t know much about this Moore fellow.”
Schary explained that he’d been a model known for posing in sweaters, and he’d become known as “The Big Knit.”
“He also appears in some toothpaste ads,” he said.
“Oh, goodie, goodie. At least, unlike Purdom and Ezio Pinza, with their garlic breath, he sounds kissable.”
“Better lay off,” Schary warned her. He just recently got married to some Welsh singer.”
“I’ll try to restrain myself,” she promised. “I don’t understand why you won’t let me play a modern woman. I want to star in contemporary dramas about today’s woman.”
Schary explained that Diane de Poitiers was actually a forerunner of the modern woman. “She was Europe’s first outdoor girl, a health fan, an advocate of the cold bath, and a devoted horse rider. She wasn’t afraid to use her head, but was never caught with her brains showing.”
Lana learned later from the producer, Edwin H. Knopf, that Metro had originally acquired the property for Greta Garbo, hoping to lure her out of retirement. Then, later, Schary had offered the script to Greer Garson. This staunch English-woman had little interest in playing “the whore of a French king.”
When Moore was told who his fellow players were, he was at least mildly surprised. “I am an Englishman playing a French prince, Henri II. My father, King Francis I, was to be played by a Mexican, Pedro Armendáriz. Lana, of course, was an American cast as a French courtesan. My wife, Catherine de Medici, I thought was going to be played by Nicole Maury, the splendid French actress, but David Miller, our director, rejected her because she had a French accent. Instead, the role went to Marisa Pavan, the twin sister of Pier Angeli, who is Italian. Hollywood… You figure.”
Before shooting began, Lana met with both Miller and also the producer, Edwin H. Knopf. He had launched the 1953 hit musical, Lili, starring Leslie Caron, Mel Ferrer, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Jean-Pierre Aumont, Lana’s former lover. Knopf also worked with many big stars, including Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, Robert Taylor, and Greer Garson.
Diane de Poitiers (1499-1566), the French noblewoman portrayed by Lana, became—through diplomatic skill, charm, beauty, good advice, and perhaps witchcraft—the “favorite” of one of the most powerful kings of the French Renaissance, Henri II.
As a film director, Miller had had a varied career, having helmed pictures that included John Wayne in Flying Tigers (1943), and the Marx Brothers in Love Happy (1949), featuring a young Marilyn Monroe.
In Diane, Lana’s actual husband was Count de Brézé (Torin Thatcher), although she becomes the mistress of Prince Henri (Moore). After the death of his father, the king, Henri inherits the throne. But his affair with Diane continues even after his politically motivated marriage to Catherine de Medici.
She is antagonistic to Diane, and her scheming eventually results in the death of Henri. Ruling as regent, she banishes Diane from the court, but spares her life.
Noted for the opulence of its Renaissance-era costumes, Lana, as Diane de Poitiers, was lavishly outfitted in costumes that included this awe-inspiring confection of velvet, ermine, and gold braid.
In a memoir, Moore, the screen’s future James Bond, said he could be grateful to Lana for teaching him to “screen kiss.” He claimed that at the age of twenty-eight, already into his second marriage and several girlfriends, he had always thought of himself as a good kisser. On hearing of the death of Francis I, and his upcoming ascension to the throne of France, he turns to Lana. “You made me a prince. Now make me a king.”
“Our lips met, and I gave her the kiss of all kisses,” he said.
Lana, as a grand diva, pushed him away and coughed. “Cut! CUT!” she called to Miller, before turning to Moore: “Honey, you’re a great kisser. But I’m over thirty-five, and I’ve got to be careful of my neckline. So, could you kiss with the same passion, but without the pressure?”
Her leading man, not her screen lover, was actually Armendáriz. Along with Maria Félix and Dolores del Rio, he was among the best-known Latin American screen stars of the 1940s and ‘50s.
Lana (as Diane) met her screen rival, Marisa Pavan (playing Catherine de Medici) and spoke about having worked with her twin sister, Pier Angeli in Flame and the Flesh in Italy. Pavan was dating Jean-Pierre Aumont and would marry him the following year. “He’s great in bed,” Lana told Pavan.
Her remark was not appreciated.
In one particularly difficult scene in Diane, a CinemaScope epic, Moore, now ascended to the throne, was slated for the filming of an episode on horseback. Astride the horse as it headed at a fast pace toward a wall, his feet became separated from the saddle’s stirrups, and he hit the ground really hard. Members of the crew rushed to his side, where they removed his armor to see if any bones had been broken.
Rushing to the scene, Lana called out in a loud voice, “Is his cock all right?”
Moore recorded her question in his memoirs. Her query suggested that Moore might have been servicing her throughout the shoot, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
“Thankfully, nothing was broken, not even my cock, but I was badly bruised. So was my ego.”
During filming, Lana was being serviced by another cock, which had been injured, but which was back performing again.
The notorious Freddy, frequented the set almost every day. On each occasion, he visited Lana’s dressing room.
The future James Bond, Roger Moore, claimed that Lana taught him the art of the “screen kiss—that is, passion without pressure. Don’t ruin the hair or a woman’s makeup.”
As Moore wrote
, “Freddy was terribly well endowed. On crowd days at MGM, he would get it out to show it around for fifty cents per person. On days when 1,000 people showed up, you can see how profitable an exercise it was for him.”
Errol Flynn used Freddy for a gag he’d play at the dinner parties he hosted. Once, Flynn dressed him up as a butler in white tie and tails and placed his massive appendage on a silver tray filled with shrimp. Guests were asked to serve themselves from the tray until one of them screamed at the discovery, buried amid the shrimp and lettuce, of his large penis.
Shelley Winters was on to Flynn’s trick, and she deliberately stuck her fork sharply into Freddy’s penis, causing him to scream out in pain.
Fortunately, by the time Lana filmed Diane, his “money-maker” was back in operation. He charged a man or a woman fifty dollars for a private session.
Lana had confided to Miller that she found Moore very attractive and planned to seduce him. At the wrap party signaling the end of shooting for Diane, cast and crew gathered in a nightclub setting, which was used for the film, Love Me or Leave Me (1955), starring Doris Day and James Cagney.
Moore sat on the steps of the mock dance floor with a drink in hand. Lana approached from behind and began a slow, sensual massage of his shoulders. He was just getting into enjoying the massage, when he heard a strong, masculine voice ring out: “Hi, honey!”
He turned to star into the face of a giant of a man, Tarzan himself, Lex Barker, A jealous husband had come for his wife.
“I got the message quick,” Moore said.
Two days later, when Lana visited the studio for some publicity stills, Christopher Isherwood, the famous author of The Berlin Stories, invited her to lunch. He had written the screenplay for Diane based on a story by John Erskine.
Over lunch, he told her fascinating stories about Diane de Poitiers that hadn’t been included in the film. She had retained her good looks well into her 50s, her appearance immortalized in sculpture and in paintings. Rumor had it that she maintained her beauty through witchcraft. She was also known for drinking gold, pulverized into powder and flakes and mixed with wine. [Indeed, she did. In 2009, when French experts dug up her remains, they found high levels of gold in her hair.]
Over coffee, Isherwood spoke of the difficulty he was having with the censors at the Breen Office. “They claim I condone adultery. Frankly, if they had their way, I think those blue noses would punish adultery by stoning homosexuals and burning them alive.”
In this tender scene, Lana as Diane offers comfort to Prince Henri (later, King Henri II), as played by Roger Moore.
“I could have offered him even more comfort off screen,” she said. “But, alas, it was not meant to be.”
At a screening of Diana, Isherwood invited one of his best friends, Tennessee Williams, who had once tried to write a screenplay for Lana himself.
At the end of the screening, Isherwood asked the playwright for his opinion. “I think Lana never looked lovelier.”
Isherwood claimed that the script would have been better if Lana had not interfered so frequently with the director.
In advance of its release, MGM launched an aggressive publicity campaign: LANA TURNER DARES THE DEVIL IN DIANE.
Privately, she complained, “I hope this is the last time I’ll have to appear in those costume stinkers.”
Most of the reviews were bad. Arthur Weiler of The New York Times found Diane “more stately than exciting, more pageant than play.” However, critic Frank Quinn called Diane “a brilliant Renaissance film.”
As Moore lamented, “Diane was a huge flop and I was fired.”
Lana herself would, indeed, be fired, but not until she completed one more loan-out from her home studio. Diane would be the last movie she ever made on the MGM lot.
***
After the filming of Diane, Lana, with Lex Barker, returned to their rented villa in Acapulco for a holiday. As she later wrote, “I nearly didn’t come back.”
On their first day in Mexico, he invited her to the beach for a swim. He did not go into the water himself, but lay on the sands for a while, reading a novel that some author had sent him, hoping he would star in a movie adaptation, cast as a serial seducer. He soon fell asleep on the beach.
Enjoying the warm waters offshore, she at first found the ocean, the sun, and the cool breezes refreshing. In desperate need of a rest, she’d been wrestling with three major problems: A lack of money, a deteriorating marriage, and a movie career drifting into limbo.
Suddenly, without warning, a mammoth wave swept toward the shore, trapping her in its undertow. “I was drowning. The wave sucked me down as the water swirled around me. I was spinning like a top. I thrashed about like a wildcat trying to break the watery grip of this riptide. I just knew I was going to die.”
“Suddenly, Tarzan must have awakened from his slumber. He didn’t see my head in the water, and he jumped up, later telling me, ‘I have never swimmed so fast in my life.’ I felt him grab my ankle and yank me out of my watery grave. Tarzan to the rescue. He was the man to save me. After all, he’d fought with ferocious, man-eating alligators in the rivers of Africa. He brought me ashore and gently put me down on the sands. I was gasping for breath itself while coughing up water from my lungs.”
“But that was not the end of my troubles on that fateful day.”
Back at the villa, she wanted to take a long shower, not only to remove the sand from her body, but hoping it would steady her shattered nerves. Her near-death experience had left her badly shaken.
Barker, too, was upset, but one of the gay Mexican houseboys agreed to take him to the bedroom for an “in-depth massage.”
She stayed under the refreshing water for nearly ten minutes, although she wondered why she wouldn’t be afraid of water for the rest of her life. After the shower, she cut off the water, and stepped out of the pink marble bathtub. Missing her footing, she fell back, hitting her head on the far side of the tub. The blow was so hard it knocked her out.
When she awakened, a doctor, along with Barker, was standing over her. The doctor reported she had suffered a concussion and should be examined more thoroughly at the local hospital.
She spent two days there, feeling despair, almost abandonment. The doctor told her that he feared she would suffer dizzy spells and migraine headaches during the months ahead.
His diagnosis was correct. Throughout the remainder of the autumn of 1954, and into the winter and spring of the following year, these ailments persisted in causing her pain and suffering.
Barker showed up only once during her hospital stay, claiming that he had met a producer from Universal, who was going to try to cast him in “a meaty drama,” in which he’d have the lead, perhaps opposite Piper Laurie.
She got into a fierce argument with him. At the end of their abortive “holiday,” both of them flew back to Los Angeles in relative silence.
She later learned from her host, Ted Stauffer, in Acapulco, that Barker spent time within the villa of Merle Oberon, the porcelain-skinned film star and nymphomaniac, who had seduced many of Lana’s former lovers: Turhan Bey, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, and Rex Harrison, plus countless others, including Prince Philip of England.
When Lana learned about her husband’s adultery in Mexico, she said, “Now I have a new female on my hate list.”
***
Lana’s final film for MGM was a loan-out to Fox for The Rains of Ranchipur (1955), which she’d made after Diane. But its remake of the 1939 The Rains Came would be in the movie houses before MGM released the ill-fated Diane.
Shooting began only two days after her return from Mexico. Dore Schary could get another $300,000 by lending her services out to Fox. Darryl F. Zanuck had always wanted her to work for Fox, or so he had said. She claimed, “He’s more interested in seducing me than starring me in any movie.”
In spite of her protests, Schary insisted that she fulfill her contract. Her scenes would be filmed in Hollywood, so she would not have to travel abroad.
Producer Frank Ross visited her home, and she warned him of her splitting migraines and occasional dizziness, but he promised he’d film his way around them.
During his talk with Lana, Barker, clad in a very brief bikini, emerged dripping wet from the swimming pool.
Lana later said, “Perhaps he thought Ross was a homosexual, which he was not.”
Barker had read the script of The Rains of Ranchipur, and he pitched himself for either the role of Lana’s husband in the movie, an English lord, or else for the part of Tom Ransome, a semi-alcoholic, disillusioned American engineer.
Ross told him he’d already cast Michael Rennie as the lord, and Fred MacMurray as the engineer.
“Tarzan sulked for the rest of the day,” Lana claimed.
***
Lana was to report to Fox the following Monday morning. On the set, she’d meet her co-star, Richard Burton.
Barker had warned Ross, “The reputation of that horndog has already preceded him. If he makes a move toward Lana, you’ll have to get someone to dub his voice, because I’ll turn him into a soprano.”
***
There was a certain irony in casting Lana in The Rains of Ranchipur. Back in 1939, when she was new to Hollywood, she came very close to getting cast in the original version of this drama, a film entitled The Rains Came, based on a novel by Louis Bromfield. Its plot involved the effect that a devastating earthquake has on a widely mixed group of “saints and sinners” in British colonial India.
Its director, Clarence Brown, had originally offered Lana the ingénue role of Fern Simon, but MGM refused to lend her to Fox. Instead, Louis B. Mayer assigned her to three other pictures that year—Calling Dr. Kildare, These Glamour Girls, and Dancing Co-Ed. Consequently, she had not been available for The Rains Came. She was very disappointed, because it would be her only chance to co-star with her all-time heartthrob and future lover, Tyrone Power.
In Lana’s place, starlet Brenda Joyce was cast in the Fern Simon role. There was another irony here, too, since a decade later, Joyce would play Jane to Lex Barker’s Tarzan in Tarzan’s Magic Fountain (1949). As Lana jokingly said, “Brenda got to swing on Barker’s vine before I did.”
Lana Turner Page 66