Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  Without Lana, Brown rounded out the ’39 cast with Myrna Loy as Lady Edwina Esketh, supported by George Brent, Nigel Bruce, and the formidable Russian actress, Marie Ouspenskaya, playing the regal Maharini.

  Sixteen years later, for the ’55 remake, Lana was too old to play the ingénue. This time around, producer Ross cast his wife, Joan Caulfield, in the role of the younger woman. A model during World War II, Caulfield had established a reputation for playing roles that were “wholesome, pretty, and blonde.”

  Instead, Lana, now a more mature woman, was given the role of Lady Edwina Esketh, the character previously portrayed by Myrna Loy. Merle Miller, the gay novelist and biographer, rewrote the character, transforming Lady Edwina into a wealthy American heiress married to a weak man she loathed, Lord Esketh (played by the British actor, Michael Rennie).

  Lana, as Edwina Esketh, treats her husband, Lord Esketh (Michael Rennie) as a servant. She’d wed a title, and he’d married her for her money.

  The original Rain was in black and white. For the 1955 remake, 20th Century Fox lavishly (and expensively) filmed it in CinemaScope and DeLuxe color.

  Before filming began, its director, Jean Negulesco announced to the press that there were only three women in Hollywood capable of playing Lady Esketh: Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, or Rita Hayworth. This would be Lana’s first film for Fox.

  Is an earthquake on the way? Lana, in the arms of Richard Burton, cast as a Hindi doctor, fears disaster, as does the alcoholic, Tom Ransome (Fred MacMurray).

  She would headline a cast that included Richard Burton, playing the Hindu Dr. Safti (the role originally handled by Power). Fred MacMurray would portray Tom Ransome (the role originally assigned to George Brent. And whereas Nigel Bruce had played the heroine’s husband in the original 1939 version, Rennie was assigned the role in the 1955 re-make. The Maharani would be played by the Russian stage actress, Eugenie Leontovich, that country’s answer to Sarah Bernhardt or Italy’s Eleonore Duse.

  Lana plays a bored, blatant man hunter, although her stated purpose of being in India was to purchase race horses. [Actually, the exterior shots were filmed in Pakistan.] Her marriage to Rennie is loveless. She is introduced to the Hindu doctor (Burton was miscast). Although he resists her at first, he eventually falls under her seductive powers.

  MacMurray is the hard-drinking Tom, who eventually wins back his self-respect and the love of Simon (Caulfield).

  Ross, the producer, had previously made The Robe (1953) with Burton. He had once been married to screen legend, Jean Arthur, another blonde. Ross was anxious to work with Burton again. At the time, Burton was only a minor actor in Hollywood, years away from playing Marc Antony opposite Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963).

  The Romania-born director, Negulesco, was very experienced, having previously helmed Jane Wyman in her Oscar-winning performance in Johnny Belinda (1948) and Marilyn Monroe in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). He’d also directed such divas as Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford before making his most recent hit, Three Coins in the Fountain (1954).

  Even though she was the producer’s wife, Lana made no special attempt to ingratiate herself with Caulfield. She did remind her that she had originally been slated to play her role in The Rains Came.

  “Oh, that was so long ago,” Caulfield said. “I also heard that you had been set to star in The Petty Girl (1950), but, of course, the part went to me.”

  After that remark, Lana got a little catty with this former cover girl and Broadway ingénue. “Your career may be in danger with the arrival of Grace Kelly,” Lanatold Caulfield. “She has your cultivated manner, but does it better.” Lana was right, as she was around to watch Caulfield’s screen career fizzle.

  Michael Rennie, cast as Lana’s husband, generated no excitement from her on or off the screen. She had recently seen him in The King of the Khyber Rifles the year before, but only because Tyrone Power was the star.

  During Rennie’s talks with Lana, he said, “I suppose women find me attractive because I am polite, charming, courteous, and a gentleman. My romantic reputation is an exaggeration. The realities are a bit different.”

  “I can believe that,” she said. She noted that the English actor bonded more naturally with Burton than with her, as he’d recently made The Robe with the Welsh-man.

  ***

  When Lana saw the rushes, she told the director that she’d never been photographed so beautifully. She thanked Fox’s Milton Krasner.

  Helen Rose, one of her alltime favorite designers, had worked with her on such films as The Bad and the Beautiful, and she came through for her once again. Lana looked like a high fashion model.

  The special effects would bring an Oscar nomination to Ray Kellogg. He simulated an earthquake which destroys a bridge and a huge dam, bringing floods, death, and destruction to the little town in India. Unlike the original version, in the remake, Lana was allowed to survive.

  In the plot, writer Miller has Rennie denounce his wife as “selfish, greedy, corrupt, and decadent.” She is a true femme fatale.

  Her best line, delivered near the end of the movie, is uttered during a face-off with Leonotovich. “I don’t give a damn,” Lana says. The word damn did not cause the outrage it did when Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, in the closing scene of Gone With the Wind, tells Scarlett: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

  But this was 1955, not 1939.

  The Rains of Ranchipur was Fox’s feature film for the Christmas season of 1955, opening in theaters across the country.

  Reviews were mixed. But whereas purists preferred the original Loy/Power film from 1939, Redbook selected the ’55 version as “Picture of the Month,” and the New York Daily News awarded it the top rating of four stars.

  The movie was not a hit at the box office, garnering far fewer viewers than anticipated. At some showings, it half filled an auditorium, if that. Fox tried hard, with provocative advertising of sexy Lana and sexy Burton. One ad had Burton sneering at her: “I wonder what the word for you is in Hindi. In English, it’s only one syllable.”

  ***

  Although Lana, in her memoirs, promised to tell “The Truth,” she gave a very incomplete rendition of her love/hate relationship with Richard Burton during the making of The Rains of Ranchipur, which was shot in Hollywood, not on location in India.

  No doubt, she was restrained in her recollections because at the time that she worked with him, he was still married to actress Sybil Williams. As a potential lover, Lana wasn’t robbing the cradle, as he was only four years younger than she was.

  She wrote that it was hard for her to simulate any sexual chemistry with Burton in their love scenes, with her as a predatory American heiress and he as a noble Hindu doctor. At first, she was put off by his attitude, attacking his “bloated self-image.” Behind his back, sometimes in the company of Rennie and MacMurray, she mocked and denounced him.

  Burton constantly argued with the director, Negulesco, who accused him of not being very convincing as a Hindu.

  “I’m a proud Welshman,” he shot back. “Not a god damn raghead Indian.”

  Lana noted that Burton spent his time off-camera in his dressing room “seducing our dusky little extras, for whom he developed a great fondness.”

  What Lana left out of her memoirs was that after only three weeks, she, too, succumbed to the sexual magnetism of Burton and his Welsh charm, especially his speaking voice, which was the most alluring she’d ever heard.

  He could be very candid about his sex life, even admitting, “Perhaps most actors are latent homosexuals, and we cover it up with drink. I was once a homosexual, but it didn’t take.”

  [No doubt, he was referring to his time in the 1940s when, as a young actor, he was trying to break into the theater. He was seduced by some of its VIP notables, namely Emlyn Williams, Laurence Olivier, and John Gielgud.

  Burton later seduced not only actresses, such as Sophia Loren, Raquel Welch, Barbra Streisand, Rachel Roberts, Tammy Grimes, Ava Gardner,
Zsa Zsa Gabor, Geneviève Bujold, and especially Claire Bloom, but Elizabeth, Princess of Yugoslavia, and even a toothless middle-aged Jamaican maid “when I woke up with a big hard-on as she came in to clean my bedroom.”]

  The story of Burton’s seduction of Lana was finally revealed in Michael Munn’s biography, Prince of Players, published in 2008. Skyhorse Publishing advertised it as “Burton’s darkest thoughts and secrets, revealing hell-raising stories that Hollywood quashed in order to save Burton’s early film career—including affairs with Marilyn Monroe and Lana Turner, being caught in a brothel with Errol Flynn, and a fistfight with Frank Sinatra.”

  Munn was a friend of both Burton and Ava Gardner, who at the time was a rival goddess at MGM, vying with Lana, sometimes for the same film roles. Amazingly, they remained close friends, although later, their amity would get frayed, especially after Gardner, when drunk, would make derogatory remarks about Lana.

  Gardner once told Munn, in reference to Lana, “That tramp fucked everyone. She fucked Burton. I bet it was one time he didn’t have to chase. She would have gone after him.”

  “I suggest it takes two to tango, baby, and she saw Rich as a bit of a trophy. She felt she could have anyone she wanted. She wanted him because he had a reputation for fucking every one of his leading ladies.”

  When Lana heard about Gardner’s gossipy evaluation of the situation, shequipped, “How can a pot call a kettle black?”

  Munn told Burton what Gardner had said. Burton replied, “I was ever so happy being Lana’s trophy during the filming of that Ranchipur movie. The film bored me to death, although I did my best with it. I liked to joke, ‘It never rains but what it Ranchipurs.’ Between takes, there was only one thing to do to make the time pass more agreeably. Lana and I passed the time together. She set out to get me, and I allowed myself to be caught. Why not? Who knows who else she was bedding? I didn’t care, and I didn’t ask.”

  A few years later, right before Burton headed for Rome to make Cleopatra (1963) with Elizabeth Taylor, Lana encountered him at a Hollywood party. He had been drinking heavily. She congratulated him on winning the role of Marc Antony, although he didn’t seem to be looking forward to it.

  “Whether she knows it or not, Miss Taylor is going to make me a star,” he vowed. “I going to use that no-talent Hollywood nothing.”

  ***

  In 1970, Burton recorded in his diaries: “Elizabeth watched me in an old film last night, The Rains of Ranchipur, which I made with Lana Turner way back when. Elizabeth said I was very handsome and sexy-looking, and the film was nothing like as bad as I had said it was. Perhaps it’s mellowed with age.”

  ***

  After wrapping The Rains of Ranchipur for Fox, Lana paid a final visit to MGM to pick up her clothing and other possessions. She got out of her car for a farewell look at the studio where she’d once reigned as queen in the 1940s.

  MGM had notified her on February of 1956 that her contract had not been renewed. “It is not our intention to make any more Lana Turner pictures,” a lawyer for MGM had written.

  Packing up her things in her dressing room, she wondered what new and younger star would be occupying it.

  She checked her face in the mirror, relieved that at thirty-six, a fatal age for most Hollywood actresses, she still looked beautiful, except for a minor telltale sign of age here and there. She called this period in her life a time of emotional trauma. Lex Barker still offered sex with a powerful weapon, but he was having a hard time finding suitable vehicles for himself in his post-Tarzan years.

  In her time, she’d earned millions for MGM, but that was in the days of Louis B. Mayer. The former mogul had been booted out in June of 1951. He defiantly issued a statement to the press which Lana read: “I am going to be more active than at any time during the last fifteen years. It will be at a studio and under conditions where I shall have the right to make the right kind of pictures—decent, wholesome pictures for Americans and for people throughout the world who want and need this type of entertainment.”

  It was an idle boast, as Lana sensed it would be, although he called her twice with picture ideas, for which he never arranged financing. At least he continued to think of her as a bankable star.

  Mayer died in 1957, and with his passing went Lana’s glory days at MGM.

  During her last hour at MGM, no one came forward to tell her goodbye, except the two old guards at the gate. Some unknown grip called out to her, “Are you finished, Miss Turner?”

  Too choked up to answer, she drew a finger across her throat to signal “Cut!”

  The guards told her goodbye. She paused before driving through the gate. Nostalgia was telling her to look back for a final gaze at the studio that had made her an international legend.

  “What the hell!” she said. “Fuck nostalgia!”

  Without looking back, she headed down the street in her car.

  That glory that was MGM and the glory that was Lana Turner were over. She recalled, “A movie MGM made said it all: Gone With the Wind.”

  The Hindu doctor, Richard Burton, nibbles at the neck of Lady Esketh (Lana herself). He boasted, “It’s not really a triumph to be a success with these Hollywood ladies, because they have so little opportunity with real men. If there’s a dame on the set, I can’t screw, my name is not Richard Burton. And I’m including that very stuck-up Lana Turner in that. The more stuck-up they appear, the more likely you are to encounter them at the bottom of the orgy pile.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Tarzan Is Revealed as a Child Rapist

  Lana in Her First Mother Role

  On April 15, 1957, Hollywood learned that that Lana had changed her mind. In a column headlined LUSCIOUS LANA TO PLAY MOTHER ROLE, Louella Parsons revealed that Lana had at last accepted the starring role, that of Constance, in “the salacious Peyton Place…This will be the first time that Lana has stepped out of her glamour roles, but this is going to be such a picture she’d be foolish not to accept it, pronto.”

  Fans bombarded Fox with letters, most of them urging glamorous femme fatale Lana not to switch to maternal parts. For Lana, however, her agreement to play Connie would be a forerunner for many equivalent roles in her future, notably Imitation of Life.

  Throughout the course of 1956, Hollywood reporters were still fascinated by the life and loves of Lana Turner, still viewing her as hot copy, even though she’d been fired by MGM.

  “She wasn’t turned on by most of the emerging pretty boys that came along in the 1950s,” said Del Armstrong, her makeup man and confidant.

  “She’d already had James Dean, but told me she found him a bit creepy. Montgomery Clift was a film star, but he was gay and a bit weird. Marlon Brando was too much of a brute for her. The one emerging new actor who really turned her on was Robert Wagner. Press agent George Nichols told me that he saw Wagner disappearing into her dressing room during her last weeks at MGM.”

  A reporter, Joe Hyams, visited her at her home, where she came out to greet him in a black sweater, black slacks, and gold sandals. “She looked as beautiful as ever—still very fuckable, a living wet dream.”

  She welcomed him warmly, offering him a drink. “I think she’d had a few belts before I got there.”

  She settled onto her sofa in her most seductive pose, telling him, “I’ve been sprung from jail. I’m still walking around in a daze, as if I can’t believe it. For all of my adult life, I’ve been in bondage to MGM except for that brief stint at Warners in the 1930s when I screwed Ronald Reagan. Don’t print that last remark. He’s settled down with Nancy now, as you know.”

  “I had become a fixture at Metro, like the Thalberg Building. If Louis B. Mayer or Dore Schary had a rotten picture to make, they’d say, ‘Give it to Lana. Maybe she can save it.’ If I absolutely refused to do it, they’d threaten to suspend me or else give it to Ava Gardner.”

  “Time and again on bended nylon, I pleased with the front office to give me better scripts. Joan Crawford at MGM did that before they dum
ped her. The last time I begged, I was cast in The Prodigal. Thanks a lot, guys”

  “I’m thinking about forming my own production company, Lanturn. Lex Barker wants us to team up like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn did, except I don’t think the two of us on screen would be typical family fare. Our love scenes wouldn’t be for the Disney people.”

  Later, after Hyams left, she said she hoped that she’d concealed her fragility. In many ways, her world seemed to be crumbling.

  She’d been forced to sell her mansion in Holmby Hills for payment of back income taxes.

  When she told her neighbor goodbye, Judy Garland wasn’t all that encouraging. “Oh, Lana dear, it’ll be our fate: We’ll both end up, deserted by men, two old alcoholic hags with dreams of yesterday. I’ll be singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ in some seedy tavern filled with whores and their pimps.”

  ***

  Despite her bravado, Lana faced one turbulent conflict after another. Chief among them was her deteriorating marriage to Barker. Ironically, the studio that hired her as a freelancer was Universal-International, the same studio that had Barker under contract, starring in a string of low-budget “B” pictures. Lana had seen them, privately, saying, “B is too high a rating for that garbage Lex is turning out.”

  Barker was in Rome making another of his cheapie pictures for an Italian film company. As Fellini said, “Rome is becoming the stockyard for Hollywood movie stars past their prime.”

  On the lot at Universal, during her filming of The Lady Takes a Flyer (1958), Lana began hearing reports that her adulterous husband was “sleeping his way” through the starlets, one by one, evocative of how Clark Gable had seduced MGM’s leading ladies in the 1930s.