Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  In spite of Lana’s highly advertised million dollar wardrobe, Love Has Many Faces was not a success at the box office. However, one critic found it, “the perfect antidote for bored housewives who thrive at the sight of beautiful clothes and emotional turmoil in opulent surroundings.”

  One of the leading film critics of her era, Judith Crist, wrote, “It’s a soapy melodrama, the kind of film that over the years has given the term ‘a woman’s picture’ all the opprobrium it bears.”

  Another critic dismissed it as “a lushly wrapped dime novel escapade on a Mexican beach and a luxurious villa.” Yet another reviewer found it “a sordid romantic tale of the beach boy set.”

  After the movie failed at the box office, Lana knew she had to have a good strong role, as well as a hit movie, if she were to continue with her film career.

  ***

  As the 1960s marched forward, Hollywood was a radically different town from what it had been in 1937, when a plucky little starlet arrived at the gates of Warner Brothers. The Golden age had ended, and each year brought more and more deaths of her friends and lovers of long ago.

  She was desperate for the right role. Her brand of movies, called “a woman’s picture,” just weren’t being made any more in this era of Dustin Hoffman, Steve McQueen, Joan Collins, Jane Fonda, and Faye Dunaway.

  She had rechristened her company Eltee Productions, and in the mid-1960s, she searched for the right script.

  Lana had had such great success working with Ross Hunter, she turned once again to him to revive a tired old property of yesterday.

  A four-handkerchief “soaper,” Madame X was first presented on stage in 1908 by the French playwright, Alexandre Bisson. It was one of the prototypes for the many “fallen woman” plots that followed. The role was cited as one of the best known examples of the literary tradition of portraying the mother figure as “being excessively punished for a slight deviation from her maternal role.”

  In 1916, Pathé filmed it with Dorothy Donnelly in the lead role. Four years later, Samuel Goldwyn put his stamp on it, casting Pauline Frederick—a celebrated star of the silent screen—in the role.

  More versions were to follow.

  In 1929, Lionel Barrymore had directed Ruth Chatterton, one of the reigning stars of early talkies, in the first sound version of Madame X.

  The only version screened for Lana was a sanitized 1937 remake of the pre-Code version, directed by Samuel Wood and starring Gladys George, with Warren William. The film was released by MGM and did well at the box office.

  Lana knew that there was only one producer who could get financing for another remake and that was Ross Hunter. They’d had such success in the past. She met with him, and they agreed to do a remake as a Ross Hunter-Eltee production with Universal releasing it and also financing it.

  Hunter went to Douglas Sirk to ask him if he’d direct Lana again, but found him in such ill health it was not possible.

  Hunter assigned a former radio actor, Jean Holloway, to pen the script, but after several versions, neither Lana nor Hunter were satisfied. The movie was delayed for three years before shooting began in April of 1965.

  When Sirk turned down the job, David Lowell Rich, whose resumé included many television dramas, was signed as director.

  This New Yorker helmed 100 films and TV episodes between 1950 and 1987. When Lana met him, he’d just shot See How They Run (1964). She considered him “very commercial—just grind them out and under budget.” She was shocked when he told the cast and crew that they would have only eight weeks to bring “this soaper in on time.”

  Whereas she was allowed to look glamorous in the beginning, especially in gowns by Jean Louis, she’d have to age twenty-four years during the course of the film.

  Although by now, 1966, most housewives were getting their soap opera fix on TV dramas in the afternoon, Lana and Hunter hoped that the targeted audience, women of Lana’s age, would drag their husbands to see Madame X in an actual movie house.

  The plot of this tired old tear-jerker was familiar to old-time Hollywood people.

  In a nutshell, it was the story of a lower class woman, Holly Parker (Lana), who marries into the wealthy Anderson family. Her husband, Clayton Anderson (John Forsythe), has political ambitions and is always away, neglecting her to pursue his career in the diplomatic corps.

  A well-known playboy, Phil Benton (Ricardo Montalban), lures her into a tryst. He and Lana had been good friends since they made Latin Lovers together.

  During one of their encounters, he is killed in an accident. Her venomous mother-in-law (constance Bennett) becomes aware of it and seizes upon the playboy’s death to break up Holly’s marriage. She had always detested her daughter-in-law anyway. She convinces her to abandon her family as a means of saving her husband’s career and to avoid disgracing her young son.

  Holly (Lana) runs away to Europe, and, when her money runs out, sinks into a pit of despair, turning to absinthe and prostitution.

  Hunter had lured Constance Bennett out of a twelve-year retirement. The sister of Joan Bennett, she had been a bigtime star in the 1920s and ‘30s. In the early 1930s, she was the highest-paid actress in Hollywood. Before appearing with Lana, she had starred with some of the biggest names in Hollywood: Cary Grant, Clark Gable, even Greta Garbo.

  There was no love lost between Lana and Constance Bennett (right) when they made Madame X. But producer Ross Hunter got them to agree to appear with him at the film’s premiere.

  Madame X would be Bennett’s last screen appearance. Shortly after this picture was taken, she collapsed and died from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of sixty.

  It seemed inevitable that the blonde goddess of the 1930s, and the blonde goddess of the 1940s and 50s, would be envious of each other when they came together on the set. They did not engage in open warfare, but there was tension between them.

  Lana had managed to get Virginia Grey cast in the role of “Mimsy,” and as such, she had a front row seat to watch the simmering rivalries between Lana and Bennett.

  “Each actress wanted to be better dressed and better made up than the other,” Grey said. “In the movie, they were supposed to dislike each other intensely. Believe me, those two weren’t just acting.”

  Columnist Sheilah Graham didn’t endear herself to Lana. She visited the set one afternoon and wrote that Bennett, in her late 50s, looked younger than Lana, even though at that stage of the filming, Lana was beautifully made up and attired.

  As a rejoinder to the comments she’d made, Lana called Graham: “Regardless of what you wrote, I’m still here, still going strong. You can’t say that for Hedy Lamarr or Rita Hayworth, can you?”

  “Lana and Bennett were very competitive in their scenes together,” Grey said. “Each actress wanted to be better dressed and better made up than the other. In the movie, they also disliked each other. They weren’t acting: They meant it.”

  As the plot unfolds, Lana’s descent into degradation and despair deepens. By now, the plot has moved her into a seedy hotel in mexico, where she gets involved with Dan Sullivan (Burgess Meredith), a con artist and blackmailer. When he learns of her identity, he concocts a plot where he plans to contact her diplomat husband and reveal her identity to her young son, who has become a lawyer on the rise.

  Lana hadn’t seen Meredith in years, not since he was married to her friend, Paulette Goddard, and had made a pass at her.

  Learning of his scheme, she fatally shoots him and goes on trial for murder, where she is identified as “Madame X.”

  In one of the ironies so often found in films, the court appoints Clayton Anderson, Jr. (Keir Dullea) as her attorney to defend her on a charge of murder. He doesn’t know he’s fighting for his mother’s life.

  Makeup was by her trusted friend, Del Armstrong. Their friendship was tested during the filming of Madame X when he had to apply makeup to add some quarter of a century of hard living to her face.

  He would not let her look in a mirror when he aged her. W
hen he turned her around and allowed her to evaluate the changes he’d wrought, she screamed in horror. “When my fans see me looking this old, they’ll desert me in droves.”

  Before a verdict comes in, Lana collapses and dies.

  She found Dullea, playing her son, quite handsome. “If only I had been fifteen years younger.” He was on the dawn of his greatest success: astronaut David Bowman, whom he portrayed in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  The year he met Lana, he had co-starred with Laurence Olivier, Carol Lynley, and Noël Coward in Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965). Lana found Coward’s assessment of Dullea a bit cruel: “Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow.”

  Unlike Love Has Many Faces, Lana was not in a seductive mood with any of her leading men. John Forsythe was cast as her husband. She found him good looking but dull. “He was a good family man,” she said.

  The actor from New Jersey, who signed a contract with Warner Brothers when he was 25, would be married to the same woman, Julie Warren, for fifty-one years. When Lana met him, he was best known for his TV sitcoms, Bachelor Father.

  Because of the intense production schedule, she and Hunter frequently conflicted, often engaging in bitter arguments where the word “fuck” would pop up.

  But at the end of production, she made up with him and even sent him an “epergne” [a tiered decorative centerpiece] of lemons. “For some reason, Ross was queer for lemons,” she told Grey.

  ***

  Hunter and Lana, hoping for the box office bonanza of Imitation of Life, were disappointed by the box office receipts of Madame X. Many of the reviews were bad.

  Writer René Jordan wrote: “Even the carefully resurrected dream world of the Ross Hunter-Lana Turner Rhinestone melodramas became passé in the ‘serious’ Sixties. Fakery had permeated the real life of the public beyond the saturation point. Blatantly glamourous movies were being rejected with a wave of the hand.”

  In one of her most dramatic scenes in Madame X, the young actor, Keir Dullea, cast as Clay Anderson, Jr., is an attorney defending her in court on a murder charge. He doesn’t know that Madame X is his mother. He develops a compassion for her and fights valiantly to save her from the electric chair.

  Fans of Lana have defined poignant moments like this as “four-hanky weepers.”

  In the Chicago Tribune, Clifford Terry Claimed, “When Lana Turner takes the stand in the final courtyard scene, her face resembles a Dust Bowl victory garden.”

  The most devastating review came from Pauline Kael: “Lana Turner is not Madame X. she’s Brand X. She’s not an actress. She’s a commodity.”

  One critic made another bitchy comment: “If you haven’t seen a movie since 1930, you may think Lana Turner’s Madame X is just great.”

  In the Los Angeles Times, Charles Champlin championed Lana’s acting in her courtroom scene and in her death-bed performance. “The unsparing, guileless honesty of her performance is very touching.”

  The Chicago critic, Ann Marsters, claimed, “Corny, perhaps, and mawkish, too, but it plays with a kind of dramatic splendor. I haven’t cried so much in years.”

  In the Hollywood Reporter, James Powers wrote, “Only producer Ross Hunter would dare to do a remake of Madame X, and it has turned out to be an electrifyingly right decision. A superb cast of players, headed by Lana Turner, takes this rather shabby old piece and gives it immediacy, vigor, and credibility.”

  The London Evening Standard wrote: “We should be grateful that Hollywood still has the face to make an unabashed weepie with the sluices open.”

  London critic David Quinland wrote: “One can never remember a more affecting performance by Lana Turner, especially in the latter half of the movie, when she is so much more impressive than one could ever imagine. She is almost entirely captive to a portrayal in which she is utterly deglamourized and says so much with brown eyes that seem old and fathomless.

  Film reviewers in Italy told moviegoers to “get out your handkerchiefs.” In fact, the picture proved quite popular in Italy. Even though the Academy ignored her, Lana won the David Donatello Award as “Best Foreign Actress” in Rome. Theater owners of Italy presented her with La Perle Verde, the Green Pearl Award, for her fine performance.

  ***

  Near the end of her life, Lana told her friends, “Madame X should have won an Oscar. Regrettably, I was lured into making four more feature films, and I even agreed to appear in that hit TV series, Falcon Crest (1982-3). I had to appear with that bitch, Jane Wyman, who resented me.”

  “When I appeared, it became the most highly rated show in the history of nighttime soapers. Wyman was furious and tried to sabotage me. Perhaps she resented that I had fucked Ronald Reagan before she did. I told her she should have hung in with Reagan and she’d be First Lady now, a figure for the history books. As it was, I told her, ‘Now you’ll be only a footnote in Hollywood history.’ For some reason, she didn’t like that.”

  Jane Wyman had long resented Lana.

  Tensions flared when producers of Wyman’s hit TV series, Falcon Crest, hired Lana as its co-star for an appearance as Jacqueline Perrault, earning the highest ratings for the series.

  Ferociously territorial, Wyman ordered the producers to “kill off Miss Turner,” suggesting that her rival be buried in a coffin in the season’s final segment.

  ***

  In an attempt to hook into the youth culture that had emerged in the turbulent 1960s, Lana agreed to star in The Big Cube (1969), the title a reference to sugar cubes spiked with LSD, then all the rage.

  The movie threw her into a world of drug parties, psychedelic episodes, rock music, and more nudity than any picture she’d ever made.

  It was set for a release through Warner Brothers and Seven Arts, with Tito Davison directing and Lindsley Parsons producing.

  It was a low-budget picture shot in Mexico, employing some high-class talent, including Gabriel Figueroa, the foremost cinematographer in Mexico, and the famous “Travilla,” who had been the costume designer at 20th Century Fox, dressing many of Tinseltown’s biggest stars before beautifully attiring Lana.

  She was cast as Adriana Roman, a major star on Broadway, who is retiring to marry Charles Winthrop (Dan O’Herlihy), a business tycoon. Previously, she had starred with him in Imitation of Life, and both of them agreed that The Big Cube was a comedown for them.

  ALMOST KILLING LANA: Campy cliffside struggle, fueled by clandestine ingestions of acid, with evil stepdaughter and her hustling boyfriend.

  One part of the plot cast Lana in a familiar theme of stepmother vs. Stepdaughter. Winthrop’s daughter Lisa (Karin Mossberg) resents Lana from the moment she gets emotionally involved with her (somewhat clueless) father. An actress from Sweden, she had not lost her native accent, and spoke with such a thick Swedish accent that her voice had to be dubbed.

  HOW did Lana’s character get herself into this druggy-hippie LSD-fired mess? Like many of the characters she played, SHE DID IT FOR LOVE.

  Here, Lana’s character cuddles while cruising with her new husband, mega-rich but clueless Dan O’Herlihy, whose untimely drowning sets off the chain of events that redefine her as a drug-tolerant flower child who trips.

  Winthrop is killed in a boating accident, leaving Lana as his heir with the ability to disinherit Lisa if she marries her sleazy boyfriend (George Chakiris). In the 1961 film version of West Side Story, he’d played the leader of “The Sharks,” a performance that won him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

  In The Big Cube, his role is pure evil, a womanizing medical student who sells LSD cubes for profit. He convinces Lisa that her father was murdered by Lana. They conspire to lace her prescribed sedatives with enough LSD to drive her insane. Johnny intends to drive her, in a state of utter terror, to suicide.

  Lana’s primal scream, as recorded as part of the plot line of The Big Cube.

  Were equivalent screams being expressed by Lana, secretly, and at home, during this period of her wildly traumatized life?

  At the last minute, how
ever, Lisa saves her. Johnny is revealed to be the homicidal hustler he is, and stepmother and stepdaughter reconcile.

  As one of the male leads, Richard Egan has the sympathetic role of Frederick Lansdale, a playwright friend of Lana’s who is secretly in love with her. He is mostly known today for starring as Elvis Presley’s older brother in the 1956 Love Me Tender.

  Maurice Forley in Motion Picture Daily Review called the film “Peyton Place with generous doses of LSD.” Since it had been filmed in Mexico, it did better business South of the Border than it did in the United States. It was entitled in Spanish El Terron de Azucar.

  The Big Cube was one of the least distributed of all Lana Turner movies. Kinney Services, Inc., an American conglomerate, took over Warner Brothers from 1966 to 1972.

  In the confusion of that acquisition, several films slated for release in the U.S. more or less ended up on the junk heap. The Big Cube, if it was released at all, played in second-tier movie houses or in drive-ins, always as the less important half of a double feature.

  Swedish actress Karin Mossberg was cast as Lana’s vengeful stepdaughter, plotting with George Chakris, an LSD-peddling male hustler who wants to drive Lana to suicide.

  Lisa Marie Bowman wrote: “In 1969 mainstream Hollywood, filmmakers were still struggling to figure out how to deal with the counter-culture. In The Big Cube, old school movie stars like Lana Turner were menaced by long-haired men and amoral girls in miniskirts. Not only do you get to watch some of the most evil hippies in history, but you get a once-in-a-lifetime experience of seeing Lana Turner on acid!”

  Critic Jeanine Basinger wrote: “The Big Cube is one of the worst films ever made. After thirty-two years in the business, Lana looks less than gorgeous on film for the first time. She wears an expensive wardrobe, but is undermined by a series of gorgonlike wigs, knee-high boots that belong on a teenager, and armloads of jewelry. She is an imitation of Lana Turner. Or, worse, an imitation of Mae West.”