***
Throughout most of the 1960s, Lana had resisted the temptation of appearing in horror films, as had Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, and Bette Davis before her.
Yet finally, her former lover from World War II, Robert Hutton, called her and asked her if she’d read a script he’d co-written with Rosemary Wootten. She agreed to read it, but warned: “I will not wear a fright wig, and I won’t wield an ax.”
“That’s not called for,” he said. “The role calls for you to be felinely wicked. You’ll still get to look glamorous as carrie.”
“send it over, darling,” she said, “and I’ll read it this afternoon. And, Bob, dear, we had some good times, didn’t we? Even though there was a war on.”
“It was the pinnacle of my life,” he assured her.
“In a fit of madness, I agreed to star in the film even though it was to be shot in london with that horrible weather,” she said. “I don’t know how the locals endure it. Now, if only they’d agree on a title.”
The film was generally called Persecution when it was released in 1974. Since much of the plot centered on a series of ominous Persian cats, each named Sheba, other titles included PURRsecution, Sheba, The Seven Lives of Sheba, and even I Hate You, Cat. She detested the last title. For a VHS release in the 1980s, the title was changed to The Graveyard.
Persecution was an obvious attempt to create a British version of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962).
Arriving in London, Lana told the press, “I’m sure I’ll get a lot of hate mail playing a very wicked mother who torments her poor son. It’s unlike any role I’ve ever played before.”
At Pinewood Studios, she met with Kevin Francis, the film’sproducer. He was the son of Freddie Francis, a noted cinematographer and horror film director.
He introduced Lana to her talented English director, Dan Chaffey, who was also a writer, producer, and even an art director.
He had been tapped for Persecution because of his involvement in a number of Anglo-horror movies.
She would be appearing with co-stars, Trevor Howard, Ralph Bates, Olga Georges-Picot, and Suzan Farmer. Only Howard was a familiar name to her.
Lana’s character, Carrie Masters, was a mother from hell, with an obsession with a series of cats, each of them known as Sheba. “In this psychological horror tale I play a matriarchal monster,” she told her friends. “There’s a hint of the supernatural, me with my creepy Persians.”
What Becomes a Movie Legend Most? HORROR!
Like Lana, near the end of their careers, movie queens of yesteryear also “descended” into roles conveying psychoses, mental illness, and decay.
Top to botton: Joan Crawford in Strait Jacket (1964); Bette Davis in Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964); and Lana in Persecution (1974), carrying the corpse of her beloved Sheba in a mini-coffin.
Early in the film, a child actor, Marks Weavers, played her ten-year-old son, David. An American émigré to England, Carrie has been crippled in her leg, and she blames her boy for her state and sets out to wreak vengeance on the poor lad, with the aid of her wicked Sheba.
Frightened almost out of his mind, David retaliates by drowning the cat in its milk, claiming that his mother loves it more than she loves him.
Time goes by, and David (played by Bates) is now twenty-four. He arrives at his mother’s house with his wife, Janie (Farmer) and their newborn baby.
Carrie (Lana) is opposed to her son’s marriage and wants to break it up. It’s as if she is toying with him, in a style copied from the way her Sheba might play with a mouse before devouring it. Her latest cat, another Sheba, malevolently suffocates the tender little infant under a pillow.
After the death of her child, Janie suffers a nervous breakdown. In a diabolical scheme, Carrie hires a sexy, sultry French nurse, ostensibly to look after her daughter-in-law. Actually, Carrie wants her son to be seduced by Monique Kalfon (played by Olga Georges-Picot).
Monique manages to seduce David. At that point, Janie enters their bedroom, catching her young husband in intercourse with the so-called “nurse” (who’s really a prostitute). Janie rushes from the room, but stumbles, falling down the stairs to her death.
At this point, David “flips out.” He not only kills the prostitute, but goes into the garden to dig up the graves of the past shebas. In doing so, he discovers the bones of Carrie’s former husband, Robert Masters.
As it turns out, he was not David’s father. Carrie murdered her husband years ago. Her son’s actual father is Paul Bellamy (Trevor Howard). It was Bellamy who crippled Carrie.
All of these revelations are too much for poor David. At the conclusion, he drowns his mother in the cat’s milk.
Lana said she was honored to be working with Howard, who arguably was described as “the greatest British actor of his generation.”
Thus goes the way of all flesh:
Lana, former sex goddess of MGM, plays a vengefully geriatric lunatic with a penchant for pampered, homicidal cats.
“I’m semi-retired,” he told her. “But I wanted to work so I took on this thankless role. Blame it on my poor state of mind.”
***
Persecution, with later title changes, received very limited distribution in the United States and became known as one of Lana’s worst failures. She infuriated the producer when she told the press, “It’s a bomb!”
In promoting the film, the following taglines were used: THE HORROR OF A TWISTED MIND! A WARNING: THIS FILM IS NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH. NOW IT’S DAVID’S TURN TO GET EVEN—AND HE HAS A VERY SPECIAL TREAT FOR HIS MOTHER.
In the London Daily Mirror, Margaret Hinxman said: “Silly as it seems, here is the spectacular Lana Turner playing a crippled, cat-loving mother dominating the life of her unfortunate son (Ralph Bates, who deserves a better fate). Given a more astute script, I imagine that able director, Don Chaffey, would have done justice to his star. As it is, the film is surprisingly stodgy, barely a gasp of surprise in it.”
Richard Schleib in the Science Fiction, Horror, and Fantasy Movie Review wrote: “Turner hams it up, and she and Ralph Bates have fun playing games with one another.”
Geoff Brown, in BFI Monthly Film Bulletin, called Persecution “a tawdry and tedious psycho-drama, and as repulsive as most movies exploiting Hollywood’s leading ladies. One can only admire Lana Turner’s fortitude. She strives to exhibit the same dignity of Portrait in Black and Madame X. Aside from her, there is little of interest in this strike-out.”
In Variety, the critic called the movie “an old-fashioned meller riddled with ho-hum and sometimes laughably trite scripting. Also, it’s very tame in the shock-horror department. But under the circumstances, Turner’s performance as the perverted dame of the English manor has reasonable poise.”
It came as a total surprise to Lana, after all the bad reviews, but in October of 1975 at Sitges, on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, she won the Silver Carnation Award at the annual festival of horror films, walking off with the Best Actress prize.
After making the film, she flew back to California to settle into her condo at Century Park East on Santa Monica Boulevard in Century City. Often she stood there at night, looking at the city lights and thinking about yesterday. After a somewhat nomadic existence, moving from one place to another, this would be her last and final home.
Lana as a rich, lonely widow confronting an incest issue in Bittersweet Love, seems, in her later years, to cling more desperately than ever to her expensive accoutrements.
***
Jac Fields, Lana’s agent for the 1970s, persuaded her to star in the melodrama, Bittersweet Love, set for a 1976 distribution from Avoc Embassy Pictures. A Zappala-Slott Production, it was written by Adrian Morrall and D.A. Kellogg. Lana would head a talented cast that included Robert Lansing, Celeste Holm, Scott Hylands, and Meredith Baxter-Birney.
In it, as a rich, lonely widow, Lana confronted an incest issue. To make herself more glamourous, she clung to her fur coats and diamonds, but the film b
ombed. She said, “I’m semi-retired. But I wanted to work, so I took on this thankless role. I’ll never return to the screen,” she vowed.
But she did.
***
For a 1980 release, Witches’ Brew, Lana made her last big screen appearance playing a witch. Once again, she was allowed to wear her diamonds and furs as a rich society lady indulging in the black arts.
On seeing the final cut, she said, “I didn’t know whether to laugh at myself or cry. What a sad adieu to a film career!”
Why Lana, among the best-preserved of the Golden Age Stars, wanted to appear in an adieu to feature films as a witch would require a probe of her psyche.
Witches’ Brew was actually shot in 1978 by first-time writer and director Richard Shorr, but few were pleased with the editing and final result. Another director, Herbert L. Strock, came in months later and reshot several scenes, hoping to salvage the project. Plagued with lawsuits that broke out among the principals, Witches Brew never had a theatrical release. However, in 1985, it had a TV premiere and was also made available on home video.
When a reporter asked Teri Garr—who was later famous for her Oscar-nominated role as Best Supporting Actress in Tootsie (1982)—about working with Lana, she said: “I don’t think either Miss Turner or myself will be remembered for Witches’ Brew. The film will not be mentioned in our obits.”
***
On looking back at her career, Lana said, “I shouldn’t have made those last four films after Madame X. I also, in the 1960s, should not have married my last three husbands. But I did.”
Chapter Eighteen
Where Love Has Gone
Three Failed Marriages To Much Younger Husbands
Sporting a buzzcut that Lana the Barber had given him, rancher Fred May, Husband #5, escorted Lana to the Bal Montmartre in 1959, where she was photographed as the epitome of oldtime Hollywood glamour.
“He loved me for myself and, unlike all my other husbands, before and since, he didn’t fall for a celluloid image, but for me as a woman. Our breakup was silly, all my fault. Blame it on my cheating heart, I guess.”
“I accused him of being the Gestapo. He was so punctual, so well organized, but he loved me and I loved him. If only I’d been a faithful wife, we might still be married. Fred was the kind of man a gal could grow old with. He was also good looking and a wonderful lover. How stupid of me to leave him.”
In the weeks following the murder of Johnny Stompanato, Lana became a recluse, not wanting to go out “to be observed like some sort of freak murderess by the public.”
However, that summer, she accepted an invitation from an actor friend, Kem Dibbs, to go to a beach party in Malibu, where she would eventually move. The host was film executive Robert Whittaker, whom she knew only casually.
Other than the host, she didn’t know anybody at the party, and the much younger guests paid no attention to her, intent as they were on having fun at the beach.
Sitting all alone, she noticed the arrival of a handsome young man.
As she remembered him, he was “dressed all in brown—everything about him was brown, especially his tanned face and sandy hair. Even his dark glasses were brown.”
“Something about him grabbed me,” she said. “Maybe it was his resemblance to Tyrone Power.”
Dibbs brought him over to introduce him to Lana. He was Fred May, a 34-year-old real estate agent and horsebreeder. She was forty-four at the time, with her greatest movies in her past.
He reminded her that he’d been introduced to her in 1939 when he was an extra on her picture, Dancing Co-Ed. “Back then, you had eyes only for Artie Shaw.”
“Don’t remind me,” she said.
As they talked, he told her that he owned a ranch where he raised thorough-breds for racing. She flirted with him, suggesting that she’d like to visit it sometime. He asked for her telephone number, and she gave it to him, noting that he didn’t write it down. She never expected to hear from him after that, especially when she saw him talking to an attractive, much younger woman later on.
Unlike most of her husbands or lovers, Fred May was said to have fallen in love with “the real Lana, not the celluloid Venus up there on the screen.”
He must have had a good memory because he phoned her two days later, suggesting she visit him for barbecued steaks at an apartment he had in Hollywood. He’d recommended that venue because she had told him that she did not go to restaurants in the wake of the death of Johnny Stompanato because she didn’t like to be stared at.
After their dinner, she left his apartment with the understanding that she would go with him the next day to his ranch, the Circle M, at Chino, California, about an hour’s drive from Los Angeles.
When she got there, as she was putting away some casual clothing she’d brought along, she noticed a large stack of newspapers in the closet. All of them focused on coverage of the murder of Johnny Stompanato.
Over dinner, she asked him about the collection.
“From afar, I think I had fallen in love with you. But I wanted to know everything about you, even all the bad stuff people unfairly wrote attacking you. I read through all that, finding it to be crap. If anything, it made me more sympathetic to you than ever. I wanted to love and protect you from the bastards exploiting you.”
She accepted that and trusted him enough to move in with him. Throughout most periods of her past life, she went out in public only if she were “glamourized.” At the ranch, however, she was often seen wearing sweat shirts and blue jeans.
When Virginia Grey arrived, Lana told her, “I get up with Fred at 6AM, and, after breakfast, I’m out there shoveling shit out of the stables.”
Grey said, “I liked Fred. He seemed to be bringing her back to life after the tragedy she’d suffered.”
At around this time, Cheryl had violated her probation. On two separate occasions, she had escaped from El Retiro Reform School, but was apprehended each time.
Lana’s first months with May seemed idyllic, a new lifestyle for her. They attended horse races, went marlin fishing off the coast of Baja, California, and enjoyed trout dinners in Pomona. She was surprised that she was rarely recognized in her drab garb, and with little or no makeup except for her painted eyebrows.
On another occasion, when Grey arrived to spend the weekend, she found Lana out mowing the sheep meadow.
“I had Fred chase away the snakes first,” Lana told her.
As a real estate agent, May arranged for her to acquire a home in Malibu Colony, an exclusive enclave of mostly film people. These were a series of beach homes with glass walls opening onto sundecks with views of the Pacific. She re-decorated the house and installed a swimming pool. This became her home for the next seven years.
Lana later told Grey, “As you know, the first thing I notice about a man is whether he’s handsome or not.” More important than that, I want to know what he’s concealing in his pants. But with Fred, it’s different. I’ve learned to look past those surface things. I’m attracted to his mind, his heart, and the feeling of stability he gives me.”
He also played a role in her business affairs, taking care of details and advising her about what he thought she should do with the remainder of her career.
Both of them were intrigued when Frank Sinatra came to visit. Variety published a story the next day, stating that Lana might hook up with Frank Sinatra’s Essex Productions, turning out starring roles for them as a team. The stars had never made a movie with each other before, and May agreed that as a duet, they might become strong contenders at the box office.
But the deal fell through.
As the autumn arrived, Lana became aware that certain tensions had arisen because of their differing habits and lifestyle priorities. Grey called May “the cruise director.” Whereas he was incredibly punctual, and always on time, she liked to delay a public appearance for hours, working on her hair, makeup, and wardrobe. “I fear I tested his nerves.”
One day, while driving to the race track
at Del Mar, both of them agreed to stop at the courthouse in Santa Ana and apply for a marriage license. A county clerk leaked word to the press, and the morning papers carried the headline—LANA TURNER TO MARRY AGAIN.
Six months would pass before they finally wed. It was on the day before the license expired.
Lana placed a phone call to Virginia Grey, asking her to serve as her matron of honor. May selected as his best man, George Mann, a well-known comedian. The wedding took place on November 27, 1960, at the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica, with a Methodist minister officiating at the ceremony.
The public had already been made aware of the couple, based on photos of them at the Hollywood premiere, on June 29, of Portrait in Black. Both Cheryl and Mildred attended.
After Lana and May were married, Cheryl was allowed by a judge, beginning in January of 1961, to come and live with them. Unlike her previous stepfathers, especially Lex Barker, the young girl and May got along very well. She later referred to him as “a warm, huggy-bear of a man.”
As time went by, Lana seemed to grow bored with staid married life. After all, she’d been known as the party girl of the 20th Century. There were reports that her “roving eye” had returned, even rumors that she was holding “auditions” in her dressing room, seducing well-built young men who worked on the crew of the pictures she was making. She began to return home to May later and later in the evening.
In an unusual statement, Time opined: “Lana Turner has never been compatible with a man one day longer than the moment she grows bored with him in bed.”
While Lana was filming Who’s Got the Action? with Dean Martin, May suspected her of having an affair with the womanizing singer-actor. Actually, she wasn’t. She’d had an affair with Martin more than a decade before.
Lana Turner Page 84