I Loved Her in the Movies: Memories of Hollywood's Legendary Actresses

by Robert J. Wagner

  Alongside the revolution that was roiling the way pictures had been made and distributed was a revolution in styles of acting and directing. Actors like Brando and James Dean worked in a different way, and there was a lot of foolish chatter about the end of “personality” acting, that the presence of Brando made actors who worked in an older style obsolete. As if you ever thought Brando was anybody but Brando.

  In fact, chameleon actors like Paul Muni or Daniel Day-Lewis, performers who can create emotionally and physically unique characters from picture to picture, come along about once a generation, if that. The reasons are basic: Actors who sustain careers for a long period of time tend to have very powerful, vivid personalities. Chameleonic actors are often strangely bland when you see them on talk shows or meet them; they don’t have strong personalities of their own, but they can expand at will to fill out large, well-written characters.

  I would go so far as to say that acting, or at least movie acting, has always been and still is a personality business, which is proven by how many of the actors of the 1930s and 1940s survived rather nicely in the 1950s, in spite of the predictions of a lot of observers—people, I might add, who never made a movie of their own.

  Still, the changes were sudden and brutal. Once MGM let Gable go, nobody was safe. The same was true of Tyrone Power at Fox, although by then Ty was anxious to get away and stretch his wings. At Fox, he worked for a straight salary; freelancing, he could get percentage deals. Ty told me he made a lot more money from a very ordinary Universal picture called The Mississippi Gambler than he had ever made for a movie at Fox.

  Lana Turner had been a huge star in the 1940s, but sailed right through the 1950s with some huge hits like Peyton Place and Imitation of Life after being cut loose by MGM when they were going through one of their periodic convulsions.

  She didn’t have a particularly good reputation as an actress, but the affection I had for Lana as a person took precedence over concerns about her level of talent. In fact, I thought she was quite good in The Bad and the Beautiful, not to mention a movie George Cukor directed called A Life of Her Own, which not enough people know about.

  But it’s probably true that Lana needed it all working for her—a good script, and a good director to motivate her. But then, doesn’t everyone? The problem was that MGM was only occasionally interested in giving their stars that kind of consistent support; their stars were expected to pull the weight of mediocre scripts and directors as a matter of course. That’s why Clark Gable is primarily remembered today for two pictures: Gone with the Wind and It Happened One Night—both made away from MGM on loan-out.

  Lana was one of those women who got into the movies very young—probably too young. The movies were all she really knew, and sometimes it showed in some of her naïve choices in men—seven husbands, eight if you count two marriages to Stephen Crane, not to mention affairs with Ty Power, and the late, unlamented Johnny Stompanato.

  Her background was similar to Crawford’s or Monroe’s—an impoverished upbringing, with a missing father. Making it in the movie business was supposed to make good on all the emotional and financial deprivation of their childhoods.

  Supposed to.

  Lana Turner

  Lana was born Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner (her family called her Judy) in an Idaho mining town. Her father was a gambler who was beaten to death in a robbery involving his stash of money. Her mother was working in a beauty parlor, so Lana was boarded out to a family that treated her badly.

  If all that wasn’t grim enough, along came the Depression. Just when things couldn’t get much worse, Lana and her mother moved to Hollywood, if only because they figured it was better to be warm and poor than cold and poor. Lana enrolled at Hollywood High, and one day in January 1937, she was sitting at a drugstore—it might have been Schwab’s, at the corner of Sunset and Crescent Heights, on the south side, and it might have been someplace else. The legend, as spread by the columnist Sidney Skolsky, says that it was Schwab’s, but you have to be careful about how much trust to put in legends.

  What Lana told me is that she had cut classes at Hollywood High—she never claimed to be a scholar. Billy Wilkerson, the publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, spotted her, and his eyes zoomed out of his head like the wolf in a Tex Avery cartoon.

  And then Billy popped the Question: “Would you like to be in the movies?” (This has always carried far more weight than the conventional question about getting married.)

  Judy was young, she was quite beautiful, and she had a body that men would go to war over. Her answer was basic: “I don’t know. I’d have to ask my mother.”

  Since the family was still in search of something that would float their lives, Mom thought it was a great idea. Billy took her to Zeppo Marx, who had quit the family comedy act to become an agent. Zeppo brought her to Warner Bros., where Mervyn LeRoy changed her name from Judy to Lana, and showcased her bouncing down the street in an unforgettable shot in They Won’t Forget when she was all of seventeen. When Mervyn left Warners to go to MGM, he took Lana with him. She was a particularly valuable addition to the studio—with the exception of the late Jean Harlow, MGM was not really in the business of sexy, but they were about to be.

  Lana went to drama school, and she was carefully placed in films where she would be noticed but wouldn’t have to carry much dramatic weight—an Andy Hardy vehicle, a Dr. Kildare, some other B-level movies, then some musicals. Ziegfeld Girl moved her out of the promising class and into the big time. Busby Berkeley staged the musical numbers, and then there was the cast. In order of billing, they were: James Stewart, Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr, and Lana Turner. MGM showcased her impeccably: In 1941, besides Ziegfeld Girl, she made Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—as the good girl!—Honky Tonk with Clark Gable, and Johnny Eager with Robert Taylor.

  Lana’s attitude toward all this was simple: Why not? As she would say, “There were girls who were prettier, more intelligent, and just as talented. Why didn’t they make it? It’s a question of magic. You have it or you don’t, I guess.”

  From the beginning, Lana had that specific ability that is common to almost all great movie stars: She was open to the camera, by which I mean it didn’t scare her.

  By the time she made The Postman Always Rings Twice in 1946, she was only twenty-six, but she’d been a star for nearly ten years. I like her performance in that film. She downplays the emotion, just as the character would in real life—a woman with that kind of sexual power doesn’t really have to do much more than just be. Look at the man and see him react. Be a trifle uninterested. Watch him grovel.

  And costuming her all in white—and in shorts!—was a master stroke of design, one that contrasted strongly with John Garfield’s darkness and street good looks. Throughout the 1940s Lana reigned as Hollywood’s primary sex symbol. Even though she had more flops than hits in the following decade—middle age is always difficult for sex symbols—the hits were considerable.

  Lana’s problem was that she became known more for her life offscreen than on-screen. Specifically, her marriages began adding up. Lana’s belief system when it came to men was simple: “If you want a blueprint, here it is: lose one love, snap right back and catch another.”

  Her first husband was Artie Shaw, whom she wed when she was barely twenty. That lasted all of four months.

  I believe that Artie took it upon himself to educate her—Artie had a terrible Henry Higgins complex, which accounts for why none of his wives (a group that included Ava Gardner) hung around long. Artie’s invariable presumption was that his girl or wife of the moment was always dumber than he was, and nobody likes to be slotted into that category, even if it happens to be true.

  After Artie came Stephen Crane, by whom Lana was already pregnant, only to find out that Crane’s first marriage hadn’t been dissolved yet. They had to get their marriage annulled in order for him to get divorced, then remarry. Quickly.

  That marriage lasted a couple of years and was followed by a very public affair
with Ty Power. Lana got pregnant again, and was thrilled, but Ty . . . Ty was separated from Annabella, his wife at the time, but they weren’t divorced yet. It was 1947—there weren’t a lot of options.

  Ty told her that the choice was up to her; all he asked was that she should let him know what she decided. He left on a twelve-week airplane trip, and she got hold of him via ham radio. “I found the house today,” she told him—their prearranged code for her decision to have an abortion.

  When Ty returned, Lana was fully prepared to resume the affair; she figured that when he was divorced, they would marry. But Ty first avoided her, then, when they got back together, was distant. Finally, he told her the truth—he had fallen hard for Linda Christian while he was overseas. What made the situation worse was that Linda Christian had played a very minor part in Lana’s film Green Dolphin Street.

  Lana had a large emotional investment in Ty, so she took all this very hard. Ty ended up marrying Christian, who played around on him and eventually took him for a hefty divorce settlement. To the end of her life, Lana regarded Ty Power as the great love of her life, probably because he was the one who got away. I can’t imagine two more beautiful people ever cohabiting on the face of the earth.

  I knew Lana best in the mid-1950s. She had been at MGM since she was a teenager, so when the studio cut her loose in 1955, it was a shock. I remember her telling me that MGM did everything for her except put the wedding rings on her finger. She didn’t know how to do such simple tasks as making a hotel or plane reservation—the studio had always done that for her. She felt like an orphan.

  At that time, she was married to Lex Barker, remembered as the guy who succeeded Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan. Lana and I got to be pretty friendly, and there was the suggestion that she was interested in me. It might have happened, but I liked Lex and didn’t want to intrude on their marriage.

  The word around Hollywood was that Lana was a semi-nymphomaniac, and that might have been true. She did like to have a good time when she wasn’t working. She drank, and even though she was never an alcoholic, she aged at a faster rate than was necessary. When she was forty, she looked fifty, and when she was fifty she looked sixty.

  But Lana was fun. She had humor, she had energy, and she was always looking for the brightness in life. Lana would invite me to her parties, and I grew to adore her. Johnny Stompanato once asked me for Lana’s phone number, but I managed to dodge that particular (literal) bullet. He got the number from somebody else and moved right in on her.

  Lana once told me that she didn’t like sex anywhere near as much as she liked romance—the candlelight, the soft music, the seduction. I think it was true for her, and for a lot of women. And if you think about it from the point of view of a female movie star, it makes perfect sense: They’re hit on all the time—everybody wants something from them.

  There has always been a very predatory attitude about women in the industry. Once, when I was preparing to leave the country to make a movie, I asked the director if he was going to take a cruise ship overseas.

  “No,” he said. “All the best pussy flies.” I’ve never forgotten the remark, and the unpleasant edge it contains. It bothered me at the time, and it bothers me even more now that I have three daughters.

  Even if people aren’t after women stars for sex, they’re after them for their time, their name on the dotted line. Rarely are they pursued for their value as people.

  Think about what a burden it must be to have to own every room you walk into. And even greater than that, to worry about what the close-ups reveal—every day that ticks by makes it that much more difficult to sustain the illusion of youth. That’s why cameramen of that era always used some level of diffusion when shooting women, unless the story mandated that the actress in question had a scene in a drunk tank. One cameraman told me that Tallulah Bankhead told him to shoot her “through a Navajo blanket,” and she was only half kidding. Tallulah drank—a lot—and she needed all the help she could get.

  To counter the pressure they faced from the industry and from themselves, many of the actresses adopted a businesslike brusqueness, while some had much harder shells—a don’t-fuck-with-me-boys attitude. Survival mechanisms, pure and simple.

  So many actresses wind up marrying their agent or their bodyguard—for protection, either psychological or literal. Of course, such unions can come apart quickly when the woman asks her agent/husband for advice about which film to do, and the recommended film bombs. Then the trust begins to falter, because the protection the actress imagined she was getting falters. And the cycle starts all over again.

  A lot of the actresses I knew married men who were on a lower social or economic level than they were, because they were the guys who reacted to them in an honest and open way. That might help explain Elizabeth Taylor’s final husband, whom she met in rehab, a choice that would otherwise have seemed evidence of temporary derangement.

  So it was that Lana gravitated toward a guy who seemed to know it all—the gangster Johnny Stompanato. When Lana’s daughter Cheryl Crane stabbed him to death, the newspapers went berserk; Lana’s life had become inseparable from Lana’s movies. She made more films after the scandal, and some of them were quite successful: Imitation of Life was probably the biggest, and the best, although it makes veiled reference to the Stompanato case. Lana plays an actress who wants her daughter to have the best of everything, but is too busy with her career to actually give her much attention.

  Lana kept making movies well into the 1970s, played around with television a little, and then seemed to enjoy not working. It’s not a surprise; she’d been supporting herself since shortly after she hit puberty. I rather like what Adela Rogers St. Johns said about Lana: “Let’s not get mixed up about the real Lana Turner. The real Lana Turner is Lana Turner. She was always a movie star and loved it. Her personal life and her movie life are one.”

  But why shouldn’t she have loved it? She was a gambler’s child, tossed out into the world without any sense of personal identity beyond the need to survive. And survive she did. Sometimes messily, sometimes gloriously, but she lived a star and died a star. That is how she wanted to be remembered, and it is how she is remembered. Add to that her immense kindness and generosity as a person. Put it all together and in my book that makes Judy Turner’s life a far greater success than she ever could have imagined at Hollywood High.

  • • •

  Like any other period, the 1950s had its good points and its bad. The bad points were somehow more obvious. For instance: the blacklist, that period when even nominal liberals had their careers destroyed or imperiled because of their politics. I know all about it: When my picture Prince Valiant opened, it got picketed because the man who wrote it, Dudley Nichols, was a liberal, or, as they’re called now, a progressive. In fact, the picture should have been picketed because of the wig I had to wear. Had anybody asked, I would have been happy to organize the protest.

  Dudley Nichols was never a Communist, never even close to being one, and everybody in the movie business knew it, which is probably why he managed to keep working. But he was seriously threatened by the American Legion’s picketing.

  The 1950s were also a period that witnessed a more openly erotic approach by female stars. Marilyn Monroe would never have been accepted in the 1940s, even though there was a healthy amount of self-parody in her image. I always thought Marilyn helped herself to aspects of Mae West’s personality, but instead of Mae’s self-awareness, Marilyn pretended to obliviousness. The characters she played were usually unaware of their attributes, even as they were flaunting them.

  Contrary to general belief, the great sea change in the impact of female beauty was not really due to the easing up of censorship and the gradual increase in nudity, first in films coming from Europe, and later in domestic movies. Rather, it was the product of a technical development: the widespread adoption of color. Great stars like Greta Garbo, or, for that matter, Norma Shearer, existed in a black-and-white world, and it served them
well because that was all there was.

  But when color came in in a big way in the 1950s, when you could see the creamy complexion, the green-blue eyes, and flaming lips of stars like Ingrid Bergman, comparatively decorous black and white seemed archaic, sexually speaking. Color eroticized women, and it freed up male fantasies. It also enabled actresses to emphasize an aggressive sexuality that black and white had only hinted at. Certainly, Marilyn in black and white had about half the impact of Marilyn in color, up to and including Some Like It Hot.

  And despite the stylization of color—red in the movies was invariably redder than red in real life—it also made the movies seem more real, continuing a series of innovations that had moved the art from the silent days. Sound gave the movies dialogue and natural sounds, water rushing, car motors revving, guns firing—all of which made the movies seem more a depiction of actual reality, even if the plots were outright fantasy.

  Color reflected the way we actually see the world, while the influence of European actresses like Anna Magnani, Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, and Gina Lollobrigida also helped. Sophia was beautiful, of course, but she was also real, as was Magnani. These were women of intense flesh and blood—magnificently so.

  But at the same time color made it more difficult for older actresses who had built their careers on their glamour and beauty, because it was harder to hide their age in color than it had been in black and white. Loretta Young only made a few color movies, and she liked it that way. Her move into television meant she could stay in a black-and-white medium, which is yet another reason why the movies began moving resolutely toward color throughout the decade—it was a selling point, just as expensive locations and widescreen spectacle were. They were all things you couldn’t get on TV.

  Some actresses reflected this trend more than others. Audrey Hepburn always seemed real in spite of the fact that she wore Givenchy because she embodied a strong emotional reality. So often there was a sadness about Audrey. Marilyn was a fantasy; Audrey was real. Both glorious; both transcendent.