Star of the screen offers her side of the story

As honest-to-goodness cinephiles we go into Ms Turner’s autobiography with the hope that while it will give due attention to her 56-film career between 1937 and 1994, we have to admit to a voyeuristic interest in the off-screen shenanigans too. As the book promises – decades of success, scandal, romance, marriage and motherhood, the good and the bad.

And so, published in 1982 when she was 61, the actress-cum-sex-symbol-cum-author was, as she writes, looking to recreate Myth Turner as Miss Turner. “Never before have I told all the truth about myself,” she promises. Her audience didn’t know her: “They had no idea that behind the facade was a scared, quaking child, a woman insecure and filled with doubts.

“I am not just a manufactured something, a ’star’ from Hollywood’s golden age. I am a real, live, breathing human being, with faults and good points like anybody else. Sure I have made mistakes, plenty of them; some I have paid for dearly… I wonder if the fans would applaud the real Lana if they knew her?” Does she swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth – yes.

Under the old male-dominated studio system she was “owned”, a profitable asset at MGM, the studio that famously boasted they had “more stars than there are in heaven”. With glamour galore courtesy of platinum blonde hair and exquisite costumes shimmering on the silver screen, Turner was also at the mercy of public opinion and gossip columnists.

MGM moguls and publicists dictated her every aspect – who she could marry and have children with, for instance. Turner had to face many nightmares and heartbreaking tragedies, and these were turned into fodder for moviegoers. For all those years, “I have had to live with headlines, and gossip columns, and intrusions into my personal life…

“I’ve despised these invasions of my secret, private self, and even more, the distortions and lies. I have had to turn my back on outrageous fabtications, some of them sadistically cruel. I simply took the punches without fighting back.” And “I refuse to leave this earth with that pile of movie-magazine trash, scandal and slander, as my epitaph.”

It would seem fair, then, to trust the lady in her determination to set the record straight. For example, why did she marry so many times? Each marriage she thought would be it, she declares. Each would last for ever, and never in her wildest dreams did she think she would have seven husbands. With one bitterly painful exception, when she fell in love she married.

That was the moral expectation of the times. Her book tackles the public notion that sex was always on her mind. Not so. Her marriages came from a desire for security and peace. She wasn’t great in bed, and the intimacies – holding hands, cuddling and being close – were more important to her than the actual sex. Romance first, please.

And so it was with horror not pride that she watched her film debut as a 16-year-old in “They Won’t Forget” in 1937, making a now-famous walk down the street that immediately earned her the nickname “the sweater girl”. Unbeknownst to her the Hollywood machine had directed and edited the film to give her what was called “flesh impact”. For the rest of her career, she avers, she tried desperately to overcome the tag and that of “sex goddess”.

“How would my career have been if my talents had been used differently?” Turner wonders.

Starting at the very beginning, the real Lana was Julia Jean Turner from Wallace, Idaho, born on February 8, 1921. Father was a miner and an excellent cardplayer, leading to his murder for some winnings. Mother worked in a beauty parlour and modelled furs. When the parents split, there were times when the money ran out and Julia and her mother lived on milk and crackers, in furnished rooms or sharing a place. Julia was sometimes sent to stay with others.

They moved to Los Angeles in 1936, during the Depression, and the girl, 15-going-on-16, was discovered at a soda fountain after cutting typing class – but not the popular movie industry hangout Schwab’s pharmacy, as the legend attests. Writers got the drink wrong, too.

It was the publisher of the Hollywood Reporter magazine who saw her and sent her to Zeppo Marx, now an agent. Say your age is 18, he instructed her. From there she progressed to director and producer Mervyn LeRoy and a contract signed on February 12, 1937, four days after she turned 16. He found her name nondescript, so they settled on Lana instead.

“They Won’t Forget” brought her an avalanche of publicity and a rapid rise. She lost her virginity at 17 to Greg Bautzer, a brilliant lawyer. Then Joan Crawford told her that she was seeing Bautzer, and advised Turner to back off. On the rebound, Turner married Artie Shaw, one of the most popular band leaders in the country. He turned out to be a monster. Pregnant, Shaw couldn’t care less and she endured an awful abortion in a dirty house.

By her 20th birthday she was the “sweetheart” of 40 fraternities around the country and sailors on a battleship voted her the most desirable companion on a desert island. She met President Franklin Roosevelt at the White House. MGM paid her a heady USD 1500 a week. She found Howard Hughes brilliant but boring. Clark Gable showed her his guns.

She married Steve Crane who said he was in the tobacco business but proved to be a loafer. And his divorce hadn’t been actual, so, pregnant again, she had to sue for an annulment or face a charge of bigamy. The baby, Cheryl, was sickly and almost died. They divorced.

On New Year’s Day 1945 she became one of the world’s most highly paid actresses, on USD 4000 a week. She bought a home in Bel-Air, furnishings, clothes, jewellery and cars, plus holidays and comforts for Mum and Cheryl. She gave gifts to everyone and aided charities.

Yes, and the films too. One of her best parts was hot-to-trot femme-fatale Cora Smith in the 1946 “The Postman Always Rings Twice”, the unhappy wife who beds a drifter willing to bump off her slob of a hubby. “The Bad and the Beautiful” in 1952 was another big success.

On a trip to South America, Argentine First Lady Evita Peron was also at a party and seemed to have a fixation on Turner, copying her hair and sometimes her clothes. Then came Tyrone Power, the greatest love of her life, but he too needed a divorce and the romance collapsed. “No man except possibly Tyrone Power took the time to find out that I was a human being, not just a pretty, shapely little thing,” She rebuffed socialite and diplomat Aly Khan.

The studio suspended her for turning down “Madame Bovary”. Married to wealthy Bob Topping, two babies were stillborn. He drank and became violent. The FBI caught a man plotting to kidnap Cheryl. Everything she had came from her own efforts under continual studio pressure. The press was always nipping, either friendly or vicious but always intrusive. And so, a suicide attempt, which is why her wrists are hidden in “The Merry Widow” in 1953. Only three people ever knew the truth of this. Now readers do too. There is a long and rivetting account of her abuse at the hands of brutal gangster Johnny Stompanato in 1958. With MGM fading, she branched into theatre and television She became close to God.

Promise fulfilled – all the truth about herself for the first time. Here it is in this autobiography, endlessly fascinating for true lovers of cinema and its dazzling stars.