Lana Turner & Marilyn Monroe: Magnetic and Disturbing Creations of the Star System

After Lana Turner's first years in the star machine, a personal transformation took place. The lovely young girl became a glamour queen, wise to the world, even cynical. She became the kind of woman whom men most desired, dangerous in a thrilling way, but safe and companionable, too. In Lana Turner the public found what they like best in a movie star: ambivalence, a mysterious mixture of good and bad. Her image was undeniably one of glamour, satin, furs, and diamonds, but it was sitting on a drugstore stool. She was the perfumed boudoir, but also the ice cream parlor. She was glamorous, but also girlish. She was a tigress, but also a kitten. Turner’s childhood was every bit as unstable and deprived as Marilyn Monroe’s, but unlike Monroe, Turner elected not to make it an issue. There was once a myth that you could attend Hollywood High School, get discovered and become a movie star. Lana Turner was the girl who turned that myth into reality. Billy Wilkerson from The Hollywood Reporter, then 47, discovered Lana Turner in early 1937, who had skipped typing class to have a Coke with friends at the nearby Top Hat Malt Shop. That this happened at Schwab's Pharmacy is persistent fiction. 

Wilkerson saw Turner, a self-possessed 16-year-old, and told the cafe manager that he'd like to speak with her. Turner was suspicious, agreeing only reluctantly. A meeting with Turner and her mother was arranged at Wilkerson's office and, just like that, a star was born. By 1938, Lana Turner was making movies with Mervyn LeRoy under a $100-per-week contract ($1,700 today). Mervyn LeRoy actually was a mentor to her: He was a good person, highly respected in the film industry, and he protected and guided the unskilled girl. His decency and experience ensured Lana's future. LeRoy himself directed her early steps through the star machine process. First, her name had to be changed. Turner was okay, but Julia Jean Mildred Frances wasn’t going to cut it on marquees. When LeRoy was lured away from Warner Bros. by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1938, he asked if he could take Lana Turner with him and Jack Warner told him to go ahead. 

Since MGM couldn’t control Lana Turner or her bad publicity—and since the public obviously ate it up and wanted more of her—the studio just let it happen. The combination of her private life's peccadilloes, and her role as a temptress in The Postman Always Rings Twice pushed Turner over the top. It was now 1946. Lana Turner had been a star since 1941. Whenever the movies wanted to invoke a symbol for their own particular brand of sex appeal, it was Lana Turner’s name that was used. She is mentioned in Cairo (1942), Lucky Jordan (1942), Meet the People (1944), Anchors Aweigh (1945), and even Tom and Jerry cartoons. In Goldwyn’s Wonder Man (1945), a girl on a park bench justifies her looks by saying, “Some people think I look like Lana Turner.” In Without Reservations (1946), directed by her old mentor, Mervyn LeRoy, for RKO, her name is mentioned so often it’s as if she had stock in the picture. (“Lana Turner?” says a character. “That’s a glandular attraction.”) This popularity made Turner a national treasure during World War II. A young GI wrote to his mother that “somehow it is better to be fighting for Lana Turner than it is to be fighting the Greater Reich.” It was a sentiment even the Germans could understand. President Franklin D. Roosevelt invited her to his annual birthday ball, and when she left early to go dancing elsewhere, he was heard to sigh, “I wish I were going along.” 

Magnetic and disturbing, Lan Turner had become a powerful image. An undercurrent of violence and recklessness (which seemed fatally linked to her sex appeal) became more overt. By now MGM realized fully that Lana Turner was not simply a product of their system. She was “Lana,” a name that despite her popularity never caught on as a name for babies. What sensible mother wanted a “Lana” on her hands? Turner was no role model. This was a part of her movie star development that hadn’t been fully envisioned by the studio bosses. Lana Turner had become a household name, which wasn’t itself unusual for a movie star, but she was a household name associated with questionable offscreen behavior, and a complicated personal life. Audiences wrote in to complain about her “morality.” MGM solved this problem by casting her as a villainess. As a change of pace, she played Milady deWinter in a lavish costume drama based on Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (1948). Turner does full justice to the juicy role of a truly evil woman. (“Beware of strange men, dark roads, and lonely places. That woman will destroy you.”) Except for her brief appearance in DuBarry Was a Lady, The Three Musketeers was her first Technicolor film. 

In 1951, Lana Turner was named the most "glamorous woman in the history of international art" and the next year she was excellent in The Bad and the Beautiful. For once, a glamorous movie star is played by one. She understands the role, and she makes it hers. Yet she wasn’t nominated for an Oscar, and MGM refused to reconsider her potential. It was the moment for her—if recognized as the actress she might have become, things could have changed. But no. Despite her success in The Bad and the Beautiful, MGM persisted in its plan to make Turner into a musical comedy star and lighten her image. After the Stompanato trial, not only was Lana Turner’s private life in a mess but her professional life was also up for grabs. Time magazine referred to her as a “wanton,” describing her sex life as a men’s room conversation “everywhere from Sunset Boulevard to Fleet Street.” Her love letters to Johnny Stompanato (pitifully childish) were published in the papers. 

As she aged, the pain of these years was seldom mentioned by her, but near the end of her life, she commented, “Whoever started the idea that we [stars] are public property? We give the public performances, glamour, and a dream. But we are all human beings, and we should have moments that are our own. If I were just an ordinary working girl and someone asked me some of the questions I’ve been asked, I’d say, ‘Get lost, Buster!’ But I just take a deep breath and try to answer. I resent stupid questions, but I can’t do anything about the Lana Turner image. I’ve lived with it too long.” Ironically, about the time she was breaking down on movie screens all over America, she was breaking down in real life. Fascinated movie audiences felt they were experiencing her private anguish, reenacted for their benefit. The last years of Turner’s stardom, from 1957 to 1976, illustrate what is left to a female movie queen who is aging and locked into roles that reflect her own life after the system that built her, nourished her, supported her, and defined her, throws her out—and then itself collapses and disappears. Her offscreen life, or what people thought it was, became the only role she was allowed to play.

She was indeed “bigger than life.” At the end of her life, Lana Turner had figured out and accepted the realities of her goldfish bowl life: “When a small-town girl makes a mistake, her family covers up for her. But me, nobody covers up for me.” She realized that this was a price she had to pay for stardom: “We are unconscious of what Hollywood may do to us. At the same time, it is unfair to blame this on Hollywood.” She was always known to be vulnerable: “Why do people want to hurt me? I can’t understand it.” She kept that softness because she was a kind person basically, but she finally worked out her own private rules to live by: “Never look back is my philosophy. What’s past is past, and I can’t let it destroy me.” She never whined to the press about how tough things were when she was young. It was inevitable that a girl with Turner’s looks wasn’t going to stay poor and unknown. She had to end up jeweled and gowned. She wasn’t found down and out in Bellevue. She didn’t kill herself, and she ended up a wealthy legend.

Comparing Turner to other female movie legends—Elizabeth Taylor, for instance—it is clear that where Taylor was spoiled and dependent on men, Turner was spoiled and independent of them. Although totally feminine, Lana Turner was one of the first film stars to openly take the male prerogative for herself. She was less a slave to sex than she was its master. Originally, Metro thought Turner might inherit Joan Crawford’s roles. Like Crawford, Turner had behind her the escapist daydreaming of a lonely and poverty-stricken little girl. But she was smarter than everyone thought she was, because she outlived the star system by making her dream image into a real image. In April 1975, the Town Hall in New York invited her to appear on their stage in person to discuss her career in a series called “Legendary Ladies,” featuring Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Myrna Loy. No one knew exactly what would happen; nobody thought she was a Davis or Crawford. But the evening was a sellout. She was introduced as “star of screen, radio, television, and stage.” A packed audience quivered in anticipation, and when she walked out onto the stage, dressed all in white, she received a prolonged, thunderous standing ovation. 

Once asked what she would like to be remembered for, Lana Turner said, “I just want to be remembered as a sensitive woman who tried to do her job, that’s all… I would like to think that in some small way I have helped preserve the glamour and the beauty and the mystery of the movie industry.” As her career had rocketed during the early 1940s, Lana Turner was managed by Johnny Hyde, ‘a dear friend for years’ according to Lana's daughter Cheryl Crane. In 1949, Hyde met Marilyn in Palm Springs, and was instantly smitten, taking her on as a client. Lana Turner was a significant influence on the young Marilyn Monroe. In her stunning pictorial biography, Lana: The Memories, the Myths, the Movies, co-written with Cindy De La Hoz (author of Marilyn Monroe: Platinum Fox), Lana’s daughter Cheryl Crane states that her mother ‘thought Marilyn Monroe was a fine actress besides being a fascinating personality’. 

Studios ran strings of types successfully, discarding each one in turn as she lost popularity. Anita Page led to Alice Faye who led to Betty Grable who led to June Haver who led to Sheree North who led to Marilyn Monroe. These women were not cookie cutters—each has her own distinctive quality—but they’re all sexy blondes who can sing and dance. Betty Grable didn’t drop out as Fox’s leading musical blonde until 1955, and June Haver had already succeeded as her official replacement. Haver’s own replacement, Sheree North, was being developed at the same time, but, most important of all, a dark horse, an unexpected blond champion, arrived out of left field and claimed Fox’s publicity machine as her own. Her name was Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn skyrocketed to spectacular fame, and she was one of the last—if not actually the last—truly big female star to be “built up” by the star machine the old-fashioned way. During the years 1951 to 1953, she began to appear in bit parts, and then moved on to big-budget movies and magazine covers.

Allegedly, Marilyn Monroe came out of nowhere, but that “nowhere” was the usual time of development and growth, in her case a four-year apprenticeship in bit parts and walk-ons. In 1950, Marilyn appeared in Right Cross, All About Eve, and The Asphalt Jungle. In Right Cross she’s sitting in the background of a fancy restaurant/bar, playing a girl Dick Powell has just decided to stand up. It was her two small speaking roles in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve that caused everyone to notice her. David Thomson adds, “Gossip would not have been slow to provide the means by which she negotiated the executive office.” There is anecdotical evidence of the casting couch during her initial career, due to Marilyn's chronic sense of insecurity. Fox, experienced at grooming successful sexy blond stars, chose to pull Marilyn Monroe out of the ranks and give her everything they had in the buildup, even though some of her directors really didn’t see her as all that unusual. 

Fritz Lang, who directed her in 1952’s Clash by Night, said, “She was a peculiar mixture of shyness and uncertainty—I wouldn’t say ‘star allure’—but she knew exactly her impact on men.” The stories of Barbara Lawrence and Marilyn Monroe illustrate the vagaries of stardom malfunction. Monroe was unique, but she, too, could have gotten lost in the system as her early movies illustrate. The star machine did its work for both women, but Monroe could bring something to her moments that Lawrence, as talented as she was, could not. The audience knew the difference, and once the machine polished up Monroe and set her up as proper bait, the audience bit and Monroe took it from there. But Monroe had no impact on audiences the way Debbie Reynolds in her “Abba Dabba Honeymoon” number in Two Weeks with Love (1950) did. No one went “oooh” or applauded or left the theatre in awe. I saw and heard a lot of audiences during the years 1948 to 1958, and Marilyn Monroe didn’t reach them the way she touched people after her death. Her still photographs had flesh impact in a way her moving image did not. Her movie image was strangely enlivened by her death, made dimensional by offscreen facts. 

Manohla Dargis: "Once, we created gods and goddesses in our image, idealized visions of our most perfect selves. In time, our gods started to descend, mumbling with Method-actor sincerity about how they wanted to join us on Earth. We welcomed them initially, but after a while we grew to resent them and hold them in contempt. We still love them, but we hate them too, because now the mirror image they hold up is irreparably cracked." As the studio system began its slow collapse during the 1950s, it took a while for Hollywood to grasp what was happening. By the end of the 1960s, most moviemakers realized that “movie star” magic was losing credibility. In 1960, the names on the list, in the order of popularity, were Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Doris Day, John Wayne, Cary Grant, Sandra Dee, Jerry Lewis, William Holden, Tony Curtis, and Elvis Presley. With the exception of Presley, who became a movie star because he was a rock music phenomenon, every name on the list was developed by the studio system. By 1970, however, the number of great movie star personalities developed by Hollywood’s star machine begins to wane. Paul Newman, John Wayne, and Jack Lemmon are on the list—but the other seven names reflect change: Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Barbra Streisand, Dustin Hoffman and Walter Matthau-two Broadway actors who weren’t traditional handsome leading men-; and Robert Redford, the only new glamour boy in the group. The last two names on the list are Lee Marvin and Elliott Gould. As the old system collapsed, and censorship lessened, films became more and more violent. —"The Star Machine" (2007) by Jeanine Basinger