Cinema: Life of a Sweater Girl

“The Hollywood press has been good to me,” says Lana Turner. “They have always crucified me with a smile.” In the December issue of Woman’s Home Companion, Lana (telling it to Cameron Shipp) tries to set her life story straight. But the saga still seems almost as painful as crucifixion by the press.

Imaginative publicity agents have always portrayed Lana as the gifted daughter of a prosperous Idaho mining engineer. The truth of the matter, says Lana bravely, is that Father Turner was a ne’er-do-well miner and part-time bootlegger, “we were poor and harassed, and no one thought I had talent.” In 1927, when Lana was six, the family packed up and migrated to San Francisco, where John Turner became a stevedore. One night he got into a crap game, cleaned up, headed home with his winnings. Next morning he was found bludgeoned to death on a street corner, his new hoard gone. The case, says Lana, has never been solved.

The Girl at the Fountain. After a siege of maltreatment in a foster home in Modesto (“I was a scullery maid, a cheap Cinderella with no hope of a pumpkin”), Lana moved to Los Angeles with her mother, who went to work in a beauty parlor. One sunny morning, when Lana was a lush 15, she sneaked out of Hollywood High School to play hooky at a Sunset Boulevard soda fountain. A man walked up and said: “How would you like to be in pictures?” Surprisingly, the proposition was on the level.

But disillusion set in as soon as Lana saw herself in her first movie, They Won’t Forget. She was cast as a sweatered Southern belle who drifted through one speechless scene. “A Thing,” Lana recalls, “walked slowly down the street, then away. She wore a tight sweater and her breasts bounced as she walked … a tight skirt and her buttocks bounced . . . She moved sinuously, undulating fore and aft . . . She was the motive for the entire picture . . . the girl who got raped.”

Nietzsche & an Ironing Board. Somehow the breaks always ended in trouble. Lana climaxed her romance with Bandleader Artie Shaw by flying to Las Vegas and marrying him on a balmy night in 1940. In less than five months the impetuous mating cracked up on “a combination of Nietzsche, low-heeled shoes, no lipstick and an ironing board.”

Scarcely had she acquired Spouse No. 2, Hollywood Restaurant Man Steve Crane, when she learned that 1) Crane’s previous Mexican divorce was not valid, 2) she was pregnant (the child, Lana’s only, was a daughter, Cheryl, now eight). In rapid order, the marriage was annulled, Crane got a legal divorce, Lana remarried Crane “for the sake of the child.” Six months after Cheryl’s birth, Lana divorced Crane because they had “no life together.”

Now “stuck for an ending” to her woeful tale, Lana is near a legal separation from her third husband, Millionaire Bob Topping, playboy tinplate heir. But like any Hollywood heroine, Lana can always count on a happy turning in the script. Last week Hollywood gossips reported her moving into a romantic closeup with a tall, dark and handsome Latin named Fernando Lamas. Says Lana: “I am quite sure that around the corner there is something good.”