Saturdays with the Stars: Lana Turner

Each month of 2020 we will be looking at the movies of some of Hollywood's most famous sex symbols, women whose intense beauty frequently overshadowed their filmic careers.  Last month, our focus was on Rita Hayworth, the quintessential pinup girl of World War II who managed to become a major player at Columbia throughout the 1940's.  This month we head across town to the MGM lot, where one of the biggest names in show business rose to prominence based not just on her films, but also her blonde allure, many (many) husbands, and penchant for (ahem) sweaters.  This month, our star is Lana Turner.

Born Julia Jean Turner in (probably) 1921 (like many actresses of the era, Turner's true age may forever be a mystery) in rural Idaho, she became the daughter of a single-parent household at only the age of nine when her father was murdered when the family relocated to San Francisco.  Her childhood was horrendous, involving physical abuse and abject poverty, with Turner being forced to live off scraps from families she'd live with while her mother tried to make enough money for them to survive.  Turner was discovered sometime around the mid-1930's, though despite Hollywood legend, it was not at Schwab's Pharmacy while drinking a milkshake, but (according to the actress herself) it was a different shop on Sunset Boulevard where she eventually got her big break when a reporter referred her to Zeppo Marx (a talent agent as well as the straight man in the Marx Brothers pictures), who got her a contract at Warner Brothers.

It was at Warner where she met Mervyn LeRoy, who cast her in They Won't Forget, where she earned the nickname "the Sweater Girl" due to the way her bust looked in form-fitting attire (a nickname that would stick despite Turner hating it-it was literally in her New York Times obituary), and when LeRoy moved to MGM, Turner came with him.  She found stardom in Love Finds Andy Hardy opposite Mickey Rooney, and would become an MGM fixture for the next decade, starring in classics of the era ranging from The Postman Always Rings Twice to The Bad and the Beautiful.

Turner's career has many chapters, and we're going to try and look at as many of them as possible this month as we can, though it'll be a struggle to get to them all.  Few of the sex symbols we will profile had quite the offscreen life that Turner did.  After all, in addition to marrying eight different times (to seven different men) she had affairs with everyone ranging from Clark Gable to Frank Sinatra to Howard Hughes to her infamous offscreen dalliance with Johnny Stompanato (which we talked about more here).  Turner, despite her time at MGM, might have had her biggest years as a star in the late-1950's with the combination of Peyton Place and Inherit the Wind giving her gargantuan box office at an age when most sex symbols would have vanished from movie screens (thanks in no small part to public fascination with the actress in the wake of the Stompanato homicide).  This month, we're going to take a look at her career (and talk about her extraordinary life), but most importantly we'll focus on the filmography she left behind, which oftentimes gets lost when discussing the legend of one of Hollywood's most notorious glamour girls.