Lana Turner found “inner peace” when she found God

Lana Turner, famously discovered at a Hollywood soda fountain, experienced a dizzying rise, soon becoming MGM’s biggest and most glamorous star.

Known for The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), and Imitation of Life (1959), in typical Lana fashion, she drank in Hollywood with zest — the jewels, the furs, the glamour, the fun — while suffering the crush of adoring fans. The fans were the least of her problems.

Easily charmed by the wrong suitors, she kept falling into the same trap — embracing their fantasies of security and love only to find her dreams dashed. Then, one day, she found what she most craved — right within her soul.

“Julia Jean” Turner was born in Wallace, Idaho, on February 8, 1921, to Mildred Frances Cowen, a 16-year-old Arkansan of Scottish, Irish, and English descent, who revered her husband, John Virgil Turner. Nine years her senior, John had been awarded medals for valor in World War I. Hailing from Montgomery, Alabama, of Low Dutch heritage, he spoke with a thick southern accent and had an upbeat personality that complemented Mildred’s reticence.

When Julia was six, the family decamped to San Francisco, settling in Stockton, where John started cashing in on Prohibition-era “moonshine.” But when he abandoned the family, mother and daughter moved to Sacramento where Mildred worked in beauty parlor and Julia attended Catholic school.

At their initial rooming house, the unmarried women brought home men, while Julia slept on a mattress in a closet. So, her mother arranged for her to live with a Catholic family with whom Julia attended Sunday Mass.  

“The ritual thrilled me so I wanted to convert, and my mother agreed,” Lana wrote in her 1982 memoir. Her father, though, was aghast and set his mind to providing her with material comforts. 

One day, when they were shoe shopping, Julia picked out “patent leather pumps with little Cuban heels,” which caused a fuss at home. It was the beginning of her shoe fetish, later epitomized by “a special room, with shelves from floor to ceiling, filled with shoes,” she writes — “698 pairs.”

Another time, “I asked my father to buy me a bicycle and he promised that one day he would.” Soon thereafter, Mildred brought Julia back to San Francisco. That night, she writes, “I saw a huge medallion of shining gold, and on it was embossed the face of God, a shimmering countenance, comforting, benign. A voice said, ‘Your father is dead.’” The next morning, he was found murdered. He was buried at the Presidio with full military honors.

A few years later, she learned the real story of her father’s demise. During a “traveling crap game,” a newsclip read, “(o)n the night of December 14, 1930 … held in the basement of the San Francisco Chronicle building,” her father was on a “winning streak.” He said “he planned to buy his little girl a bicycle,” tucking his winnings into his left sock.

“The next morning,” she writes, “they found him slumped against a wall at Mariposa and Minnesota streets,” near Potrero Hill. “He had been bashed in the head with a blackjack, and his left foot was bare.”

With her father tragically gone, Julia soon rejoined her mother and, while attending Presidio Junior High, began frequenting the matinee, scraping together the 25-cent admission by saving a nickel of lunch money each day.  Before long, her mother, needing a warmer climate, decided to move to Los Angeles.

It was 1936, the depths of the Great Depression. The trip was harrowing, their constantly chattering female driver once losing control of the car on a muddy road during a storm, causing it to flip over.

“We rattled our way into Los Angeles — the biggest city I’d ever seen,” Lana writes, “its wide streets lined with ornate stone buildings, with bright, imposing signs.” The driver dropped them off at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Highland Avenue. “That,” she writes, “was my introduction to the movie capital of the world.”

After a month at Hollywood High, one day, cutting typing class, she skipped over to the “Top Hat Malt Shop” for a Coke. The publisher of The Hollywood Reporter, Billy Wilkerson, also there, stared at her until he finally asked if she would like to be in the movies. “I don’t know,” she replied. “I’d have to ask my mother.”

The rest, as they say, is history.

Before long, she was cast in They Won’t Forget (1937), based on the novel Death in the Deep South.  Her scenes, said director Mervyn LeRoy, had “flesh impact” and she was immediately dubbed “the sweater girl.”

Renamed Lana Turner, though still a brunette, she signed with MGM and was cast in Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938), co-starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. But, after auditioning for Idiot’s Delight (1939) starring Clark Gable, while she did not get the part, she got a new look. Now a voluptuous blonde, she was soon paired with Gable — sending his wife, the talented comedienne Carol Lombard, rushing back home, via plane instead of train, a fateful choice. Lombard’s plane crashed.  

Lana, too, made many fateful choices when it came to men. She was gorgeous and more than a little clueless. After being married eight times (albeit twice to Steve Crane, the father of her daughter) — and being stalked by a Marine-turned-LA-mob-boss-bodyguard, who had his own fateful end after hiding in Lana’s home post-Oscars, threatening to kill her — she had a spiritual awakening.

It was 1980 — 35 years after becoming the highest paid actress in the world, living a fittingly glamorous life on the ninth hole of Belair Country Club.

Now, hardly eating and mostly drinking, her weight down, and very ill, realizing what “a total mess,” she was, she consulted a holistic specialist who advised her to give up alcohol she had initially foresworn.

“A light came right straight down to my head,” she writes, “a light from God, and I said .… ‘You’ve got a deal.’ …it was a three-way partnership — God, the doctor and me.”

This change was not easy, but, she writes, “When you accept God, you’re never alone. With His help, I entered a new phase of my life.” And while, she writes, she was never as devout a Catholic as her ex-husband, Steve, who converted after their divorce, she still found sustenance in the faith.

In 1992, she fought and beat throat cancer. Given seven days to live, she told a TV host, “I walked out of there in seven days — having gained seven pounds.”

“That was a manifestation of God’s. He himself, I could hear (saying) … ‘No, I’m not through with her yet’ … I have joy in my heart and I have peace of mind. And no person, place or thing can take that away from me because God is within me.”

This interview on November 13, 1994, would be her last. “Fame,” said Leach, “drove her ever further from the public gaze.”

That September, she attended The San Sebastián International Film Festival to receive a lifetime achievement award and Leach produced a documentary with the highlights, and showed her lighting a candle and praying fervently at the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd in the heart of Basque country in the November interview.

The throat cancer had come back with a vengeance that March and now, she told Leach, she was fighting it “with chemotherapy treatments and with her faith.”

Asked if she prayed “for relief from the throat cancer,” her response was classic Lana: “In my particular way: I say, ‘Now, look, Power Partner.’ … (He is within me, so I know where all the good stuff is coming from.) I say … will you give me another miracle, please?”

“The kind of inner peace” she gained from God, she said, eluded her during her Hollywood glory days.

Reflecting on her past life and bad decisions, she said, “There’s a ‘Lana used to be’ and there’s a ‘Lana now.’ … The ‘Lana now’ realizes the ‘Lana used to be’ was a fool. But she was shy and retiring.”

Regarding all the men in her life, she said, “I was searching, searching for something and foolishly I turned to someone else. I did not search within myself.”

Asked if she was “frightened of death,” she said, “No, if God says, ‘I’ve given you enough, now I have other things for you to do,’ I’m ready.”

She died on June 29, 1995, having found her true love at long last — ready with her new role … in Heaven.

Excerpted and condensed from the story told in Oasis: Conversion Stories of Hollywood Legends