A tribute to a true Hollywood legend

Welcome to my blog dedicated to the beautiful, talented and unique actress Lana Turner, one of the most prominent Hollywood legends in history! I opened this website because I have been a fan of Lana for many years and I appreciated her even more after having seen the superb movie Madame X (1966), in which she co-stars with John van Dreelen free unblocked games, an elegant and handsome actor, equally talented. I made a website for him, too, and you could visit it at the Links section. It’s still under construction, but you could find already some nice photos and screencaps.

This blog about Lana will consist mostly of photos and fan tributes – including my creations. The photos which I scan from my own collection will be watermarked unblocked website, the rest will have no watermarks. You will see many wonderful portraits and videos, but also gif images, wallpapers, icons and all sorts of creations made by me and other fans of this Great Lady of the Silver Screen.

I hope you will enjoy the website and feel free to leave your comments. I am always open to feedback. You could visit as well my other websites dedicated to my all-time favourites, Conrad Veidt and Vivien Leigh. I am a classic film collector, as I own hundreds of cinema magazines, albums, books, postcards, photos and DVDs, and, among them, there are some rare items related to my favourite Lana Turner film, which is Madame X. You will find them at the special section dedicated to this motion picture, one of Lana’s personal favourites and certainly one of the best productions released by the end of the Golden Hollywood.

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Lana Turner in IMITATION OF LIFE Screening

Karen Dicker, Juanita Moore, Terry Burnham, and Lana Turner in Imitation of Life

Douglas Sirk's classic melodrama Imitation of Life, starring Lana Turner, will have its 50th anniversary celebrated with a screening of a recently struck print at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills on Friday, August 21, at 7:30 p.m.
Hosted by film critic Stephen Farber, the Imitation of Life screening will feature an onstage discussion with Oscar-nominated (supporting) actresses Susan Kohner and Juanita Moore, conducted by Kohner's sons, filmmakers Paul and Chris Weitz. The print, which is part of the Academy Film Archive collection, was made from the Universal Pictures restoration.

Sandra Dee, Lana Turner

Douglas Sirk's reputation has gained some belated recognition in the last two or three decades, thanks at least in part to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Sirk-inspired 1970s films. Though Sirk's efforts have been dismissed as “women's pictures,” i.e., with little (if any) social or artistic value, for women and their issues are inherently less important than men and their issues, Douglas Sirk's Weepies actually have more guts and glory than the vast majority of John Ford's Westerns, while Sirk's women are more resilient than just about every male toughie found in a Howard Hawks flick.
My favorite among Sirk's films is All That Heaven Allows, in which widow Jane Wyman breaks with social conventions to have an affair with gardener Rock Hudson, but Imitation of Life is right up there as one of Sirk's most accomplished – and most financially successful – productions.
In this blindingly bright color remake of John M. Stahl's more sedate 1934 version starring Claudette Colbert and Louise Beavers, white Lana Turner plays an ambitious actress and black Juanita Moore is (superb as) her housekeeper, both of whom are at odds with their willful daughters, Sandra Dee (instead of original choice Natalie Wood) and Susan Kohner, respectively.

Dee likes mom's man (John Gavin, above, with Turner) – the film was released the year after Turner's daughter, Cheryl Crane, killed her mother's abusive lover, Johnny Stompanato, with a kitchen knife – while Kohner is a light-skinned “black” girl who, while trying to pass for white, turns her back on her doting mother.
At the film's pipe-bursting finale, you may laugh or you may cry (I did both), but I dare you to remain impassive at the on-screen goings-on.
Also in the Imitation of Life cast: Dan O'Herlihy, Robert Alda, Troy Donahue, Karen Dicker, Terry Burnham, and Mahalia Jackson. Adapted by Eleanore Griffin and Allan Scott, from Fannie Hurst's popular tearjerker. The appropriately gaudy cinematography comes courtesy of Russell Metty. Produced – inevitably – by Ross Hunter.
Tickets for Imitation of Life are $5 for the general public and $3 for Academy members and students with a valid ID, and may be purchased online at oscar, in person at the Academy box office or by mail. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. The Samuel Goldwyn Theater is located at 8949 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. All seating is unreserved. For more information, call (310) 247-3600 or visit

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History & Archaeology

The Leo Frank case is one of the most notorious and highly publicized cases in the legal annals of Georgia. A Jewish man in Atlanta was placed on trial and convicted of raping and murdering a thirteen-year-old girl who worked for the National Pencil Company, which he managed. Before the lynching of Frank two years later, the case became known throughout the nation. The degree of anti-Semitism involved in Frank's conviction and subsequent lynching is difficult to assess, but it was enough of a factor to have inspired Jews, and others, throughout the country to protest the conviction of an innocent man.

The Murder

On April 26, 1913, Mary Phagan, the child of tenant farmers who had moved to Atlanta for financial gain, went to the pencil factory to pick up her $1.20 pay for the twelve hours she had worked that week. Leo Frank, the superintendent of the factory, paid her. He was the last person to acknowledge having seen Phagan alive. In the middle of the night the factory watchman found her bruised and bloodied body in the cellar and called the police. The city was aghast when it heard the news. A young factory girl had been brutally murdered; rumors spread that she had been sexually assaulted before her death. The public demanded quick action and swift justice.

The Evidence

When police took Frank from his house the next morning, he appeared nervous. He went with them to see Phagan's body in the factory. One of the policemen knew the girl and identified her. Frank claimed to have been in his office for about twenty minutes or more after Phagan left the previous day. Another young factory worker who had come shortly afterward to collect her pay stated that Frank was not in sight when she arrived. She waited a few minutes and then left. The night watchman, another early suspect in the case, told police that Frank called later in the day to see if everything was all right, which he had never done before.

On the basis of this evidence Frank was arrested. The police thereafter collected more "evidence" before deciding to put Frank on trial. The state's main witness, Jim Conley, a black janitor who was arrested when he was seen washing red stains from a shirt, later gave at least four contradictory affidavits explaining how he had helped Frank dispose of the body.

The Trial

Based mainly on the testimony of the janitor, who had been held in seclusion for six weeks before the trial on orders from Solicitor General Hugh M. Dorsey, the jury convicted the defendant. Frank's attorneys were unable to break Conley's testimony on the stand. They also allowed evidence to be introduced suggesting that Frank had many dalliances with girls, and perhaps boys, in his employ.

Atlantans hoped for a conviction. They surrounded the courthouse, cheered the prosecutor as he entered and exited the building each day, and celebrated wildly when the jurors, after twenty-five days of trial, found Frank guilty.

The Appeals

Within weeks of the trial's outcome in early September, friends of Frank sought assistance from northern Jews, including constitutional lawyer Louis Marshall of the American Jewish Committee. Marshall gave advice about what information to include in the appeal, but Frank's Georgia attorneys ignored his counsel. Frank's lawyers filed three successive appeals to the Supreme Court of Georgia and two more to the U.S. Supreme Court, all on such procedural issues as Frank's absence when the verdict was rendered and the excessive amount of public influence placed on the jury. Ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court, still on procedural grounds, overturned Frank's appeals; however, a minority of two, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Evans Hughes, dissented. They noted that the trial was conducted in an atmosphere of public hostility: "Mob law does not become due process of law by securing the assent of a terrorized jury."

The Governor's Decision

When all the court appeals had been exhausted, Frank's attorneys sought a commutation from Georgia governor John M. Slaton. Thomas E. Watson, a former Populist and the publisher of the Jeffersonian, had conducted a campaign denouncing Frank that struck a chord, and Georgians responded to it. Watson's accusations against Jews and Leo Frank in particular increased the paper's sales and elicited enormous numbers of letters praising him and his publication. As Watson continued to fan the flames of public outrage, his readership grew. By the time Slaton reviewed the case, there was tremendous pressure from the public to let the courts' verdicts stand.

Slaton reviewed more than 10,000 pages of documents, visited the pencil factory where the murder had taken place, and finally decided that Frank was innocent. He commuted the sentence, however, to life imprisonment, assuming that Frank's innocence would eventually be fully established and he would be set free.

 

Slaton's decision enraged much of the Georgia populace, leading to riots throughout Atlanta, as well as a march to the governor's mansion by some of his more virulent opponents. The governor declared martial law and called out the National Guard. When Slaton's term as governor ended a few days later, police escorted him to the railroad station, where he and his wife boarded a train and left the state, not to return for a decade.

 

Frank's stay at the prison farm in Milledgeville was cut short on the night of August 16, 1915, when some of the prominent citizens of Marietta, Phagan's hometown, took Frank from his cell and drove him back to Marietta. They hanged him from an oak tree the next morning.

Conclusion

The Frank case not only was a miscarriage of justice but also symbolized many of the South's fears at that time. Workers resented being exploited by northern factory owners who had come south to reorganize a declining agrarian economy. Frank's Jewish identity compounded southern resentment toward him, as latent anti-Semitic sentiments, inflamed by Tom Watson, became more pronounced. Editorials and commentaries in newspapers all over the United States supporting a new trial for Frank and/or claiming his innocence reinforced the beliefs of many outraged Georgians, who saw in them the attempt of Jews to use their money and influence to undermine justice.

In 1986 the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles pardoned Frank, stating:

Without attempting to address the question of guilt or innocence, and in recognition of the State's failure to protect the person of Leo M. Frank and thereby preserve his opportunity for continued legal appeal of his conviction, and in recognition of the State's failure to bring his killers to justice, and as an effort to heal old wounds, the State Board of Pardons and Paroles, in compliance with its Constitutional and statutory authority, hereby grants to Leo M. Frank a Pardon.

The pardon was inspired in part by the 1982 testimony of eighty-three-year-old Alonzo Mann, who as an office boy had seen Jim Conley carrying Mary Phagan's body to the basement on the day of her death. Conley had threatened to kill Mann if he said anything, and the boy's mother advised him to keep silent. For those who thought Frank innocent, this provided confirmation; for those who believed him guilty, this was insufficient evidence to change their views.

This trial had long-reaching and far-reaching impact. It struck fear in Jewish southerners, causing them to monitor their behavior in the region closely for the next fifty years—until the civil rights movement led to more significant changes.

 

The case inspired several scholarly treatments by historians and also made its way, through various media, into the popular culture. In 1915 Georgia musician Fiddlin' John Carson wrote a ballad about Mary Phagan, which he performed on the steps of the state capitol to protest the commutation of Frank's sentence. Ten years later the song was recorded as "Little Mary Phagan" by Moonshine Kate, Carson's daughter, and around the same time Carson recorded a related song, "The Grave of Little Mary Phagan."

 

Other popular interpretations of the case include the film They Won't Forget (1937), based on Ward Greene's fictionalized account Death in the Deep South (1936), with Lana Turner playing the victim in her first credited screen role; the television mini-series The Murder of Mary Phagan (1988), starring Jack Lemmon as Governor John Slaton; two novels—Richard Kluger's Members of the Tribe (1977), a detailed reconstruction of the case, but set in Savannah rather than Atlanta, and David Mamet's The Old Religion (1997), in which a fictionalized Frank tells his story in the first person; and Atlanta playwright Alfred Uhry's Broadway musical Parade (1999), the title a reference to both the Confederate Memorial Day parade that brought Mary Phagan to town and the lynch mob that took Frank from Milledgeville to Marietta.

 

In 2008 the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta opened a special exhibition entitled Seeking Justice: The Leo Frank Case Revisited, and in 2009 an episode of the PBS series American Experience entitled "The People v. Leo Frank" premiered in Atlanta, where the program was also filmed.

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“Lana Faints; In Hospital”: A Visual Footnote for Frank O’Hara’s “Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed)”

“Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)” is one of Frank O’Hara’s funniest and best-loved poems.  With its campy treatment of a tabloid headline about a glamorous celebrity facing adversity, it’s often cited as an example of O’Hara’s embrace of pop culture and his affection for the cinema and its stars.

I assume the influential poem even has something to do with the unusual name of the excellent journal of poetry and commentary, Lana Turner, now on its sixth issue (I may be mistaken about that connection, but it’s one I can’t help but make).

As the oft-told story about the poem’s origin goes, O’Hara wrote it while he was on the way to give a reading with Robert Lowell at Wagner College on Staten Island.  O’Hara didn’t care much for Lowell’s poetry, and as David Lehman tells it in The Last Avant-Garde, “O’Hara regarded the event as something of a grudge match; his close friend Bill Berkson remembers it as a ‘mano/mano’ duel.  February 9, 1962, was a cold, snowy day in the city.  On the way to the Staten Island Ferry, O’Hara bought the New York Post and on the choppy half-hour ride he wrote an instant meditation on the tabloid revelation that Hollywood actress Lana Turner had collapsed… O’Hara read the poem that afternoon, making it clear that he had written it in transit.  The audience loved it; Lowell looked put out.”  When it was his turn to read, a peeved Lowell told the crowd that he was very sorry, but he hadn’t written a poem on the way to the reading.

Less familiar than this anecdote, however, is the actual incident O’Hara responds to in the poem. Even though I’ve written about and taught the poem for many years, until now I wasn’t really aware of what exactly had happened to Turner on that fateful day in 1962 (and it doesn’t help that this incident has not left much of a digital trace on the web).

Fortunately, a friend of mine, the poetry scholar Paul Stephens, recently got in touch with me about a fascinating essay he is writing on “the poetics of celebploitation,” in which he argues that the obsession in recent poetry with celebrity culture and, especially, “celebrity misfortune,” has its roots in this poem, and in O’Hara’s work in general.  Paul did some digging and found the original New York Post piece that O’Hara saw that day on microfilm (remember microfilm!?) and sent it along.  Here it is, a visual footnote for the famous poem:

New York Post, Feb. 9, 1962, page 5

One neat thing about seeing the actual news item is that it gives one a clearer sense of the severity, or non-severity, even absurdity, of the incident O’Hara writes about — complete with a quote from the scandal-plagued actress’s fifth husband about her “collapse” at her own birthday party.  (I’ve written a bit about the poem’s rather complicated stance towards celebrity here, p.115-117).

O’Hara’s Lana Turner poem is certainly an important precursor to the recent flood of poems that reflect on celebrity culture and media that will be the subject of Paul’s article. As he pointed out to me, its famous last line — “oh Lana Turner we love you get up” — has even become a kind of meme (at least among the small subculture of poetry people), deployed when bad news about a celebrity or beloved famous person begins to circulate: “oh ____ we love you get up.”

If you’ve ever wondered what may have caught O’Hara’s eye on the ferry to Staten Island that snowing and raining night in February 1962, here’s a great candidate*: “Lana Faints; In Hospital.”  Here’s the story in the context of the entire page in the originalNew York Post (again courtesy of Paul Stephens):

New York Post, Feb. 9, 1962, page 5

* UPDATE: I’ve altered this sentence slightly after hearing from Terrence Diggory(Encyclopedia of the New York School of Poets), who raised the point that we do not know conclusively that this is the same news item O’Hara saw and responded to in the poem — unlike in “The Day Lady Died,” O’Hara never identifies it as the New York Post.  Furthermore, the lines “suddenly I see a headline / LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED” seem to imply that he is reproducing a headline verbatim, which does not match the Postpiece.  So, as Terry points out, O’Hara may have been responding to a different source.

However, not only does David Lehman (above) say that O’Hara had bought a copy of theNew York Post on the way to the ferry, but Joe LeSueur’s account of the poem (inDigressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara) also states that “Frank was merely responding to a New York Post headline — impulsively, unpretentiously, with humor” (p. 265).  LeSueur had the advantage of actually being there with O’Hara on the night in question, on the ferry, and while that doesn’t mean his recollection is correct, it certainly points to the likelihood of this being the newspaper O’Hara read that day.

And while O’Hara does say “suddenly I see a headline” in the poem before seemingly reproducing the headline in all caps, the poem seems playful and campy enough that it seems plausible he may be re-casting the headline in hyperbolic terms to play up the absurdity of the original piece.  Perhaps that is why he doesn’t include quotation marks around it either.

So it’s fair to say that there is no definitive proof that this is the exact news item O’Hara saw, but there are also some good reasons to think it was.

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Notes on Safe Conceptualisms

In 1968, the poet and conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers, having some years prior encased in plaster dozens of copies of his last book of verse, led a group of cultural activists into the Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels, declaring it an autonomous zone. They read statements and hung banners, denouncing the complicities of high institutions of culture in larger networks of power and instrumentalization. The cops were called. (How like our own recent Croatoan Poetic Cell, at the Poetry Foundation, where the cops were sent in on peacefully protesting poets, too.) 1 Broodthaers, member of a revolutionary socialist organization, went on to extend powerfully his stance of institutional critique with multiple, unfolding installations of his faux and satirical Musée de Art Moderne. Forty-five years later, in ironic illustration of how poetry is indeed 50 years behind critical art as it was then, the Conceptual poet and artist Kenneth Goldsmith, on record as believing in the “revolutionary” potential of Wall Street, is appointed Poet Laureate of the demonstrably real Museum of Modern Art, the most powerful institution of the current art world and market, whose links to corporate capital are indivisible from its cultural operations. Goldsmith announces a series of “guerrilla readings,” featuring apparently insurgent poets from Charles Bernstein to Rick Moody (albeit whose guerrilla status is approved by MoMA’s Board—the Museum Guards are briefed). Goldsmith also announces his opening Laureateship lecture, its subtitle “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Institution,” the same title of a talk he presented at the Poetry Foundation, two weeks after the PF sent the Chicago cops on the young Croatoan commandoes. His tenure ends with a wine-and-cheese reading by numerous post-avant poets who pose for perfectly non-ironic photos in front of the Warhols and Judds.Jacket2 runs a feature article, celebrating the event.

~~Keston Sutherland, one of England’s leading radical poets, in an email to the UK Poetry List, points out the following (shared here with his permission):

But not only could Goldsmith not have made that work [a hypothetical version of Soliloquy transcribing the utterances of a homeless subject, KJ], but he could not accept it as a proper "conceptual" work in his sense either, because a work like that which (in Adorno's phrase) gives a voice to suffering cannot at the same time "avoid subjectivity". The thought experiment is highly instructive. It makes clear what is actually at stake in the demand for a completely anti-subjective art. Together with all the bits, postures and aspects of the subject that have been positively identified for the chop (Romanticism, the lyric ego, "expression", "originality" etc.), it also does away with suffering. Its brand identity is painless art for bored consumers. It's an ok joke if you are an infinitely mobile enough subject who is intimate with the specific type of boredom being outlined, the boredom of going on exhausting options that are all transcendently affordable and within reach.

~~It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Conceptual poetry in principle. Conceptual poetry can be very good! When conceptual interventions emerge as resistant expression and proceed in a praxis of cultural and political critique (as in the case of Berlin Dada and the Situationists, or late-Soviet, 1980s Chilean, recent Chinese conceptualism, and others), it can be revolutionary, even, with deep social effects. The problem is not the general anti-aesthetic. Forms and modes in poetry are not immanently this or that in regards their political meanings, as some teleologically minded post-avantists have had it.2 Modes and forms are charged and determined by choices of positioning, register, and use. Their character can range--and transmute over time--from radically critical, to complacently neutral, to nihilistically complicit. In the last case, this might include when, in line with Fredric Jameson’s notion of the “hysterical sublime,” neo-avant gestures end up in cynical embrace and quasi-replication of the simulacral, serial logic of commodities under global capital. As in Pop, Jameson has proposed; or as in its quick descent into unambiguous commodity art, with artists like Hirst or Koons (both of whom Goldsmith has extolled, incidentally), or as in the avowedly “disinterested,” blank registers of mainline Conceptual writing--arguably more poetry’s belated Pop moment, than its post-Conceptualist one… Thus enacting and validating, at levels of “High Art,” the very serialization of subjective experience on which the Culture Industry feeds…3

~~Russian conceptualism was engaging in the forgery, theft, plagiarism, appropriation, and falsification of ideological imagery as early as the 1970s, when the first-gen Conpo writers--if I may use that shorthand--were barely in junior high.4 Marjorie Perloff has claimed that samizdat Conceptualism doesn’t count because it’s too tied, in its ideological critique, to “psychological depth,” very different, she insists, from the erasures of any subjective affect in U.S. ConPo. Craig Dworkin, in his introductory essay to Against Expression: an Anthology of Conceptual Writing, parrots the dismissal. The tones of such “we came first” claims of unoriginality couldn’t be richer, given the originality anxiety they betray. As I’ve just suggested, they really betray something more substantial: the rejection of a poetic practice that is truly consequent with ideological and institutional critique. Instead of a commitment to satire and parody, hallmarks of the historical avant-garde’s negative aesthetic, we have, in U.S. ConPo, a proudly recondite, “disinterested,” take-it-as-you-will pastiche.5

~~ Goldsmith is fond of poaching Benjamin to make the analogy that the computer is now to writing what photography was to painting. But it’s a false comparison, because what the camera helped to do for painting, in the main, is push it further awayfrom the finer representational capacities of the camera; Conpo, of course, advocates a poetics that decidedly embraces the representational, recycling dynamics of the camera/Internet, analogously mimicking its protocols, forms, and effects. It’s as if, following the outlines of Goldsmith’s analogy, Conceptual writing would be like the most vanguard painting in the early 20thcentury rushing to slavishly create something like a delayed “Daguerreotype Super-realism.” Goldsmith’s trusty trope, so central to his manifesto-theory, is frankly bogus, a kind of wacky category mistake. On this particular matter, at least, especially given that Conceptual writing supposedly works by way of allegory, Goldsmith really should go back to the theoretical dark room.6

~~Returning to the subject of museums, though: It’s the Academy that is ConPo’s real MoMA. Of course, not just for the Conceptualist faction! The Academy has been our general “post-avant” situation for a while, and we’re pretty much all in it, in some measure or other. Drawing from the great art critic Benjamin Buchloh, it wouldn’t hurt to ask some questions a bit more insistently than, I think fair to say, we’ve tended to so far: What are the longer-term ramifications of the Academic climate for so-called “oppositional” poetry? What about the discourses (teaching, theorizing, historicizing) that compose its practices, as well as their reception (their criticism, archiving, ranking, distribution, which is to say, their reinscription). To what extent might we begin to see the Academy as a normalizing, disciplining habitus of avant poetry’s historically agonistic dispositions, and with what long-view consequences for its dissident articulations? It’s not that the Academy is innately bad or naturally incommensurate to poetry’s spirit. Thank goodness for scholars, because things are more complicated than ever, and we need them urgently. But what we’re talking about is an unprecedented institutionalization of “oppositional” poetics, where once-vanguard, culturally resonant practices (think the 50s, 60s, even 70s) are now expertly adapted to, thoroughly legitimated by, and safely meshed with the protocols of an insular, hyper-professionalized surround. Given that the museum--once an essential element of the enlightenment culture of the bourgeois public sphere--has become, in the field of contemporary art, a machine for the constant dissemination of “vanguard” art commodities, can we speculate that the Academy, at least in regards its most elite programs, is quickly becoming a species of machine for the reproduction of specialty concept goods for a niche market within the field of innovative poetries, much the haute-culture capture Broodthaers had set out to expose? 7

~~That said, poetry is resistant to any easy theoretical reduction of its operations and forms to larger structures, especially historical ones. Even the poetry-loving Marx was confounded. Perhaps the most famous critical instance for poetry of a materialist all-over-ism in recent memory is Jameson’s attempt to frame, in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, the prosodic energies of Bob Perleman’s poem “China” (and by implication Language writing broadly) as representative, in their “schizophrenic disjunctions,” of the global operations of late capital. His analysis is controversial. U.S. ConPo, however, may lend itself much more aptly to such quasi-reflectionist approaches as Jameson’s cited above, readymade, as it were, for readings that would frame particular practices as ideologically consonant with cultural, technological, and economic substrates.8 Conceptual writers largely do this work for us in their programmatic statements. Parallel to consigning all verse outside their current to the lyrical junk shop, they are perfectly candid about their writing’s functionality as a sub-relay node for the very kinds of empty, disembodied, simulacral effects that Jameson once dismissed (not convincingly, in my view) as generating features of Language poetry. After all, the Conceptual authors bluntly claim as mission the recycling and managing of zero-affect boring information! Langpo, at least, claimed its poetics were those of analysis, critique, and resistance to such late-capitalist ideology; Conpo, on the other hand, replicates the cultural effluvia it poaches with little trace whatsoever, really, of any purposeful détournement, and with a High Modernist paring of the fingernails about it all. As Vanessa Place has said, Conceptual writing maintains an attitude of “disinterest” towards what she calls the “dumb” meaning of the political. To Langpos who once claimed a mission of institutional and social critique we now have Conpos openly wallowing in its exhaustion: a mission now stood on its purported Marxian head, purged and retooled for ready framing and exhibit in the highest cultural quarters.

***

NOTES

1. For some of the discussion around the CPC action at the Poetry Foundation, see this conversation between Brooks Johnson and Linh Dinh, at Lana

2. As in the early heroic stage of Language poetry, for prominent instance, and whose “more advanced than thou” dispositions continue to echo in much U.S. experimental writing—most notably, no question, in the theatrically arrogant “avant-garde” proclamations of Conceptual poetry. But in this regard, there is a poignant, anachronistic twist: the ConPo poets have taken the chassis of textual indeterminacy and radical co-production that emerges from the Langpo shop, and grafted onto that post-structural undercarriage a weighty, re-chromed body of High Modernist autonomy aesthetics. Indeed, at the Princeton symposium, during the discussion session, Place very solemnly acknowledged that her oft-stated commitment to authorial attitudes of “disinterest” comes “directly out of Kant.” Of course, given the essential linkage of authorial display to the group’s general production, one might understand this “funny-car” fusion as an inescapable philosophical corollary. Though not that Kant is to blame…

3. More like Pop than Conceptual art, too, as the latter current was guided by a spirit of determined Institutional Critique (e.g. Broodthaers, Asher, Buren, Haacke, Rosler, etc.)

4. It’s of note that the Moscow Conceptualists (Prigov and others) often employed strategies of authorial dissimulation, replication, and heteronomy-- subversive forms entirely beyond the paratextual frame, it seems, of the safe and protocoled staging of self-authorship in U.S. Conceptual writing.

5. The distinction between parody and pastiche (and the different political charges the modes carry in potential) has been made by Fredric Jameson, inPostmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Peter Bürger, in Theory of the Avant-Garde, makes the case, too.

6. As well, on the matter of theoretical “consistency,” Goldsmith has frequently claimed that ConPo represents a kind of “ecological,” “recycling” alternative to the surfeit wastage of conventional poetic discharge. Most recently, however, he has urged the “printing out of the Internet,” a proposal, however kooky, that would seem to put his environmental ethos (so much for the trees!) in brackets, to say the least.

7. In this regard, see also note #2. The spectacularization of author-function dynamics in ConPo, I’d submit, must be understood in broader institutional context of the deepening professional dependency of the “post-avant.” Conventional, verifiable authority is sociologically prerequisite, a virtual statute in our present Academic conjuncture.

8. Curiously, Place referred in her talk to “lyric poetry” as “the new Gold Standard.” As I recall, I asked the opening question after she was done. I asked her what exactly she meant by “lyric poetry,” wondering if she was dismissing the whole, fractal complexity of a tradition that proceeds, at least, from Archilochus and Sappho forward. She replied something to the effect that no, she didn’t mean “all lyric poetry.” I then commented that we should also be careful about too loosely using economic metaphors. In fact, I proposed that it’s Conceptual poetry that may best lend itself to being likened to a Gold Standard poetics, given that the simulacra of its currency are so decisively tied to a validating and valuing Original. I further proposed that the concept of “heavy leveraging” could also be suggestively applied to ConPo poetics, though I believe the discussion took another turn at that point. Place’s presentation, quite impressive in its way, for sure, can be read here.

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Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Lana Turner, Sweater Girl Gone Bad

Lana Turner never looks the same. I’ve seen her in hundreds of pictures and dozens of films, and each time she looks like a slightly different person. Turner was a chameleon, a Hollywood-made confection, a liar, a victim, and a real-life femme fatale, party to one of the most infamous — and tragic — Hollywood scandals. Her image combined sex appeal and vulnerability, both imbued with a sense of danger. At the height of her career, Turner seemed a beautiful yet wounded animal, ready to lash out.

Turner’s story was sordid from the start. She was born in Wallace, Idaho, which might not mean anything to you, but as one of the 5223 users of the internet who grew up in Idaho, I can tell you that it can mean ONLY BAD THINGS. Now Wallace = meth heads, bad teeth, and lots of venison stew; in the 1920s it meant all of those things, only exchange “bathtub liquor” for “old RV meth” (sorry Northern Idaho friends, but the truthiness hurts).

Her father was a miner and a ne’er do well, and when Turner was six — that is to say, when she was just old enough to get a real good dose of Idaho in her — the entire family moved to San Francisco. Her father was killed at the end of a card game gone wrong, and Turner’s mother hauled her to Los Angeles, where Turner was shuffled from the house of one friend to another. As Turner later put it, “I was a scullery maid, a cheap Cinderella with no hope of a pumpkin.”

Until, that is, she was discovered by Hollywood at the age of 16. As her publicity team sold it, an agent spotted her sitting at Schwab’s Pharmacy in Los Angeles wearing a tight sweater, daintily licking an ice cream cone, and asked her if she’d like to be in pictures, to which she replied “I’ll have to ask my mother.” The story was a fiction — in actuality,Hollywood Reporter editor Willie Wilkerson spotted her at the downmarket Top Hat Cafe, where she was skipping school and probably eating a chicken fried steak.

But the story, however bullshit infused, helped reinforce the notion that stardom was accessible to anyone — even anonymous girls in sweaters at the ice cream shop.

And in the beginning, Turner’s image was all about this sweater. In her first major film,They Won’t Forget, she played an oversexed schoolgirl, which Turner later described as “A Thing” who “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.”

WHOA. Um, do you think I could get Lana Turner to read that to me? Wouldn’t that be hot? Especially if she stopped before the last part?

Turner’s undulation incited strong audience reaction, and pin-ups of Turner began to circulate. She was crowned “The Sweater Girl,” which, at least for me, brings to mind images of Norwegians in thick, musty nordic sweaters, but this was a different type of sweater. It was short sleeved, tight on the breasts, and kinda looked like it had been shrunk in the wash — the sexy sweater.

Its sexiness stems not from the garment itself, but from suggestion — a body bursting to get out yet still contained and, as such, safe. The sexy sweater became a primary means of conveying sex, modeled by Turner, Jane Russell, and other busty stars of the era. As the visible thong was to the early 2000s, so the tight sweater was to the early ’40s.

The role helped earn Turner a contract at MGM, where she would stay for the next 20 years. In 1938, a contract with MGM meant musicals, playing Clark Gable’s love interest, and the services of the studio’s Fixers. She dyed her hair blonde (we’re talking Gwen Stefani blonde, not Cameron Diaz blonde) and through a series of roles in films aimed at teens, she became popular with the college boys, which is another way of saying she took the Megan Fox route to stardom. The studio sold her as All-American and wholesome, and her roles, youth, and blondness all seemed to match.

But in 1940 she began compromising that image. Instead of a nice courtship with, say, Andy Hardy or Mickey Rooney, Turner went on a date with Artie Shaw, the most popular big band leader of the era and a man 11 years her senior, and up and got married. Like THAT NIGHT, at the point when most of us are trying to decide if letting a guy buy another Gin & Tonic is going to require a make-out sesh as quid pro quo.

Most people you like after a few cocktails turn out to be weird, assholes, drunks, or boring, and Shaw was pretty much just an asshole. They fought, Turner got supposedly pregnant, he denied the baby was his, she had an abortion, and they divorced — all within four months.

MGM’s publicity department rolled with the punches, inflecting Turner’s All-American image with touches of “passion” and impulse. The studio moved her from JV to Varsity, casting her in four films with Clark Gable, who, as all good Hairpinners know, skeezed on all MGM stars, especially impulsive ones with nice sweater boobs.

There’s no proof that anything happened between them, but it was a publicity department’s dream. Lots of coded language in the fan magazines, a steamy picture on the cover of Life, a huge desire to see their chemistry onscreen, but no actual mess to clean up. That’s when gossip does its best work — when it makes you buy the products in which the stars appear, not just the magazines in which the gossip appears.

Turner married again on impulse, only turns out Asshole #2 wasn’t actually divorced from his first wife. The marriage was annulled, the non-husband attempted suicide, Turner found out she was pregnant, and they remarried “for the sake of the baby.” This baby, Cheryl Crane, will become VERY IMPORTANT to the story in about 500 words. At the time, however, the baby added a bit of maternal ordinariness to Turner’s image, until, naturally, she divorced the guy. As my academic super-crush Richard Dyer explains, the structuring tension of Turner’s image was beginning to coalesce: “what she touches turns bad, but is that because she is bad or because she is irresistibly attracted to the bad?”

This tension was further elaborated in 1946, when Turner convinced the studio to cast her as the femme fatale in The Postman Always Rings Twice. The film was what we now call a film noir, but at the time was just a movie based on a hard-boiled crime novel, with a plot that hinges on the effect of a beautiful, damaged, and desperate woman on a susceptible man.

Watch this clip; it will tell you all you need to know. No seriously, watch it right now, even on mute — I promise lipstick and thighs and hamburgers.

I mean, THIS IS IT, right? Like there’s no need for another seduction scene ever? And the high-waisted white shorts and the knotted crop top … does Urban Outfitters carry those in my size? Can someone teach me how to make my towel topknot look like that? Do I need to live in the South, seduce some guy who comes to the diner owned by my old boring husband, and get him to kill said husband?

The film was a smash, and the first to prove that Turner could actually act (kinda like when Tom Cruise was in Born on the Fourth of July, a memory now shrouded by too much couchjumping, thumbs-upping, and Joey/Katie Holmes-lobotomizing) and reinforced her image as a woman with the potential for malice.

Over the next decade, Turner married and divorced, married and divorced, first to a millionaire, second to actor Lex “Tarzan” Barker. She dated dozens of men in between, and the rumor was that she, like that goody-two-shoes Grace Kelly, truly loved sex. As one MGM executive explained, “Lana had the morals and attitudes of a man … If she saw a muscular stage hand with tight pants and she liked him, she’d invite him into her dressing room.”

[UM, IS IT JUST ME, OR ARE YOU LIKING THIS GIRL MORE AND MORE?]

In order to explain Turner’s rapidly accumulating ex-husbands, MGM did something genius. They admitted that Turner’s “origin” story — that her father was a stand-up guy, that she grew up in a happy home — had been fabricated for publicity, and that she was, in fact, the damaged product of a broken home. In a time when pop-Freudian concepts of psychology were increasingly popular, it was easy to explain Turner’s mistakes, both at love and in life, through her relationship with her abusive father, who was equally inclined towards “badness.” (Publicity departments and fan magazines manufactured similar explanation stories for dozens of misbehaving stars, most notably Marilyn Monroe. The overarching idea: You like sex because you were poor.)

By 1956, the trouble Turner caused at MGM had begun to outweigh her value, and the studio opted not to renew her contract. Which isn’t to say that Turner was out of work: she made Peyton Place, a film so melodramatic and soapy it’s like Gossip Girl timesDesperate Housewives to the everything-Nicholas Sparks-has-ever-done power.

And, most importantly, she started dating a mobster.

Johnny Stompanato was a decorated ex-Marine, a well-known clothes horse, the former bodyguard of Mob kingpin Mickey Cohen, and “the Adonis of the Underworld.” (Thanks for that one, Los Angeles Times.) He and Turner began associating at some point in 1957, and, while the details are hazy, it’s clear that Stompanto followed Turner to Europe where she was filming Another Time, Another Place. She and Stompanato then absconded to a private villa in Acapulco (how very Jen Aniston of you, Lana) and, after two months, made a very public return to the United States, greeting Turner’s daughter while looking very tan and very Sopranos.

Of course, Turner denied that she and Stompanato were involved. “There is definitely no romantic interest between us,” she declared, as they had obviously spent the last two months playing Gin Rummy and talking about feelings. Back stateside, the “non-relationship” quickly turned sour. Turner and Mr. Stomps-a-lot were constantly fighting, apparently because she refused to take him to the upcoming Academy Awards. (Can you imagine? That’d be like Jennifer Aniston taking The Situation to The Golden Globes. I. WOULD. DIE. and go to gossip heaven.)

Turner tried to jettison Stompanato, he refused, and on April 4th, the fighting escalated in Turner’s bedroom. According to later testimony, Stompanato threaten to cut, disfigure, and maim Turner. The 14-year-old Crane, fearing for her mother’s safety, grabbed a 10-inch kitchen knife and stabbed Stompanato in the stomach. He collapsed, Crane fled to her room, and Turner called her mother, who called the police. Stompanato was pronounced dead on arrival.

A shit-storm obviously ensued. There was a giant mobster dead on Turner’s pink carpet, Crane was sent to juvie, the mob was pissed, and Turner had no studio publicity team to help clean up the mess.

The weeks to come featured a series of accusations and denials: one day, Turner claims she had never encouraged Stompanado’s affections and he was essentially obsessed with her; the next, the police reveal that a photo of Turner was found on Stompanado’s person, inscribed in Turner’s hand with

Para Juanita, mi amor y mi vida – Lanita.

OH NO SHE DIDN’T!!!

But it totally gets better: Not only did Turner paint “Juanita” as a stage-five clinger, but the chief of police told the papers that Stompanado was “a gigolo type,” and, further, that “this gigolo type of behavior is not unusual. They’re always beating their women.”

OH FUCK NO HE DIDN’T!!!

Mickey Cohen was pissed. He came forth with dozens of love letters, taken from Stompanado’s house, in which Turner addressed her “Juanita” as “My Dearest Darling Love,” “Honey Pot,” and “Daddy Darling.”

All of this back-and-forth made front page news across the country, culminating in a coroner’s inquest to determine whether the killing was justifiable homicide. Turner’s testimony was a tour de force and, naturally, recounted at length:

As she answered the questions….she stared down at her twisting hands or out over the heads of the spectators — as though mumbling the details of an incredible nightmare ….The actress closed her eyes, touched at her face and continued. ‘He grabbed me by the arms and started shaking me and cursing me very badly, and saying that, as he had told me before, no matter what I did, how I tried to get away, he would never leave me, that if he said jump, I would jump; if he said hop, I would hop, and I would have to do anything and everything he told me or he’d cut my face or cripple me….’

…..Miss Turner closed her eyes again for a moment blinking and tears forming there. ‘And if…when it went beyond that, he would kill me and my daughter and my mother. He said no matter what, he would get me where it would hurt the most — and that would be my daughter and mother.

Seriously, HIGH DRAMZ!

It was, as many a journalist put it, the performance of Turner’s life. Coincidentally, Peyton Place, in which Turner’s character also takes a dramatic turn on the witness stand, was still very much in theaters. Turner’s textual and extra-textual lives were converging, and suddenly the film, up to then a modest success, become a phenomenon.

All charges against Crane were dismissed, but the months to come were filled with speculation. Was Turner involved with the Mob? Was the star of The Postman Always Rings Twice blaming a murder on a daughter? AND OHHHHHHH SHIT WHAT IF CHERYL KILLED JOHNNY BECAUSE SHE WAS SECRETLY IN LOVE WITH HIM?

Peyton Place earned Turner an Oscar nomination, but her next two films, neither of which exploited details from Turner’s life, were flops. Then, with no contract and few prospects, she took a huge pay cut to appear in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life. This film is like everything that’s great about Turner and her image to the most lavish and over-the-top degree: over $1 million in costumes, a plot involving a single mother who shirks her duties to become a famous actress, an orchestral score to kick all other orchestral scores’ asses, and a teenage daughter who falls in love with the mother’s boyfriend. I WONDER WHERE THEY THOUGHT OF THAT?

Imitation of Life was a hit, even if it was, at the time, panned by critics. (Now all critics want to have Douglas Sirk’s melodramatic German babies, but bygones.) Yet it would be Turner’s last hit: She was nearing 40, and the luster, vulnerability, and threat seemed to have faded. In her final films, she seemed a shell of herself, inhabiting the Turner image but not owning it. Turner married three more times, including, most dismally, to a nightclub hypnotist who absconded with her money, and retreated from the public view.

Turner is remembered for her role in the Stompanato killing, but what amazes me is how exquisitely the event fit within the trajectory of her image and life. It’s as if all of her roles, marriages, and dalliances were leading up to that night and the peak performance on the witness stand that followed. Which is why, for all of the hoopla, Turner could remain a star: It fit seamlessly with her image and, as such, was not scandalous so much as scintillating.

Turner wasn’t pitiable like Judy Garland, wasn’t strong like Joan Crawford, wasn’t childish like Marilyn Monroe. Rather, she was dangerous in a way that few other female stars seem dangerous: She was never aggressive, per se, but she was manipulative — able, through her beauty and sexual appeal, to get others to do what she wanted, on and off the screen.

That sort of power destroys, especially when wielded indiscriminately. In this way, Turner’s contemporary analog might be Britney, another blonde sold as an embodiment of the American Dream. When Britney’s power led to choices that seemed to betray a souring in that Dream, it forced us to reconsider the package we had been sold, why it had been so attractive, and the destructive machinations necessary to make that dream a reality. In the end, both Britney and Turner inhabited and were betrayed by an imitation of life — and that’s the most tragic plot line of all.

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Lana Turner, the Sultry Actress, Is Dead at 75

Lana Turner, who built a successful movie career on her first screen appearance as a teen-age "sweater girl," died yesterday. She was 75 and lived in Los Angeles.

"She just took a breath and she was gone," her daughter, Cheryl Crane, was quoted as saying in Daily Variety, a trade newspaper. Miss Turner, who had been treated for throat cancer, apparently died of natural causes, a police spokeswoman, Ramona Baety, confirmed to The Associated Press.

Miss Turner was discovered in 1937 by a reporter as she sipped a soda in a Hollywood ice cream parlor while cutting a secretarial class at her high school. The encounter led to her first film role, in "They Won't Forget." Wearing a skintight sweater and skirt, she sauntered along a street, spoke not one line, was murdered in the first reel and began a quick climb to stardom.

Her best performance was that of an unfulfilled wife who persuades a drifter to kill her husband, in "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (1946). Other major roles were a rebellious student in "These Glamour Girls" (1939), a shallow performer in "Ziegfeld Girl" (1941) and an alcoholic actress in "The Bad and the Beautiful" (1952).

Recalling "The Bad and the Beautiful," John Houseman, the producer, said he and Vincente Minnelli, the director, had agreed Miss Turner "was capable of brilliant individual scenes, but seemed to lack the temperament or the training to sustain a full-length performance."

"This made our episodic film just right for her," Mr. Houseman said.

Mr. Minnelli recalled using "many ruses and subterfuges" to extract a major performance from Miss Turner, adding, "As she got more into the picture her nervousness disappeared, and she effectively made the character's transition from tramp to glamour queen."

The actress, a star at MGM for 17 years, was a quintessential product of the Hollywood studio system. She recalled in 1969: "It was all beauty and it was all power. Once you had it made, they protected you; they gave you stardom. The ones who kept forging ahead became higher and higher and brighter and brighter and they were stars. And they were treated like stars. We had the best."

Her stormy personal life, peppered by many marriages and publicized romances, was as lurid as many of her films, but her identity as a sex symbol served to insulate her career from scandal's consequences. The most sensational incident occurred in 1958 when her lover, Johnny Stompanato, threatened to disfigure her and was stabbed to death with a carving knife by her 14-year-old daughter, Cheryl Crane. A jury exonerated her daughter with a finding of justifiable homicide.

Miss Turner was born on Feb. 8, 1920 in Wallace, Idaho, and was named Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner. Her father, John, was a miner. The family soon moved to San Francisco, where her parents separated and her father was mugged and murdered. Her mother, Mildred, became a beautician and moved to Los Angeles, where the girl lived for a while in a foster home before returning to her mother.

Her discovery in a soda shop led to an interview with Mervyn LeRoy, the director and producer, who advised her to chose a catchy first name and began guiding her career. She chose Lana and began appearing in films, including "Love Finds Andy Hardy" (1938), "Calling Dr. Kildare" (1939) and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." She studied with a dramatic coach and soon co-starred successfully with such leading M-G-M actors as Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable and Robert Taylor.

Her acting was often barely passable, but she was convincing in love scenes and in some melodramas. Her films included "Green Dolphin Street" (1947), "Cass Timberlane" (1947), "The Three Musketeers" (1948), "The Merry Widow" (1952), "The Rains of Ranchipur" (1955) and "Diane" (1956).

Miss Turner was nominated for an Academy Award in 1957 for her portrayal of a neurotic mother in the film adaptation of Grace Metalious's novel "Peyton Place." In many later movies, including remakes of "Imitation of Life" (1959) and "Madame X" (1966), she played heroines racked by sacrifice and suffering.

On television, her most ambitious effort was "The Survivors," a lavish, prime-time soap opera based on the Harold Robbins novel about a sordid banking family. Later, she toured in several plays, including the comedy "Forty Carats."

Miss Turner's 1982 memoir, "Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth," focused on her eight marriages and many romances. The memoir also recalled a suicide attempt, two abortions, three stillbirths, alcoholism and her religious awakening in 1980.

Miss Turner was married to and divorced from Artie Shaw, the band leader; Stephen Crane, a restaurateur (they were married and divorced twice); Bob Topping, a sportsman; Lex Barker, an actor whose roles included Tarzan; Fred May, a businessman and rancher; Robert P. Eaton, a businessman, and Ronald Dante, a nightclub hypnotist.

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