How to stumble onto a high-paying gig | MARK HUGHES COBB

Let’s say you were hiring.

(If so, where do I send a resume? For a friend, of course.)

A line of candidates emerge. None excites you, or makes your heart beat.

Then you remember this isn’t Bumble (still bouncing), OKCupid (articulating which may activate your phone’s voice assistant, and Siri, Alexa, and Bixby are all seeing Charlie, a catfisher, and something sounding eerily like Scarlett Johansson, though stacked by a pile of zeroes and ones, rather than a heapin’ helpin’ of 10s), nor Tinder, which flashed too close to self-immolating Hinge, and boy is that a 1 to 0 in picoseconds flat metaphor for love.

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So you recall it’s not a popularity contest. You need the best person for the job, and unless that involves hosting soirées, or one-to-one service, what’s needed:

• Professional behavior in the workplace, adjoined to awareness that employee serves as de facto ambassador for the employer. Avoidance of even the appearance of impropriety would be preferred.

• Proven ability to perform tasks laid before them.

But again, no prospect seems just right, and perfection is soooooo easily attainable, once you throw out the good with the bathwater, yes?

The job’s gotta be filled though, so the board votes, and eight out of 10 members don’t bother to show up.

Those who show get all the say, because fellow employers couldn’t be arsed, as the Brits say.

Not hard to believe another Presidents’ Day ambled by already, with neither bang nor whimper, Feb. 19. So go shop for the half-off bargains on, uh, top hats, meerschaum pipes and pince nez, I guess? I don’t fashion much.

Not so tough, given only about 16% showed for the hiring fair. Why just about any old idiot could stumble on a high-paying, potentially life-changing gig!

We’re talking Lana Turner turning and turning in the widening gyre of that Schwab’s Pharmacy stool dumb luck. That milkshake did in fact bring all the boys to the filmyard (That's bound to be a thing, right? Like a theater being a playground?), though Turner later corrected the myth: She actually was downing a Coke at the Top Hat Malt Shop, and rarely before has the tiniest article helped prevent scandal rumors.

A Coke. And yes, a Coke coke, not a Pepsi coke.

Turner worked one of those jobs where appearance and amiability — or the actor's skill to fake it — served well. Over almost five decades in Hollywood, Turner helped MGM sell $50 million at the box office over her 18-year contract, which would be a single Marvel flop today. Calibrating for inflation, that’d be about $852 million now, or a Marvel flop if the Mouthbreathing Brain Donors of Moms’ New Boyfriend’s Basement ( dibs on the band name) have anything to a type about it, and boy do they ever.

Speaking of the persistence of hope over experience, Turner married eight times, to seven guys, including a musician (Artie Shaw), an actor and an actor (having and holding Joseph Stephen Crane twice), a Tarzan (Lex Barker), and a fraudulent hypnotist (Ronald Pellar), though that description is redundant unless you’re talking about The Amazing Kreskin.

With Mr. Two Times she bore a daughter, Cheryl Crane, who created her own legend by rescuing Mom from a beating, stabbing Turner’s gangster boyfriend Johnny Stompanato — Same thug who’d pulled a gun on James Bond on the set of “Another Time, Another Place,” on which Sean Connery took the gat away and shoved him off the set, because Bond-in-training — to death. Crane was acquitted: justifiable homicide.

Her tale winds through therapy at a state school, from which she escaped twice, and other minor troubles. After high school, she followed Mom, tentatively, into modeling, but found a calling working in her father’s restaurant, the Luau. Later she relocated to Honolulu, working as a real estate broker, then to San Francisco, and later Palm Springs.

Crane has published a couple of memoirs, and written three mystery novels. In 2014, she married her partner of more than 40 years, Joyce LeRoy, whom she discovered, er, met through, and I’m not making this up, Marlon Brando, at a party hosted by Wally Cox.

Turner sold millions in bonds for the World War II effort, endorsed FDR, and broke through as a serious actress/femme fatale in 1946 noir classic, “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” after which she began beating big names for major roles. She dallied with Tyrone Power, Frank Sinatra, Howard Hughes, and millionaire socialite Bob Topping — hubby no. 3 or 4, depending how you count — who proposed by dropping a diamond in her martini, at the Big Apple’s 21 Club.

But it wasn’t all suitors and stars: In 1951, suffering depression over a career downturn and financial woes, Turner slit her wrists in a locked bathroom. Though her business manager kicked in the door, saving her, nightmares continued: abusive relationships, box office bombs, divorces, stillbirth …. Probably worst of all, Crane alleged Barker had raped her; Turner drove that soon-to-be ex out at gunpoint.

The stabbing happened the night of the 1958 Academy Awards, where Turner was nominated for “Peyton Place,” and presenting the best supporting actor award. Angry he wasn’t invited, the abuser began assaulting her in her rented home, later that night. Fearing for their lives, Crane ran to the kitchen for a knife.

And that truly is not all.

Turner didn’t go looking for Hollywood. Hollywood chanced on her. Imagine how different that rollercoaster may have rambled had not Julia Jean Turner, only child of Arkansan Mildred Francis Cowan and Montgomery, Alabama miner John Virgil Turner, sat on that spot at that time? Wonder how differently things could have gone had not her dad been bludgeoned to death in 1930? If her family life had been stable, had not beatings and abuse become common as dirt?

What could have prepared her, or anyone, for such a ride? Reflecting on stories such as theirs, it makes you appreciate the quietly sane powerful folks — including artists such as Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa, and Dolly Parton and whomever she’s been married to all these decades — who get stuff done sans scandal, fuss, or fanfare.

Not all diamonds are forged in darkness.

Mark Hughes Cobb is the editor of Tusk. Reach him at mark.cobb@tuscaloosanews.com.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Lana Turner's rollercoaster ride in Hollywood | MARK HUGHES COBB