By Blake Allmendinger

From the 1920s through the 1950s, Hollywood studios converted ordinary young men and women into “stars.”  Teaching them to sing and dance, giving them deportment and elocution lessons, and altering the manner in which they dressed, studios changed the names and identities of such aspiring actors as Marion Morrison (John Wayne) and Lucille LeSueur (Joan Crawford).  Like her contemporaries, Julia Jean Turner was transformed into a movie star by MGM in 1936.  Given the new first name Lana, Turner was presented as a light-skinned platinum blonde and paired with such male co-stars as John Garfield, Clark Gable, and Spencer Tracey.

In fact, Turner was a swarthy, dark-haired country girl, born in Burke, Idaho to a miner named John and his wife Mildred.  Biographical sources state that Turner’s mother was of English, Scottish, and Irish descent.  However, certain clues indicate that she may have been Basque, and that this part of her identity was possibly hidden from movie-goers at a time when Basques, despite being Caucasians, were referred to as “dirty Basques” because of their reputation for working outdoors, herding sheep, and living in sometimes unsanitary rural locations.  If so, Turner wouldn’t have been the only aspiring actress whose ethnicity was whitewashed by studios in order to appeal to mainstream audiences.  Merle Oberon was a Eurasian born in Sri Lanka and Rita Hayworth’s father was a Romani from Spain.  Despite Hollywood’s best efforts, Hayworth still “read” as vaguely ethic on film.  She became wildly popular in the Basque Country after the noir classic Gilda was released in 1946.  To this day, there is a pintxo named the Gilda that can be purchased in many bars and restaurants in the Spanish Basque provinces.

Several pieces of circumstantial evidence suggest that Turner’s mother may have been Basque.  In Detour, a memoir by Lana’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, the author notes that both her grandmother and her mother had Rh negative blood.  One of the world’s rarest blood types, it appeared most frequently in the central European Basque population, and among immigrants from the Old World, most of whom settled in California, Nevada, and Idaho.  When a Basque woman became pregnant by a man with Rh positive blood, her body identified the fetus as an antibody, or malignant tumor, and attacked the fetus, causing a spontaneous miscarriage.  Crane notes that her grandmother nearly bled to death during childbirth—most likely because the small rural hospital didn’t have a backup supply of Rh negative blood.  (My grandmother experienced the same life-threatening situation when she gave birth to my father in rural Colorado in the late 1930s.)  Crane also notes that her mother had the same problem delivering Cheryl.

The fact that Turner wore a beret when she first appeared onscreen in the 1937 film They Won’t Forget may be merely a coincidence.  Berets were also worn by fashionable non-Basques in France and Spain, and throughout Europe, starting in the 1920s.  Ernest Hemingway and Greta Garbo both wore them when posing for publicity photographs and studio marketing campaigns.  But Turner also became known for wearing another fashion accessory in the 1952 musical adaptation of The Merry Widow.  The one-piece foundation garment with a cinched waist, removable bra straps, and a plunging neckline was called a Basque.

No one has provided a theory to explain why the garment was called this.  Furthermore, why would the studio call attention to Turner’s possible Basque heritage at the same time that it was lightening her hair and her skin to appeal to American filmgoers?  By the early 1950s Hollywood was beginning to hire “exotic” actresses to play women who were on a color spectrum, giving them racier roles to play.  In the early 1940s, MGM stopped casting the teenage Turner as the fair-haired girl next door and began featuring her in more adult-themed movies with scandalous storylines, such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Honky Tonk, and The Postman Always Rings Twice.  Her later films—and many would argue her greatest ones—featured Turner playing roles normally associated with “dark” heroines, such as the adulterous housewife living in a small New England town in Peyton Place and the conspiring white employee whose black maid’s light-skinned daughter passes as white in Imitation of Life.  When she did appear in musicals and romantic comedies, such as Latin Lovers and The Merry Widow, Turner’s co-stars were suave and sophisticated leading men, such as Ricardo Montalbán and Fernando Lamas—actors who were in the more “acceptable” middle-range of the color spectrum, unlike Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier.

In this essay I refer to Turner’s origins as a mystery that has never been solved.  Perhaps readers on this website already know about the actress’s possible Basque heritage or have additional information to share with readers.  If so, like Sherlock Holmes, put on your deerstalker hat (or your Basque beret) and help me in solving this mystery!