{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"When They Were Making It","title":"Lana Turner: The Sweater Girl Who Became MGM's Most Glamorous Star — Scandal, Survival, and a Very Hollywood Murder","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":6076,"description":"On Good Friday, 1958, a man lay dead on a pink bedroom floor in Beverly Hills — a severed aorta, almost no blood, a knife with no fingerprints in the bathroom sink, and the most famous actress in America asking the police chief if she could take the blame. By the time he arrived, the story of what happened that night had already been written.\nBefore she became Hollywood's \"Sweater Girl\" — before she was the platinum blonde MGM built in a dead woman's image — Lana Turner was Julia Jean Turner, a bootlegger's daughter from a mining town in Idaho, raised on instability and crackers and milk, shaped by a father murdered in an alley over his gambling winnings when she was nine.\nThis episode traces her invention, her rise, and the price of being a fantasy the studio designed down to the last detail — from a soda fountain Coca-Cola to a personal contract at sixteen, from a seventy-five-foot tracking shot in a tight sweater to the platinum hair and the new name and the slot left open by Jean Harlow's death. It follows her through the breakthrough of Ziegfeld Girl, the role that finally proved she could act in The Postman Always Rings Twice, the suspensions and the slide, and the improbable comeback of Peyton Place — an Oscar nomination for a woman everyone in the industry had written off.\nIt also follows the private life the studio fought to contain. The marriages — seven of them, eight ceremonies — to a bandleader who wanted to belittle her, a \"tobacco heir\" who turned out to run a cigar store, and the man she'd call the love of her life, who she lost to a telegram and a coward's silence. The pregnancies the studio ended without anesthesia and billed to her paycheck. The Tarzan who abused her daughter under her own roof for three years. And finally Johnny Stompanato — the mob-connected enforcer in Mickey Cohen's world, the man she couldn’t leave, the violence she couldn’t hide, and the fourteen-year-old who ended it with an eight-inch carving knife\nThis is the story of...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/Tes24ZxB1qT02fjSVHxfJY99rJ8MnAs1gX-xKNBvoeY/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8yZDVj/YjVjNTA5NWZiZTdh/Mjk1OWU2MDQ1M2Nm/MDdiYy5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}