In her reign as a movie goddess of the 1940s and early 1950s, Lana Turner came to crystallize the opulent heights to which show business could usher a small-town girl, as well as its darkest, most tragic and narcissistic depths. In her years as a top box office draw, she and longtime studio MGM forged her statuesque form into any number of pop cultural effigies: the stuff of both starry-eyed legend and tabloid-feeding frenzies; of coquettish sensuality to the G.I.'s of World War II; and later of smoldering elegance, a bedazzling glamour girl and the archetypal, scheming femme fatale. Her
