She modeled for a year at Jax, while picking clothes up off the floor for clients like Susan Hayward. Then one day Steve McQueen’s wife, Neile, popped in to the store and convinced Lana it was time to get back to acting.

But Lana feared the burdens of celebrity. “I wasn’t acting to become anything other than an actor,” she said. “That was it! I love getting the script. I love doing the part, but when they say ‘it’s a wrap’ at the end of the day, I want to just go wherever it is I want to go.”

She recalled marching downtown and getting herself “informally deputized’ by the county’s animal commissioner, “so I could keep an eye on the shelters and come up with a plan to improve them.”

Another thing Lana loved to do was go home and write. (Putnam published her memoir, “Natalie,” in 1984. In his own memoir, Mr. Wagner called it “ridiculous.”)

At 18 Lana took a different tack, becoming one of Judy Garland’s protectors while the star was on tour in Australia. “It was a major responsibility,” she writes in “Natalie”: “I was the only other female in her entourage of six. I was pretty much left to handle Judy alone. They would send me to her room when she wasn’t there and say go through all her clothing, anything that’s sharp, that she could hurt herself with — remove! All the things I’d heard about her, that she was pathologically insecure, unstable and one of the most delightful people you’d ever want to know were absolutely true.” And yet, she writes:” “I had never seen her perform and was captured by her magic.”

That magical motion of singing, that lifting of the spirit, was something Lana had always loved to do herself and still does. “I sing all the time, everywhere,” she said during lunch. “When I was in high school, I remember singing an entire song in a classroom unbidden. I walked in singing it. The bell rang. I didn’t care. I wasn’t done, so I completed the song.”