On the night of Good Friday, April 4, 1958, police were called to a house on North Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills. Inside, a man lay dead on the bedroom floor. The woman who lived there, one of the most famous actresses in the world, sat nearby in shock. Her fourteen-year-old daughter had just done something that would make the front page of every newspaper in America.
The woman was Lana Turner. That night was not the beginning of her troubles, nor was it the end. Behind it stretched a childhood shaped by poverty and violence, eight marriages to seven different men, a career that made her one of the highest-paid women in the country, and a personal life so relentlessly dramatic that even those who lived through it struggled to believe it was real. She was born Julia Jean Turner on February 8, 1921, in Wallace, Idaho, a small mining town in the mountains of the Silver Valley.
Her father, John Virgil Turner, was a miner, occasional gambler, and bootlegger. Her mother, Mildred, had eloped with him at fifteen. The family moved often in Lana’s early years, following work and circumstance before settling in San Francisco, where her parents’ marriage collapsed. On the night of December 14, 1930, John Virgil Turner left a card game with considerable winnings reportedly stuffed into his left stocking.
He never made it home. He was beaten and robbed in the street and died of his injuries. Lana was nine years old. The murder was never solved.
Mildred, left a young widow with almost no money, worked as a beautician, sometimes putting in as many as eighty hours a week in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Because there was no one else to care for Lana, she spent periods of her childhood in foster homes, where she was later confirmed to have suffered physical and emotional mistreatment at the hands of her caretakers. By the time she was ten or eleven, the family had moved to Los Angeles, following the promise of steadier work. She enrolled at Hollywood High School, an average student with no particular sense of where her life was headed.
Acting was not something she planned. It happened on an otherwise unremarkable January afternoon in 1937, when she was sixteen. She had slipped out of her typing class and crossed Sunset Boulevard to a soda fountain called the Top Hat Malt Shop. A man at the next table was watching her.
His name was William R. Wilkerson, publisher and founder of the Hollywood Reporter. He asked if she had ever thought about being in movies. She told him she would have to ask her mother.
Wilkerson connected her to an agent, who introduced her to director Mervyn LeRoy, and weeks later she signed a contract with Warner Brothers at fifty dollars a week. Julia Jean Turner became Lana Turner. Her first film appearance came later that year in They Won’t Forget, in which she played a murdered schoolgirl. She had little screen time, but she wore a tight sweater, and audiences noticed.
The press nicknamed her “the Sweater Girl,” a label she privately disliked for the rest of her career. By 1940 she was nineteen and one of the most photographed women in Hollywood, an MGM star appearing alongside Clark Gable. She was also deeply lonely in ways money and recognition did not touch. Her first marriage, to bandleader Artie Shaw, set the pattern for what followed.
Shaw, thirty years old and one of the most successful musicians in the country, could be contemptuous of her education and the way she expressed herself. He reportedly told her she was not smart enough. They eloped in February 1940 and lasted four months. She later referred to the marriage, with dark humor, as her “college education.
” She left him in September 1940. Her career accelerated through the early 1940s with films like Ziegfeld Girl, Johnny Eager, and Somewhere I’ll Find You opposite Clark Gable. In 1946 she appeared in The Postman Always Rings Twice, playing a calculating woman caught in a spiral of dangerous desire. It was a massive commercial success and gave her a credibility she had not quite possessed before, proving she could play women with real interior lives and real menace.
Her second and third marriages were to the same man. She married actor and tobacco heir Joseph Steven Crane on July 17, 1942, but it soon emerged that Crane had not properly finalized his divorce from his first wife. Under California law, the marriage had never legally existed and was annulled in February 1943, by which point Turner was pregnant. They remarried on March 14, 1943.
Their daughter, Cheryl Christine Crane, was born July 25, 1943. The second marriage ended in divorce in August 1944. In the mid-1940s, Turner fell deeply in love with actor Tyrone Power, whom she later described as the most gentlemanly, enchanting man she had ever known. But Power was still married, and in 1947 she discovered she was pregnant with his child.
She ended the pregnancy, a decision those close to her said she carried quietly and painfully for the rest of her life, driven by fear of what a public scandal would do to both careers. In 1948 Power divorced his first wife and then married someone else entirely. He did not choose Lana Turner. Within months, she married again.
Her fourth husband was Henry J. “Bob” Topping Jr. , a wealthy socialite whose family had made its fortune in tin and steel. On the surface, it was the kind of match that satisfied many definitions of success, a movie star and a millionaire.
But Topping had problems with alcohol and gambling that grew more serious. Turner later described having to cover significant financial obligations herself because his money kept disappearing into his habits. A pregnancy ended in miscarriage at a point when the marriage was already strained. She filed for divorce in December 1952.
Within a year she married again. Her fifth husband was Lex Barker, the actor best known for playing Tarzan. They married in September 1953, and by external appearances it was one of her more stable unions. But something was happening inside that household that Turner did not speak about publicly until much later.
In her 1988 memoir, Cheryl Crane alleged that during those years she was subjected to inappropriate conduct by Barker. When Turner discovered what had been happening, her response was immediate. She confronted Barker and, according to multiple accounts, removed him from the home at gunpoint. The marriage ended in divorce on July 22, 1957.
No criminal charges were filed at the time. It was in the shadow of all this that Turner met Johnny Stompanato. He was thirty-two, handsome in a dark way, and connected through his association with gambler Mickey Cohen to a world far removed from the MGM lots. He served in the United States Marines and was charming when he chose to be.
Turner later said she had not known the full extent of his associations. The relationship began in 1957 and almost immediately alarmed those around her. Stompanato was consumed by jealousy beyond ordinary possessiveness. He monitored her, showed up places he was not expected, and made demands on her time until she had little room to breathe.
When she traveled to England in early 1958 to film Another Time, Another Place opposite Sean Connery, Stompanato followed her uninvited. During one confrontation Connery reportedly intervened, and British authorities eventually sent Stompanato back to the United States. The incident was reported in the press. On the night of April 4, 1958, Turner decided it was the night she was ending things.
She had learned Stompanato was not the age he had claimed to be, a discovery that clarified everything she had been avoiding. He arrived around eight in the evening. The argument that followed was fierce enough that Cheryl could hear every word through the walls. This time she heard Stompanato making direct threats against her mother, against her grandmother, and against Cheryl herself.
According to what Turner told authorities, he produced something capable of causing harm and made clear he intended to use it. Cheryl armed herself with a kitchen knife from downstairs and came back to the bedroom door. The door opened. Stompanato was directly behind Turner.
Cheryl later said she does not clearly remember the next few seconds, that they happened faster than memory can hold cleanly. Stompanato moved toward her. He was stabbed once in the abdomen, the blade reaching his aorta. He collapsed in the doorway.
Turner initially thought her daughter had struck him with her fist, until she saw blood spreading through his shirt. Stompanato was thirty-two when he died. The coroner’s inquest on April 11, 1958 drew enormous public attention. Turner took the stand and gave detailed, emotional testimony about the relationship and the threats.
Some columnists wrote she was too theatrical, too much the actress even in genuine pain. The inquest jury ruled the death a justifiable homicide. Cheryl was exonerated, spending a brief period in a juvenile detention facility before release into her grandmother’s custody. Stompanato’s family went to the press.
Love letters between Turner and Stompanato were published in newspapers across the country without her consent. Mickey Cohen held press events and made accusations. The story kept regenerating itself, and Cheryl’s name kept returning to the headlines. Turner returned to work.
Her performance in Peyton Place, filmed before the killing but released afterward, earned her an Academy Award nomination for best actress in 1958. The relationship between mother and daughter grew more complicated and strained in the years that followed, fed by guilt and unspoken things. Her sixth husband was Frederick May, a rancher and businessman from New Mexico. They married on November 27, 1960.
It was one of the quieter marriages, and Cheryl later wrote that May was the husband her mother seemed most genuinely fond of, even after it ended. It ended in October 1962. Marriage seven came in 1965, to film producer Robert Eaton, who helped manage Turner’s business affairs and produced Madame X in 1966, the last major leading film role of her career. The marriage was wrecked when Eaton hired Harold Robbins, the author of a best-selling novel widely understood to be a thinly fictionalized account of the Stompanato killing.
Turner, who had lived with public fascination over that night for nearly a decade, quit the project and filed for divorce. The last one was Ronald Pella, a nightclub hypnotist performing under the name Ronald Dante, married in Las Vegas on May 9, 1969, three months after meeting. Within months he disappeared from the marriage in a way more than metaphorical. According to Turner, he took approximately thirty-five thousand dollars she gave him for an investment and used it for something else entirely.
She accused him of stealing a hundred thousand dollars in jewelry. He denied the accusations, and no charges were filed. After the divorce was finalized in 1972, Pella was later convicted of attempting to arrange the killing of a rival hypnotist. Turner publicly said she was done with marriage.
In the early 1970s, she lived a quieter life. A recurring role in the prime-time soap opera Falcon Crest in 1982 introduced her to a new generation. She published her autobiography that same year, addressing her life with a level of candor that surprised some readers. She spoke about her faith, about learning to sit with stillness, about the importance of laughter as survival.
In 1988, Cheryl published her own memoir, honest about growing up as Lana Turner’s daughter, about the Lex Barker years, and about what the night of Good Friday 1958 had cost her. Talking through the things it contained, working through them together, brought mother and daughter back to each other. Turner was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1992. Cheryl took care of her with devotion through the end.
Lana Turner died on June 29, 1995, at her home in Los Angeles, age seventy-four. Cheryl was beside her. Eight marriages, seven men, a career across nearly five decades, and the daughter whose own life was shaped at every turn by being Lana Turner’s child. She had come from absolutely nothing, the murdered father, the mother working eighty hours a week, foster homes where she was not safe.
She spent her whole life looking for security and peace. She found it finally, not in a marriage, in the last years she had left, in the daughter who had come back.