On the evening of April 4, 1958, a fourteen-year-old girl stood in a hallway and listened to her mother being threatened through a closed bedroom door. It was Good Friday in Beverly Hills, and the fight inside the house at 730 North Bedford Drive had been building all evening. The mother was Lana Turner, the most photographed woman in America, and the man behind the door was Johnny Stompanato, a mob enforcer who had entered her life under a false name and would not let her go. What happened next took only minutes, and those minutes have been argued over ever since.
According to the account Cheryl Crane gave under oath and has maintained for the rest of her life, she heard Stompanato threatening to hurt her mother, went down to the kitchen, took a carving knife, and came back upstairs in fear for her mother’s life. As the bedroom door opened and Stompanato moved forward, she stepped in with the knife. The wound was not deep, but it struck the aorta. The thirty-two-year-old man bled out fast on the carpet.
Within minutes, the man who had terrorized the household for the better part of a year was dead. It was a shocking end to a story that had been building for two decades, and its roots went back far before the killing. Lana Turner was not born Lana Turner. She was Julia Jean Turner, born in a mining town in Idaho, the daughter of a miner and gambler who was robbed and beaten to death for a night’s winnings when she was nine.
She and her mother drifted to California, and it was in Los Angeles, at the Top Hat Cafe on Sunset Boulevard, that a teenage girl skipping a typing class was spotted by someone from the trade world. The famous story of a wholesome discovery at a soda fountain was a fabrication, assembled by the publicity machinery that would come to define her life. The studio renamed her Lana and set about building a woman on top of the real person. In 1937, at sixteen, she had a small part in the film They Won’t Forget.
On screen for only a few minutes, she walked down a street in a fitted sweater, and it was enough. Audiences forgot the plot and remembered the walk. Overnight she was called the sweater girl, reduced, in effect, to a shape rather than a person. The nickname stuck for the rest of her life.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer signed her, and the contract was written in terms that made clear what the studio now owned. Under the long-term system of the era, the studio decided her films, her salary, her public appearances, and through a morality clause, whether her private behavior was acceptable. It was a form of ownership that came close to the literal meaning of the word. The publicity department lightened her hair to platinum, dressed her in gowns and furs, and photographed her until the girl from the mining town disappeared into manufactured glamour.
America looked at the surface and agreed, without quite saying so, to see the photograph and not the woman. The money told the story of her value. She began at roughly a hundred dollars a week at the big studio, rose to around twenty-five thousand a week at the height of her earning power, and her films generated more than fifty million dollars for the studio over her eighteen years under contract. For a working family of that era, a couple of thousand dollars a year could be enough to live on.
The smile was an asset worth a fortune, and the woman behind it was considered worth managing, containing, and when necessary, covering up. For most of her career, the machinery worked flawlessly, and the public never suspected how much was being hidden. The image held, and she rose steadily. In 1946, her performance in The Postman Always Rings Twice proved she was more than a nickname, and by late 1957, she was at the summit of her profession, nominated for the Academy Award for best actress for her role in Peyton Place.
It was the first and only Oscar nomination of her career, validation after twenty years of being dismissed as a manufactured body with a pretty face. The film was one of the biggest hits of the year, and she had been shrewd enough to take a percentage of the earnings rather than a flat salary. In the same triumphant months, her private life was collapsing. Johnny Stompanato appeared in the spring of 1957, introducing himself as John Steel.
He was charming and attentive, and almost nothing he told her was true. He was a decorated former Marine who had drifted into the world of organized crime, working as an enforcer for Mickey Cohen, one of the most notorious gangsters in Los Angeles. His specialty was attaching himself to wealthy, famous women and living off them. By the time Lana understood who he was, she was already entangled, and Stompanato was not the kind of man who accepted being sent away.
The relationship curdled from romance into control. He was jealous and possessive, told her he would disfigure her if she left him, and threatened to cut the face that was her entire livelihood. When she tried to end it, he escalated. He followed her to England in the autumn of 1957 while she was making a film, stormed onto the set brandishing a gun at her young co-star, and beat Lana badly enough that the British authorities deported him.
She came home carrying all of it, unable to go to the police without exposing the hidden reality that the studio had spent twenty years protecting. To call for help would have been to admit the goddess was living in fear of a gangster, and the image would have shattered. On the night of the Academy Awards, March 26, 1958, Stompanato was furious that she would not take him to the ceremony. Lana did not win the Oscar, and she went home to a man who took his humiliation out on her behind closed doors.
Through the end of March and into April, the fights grew worse. The house on North Bedford Drive had become a pressure vessel with no valve, and a fourteen-year-old girl was watching her mother’s fear grow. The coroner’s inquest was convened on April 11, one week after the killing. More than a hundred reporters and photographers packed the room.
Lana took the stand for about sixty-two minutes and told the story of the relationship, the deception, the threats, the promise to cut her face, and the moment her daughter appeared with the knife. She wept and trembled, and the country split in two. Some saw a battered woman telling the truth. Others saw a great actress giving the performance of her life.
The image that had been built over twenty years had stripped her of the right to be believed. The jury deliberated for roughly twenty-five minutes and returned a verdict of justifiable homicide. Cheryl Crane was not charged with any crime. The law had closed the case, but the court of public opinion never settled it.
Mickey Cohen publicly rejected the verdict and questioned whether the fourteen-year-old had really done the stabbing. He got hold of the love letters Stompanato had kept, broke into his apartment to retrieve them, and handed them to the newspapers. The most private words Lana had ever written were printed word for word for the whole country to read over breakfast. It was a violation that no lawyer could undo.
The killing followed her through the courts as well. Stompanato’s former wife filed a wrongful death suit against Lana, Cheryl, and Cheryl’s father, seeking damages reported at $750,000. The case dragged on for years before being settled out of court in 1962 for around $20,000. The verdict freed Cheryl of the crime, and then the state took her anyway.
She was made a ward of the court, placed into custody, and in 1960, placed in the El Retiro School for Girls, a facility for troubled young women. A child who had survived abuse, terror, and a killing was treated as a delinquent to be confined and corrected. About six weeks after arriving, she climbed a ten-foot wall with two other girls and escaped. Her mother and father fought over custody, her fate was decided by strangers in courtrooms, and she was labeled by the public as the girl who killed Johnny Stompanato, flattened into a single act, exactly as her mother had once been flattened into a single image.
One year after the killing, Lana Turner made the most profitable film of her life. Imitation of Life, released in 1959, was a melodrama about a glamorous woman whose success hides a hollow personal life. The casting was almost unbearably on the nose. Instead of taking her usual salary, she agreed to take fifty percent of the film’s profits.
It earned more than fifty million dollars, and her share came to more than two million, reported at the time as a record for an actress. The scandal had not destroyed her. The scandal had sold tickets. America claimed to be shocked, then lined up to watch the woman whose real life had produced a corpse, and paid for the privilege.
Lana Turner worked for years more, moving into television and remaining famous to the end. She died of throat cancer on June 29, 1995, in Los Angeles, at seventy-four. At her bedside, holding her hand, was Cheryl, the daughter who had been taken from her, institutionalized, and labeled a killer, and who had stayed with her to the end. Cheryl had built a life in real estate and the restaurant business, and in 1988 she wrote her memoir, telling the truth about the abuse, the terror, and the night of the killing in her own words, under her own name.
It became a bestseller, and in it she said plainly what she had maintained all along: she killed Johnny Stompanato, and she did not do it to cover up for her mother. When Lana died, her estate, valued at around $1. 7 million, was left mostly not to Cheryl but to her maid and companion of forty-five years. Cheryl received her mother’s personal effects and $50,000.
Even at the end, the surface stayed a little bit closed. But the deepest question of the story was always about the rest of us. The public bought the magazines with her face on the cover, watched the sweater girl and decided she was a shape they were entitled to, read the leaked letters over coffee, and lined up for the film made in the shadow of a death. The machine manufactured her, the public consumed her, and called it love.
The photograph asked them not to look at the woman, and for more than sixty years, that quiet agreement has held.