Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  He was on the island when U.S. forces captured it from the Japanese. An Army nurse, Betty Nulle, remembered him. “Johnny, as a Marine, was always getting into trouble. He attracted women to him like flies to a raw steak left out in the sun. He’d even borrowed the uniform of this gay lieutenant, who was in love with him, and he would wear it into the officers’ mess which served better food that the grub offered enlisted men.”

  “That was the kind of guy he was. Nobody, not even a general, could tell that cocky bastard what to do. He was a great lover…the best. None of my future four husbands ever measured up to Johnny.”

  Although World War II ended in September of 1945 after two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, Johnny wasn’t discharged from the Marines until March of 1946. At the time of his discharge, he was stationed in Tianjin, China.

  Instead of returning to America, he decided to stay on for a while, opening a seedy little nightclub, where he hired underaged Chinese girls. His clientele consisted mostly of expatriates living in China and figuring out how to flourish (or at least how to survive) as foreigners in a post-colonial society ripped apart by war and the tides of history.

  Barry Edwards, one of the American Marines who opted to remain in China for several months, said, “Johnny’s sleazy bar became a great hangout, especially for pickups. Right after the war, a five-dollar bill would have bought anything. Of course, Johnny ‘auditioned’ every gal before hiring her. Some were gorgeous. He knew how to pick ‘em.”

  Johnny’s life changed when he walked into a dress shop in Tianjin where he was immediately attracted to a Turkish woman, Sarah Utish. “I just had to have her, even if it meant converting to Islam, which she demanded. Religion means nothing to me, so what did it matter? She was just so fucking petite and pretty.” He made this confession to Edwards.

  He didn’t know her age when he married her. He was only twenty-one, and she was five years older.

  Both Johnny and his new wife ran into some kind of trouble in China, Johnny no doubt with the police. He took her back to Woodstock, where he got a job driving a bread truck, later in an auto parts factory. In time, John Stompanato III arrived.

  Sarah worked at night in a sewing factory, freeing Johnny to “sample the most gorgeous bitches of Woodstock,” he later claimed.

  Sarah modestly said, “Johnny had a good heart, but he was the boy who never grew up.”

  Eventually, he deserted his wife and son in Woodstock, and headed for Chicago.

  There, in the bar of a hotel, he met Sir Charles Hubbard, a British aristocrat and heir to a fortune and a country estate in England.

  Hubbard seemed much impressed with this handsome, sexy young man, and Johnny became his live-in companion. It was Hubbard who flew Johnny to Los Angeles, where he settled and, in Lana’s house, eventually died.

  Johnny came under an audit from the IRS for failing to pay income tax. An agent discovered that he had not reported $85,000 in cash that Hubbard had given him. In his defense, Johnny claimed it was a loan. The IRS didn’t think so, interpreting it as a fee for services rendered, perhaps in blackmailing Hubbard.

  This experience launched Johnny on his new profession, that of a hustler and blackmailer.

  While working for Mickey Cohen, Johnny answered to a number of nicknames. One was Johnny Valentine, inspired by Rudolph Valentino, the legendary silent screen star who died young. He was also called “Handsome Harry” and “Johnny Stomp.”

  Marilyn Maxwell nicknamed him “Oscar,” claiming that he had something in common with the size of the Academy Award statuette. She also boasted “He’s got more than Sinatra.”

  In her memoir, Cheryl used the term “Academy Award size phallus,” in reference to Johnny’s outsized penis.

  At night, he frequented Lana’s favorite night clubs, the Trocadero, Mocambo, and Ciro’s, hoping to meet rich women.

  During the afternoon, he could always be seen by the swimming pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Merv Griffith, the homosexual TV host, spotted him there. Charmed and deeply impressed, he spread the word to his gay friends, including Liberace.

  “Johnny wore a collection of almost sheer male bikinis,” Griffin said. “As he emerged from the water, the fabric became almost transparent. It was at least eight inches long, soft, and very thick.” Griffin picked Johnny up the first afternoon he met him and became a regular customer.

  Liberace turned out to be the biggest tipper, at one point rewarding Johnny with a thousand-dollar bill.

  During his first year in Hollywood, Stompanato met and married Helen Gilbert, a 33-year-old actress. The marriage lasted much less than a year.

  Gilbert, who was eight years his senior, had appeared in Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy series. In filing for divorce, Gilbert told the judge, “During our short marriage, Stompanato had no visible means of support. I did what I could for him.”

  In 1953, he married another actress, Helene Stanley. She had starred in severalB pictures, and was much older than he was. His marriage to this former Fox contract player lasted two years, but he was gone most of the time.

  Helen Gilbert became Johnny Stompanato’s second wife. She was a beautiful woman—at least Mickey Rooney thought so when she appeared in his Andy Hardy series.

  “In her looks and blonde hair, she reminded me of LanaTurner,” the pint-sized actor claimed.

  At her divorce hearing, she told the judge, “Stompanato has an awful temper. He once tried to choke my mother when she mislaid his handkerchiefs.”

  Even during his marriages, Johnny went out with other men and women. He had an affair with a very young Janet Leigh and engaged in a torrid romance with Ava Gardner. Sinatra found out about this and protested to Mickey Cohen.

  He pleaded with Cohen to force Johnny to break off from Gardner. At the time, Cohen was under 24-hour surveillance by the police. “I couldn’t believe that Frankie wanted me to risk the cops looking me over in a case of his ‘hot nuts.’”

  Cohen told Sinatra, “I don’t mix with my guys and their broads. Frankie, why don’t you go back home to Nancy where you belong and quit running after this Tarheel slut?”

  Stompanato’s real money came from various scams, notably blackmailing Hollywood stars, male and female, by secretly photographing them in compromising situations. He went through a vast fortune at the time, mainly to pay off his gambling debts. He always lost money gambling, but was drawn to it like an addict to heroin.

  Helene Stanley, Stompanato’s third wife, was pretty and perky. She arrived in Hollywood hoping to make it as a star. She did get cast in some low-budget pictures, but major stardom eluded her.

  Johnny also eluded her much of the time, occupying the beds of other “lucky broads” (his words).

  Certainly not all of his dates were with movie stars, of course. It was discovered that the wife of a doctor, Rosemary Trimble, claimed she made two payments to Johnny—one for $2,500, another for $25,000.

  These payoffs were first revealed in the Dell book, Lana: The Public and Private Lives of Lana Turner. In a separate, unrelated incident, a widow, Doris Jean Cornell told police she gave him $8,150 so that he could open a pet shop.

  During the early 1950s, police records in Los Angeles reveal that Stompanato was arrested eight times, based on charges ranging from suspicion of robbery to vagrancy.

  Cohen later mocked the vagrancy arrest. “When the cops took him in, Johnny had $5,000 in his wallet, all in one-hundred dollar bills.”

  As a front, he opened the Myrtlewood Gift Shop in Westwood, selling wood carvings as fine art and crude pottery.

  ***

  One Saturday afternoon, Lana’s old friend, Mickey Rooney, dropped in. He’d heard rumors that Lana was dating Johnny Stompanato, and he wanted to warn her about the dangers involved.

  She was very candid with her lover of long ago. In reference to Stompanato, “I think I’ve fallen in love with him, even though he broke into my apartment and raped me one night.”

  “He’s bad news,” Rooney clai
med. “I mean really bad news. You referred to him as John Steele. That’s not his god damn name. He’s the notorious Johnny Stompanato, the henchman of Mickey Cohen. His name has been in the papers.”

  Before leaving that afternoon, Rooney gave her a copy of U.S. Confidential, a book-length exposé written in 1951 by Lee Mortimer and Jack Lait. He’d marked a passage for her to read.

  “One of the minor tough guys is handsome Johnny Stompanato, who is the general stooge for Mickey Cohen. Johnny is the introducer of gals to visiting mobsters, and the dancing escort to stars and would-be’s.” Passages in the book also claimed, accurately, that Stompanato had a record of arrests by the Los Angeles police.

  That night, Lana confronted Johnny with Rooney’s revelations. He admitted that they were true. “If I’d revealed who I really was, you would not have had anything to do with me. I was planning to tell you, but only after you’d fallen in love with me and could not leave me. Now that I have you, I’ll never let you go.”

  She recalled that the sound of his voice was ominous. Was this not a veiled threat? If so, it would be the first of many to come in the months ahead.

  Almost from the beginning, money was a constant source of friction between Lana and Johnny. She paid his living expenses, but objected to having to settle his gambling debts. The first that he presented to her was for $3,500. “If I don’t pay up,” he warned, “I’m likely to meet up with a stray bullet one night.”

  “I know that Lana was giving Johnny sums of money at least every other day,” Virginia Grey said. “Not huge sums, but at least hundreds of dollars. She told methat every time they had sex, he seemed to bill her. Of course, she was exaggerating, but there was some truth in that. I never confronted Lana with this—she was too much in love—but all of her friends, and especially her enemies, knew that he was nothing but a gigolo.”

  By now, Lana knew not only that Johnny was a gangster, but that he had a violent streak in him. In spite of that, she introduced him to Cheryl and even allowed them to spend afternoons alone together.

  “Johnny and the kid were real close,” Cohen said. “She was crazy about him. He told me that himself.”

  Cheryl even described her first impression of him. “B-picture good looks, thick set. Powerfully built and soft spoken. He talked in short sentences to cover a poor grasp of grammar and had a deep baritone voice. With friends, he seldom smiled or laughed out loud, but always seemed coiled, holding himself in.”

  “His watchful, hooded eyes took in more than he wanted anyone to notice. His wardrobe on a daily basis consisted of roomy, draped slacks, a silver buckled leather belt, and lizard shoes. By this time, he was also wearing a heavy, gold-link bracelet on his wrist with ‘Lanita’ inscribed inside.”

  Cheryl later said that the two of them went horseback riding together or else swimming, during which Johnny liked to show off his manly physique. Their closeness sparked rumors that he might be seducing Cheryl, evoking memories of her repeated rapes by Lex Barker. But there is no evidence that Johnny ever forced himself on the girl.

  As a surprise gift, which delighted her, he purchased a red Arabian mare with a flaxen tail and mane. This was the same horse that Lana had ridden in her historical costume drama, Diane (1956). Cohen later said that he gave Johnny $900 to purchase the mare.

  Johnny and Cheryl often went riding in the Hollywood Hills, overlooking the flatlands where the original silent screen version of Ben-Hur had been shot. It had starred Ramon Novarro, who, like Johnny, would meet a violent death.

  At the stable, where the horses were kept, an associate of Stephen Crane later reported back to him: “That Stompanato guy seems to be putting his hands all over your daughter.”

  When Crane confronted Lana with this nasty bit of gossip, she denied that Johnny had ever come on to Cheryl.

  ***

  Although Lana was still entranced with Johnny’s love-making, she decided not to fly him with her to England, where she had signed to make her next picture, Another Time, Another Place (1958). It was to be the first venture of Lanturn, her independent film company. Paramount had agreed to distribute it.

  Before she left, she and Johnny had some severe arguments after he learned that he was not going to accompany her. She still found him very attractive sexually, but had ruled him out as marriage material—in fact, she’d abandoned any illusion about a long-term relationship with him.

  She told a few friends, “Johnny is what is known as an interlude.” Privately, she was hoping that with thousands of miles between herself and his sexual magnetism, she would be in a better position for a clean break, perhaps after sending him a “Dear John” letter.

  Two weeks before her departure for England, he’d been in her bed every night. As she confessed to Virginia Grey, one session with him that began late one Saturday night lasted until dawn Sunday morning. “He has the stamina of a bull,” she claimed. “He can’t seem to get enough. A little rest and he’s on fire again.”

  She decided to fly to London with her makeup man and confidant, Del Armstrong. Because of strict union laws in Britain, he could not practice his profession there, so she arranged to have him listed as an associate producer.

  She met with her director, Lewis Allen, to discuss the production of the film. Although born in England, he had worked mainly in the United States, turning out eighteen movies from 1944 to 1959. He was also a film actor. After shooting war propaganda movies for Britain, he made his film debut as a (non-military) director in 1944 when he helmed The Uninvited, an atmospheric ghost story starring Ray Milland.

  The screenplay for Another Time, Another Place was by Stanley Mann, a Canadian, who had penned a TV adaptation of Death of a Salesman in 1957. Lana’s soapy film was based on Weep No More, a novel by Leonore Coffee. [Coffee had also written for the screen, winning an Oscar nomination for Four Daughters back in 1938.]

  She had told Lana, “Hollywood picks your brain, breaks your heart, ruins your digestion—what do you get for it? Nothing but a lousy fortune.”

  Lana ordered Mann to come up with a new title. After lots of debate, it emerged as Another Time, Another Place. Although as a title, it was weak and somewhat nonspecific, Lana liked it.

  From the beginning, she announced that it would be a woman’s picture. Set in England during the closing months of World War II, it’s the story of the wife of an English soldier killed in battle, in conflict with his grieving mistress. Whereas his kind and unpretentious wife lived in a small Cornish village, his emotionally bereaved mistress, Sara Scott (as played by Lana), had been stationed in London as a chic, mink-clad, impeccably groomed American newspaperwoman.

  During her character’s work-obsessed wartime sojourn in London, she had met Mark Trevor, finding him handsome and charming, a news commentator for the BBC. She begins to see a lot of him, as they start to date. By the time he confesses to her that he has a wife and son living in Cornwall, she has fallen desperately and irretrievably in love with him.

  During the final weeks of the war, Mark is sent on a mission to France. His plane crashes, and he is killed instantly.

  The sends Sara into shock and generates a kind of grieving obsession for her lost lover. Impulsively, she decides to visit the Cornish village where he’d lived and where his wife, and young son, also grieving, are living. The picturesque Cornish village of Polperro, in the southwest of England, was selected for the exterior shots. The interior shots were to be filmed at Elstree Studios outside London.

  Jack Hildyard, who had won an Oscar for his high-caliber camera work on The Bridge on the River Kwai in 1959, would brilliantly recapture the English countryside, and photograph Lana looking as lovely as she did in the early 1950s.

  Seeking emotional closure, in defiance of the strident advice of her friends, Sara leaves London, traveling to Polperro to see where her lost lover had lived. Overcome with emotion, she falls ill there, and, by coincidence, is invited to recuperate within the home of Mark’s wife, Kay, and his young son, Brian.


  As would be inevitable, Sara’s true identity as “the other woman” (Mark’s grieving mistress) is revealed to Kay before the end of the film.

  To complicate matters, Sara (i.e., Lana) has been conducting a subdued romance with her fiancé, Carter Reynolds, her publisher, and he’s longing to marry her.

  That role went to Barry Sullivan, who had worked with Lana before in, among others, The Bad and the Beautiful. When they’d met for drinks in Hollywood, he told her, “I’ve pursued you for years. But this time, I’ve thrown in the towel, deciding you’re unobtainable. At least out of my league.”

  Glynis Johns was assigned the role of Mark’s cheerful, long-suffering British wife, Kay. Noted for her husky trademark voice, she had begun acting and dancing as a child. She’d made her film debut in 1938, the same year Lana did. Over time, she had co-starred with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Alec Guinness, David Niven, James Stewart, and Danny Kaye.

  During filming, Lana was often frustrated and in a nervous state, based on her ongoing difficulties with Stompanato and in her capacity as the producer of the film as well as its star. The actual producer—the one in charge of arranging and organizing its business affairs—was Joseph Kaufman.

  In her anxiety, Lana nervously lashed out at Johns, at one point calling this talented and engaging actress, “the bitch of the world.”

  While her character decides who she’s in love with, her boss, Barry Sullivan, waits patiently on tender-hooks.

  Two other actors had key supporting roles: Raymond Burr as Walt Radak, and the English actor, Terrence Longdom, as Alan Thompson.

  ***

  Although her star power had waned since she’d been fired from MGM, Lana still retained the right to select her leading man. Twenty actors were considered before she settled on a newcomer to films, Sean Connery.

  A Scotsman, the son of a cleaning woman and a factory worker, he’d been a milkman, truck driver, day laborer, coffin polisher (that’s right), and bodybuilder. He’d also been a nude model. A student artist, Arlene Hector, later said, “Young Sean was magnificent in the nude and lacked nothing ‘down there.’ In fact, it was the biggest I’d ever seen. It made me drop my charcoal pencil.”