Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  At first, she’d been so distracted that she didn’t hear a tinkling sound at her door. She recognized it as Cheryl’s gold charm bracelet. She called out, “Cheryl, get away from the god damn door! Go back to your bedroom.”

  “Are you okay, Mother?”

  “Just go and let us alone,” she ordered her daughter.

  When she had ascertained that Cheryl had gone, she turned once again to face Johnny, whose own rage seemed near to exploding. “Tonight, Mister, I’m giving you your walking papers. I’m through with you. It’s over! You wouldn’t be the first man I’ve kicked out on his ass.”

  “I’m sure the tally runs into the hundreds,” he charged. “You’re the ultimate user. You use people, suck them dry, and them kick them out, moving on to your next conquest. Lovers and husbands alike. When Miss Turner wants a new dick, it’s bye-bye!”

  “I could have a thousand and one guys like you any day, any time I want. All I have to do is cock my little finger, and they’ll come running to my side.”

  “Don’t fuck with me,” he said, “or you’ll live to regret it. That is, maybe you’ll live. Maybe not. After I’ve taken care of you, I’ll go after Cheryl and Mildred. I’ll mutilate all three of you bitches!”

  According to testimony, Cheryl had returned to her bedroom when she heard Johnny threatening to mutilate her mother and maybe go after her, too, as well as her beloved “Gran” (Mildred).

  Impulsively, Cheryl opened her bedroom door and, in her pink mule slippers, ran down the stairs and into the kitchen, where she picked up a knife with a nine-inch blade and darted back up the steps.

  [Other sources claimed it was an eight-inch blade.]

  Once again, Lana heard the tinkling of her daughter’s charm bracelet. Armed with the knife, Cheryl stood at the open door. “Mother, Mother, are you okay? What’s wrong?”

  Lana didn’t answer.

  What happened next has caused a debate in Hollywood that has continued for decades. Although there were slight discrepancies, the version of both Cheryl and Lana more or less paralleled each other. Their accounts became known as “the official version.” There would be many other versions to challenge their testimony.

  In the account that was made public, the events of that fateful night unfolded more or less like this:

  Cheryl pounded on the door but did not open it or enter. “Let’s talk. Stop fighting!”

  Thinking that he and Lana might go out that night, Johnny that afternoon had brought over a white shirt and a jacket, which he’d hung in one of her closets on large wooden hangers. She later said that when she saw him going to her closet to retrieve his clothing, she was overcome with relief, thinking that he was going to leave without any more fights or arguments.

  Before that, he had been “running around the room looking like an enragedbobcat,” in her view.

  With his clothing thrown across his right shoulder, he confronted her. “You’ll never get away with this, you stinking cunt!”

  Then his voice grew louder: “I’ll cut you up. I’ll carve up your ugly, wretched face. You’ll never work in this town again. You may not even be alive when I’ve finished with you!”

  “You’re a psycho!” she screeched. “Get out! never come across my doorstep ever again.”

  Suddenly, Cheryl threw open the door and saw that his arm was upraised. Lana was heading out the door, and he was in hot pursuit right behind her. From Cheryl’s perspective, it appeared that he had a weapon that he was going to use against Lana’s head. She did not know that it was wooden hangers slung across his back.

  As Cheryl testified, “I took a step forward, and he ran into the knife.”

  Looking stunned, he said, “My god, Cheryl, what have you done?” Those were the last words he’d ever utter.

  The kitchen knife she’d plunged into his abdomen had sliced one of his kidneys, struck a vertebra, and punctured his aorta.

  Lana later claimed she did not see the knife in her daughter’s hand. “It looked to me like she’d punched him in the stomach. John took little circling steps in slow motion. Instead of clutching his stomach, he fell backward onto the floor, landing on his back. The sound coming from his throat was a weird gasping.”

  As she bent over him, she looked up to see Cheryl holding a bloody carving knife. At that point, she dropped the knife and retreated to her bedroom, consumed with hysterical sobbing.

  Lana didn’t see the wound until she lifted Johnny’s sweater. There, she viewed the puncture, but little blood, since the great injuries were internal, where he was bleeding profusely.

  She picked up the murder weapon and ran with it into the bathroom, where she dropped it into the sink before reaching for a towel.

  When she came back into the room, she must have realized how a towel would be of no help whatsoever. She dropped it and rushed to her phone to call Mildred, since she’d been away so long, she’d forgotten the number of her doctor.

  As Mildred picked up her phone, she heard the hysterical voice of her daughter. “Mother, John is dead. Get Dr. John McDonald over here at once. There is no time to explain.”

  Within twenty minutes, Mildred was on the scene, rushing at once to confirm that Cheryl was all right before heading for Lana’s bedroom. There, she took in the horrid scene, as she gazed upon a sobbing Lana and on Johnny’s body lying on the floor with his stomach wound bleeding. She bent over and tried to detect a heartbeat. Moving to his head, she began to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

  As Lana later wrote, “I didn’t want her mouth on his.”

  Dr. McDonald was the next to arrive on the scene. He put a stethoscope to Johnny’s chest, hoping to detect a heartbeat. There was none. From his bag, he removed a needle. It contained adrenaline, which he plunged into Johnny’s heart. It was of no use. “He’s dead,” he told a sobbing Lana. “I can’t help him now.”

  She might have phoned the police, but instead, she placed an urgent call to the attorney, Jerry Giesler.

  Jerry Giesler, the attorney you called when you’d committed murder.

  He was a tough, battle-hardened lawyer, a veteran of many a court trial, having defended Errol Flynn on statutory rape charges, Charlie Chaplin in a paternity case, and Bugsy Siegel on a murder rap.

  A short, plump man with a nasal voice, Giesler soon arrived and took immediate charge. What happened next differed remarkably from the official version.

  One of his main tasks was to make sure that Cheryl and Lana did not contradict each other during their interrogations. Those would most likely be conducted with each of them in separate rooms.

  It was later alleged that he did not find Johnny’s body on the floor, but on Lana’s bed. Giesler called Fred Otash, who later revealed “what really happened” (his words).

  Otash presented a rather limited and highly censored overview of his life in Investigation Hollywood: Memoirs of Hollywood’s Top Private Detective. Author James Ellroy used a fictionalized version of Otash in two of the novels from his Underworld U.S.A. trilogy.

  In Roman Polanski’s 1974 movie, Chinatown, Jack Nicholson’s character was based on Otash. At the time of his death, Otash was writing a memoir to “blow the lid off Hollywood’s greatest scandals.” It included an overview of his secret involvement in the Stompanato murder. That manuscript was stolen and has never resurfaced.

  Privately, Otash gave his own account of what he discovered in Lana’s murder house.

  Giesler often worked on cases with Otash, who claimed that on the night of Stompanato’s murder, he received desperate call for assistance from Giesler.

  “It was right in the middle of knocking off a choice piece of ass. When I picked up the phone, Giesler told me what had happened. ‘Get your ass right over here. Stompanato’s on Lana’s bed, which looks like a hog was butchered.’”

  When he got to Lana’s house, Otash was ordered to remove the bloody sheets and replace them with clean ones at once. He stashed the bloody linens in the trunk of his car and burned them later. T
hat would explain why there was no blood found around the body when the police looked it over later.

  Otash later told fellow detective Milo Speriglio that by the time he’d arrived, Johnny’s body had been moved from the bed to the carpeted floor.

  ”From what I gathered, Lana had walked in on Johnny in bed with Cheryl,” Otash said. “Both of them were in a post-coital sleep. At least that’s what I was told.”

  Otash also said, “Lana confessed to Giesler that she’d bought the kitchen knife the day before to protect herself against Johnny, who was threatening her. When she’d assumed he’d seduced her daughter, she went for the knife in a drawer in her nightstand, and plunged it into his stomach.”

  Fred Otash had been a police officer at one time, and a private investigator, and he was also the chief sleuth for the scandal magazine Confidential.

  After his involvement in the Stompanato murder case, he would evolve, four years later, in 1962, into a key figure in the mysterious death of Marilyn Monroe, having been hired by Peter Lawford.

  James Bacon, the famous columnist, heard the report of the murder late on the night it happened and drove at once to Lana’s house, telling a policeman stationed at the door that he was from the coroner’s office. A reliable reporter, Bacon later claimed that he saw Otash on the scene. He knew him well over the years.

  Lana was also alleged to have placed a call to Frank Sinatra, perhaps hoping he might intervene with members of the mob, especially if Mickey Cohen wanted to take revenge on her. Sinatra’s role in the events of that night has mostly been overlooked.

  Lana reportedly confessed her version of what happened directly to him. “I can’t bear to tell it,” she told Sinatra in the presence of Giesler and Otash. “I discovered Cheryl and Johnny in bed together. They were both sleeping, but it was obvious what he’d done to her. I went berserk. I took the butcher knife I kept beside my bed in the drawer of my nightstand. I don’t know what overcame me. I grabbed the knife and plunged it into Johnny’s stomach. He was on his back, resting up having done the dirty deed. I really wanted to castrate him, not to kill him. Cheryl woke up screaming. It’s all a sort of blur now.”

  Sinatra gave her some vague reassurances and then slipped out of the murder house before the police arrived.

  At the scene of the murder, Giesler warned Lana that a jury would “throw the book at you. Let Cheryl take the fall. She’ll get off easily, maybe a little detention—that’s it. I’ll try to get it ruled as justifiable homicide. She was protecting you. If you confess, it’ll destroy your life for all time.”

  By the time the police were summoned, those who had gathered within the murder house seemed to be fairly well-rehearsed in their testimonies to come… well, almost.

  Two police officers were on the scene before Clinton B. Anderson, police chief of Beverly Hills, barged through the door. He was all too familiar with the career of Johnny Stompanato, as he’d long predicted that the gangster would come to some violent end. He ordered that Lana and Cheryl be placed in separate rooms during their respective interrogations.

  He was directed first to Lana’s bedroom, furnished with pink carpeting, pink curtains, pink bed linen, and even a vase of pink roses resting on one of the tables. One of the officers knelt over the body and pulled up Johnny’s sweater, revealing the stab wound in his stomach.

  After grilling Lana, he was led into her bathroom, where he saw the bloody murder weapon in the sink. He ordered that it be carefully removed, preserving whatever fingerprints that might be on it.

  Two days later, the report from the police laboratory stated that no identification of fingerprints could be concluded because the handle of the knife had been “smudged.”

  In another room, Anderson was introduced to Cheryl, who was crying. “I stabbed him! I didn’t mean to kill him. I just meant to scare him!”

  After a preliminary grilling of both Lana and Cheryl, Anderson later said, “Their stories were a perfect match…perhaps too perfect. Had they been given a script?”

  Cheryl later admitted that Anderson had been rankled that Giesler had beaten him to the scene of the murder. He wanted both Lana and her daughter to be taken to the police station for more questioning.

  Clinton Anderson, Beverly Hills Police Chief.

  From the beginning, he was suspicious that a fourteen-year-old girl could attack a hardened street fighter and survive, unscathed.

  Stompanato, a tough ex-Marine and street gang leader, had successfully defended himself in knife fights since he was a kid.

  In the hall, Lana confronted him. “Can I take the blame for Cheryl?” she asked. “I’ll say I did it.”

  Almost immediately, he was suspicious of such a spontaneous confession. Was this so-called confession part of the cover-up?”

  Later, when Cheryl read reports of what had happened that night, she said, “The reading public must have imagined me to be a young Lizzie Borden.”

  ***

  Stephen Crane was working late at his restaurant when the desperate call from Cheryl came in. “Daddy, Daddy,” she cried out to him. “Something terrible has happened!”

  “What’s the matter?” he demanded to know.

  “Don’t ask questions,” the teenager said. “Daddy, hurry. Please come!”

  Arriving shortly thereafter, after outrunning a motorcycle cop, Crane came running through the front door of the murder house. Almost immediately, Cheryl raced into his arms. “I did it, Daddy! I killed John Stompanato! I did it! He was threatening mother. I didn’t mean to, Daddy. Please help me. Don’t let them take me.”

  Like the loyal father he was, Crane stood by Cheryl through all the horrendous events that were soon to befall her.

  The murder caused great tension between Lana and him. Up to now, they had enjoyed a rather peaceful relationship, having put their long-ago divorce far behind them.

  “I’ll never forgive Lana for making our daughter take the blame for the murder,” Crane later told Jerry Giesler one night in his restaurant. “What was she thinking? Moving a gangster into her house? She was just inviting trouble.”

  ***

  Sydney Guilaroff had been Lana’s favorite hairdresser during her glory days at MGM, and their friendship had lasted. In his memoir, Crowning Glory, he revealed that just before the Stompanato murder, he had gone to a drugstore in Beverly Hills to pick up some medication. As he was coming out, he spotted Lana emerging from the nearby Pioneer Hardware Store.

  “So this is where you go to buy your expensive perfume?” he joked.

  “I needed a kitchen knife,” she said.

  After some small talk, he suggested they have dinner some night, and she agreed. After kissing him on both cheeks, she got into her car and drove away.

  He thought no more about the knife until the next day, when he heard over radio that Johnny had been stabbed to death at Lana’s home. Perhaps it was the same knife he’d seen after she’d purchased it the day before.

  After hearing the news, Guilaroff wrote, “I got into my car and flew to Lana’s house. When I arrived, none of the servants were on duty, and she opened the door herself. “Oh, Sydney, I’m so glad you came.” She sobbed, falling into his arms. “She wept for a long time.”

  Sydney Guilaroff with Ava Gardner. Other than Lana Turner, she was his most favored client. “Whenever possible, each of them demanded I do their hair.”

  Apparently, this scene took place the morning after she had returned from further interrogations at the police station.

  “Did you ever dream that this would happen?” she asked. “And with that very knife I bought yesterday?”

  In her own memoir, Lana contradicted her hairdresser’s account, claiming that Johnny had gone with her to the hardware store to purchase not one knife, “but several kitchen knives.” She claimed that she let him select the knives “because he was an expert on knives, having indulged in many a knife fight in his life.”

  When Mickey Cohen got a call that Johnny had been stabbed to death, he
, too, drove to Lana’s house. Giesler was still there, although Lana and Cheryl were at the police station.

  “If Lana comes back and sees you,” Giesler said, “she’s gonna fall apart. John’s dead. The body has been sent to the morgue. Go there! You’re the only person around who can make the funeral arrangements. I’ll get the address for you.”

  ***

  Even though Lana was no longer a client of MGM, both Howard Strickling and Eddie Mannix went to work to plant sympathetic news articles about her. What followed was a steady stream of news depicting her as the “victim of Johnny Stompanato’s insane rages and violent attacks on both her and Cheryl.”

  Otash later disputed the story that Lana had volunteered to the police to take the blame for the murder. “I was there,” Otash told fellow detective Milo Speriglio. “She did no such thing. That was a lie about her volunteering to claim she murdered Johnny. It was a crock of the smelly stuff. What I saw was Lana running around hysterically. She didn’t seem concerned about who murdered Johnny. She was screaming hysterically, ‘My career! What’s going to happen to my career? This will ruin me!’”

  “I was the one who wiped the fingerprints off the knife in Lana’s bathroom sink,” Otash told Speriglio. “I was a naughty boy doing what I’m not supposed to do. But I never did what I was supposed to do. Rules were made to be broken, not followed in my book.”

  Otash later claimed, “Some fucker ratted me out about the cover-up at Lana’s house. I was called into Anderson’s office two days later, and he threatened to charge me as an accessory based on what he’d heard that I did with Giesler. He told me that Giesler stood to lose his license, even though he was the most powerful lawyer in Hollywood.”

  “I can’t go into details,” Otash continued, “but I told Anderson that a number of people held very damaging stuff on him that would also ruin his own god damn career. He was a smart fox. He never brought any charge against me or against Giesler.”