Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  Over the years, many producers considered filming their own versions of the murder. A number of actors were considered for the role of Johnny Stompanato, including Richard Gere, Benjamin Brett, and Paul Hipp, known for playing rocker Buddy Holly in Buddy (1990) and for a role in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997).

  A gay casting director said, “There is only one actor who can play Johnny Stompanato, and that’s Hugh Jackman. He’s sure sexy enough. Just imagine how he’ll look imitating Johnny, with his silk shirt unbuttoned to that tantalizing navel Jackman has on that magnificent Aussie body.”

  Lana with baby Cheryl. Having survived death-defying medical problems at birth, both mother and daughter went on to face an array of other tragedies in life.

  Cheryl later recalled her unhappy life growing up as “the baby of a star” in the glamourous Hollywood era of the 1940s and 50s.

  [A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER: There is only one person, now alive, who knows exactly who murdered Johnny Stompanato on that long-ago night back in April of 1958. That is Cheryl Crane, the daughter of Lana Turner.

  Compiled over many years, the information in this chapter, with all its conflicting opinions, is similar to what might have been presented at a murder trial.

  Since that never happened, it is up to you, the reader, to form your own opinion. Was it the mother or the 14-year-old daughter who plunged the kitchen knife deep into the bowels of the ill-fated gambler, hustler, and blackmailer?

  Chances are good that a definite answer will never be known unless Cheryl, perhaps on her death bed, revises previous statements.]

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Twilight of a Film Career

  THE DECLINE OF LANA TURNER’S FILM ROLES:

  No Longer Cast as a Glamourous Millionaire Buying Hustlers, She Now Portrays a Broken-Down Old Whore

  In Madame X, the public saw Lana Turner as she’d never been depicted on screen before. She cried when she first gazed at her aged and defeated image in the mirror.

  In this scene, she appears with her hair brushed severely back and with dark circles under her eyes. The embittered, violently betrayed character she’s portraying is, in fact, facing death.

  She lamented to her friends, “My appearance in this remake of an old, old theme is going to destroy what career I have left.”

  “For mother, life was a movie,” said Cheryl Crane.

  Her friend, Virginia Grey, put it another way: “If the movies had not existed, they would have to be invented just for Lana Turner. She could have been nothing less but a movie star.”

  In the weeks that followed the Johnny Stompanato verdict, Lana felt she was sinking into quicksand. Almost daily, some figure in Hollywood announced that her film career was over. Some producers sidestepped the issue. David O. Selznick claimed, “I would hire her in a minute, but I don’t have any suitable property right now.”

  “Of course, I’d cast her,” Jerry Wald said. “Before all this shit came down, I tried to get her to co-star in The Sound and the Fury. Should another role arise, I’d be the first to go knocking on her door.”

  “After all this publicity, Lana will come back bigger than ever at the box office,” predicted producer Byron Foy. “Audience surveys have shown that most of the public is sympathetic to her.”

  It was Lana herself who almost daily told someone, “I fear even my most loyal fans have now turned against me.”

  Money was one of her biggest problems. She needed work, because she still owed MGM a lot of money for covering her debt to the IRS. Her legal bills had become colossal, and she also had to support not only herself, but Mildred and Cheryl.

  On April 24, 1958, Cheryl had been made a ward of the court, the judge ruling that she should go and live with her grandmother, Mildred.

  After the court hearing, as she exited from the courthouse, Lana flashed a smile. As she said, “It was called putting up a brave front.”

  “I’m pleased with the decision of the judge,” she assured reporters, perhaps masking her true feelings.

  By December, the arrangement of Cheryl living with Mildred was extended by the judge with no definite cutoff date. His ruling did not bring any objection either from Lana or from Stephen Crane.

  She gave up her rented house on Canon Drive, turning it over to Cheryl and Mildred, while she went to live at her mother’s former apartment. She was not happy with the accommodation, and soon moved into a small house at 515 North Roxbury Drive.

  Del Armstrong had remained her trusted friend and confidant. She told him, “I’m not going to look back, but go forward into my uncertain future. I’ve got to push myself. That means facing up to my personal problems. Any future love affairs will have to be put on hold. I’ve got to find film work. What else is there for me to do? Work behind a sales counter in a department store? I saw Bette Davis attempt that in her movie, The Star (1952). It didn’t work out for Bette in that film, and it wouldn’t work out for me, either.”

  Letters addressed to her still poured in at MGM, although she was no longer under contract. The mail department faithfully delivered all correspondence from both fans and enemies, perhaps censoring some of the most vicious ones. A telephone operator from Cleveland wrote, “There’s hardly a woman alive who at one time or another hasn’t loved an unworthy man. Only Lana got caught.”

  On looking back at her life at the time, she dredged up a cliché, “For me, it was darkest before the dawn.”

  ***

  That “dawn” arrived in the form of producer Ross Hunter, who since 1956 had wanted to remake the 1934 movie, Imitation of Life, starring Claudette Colbert as “The Pancake Queen” and Louise Beaver as her faithful black maid. The plot was based on a novel by the best-selling author, Fannie Hurst.

  Originally, his intention was to turn the soapy melodrama into a musical, starring Shirley Booth and Mahalia Jackson. Hunter had become known for employing actresses “beyond their expiration date,” as in the case of Ann Sheridan and Joan Bennett.

  When he changed his mind and decided to make Imitation into a melodrama, his phone started ringing. Three of the most honored and distinguished “drama queens” in the history of Hollywood called, each wanting to star in the remake. They were Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford. But he wanted Lana Turner.

  Although Juanita Moore is employed as Lana’s housekeeper, she is more like a comforting, surrogate mother.

  In the 1934 film, Colbert launched an empire based on a pancake recipe from her maid, as portrayed by Louise Brooks. Colbert’s daughter was played by Rochelle Hudson. The maid, Delilah Johnson, in the script, has a daughter, Peola (Fredi Washington) whose fair complexion allowed her to pass as white, even though she was of mixed-race ancestry.

  From the day it was published in 1933, the Hurst novel had generated controversy. Until the 1967 Supreme Court ruling (Loving v. Virginia), Southern states required that persons of any known African American ancestry had to be officially classified in records as “black.”

  Here’s John Gavin, later a U.S. ambassador to Mexico, who NEVER tried to build a wall—at least not between Lana and himself.

  When Hunter announced he was remaking the movie, the censors at the Production Code sent an advance warning, “You’re just asking for trouble.”

  The day Hunter drove over to see Lana, he was at the peak of his success. He’d scored a big hit with Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman in Magnificent Obsession (1954). In the same year as Imitation of Life (1959) he’d also launched Pillow Talk with Rock Hudson and Doris Day, one of the most successful comedies of the 1950s, ranking up there with Marilyn Monroe’s Some Like It Hot (1959).

  Even though the critics attacked Hunter’s films, the public flocked to them, especially women. “In my pictures, I give women the chance to live vicariously, to see beautiful women in jewels and gorgeous clothes, with plenty of melodrama going on in their love lives.”

  Over a drink at Lana’s house, Hunter pitched the rewritten starring role to her. As a girl, Lana h
ad been taken to see the Claudette Colbert version of Imitation of Life.

  She listened patiently as Hunter outlined the character to her. When he’d finished, she said, “What? Another mother role?” She was referencing Peyton Place.

  He quickly pointed out, “You did god damn well with that one.”

  One aspect of the plot particularly disturbed her. “In the movie, my daughter and I are in love with the same man. Don’t you think that will revive rumors that Cheryl was in love with Johnny Stompanato?”

  “So what?” Hunter asked. “You’ll have to face life at some point, dear. It’s a great role—potentially your greatest—and I think your fans will admire you all the more for the courage and bravery of your doing it.”

  “I need work, but this script is just too close to home,” she protested.

  “Take the role, or you’ll regret it. Your friend, Susan Hayward, thinks it’ll be an Oscar winner. Why don’t you win that Oscar instead of Susan? To be nominated for Peyton Place is one thing. How about actually taking home the Oscar for a change?”

  It took another three hours and a half bottle of vodka before she agreed to do the role. “Announce it to the press. Lana Turner is coming back!”

  ***

  During their long session at her home, Lana had been impressed with Hunter’s brutal honesty, especially when it came to himself. At one point, he admitted, “I’m in love with Rock Hudson. He’s got a big one that he lets me sample two or three times a week. I don’t kid myself. He’s not in love with me, but that doesn’t mean he won’t have sex with me.”

  “That’s the story of my life, too,” she said, sympathetically.

  The next week, one of her hopes was dashed, as she’d been wishing that Hunter would give her perhaps $150,000, maybe more, for her appearance. But over dinner with him, he told her the bad news.

  Universal didn’t have a lot of faith in the remake and would allow him only a budget of $1.2 million. The studio was willing to settle for another deal, paying her a salary of only $2,500 a week. But as an amazing concession, she would be given fifty percent of the profits. However, if the movie failed at the box office, she would have worked for far less than what she was accustomed to.

  Finally, after listening to all of his reassurances, she agreed to sign the contract. As she recalled months later, “That was the best financial decision I ever made. I made at least a million dollars for the role long before Elizabeth Taylor became famously paid a million dollars for appearing in Cleopatra (1963).”

  Before filming began, Hunter assured her she’d have a spectacular wardrobe that Jean Louis would design for her. “That, plus you’ll be seen in at least a million dollars worth of jewelry. Just because I’m a gay man and not turned on by female flesh doesn’t mean I can’t make you look like a goddess.”

  Author Sam Staggs wrote, “Like Myra Breckinridge (a novel by Gore Vidal), Lana in the film embodies both heterosexual and homosexual camp while remaining oddly sexless.”

  To many other critics, Lana in the character of Lora Meredith was playing herself.

  Hunter hired a German-Danish film director, Douglas Sirk, who had in the early years of the Nazi regime worked for Josef Goebbels at the UFA Studios in Berlin. He left Hitler’s Germany in 1937 because he was married to a Jew, Hilde Jary.

  Before her, he’d been married to Lydia Brinken, a member of the Nazi Party who had arranged for their son, Claus Detlef Sierck, to join the Hitler Jugend. In time, he became the leading child star of Nazi cinema. The last Sirk heard of his son was to learn of his death at the age of nine on the Russian front.

  Sirk told Lana that he’d never been a Nazi, and he offered to arrange a screening of his first Hollywood picture for her, Hitler’s Madman (1942).

  Within days, Hunter and Sirk had arranged Lana’s supporting cast. No longer a “pancake queen,” like Claudette Colbert, Lana’s Lora Meredith was a stunningly beautiful stage actress on Broadway. Her daughter, Susie, age 16, would be played by Sandra Dee.

  Instead of the more racially charged part of the black maid, the Louise Beavers role would be essayed by Juanita Moore, cast as Annie Johnson, Lana’s “housekeeper and companion.”

  Before deciding to cast Moore, Hunter had considered both Pearl Bailey and Marian Anderson.

  The former Merle Johnson, Jr., Troy Donahue was one of Henry Willson’s boys, having been worked over on the casting couch.

  He was a handsome, rather bland, blonde-haired, blue-eyed sensation, one of the fabled “pretty boys” of the Eisenhower 1950s. Its ranks included such competitors as Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson.

  Her mulatto daughter, Sarah Jane, would be played by Susan Kohner, the daughter of Paul Kohner, Lana’s agent.

  As a freelance photographer, Steve Archer, the leading man role would go to John Gavin.

  Dan O’Herlihy was cast in the part of the playwright scripting those hit shows for Lana’s character.

  Troy Donahue would play Frankie, Sarah Jane’s boyfriend until he learns she’s a mulatto. Actor Robert Alda was cast as Lana’s agent, Allen Loomis, in the film.

  Growing up in the backwoods of segregated Mississippi, Moore and her family had gravitated to California in hopes of a better life. She made her film debut in Pinky (1949), with Jeanne Crain and Ethel Barrymore. This was Hollywood’s other pioneer racial drama of a black girl passing for white.

  During filming, Lana and Moore had many sympathetic talks. Hunter claimed, “Juanita became a sort of mother figure to Lana, even though she was born in 1914. And, as such, was only a few years older than Lana.”

  Lana was quite blunt with Moore. “When I signed for this picture, I was on my ass.”

  “Honey chile, you can’t get much lower than that,” Moore replied.

  Even though she didn’t get one of the leads, Mahalia Jackson, the African American singer, hailed as “The Queen of Gospel,” appeared at the end of the movie, singing a brilliantly moving rendition of “Trouble of the World” at the funeral of the character played by Moore.

  In her memoirs, Lana wrote about this “heartbreaking spiritual. When I heard the first strains of the song in rehearsal, I simply broke down. Images of my own life, by own dark fears flooded my mind, and I dissolved in tears. I fled to my dressing room.”

  The dashing John Gavin was a “dreamboat leading man” (as defined by both Lana and his gay agent, Henry Willson), who seemed to have a crush on Gavin. Willson had been the first to alert her to Gavin’s manly charms and male beauty.

  “As you know, my boy Rock Hudson is the biggest money maker in pictures today,” Willson said. “I’m calling Gavin ‘Rock Junior.” He is tall, dark, and gorgeously handsome. You’ll cream in your jeans when he takes you in his arms for a love scene. Some critics call him wooden. But with those looks, that body, who needs to act?”

  “Is he one of your boys?” she asked.

  “Don’t take me for a total pansy,” he said. “I know who to put on the casting couch, and I also know where not to trespass. When it comes to John, I can only dream of those mighty inches. He doesn’t put out to get a role.”

  Once again, as in Peyton Place, Lana played a stylish mature woman involved in a mother-daughter conflict, this time with Sandra Dee.

  Hunter arranged a screening for Lana of Gavin’s latest picture. A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), based on Erich Maria Remarque’s antiwar novel, the story of a young German soldier who wakes up to both the horror and futility of war.

  “I’m awed by Gavin’s screen presence,” she told Hunter. “So strong, so virile, so yummy.”

  “During filming, I never got to seduce John,” she confessed to Virginia Grey. “If he had raised only a little pinkie and beckoned to me, I would have come running. No woman in her right mind would turn down a guy like this. He could even change a lesbian’s sexual preference.”

  “If anything, I found him a bit square,” she said. “after work, he goes home to his wife, Cecily Evans. They have a small apartment in Beverly Hills,
and they’re expecting a baby.”

  Lana later became friends with Gavin and his second wife, Constance Towers, whom he’d married almost a decade after his divorce from Cecily came through.

  Look magazine labeled Gavin a “non-neurotic newcomer,” and Alfred Hitchcock cast him as Janet Leigh’s boyfriend in Psycho (1960).

  [Although Lana lobbied to play opposite Gavin in Back Street (1961), based on another Fannie Hurst novel, she was rejected. The role went instead to Susan Hayward.]

  Susan Kohner played Sarah Jane, 18, the daughter of the black housekeeper who grows up “to pass.” She performed brilliantly, her role winning her an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress.

  The year Lana met her, she had appeared opposite Sal Mineo in The Gene Krupa Story. The fabled drummer had been one of Lana’s earliest beaus. She told Kohner, “I liked the original title of your movie better. If it was the story of Gene, it should have been called Drum Crazy.”

  From the depths of Bayonne, New Jersey, Sandra Dee, born in 1942, launched her career as a beautiful, blue-eyed, blonde-haired child model. Her parents divorced in 1950, and her new stepfather reportedly molested her.

  Ross Hunter discovered Sandra on Park avenue in Manhattan, and by 1957, she was lured to Hollywood to make her film debut in Until They Sail, co-starring Paul Newman, Joan Fontaine, and Piper Laurie.

  When Hunter cast her in Imitation of Life as Lana’s daughter, she became a teenage sensation. Her position was firmly established that same year when she co-starred with Troy Donahue in A Summer Place, a “soaper” of adultery and teenage love.

  INTERRACIAL IRONIES (IMITATION OF LIFE)

  Psychic sisters, one white (Sandra Dee, left), another (Susan Kohner), “passing as white.”