In Lana Turner’s Bedroom

It was because it was night-time and raining that I decided to drive up to Lana Turner’s old house in Beverly Hills. The crime had taken place forty-six years earlier, on a stormy Good Friday. This was Ash Wednesday, and if I went now, who knew, maybe I would get some sense of the atmosphere that night, when Johnny Stompanato was murdered.

At 9.20 p.m. on April 4, 1958 Cheryl Crane, Lana Turner’s fourteen-year-old daughter, stabbed her mother’s lover in the stomach. Johnny Stompanato was a suave, well-known gangster who had escorted other stars around town and had once been Mickey Cohen’s bodyguard. Two weeks earlier, Stompanato and Lana had had a violent fight because she refused to take him with her to the Oscars (she had been nominated for the first time, for her role in Peyton Place). On numerous occasions he had threatened to disfigure her or harm her family if she left him — he had visited her in London on the set of her most recent movie and reportedly had such a clash with her young co-star, Sean Connery, that Scotland Yard had him deported. That Friday night the arguments escalated to such a degree that Cheryl, hoping to protect her mother, ran down to the kitchen to get a knife. She stood outside Lana’s bedroom door, and when the door opened she saw Stompanato behind her mother with his arm raised, as if to strike her. She ran at him, and he fell. Lana didn’t see the knife. She only saw the stab wound in her lover's dying body.

This is what Lana and Cheryl told Clinton Anderson, the Beverly Hills chief of police, when he arrived an hour and a half later. Anderson said their stories matched exactly. In the 1980s, Lana and Cheryl both wrote memoirs; their stories still matched. But let’s go back to 1958: in that hour and a half before Anderson arrived, the two women were joined by six other people, not counting the corpse. Cheryl called her father, Stephen Crane, who ran a restaurant nearby (Crane was Lana’s second husband; she would eventually marry eight times). Lana called her mother, Mildred Turner, because she couldn’t remember their doctor’s number. Mildred Turner called the doctor, and the doctor, on pronouncing Stompanato dead, suggested to Lana that she call the most celebrated criminal lawyer in Los Angeles, Jerry Giesler. Giesler was nicknamed ‘the magnificent mouthpiece’; he had got Errol Flynn cleared of two rape charges and Bugsy Siegel cleared of murder. He arrived with a private eye, Fred Otash, who was a former vice cop and fed stories to Confidential magazine on the side. By now the house was surrounded — by medics, policemen and neighbours in bathrobes — but one last person made it into the bedroom before Anderson: James Bacon, a journalist who slipped through by pretending he was the coroner’s assistant.

Not only was the room a little crowded, but two crucial things happened in that hour and a half which made the facts unverifiable — and which have preserved the mystery in people’s minds ever since. The body was found quite a way from the door with very little blood around it (that is, it had most likely been moved), and the knife was found in the bathroom, covered with smudged and unidentifiable fingerprints.

There was gossip from the start — that Lana made Cheryl take the rap in order to avoid the death penalty and save her career, that Lana found Cheryl and Johnny in bed together — and given that so many people want a piece of the celebrity puzzle, how can we know who to believe? Turner had a word for people who were obsessed with her: Lanatics.

‘We get a lot of people knocking,’ said the woman who opened the door to the house on North Bedford Drive. ‘I usually don’t let them in. Some of them are really crazy — people write letters to Lana Turner here saying they’re in love with her, and they don’t even know she’s dead.’

The place was a broad, white, colonial-style mansion, set back from the road by a crescent-shaped driveway (it had been built for the actress Laura Hope Crews with the proceeds from playing Aunt Pittypat in Gone with the Wind). Large drops of rain fell from dizzying black palm trees, and a newspaper lay drenched on the ground.

The woman led me into the hallway. ‘Here’s the kitchen,’ she said, sweeping her arm through a doorway to the left as if showing off a piece of real estate. ‘This was just redecorated recently. The murder weapon's still in the house somewhere.’

‘What do you mean?’ I said. ‘It was taken in evidence, wasn’t it?’

'Yeah, but when they’d finished with it they gave it back. I mean, it belonged to my stepfather. This is his house. It was his knife.’ Her stepfather, who was now dead, had rented the house to Lana Turner. It now belonged to the woman’s mother, and she had been living there for a while with her children.

There was a strong smell as soon as you walked in — a woody, smoky-sweet, cigar box smell. A large nineteenth-century oil painting hung on the wall in the hallway, and there was a suit of armour standing in the corner of the living room. Mixed in with this antebellum feel were traces of other times — the one I was looking for (the white leather bar stools Lana had sat on while drinking her inalienable vodkas, the make-up mirror with a lightbulb frame that stretched along an entire wall) and the present era that had all but recorded over it: a child’s lunch box deposited at the foot of the stairs; two girls, the woman’s daughters, watching TV on Lana’s old bed (‘a bedspread went missing you know, and never came back,’ said the woman, who was not yet born then, about the famous crime). The chaise longue, visible in crime-scene photos next to the corpse, had been reupholstered in dark pink damask and moved to another corner.

I asked why her stepfather hadn’t changed more of the decor after the murder. ‘Well, it was his furniture,’ she said, in the casually proprietary tone she’d used when speaking of the weapon. ‘She only lived here for a few months. Why would he change anything?’

I stood in that room as one who has been party to a failed seance. The subject was slippery; there was no knowing Lana Turner now. She was dead, and worse — she was a fiction. I don’t mean that she never lived — only that she lived as if she were in a movie.

Lana Turner was a poor girl from Idaho who moved to Los Angeles with her mother after her father had been murdered in a gambling incident. She was famously, and apocryphally, ‘discovered’ in Schwab’s soda fountain when she was sixteen. She became ‘the sweater girl’ then — a name she earned by wearing thinly lined bras beneath her jumpers — and died in 1995 at the age of seventy-five (or seventy-four, depending on whose version you believe) having spent the years in between living up to what she called her ‘trademark’ faculties: her platinum hair, her glossy pout, her pin-up’s legs. Cheryl Crane recalled that she never saw her mother without make-up. Her roles reflected her life to a stunning degree — or perhaps it was vice versa — the drinking, the marriages, the mothering, the murders. There was always a touch of the simulacrum about her; she might stand for every star who ever changed her name or her looks — others were better dissemblers, but part of Lana Turner’s fleshy vibrancy was that her roots, so to speak, were always showing.

After Stompanato’s death there was a coroner’s inquest instead of a trial, and Cheryl was found guilty of ‘justifiable homicide’. She was made a ward of the court until the age of eighteen and released into the custody of her grandmother; the District Attorney announced that she had never had a ‘real home’. The inquest was nationally televised, and Lana, who testified for over an hour, was widely said to have given the performance of her life. As a result, her career picked up again, and she was at her best playing a histrionic actress for Douglas Sirk in the aptly titled Imitation of Life.

One of the most curious things about her is how she built such an iconic career out of so little talent. But to say that she was a bad actress is to miss the point: overacting was naturalism to her. The morning after the inquest the Los Angeles Times ran an editorial sympathizing with Cheryl and what was thought to be her helpless hero-worship of Lana: ‘In an unreal world,’ it read, ‘unreality is the only substance.’

‘We don’t talk to strangers [in Hollywood],’ F. Scott Fitzgerald has his narrator say in The Last Tycoon, ‘And when we do, we tell them lies so well rehearsed even we don’t always recall if they’re true.’ The woman at North Bedford Drive told me that Lana had lived there for a few months and that the murder weapon had belonged to her stepfather. In fact Lana moved in only days before the murder and moved out the morning after the inquest — she lived there for less than two weeks; and she had bought the knife with Stompanato earlier that day — the coroner found the price tag still on it. But the woman who told me these things was reciting family lore, not misleading me. Telling tales is perhaps a more useful phrase than lying: stories are what Hollywood is made of, and the fact that there may be no final documented truth in this one only makes it more fitting — makes it all the more telling a tale. The producer Robert Evans put it this way: ‘There are three sides to every story,’ he wrote, ‘yours…mine…and the truth. No one is lying. Memories shared serve each differently.’

Some idea of how information about the Stompanato murder has Chinese-whispered its way through the past half-century can be gleaned from this snippet about a crucial aspect of the crime: why there was so little blood around the body. Fred Otash’s ghostwriter told Lana Turner’s hairdresser that Otash had told him that Jerry Giesler had told him to ‘get the hell over here’ because ‘the bed looks like somebody butchered a hog in it’. They then, reportedly, cleaned up the mess and mussed up the fingerprints. Is this ‘evidence’? Of a sort. It’s not that you give up on the facts, exactly, only that other kinds of information begin to sidle up to them, creating a new democracy of evidence.

At North Bedford Drive, I became preoccupied with sensations — the smell of the house, the sound of the rain, the colour of the night. These things were merely subjective and yet, in a story such as this, full of smudged-over evidence and snatches of gossip, they claimed an equal footing. In fact, they held unsuspected promise; you could no doubt learn a lot about a person by following their scent.

Eric Root, a friend who claims Lana asked him to tell everyone that she killed Stompanato, has a story in his memoir about Turner’s perfume. She wore Tuberose by Mary Chess, a scent Cheryl Crane also remembers being something of a signature with her mother. The perfume was first sold in 1930, and by the time Root met Turner in 1971, it was rather hard to come by. He did some research and arranged for several bottles to be sent to her from New York. Lana, he says, wouldn't stand for any other smell in the house. If you came to visit you were not allowed to wear perfume or aftershave (unless it was a tiny dose of Old Spice, which her great love Tyrone Power used to wear). So one day Root came sprinkled with something he thought she would like. ‘What in the hell is that godawful stuff you have on?’ she reportedly asked before he was even in the door. Root was ordered to have a shower and let the maid wash his clothes before he could stay. He did as he was told, and once he was clean he answered his hostess’s question: ‘That was Tuberose, by Mary Chess.’ Turner didn’t question the reason behind his transgression, or over-identification. She simply put her foot down: ‘No one wears that around here but me. Got it?’

When I arrived back at my hotel I did what private detectives do in thrillers: I checked behind all the doors, in the closets and under the beds. I looked at the heavy velour curtains and was gripped by the fear that someone was behind them. I changed rooms. Then I realized what was troubling me. Unlike the famous bedroom I’d just visited, hotel rooms had a way of erasing their past inhabitants. More people had done more things in each one of the identical rooms around me than had ever passed through Lana Turner’s bedroom, and yet there was not a single trace here of any of them — not a gram of cigarette ash, not a spill or a stain or a record of any kind of mood. The scene of a famous suspected cover-up was in fact much less covered up than Room 425 was every day. Yet it still would not yield what I felt were facts. I supposed that what I was afraid of was also what I was after: Lana Turner would always be a shape behind a curtain to me, hidden somewhere behind, or within, the deftly woven fabric of Hollywood.