Al Teitelbaum lived to the age of ninety-six; he died in May 2011. In his last brush with publicity, in 2005, he was interviewed on the radio and shared several stories about his glory days in Beverly Hills, including how tycoon Howard Hughes bought furs for each of his starlet lovers. In one year alone, Hughes purchased two dozen coats. Teitelbaum also shared his tragic connection to blonde beauty Carole Lombard, the actress who was the love of actor Clark Gable’s life. She died in a plane crash at the age of thirty-three. “She was wearing my mink coat when they found her body,” Teitelbaum said sadly, traveling back in time to the Golden Age of Hollywood—that time long, long ago when the name Teitelbaum meant only the best.
Teitelbaum claimed more than two hundred furs had been stolen from his shop. He is shown surrounded by models ready for a magazine photo shoot.
Mario Lanza, thirty-eight years old, died suddenly of a heart attach shortly after Teitelbaum’s trial. Five months later, Lanza’s wife passed away of a suspected drug overdose, orphaning their four children, who were raised by Lanza’s parents.
1958
Actress’s Lover Knifed to Death • A Mother/Daughter Whodunit
Movie star Lana Turner was the reigning sex goddess at M-G-M studios. Her on-screen appearances were sizzling and so was her private life—married eight times to seven men. The actress had just one child, daughter Cheryl Crane, who spent much of her time at her father’s house or at boarding schools, leaving Lana with lots of time for romance. In between marriages, Lana fell hard for the handsome Johnny Stompanato, a local gigolo known not only for his prowess as a lover, but also because of his ties to the mob and gangster Mickey Cohen. The love-struck Lana didn’t care about Johnny’s reputation; he made her feel things she’d never felt before, and thus the two began a torrid affair.
But the relationship became volatile and abusive. Lana occasionally wore sunglasses to hide bruises on her pretty face. Hot-blooded Johnny Stompanato became even more menacing when he found out Lana wasn’t taking him to the Academy Awards, Hollywood’s biggest night; he was good enough to be in her bed but not on her arm? The arguing was relentless. Finally, Lana’s mother called police to report that her daughter had become terrified of “this hoodlum Stompanato” and wanted to know what could be done. The police chief advised her to come in immediately with Lana and file an official complaint; they never did. Exactly one week later, the couple would have their last argument.
On Good Friday, April 4, 1958, around midnight, police were called to Lana’s home at 730 North Bedford Drive. Inside the star’s nearly all-white bedroom, officers found Johnny Stompanato face up on the carpet, dead—stabbed with a knife; a major artery had been severed. Oddly, Lana’s attorney, Jerry Geisler, was already at the scene.
“Cherie killed Johnny,” Lana told investigators between sobs, “He threatened to kill me, and poor Cherie got frightened.” The trembling teenager told investigators she ran to the kitchen after hearing the violent argument and grabbed a butcher knife—determined to protect her mother. “I didn’t mean to kill him, I just meant to frighten him,” Cheryl told the chief, before she was taken into custody and placed in juvenile hall.
A sensational, three-week trial followed. Lana’s testimony on the stand was described by many as the best performance of her life. She broke down twice while defending her daughter and spoke in barely a whisper as she tried to explain to the judge why she stayed with a man who abused her, confessing it was something even she couldn’t understand. The murder was ruled a justifiable homicide, Cheryl was released and sent home.
Rumors persisted that Lana Turner herself had murdered Johnny in a fit of rage, because she found out he’d molested her daughter, and that Geisler had talked her into letting Cheryl take the rap since the teen would be less likely to be found guilty. While there’s no hard evidence to support that theory, there are two facts that conspiracy theorists point to:
1. Police Chief Anderson noted in his biography that on the night of the murder, “Although [Lana’s] voice shook slightly, she appeared to be a remarkably composed woman under the circumstances.”
2. In unpublished FBI files, letters Cheryl Crane wrote to Johnny Stompanato reveal a young woman who has some kind of a special relationship with her mother’s lover: “Love ya and miss ya loads,” wrote the teenager to Johnny, “Write soon, be good.”
Crane is now an author and real estate agent living in Palm Springs. She admits one of her mother’s husbands abused her, but she says Johnny never did. Stompanato’s death, she insists, was really just a freak accident, “Nobody wants to believe the truth. I was the only one there, and I had to do something. John was coming toward me, I stepped through the door and he ran into me, literally ran into the knife.”
Cheryl Crane also says that she and her mother weren’t really close until later years, and that shortly before her mother died, in 1995, at the age of seventy-four, Lana thanked her for the first time for killing Johnny. She also told Cheryl she was glad her daughter had finally found what she never could: a long and happy relationship. (Cheryl celebrated her fortieth anniversary with her partner, Josh LeRoy, a former model and girlfriend of actor Marlon Brando.)
Shortly after Stompanato died, someone turned in to the police a wooden box that had belonged to the playboy. Inside, police found photos of several women — wives of attorneys and doctors and other socially prominent men. Apparently Stompanato, a lover of ladies, was a blackmailer as well. In a never-published police report, a detective revealed the women claimed they’d been drugged and photographed in the nude. The detective noted, “The Chief and I decided after interviewing third parties that it would serve no purpose to…possibly ruin marriages.” The photos were destroyed. The closing line in the report reads: “In my opinion, Cheryl did society a favor in disposing of Stompanato.”
Clark Fogg’s Analysis:
A fourteen-year-old takes down a mobster with one blow? Highly suspect, and it’s very unlikely that “he ran into the knife.” There was not a lot of blood at the scene, most likely due to a major internal injury. The knife used had a very long blade, which means the weapon was plunged into Stompanato with force. It’s very possible that Cheryl brought the knife into the room, but it was soon taken away from Cheryl by her mom, who then plunged it into Stompanato. (Possibly explaining why the blade was upside down when it was used to stab Stompanato). If Cheryl was “just holding” the knife and Stompanato ran into it, the wound would have been much lower on Stompanato’s torso area. Those letters in the FBI file from Cheryl to Stompanato are quite interesting. Maybe Lana Turner was angry or suspicious that something was going on between Stompanato and her daughter? I think with today’s DNA technology, if we had that knife, we’d find Lana Turner’s DNA all over it.
The arrow indicates the location of the bedroom in the Turner home where Johnny Stompanato was found.
Lana Turner and her fourteen-year old daughter Cheryl Crane flank Stompanato at the Los Angeles Airport.
Mother and daughter conferred with their attorney Jerry Geisler.
Turner testified that Stompanato “grabbed his stomach, walked a little, half-turned and fell. He didn’t talk, just kept gasping.”
Turner cries in court.
Turner, known as “The Sweater Girl,” signed this love letter (2 images prior) to Johnny with his pet name for her: Lanita.
An officer displays the weapon found at the scene of the crime.
The Times They Are A-Changin’
The 1960s and 1970s
The winds of change are blowing across Beverly Hills—the Pacific Electric Railway trolley cars are dismantled in 1965 and the city’s bridle path is paved over. Several of the supersized mansions built in the 1920s and 1930s are being torn down, and properties are subdivided.
Over on Rodeo Drive, more high-end stores appear, like Gucci. Hairdressers named Vidal Sassoon and Gene Shacove (he inspired the character in the movie Shampoo [1975]) take the town by storm, becoming quasi-celebrities the
mselves. Speaking of celebs, superstar Doris Day can be seen riding around town on her bike, and the new hotspot in town is The Daisy, a private club where new and old Hollywood like to mingle.
Big changes at the police department too: crime-fighting equipment is getting more sophisticated; radar units are mounted inside patrol cars. The police chief reports that his officers are noticing a shift in illegal activity: fewer crimes of passion, more crimes of opportunity, and an increase in narcotics-related cases.
One of the most shocking (and not widely talked about incidents) involves popular athletes at Beverly Hills High School. The players have fallen prey to professional drug dealers who recruit them to sell marijuana to fellow students. The high school boys receive a most unusual reward: all the free sex they want from prostitutes who are kept in a residence across from the high school. The operation is quickly shut down after an anonymous tip to the police department.
Nearby at the Friars Club, a card-cheating scandal has been exposed. Swindlers drill peepholes into the ceiling and use signaling devices disguised as burglar alarms to let their fellow scammers know what cards to play. Several customers are fleeced out of as much as one hundred thousand dollars, including big names like Dean Martin and millionaire shoe-store mogul Harry Karl. Karl, who is married to actress Debbie Reynolds at the time, has gambled away much of her fortune. (More bad-husband behavior for Ms. Reynolds. She already has endured a humiliating divorce from first husband, Eddie Fisher, who left her for actress Elizabeth Taylor.)
Other stars blazing through the headlines during these decades include popular singer Vic Damone, who is arrested in 1964 for “kidnapping” his own nine-year-old son. The arrest warrant is prompted by accusations from Damone’s ex-wife, the beautiful, Italian-born actress Pier Angeli. The couple has been embroiled in an ugly and highly publicized custody battle that took years to settle. Then, tragically, Angeli dies in 1971, at the age of thirty-nine, of an accidental barbiturate overdose. She had just been chosen to play a part in The Godfather (1972).
Jan Berry, half of the surf-music sensation Jan and Dean, nearly dies in a horrible car accident two years after the duo wrote a song about a crash called “Dead Man’s Curve.” In 1966, Berry smashes his Corvette Sting Ray into the back of a parked truck on Whittier Drive, just north of Sunset Boulevard, a few miles away from the spot the song refers to. Berry, twenty-five years old, suffers severe brain damage and partial paralysis; his recovery is slow and painful.
Aging actress Barbara Stanwyck finds herself in a pickle with police. Stanwyck, the star of the classic film Double Indemnity (1944), sets her silent alarm off three times one night. The same officer responds each time, but finds nothing. As he walks out the door, the actress grabs him and both tumble onto the bed. “I got off that bed fast—I’m a married man,” the shocked officer told his boss. “Then I got the hell out of there!”
In 1968, actor Nick Adams, the popular star of the TV series The Rebel, is found dead in his Roble Lane home in Beverly Hills. The medical examiner finds no alcohol in the actor’s bloodstream, but does find sedatives and other drugs in his system. Did the thirty-six-year-old want to die, or was it an accidental overdose? The death certificate merely states: suicide, undetermined.
Another sign that perhaps the most magical era of Beverly Hills has drawn to a close: Police Chief Anderson retires in 1969 after a forty-year career with the department. It will be a while before the city sees such dedication and longevity again. In the 1970s alone, three chiefs of police come and go, including Joseph Kimble, the first top cop hired after Anderson. Kimble is barely in office before he falls into disfavor with city leaders for making bad decisions, like the time he doesn’t ask for the council’s permission to participate in security operations at the New York rock festival, Woodstock.
Some of those big-name stores on Rodeo Drive are making national news. Tiffany & Co. is hit by five jewel thieves who get away with about $250,000 worth of gems. The culprits are all apprehended, but much of the loot remains unaccounted for.
Over at the swank Giorgio boutique, Louise Lasser, spacey star of the hit TV show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, is arrested on a felony narcotics charge after getting into a fight with store clerks over a purchase. Lasser, a former wife of writer/director Woody Allen, claims somebody gave her the vial of cocaine and that she has absentmindedly thrown it in her bag.
Beverly Hills is no longer a haven for just rich-and-famous Americans. Big changes are occurring half a world away that drastically shift the makeup of the population. The late 1970s mark the beginning of an influx of Iranian immigrants. The Middle-Eastern expatriates are troubled by the state of affairs in their own country where a revolution is taking place, and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi is about to be overturned. When the shah’s sister quietly moves into Beverly Hills and his ailing mother arrives to visit, anti-shah protestors storm the gates of her Calle Vista Drive estate. “These are criminals…living in mansions in Beverly Hills,” says a spokeswoman for the crowd, mostly made up of students, “If they’d stayed in Iran, they would have faced trial.” The furious mob sets several small fires around the manor and shatters windows. Police use tear gas to drive back more than five hundred protestors. The shah’s sister escapes out the back of the home carrying bags reportedly stuffed with cash.
The demographics may be changing, but one thing remains constant: this city of glitz is filled with scandalous stories that can only be found in Beverly Hills.
The Canon and Wilshire Drive intersection in the heart of Beverly Hills.
Debbie Reynolds poses with husband Harry Karl.
The wreck that almost killed Jan of “Jan and Dean”
Jan Berry, on the left, survived the accident.
Anti-Shah demonstrators stop a sheriff’s vehicle while the more peaceful carry signs reading “Shah is a Fascist Butcher.”
Pier Angeli enjoying the moment with husband Vic Damone.
1965
Cinderella Songwriter and Wife Shot By Son • Barricades and Bullets
Three-time Oscar-nominated composer Jerry Livingston was famous for his lighthearted, fun songs like “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo” from the movie Cinderella (1950) and the children’s classic “Mairzy Doats.” One of his earliest hits was “It’s the Talk of Town,” and his family became exactly that when he and his wife were almost killed by their son.
Gary Livingston was still living at home at age twenty-one. He had “mental issues” according to news reports, and his temper could be triggered by the smallest slight. His mother explained to friends that her son was just trying to find his place and purpose in life; not to worry, the family could handle it. Besides, her son was seeing a doctor, and he appeared to be much better. If only a mother’s love could make everything right.
On February 17, 1965, young Livingston had slept in again. It was almost noon. Exasperated, Ruth Livingston asked her husband, “Can you check on him this time?” She was tired of struggling with her son. “He still hasn’t picked up his room.”
“Of course,” said Jerry Livingston. They’d been after their son for weeks to straighten up his mess. The elder Livingston climbed the stairs, knocked on the door, and walked in.
The young man was still in bed. He ignored his dad’s order to get up and clean his room. His dad wouldn’t leave him alone, kept hassling him like a broken record: Gary, do this; Gary, do that; do what we ask, Gary. Sick of his parents’ constant nagging, he’d had enough. He stared at his father then wordlessly turned away. Instead of picking up the clutter, Gary Livingston picked up a pistol that he’d taken from his father’s gun collection and took aim.
“Gary, no!” screamed his dad, but it was too late. He pulled the trigger; this was how he would get his father to shut up. A flash exploded. Hot pain seared through Jerry Livingston’s arm, “Ruth, oh my God, Ruth, he shot me!”
His wife raced up the stairs, unaware she was now in the line of fire. Gary aimed at his mother’s heart and fired. His aim was off.
Shell-shocked, but alive, his parents turned and fled, racing down the stairs, away from their child, out the door. Ruth didn’t make it far; weak and bleeding, she fell by a tree. Her husband ran to the neighbor’s house and called police.
Within minutes, an ambulance arrived. Paramedics pulled Jerry Livingston onto a gurney. Next, they raced over to his wife. Her pure white sweater was stained with a slowly expanding bright red circle of blood. But instead of asking officers to stop her suddenly homicidal son, Ruth Livingston was begging them not to hurt him, “He didn’t mean to do it,” she whimpered.
“Where is he, ma’am?” asked an officer.
“Upstairs,” she hesitated. “His room is upstairs. Please don’t hurt him; he’s not well!”
The shooter barricaded himself on the second floor. More officers arrived and surrounded the house. Two cops cautiously entered the home, calling to him, telling him to come out. Instead, he began shooting again. This time he fired four shots from behind his closed bedroom doors, two blasts from a rifle, two from a shotgun.
Police retreated; time for a new tactic to flush out the kid. They lobbed tear gas canisters through the windows, but those either malfunctioned or missed their mark; the young man stayed put. Hours later, Gary was finally talked out of the home and staggered out the front door, hands over his head. He was escorted into a squad car and taken to the prison ward of the county hospital. His parents chose not to press charges against their son.
Beverly Hills Confidential : A Century of Stars, Scandals and Murders Page 9