Lana Turner

by Darwin Porter

  The role of Lana’s daughter, Allison MacKenzie, was debated as a vehicle for Joanne Woodward. Lana objected vehemently, claiming that Woodward was far too old for the part, having been born in 1930.

  Other possibilities that were under discussion for the daughter role included Elizabeth Montgomery, Julie Harris, Susan Strasberg, Eva Marie Saint, and Natalie Wood. The part eventually went to the relatively unknown Diane Varsi.

  Making her film debut in Peyton Place, Varsi, born near San Francisco, was considered “an oddball” even in high school. She’d dropped out of school at the age of fifteen, suffering from boredom. Shortly thereafter, she married an 18-year old, but the union was annulled.

  Cast in the sympathetic role of Miss Thornton, veteran actress Mildred Dunnock gave her usual stellar performance. On Broadway, she’d been the first Mrs. Loman in Death of a Salesman.

  Before joining the cast of Peyton Place, she had delivered a stunning performance in the 1956 film version of Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll.

  She’d wanted to be a ballet dancer before switching her ambition to that of a folk singer.

  Soon after hitchhiking to Los Angeles, she was discovered by producer Buddy Adler, who put her under contract to Fox, who decided to showcase her in Peyton Place.

  After working with Lana, Varsi was involved in only a handful of other film roles, including Compulsion (1959), before suffering a nervous breakdown. By the spring of 1959, she’d bolted from Hollywood, claiming, “I’m running away from destruction.”

  During filming, she told Lana, “Unlike you, I’d rather meet Aldous Huxley, not Clark Gable.”

  Selena’s boyfriend, Ted Carter, was played by David Nelson, the son of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, whose younger brother was the famous singer, Ricky Nelson.

  David would go on to become a producer and director, too.

  “I know Gable very well,” Lana answered. “But who is this Huxley actor?”

  The key role of Dr. Matthew Swain was played by veteran actor Lloyd Nolan. He was mostly a B-movie star, though he did appear with such actresses as Dorothy McGuire, even Mae West. He was always steady, always reliable.

  The role of the rapist and town sleaze-ball, Lucas, went to Arthur Kennedy, always brilliant on both the stage and screen. On Broadway, he’d been part of the original cast of Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman.

  Rodney’s romance with Terry Moore is forbidden by his stern father, Leslie Harrington (played by Leon Ames). The owner of the local woolen mill, he is the town’s biggest employer.

  Lana shared a reunion with Ames, who had played the district attorney hot on her trail in The Postman Always Rings Twice.

  As one reviewer of Peyton Place noted, “It may be a long, long time before Hollywood gets another supporting cast of such talent and magnitude. Virtually every actor, based either on past performances or possible future roles, has star potential, even the character actors.”

  ***

  In 1957, Peyton Place became the second highest-grossing film of the year, earning $26 million in the United States alone. When it first opened, box office receipts were somewhat average, but after the Lana Turner/Johnny Stompanato murder flared into headlines, long lines assembled at box offices around the country.

  Ironically, although Lana feared that the murder of her gangster lover would destroy her standing as a movie star, it produced the opposite effect: It revitalized her career.

  Grace Metalious saw the movie and phoned director Mark Robson. “I hated the fucking thing. You’ve botched up all my characters.”

  Months later, he told her that even though she despised Peyton Place, the film, he hoped that she would accept a $400,000 check for royalties.

  Critical reaction was mixed, the Chicago Times hailing it as “one of the best films ever made.” A critic in Baltimore wrote, “Lana Turner was nominated for an Oscar, although she resembles a department store mannequin that has somehow wandered away from the window.”

  Variety claimed that “in leaning backward not to offend, scriptwriter John Michael Hayes has gone acrobatic. He underplays the dirty sex secrets of the little town depicted in the Metalious novel. In the film, these characters are not the gossipy, spiteful, immoral people she portrayed. There are hints of their hypocrisy, but only hints.”

  Even Lana’s harshest critic, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, wrote, “Lana Turner did the role remarkably well.” In The Saturday Review, Stanley Kauffman said, “Lana Turner, given a role of some depth, proves that she can be as persuasive as some of the Method-dedicated girls flocking into the movies these days.”

  When Lana saw this publicity still, she quipped: “Lee Philips got no more intimate with me than this when we shot Peyton Place.”

  The National Board of Review cited Peyton Place as “an example of a fine motion picture that can be made out of a cheap and dirty book.”

  Wanda Bale in the New York Daily News claimed, “Putting Peyton Place on the screen was a gigantic undertaking. And from it, Fox has made a picture that is better than the book. It is less shocking, although it is as candid as a French drama, as unreserved as Italian neo-realism. Grace Metalious couldn’t ask for a better cast to bring her characters to life.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Who Killed Johnny Stompanato?

  Lana Turner Fears Reprisals from the Mob: Acid Thrown in Her Face, or a Bullet.

  The shocking murder of Johnny Stompanato made frontpage news across the nation, with bulletins issued frequently on radio. In Hollywood, the rumor mill began grinding out an alternate claim to the official version, and that was that Lana had plunged the knife into Johnny’s stomach and allowed her daughter to take the fall.

  Lana obviously knew that if she were exposed as the guilty party, it would mean not only the end of her movie career, but perhaps a lifetime in prison.

  Cheryl, or so Lana’s attorney, Jerry Giesler, had told her, would get off with only a few months in reform school, if that. Again, he pressed the case that a judge and jury would probably rule it as “justifiable homicide.”

  As Lana wrote, in her memoirs, about the most notorious event in her life, “It all started with flowers and an innocent invitation for a drink, and it was to end in screaming headlines, in tragedy, and in death.”

  Lana confessed, “Johnny’s consuming passion for me was strangely exciting. Call it forbidden fruit. My attraction to him was very deep—maybe it was something sick within me.”

  Months later, when columnist Lee Mortimer learned about Stompanato’s break-in of Lana’s apartment, he called it “asphyxiation sex.”

  “Lana was hot for the bastard,” Frank Sinatra said. “I hated the shithead. He was selling his dick to the highest bidder, male or female.”

  In April of 1957, Lana, newly released from MGM, was working at Universal International. She was starring in The Lady Takes a Flyer with Jeff Chandler, with whom she was having a fling.

  At the studio, she began to receive phone calls from a stranger, who identified himself as “John Steele.” At first, she ignored the calls, refusing to come to the phone. She wrote him off as “another god damn stalker—I’ve had plenty of them, but this one is more persistent than most.”

  The calls came in frequently to her dressing room, whose number he had obviously obtained from someone. Flowers, enough for a funeral, arrived daily, along with his card and private phone number.

  He appeared to know someone familiar with her, as he sent yellow roses, her favorite, not red ones. He also sent the most expensive boxes of chocolates in Beverly Hills, which she fed to the crew working on her picture, since she did not want to gain weight. As the calls increased, and as the flowers became annoying and overwhelming, more costly gifts arrived, beginning with a diamond bracelet.

  Even sets of records were delivered. He knew that Tony Martin and Frank Sinatra, both of them former beaux, were her favorite singers.

  Finally, she decided to come to the phone and speak to him. She liked the sound of his stro
ng, virile voice. As a way of introduction, he told her that he was a friend of Ava Gardner, who often spoke lovingly of her. Gardner was in London at the time, and Lana made no attempt to confirm his connection with her.

  “I’ve also dated Janet Leigh,” he claimed. “She told me that you and she became friends at MGM.”

  That, of course, was true.

  He invited her for dinner, but she turned down the offer, claiming, “I’m too busy.”

  Actually, in the wake of her divorce from Lex Barker, she was experiencing many lonely nights. There was no one man in all of Hollywood that she wanted to date. “Most of my lovers are getting gray at the temples and have found other mates,” she complained.

  One night, when Lana worked late at the studio, she got into her “Baby Whale,” the nickname for her steel-gray Cadillac. She drove to the apartment house, where she was living temporarily. During that unsettling period of her life, she seemed to be constantly changing addresses.

  There was space in front of her apartment house, and she parked Baby Whale there. She could not help but notice a black Lincoln Continental parked across the street. A red glow of a cigarette signaled to her that the driver was behind the wheel, perhaps that of her stalker, John Steele. She didn’t know for sure, but at least his name flashed in her mind.

  She hurried into the elevator and quickly got off on her floor and went inside, where her Mexican maid, Armida, was waiting, telling her that her dinner was in the oven and ready.

  Fifteen minutes later, Armida announced that a Mr. Steele was standing outside her door, wanting to see her.

  Out of curiosity, perhaps with the thrill of danger, she told Armida to let him enter her living room.

  She didn’t know what to expect coming face-to-face with this man of mystery, who seemed rather rich, to judge by that diamond bracelet, the endless flowers, and the lavish gifts, including the most expensive of French perfumes.

  While working as a bouncer in one of gangster Mickey Cohen’s bars, Johnny Stompanato (left) met the mobster himself. The two men almost immediately struck up a friendship, a very unusual move on Johnny’s part.

  He was subsequently hired as one of Cohen’s bodyguards at $300 a week, although Cohen later admitted that his job was more akin to that of a pimp. “He could attract the babes, and I needed plenty of gorgeous gals in my enterprise to entertain my clients.”

  Before entering her living room to greet him, she spent at least ten minutes before her vanity mirror, working on her makeup, which had faded by this hour in the early evening. She also put on a beautiful champagne-colored cocktail dress and high heels before emerging. What greeted her dazzled her a bit. She later described him as “very handsome, very masculine, sexy as hell. He treated me like he was in the presence of the Queen of England. This Mr. Steele was oozing with masculinity, and wore a tailored gray suit with a red silk shirt unbuttoned all the way to the silver buckle of his belt.”

  He had obviously learned how to dress from watching George Raft movies, and was most often described as “cunning and cocksure,” with an emphasis on cock.

  Not wanting to appear overly awed by his striking presence, she chastised him: “You should have called first.”

  “I have called,” he protested. “Day after day, spending my nights alone, dreaming of you. You’re the first person I think of when I go to bed at night, hoping you will visit me in my dreams, which you always do. But a man can’t spend his life dreaming. Will you go to dinner with me tonight?”

  She turned him down, claiming that she had an early call. “Perhaps lunch in my apartment Saturday at one? Now, Mr. Steele, good night.”

  As he walked to the door, he leaned in as if he wanted to kiss her, but she backed away. “Until Saturday, I said.”

  “I’ll bring the food.”

  Arriving exactly at one o’clock, he brought one of her favorite dishes: Vermicelli in white clam sauce from Mario’s, an Italian restaurant she sometimes frequented. How did he know to do that?

  Two hours before he showed up, a diamond bracelet had been delivered. It was fashioned from miniature gold leaves surrounding the sparking stones.

  She greeted him, and after the maid had served him a drink, she protested. “I can’t accept such an expensive gift! You must take it back!”

  “I can’t. I’ve had it engraved.”

  She checked the engraving. “To my beloved Lanita.” She put it on her wrist. “Do you own a money tree?”

  “Just the leaves,” he answered.

  “Never in my life have I had lunch with a man of such charm. He was flirtatious, courtly, treating me like a goddess, hanging on my every word like it was divinely inspired. When I dismissed him at three that afternoon, I promised I’d go out dining and dancing with him.”

  She later confessed to Virginia Grey, “His first sexual come-on was a winner. Since he knew so much about me, he’d found out that I have thing for well-endowed men. He told me he and Oscar shared something in common.”

  “What might that be?” Grey asked. Both of them knew what he was implying.

  Oscar is a foot long. She assumed he was exaggerating, as so many men do. “Every man with six inches often claims it’s at least nine,” Lana said.

  That night, Johnny slept in Lana’s bed.

  During a phone call to Grey, Lana confessed, “John Steele did not exaggerate. He could penetrate as far as Oscar. It was unbelievable. He can satisfy a woman’s deepest desires. I really don’t know much about him, but a man who can thrill a woman like John could be Jack the Ripper, and still a woman would invite him into her boudoir. He’s a walking streak of sex.”

  Word of his endowment had already become legendary. Columnist James Bacon defined him as “The John C. Holmes of his day,” referring to the most famous male porn star in history.

  Despite his flair as a great lover, Lana did not immediately make him her boyfriend. In fact, during the summer of 1957, she seemed to tantalize him, going out with other men, usually former beaux who were between marriages.

  In early September, he told her, “I want to totally possess my little Lanita.”

  She still wasn’t ready to commit, and for the next few days, claimed that she was always too busy to see him. He accused her of “dangling me like a puppet, knowing how much I love you.”

  One night, after she’d turned him down ten times in a row, he climbed up the fire escape of her apartment house and broke into her living room window. She was in bed at the time. A noise must have awakened her, and she rose, seeing this shadowy figure moving toward her.

  Before she could scream, he was on top of her. “With a jump, he was on the bed shoving a pillow over my face. Holding my arms pinned to my side, he straddled me and held my legs tight.” [She wrote that in her memoirs.]

  What she didn’t put in her memoirs was that he raped her. At least it was rape in the beginning, but, as she told Grey, “before a minute or two, my fingernails were digging into his back.”

  ***

  Who was this mysterious John Steele? She didn’t really know.

  He told her that he was forty-two years old, as compared to her thirty-six. She was sensitive about being seen as an older woman dating a younger man. Hollywood was filled with sex-for-pay couplings like that.

  Over the years, the identity of John Steele has been revealed after massive research into his background and the testimony of various people who knew him, many with revelations appearing here for the first time.

  John Steele was a pseudonym. His real name was John (“Johnny”) Stompanato, born into an Italian-American family in Woodstock, Illinois, on October 10, 1925. His father, John Sr., owned a barbershop, and his mother, Carmela, was a seamstress. Both parents were immigrants, but they had met in Brooklyn, fell in love, and married.

  In 1961, they went to Illinois, seeking a better life. It was there that Carmela gave birth to four children, Grace and Teresa and a boy, Carmine. Her final child was John Jr., the youngest. He never knew his mother, who di
ed of peritonitis six days after his birth. A few months later, Johnny had a new stepmother, Verena Freitag.

  During his freshman year at Woodstock High School, Johnny got into trouble. “It was time to get out of Dodge,” as the local police chief said of the boy. He had impregnated two teenaged girls, causing a local scandal.

  His father shipped him off to Kemper Military School for boys in Booneville, Missouri. Ironically, his roommate there was the future movie and TV star, Hugh O’Brian, born Hugh Charles Krampe the same year as Johnny.

  In the 1950s, O’Brian became a household word starring in the hit TV series, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, which ran on ABC from 1955 to 1961. In 1965, O’Brian would co-star with Lana, playing a gigolo in Love Has Many Faces. During that time the two co-stars sustained a torrid affair in Mexico.

  “Johnny was an amazing guy,” O’Brian recalled. “Unfortunately, not all of it was put to use in the right direction. In the gym after playing football, we headed for the communal shower, a dozen showerheads in a row of naked boy ass. Usually, we walked to the showers with a towel around our waists, hanging them up at the door. But Johnny stripped bare-assed naked in the locker room, and he didn’t just walk to the shower, he paraded, shaking that monster dick. We had three or four gay guys in our gym class, and they always followed him with their tongues hanging, taking the showerheads on each side of Johnny. He was the ‘big’ attraction.”

  “He was also the prize stud of school. All the gals were after him. At one point, he seduced the much older school nurse. Older women never turned him off. Maybe because he lost his mother, I don’t know. A lot of girls were attracted to me, too, but John was clearly the chief rooster of the henhouse.”

  After his graduation from military school in 1942, at the age of seventeen, Johnny joined the U.S. Marines the following year. He served in the South Pacific theater, engaging in some of the most horrific warfare as American troops invaded island by island with an aim to attack the Japanese mainland. He saw some of the most horrendous battles in Okinawa.