Years later, Otash wrote: “Giesler summoned me to the hospital, where he was dying.”
“Don’t ever tell the story of what happened that night at Lana Turner’s home,” the dying man pleaded.
“I promised I would not,” Otash said. “But who has to follow a promise to a dying man once he’s dead?”
***
The coroner’s inquest began at 9AM on Friday, April 11, 1958, in the spacious but sweltering Hall of Records on the 8th Floor of the Courthouse in Beverly Hills. The temperature soared to 88°F at noon. Crowds of onlookers had formed as early as 5:30AM. Of the 160 seats, some 120 of them were occupied by the overheated press corps.
Authorities had ruled that Cheryl did not have to appear in court, but Lana did. At the entrance to the hall, she had to battle her way through a crowd of reporters, photographers, cameramen, and just the idle curious, plus many of her loyal fans. She looked distraught but glamourous in a gray coat and gray silk, tweed-type dress.
She took the stand in the crowded courtroom. As one reporter described it, “A hush fell over the crowd as the famous actress sat down and filled her lungs with a deep, steady intake of air. Photographers, desperate for a better shot, stood up on their seats and even on the large window sills. Almost everyone was standing on their seats.”
Another journalist wrote: “The audience soon grew frozen, the stillness broken only by the click and clatter of the desperately laboring cameramen.”
Lana’s voice came out identifying herself, as if she needed it, in a throaty, halting tone.
She dramatically removed one glove, revealing she’d polished her nails silver instead of her usual blood red. Her hand went up to her forehead, as she was visibly trembling. At times, she looked as if she were going to faint in the almost unbearable heat. She recited testimony—nothing new—that had already appeared in newspapers around the globe.
A week after the death of Johnny Stompanato, Lana was grilled on the witness stand.
Some members of the press claimed that she gave “the greatest Oscar-worthy performance of her career.”
A skilled prosecutor at a trial might have pointed out a lot of inconsistencies in eyewitness accounts of what had happened on the night of the murder, but that didn’t happen.
It was brought out, however, that if Johnny had been stabbed in the stomach, chances were that he would have fallen forward, not onto his back. Lana tried to explain that by the “dance” she alleged that he did before his collapse onto his back.
Finally, since Lana had nothing new to add, she was dismissed after sixty-two minutes on the stand.
Mickey Cohen appeared in court, dressed like a gangster in one of those movies from Warner Brothers in the 1930s. He was chewing gum as he sat down for his questioning. He was asked if he had identified the body in the morgue. He then uttered a shocking statement: “I refuse to identify the body on the grounds that I may be accused of murder.” He was then dismissed.
The autopsy report showed that Johnny had died only minutes after the stabbing. Attempts to revive him had been in vain, and it was made clear that even if an attempt had been made to rush him to any of the hospitals in the neighborhood, he would have arrived DOA.
A tantalizing detail emerged from the autopsy report, which claimed that even if Johnny had not been murdered, he would have died within a few months, as he suffered from an incurable liver ailment.
As Lana’s defender, Jerry Giesler appeared before judge and jury, claiming, “This case is justifiable homicide. There is no justification for a trial.”
When Johnny’s stepmother, Verena Freitag Stompanato, heard that, she later claimed, “There is no such thing as justifiable homicide.”
The jury of ten men and two women took just twenty-five minutes to deliver a verdict of justifiable homicide. Then Judge Allen T. Lynch ruled that the case was closed.
As he did, an unidentified spectator rose from the rear of the courtroom, shouting “Lies! Lies! Lies! This mother and daughter were in love with Stompanato. He was better than the both of them. All you people in Hollywood are no good.” He was seized and led out of the hall by two security guards. On his way out, the spectator shouted back at the judge. “Johnny Stompanato was a real gentleman.”
Cohen had nothing but contempt for the inquest. He told the press, “It’s the strangest case I ever saw. The first time in history where the murdered corpse has been found guilty of his own murder.”
Sitting through the entire inquest was District Attorney William R. McKenson, who had objected to Cheryl going free on bail. Although he had the legal right to prosecute the girl in a separate trial, he chose not to.
The judge also ordered that the teenager undergo psychiatric consultation. He announced there would be a separate hearing in Juvenile Court to determine the fate of the girl. Until that happened, she would be locked away in Juvenile Hall.
A tense Stephen Crane and Lana, parents of Cheryl, appeared in court after the inquest. Up for a ruling: Who would gain custody of their daughter?
Without actually saying so, McKenson left the suggestion that Cheryl might be sent to live with her grandmother, Mildred, or perhaps placed in a decent foster home where she might be reared properly. Looming over those arrangements was the nagging fear that she might be sent to reform school.
***
By the time Lana returned home from the police station, her press agent, Glenn Rose, was handling the traffic and the reporters. “Lana that night was climbing the wall,” he said.
“Why can’t they let me take my baby home?” she asked.
Lana met with Del Armstrong. He realized at once that a strong glass of vodka would not solve the problem. She seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown, so he once again summoned Dr. McDonald to give her a sedative.
Mildred and her hovering presence was also there, sometimes sobbing out her grief, which did little to help ease Lana’s anxiety.
Author Dominick Dunne lived nearby, and he rushed to the scene. He said, “It was a damn circus. Cars were arriving on the scene, disgorging entire families. People were hanging out of the trees like monkeys with binoculars trained on the house. The traffic jam in front of Lana’s house went on for a month or two. Apparently, the public couldn’t get enough of the gory details.”
That night, Sinatra reappeared to offer whatever comfort he could and to express his condolences. Cheryl later praised the singer for lending his support to her mother during her time of crisis, when many members of the film colony were predicting the end of her career.
Too many horrible memories haunted Lana in her rented house on Bedford Drive. Not only that, but crowds of onlookers formed outside to watch anybody coming and going.
Armstrong suggested she move into another furnished house, and he found one that was suitable on Canon Drive, about six blocks away. That address would be kept secret.
As for Cheryl, she said, “At least I missed the gas chamber.”
***
For the most part, the press pillorried Lana, citing her as an unfit mother. But in his column, Walter Winchell defended her. “It seems sadistic to me to subject Lana Turner to any more torment. No punishment that could be imagined could hurt her more that the memory of this nightmarish event. And she is condemned to live with this memory to the end of her days.”
Winchell, however, also ran a comment he’d received from the silent screen vamp Gloria Swanson: “I think it is disgusting that you’re trying to whitewash Lana Turner. She is not even an actress…only a trollop.”
Ava Gardner in London was more charitable. She’d had a fling with Johnny long before Lana. She told the press, “When it comes to men, my friend Lana and I are the world’s lousiest pickers.”
Time magazine was one of Lana’s harshest critics, labeling her as “a wanton woman.”
The Los Angeles Times reported, “Lana Turner has always found the way to heal yesterday’s hurts with tomorrow’s diversions. In the turnover of husbands, wives, lovers, and mistresses
, the Cheryls of Hollywood are the misplaced baggage, lost and found and lost again. In the Turner case, Cheryl isn’t the juvenile delinquent. Lana is!”
The Los Angeles Times ruled Cheryl as blameless: “Lana Turner is a hedonist whose narrative showed the lack of almost any reference to moral sensitivity in the presence of a child. Cheryl isn’t the juvenile delinquent: Lana is!”
Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen was one of many reporters who questioned the claim as to how Johnny got stabbed—that is, just by running into a knife. “The evidence shows that the knife was done with the skill of a trained commando.”
James Robert Parrish, the prolific Hollywood biographer, wrote: “To this day, there are people who insist that on that long-ago evening, it was actually Lana Turner who ended the life of her combative lover.”
***
Johnny Meyer, the right-hand man (read that “pimp”) of Howard Hughes, phoned his boss to report that Johnny Stompanato had been stabbed to death at the home of Lana Turner, and that the blame had been placed on her daughter, Cheryl.
Then, Meyer went on to tell his boss, who was staying in a bungalow on the grounds of the Beverly Hills Hotel, that it had, in reality, been Lana who had murdered Johnny, and that Cheryl had been configured as the fall girl because she’d get a light sentence.
Lana herself phoned Hughes the next day, allegedly confessing that she had stabbed Johnny. In a state of panic, she told him she’d received death threats from the mob and that she needed protection. One caller had threatened to throw sulfuric acid in her face.
Hughes had always liked Lana when they were having an affair, and had even considered marrying her. He agreed to divert some of his security guards to protect her from any mob attack. Meyer later claimed that Hughes spent $50,000 on her security protection.
“I will always be grateful to Howard for coming to my rescue,” Lana said. “For eight months, I lived in fear of reprisal from the mob. He sent his men to fend off any possible attack on me or Cheryl.”
When Hughes learned that Jerry Giesler had suddenly become reluctant to represent Lana because of his pre-existing links to Mickey Cohen, the aviator reminded him that he, Hughes, was a far more valuable client of his than Cohen. “Protect Lana. That’s an order, Giesler. If you don’t, I’ll take my business elsewhere. Need I remind you, you’ve made millions off me.”
Mickey Cohen mourning and/or raging beside the corpse of Johnny Stompanato.
***
In the beginning, Cohen didn’t believe the ruling of the court in the Stompanato murder case.
“I have no proof,” he later wrote in his autobiography, “but I don’t believe that Cheryl killed Johnny Stompanato. You know, Johnny was an athlete. He wasn’t a guy that would go and slug somebody, nothing like that, but if somebody came to challenge him, he could stand up for himself pretty well.”
Cheryl is seen with her grief-stricken parents, Lana and Stephen Crane. Her fate was to be decided by a judge.
“They say he was stabbed while he was standing,” Cohen continued. “But I can’t believe that anybody could. I think he was in bed by himself sleeping. Someone must have broke in and stabbed him. I don’t believe it was Cheryl or Lana.”
Regardless of what his ghost writers put into his memoirs, Cohen put the blame on Lana. His longtime mistress was the voluptuous, blonde-haired, and very outspoken actress, Liz Renay, who once won a Marilyn Monroe lookalike contest.
Liz Renay was the sometimes mistress of Mickey Cohen, and she even went to jail for him for refusing to testify against him.
The Beverly Hills police, in their review of evidence left behind by Johnny Stompanato, revealed that she had been a participant in a blackmail scheme against Lana.
According to Renay, “Mickey told me one night that it was Lana Turner herself—not her daughter—who plunged the knife into Johnny. He was seriously considering having one of his boys toss acid into her beautiful face.”
Furious that “Hollywood likes to protect its own—in this case, Lana Turner—Cohen vowed, “I’ll get even with her. She needs to be humiliated for killing Johnny, unless I decide to have my boys do something more dangerous.”
He also expressed resentment that he’d been stuck with Johnny’s funeral bills. A famous photograph of Cohen viewing Johnny’s corpse in its casket was flashed around the world.
Cohen had an apartment in the same building as Johnny’s. He had been given a key. When he first heard that his henchman had been stabbed to death, he went upstairs and entered the apartment.
What he was looking for was a wooden box that contained pictures of movie stars in compromising positions, always sexual. These photographs were being used for blackmail.
To his horror, he discovered that someone had already broken into the apartment by cutting the screen in Johnny’s bathroom window and climbing in. When he saw that the glass window pane wasn‘t broken, he surmised that Johnny must have left the window open.
There was no wooden box with the blackmail photographs. Obviously, the box and its contents had been removed shortly after Johnny’s death and before the police arrived to search the apartment.
Before exiting, almost as a keepsake, Cohen removed an alligator leather shaving kit he’d presented as a birthday present to Johnny.
It was only later, back in his own apartment, that he discovered that the shaving kit contained “mushy” love letters from Lana to Johnny. The thief had obviously overlooked this stash. He decided to have them published in the newspapers as a means of humiliating Lana.
He did admit that Johnny, on occasion, might have had to get rough with Lana. “My god, the bitch was deballing him, and what would Johnny be without his grapefruit-sized nuts?”
Lana suffered her most acute embarrassment when her gushy love letters to Johnny were reproduced word for word in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and then picked up by other media outlets too. “The letters were a stark reminder of how foolish I was,” she said. “I sound like a lovesick schoolgirl with a crush on the high school football captain.”
“I released the letters because Lana had been intimating that she was fleeing from Johnny’s unwanted advances,” Cohen said. “But the letters show that they were deeply in love.”
The mobster’s biographer, John H. Davis, wrote: “One of Mickey Cohen’s rackets was sexually compromising Hollywood stars for the purpose of blackmail. He had engineered the torrid affair between his accomplice and Lana Turner in the hope of getting pictures of the two of them in bed together.”
A grieving Cheryl Crane said, “At least I missed the gas chamber!”
Davis also claimed, “Others have reported that Cohen was successful in recording a sexual tryst between Stompanato and Turner. Copies of the videotape sold at fifty bucks a pop, and played to the delight of horny Friars Club members on both coasts.”
In the wake of the murder of Bugsy Siegel, Cohen had become Mobster No. 1. There are records of him presenting Johnny with bundles of cash, once $4,000 in twenty-dollar bills, based on their lucrative scheme of blackmailing movie stars, both male and female, who had been secretly photographed having sex with Johnny.
Mickey Cohen’s so-called autobiography was not the most truthful of books. In it, he absolved Lana of the murder.
But privately, he told his associates, “Lana did it. She stabbed Johnny. He was having an affair with Cheryl, and Lana was jealous to see her lover attracted to a young girl—and not to her. It was a plot out of Mildred Pierce.”
He was referring to Joan Crawford’s Oscar-winning performace in which her on-screen daughter, Ann Blyth, steals her husband, Zachory Scott.
He had once bragged, “My penis has been the most photographed in the history of the world.”
“Well, it’s damn photogenic,” Cohen told him.
Columnist Lee Mortimer had exposed the mob’s blackmail ring. Although it officially operated out of Chicago, it was mostly centered in Los Angeles and New York. Cohen handled the illegal operation in Los Angeles.
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The Mob’s blackmailers also went after political figures in Washington. Some congressmen had been paying off blackmailers for years.
Mortimer revealed that “The ring employed gigolos of the Johnny Stompanato type, luscious babes, and homos who entrapped gay celebrities.”
Police chief Anderson said he knew that Johnny, for several years, lived off funds generated from blackmail victims.
Brad Lewis, another Cohen biographer, wrote, “One of Stompanato’s pimping chores was to keep a constant stable of women on hand for Mickey’s out-of-town guests. His supply chain stretched all the way to Las Vegas, where demands for a steady flow of hot flesh ran high at the hotels.”
Lewis also revealed that Johnny, on occasion, was seen in the company of wealthy homosexuals in the film colony. One informant stated that Johnny went with both men or women.
***
Two days before Cheryl’s hearing in Juvenile Court, Carmine Stompanato, Johnny’s older brother, filed a lawsuit against both Lana and Stephen Crane, seeking $752,250 in damages for alleged parental negligence.
Johnny’s brother flew from Illinois to Los Angeles, where on the first day in California, he obtained a trial lawyer and also contacted police chief Anderson. The 45-year-old barber was an elder in the Presbyterian Church in Woodstock, Illinois.
Johnny’s stepmother, Verena Freitag Stompanato, charged that “a cold-blooded murder should be more thoroughly investigated.”
Carmine told the press, “Lana Turner is a liar. She’s trying to save herself, her career, and her daughter. I demand that she take a lie detector test.”
He also told reporters, “Turner phoned her mother, her ex-husband, her press agent, and her lawyer before calling a doctor and the police. Johnny lay dying while all this cover-up was plotted. The police might have arrived with an ambulance, and Johnny’s life could have been saved.”
After Carmine presented his credentials to the police, Chief Anderson allowed him to go to Johnny’s apartment house with two policemen and break in. Pulling up at the Del Capri, police also learned that this was one of the residences of Mickey Cohen.
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