Author Casey Sherman has long had an interest in Los Angeles noir.
So when his agent sent a magazine article about Lana Turner and Johnny Stompanato, Sherman asked for two weeks to see what else he could find. It didn’t take long for the best-selling author of “Helltown” to begin to see this nearly 56-year-old scandal in a fresh light.
“I feel like Lana Turner has been wrongly categorized, or I would say wrongly remembered, as a femme fatale, kind of a villainess, in Hollywood history,” says Sherman by phone from Rhode Island, where the Boston-based author was at the time of this interview.
“A Murder in Hollywood: The Untold Story of Tinseltown’s Most Shocking Crime,” is ostensibly about the death of Johnny Stompanato, an associate of gangster Mickey Cohen who was in a relationship with Lana Turner. The film star’s 14-year-old daughter, Cheryl Crane, confessed to stabbing him while Stompanato fought with her mother.
Is that what happened? Sherman posits that Turner, not her daughter, killed the gangster, not merely to protect herself, but to protect her mother and daughter.
“It’s the world’s worst-kept secret,” says Sherman, noting that, even in Hollywood, many don’t believe the official story.
In “A Murder in Hollywood,” Sherman lays out a story of domestic abuse and sexual abuse, both of which were pervasive in the film world decades before #MeToo.
“Lana Turner, at 15 years old when she was discovered, lost her innocence right away and was sexualized on screen and forced to really grow up much quicker than she should have,” says Sherman.
Turner was a teenager when she was dubbed a “sweater girl” and often paired with much-older men. Yet, even as she grew up, she was bound by so-called morality clauses in contracts that aimed to control a star’s personal life.
“I marvel at the morality clause that was in Lana’s contract,” says Sherman. “I always speak about how, yes, Lana was married 7 times, but Lana, if she fell in love, couldn’t just have a boyfriend. That was against the rules in her contract. She had to marry the person that she wanted to be with and, ultimately, she would end up trapped in these relationships.”
This included multiple, abusive relationships. In some instances, the abuse extended to Turner’s daughter, who wrote about her own experiences in the 1988 memoir, “Detour: A Hollywood Story.”
Sherman read “Detour” and says that he was surprised that Crane continued to take responsibility for Stompanato’s death. “I think the reason Cheryl did it is because Cheryl wanted to protect her mother,” he surmises. Turner, who died in 1995, could still have been tried for murder had her daughter changed her story.
A longtime investigative journalist, Sherman knew something was amiss when he looked at crime scene photos. For one thing, the space was too clean. “Johnny Stompanato was laid out in Lana’s all pink-white bedroom and there’s not an ounce of blood anywhere in that crime scene,” he says.
Stompanato’s death came via an eight-inch serrated blade. Sherman had previously looked at the crime scenes for similar stabbings. He knew that there should be a lot more blood. Plus, he says, Stompanato’s body didn’t necessarily line up with how a person falls when stabbed. “If you look at how Johnny is laid positionally on the bedroom floor, it looks like something out of a movie,” he notes. “He looks like a stage prop.”
Sherman’s theory is that Turner stabbed Stompanato in his sleep to protect her family and that her lawyer, Jerry Giesler, devised the plan where Crane, who was still a minor, would take the blame. He explains that, if Crane were believed to be the perpetrator, a lawyer could successfully argue that it was a justifiable homicide. Ultimately, that is how the case played out. However, that kind of defense would have been trickier if Turner were charged and, as an adult, she would have been looking at the death penalty.
That theory is plausible because, as Sherman explains, there really weren’t protections for women in abusive relationships at that time.
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“In the 1950s, Lana being the subject of domestic violence couldn’t necessarily go to the police because the police wouldn’t do anything about it. There was no such thing as a restraining order at that time,” he says.
“If she went to the police with these charges, Johnny Stompanato would have of course heard about it and probably would have killed Lana,” Sherman adds, “So Lana had to be very preemptive, I think, in terms of turning the tables on Johnny Stompanato.”
In looking at the scandal through a 21st-century lens, Sherman casts Turner in a new light. While Turner played the role of femme fatale in “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” that’s not who she was, says Sherman.
“When I looked at what she had gone through,” he says, “I decided that this is a feminist icon.”