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For months the Hollywood glamour queen had been beaten, abused and threatened by her mobster boyfriend and now he appeared to have forced himself on her little girl.
In a rage the blonde bombshell grabbed a knife she had bought days earlier to protect herself and fatally stabbed Johnny Stompanato in the stomach.
That’s the astonishing scenario laid out in a new book that makes a murderer out of the star of Ziegfeld Girl, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Peyton Place.
It’s in stark contrast with the official version given 59 years ago after the Los Angeles coroner concluded that Turner’s daughter Cheryl Crane had accidentally stabbed Stompanato to death after hearing him argue with her mother, and grabbed a knife from the kitchen.
“He ran into the knife,” Cheryl claimed in 1958. But Hollywood biographers Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince, in their new book Lana Turner: Hearts & Diamonds Take All, uncover an alternative version of events that the screen goddess confided to her loved ones.
“I discovered Cheryl and Johnny in bed together,” Turner told friend and former lover Frank Sinatra, who arrived at the scene before police were even called.
“They were both sleeping but it was obvious what he’d done to her. I went berserk. I grabbed the knife and plunged it into Johnny’s stomach.”
Hollywood private investigator and cover-up specialist Fred Otash was called in, claiming that he disposed of bloody bedsheets, wiped Turner’s fingerprints off the murder weapon and moved the corpse on to the floor as Turner wept.
Otash recalled: “She was screaming hysterically: ‘My career! What’s going to happen to my career?’” Turner’s lawyer warned that Lana faced prison but Cheryl could get off with a short detention if she confessed, the book claims.
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The coroner’s inquest declared the death a justifiable homicide and the case was closed.
But this new biography exposes Lana Turner as not only a killer but also a deeply troubled star.
“She was a sexually voracious and insecure woman looking for love in all the wrong places, including seven failed marriages,” says author Darwin Porter.
“She seduced more stars than anyone in Hollywood but she was looking for more than sex. She was looking for love but never truly found it.”
Her conquests included a Who’s Who of Hollywood’s leading men: Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, James Dean, Steve McQueen, Richard Burton, Victor Mature and Sean Connery. “So many men, so little time,” lamented Turner.
“I was impulsive when it came to men. I could fall in love for just one night.”
She called Victor Mature “my biggest thrill”. And Ronald Reagan was a clean-freak: “He showered before and after our encounters,” she confided.
Clark Gable was nothing special in bed but she told friends: “That’s missing the point. Studs are a dime a dozen in Hollywood but there’s only one Clark Gable.”
After a fling with John F Kennedy, Turner confessed: “The sex isn’t all that great”, but she liked his personality
Discovered by a Hollywood executive in a Tinseltown drugstore, at 16 she seduced Errol Flynn, unaware that behind the two-way mirror in his bedroom his friend David Niven watched their trysts.
Cast opposite MGM’s biggest child star Mickey Rooney at 17, they became lovers. “Lana was as oversexed as I was,” said Rooney, notorious for his own raging libido.
When she fell pregnant, Turner had an abortion – the first of many – without telling Rooney.
“Had she done so I might have insisted she have our kid,” he said. Turner hoped to star in Gone With The Wind but her screen test for Scarlett O’Hara was a flop.
Director George Cukor hated her “horribly fake southern accent” and Vivien Leigh went on to fame. Turner was also 17 when she co-starred with Gary Cooper but he rejected her advances, telling her to call him when she turned 18 – she did.
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“Gary Cooper was everything that John Wayne wasn’t,” she said.
“He was all male!” In 1940 Turner wed bandleader Artie Shaw but had numerous affairs. Discovering she was pregnant after four months of marriage Shaw raged: “Who’s the father?”
Turner ended the pregnancy and the marriage. During the Second World War she put a smile on the face of many GIs heading off to fight.
Turner even received unlikely fan mail from Hitler’s lover Eva Braun, explaining that if the Nazis won she would ask the Führer “to spare your life because of how much your films have meant to me”.
But it was Turner’s affair with Clark Gable that made his wife, actress Claudette Colbert, desperately race back to her husband’s side after a tour selling war bonds, only to die when her plane crashed into mountains near Las Vegas.
Turner’s second husband Stephen Crane, whom she married twice, turned out to be the kept plaything of mobster Bugsy Siegel’s moll Virginia Hill, who refused to give him up.
“I finance the gigolo with money I get from Bugsy,” Hill told Turner.
“I even paid for his plastic surgery.”
Not long after the marriage ended she turned her attention to actor Tyrone Power, whom Turner described as “the love of my life”, telling friends: “He is the first man who makes me really happy.”
But she never got him to the altar and remained unlucky in love, her marriages destroyed by her infidelities.
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In 1951, after a miscarriage and filing for divorce from her third husband, millionaire Henry Topping, Turner slashed her wrist with a razor and took a bottle of sleeping pills.
“There was nothing else left for me to do,” she said. Recovering, Turner found comfort in close friend Judy Garland, also a suicide survivor.
“We promised to keep each other from killing ourselves,” said Turner. Her next marriage, to Hollywood Tarzan star Lex Barker, didn’t fare any better. Daughter Cheryl was only 11 when she was repeatedly raped by Barker, the book claims.
When Turner found out she held a gun to Barker’s head. “I wanted that perverted brain of his to explode,” she said.
Finally controlling herself she gave him 20 minutes to leave. She went on to have three more short marriages before her death in 1995 at the age of 74 but it was her fl ing with mobster and blackmailer Johnny Stompanato that Turner called “the worst mistake of my life”.
When she tried to end their romance he beat her, held a knife to her face and warned: “I’ll cut you up… You’ll never work in this town again.”
He threatened to kill Turner’s daughter and mother if she left him.
Though Cheryl confessed to Stompanato’s killing, Turner told friends a very different story, the book reveals.
“She was the last love goddess of Hollywood’s golden age,” says Porter.
“She chased the Hollywood dream of a happy ending but it eluded her.”
To pre-order Lana Turner: Hearts & Diamonds Take All, by Darwin Porter & Danforth Prince (published May 24 by Blood Moon Productions, £24.99) call the Express Bookshop with your card details on 01872 562310.
Or send a cheque/PO payable to The Express Bookshop to Lana Turner Offer, PO Box 200, Falmouth TR11 4WJ or visit expressbookshop.co.uk. UK delivery is free.
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