All True Divas need at least one domestic murder.
Hollywood hairstylist, Eric Root, claimed in 1996, the year after Lana's death at age 74, that she had admitted to him that she'd done the crime she'd long been suspected of: snuffing out her tough-guy lover with a butcher blade, Lana blurting out to Root:
"I killed the son of a bitch, and I would do it again." Root said he urged her to go public with it before her own death so daughter Cheryl's name could be cleared.
The same year, 1996, MGM hairdresser Sydney Guilaroff revealed that
on the morning of Johnny Stompanato's murder, Sydney had run into Turner leaving the Pioneer Hardware store in Beverly Hills, and that he asked the actress what she was doing at the hardware store, she responded: "
We needed a new knife."
The next day, when Guilaroff went to see Lana, she sobbed:
"Did you ever dream this could happen? And with the very knife I bought yesterday." Lana herself conceded in her 1982 memoir that Stompanato was indeed killed with the same knife, but insisted that she and Johnny had gone shopping together for kitchen utensils and several knives (but not the singular knife which Lana, alone, told Guilaroff about the day before the sensational killing.
Her daughter has maintained for 65 years that the public story is true, and that she herself -- and not her movie star mother -- had stabbed Johnny Stompanato to death.
However, when Johnny's ex-wife, Sarah Ibrahaim, filed a wrongful death lawsuit only weeks after the murder (a suit which was ultimately settled out of court four years later for $20,000, an amount far less than was requested but still substantial given that Ibrahaim was no longer married to Johnny at the time he died) Lana's daughter, Cheryl, admitted to the attorney overseeing the civil case, William Jerome Pollack, that
she couldn't even remember stabbing Johnny Stompanato, and that Cheryl
also could not recall providing the written statement read on her behalf during the April 11 inquest.
Tongues have, of course, wagged for two-thirds of a century that Lana Turner murdered her lover on April 4, 1958, either during a violent argument or even premeditatedly (the knife purchase only 36 hours earlier) and that the LAPD and the studios had her guilt neatly covered up, her 14-year old daughter taking the blame but not prosecuted. It became one of Hollywood's most infamous killings -- right up there with the 1921 rape trial of silent comic star Fatty Arbuckle (he was acquitted but his career was ruined, with a little help from Hearst's yellow journalism), the mysterious death of Marilyn Monroe in 1962, the orgiastic slaughters by the Manson Family in 1969, the strange 1981 drowning of Natalie Wood, and the two 1994 murders attributed to OJ Simpson (also acquitted to great controversy) and Stompanato's death remains one of the most famous crimes of the 20th century.
(The 1906 murder of NYC architect Stanford White by Harry Thaw over showgirl Evelyn Nesbit was a biggie, too, but that wasn't in Los Angeles).
Did Lana do it? Has all the scurrilous gossip which has churned for decades have any merit?
She was accused of "acting" during her testimony in court, there was some forensic evidence that Johnny was stabbed while lying in a horizontal position (in contrast to Lana and Cheryl's version that the gruesome event happened just inside the bedroom doorway when all three participants were standing, and many, many folks in Hollywood have always believed that Lana, one of the most glamorous stars in the history of motion pictures, got away with homicide -- perhaps even a premeditated one. Johnny's boss and friend, mobster Mickey Cohen, was convinced his "enforcer" (allegedly a less brutal man than his exaggerated reputation would have it) could never have been so easily killed by a single jab from such a young girl, and Cohen had been convinced that Lana actually stabbed Johnny Stompanato in his sleep.
It should also be noted that the celebrated movie queen was a not-insignificant alcoholic.
But a true diva's career is rarely ruined by a murder scandal -- it's enhanced by it. The dark and sordid drama only solidifying and indeed adding to their mystique... And they know it, too.
No wonder she was perfect for FALCON CREST, where she was potentially the Soapiest Soap Mother of Them All (if it hadn't forgotten about her fictional legacy as the serial eventually lost its way). But it sounds like THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE and PORTRAIT IN BLACK may been
de facto documentaries.
"Not a lady" indeed, Angela Channing.
As of today, Alec Baldwin has yet to be implicated in Stompanato's death. But since Baldwin was born
the day before Johnny's grisly execution, nothing can be entirely ruled out.