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“Even to this day when my mother and I refer to the tragedy in conversation, we euphemize it as ‘the paragraph,’ because no press mention of us seems to be complete unless it includes a paragraph about what happened that Good Friday 1958.”
So writes Cheryl Crane, daughter of movie star Lana Turner, in the amazingly frank and compassionate 1988 autobiography Detour: A Hollywood Story. On April 4, 1958, 14-year-old Crane killed Johnny Stompanato, her mother’s abusive boyfriend, who had ties to the gangster Mickey Cohen. The story became a media sensation. YetCrane’s chronicle of her life as Hollywood princess turned exploited killer is about more than “the paragraph;” it’s filled with so much searing honesty and graceful forgiveness that it almost boggles the mind. (Crane is an accomplished author: she also co-wrote the celebratory coffee table book LANA: The Memories, the Myth, the Movies in 2008).
While Crane paints Turner, the glamorous star of films including Ziegfeld Girl, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Imitation of Life, in an often-unflattering light, her tone doesn’t emulate the bitter memoirs of other stars’ children. “Mother was never intentionally cruel to anyone,” she writes, “though sometimes it may have seemed to me that she was.”
Lana: The Lady, the Legend, The Truth , Turner’s own highly enjoyable—if carefully curated—1982 autobiography, bears this assertion out. In it, Turner recounts her seven tumultuous marriages, numerous tragic miscarriages, and reckless choices. The actor, who died in 1995, comes across as a fundamentally good-hearted, but woefully gullible romantic, someone who bought into the Hollywood star system hook, line, and sinker. But Crane emerges as the true star, a woman who refused to let “the paragraph” define her life. “It’s been a long, hard journey for her,” Turner writes of Crane, “but she’s made it—made me proud, too, to be her mother.”
The Sweater Girl
Julia Jean Turner was born in Wallace, Idaho, on February 8, 1921. In Lana: The Lady, the Legend, The Truth, Turner bluntly describes her rootless, hardscrabble childhood, speculating that the trauma of the 1930 murder of her charming gambler father, Virgil, may have led to her many obsessive love affairs.
Turner’s mother, hairdresser Mildred, tried valiantly to raise her daughter, but had to leave her with an abusive foster family when money got tight. (Mildred immediately pulled her out when she learned of the abuse—which would become something of a theme in the Turner family—but the damage was already done.) In 1936, the duo took a mud-covered jalopy to Depression-era Los Angeles.
Determined to be seen as ladies, Mildred and her daughter would pour over etiquette books by Emily Post and read Vogue cover to cover. According to Turner, she was discovered sipping a Coke with friends at the Top Hat Café by Billy Wilkerson, the infamous founder of The Hollywood Reporter.
Turner was quickly cast in the 1937 film They Won’t Forget as a sexy murder victim, wiggling down the street suggestively in a tight sweater. The objectification of the role mortified the young teenager, but it caused a sensation. Turner—now rechristened Lana—became a sex symbol overnight.
Seemingly addicted to romantic drama, Turner palled around with the equally voracious Ava Gardner and carried out a stream of high-profile Relationships with the likes of Tyrone Power (her true love), Artie Shaw, Howard Hughes, Frank Sinatra, Victor Mature, Robert Stack, and (allegedly) a married Clark Gable. Brutally honest about some relationships and mum on others she unabashedly discusses her love of partying, which gained her the moniker “the nightclub queen.”
“How I’d love to dress up and go dancing with a handsome dark man,” she writes.
“Ciro’s was a favorite haunt…the headwaiter would spring forward-— ‘Ah, Miss Turner . . .’ and escort me in. I had a special table right by the stairs so I could watch the comings and goings. I’d head straight there, never glancing right or left. And then, when I was seated, I’d give the room a long casing, bowing to this one or blowing that one a kiss. Silly, I guess, but fun.”
Star-baby
It was into this heady atmosphere that Cheryl Crane was born on July 25, 1943. Her father, Stephen Crane, was a magnetic, slightly shady actor and gadabout whose marriage to Turner was already falling apart. To make matters worse, Cheryl was in danger because her blood was incompatible with her mother’s RH factor blood. “My birth was a life and death struggle that swayed in the balance for nearly two months,” Crane writes. “That was me all over.”
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