It’s part of Hollywood folklore: a beautiful young woman discovered sipping a soft drink at a malt shop in Los Angeles, signed to a Hollywood movie contract just days later.
That woman was Lana Turner, one of the biggest stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age, whose string of movies with MGM studios in the 1940s and 1950s netted the studio more than $50 million. But while Turner’s film career continued to grow—culminating in an Oscar nomination for Peyton Place in 1957—her personal life soured, and in the strait-laced 1950s, this raised more than a few eyebrows.
In all, she married eight times—twice to B-movie star Steve Crane, with whom she had her daughter, Cheryl, in 1943. Of all her relationships, however, it was the collapse of her marriage to her fourth husband, Lex Barker that signaled the start of a particularly grim chapter not just in Turner’s life, but in Hollywood history.
After Barker and Tuner separated in 1957, Turner started a relationship with Johnny Stompanato, a renowned LA hoodlum known for his underworld connections to the gangster Mickey Cohen. Their romance was torrid and passionate but immensely unhappy. The couple would fight constantly, with Stompanato often threatening Turner with violence. Finally, enough was enough. During a particularly vicious fight at Turner’s Bel Air home—during which Stompanato threatened to disfigure Turner, ruining her movie career—14-year-old Cheryl decided to matter into her own hands. Leaping to her mother’s defense, she stabbed Stompanato in the gut with an eight-inch kitchen knife, leaving him fatally wounded.
Understandably, the murder caused a sensation.
A coroner’s report recorded a verdict of justifiable homicide, as Cheryl’s actions were seen to be in defense of her mother. As an outcome of the case, however, Cheryl was sent to live with her grandmother, while Turner rebuilt her life by throwing herself into her career. Just one year later, she scored one of the biggest box office successes of her career with a lead role in 1959’s Imitation of Life. In Hollywood, it seems, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.