A Murder in Hollywood

I don't read a ton of true crime books, but a recent one I recently read and enjoyed is Casey Sherman's A Murder in Hollywood. The core of its story is about the April 4, 1958 killing of small time hood and wannabee Hollywood player Johnny Stompanato by the teenage daughter of Hollywood star Lana Turner. What seemed to have happened is that during a heated argument between her mother and Stompanato, who was her mother's boyfriend, Cheryl entered the room and wound up stabbing Stompanato. The mother and daughter's claim was that Stompanato had sort of moved toward Cheryl after she entered the room and walked directly into the knife, which punctured his stomach. He bled a lot and died at the scene. This was the story Cheryl and her mother told to the authorities, but the actual details of the stabbing were murky and it's quite possible that Lana herself, during the argument, stabbed Stompanato. For years, Stompanato had been abusive toward Turner, assaulting her physically, and on several occasions, when she had tried to sever ties with him, he had threatened to kill both her and her daughter. It's fair to say that through the stabbing he got what he deserved. On the night of the murder itself, Lana called up the brilliant lawyer Jerry Geisler -- a man whose clients over the years included Errol Flynn, Robert Mitchum, Charlie Chaplin, and Bugsy Siegel -- and Geisler definitely helped mother and daughter prepare their stories about what happened. If Lana had been judged the one who killed Stompanato, it most likely would have ended her acting career. Having Cheryl take the blame for the death of a person virtually no one regarded as sympathetic in any way made more sense as a defense strategy. And indeed, in the end, at the cororners inquest, after testimony from both mother and daughter, the ruling came back as justifiable homicide as done by Cheryl. Lana was off the hook. A year later, in 1959, she would appear in Imitation of Life, a huge commercial hit and probably the best movie she was ever in. A Murder in Hollywood quite a tale, among the juiciest of all the Hollywood scandal tales, and Casey Sherman tells it well, with the clarity and economy of a good novel. 

How had a lowlife like Stompanato wound up with Turner in the first place? It has to do with his connection to Los Angeles mobster Mickey Cohen, a man who mingled with Hollywood stars and execs of the time and who knew Turner. One part of this book follows the trajectory of Turner's life up to and through the homicide case, and the other follows Cohen's life, from his beginnings growing up in a Los Angeles Jewish ghetto called Boyle Heights to his rise to the position of power as the top Los Angeles crime kingpin in the late 1940s and the 1950s. His ascension happened after the murder of Bugsy Siegel, who Cohen had worked under. Cohen's story is a fascinating one in and of itself, and there's a reason he's a guy who has shown up in a number of Los Angeles-set films. Harvey Keitel played him in Bugsy, Paul Guilfoyle played him in L.A. Confidential, and Sean Penn played him in Gangster Squad. And needless to say, when you're talking Los Angeles crime in the 1940s and 50s, it's hard not to bring up James Ellroy, and Cohen figures prominently in a few of Ellroy's L.A. Quartet novels (of which L.A. Confidential, of course, is one). When Cheryl was cleared of the murder charges at the inquest, Cohen was irate (he had real affection for Stompanato, a sort of son to him), and Turner for awhile lived with the worry that Cohen would have her killed. Cohen, for one, believed that Turner had stabbed Stompanato, not her daughter.

Hollywood in its Golden Age, underworld people straight out of B movies, sexism, cinematic glamour, toxic greed and masculinity, an ambiguous crime -- there's plenty in this book to keep one reading at a rapid pace, and Sherman blends all the elements skillfully. If this book isn't adapted into a film, I'd be surprised.