My Date With Lana Turner

Celebrity is a glamorized yet misunderstood topic in today's society. We have fallen in love with the idea that our actors, our pop-stars, our supermodels are the ones that count and before Brittany, before Anna Nicole, pre Paris Hilton there was no real scandal. Ours are the best - and the worst. Let's put that idea to rest once and for all. Stars and their smoking scenes have been with us since the dawn of mass media.
The following short story is a fiction, but it is based entirely in fact. The character of Jim Bacon was a real person, as are all of the players. It is only in the way that I tell it that it veers from reality.
MY DATE WITH LANA TURNER
It must have been fate. For the last four months I had been trying to get an interview with Lana Turner, one of the last of the big studio stars, to no avail. Suddenly on the police scanner there were rumblings of something big happening at her newly rented home on Bedford Dr. I recognized the address right away, I had been granted an interview the week before at the residence only to have it cancelled last minute.
I thought about those previous cancellations as I turned the car around and rumbled down Fountain. My editor had asked me to get the dope on a Johnny Stompanato way back in January. He'd been seen in the company of Miss Turner and seemed to be her new playmate. She had had many such playmates in the last few years, almost as many as she'd had movies in her twenty two years as a movie star. I thought that it was only fair that we hear her side of the story and my editor agreed. L.A. Times readers deserved fair, unbiased reporting in their smut. Unfortunately, my first interview appointment was dashed a week after it was made. Apparently she had forgot about the little trip to Acapulco she had planned...
The radio kept sputtering as I whipped up Bedford. I couldn't tell what the emergency was but I knew it was hot.
By the time she got back at the end of February Lana Turner was looking rough. I know, I met the plane at the airport, hoping to schedule another interview. I knew a lot about Mr. Stompanato by then, his shady dealings back east to his quick rise as a Mickey Cohen stooge and mob bag-man. Not to mention his dalliances with many rich older women including Janet Leigh and Ava Gardner. There was the whiff of blackmail about him, but nothing conclusive. I was curious. Of course so was every other reporter in Hollywood, especially, as it turns out, because she'd just been nominated for an Oscar for Peyton Place. So, try as I might to reach her as she stepped on the crowded tarmac, fourteen year old daughter in tow, she reached the limo before I ever had a chance. Johnny S. was there to welcome her home.
I tried to make contact by phone- even a phone interview would have made me happy at this point- but her secretary told me off after the fifth call, "Miss Turner is not granting interviews until after the awards ceremony!" I could imagine her working at excess pounds and the pull of gravity in time for the show. She did a hell of a job because it was a different woman who faced the Academy on March 24th. Much different than the alcohol bloated, red, puffy faced creature getting off the airplane. Though she lost to Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces Of Eve, Lanita, (as her friends call her) was in good spirits and looked swell when I caught up to her after the show.
"So this is the man who's been hounding me for months for an interview! Cheryl, meet Jim Bacon from the Times," Lanita smiled at me, then giggled. She'd been at the champagne. I held my hand out to Lana's daughter, beautiful in her dark green evening gown, but she just sighed and looked away. "I'll tell you what, we'll get together next week at my new house. I'll give you the ten cent tour and your little interview."
That had been cancelled as well and now I was parked across the street from the rambling two story, trying to figure out how I was going to get past the cops. There were lots of them and they swarmed the yard with a confused purposelessness that gave me an idea. I wasn't sure what was going on either but I knew I'd hit it big. When I reached the door, I bustled my way in. "Coroners office, where's the body?", I mumbled. "Upstairs.", a bewildered cop answered. As I worked my way upstairs, I wondered just who's body I was going to find.
The master bedroom was filled with people and as I entered I heard Lana Turner's throaty voice pleading, "Can't I take the blame for this terrible thing?" She was standing over the body of John Stompanato, talking to Beverly Hills Police Chief Clifton Anderson. I watched him shaking his head as I stood in the corner taking inventory of the rest of the guests. Lana's mother, a doctor, and a few cops all stood around the corpse which lay on the floor in such a peaceful repose I would have sworn he was sleeping if not for the knife sticking out of his chest. Cheryl Crane was sitting off to one side, a look of shocked astonishment on her face. Just then Stephen Crane, her father, came rushing in and dropped to his knees beside her. Before he could even ask she looked at him distantly and said, " I did it, Daddy, I didn't mean to. He was going to hurt Mommy." She seemed a million miles away.
"Oh baby," he sighed and stood up to join the adults discussing their next move. As they still hadn't noticed me I walked over to Cheryl and put my hand on her shoulder to comfort her. "What happened?", I whispered. "Don't touch me.", she growled. As I snatched my hand away her eyes narrowed as she said in explanation," I don't like... men." She spoke the word with a contempt usually reserved for snakes and grubs. Behind her sweet, girl next door beauty there swelled a fury, a blinding, white hot rage alien in most fourteen year old girls. Just then Chief Anderson noticed me and it was all over, just like the blood on the carpet.
"How the hell did you get in here, Bacon?" As he shuffled me out I asked him, "Where's Lex?", Hollywood's latest Tarzan and Lana's latest ex-husband. "He's in Italy working with some dago named Fellini, not that it matters. You're going to keep a lid on this until we release a statement, right Jim?"
" As long as I got first crack, no problem." And that's how we left it. I was left with the scoop of my life, Lana Turner was left with the role of her life at the murder inquest, tearful mother and abused woman, and Johnny Stompanato was left in a coffin. Cheryl Crane spent a few nights in juvie before the death was ruled justifiable homicide and she was released to her grandmother's custody. Years later she wrote her autobiography and I got a few answers to her puzzle. Seems that when Mom was married to Lex Barker he took advantage of the situation by raping his ten year old stepdaughter on a regular basis until the marriage ended three years later. So when Lanita started seeing Johhny, to Cheryl, it must have seemed like a bad rerun. The verbal sparring soon turned to fistfights and ended in beatings. When she heard the fight brewing in her mom's room and upon opening the door, saw Johnny with his fist raised, she had no idea he was merely hoisting his garments on a hanger over his shoulder and proceeded to sink the nine inch carving knife deep into his chest, puncturing a kidney before slicing the aorta.
The real culprit of the story, Lex Barker, returned to the U.S. after completing his little movie La Dolce Vita, where he dropped dead of a heart attack on a New York sidewalk.
Ahh, the sweet life. DURANGO© 2008