The Bad & the Beautiful

(2 of 3)

Johnny-Come-Lately. Back in Hollywood, Johnny cannily saved the letters. His own notes were fourth-grader's work; many of them, laboriously scratched in copy books, were never sent, e.g.: You know Baby, I'm so lonesome for the touch of you I could die. I try to think back of when you were here and those precious minutes I wasted when my lips were not on yours.

Johnny wasted no time. One day he turned up in London to keep Lana company. But by then, Lana Turner was wearying of Johnny, and Johnny was too tough to let himself be discarded. They fought. Once he nearly strangled her, grabbed a razor and threatened to cut her face. Lana's studio friends heard about it, got Scotland Yard to get Johnny out of the country.

Lana's fear was clear, and it led to Johnny Stompanato's death a month later. When it happened, all Hollywood broke loose. Newspapers all over the U.S. poured on the black ink and the big type, scrambled wildly for the kind of news that would keep the public buying. They found it. Two-fisted Aggie Underwood, 55, city editor of Hearst's Herald-Express (and only woman city editor of a U.S. metropolitan paper), decided that there must have been some love letters. She called Mickey Cohen, who took Johnny Stompanato's death as a personal affront. Cohen's hoods raided Johnny's expensive Los Angeles apartment, found the letters. The Mick turned them over to Aggie. In a few more hours, Lana and Johnny were splashed on the world's front pages for a second performance.

The Showdown. Lana still had one more performance to give. At the Los Angeles Hall of Records, onlookers crowded the corridors to get a glimpse of the drama, ohed and ahed as the principals threaded into the courtroom. Cheryl, detained in juvenile prison, testified by deposition that the last fight between Johnny and her mother arose after Lana learned that Johnny had lied about his age: he was really 32, not 42, as he had said.

Lana, 38. was now determined this time to give him the air.

Taking the stand, in the final scene, Lana told the rest: "He was verbally very violent . . . and I walked into my daughter's room . . . Mr. Stompanato was behind me all the time saying some very bad things ... I said, 'I told you I don't want to argue in front of the baby.' [Back in my bedroom] Mr. Stompanato grabbed my arm, shook me ... said, as he told me before, no matter what I did or how I tried to get away he would never let me. If he said 'jump' I would jump, and if he said 'hop' I would hop ... or he would cut my face or cripple me . . . that he would kill me and my daughter and my mother."

Frightened, Cheryl fled to the kitchen, headed for her mother's room with a knife. "I walked toward the bedroom door," said Lana. "He was right behind me. And I opened it and my daughter came in. I swear it was so fast, I truthfully thought she had hit him in the stomach ... I never saw a blade."