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Forgotten Details From The Golden Age Of Hollywood

Khalid Elhassan July 10, 2023 29 min

The Golden Age of Hollywood was as posh as posh gets. Filmmaking Lifestyle

A Good Girl With a Taste for Bad Boys

Hollywood - Lana Turner and Johnny Stompanato — Lana Turner and Johnny Stompanato. Wikimedia

By the late 1950s, Lana Turner’s career had passed its peak, and she no longer cared about her public image. In 1958, she hooked up with a new boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato, a mobster with close ties to LA’s key crime boss, Mickey Cohen. On the one hand, Stompanato, a World War II Marine veteran, was a handsome hunk. On the other hand, he was a violent psychopath who did not hesitate to beat the daylights out of Turner, starting with when she first tried to break up with him. It was a toxic relationship that ended with a scandal that shocked even a jaded Hollywood seemingly impervious to scandals.

Throughout the course of a stormy year, Turner and her psycho beau carried on a torrid affair filled with violent arguments, physical abuse, frequent breakups, and just-as-frequent reconciliations. Turner claimed that on at least one occasion, her mobster boyfriend drugged and photographed her naked when she was passed out, in order to have something to blackmail her with. The relationship finally ended when Stompanato was stabbed to death in Turner’s home – not by her, but by her fourteen-year-old daughter.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.