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History’s Juiciest and Intriguing Scandals

Khalid Elhassan January 11, 2021 32 min

Cheryl Crane - Johnny Stompanato — Lana Turner's daughter Cheryl being escorted from jail to juvenile court. Getty Images

29. Scandal Ensued When America’s Famous ‘Good Girl’ Developed a Taste For Bad Boys

By the late 1950s, with her best acting years behind her, Lana Turner had no more… fudges to give about whom she associated or was seen with. In 1958, she hooked up with a new boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato, a mobster with close ties to LA’s leading organized crime figure, Mickey Cohen. On the one hand, Stompanato, a WWII Marine veteran, was a good-looking and charming hunk. On the other hand, he was a violent psychopath who was not above beating the daylight out of Turner, starting with when she first tried to break up with him. It ended with a scandal that shocked even a jaded Hollywood seemingly impervious to scandals.

Lana Turner and Johnny Stompanato at a Hollywood night club. The Daily Beast

During the course of a year, Turner and Stompanato carried on a stormy affair filled with violent arguments, physical abuse, frequent breakups, and just-as-frequent reconciliations. On at least one occasion, Turner claimed, her mobster boyfriend drugged and photographed her in 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.