If you want to buy a house in Palm Springs, Cheryl Crane is the woman to see -
an elegant blonde, with a large back catalogue of satisfied clients. What
most never discover is that she’s also the daughter of the original
Hollywood “goddess” - that potent sex symbol known as Lana Turner, who
married eight times and came to epitomise MGM glamour.
Certainly, few will know that this Californian estate agent was once
responsible for the kind of gigantic headlines normally reserved for wars or
natural disasters. For the first time, it was said, the Hollywood studios
had been unable to massage a story or make it disappear. It was simply too
sensational: at 14, Cheryl had killed her mother’s lover.
When she looks back on the stabbing now, she tells me: “I’m looking at someone
else; it’s like watching a movie of myself.” The 1958 incident features
briefly in a sumptuously illustrated book she’s just written about her
mother - Lana: the Memories, the Myths, the Movies (£19.99, Running Press).
But, even now, 50 years later, there is a tangible sadness to her as she
recalls her childhood.
As an only child, she’d been pampered and protected to an extraordinary
degree: given lavish presents, dressed like a doll in clothes that matched
her mother’s, forbidden playmates and left with a series of nannies while
her mother made films or went on yet another honeymoon (one of them lasted
18 months). Crane remembers almost worshipping the tiny, exquisite beauty to
whom nothing mattered more than searching for the perfect love and always
looking good.
“As a child, I was in awe of her, particularly when she was done up for a
scene. She was like one of my dolls - the ones you were allowed to look at
but not play with. I can remember being taught not to mess with her hair and
make-up.”
Although Crane has always loved her mother, it’s taken her years to realise
how helpless Turner must have felt as she spiralled from one disastrous
relationship to the next. A whole section of the book is devoted to the men
whom Crane calls “Lanamours” - including the actor Tyrone Power, the
bandleader Artie Shaw (Turner’s first husband), Frank Sinatra, and the
billionaire Howard Hughes.
“I always felt I was much less naive than my mother,” says Crane, whose
father, Stephen Crane, was husband two and three (the couple had to remarry
after discovering they had gone through the first ceremony before his
divorce had been finalised). “My mother was naive, I think, until the day
she passed away [in 1995]. She was not cautious. She loved to have fun - and
men adored her.”
Perhaps the most stark contrast between mother and daughter is that Crane
adores women: she knew she was gay from the age of six, she says, and has
had the same lover - a former model called Josh LeRoy - for the past 38
years. Certainly, her experience of men was rarely pleasant. Turner’s fourth
husband, the tinplate heir Bob Topping, once threw Crane’s poodle across a
room in a drunken rage. But the worst stepfather was husband number five, an
actor called Lex Barker, best known for playing Tarzan.
When Crane was 10, Barker started sexually abusing her. “Nobody knew about it
- he told me that if I said anything, I’d be sent away.” But, by the age of
12, she was starting to doubt Barker’s threat. “I told my governess first.
In those days . . . not only did you not want to discuss it with your
family, but my own family would have been terrified it might get in the
press. So it was extremely difficult to tell my mother, and I don’t think
she believed me until she took me to the doctor.”
The doctor was asked to check that the child had lost her virginity. She had;
and Turner quickly dispatched Barker. Afterwards, says Crane, her mother
seemed to feel threatened by her. When Turner started seeing another man,
she accused her daughter of flirting with him. “I did try and tell her that
[I was gay], but I don’t think she believed me.”
Her star no longer in the ascendant, Turner was by now dogged with feelings of
worthlessness - and an awareness that her daughter was becoming beautiful.
“We tried hard to get along,” says Crane, “but she wanted to keep me young
and childlike and I couldn’t wait to grow up. We were a constant tug-of-war.”
Then Turner began seeing a gangster called Johnny Stompanato, who enjoyed the
kudos of having a movie star girlfriend on his arm but suffered from jealous
rages. He once tried to smother Turner with a pillow and frequently
threatened to disfigure her.
“She loved him. I can’t explain it,” says Crane. “When he beat her up in
England, Scotland Yard removed him from the country, but he followed her to
Acapulco, where she went next.”
However, after a particularly bad beating that left her face bruised, Turner
told her daughter she was going to end the relationship. On the night of
April 4, 1958, she retreated to her bedroom with Stompanato. Crane was
downstairs in the kitchen. “It was a moment of terror - to hear those
voices, that yelling, the threatening of her, me, my grandmother. My mother
couldn’t take control of the situation.”
Crane momentarily looks wistful. After all, if her mother had managed to take
control, she wouldn’t have felt the need to do anything herself. As it was,
the terrified teenager grabbed a knife and rushed to her mother’s door - in
time to hear Stompanato threatening to destroy Turner’s face. When her
mother suddenly threw the door open, he was immediately behind her, his arm
raised as if to strike. Crane took a step forward and stuck the knife into
his chest. He died almost instantly.
She hadn’t been able to control the abuse from her stepfather - was that sense
of powerlessness behind her need to take control? “Yes,” she says. There’s a
long, sad pause. Had the abuse made her emotionally disconnected? “I don’t
really know. It could have been all that - the lack of control, the feeling
of helplessness - though I wasn’t thinking that at the time. It’s not
something I find easy to dwell on; it’s painful. My life has gone on so much
further . . . yet that is always there.”
The police locked her up that night. “People who have tremendous misfortune
don’t go through anything like that night alone in the cell,” she says.
“It’s a memory so crystal-clear in my head. I’d never slept in my clothes
before. I kept replaying what had happened; it was a nightmare that never
seemed to end. I was held overnight, then sent to juvenile hall. It was
unlike anything I’d experienced, with kids unlike any I’d met.”
Turner turned up to the coroner’s inquest in a grey suit and a new, mannish
haircut, as if she’d been brutalised. Some considered her testimony the
performance of her life. The verdict was justifiable homicide, and Crane was
released into the custody of her grandmother.
A wild period followed, during which Crane took drugs, attempted suicide and
spent several months in reform school. Did she grow closer to her mother
after saving her face, if not her life? “No: what was happening in our lives
was pulling us apart.”
Turner’s career underwent a late resurgence with the movie Imitation of Life,
in which she played the mother of a teenage daughter. But her real daughter
moved to San Fran-cisco, then Hawaii. Towards the end of Turner’s life,
though, Crane had a change of heart and moved to Los Angeles to be with her.
As we are talking, Crane’s lover Josh comes into the room to ask if she needs
anything. At the time they met, Josh was Marlon Brando’s girlfriend.
“They were under a pool table at a party, talking - a common thing for him,”
says Crane. “He’d often go into closets or under things. She grabbed my
ankle and that was it.” Their life together is a world away from Turner’s:
they cook, bake, love being home-bodies. Josh was the first person to whom
Crane was able to talk about the killing.
Her mother, whose own life had been mapped by popping flashbulbs, was worried
about her daughter being openly gay. “It’s something I’ve never hidden,”
says Crane, “but she was still fearing publicity, fearing what the fans
would think.” Privately, though, Turner used to boast about her daughter’s
happy union, and she and Josh grew to love each other.
Finally, the differences between mother and daughter melted away, and Crane
looked after her until she died. The book is a celebration of her mother’s
extreme beauty, but, in a touching way, it’s also a deliberate act of
forgiveness.
“When I think of her,” says Crane, “she is always laughing.”
