Lana takes secret to the grave

at her home

For Lana to be accused of murder would have cost the studio dear

THE secret that the blonde, svelte, sexy, Lana Turner, who has died in

Los Angeles from throat cancer, took with her to the grave is the answer

to who killed her lover, the gangster Johnny Stompanato. In 1958 her

teenage daughter, Cheryl Crane, was accused of stabbing him with a

kitchen knife to stop him beating up her mother. She was found guilty of

justifiable homicide, and sent to reform school.

Yet exactly what happened that spring night in the Turner mansion when

Cheryl, roused by the sounds of yet another violent row between Lana and

Stompanato, remains unclear. Years later mother and daughter would still

refer to it only as ''the happening'' and Cheryl's book about life as a

film star's daughter, Detour: A Hollywood Tragedy, does not provide much

light.

The studio may have stepped in. Those were the days when stars -- Lana

had just been Oscar nominated for her role in Peyton Place and was still

big box-office -- had to be protected.

There have been suggestions that it was not Cheryl who used the knife.

Stompanato, who had dreams of stardom which refused to come true, was a

strong and violent man. Cheryl was only a 14-year-old. Had she the

strength? Had she the reason? But for Lana to be accused of murder would

have cost the studio dear. All the grounds for a cover-up in the classic

Hollywood manner existed. Now we may never know.

Lana, according to the legend which she fostered, was discovered as a

teenager in classic fashion by a talent scout while she was sipping a

Coke in the Top Hat Cafe on Hollywood's Highland Avenue. She was aged

15, playing truant from school. He asked: ''Do you want to be in

pictures?'' She replied: ''I don't know. You'll have to ask my mother.''

Whatever the truth, it is a good story, which is sometimes set in

Scwab's drugstore. Lana, naturally auburn, duly became the leading

Hollywood blonde of her generation -- peroxide sometimes, platinum at

others. In her public life she was everything a film star should be --

glamorous, immaculately groomed, a divine creature from a world of

unimaginable sophistication which ordinary mortals could only dream of

inhabiting. She once said: ''When I leave home, I'm on.''

The remark sums up the way she was educated by MGM, because it is not

a practice today's casually-clad stars observe, although they too demand

the stretch limousines and the attention. They, however, travel wearing

trainers and faux-Oxfam grunge, while Lana was never seen unless

dripping in diamonds and swathed in furs.

Alas, her private life, which was, to say the least, colourful -- she

was married seven times -- contained some very ordinary mortals indeed.

Lana was a goddess with feet of clay.

The killing -- the Stompanato relationship reflected one of her early

successes, Johnny Eager, made in 1941, in which she had played a society

girl fallen for a gangster -- did Lana's career no harm. As a result of

the notoriety provided by the murder she gained a new lease of stardom

in a series of lush Ross Hunter melodramas -- Imitation of Life, By Love

Possessed, Portrait in Black and Madame X.

They were all tosh, but throughly enjoyable tosh, allowing audiences

to wallow in heightened emotion as Lana, dressed to the nines, suffered

as only a woman no better than she should be, must suffer. There were

always tears before bedtime for the heroine, but they never damaged

Lana's mascara, and nothing was allowed to upset her hairdo, smudge her

lipstick, or cause her to drop a spangle.

The film which probably best sums up Turner's star quality was The Bad

and the Beautiful, made in 1952, in which she played a Hollywood star

who owed her career to a thrusting, unscrupulous producer played by Kirk

Douglas. It was billed as ''The story of a blonde who wanted to go

places, and a brute who got her there -- the hard way.''

She gave one of her better performances, the sheer terror which must

infect a star, forever jealous of the need to protect her stardom,

coming across. Never much of an actress, she was always at her best when

the roles reflected the real Lana. Judging by the picture her daughter

gave, she was a vulnerable, fun-loving woman who was forever looking for

love, for whom life was a movie, who played hard, but also worked hard.

The role which encapsulates her celluloid sex-appeal to perfection was

in the 1945 film The Postman Always Rings Twice, based on the novel by

James M Cain, who wrote Double Indemnity. It is another story of a

designing woman who traps a gullible man, with Lana as a discontented

housewife who persuades the itinerant handyman, John Garfield, to murder

her husband. She reeks of sex, wears only white, and is both goddess and

whore combined.

Lana Turner was born Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner in the mining

town of Wallace, Idaho, in 1920, although in her book, Lana -- The Lady,

the Legend, the Truth, she said it was in 1921. She moved with her

mother, Mildred, who remained a force in her life for many years, to

California after her father was murdered.

After that drugstore discovery, MGM put her under contract, and in

1937, when she was either 16 or 17, she made four films. She worked

steadily in small parts for MGM, including appearing in the Andy Hardy

series, and made her first really big impression in 1941 as one of the

showgirls in Ziegfeld Girl, a lavish musical.

She acquired the ''sweater girl'' tag during the war when the fashion

was to give actresses such labels for publicity purposes, and to cheer

up the boys at the front. It was justified.

Although Lana was never one of the ladies with a huge bust, she could

fill a sweater in memorable fashion. Her heydays proper, however,

started in 1946. She was an imperious Milady in the Gene Kelly Three

Musketeers (1948), a gorgeous Widow in The Merry Widow (1952), a

wonderful courtesan in Diane (1956) -- she played Diane de Poitiers --

and an unhappily married woman opposite Richard Burton in The Rains of

Ranchipur (1955), a disaster movie in which floods, epidemics and an

earthquake bring a tangle of plot lines to a climax.

Lana claimed that she always married the men she loved, although it

does beg the question of Stompanato, not to mention Tyrone Power and

Howard Hughes, with whom she also had affairs, the fact that she had two

abortions, and the home visits by ''Uncle'' Fernando Lamas.

Her husbands were: Artie Shaw, the bandleader, with whom she eloped

when she was 19; Stephen Crane, a Hollywood restaurateur, whom she

married in 1942, divorced and remarried, and by whom she had her only

child, Cheryl; the millionaire playboy, Bob Topping -- when that union

failed she tried to kill herself; the Tarzan star, Lex Barker, who,

according to Cheryl, sexually molested her as a child which led to Lana

throwing him out of the house; a rancher, Fred May; a producer, Robert

Easton; and finally a hypnotist and dietician, Ronald Dante. Power, with

whom she had had a very serious affair, proved a sad disappointment,

marrying Linda Christian instead when his divorce came through.

As her career went into a decline in the 1970s she turned to drink,

but in 1980 discovered God, pulled herself together, and appears to have

lived happily ever after doing the usual things retired film stars do --

writing her memoirs, attending retrospectives at film festivals and

appearing on TV chat shows. She also became reconciled with Cheryl, who

after reform school had embarked on a troubled adult life.

From 1982-83 Lana enjoyed success in the television soap Falcon

Crest, and she also did dinner theatre. Her last big screen hit was

Madame X in 1966, after which she made only a handful of films. They

included Persecution, a thriller made in Britain in 1974 with a good

British supporting cast, of which the critic Michael Billington said it

gave off ''the unmistakable odour of damp mothballs''. Her final film,

Witches Brew, released in 1985, does not make the reference books.

She grew up at MGM with the likes of Garland, Lamarr, Rooney and

Darnell. Her career had its crises, as did her life. But she did not

self-destruct like Garland, or her successor as blonde of the day,

Monroe. Nor was she a mother from hell in the Joan Crawford mould.

Cheryl, although her adolescence was traumatic and certainly the

Stompanato period was horrendous, bore her mother no grudge at not being

the centre of her life. She was well cared for by the staff, and was

close to her grandmother, Mildred. In Detour she wrote that while she

grew up before her mother, she had ''caught up by leaps and bounds''.

Lana Turner remained a true Hollywood star to the end of her life,

even if she no longer made movies. The image survived. They don't make

them like her any more.