It was some neighbors who paid for the burial. They placed Virgil Turner in an unmarked grave in a common grave at the Colma Cemetery, south of San Francisco, in Isel. For almost 10 years, that grave remained unmarked. Only in 1938, when young Julia had already signed with MGM and She was starting to earn money, and her first purchase after her first big paycheck wasn’t clothes, it wasn’t jewelry, it was a white marble headstone for her father’s grave.
A headstone with a single phrase carved into it. It read in English: “To my daddy, the daughter you never knew you had.” That headstone in the Coma Cemetery is still there in 2026. Lana Turner had it made when she was 17. She paid for it with her first real paycheck. Every year, until the last year of her life, Lana Turner secretly traveled to that grave to leave flowers, without photographers, without assistants, alone.
It was the only place in the world where she wasn’t a star, she was just Julia Jean Turner, a girl who lost her father at age 8 because they were too poor to protect him. Mildred and Julia moved to Los Angeles in 1931. Mildred got a job at a beauty salon on Wilsher Boulevard. Julia started attending public school.
She was a shy, quiet girl who hardly spoke to her classmates. That’s it. Back then she was She was extraordinarily beautiful, but she didn’t know it. Her mother, too busy working 14 hours a day, never told her. And then, in 1937, in a Hollywood café called the Top Hat Café, the moment that changed everything happened. Julia was 16 years old.
She was sitting on a stool drinking a Coca-Cola, waiting for her mother to finish work across the street. She was wearing a tight sweater, a gray skirt, and white socks. She was reading a fashion magazine. A man approached, about 40 years old. He asked her if she wanted to be an actress. Julia, surprised, said she didn’t know.
He handed her a card. The card read William R. Wilkerson. He was the editor of the Hollywood Reporter, one of the most influential film magazines. He told her to introduce her to an agent, giving her the name and address. The Hollywood legend, which would circulate for decades, would say that Lana Turner was discovered in a drugstore drinking a Coca-Cola in a tight sweater.
The legend is almost true; only two details are different. It wasn’t a drugstore, it was a café. Wilkerson wasn’t a talent scout that day ; he was simply a man who had witnessed, for 15 seconds, the rarest beauty of his career. Three weeks later, Julia signed her first film contract. They changed her name. Julia Turner. It sounded too austere, the producers told her .
They needed something more exotic, something that marquees could light up at night. They suggested Lana. Indifferently, she accepted. Julia Jean Mildred Francis Turner disappeared that afternoon and Lana Turner was born. At 16. The most photographed pinup of the next 20 years had just been christened by a group of agents who barely looked her in the eye.
Her first film arrived in 1937; it was called They Won’t Forget. It was a small film about a crime in a small southern town. Lana, in a tiny role, appeared walking down a street. She wore a tight red sweater. She walked with a languor that cameras had never seen in a teenager. Her bust moved with every step. The scene lasted 15 seconds.
Those 15 seconds are going to change all of American culture. When the film premieres, the men in the theaters applaud that single scene. Letters start pouring into the studio. Young women begin buying tight sweaters. Journalists immediately give her a nickname that will haunt her for the next 30 years. They call her Sweater Girl.
At 16, Lana Turner is a national sensation. But MGM, the most powerful studio in Hollywood, had already set its sights on her. They sign her in 1938. They give her a 7-year contract. They subject her to the same brutal regime they applied to all their young stars: amphetamines to maintain her weight, sleeping pills to help her sleep, sedatives for filming.
Seventeen-year-old Lana starts taking pills given to her by men in white coats without anyone explaining exactly what the pills are. Just like with Elizabeth Taylor five years later, they will create a chemical dependency that Lana Turner will never be able to break. At 40, she was still taking some, at 60 she was still taking them, at 70 she was still taking them.
MGM robbed her of the chance to have a clean body, and it robbed her of something else. It robbed her of the chance to learn what healthy love was. Because while she was filming her first movies, the producers started introducing her to the most powerful men in Hollywood. They arranged dates for her, told her she had to be seen with this or that actor, explained that film was a business of public images and that her image had to include famous men by her side.
At 18, Lana Turner was already dating Howard Hughes, the eccentric aviation magnate. Tony Martin, the singer; Robert Stack, the actor; Tommy Dorsy, the conductor; Tyrone Power, Hollywood’s number one heartthrob. But the first man she married surprised even her. Where are you watching from? Tell us in the comments.
We love to know what country you’re following us from. February 13, 1940. Lana is 19 years old. She is in a At a Sunset Boulevard nightclub, a 30-year-old man is conducting his orchestra on stage. He’s thin, dark-skinned, with a thin mustache and intense black eyes . His name is Art Shaw. He’s one of the most famous jazz musicians of the swing era.
He’s just divorced the actress Betty Kern. That night, Lana and Ardy talk for an hour between songs. At the end of the concert, he proposes something absurd. He says, “Let’s get married. We’re going to Las Vegas tonight.” Lana, laughing, tells him he can’t be serious. And he says yes, he has his car outside, they can be in Las Vegas in four hours.
Lana is 19 years old, she doesn’t know this man. But there’s something about her, something of that poor girl from Idaho who lost her father at eight, who desperately needs a man to decide for her, to rescue her, to take her away. She gets in the car. At 5 a.m., in a Las Vegas chapel, Lana Turner marries Art Shaw, without warning.
to her mother, without informing MGM, without informing anyone. When the news gets out, two days later, MGM creates a crisis. Its executives call Shaw. They explain that Lana’s public image is the property of the studio. They ask, almost demand, that the marriage be called off immediately. But Art Adawan also has his own temperament. And during the first few months, Lana discovers that the man she has just married is something she didn’t expect. He is an intellectual.
He is fiercely jealous. He forbids her from having female friends. He forbids her from wearing makeup when he is n’t around. He forbids her from speaking to other men. He locks her in his Beverly Hills house for days on end. He makes her read books he chooses. Lana, at 19, feels trapped. After four months, she does something no one expected: she takes a plane to Mexico and has an abortion at a clandestine clinic in Tijuana.
She doesn’t ask Art’s permission, she doesn’t say anything to him, she just does it. When she returns, she tells Art, “It’s over.” They divorce on September 12, 1940. The marriage had lasted seven months, but that first experience, that first clandestine abortion at 19, would mark Lana Turner forever. It would be a decision she would privately mourn for the next five decades .
In her autobiography, published in 1982, Lana would confess something terrible. She would say that that first abortion was the darkest moment of her life, darker than the murder of her father, darker than the Stompanato scandal. She would say, “I aborted a child who was perhaps going to be the only one who would truly love me, and I did it out of anger, not out of love for myself.
” That confession, made at 62, says a lot about the woman who married eight times, about the woman who spent 74 years searching in each new man for what she had killed at 19 in a Tijuana clinic. Meanwhile, her career was exploding. In 1941, MGM cast her in Honkey Tonk, opposite Clark. Gable. The chemistry between the two was electric.
Rumors began immediately. Gable, married to Carol Lombard, denied any affair. Lana denied it too. But later testimonies from studio employees suggested that something did happen. A short, intense relationship, covered up by MGM with professional efficiency. When Carol Lombard died in a plane crash in 1942, Gable was devastated, and Lana, according to testimonies, was one of the women who tried to comfort him in the following months, but Gable never pursued her seriously again.
Lana, once again, had to admit that she wasn’t the one . Her second marriages came quickly. In July 1942, Lana married Stephen Cran, a restaurateur from Indiana. They married in Las Vegas again, but there was a problem. Four months later, Lana discovered something that left her stunned. Stephen Cran wasn’t legally divorced from his first wife when he married her.
The marriage was void, by law. Lana, outraged, filed for an annulment. Cran, desperate, tried He commits suicide. He sends her letters, begs her, promises to officially divorce her. Lana finally agrees to remarry him, but on one condition. They marry again on March 14, 1943, in a second ceremony, this time legal, and shortly afterward discover that Lana is pregnant.
On July 25, 1943, Lana Turner gives birth to a baby girl at a Hollywood hospital. The delivery is complicated. The baby suffers from a rare condition called erythroblastosis fetalis, caused by an incompatibility of the parents’ blood types. Little Sheryold Christina Crane almost dies in her first few days. She needs whole blood transfusions.
Lana, also weak after giving birth, is unable to be with her . There is a documented image by a hospital nurse. Lana, still in her hospital bed, cries, asking to see her daughter, but the doctors refuse to move her. The baby is in an intensive care unit . Lana, alone in her room, writes a phrase in a notebook that the nurse would recall years later: ” If Cherell dies, I don’t want to live anymore.
That little girl is the only good thing I’ve ever done in my life. Cher survives, and Lana, who had never had a present mother, who had never felt unconditional love, sees for the first time in her life what it is to love someone unconditionally. That little girl will be, for the next 14 years, the only real thing in Lana Turner’s chaotic life .
The only thing, but her marriage to Steven Cran quickly collapses. Cran turns out to be so weak, so dependent, so unreliable, that Lana leaves him in August 1944. Little Cherold was one year old. From that moment on, Lana becomes what the press of the time called a Hollywood single mother. But the reality is that Cherold grows up spending more time with her governesses than with her mother.
Lana films more and more movies, dates more and more different men. Cherold, raised by nannies, sees her mother only on weekends. Sometimes, in 1945, Lana stars in the film that will define her forever. It’s called The Postman Always Rings Twice, a film noir based on the novel by James M. Kan, stars Lana as Cora Smith, a femme fatale who convinces her lover to kill her husband.
Her entrance in the film, dressed all in white in a roadside diner, is considered one of the most iconic images in 20th-century American cinema . The film is a massive success. Lana cements her status as one of MGM’s biggest stars. Her salary rises to $5,000 per film, an astronomical sum for 1945. In 1948 comes her third marriage, this time to a millionaire, Henry Bob Topping Jr.
He is the heir to an industrial fortune. He is 41 years old, divorced three times, and has four children from previous marriages. He promises Lana a golden life: mansions, yachts, jewels, money. Exhausted from Hollywood, exhausted from the pressure of MGM, she accepts. The marriage lasts four years.
Topping turns out to be an alcoholic. He has constant affairs. He loses money gambling. Letters. Lana. Again, she spends the night alone with her little Shery in the next bed, weeping silently. In 1951, after a miscarriage in the second trimester, Lana falls into a deep depression. She shuts herself away in her Bellair mansion, stops filming, and one November morning takes an entire bottle of sleeping pills.
It’s a suicide attempt. The maid finds her in time. She’s taken to the hospital, her stomach is pumped. She survives. Her daughter, Sherold, is eight years old, and from her bed that day, she overhears the nurses whispering. One of them says, “If the child weren’t here, perhaps her mother wouldn’t have tried anything.
” Eight-year-old Sheryold Crane understands that her mother wanted to kill herself, but she doesn’t understand why. That unanswered question will haunt her for the next 70 years of her life. Lana divorces Bob Topping in 1952, and a year later, in 1953, her fourth husband arrives—the man who will destroy her. What little remained of Shery’s innocence was named Lex Barker.
He was an actor, known for playing Tarzan in six films in the 1940s. He was 34 years old. Tall, blond, and athletic. He had the perfect face of an American movie star. Lana fell madly in love. They married on August 8, 1953. Sherold was 10 years old when this man entered his mother’s life. And here this story becomes one of the darkest in 1950s Hollywood.
A truth that would only come to light decades later, when Sherold Cran published his memoirs in 1988 at the age of 45. Lex Barker sexually abused Sherold Cran during the four years he was married to Lana Turner. Sherold was 10 the first time; he was 11, 12, 13. Lex Barker would enter his room at night while Lana slept on another floor of the mansion and rape her.
He threatened to kill her. Sherold would speak to her mother if she spoke. Terrified, Sherold fell for it. For four years she fell for it. Sherold, in her memoirs, would describe with clinical precision how the pattern worked. Lex would wait for Lana to leave the house. Sometimes it was formal dinners, sometimes premieres, sometimes simply producers’ meetings.
When the maid was asleep and the house was quiet, Lex would go upstairs to Sherold’s room . The girl learned to recognize his footsteps in the hallway. She learned to pretend to be asleep. She learned that pretending was useless. She learned to mentally count the seconds until he left.
Then, when Lex Barker left, Cher would go downstairs to the bathroom, shower with scalding hot water, scrub her skin until it bled, and return to her room. She would cry silently so the maid downstairs wouldn’t hear her. And the next day, at breakfast, she would smile. She would say, “Good morning, Alex.” She would pass him the butter when he asked for it.
Her Her mother, sitting across the table, saw nothing. In 1957, this was the daily hell of Sheryold Crane, a 13-year-old girl who had learned to be a perfect actress alongside her mother, the most famous actress in Hollywood. Until one afternoon in 1957, she confided in a school friend. The friend told her mother. The mother called Lana.
And that night, Lana finally understood what was happening inside her own home. Sheryold, in her memoirs, would recount the scene like this: That night, after the friend left, Lana called Shery to her room. She asked her to tell her the truth. Cher, crying, told her everything: four years of rape, the death threat, the terror.
Lana said nothing for several minutes. Then she got up, walked to the study in the mansion, took a revolver from her desk drawer, loaded it, went upstairs , entered the bedroom where Lex Barker was sleeping, and put the barrel of the revolver to his forehead. She waited. Sherold, who had silently followed her , watched the whole scene from the doorway.
For several seconds, Lana stared at her sleeping husband, the revolver still in his hand, and then, as Sherold would recount many years later, she decided not to pull the trigger—not out of compassion for Lex Parker, but for herself, because she knew that if she killed him, she would go to jail and Cheryell would be left alone.
She lowered the revolver, woke Lex Parker, and said in a cold voice, “You have 10 minutes to get out of my house.” “If I ever see your face again, I’ll kill you, and no one will defend you in court when what you did comes out.” Lex Barker left that night naked, penniless, in his bathrobe, driving his car to a hotel.
Lana signed the divorce papers immediately. The official reason was irreconcilable differences. MGM made sure the truth was never published in the newspapers. They paid journalists to silence the scandal. Lex Barker went to Europe and married three more times. He made a career in German and Italian cinema, playing the hero Old Shatter in a series of European Westerns that were very popular in the 1960s.
He died in New York in 1973 of a heart attack in the street while walking down Lexington Avenue. He was 58 years old. He never faced charges for what he had done. American justice in 1957 did not investigate these types of cases when the victim was the daughter of a movie star. At his funeral, according to German accounts, hundreds of fans of the Old Shatter character attended, people who They cried, they applauded, they wrote tributes in European newspapers.
None of those people knew what he had done for four years to Lana Turner’s daughter. Sherold Crane, when he learned of her death on the radio, called her mother that same afternoon in 1973. They were silent on the phone for several minutes, and then Lana, according to Sherold, said only four words: “We can rest at last , daughter.
” Sherold Crane was 14 years old in 1957 when he was kicked out of the house. He had just escaped four years of rape, and now, on top of that, he had to bear the knowledge that his mother had been on the verge of killing a man for her, but hadn’t. A mixture of gratitude, rage, and loneliness impossible to process.
If this story is impacting you, please like it now; it helps us enormously to continue telling these forgotten stories. And then, just weeks after her divorce from Lex Barker, Lana Turner met the man who would destroy her daughter’s life forever. His name was John Steel. That was the first He told her. A handsome Italian-American, around 32 years old, strong, always elegantly dressed , with expensive rings and tailored suits.
He met her at a Hollywood party, sent her flowers the next day, and invited her to dinner. Lana, still hurt, still in shock from what she had discovered about Lex Parker, without the emotional strength to resist, accepted. Only two months later, Lana discovered the truth. John Steel wasn’t named John Steel. His real name was Johnny Stompanato.
He was a notorious mobster in Los Angeles organized crime . He had been the personal bodyguard of Mickey Cohen, one of the most feared gangsters on the West Coast during the 1950s. He had a history of violence, a history of outstanding warrants , but Lana, instead of Weir, stayed. Why? Biographers have been trying to answer that question for 70 years.
Lana herself, in her memoirs, gave a partial answer. She said that at that point in her life, after Lex Barker, after the depression, after the miscarriage, she felt unworthy. of any decent man. She said that Stompanato had looked at her with an intensity that no man before her had ever shown her. She said, above all, that she was afraid.
Afraid of being alone, afraid of growing old without anyone, afraid of the silence. Don Panato, as Sherold would later recount, knew how to exploit that fear from the very first day. There is an episode that Sherold would describe in detail in her memoirs. It was October 1957, barely two weeks after Stompanato moved into the house in Beverly Hills.
One night, Lana arrived late from a film shoot. Sheryell, who was 14 years old, was in the dining room having dinner with the maid. When Lana entered, Stompanato was waiting for her in the living room without greeting her, without smiling. He asked her why she had arrived late. Lana explained that filming had run late. Without warning, Stompanato slapped her in front of the maid and Sheryell.
Sheryell, 14 years old, saw the whole scene. She got up, She wanted to intervene. Stompanato, staring intently at her, said something she would remember forever. He said, “If you interfere, I’ll cut your face, and then your mother’s.” Both of them together. Sheryold sat back down. The maid, terrified, left the dining room.
Lana, weeping silently, said nothing. That night, the three women of the house—Lana, Sheryell, and the maid—went to sleep knowing that a man who could kill them slept inside the building, and they stayed. That passivity, that paralysis in the face of violence, was exactly the pattern Lana had lived her whole life: her father murdered by poverty, her first husband who locked her up, the man who had forced her to have an abortion at 19, Lex Barker, and now Stompanato.
Each time, Lana knew how the story would end, but each time she could do nothing to change it. The relationship lasted 14 months. 14 months. During which Stompanato became a constant shadow in Lana’s life. He went everywhere with her . He decided which parties they went to. He decided which friends could visit them. Above all, he decided how much money flowed from Lana’s bank accounts into Stompanato’s pockets.
Enormous sums disappeared every month to pay debts no one understood, and he started hitting her. There is documented testimony. The housemaid, a Mexican woman named Esperanza, recounted years later that she saw bruises on Lana’s arms at least 10 times during those 14 months. She would ask her what had happened.
Lana would reply that she had fallen. Esperanza didn’t believe her, but she kept quiet. The escalation came in February 1958. Lana was in London filming a movie called Another Time, Another Place. Her co-star was a young, then-unknown Scottish actor named Sean Connery. He was 27 years old. He wasn’t James Bond yet, but he was already handsome, tall, magnetic.
Stompanato, jealous, pathological. He traveled to London unannounced. One morning in the He stormed onto the film set. He had a gun in his pocket. He accused Sean Connery of having an affair with Lana. He pointed the gun at his face. What happened next is legendary in Hollywood. C.N.
Connery, with the cold-bloodedness that would define his James Bond career a few years later, punched Stompanato. Just one punch. It knocked him unconscious on the studio floor. When Stompanato regained consciousness, Connery said to him in his deep Scottish voice, a line that would also become legendary: “Antu, if I see you again, I’ll kill you.
” Humiliated in front of the entire film crew, Stompanato left London the next day. He returned to Los Angeles a few days before Lana waited for him at her house. And when she arrived, according to later testimony from the maid, there was a brutal fight. Stompanato hit her. He told her he would kill her if she ever humiliated him in public again.
That night, Lana slept in a different room with the door… The key was in, but Good Friday night of 1958 was approaching. April 4, 1958. Lana had just returned home. Her daughter, Sher, had come to spend the Easter holidays with her. Little Sher, now 14, had been living with her grandmother Mildred for the past few months after the Lex Barker scandal.
But that week Lana had insisted on having her at her house. Cher, as she would later recount, had noticed during those days that something wasn’t right between her mother and Stompanato. The fights were constant, the shouting, the insults. One night, Sher had heard Stompanato threatening Lana with a knife.
He had put the knife to her throat. Sher had heard everything from the hallway. On the afternoon of April 4, there was a fight even worse than the others. Lana had told Stompanato definitively that the relationship was over. Stompanato, out of control, had started shouting threats, that he was going to disfigure her, that he was going to cut her face, that he was going to kill her.
Cherold, in her room, heard everything. She waited and waited, and when the screams reached a point she could no longer bear, she went down to the kitchen. She took a 15-cm butcher knife from the knife drawer and went upstairs . Sherold would describe the exact moment years later in her memoirs .
She said that as she climbed the stairs, she wasn’t thinking about killing, she wasn’t thinking about anything specific, she just wanted the screams to stop. She just wanted her mother to stop being afraid. She just wanted to get into the room and somehow make the monster go away forever. When she reached the second- floor landing, she heard something that made her decide.
She heard Stompanato’s voice. He was saying to Lana, “I’m going to disfigure you.” I’m going to cut off that face of yours that made you famous. ” I’m going to make sure no man ever wants to look at you again.” And after that, I’m going to kill your daughter, you little [ __ ]. Your daughter, you little [ __ ].
Sher, without thinking, opened the door. The rest of the story, you know, we told it at the beginning. Fourteen-year-old Sheryold Cran killed Johnny Stompanato with a single stab wound to the stomach. What happened in the following hours is what would define Lana Turner’s public image for the next 37 years. Lana, who had left the master bedroom after the crime, made a quick decision.
She called her lawyer, first asked for advice, then called the police. By that time, 30 minutes had already passed. Those 30 minutes would fuel conspiracy theories for years. Some believed that Lana had actually killed Stompanato herself and that Sheryold had agreed to take the blame to protect her mother. That theory, based on anonymous rumors and conflicting testimonies, could never be proven.
The police concluded that Cher had been the killer, but the The debate was going to drag on. When the first police patrol arrived at the mansion, they found a scene that would be front-page news the next day. Stompanato was dead in the hallway, surrounded by a pool of blood. Shery sat on the edge of the bed, still in her stained pink shirt, not crying, not speaking.
Lana, in a white robe, her makeup smeared, yelled at the police that her daughter wasn’t responsible, that it was she, Lana, who had killed the man. The police, who knew the Hollywood scene all too well, didn’t believe Lana. The blood on Sherold’s hand, the fingerprints on the knife, the conflicting testimonies—everything pointed to the girl.
That night, Sherold spent her first hours in a cell at the Los Angeles County Juvenile Detention Center. She was 14 years old. It was the first time in her life she had slept alone outside of a family bed. She cried alone all night without anyone comforting her. The trial, however, was brief. After After 18 days in jail, a jury found Sheryold Crane guilty of justifiable homicide.
She was acquitted, returned home, but the scandal was cataclysmic. Newspapers around the world ran the story: the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Lemond, the Spanish, Italian, and South American press. Everyone talked about the Stompanato case for months. Television cameras followed Lana everywhere. Fans wrote her hate letters, others wrote her letters of support.
There was one detail that the American press highlighted for weeks. During the trial, Lana Turner took the stand as a witness. She spoke for an entire hour, weeping, recounting Stompanato’s abuse, the threats, the bruises, the constant terror. The journalists present in the courtroom said that her testimony was so convincing, so dramatic, so perfectly measured, that it seemed like the best performance of her career.
Some critics even cynically suggested that Lana should have won an Oscar for that statement. That coldness of the critics toward Lana, that constant suspicion The fact that she was acting even at the worst moment of her life was a burden she would carry for decades to come. For many people in America, Lana Turner was never a victim.
She was an actress who, even in real pain, was accused of faking it. But the true cost, the one no one saw, was paid by Sherold Cran. At 14, Sherold had killed a man, had watched him die. She had lived through the trial, had heard the press call her the child killer. She had read her own pictures in the newspapers. After the trial, she had been sent to a psychiatric rehabilitation center for troubled girls in California.
Sherold, in her memoirs published 30 years later, would describe those years as ” real hell.” She said the rehabilitation center was almost like a prison. The girls were beaten if they disobeyed. Sherold was punished three times for trying to escape. She was locked in solitary confinement. She was subjected to psychiatric treatments that today would be considered torture.
And all of this while her mother, Lana Turner was returning to the movies. Because the cruelest irony of this whole story is that the Stanto scandal, instead of destroying Lana Turner’s career, saved it. The film Payton Place, which had premiered a few months before the murder, was a smash hit thanks to all the publicity surrounding the trial.
Lana was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress. The film made more money than expected. And a year later, in 1959, Lana starred in Imitation of Life, directed by Douglas Cirk. It was one of the biggest hits of her career, grossing over $50 million at the box office. The film was cruelly ironic. Lana played an actress mother who sacrificed her daughter for her career.
The plot included scenes in which the daughter reproached her mother for having been absent all her life. When Imitation of Life was released, critics couldn’t help but point out the perverse parallels with Lana’s real life. Viewers in Hispanic theaters reacted to the scenes with murmurs. Some wept. openly. Lana, during a promotional interview, was asked by a French journalist if the film didn’t remind her too much of her own life.
Lana responded with a tired smile, a phrase that appeared in Lefigaro the next day. She said, ” Cinema, madam, always imitates life, only no one dares to tell the truth.” In this film, I told what I could. “The rest I still don’t dare to tell.” That phrase, uttered in 1959, was a veiled confession. Lana knew that her entire career, including the colossal success of The Imitation of Life, was built on the suffering of her daughter Sherold, who at that time was in a reform school for troubled girls. Lana earned money.
Lana signed autographs. Lana went to premieres, while 15- year-old Sherold was locked in solitary confinement for trying to escape. Lana won. Sherold lost. Lana’s career . From 1960 onward, a slow decline began, the roles becoming weaker, the films increasingly poorly received, but Lana kept getting married.
Three more husbands between 1960 and 1972. Fred May, a rancher. Robert Eton, a [cough] minor producer. Ronald Peller, a nightclub hypnotist who, after five months of marriage, disappeared with $15,000 from the accounts. Lana’s husband was convicted years later for trying to hire a hitman to kill a rival hypnotist. Each marriage ended worse than the last.
Fred May, the rancher, was an alcoholic. Robert Eton, the producer, discreetly stole money from her and spent it on other women. Ronald P., the hypnotist, was a professional con artist who had used his fake charm to get close to Lana, marry her quickly, empty her accounts, and disappear. When Lana discovered the truth about Pellar, she called the police, but Pellar was already in another state living under another name.
Lana never got her money back. Those last three marriages were, according to biographers, a kind of desperate search by Lana for some sort of protection. Each time she signed a divorce paper, she swore she would never marry again. Each time she met a new man, she fell in love again within weeks.
It was as if her body did n’t know how to live without someone by her side, even if that someone was a con artist, an alcoholic, or a rogue hypnotist. In 1975, Lana entered what she called her ” ghost years.” She drank alone in her apartment. She hardly ever went out. She only received Shery, who visited her once a week.
She watched old movies on television. She cried whenever one of her own films came on the channel. Her mother, Mildred, had died in 1982. Lana went to the funeral. She didn’t cry during the ceremony, only afterward in the car on the way back to Beverly Hills. Eight marriages in total, seven different husbands, and in the end, no true love, no man to care for her.
Sheryold, her only daughter, became emotionally distant from her mother for years. She was in psychiatric clinics. She came out as a lesbian at age 13 during the Stompanato trial. She lived her entire adult life with a female partner named Joyce Leroy. When Lana finally discovered Shery’s homosexuality, it took her years to accept it, but in the end, according to her own testimony, she came to accept it.
Lana spent the last She spent decades of her life in a small apartment in Century City, Los Angeles. She drank, smoked incessantly, and saw her friends less and less. Sheryold visited her weekly. The two, according to later accounts, spoke little, but at least they spoke. There’s a photo from 1990, taken by a street photographer, that later appeared in a book about Lana Turner’s life.
The photo shows Lana, then 69, leaving a supermarket in Beverly Hills. She’s wearing a large hat, dark glasses, and an old coat. She’s pushing a cart with a single shopping bag. A bag with milk, bread, and cigarettes. That was all. The biggest legend of Hollywood in the 1940s and 50s, alone in a supermarket, buying the bare minimum to survive.
That photo, according to the press that reproduced it years later, was a brutal image. It showed what time does to stars. Lana in the supermarket was unrecognizable. The cashiers didn’t recognize her. The other customers walked past her without looking at her. She was an old woman. Anyone. It was exactly what she had feared her whole life to be.
An ordinary woman like her mother, like the women of Idaho she had left behind at 16. In her autobiography, Lana confessed something terrible about those years. She said that every morning when she looked in the bathroom mirror, she didn’t recognize that the woman she saw was a stranger. An old woman with a face swollen from alcohol, small eyes, and dull hair.
She said, “The real Lana Turner died a long time ago.” What remains in this apartment is a ghost of herself.” In 1992, Lana was diagnosed with throat cancer—too many cigarettes for too many decades. She underwent radiation therapy, had a brief remission, but the cancer returned. During the last three years of her life, Lana secretly returned to the Catholic faith, the faith she had held as a child, which she had abandoned when she signed with MGM.
Once a week, a maid would take her to a small Catholic church in Westwood. Lana would sit in the back pew. She would pray; she didn’t confess to the priest, but she prayed. Sherold, who sometimes accompanied her, later recounted that his mother always prayed for the same person, for Stompanato. She asked God to forgive Sherold for killing that man.
She asked God to receive Stompanato’s soul despite everything he had done. Above all, she asked God to forgive her, Lana, for not having been able to protect her daughter from the wrong men. Prayers, during the last few months, were the only moments of peace Lana Turner knew in her life. On June 29, 1995, in her Century City apartment, Lana Turner died. She was 74 years old.
She was alone. Cherold hadn’t had time to arrive. Her maid found her that morning. Lana was in bed with a photograph of Shery as a child on the nightstand. The photo was from 1947. Sheryold was four years old. She was smiling. They were on Malibu Beach. It was one of the few happy photographs that existed of the two of them together.
Next to the photo was a handwritten note. Lana had written it that very night before falling asleep. The note had only five words. In English, it said: Cherl, I took care of you as best I could. It was signed simply with an M, the M for Mom. That note was the last thing Lana Turner wrote in her life. Five words addressed to the only person who had truly loved her.
The daughter she had never known how to take good care of. The daughter who, at 14, had killed for her. Sheryold Cran inherited almost everything, but made a decision that surprised everyone. She sold most of her mother’s personal belongings. She donated the money to organizations that helped victims of domestic violence.
The foundation she created with those funds still bears the name of the Good Friday murder: the April 4 Foundation. Sheryold Cran is still alive in 2026. She is 82 years old. She lives in Hawaii with her partner, Joyce. She has published three novels. She lectures on domestic violence and child abuse.
She speaks, nonstop during all her presentations, about her mother. She speaks of Lana Turner as a victim, also as a woman who was never protected as a child and who, therefore, did not know how to protect her own daughter. In a 2008 interview, Sheryold said something that perhaps summarizes this whole story.
She was asked if she still remembered that night of April 4, 1958. If she still thought about Stompanato. Sheryold replied, “I didn’t kill Stompanato that night. I killed a…” Shadow. A shadow my mother had been dragging with her since Idaho. A shadow that was the father who didn’t take care of her. The producer who gave her pills when she was 17. The first husband who locked her up.
The fourth husband who raped me. Stanato was just the latest in a long line. I did n’t actually kill anyone, I just finished a job no one wanted to start. That statement, made by a 65-year-old woman to a journalist from The New Yorker, is perhaps the deepest truth about Lana Turner, about all the women she represented, about the poor girls who became stars and paid a price the world never wanted to acknowledge.
Lana Turner died at 74, but in a way, she had already died long before. She died a little at 8 when her father was killed. She died a little at 19 when she had an abortion in Tijuana. She died a little at 37 when she had to tell her 14-year-old daughter that a man had raped her for four years. She died a little at 38 when she saw Stompanato’s body in the hallway of her house.
Each of those blows killed her until, at 74, there was almost nothing left to kill. But there’s something very few biographies mention, and it’s perhaps Lana Turner’s most important legacy. In her autobiography, published in 1982, Lana dedicated the book to only one person. Not to her husbands, not to her mother, not even to her granddaughter.
She dedicated it to Sheryl, and the dedication, written in her own handwriting in the first edition, read: “To Sheryl, you saved my life. I could never repay you what you owed me, but now, at least, I say it out loud. You are the only reason I ‘m still here.” Sheryl, when she read that dedication for the first time, prayed for an hour.
Afterward, she called her mother and said only two words: ” Thank you, Mom.” That was, according to Sheryl herself, the only real conversation they had about the night of April 4th, the only one in 70 years. But according to her, it was enough. Today, 31 years after Lana Turner’s death, her name remains a double symbol. On the one hand, one of the most beautiful women to ever grace Hollywood.
On the other, a mother whose negligence led her daughter to kill at the age of 14. Both things are true, both things contradict each other, and both things still coexist today in every documentary made about her, in every book published, in every photo circulating online of her in her famous white sweater. Lana Turner is perhaps the most perfect symbol of something that future generations may understand better than ours: that famous women pay a price they can scarcely imagine, that poor girls who arrive in Hollywood almost always end up broken. And
that the daughters of stars inherit a loneliness that no trial can undo, no Oscar can compensate for, no photograph can capture. There is one more detail that appears only in an interview Sheryold Cran gave to the New York Times in 2018, when she was already 75 years old. The journalist asked her if Did she keep any of her mother’s belongings? Sherold replied that no, she had sold almost everything, but had kept only one item: a fitted white crew-neck sweater.
The same sweater her mother had worn in 1937 when a man named William Wilkerson discovered her in a Hollywood coffee shop , the sweater that had made Lana Turner a legend. Sherold said that this sweater, ironed and stored in a cedar box in her Hawaii home, was her most painful reminder, that every time she looked at it she thought of that 16- year-old girl who had walked into a coffee shop without knowing she would leave transformed into someone else, into someone who was no longer called Julia Jean Turner, into someone who would lose her father,
her innocence, her health, her peace of mind, her capacity to love; into someone who, at 37, would have to watch her only daughter kill a man for her. If she could, Sherold said in that interview, she would go back to that coffee shop, she would find Wilkerson. She would beg him not to give her the A card to my mother.
I would beg her to let her remain Julia Jean. I would beg her to let her grow up in San Francisco, marry an ordinary man, have three or four children, and die at 90 in a small house. My mother never wanted to be Lana Turner. It happened to her like cancer happens, like an earthquake happens. It happened and killed her slowly over 74 years.
These words of Cherold Crane, spoken at age 75, are perhaps Lana Turner’s true epitaph. Better than any biography, better than any film, better than any tribute on the Hollywood Walk of Fame . Her best role, the most important of her life, was one that no one paid her for: that of a mother. And that role, as she herself confessed at the end of her life, was the only one she never learned to play well.
And in our next story, we will delve into the life of another woman whose beauty was considered a curse. A woman who fell in love with the wrong man and paid for that choice with the life of a child, a woman whose name was forbidden for years by One of the most brutal dictatorships of the 20th century, a story that is still not openly discussed in some countries .
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