Johnny Stompanato

Johnny Stompanato with actress Lana Turner.

Johnny Stompanato, Jr. also known as "Handsome Harry", "Johnny Stomp", "John Steele", and "Oscar" (October 9, 1925 – April 4, 1958) was a former United States Marine who became a bodyguard/enforcer for gangster Mickey Cohen. In 1958, after a tumultuous relationship with actress Lana Turner, he was stabbed and killed by Turner's daughter, Cheryl Crane.

Early years

John "Jackie" R. Stompanato was born into an Italian-American family in predominantly Irish-American Woodstock, Illinois. Stompanato was the youngest of four children. His father John Sr. was a successful barber who owned a barber shop located on the historic Woodstock Square. John's mother died after his birth, and his father married a woman named Verena Freitag. The Stompanato family lived in a clapboard house on Blakely Street.

Wartime service

In 1940, after Stompanato's freshman year at Woodstock High School, his father sent him to Kemper Military School for boys in Boonville, Missouri, from which he graduated at age 17.

In 1943, Stompanato joined the U.S. Marines; he saw action in the South Pacific theater, in Peleliu and Okinawa, and then landed in China with the Marines, in 1945.

Marriage

Stompanato later claimed that he stayed in China after the war, operating night clubs and going bankrupt in the process. He may have also worked as a minor bureaucrat at a U.S. government office in Tianjin, China. While working for the government, he met and married a Turkish woman, six years his senior, and converted to Islam. Soon the couple returned to Woodstock, Illinois, where Stompanato's son, John Stompanato III, was born. Stompanato worked as a bread salesman for a few months before leaving for Hollywood, California.

Boyfriend to a star

In Los Angeles, Stompanato owned and managed "The Myrtlewood Gift Shop" in Westwood, California. He sold inexpensive pieces of crude pottery and wood carvings as fine art. The few shoppers who entered the store were either served by a part-time clerk or ignored altogether. When he started dating Lana Turner, he began wearing a heavy gold-link bracelet on his wrist with "Lanita" inscribed inside. Turner's daughter with second husband J. Stephen Crane, Cheryl Crane, described Stompanato in her autobiography, Detour: A Hollywood Story (1988):

... B-picture good looks ... thick set ... powerfully built and soft spoken ... and talked in short sentences to cover a poor grasp of grammar and spoke in a deep baritone voice. With friends, he seldom smiled or laughed out loud, but seemed always coiled, holding himself in ... had watchful hooded eyes that took in more than he wanted anyone to notice .... His wardrobe on a daily basis consisted of roomy, draped slacks, a silver buckled skinny leather belt and lizard shoes.

However, the reality was that Stompanato was jealous and possessive of Turner and severely abused her on many occasions. Turner attempted to end their relationship several times, but he always persuaded her not to do so.

On one occasion, Stompanato stormed onto a movie set in the UK and pointed a gun at actor Sean Connery, her costar in Another Time, Another Place, only to have Connery take the gun from him and force him from the movie set. Stompanato was deported for this offense, as unlicensed handguns were (and are) illegal in the UK.[1][2] Rumours flew after Stompanato's death that the mob held Connery responsible; the actor allegedly laid low until things blew over.

Death

On April 4, 1958, Johnny Stompanato was stabbed to death at Turner's Beverly Hills, California home. The assailant was Turner's then teenage daughter, Cheryl Crane. The girl claimed that Stompanato had been attacking her mother and she had had to defend her. The courts agreed, ruling Stompanato's death to be justifiable homicide. After the ruling, Stompanato's family sued Turner for $7 million; gangster Mickey Cohen supposedly paid the family's legal costs. The case was finally settled out of court.

Lana Turner's former home in Beverly Hills where Stompanato was killed in 1958.

There have been endless rumors in the years since Stompanato's death that Turner was the actual killer and that her daughter took the blame because she was a minor and would face minimal judicial punishment given the circumstances; however, there is no evidence to prove such claims.

Johnny Stompanato is interred at Oakland Cemetery, in Woodstock, McHenry County, Illinois. His grave is at 42.318239 N, 88.462386 w. He is buried between his mother, Carmela (1890–1925), to the north, and his father John (1890–1952) and his step mother Verena (1901–1967) to the south. His brother, Carmine (1912–1961) is buried across a small road, to the west of Johnny.

See also

Brad Lewis, Hollywood's Celebrity Gangster: The Incredible Life and Times of Mickey Cohen (New York: Enigma Books, 2007) ISBN 978-1-929631-65-0

In popular culture

• In the novel L.A. Confidential, Johnny Stompanato is one of the alleged gunmen in the Nite Owl Massacre, but is murdered before he can be prosecuted. James Ellroy, author of LA Confidential, stated in My Dark Places that Stompanato's murder overshadowed the murder of his mother.
• In 1979 Rene Ricard wrote one of his most well known poems, "The Death of Johnny Stompanato," published in Italian translation in 1981 and republished in Rene Ricard, Love Poems, CUZ Editions, 1999.
• In November 2009 a BBC Radio 4 original play "A Night with Johnny Stompanato" was first broadcast.

Further reading

• Detour: A Hollywood Story by Cheryl Crane with Cliff Jahr (Arbor House/William Morrow, 1988)