Every Valentine’s Day, there are people in every town who find themselves unlucky in love, and Woodstock is no exception. If that’s the case this year, consider a visit to Oakland Cemetery – no matter how bad you struck out, you can always find someone there who got it worse.
Other Hollywood notables and well-known names have called Woodstock home, but aside from Chester Gould, only one stuck around. Johnny Stompanato, Woodstock’s own native son, had one shot in the role of a lifetime alongside actress Lana Turner and her daughter Cheryl Crane. The production: justifiable homicide.
Stompanato, born 1925, had never been a stranger to high-risk lifestyle choices. He survived three years in the 1st Marine Division at the end of World War II, serving at Peleliu, Okinawa, and in China after the war. In Tianjin, a city near Beijing, he met and fell in love with a Turkish woman, Sarah Utish, and eventually brought her back to the United States. But despite converting to Islam to marry her, Stompanato never seemed to take the relationship seriously, and in 1947 he walked out on her and his newborn son to sell bogus fine-art pieces in Los Angeles.
In L.A., Stompanato seemed to have found his element. His “Myrtlewood Gift Shop” served as an introduction to the town’s criminal underworld, and he soon found himself in a better gig as bodyguard and enforcer for “celebrated onetime mobster,” Mickey Cohen. Cohen, in turn, introduced Stompanato to Hollywood, and the former small-town kid took to it with gusto. According to a tell-all book from 1982, Stompanato collected the numbers of several major actresses, eventually settling on top star Lana Turner to shower with gifts and aggressive affections. Turner, charmed by what her daughter called “B-picture good looks,” began dating Stompanato, but by her account the relationship started to hit the rocks when she discovered his mob connections.
One well-known story from that year’s tabloid archives was the time Stompanato challenged Sean Connery with a gun and lost. In 1957, Stompanato flew to London to visit Turner on the set of “Another Time, Another Place,” but became suspicious that Turner and the future James Bond actor were having an affair. He stormed onto the set and waved a gun at Connery, but the body-building Scotsman simply bent it out of his hand without much effort, leaving Stompanato to be deported to the United States shortly afterward. It’s fortunate that the Woodstock native didn’t pull the trigger – “Highlander,” “The Last Crusade,” and of course “Zardoz” just wouldn’t have been the same.
But if Sean Connery escaped Stompanato intact, then Stompanato himself wasn’t so lucky. On April 4 the next year, in what would become a media circus for the ages, the relationship between the Woodstock mobster and the star actress hit a new low when the former turned up dead in the latter’s rental home.
The story fanned a roaring controversy in the day, and could probably still do so now. Turner claimed that the admittedly-less-than-spotless Stompanato had threatened to disfigure and kill her after she announced she was breaking up with him, and that her daughter, age 14 at the time, had come to her defense and met Stompanato with a kitchen knife.
While there weren’t many following the story who would put violent threats past the short-tempered mob enforcer, the trial of the A-list star left her with few sympathizers outside L.A. as well – after a four hour hearing reviewed by the New York Daily News as “the most dramatic and effective role of her long screen career,” and barely half an hour of jury deliberation, Turner’s version of events was accepted without qualm. Stompanato’s death was deemed a justifiable homicide, and Turner and her juvenile daughter were both exonerated of wrongdoing.
In Woodstock, of course, Turner’s treatment in the case was not received well. Stompanato’s brother Carmine never accepted that the “whole truth” had come out at the hearing, and stated that the investigators at the Beverly Hills PD had “made up their mind right from the start that Johnny deserved to die.” Then and now, the two alternate theories are that Cheryl Crane was also infatuated with Stompanato and killed him out of jealousy, or that Turner, justified or not, was the one who held the knife – and convinced her underage daughter to take the rap in front of an already-sympathetic jury.
After almost sixty-one years, of course, this “Hollywood-vs-Flyover” classic doesn’t have much left to go on. But here in Woodstock, there’s always Johnny. You can meet up with him at Oakland, and share a toast over love affairs that could have gone better.
Willcockson Wordsmithing 