Women Who Kill Men: California Courts, Gender, and the Press

6. Celebrity on Trial: Tinseltown Tarnished

CHAPTER SIX Celebrity on Trial Tinseltown Tarnished American spectators love a good show, and the trial of a celebrity is the best spectacle. Thane Rosenbaum argues, “The courtroom as theater is as old as ‘Oedipus Rex.’ We have come to organize our lives around the law, and our cultural consumption is overwhelmingly fed by the calories of courtrooms.”1 In 1955 Broadway brought theatergoers the Scopes Monkey Trial via Inherit the Wind. Twelve Angry Men was on stage in 1954 and in movie theaters in 1957. Rosenbaum notes, “That ‘Inherit the Wind’ and ‘Twelve Angry Men’ have undergone so many creative incarnations demonstrates the litheness of law as spectacle and that the public seemingly never tires of trials.”2 Further, “we are drawn to the spectacle of trials, with lawyers as cunningly disarmed gladiators and elevated judges who can resolve all conflicts peaceably, with brains and a gavel rather than blood and gore.” Rosenbaum also suggests, “The adversarial nature of the legal system also appeals to Americans’ tendency to reduce everything to a competition. Trials also speak of our desire to believe in a single truth, that reasonable doubt can be overcome and that what actually happened is, indeed, knowable.”3 Susan 162 C E L E B R I T Y O N T R I A L Jacoby, a journalist-author, writes that media have had a celebrity -making role because “the pressure to ‘personalize’ was directly proportional to the bigness of the story, and the story grew bigger the more it was personalized.”4 Further, “the insistence on celebrity personalization . . . intensified with the birth of the new feminist movement, because judging women on the basis of their appearance is as acceptable in the culture of journalism as it is throughout American culture.”5 Clearly this trend began in the 1920s; in the 1950s a killing involving a celebrity sharpens this focus and mesmerizes the audience . Such was a case in 1958. Lana Turner In April 1958 Beverly Hills police were summoned to film star Lana Turner’s bedroom, where Johnny Stompanato, the former bodyguard of Mickey Cohen, had been killed. The convergence of film, celebrity, and homicide produced media frenzy as well as multiple books on the subject.6 The fact that the criminally accused was Cheryl Crane, the minor child of Lana and Stephen Crane, proved secondary, yet it was the focus of the legal proceedings that followed.7 This whirlwind homicide case was much like Turner’s marriage to Stephen Crane. In 1942 she eloped with the “wealthy tobacco heir and stock broker” to Las Vegas.8 Discovering that Crane’s divorce was not final at the time of the wedding and that she was pregnant, Turner obtained an annulment.9 Crane and Turner soon remarried.10 Three months later Lana gave birth to Cheryl.11 Lana and Stephen committed themselves to parenthood .12 Parenthood lasted, but the marriage did not. Stephen and Lana divorced in 1944.13 Then came the killing, and their lives converged again. C E L E B R I T Y O N T R I A L 163 Distinguishing this case from prior cases was the presence of seasoned counsel immediately on the scene, providing the media with information favorable to his client. Lana Turner and Stephen Crane retained Jerry Giesler within one hour of the homicide. The day after the stabbing, Giesler told the press, “Lana’s daughter acted out of extreme fear of Stompanato and said that she obviously struck at him in an attempt to defend her mother from an attack which had been repeatedly threatened by Stompanato.” Giesler also informed the press that a police report contained information of Stompanato ’s beatings of “Miss Turner” with his fists and threats to cut her face.14 In a 1963 interview California Supreme Court chief justice Phil Gibson remarked, “[Giesler] was one of the best trial lawyers I ever knew.”15 Giesler also understood the power of the media. The April 6, 1958, edition of the Los Angeles Times provided readers with a visual tabloid of Turner and Jerry Giesler, Stompanato and mob figures, and a few photos of Cheryl Crane. The stories focused on Lana and Johnny. Lana saw her daughter whisked off to Juvenile Hall because of “a violent bedroom scene” leaving her “handsome friend Johnny Stompanato dead.” The “slaying” took place in Lana’s “pink bedroom” and “climaxed a gossip...