"Is Lana Turner guilty?": blaming, shaming, and framing abuse as scandal

When Lana Turner’s teenage daughter, Cheryl Crane, stabbed and killed Johnny Stompanato in April 1958, the feeding frenzy amongst the press was both predictable and inevitable. The Good Friday death of an associate of mobster Mickey Cohen at the hand of the daughter of a Hollywood love goddess contained all the ingredients for a movie script. Behind these real-life events that Turner would refer to only as ‘the happening’, however, was a relationship dominated by physical and sexual abuse, stalking and death threats against Turner, her mother and Crane, as well as previous histories of abuse relating to the star and her daughter. While Turner detailed this abuse on the stand at the coroner’s inquest and in her later autobiography, much of the press narrative suggested instead that the star’s lifestyle and film performances served as proof of her responsibility for her abuse, the death of her abuser and her daughter’s subsequent trauma. Framing Turner’s lifestyle as a series of unruly relationships, broken marriages and poor parenting, Photoplay posed the question ‘Is Lana guilty?’, while Life drew parallels between her fictional court appearances on the screen and her evidence in court described by the magazine as a ‘real-life drama triumph’. This chapter considers how articles in contemporary magazines and newspapers established a narrative of victim-blaming and gendered performativity around these events that remains central to Lana Turner’s personal, public and professional identities. As the star’s and Crane’s experiences and responses to abuse were either minimized or denied, Turner became a Hollywood example of the culture of victim-blaming that surrounds abusive relationships. The chapter also explores the ways in which autobiography, memoir and interviews act as disturbances to these problematic framings, creating alternative narratives and power dynamics. In addition, it considers how the press narrative has impacted Turner’s identity as an actor through notions of performance and inauthenticity that have continued in scholarly approaches to Turner, suggesting a highly gendered framing that serves to taint the star both personally and professionally.