L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

Whatever version is true, Sammy Davis Jr. apparently felt nothing but gratitude toward Mickey. When Cohen was hauled into court on April 4, 1958 (Good Friday), for assaulting a waiter who had annoyed him at a party for Davis at Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford’s Villa Capri restaurant, the entertainer came forward as a witness for the defense. (He testified that the waiter had spilled coffee on Cohen and made a rude remark.) So did another guest with a long and curious relationship with Mickey Cohen, the actor Robert Mitchum. Public violence, high-profile arrests, celebrity alibis—to a recently relapsed gangster hungry for publicity, things could hardly get better. But later that night, they did. At 9:40 p.m., Cohen associate Johnny Stompanato was stabbed to death in the home of then-girlfriend Lana Turner.

Turner, thirty-eight, was one of Hollywood’s best-known (and most frequently married) actresses. According to Turner’s FBI files, she was also one of the most sexually voracious. As a result, it’s no surprise that she soon shacked up with Stompanato, thirty-two, a celebrity in his own right among adventuresome Hollywood actresses. “The most handsome man that I’ve ever known that was all man,” Cohen called him. But it wasn’t Stompanato’s good lucks that made him Hollywood’s most notorious gigolo. Rather, it was his legendary “endowment.” To Mickey, though, Stompanato was kind of like a kid brother. As soon as he heard the news of Stompanato’s death, he raced over to Turner’s house in Beverly Hills. Attorney Jerry Giesler intercepted Cohen outside.

“If Lana sees you, she’s going to fall apart altogether,” Giesler told Cohen. Instead, he sent him over to the morgue to identify Stompanato’s body.

In fact, Turner was terrified of Cohen. Wild rumors quickly spread. “LANA FEARS COHEN GANG VENGEANCE,” cried one tabloid. The identity of the supposed killer quickly emerged—Lana’s fourteen-year-old daughter, Cheryl Crane. Supposedly, she had stabbed Stompanato with a kitchen knife when she walked in on him beating her mother.

Cohen didn’t believe it. Stompanato wasn’t the toughest of Cohen’s henchmen, but he was a former Marine. Mickey couldn’t believe that a mere girl could have killed him with a knife. He suspected that Lana herself was probably the killer. Cohen wanted to see justice done.

In this, he was virtually alone. Neither prosecutors nor the public seemed upset that Johnny Stompanato was dead. The general attitude was, Good riddance. Press accounts portrayed Stompanato as a swarthy abuser who had preyed upon the fair Turner. This offended Mickey, who believed that Stompanato and Turner genuinely loved each other. Cohen resolved to set the record straight.

The day after Stompanato’s death, his apartment at the Del Capri Motel in Westwood was mysteriously sacked. A week later, love letters from Turner to Stompanato appeared in the Herald-Express, just as the trial of Cheryl Crane was beginning. The letters left little doubt of Turner’s affection for Stompanato, whom she addressed as “daddy love” in notes signed “Tu Zincarella” (your gypsy). But this time, the resurgent gangster was out of touch with the public. The publication of private letters was seen as unseemly, and the press read them for evidence that the affair was winding down.

Cohen was puzzled by this hostile reception. But he didn’t dwell on it. Perhaps he didn’t care all that much about Johnny either. Or maybe he was distracted by his latest discovery, a thrice-married, hazel-eyed Marilyn Monroe look-alike named Liz Renay.

Renay was a sometime stripper (44DD-26-36) as well as an aspiring painter and occasional poet who had left New York after boyfriend Tony Coppola’s longtime boss, Albert Anastasia, was rubbed out in 1957. Friends such as “Champ” Segal in New York told Renay to look up Mickey. When she did, Renay was pleasantly surprised: “His hands were soft, his nails fastidiously clean and polished. His touch was more like a caress. He wasn’t at all what I expected him to be.” The two hit it off and soon became a couple (though Renay would later claim that in private Mickey always “stopped short”—out of respect for Renay’s boyfriend in New York). In March 1958, Life magazine featured a photo spread of the two of them eating ice cream sundaes at the Carousel. This was too much for LaVonne. Escorting starlets to nightclubs was one thing—that was practically part of a Hollywood gangster’s job description. Flirting around town and eating ice cream with a rather notorious young woman was quite another. That June, LaVonne and Mickey returned to divorce court. This time the split was final. As alimony, Cohen agreed to pay LaVonne a dollar a year.