Word: hollywood
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Star. Julia Jean Mildred Frances Turner was a pressagent's dream ready-made for stardom by Hollywood standards. Her father was killed in a gambling scrape when she was ten; her mother struggled to keep her alive. In Hollywood one day, when she was a well-stacked 16, she was "discovered" as she sat at a drugstore fountain. Hollywood gave her the big buildup. Renamed Lana, she made movies with the biggest of the box-office giants-Gable, Taylor, Cooper-and nobody, least of all the customers, cared if she was not a second Sarah Bernhardt...
...Crowd. Like many other show folk in Hollywood, Lana liked to run with the hoodlum crowd that sprouted into semi-respectability in moviedom after World War II. High up in the crowd was a runty gambler named Mickey Cohen. To the movie folk, gum-chomping Mick typified a real-life heavy out of their own films; for the Mick to invite a star to his table in a swank joint seemed as thrilling for the guest as it would be if a rubberneck tourist were asked to drink with Lana Turner. The Mick and his crowd just loved...
Johnny-Come-Lately. Back in Hollywood, Johnny cannily saved the letters. His own notes were fourth-grader's work; many of them, laboriously scratched in copy books, were never sent, e.g.: You know Baby, I'm so lonesome for the touch of you I could die. I try to think back of when you were here and those precious minutes I wasted when my lips were not on yours...
Lana's fear was clear, and it led to Johnny Stompanato's death a month later. When it happened, all Hollywood broke loose. Newspapers all over the U.S. poured on the black ink and the big type, scrambled wildly for the kind of news that would keep the public buying. They found it. Two-fisted Aggie Underwood, 55, city editor of Hearst's Herald-Express (and only woman city editor of a U.S. metropolitan paper), decided that there must have been some love letters. She called Mickey Cohen, who took Johnny Stompanato's death...
...Lana's desperation rang true, but even a Hollywood scenario might have missed the final touch that came when a man in the courtroom stood and shouted: "This whole thing's a pack of lies. Johnny Stompanato was my friend! The daughter was in love with him and he was killed because of jealousy between mother and daughter!" Then, as an afterthought before he wheeled and stomped out of the room, the man cried: "Johnny Stompanato was a gentleman...