Word: stompanato
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Through the Sawdust. Beyond any question, the characters and central incident of Robbins' new novel, Where Love Has Gone, are those of the pitiful 1958 murder case in which Cheryl Crane, Lana Turner's daughter, killed Johnny Stompanato, her mother's lover. As usual, some of the details are disguised and some patently fallacious: the mother, for instance, is a beautiful, rich sculptress instead of an actress. Also as usual, the disguises will fool no one, nor are they intended to. Legions of innocents will pick through Robbins' sawdust prose translating "Dani Carey" to Cheryl Crane...
Here Robbins' bad taste becomes really impressive; setting a new West Coast record for hutzpa, he supplies an "inside" ending to the murder case quite different from what the court determined in the actual Stompanato affair. But this is merely a matter for quiet pride; what is important is that Robbins climbs out of his garbage heap smelling like money...
...interloper in a man's world. Years away from her reputation as the town's best crime reporter, she still keeps up a running dialogue with the underworld that helps her paper to impressive scoops. It was Aggie to whom her pal Mickey Cohen gave the Johnny Stompanato-Lana Turner love letters...
...Flynn to Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin to Smoky Bob Mitchum. He was attacked as a publicity hound and had a reputation as a fast man at taking on sensational cases: when the Beverly Hills cops first arrived at the home of Lana Turner after her daughter had stabbed Johnny Stompanato, Giesler opened the door. But underneath all the star-spangled headlines was a quiet, brilliant lawyer, an ambivalence chaser and not an ambulance chaser, who third-guessed his opposition and won his cases less by theatrics than by thorough and meticulous preparation...