Once upon a time, thanks to the incomprehensible logic of algorithms, Netflix thought I might be interested in watching a film called Turner & Hooch. How it arrived at this decision based upon my late night viewing of Dr. Who: City of Death I’ll never know, but the thought of watching a 1 hour and 39 minute buddy cop comedy starring Tom Hanks and a slobbering Bordeaux Mastiff left me very, very limp.
And, for reasons that are also unclear, wide awake.
As I lay sleepless in bed, wondering both what to watch next and how a major streaming platform could so swiftly insult my taste in programming, my thoughts shifted to a very different Turner & Hooch combination: Mr. Hanks was replaced in my mind by glamour girl Lana Turner and the enormous dog by the family-sized bottle of bourbon I had on the shelf of my little bar, so I got up and poured myself a drink.
If I had to think about Turner and Hooch, it was going to be on my terms. And my terms generally involve cocktails.
As I nursed my whiskey, I started to dig into the life of Miss Turner for a bit of amusement, and was surprised to discover that homicide helped propel her celebrity trajectory, both directly and indirectly.
And not once, but twice.
On December 14th, 1930, having won some money at a craps game in San Francisco, Lana Turner's father John stuffed his winnings into his left sock, but never made his way home. He was found bludgeoned to death near the corner of Mariposa and Minnesota Streets, his left shoe and sock missing. His murder was never solved.
Lana and her mother moved out of the city, bouncing around various other towns until finally landing in Los Angeles, where she famously skipped her high school typing class one afternoon to get a soda at the Top Hat Cafe, was discovered by the publisher of The Hollywood Reporter, and began turning heads in her very first film by wearing a very tight sweater and getting bumped off in 1937’s They Won’t Forget.
The second, more famous murder happened nearly 28 years later when Miss Turner’s 14 year-old daughter, Cheryl, fatally stabbed her mobster lover, Johnny Stompanato.
Stompanato was a handsome, but abusive creep who served as bodyguard for gangster Mickey Cohen. An extremely jealous man, he once flew to Britain, where Miss Turner was filming Another Time, Another Place with Sean Connery. Suspecting his girlfriend of having an affair with the future James Bond, Stompanato drew a gun on him, which resulted in Mr. Connery taking the weapon and inflicting just enough pain to cause him to run from the set.
On the evening of April 4th (Good Friday), 1958, as he and Turner argued in her Beverly Hills bedroom, things turned more violent than usual. Cheryl heard her mother's lover threaten to kill her, ran to the kitchen, and returned with a large knife which she proceeded to use upon his midsection multiple times. The trial, at which some people say Turner gave "the performance of her career", was one of the most sensational of the 1950's. Stompanato's murder was ruled a justifiable homicide.
The trail revitalized her career, making her an even bigger star in the late 1950's as a world-weary woman wronged than she had been in the 1940's as a tight sweatered bombshell.
Hollywood— it's murder, I tell you. Murder.
It’s enough to drive a person to drink.
The Stompanato
This cocktail is essentially an old fashioned, but with a bloody, bitter twist. It's a bit rough on the kidneys but, then again, so was that kitchen knife.
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