In Lana Turner’s Bedroom

'We get a lot of people knocking,' said the woman who opened the door to the house on North Bedford Drive. 'I usually don't let them in. Some of them are really crazy—people write letters to Lana Turner here saying they're in love with her, and they don't even know she's dead.'

The place was a broad, white, colonial-style mansion, set back from the road by a crescent-shaped driveway (it had been built for the actress Laura Hope Crews with the proceeds from playing Aunt Pittypat in Gone with the Wind). Large drops of rain fell from dizzying black palm trees, and a newspaper lay drenched on the ground.

The woman led me into the hallway. 'Here's the kitchen,' she said, sweeping her arm through a doorway to the left as if showing off a piece of real estate. 'This was just redecorated recently. The murder weapon's still in the house somewhere.'

'What do you mean?' I said. 'It was taken in evidence, wasn't it?'

'Yeah, but when they'd finished with it they gave it back. I mean, it belonged to my stepfather. This is his house. It was his knife.' Her stepfather, who was now dead, had rented the house to Lana Turner. It now belonged to the woman's mother, and she had been living there for a while with her children.

There was a strong smell as soon as you walked in—a woody, smoky-sweet, cigar box smell. A large nineteenth-century oil painting hung on the wall in the hallway, and there was a suit of armour standing in the corner of the living room. Mixed in with this antebellum feel were traces of other times—the one I was looking for (the white leather bar stools Lana had sat on while drinking her inalienable vodkas, the make-up mirror with a lightbulb frame that stretched along an entire wall) and the present era that had all but recorded over it: a child's lunch box deposited at the foot of the stairs; two girls, the woman's daughters, watching TV on Lana's old bed ('a bedspread went missing you know, and never came back,' said the woman, who was not yet born then, about the famous crime). The chaise longue, visible in crime-scene photos next to the corpse, had been reupholstered in dark pink damask and moved to another corner.

I asked why her stepfather hadn't changed more of the decor after the murder. 'Well, it was his furniture,' she said, in the casually proprietary tone she'd used when speaking of the weapon. 'She only lived here for a few months. Why would he change anything?'

I stood in that room as one who has been party to a failed seance. The subject was slippery; there was no knowing Lana Turner now. She was dead, and worse—she was a fiction. I don't mean that she never lived—only that she lived as if she were in a movie.