In Lana Turner’s Bedroom

Lana Turner was a poor girl from Idaho who moved to Los Angeles with her mother after her father had been murdered in a gambling incident. She was famously, and apocryphally, 'discovered' in Schwab's soda fountain when she was sixteen. She became 'the sweater girl' then—a name she earned by wearing thinly lined bras beneath her jumpers—and died in 1995 at the age of seventy-five (or seventy-four, depending on whose version you believe) having spent the years in between living up to what she called her 'trademark' faculties: her platinum hair, her glossy pout, her pin-up's legs. Cheryl Crane recalled that she never saw her mother without make-up. Her roles reflected her life to a stunning degree—or perhaps it was vice versa—the drinking, the marriages, the mothering, the murders. There was always a touch of the simulacrum about her; she might stand for every star who ever changed her name or her looks—others were better dissemblers, but part of Lana Turner's fleshy vibrancy was that her roots, so to speak, were always showing.

After Stompanato's death there was a coroner's inquest instead of a trial, and Cheryl was found guilty of 'justifiable homicide'. She was made a ward of the court until the age of eighteen and released into the custody of her grandmother; the District Attorney announced that she had never had a 'real home'. The inquest was nationally televised, and Lana, who testified for over an hour, was widely said to have given the performance of her life. As a result, her career picked up again, and she was at her best playing a histrionic actress for Douglas Sirk in the aptly titled Imitation of Life.

One of the most curious things about her is how she built such an iconic career out of so little talent. But to say that she was a bad actress is to miss the point: overacting was naturalism to her. The morning after the inquest the Los Angeles Times ran an editorial sympathizing with Cheryl and what was thought to be her helpless hero-worship of Lana: 'In an unreal world,' it read, 'unreality is the only substance.'