In Lana Turner’s Bedroom

'We don't talk to strangers [in Hollywood],' F. Scott Fitzgerald has his narrator say in The Last Tycoon, 'And when we do, we tell them lies so well rehearsed even we don't always recall if they're true.' The woman at North Bedford Drive told me that Lana had lived there for a few months and that the murder weapon had belonged to her stepfather. In fact Lana moved in only days before the murder and moved out the morning after the inquest—she lived there for less than two weeks; and she had bought the knife with Stompanato earlier that day—the coroner found the price tag still on it. But the woman who told me these things was reciting family lore, not misleading me. Telling tales is perhaps a more useful phrase than lying: stories are what Hollywood is made of, and the fact that there may be no final documented truth in this one only makes it more fitting—makes it all the more telling a tale. The producer Robert Evans put it this way: 'There are three sides to every story,' he wrote, 'yours...mine...and the truth. No one is lying. Memories shared serve each differently.'

Some idea of how information about the Stompanato murder has Chinese-whispered its way through the past half-century can be gleaned from this snippet about a crucial aspect of the crime: why there was so little blood around the body. Fred Otash's ghostwriter told Lana Turner's hairdresser that Otash had told him that Jerry Giesler had told him to 'get the hell over here' because 'the bed looks like somebody butchered a hog in it'. They then, reportedly, cleaned up the mess and mussed up the fingerprints. Is this 'evidence'? Of a sort. It's not that you give up on the facts, exactly, only that other kinds of information begin to sidle up to them, creating a new democracy of evidence.