A Murder in Hollywood by Casey Sherman

Author:Casey Sherman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks

CHAPTER NINETEEN

JOHN STEELE

Like any good hood, Johnny Stompanato carried several aliases. To some, he was Johnny Valentine, while others knew him as Thommie Valen. Eventually, he would introduce himself to Lana as John Steele. She would become his biggest score yet. But a budding thief doesn’t start his career planning to hit Fort Knox. Instead, Stompanato would have to start small and work his way up to seducing the silver screen’s most glamorous star.

Shortly after he arrived in Hollywood, Stompanato had met an attractive thirty-three-year-old actress named Helen Gilbert. With high cheekbones and blonde curls flowing over her shoulders, Gilbert, a musical prodigy from Wisconsin, was discovered while playing cello in the MGM studio orchestra.

“Why are you behind the camera instead of in front of it?” director Fred Wilcox, known for helming Lassie movies and Forbidden Planet, asked her.1

Gilbert’s first paid acting gig was a small role in another in the seemingly endless series of Andy Hardy movies starring Mickey Rooney. Her career was beginning to take off, and she was cast in the plum and soon-to-be iconic role of Glenda the Good Witch of the North in The Wizard of Oz. But the classically trained cellist turned actress had a wild streak. Soon after landing the role, Gilbert disappeared with Howard Hughes for several days. Frustrated studio executives were forced to recast the role with Billie Burke filling in as Glenda the Good Witch, and the rest is history.

As for Gilbert, she was suspended from the studio and eventually fired. She was down and out when she met Stompanato, eight years her junior, while still hoping to resurrect her Hollywood career. Eager for attention, she used her relationship with Stompanato to garner some much-needed ink in the press. Gilbert’s marriage to Stompanato was big enough news to secure a small item from the International News Service under the headline “Actress Weds.”2 Gilbert had called the news service from Las Vegas to announce that she had married Stompanato, whom she described as a “ceramics manufacturer.”

Gilbert herself was unsure as to her husband’s actual occupation. Their union lasted just five months before she filed for divorce. “During our short marriage, Stompanato had no visible means of support,” she told the judge.3 “I did what I could for him.”

But her husband was not destitute. In fact, he had plenty of money but could offer no explanation as to where it all came from. He was arrested in the spring of 1952 due to the fact that, according to a news report, “his pockets had too much jingle, jangle, jingle.”4 Members of the LAPD Intelligence Squad busted Stompanato at his luxurious rented home at 21110 Pacific Coast Parkway on the waterfront in Malibu. He had been under surveillance by police captain James Hamilton after he was seen driving around Hollywood in a shiny new Cadillac. When officers raided the palatial home, they recovered two pistols—a loaded .32-caliber automatic and a 7.65-mm Walther automatic. Stompanato also had $2,689.75 in cash tucked into his wallet.

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