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Lee is very much into cemeteries, and I like them, too. Los Angeles
has one of the most fascinating collections of famous stiffs anywhere
in the world, in about a dozen major graveyards, from the San
Fernando Mission (which has
Bob Hope) to Westwood (which has
Marilyn
Monroe). Some are accommodating and don't mind
thanato-tourism. Some
are uptight, like Forest Lawn, and won't help you find a particular
urn or hole in the ground. There are websites that will direct you,
though, and we decided to take a day off and stray a few blocks off
Sunset for a tour of the Hollywood ∞ Forever Cemetery, not far from
our apartment, which has some real superstars ... though no very
lively ones.
I hasten to add that Lee has been doing this for a long time, and is
less interested in famous corpses than in the monuments themselves.
She used to regularly haunt (so to speak) the pioneer cemetery in
Portland, where many of the people have streets named after them.
Still, it doesn't hurt to be walking among the stones and look down
and say,
"Hey! It's
Fay Wray!" (A very simple stone, just the name
and 1907 ∞ 2004.)
In the last ten years (we learned from a couple of guys from Orange
County whose family has a plot here) the place has come to be
dominated by Russians and Armenians and some Greek Orthodox. You see
a lot of those weird three-armed crucifixes, the
Slavonic Cross. These are people
who are not satisfied with a small stone set flush in
the ground. They like big ones, black stone, smooth, and very often
with photo-real pictures etched in them by some new process that
probably involves lasers. You have to be reminded of
2001: A Space Odyssey. But
when they cluster together it's more like a necropolitan Manhattan.
The place was opened in 1899, when there probably wasn't much in the
neighborhood but citrus groves and cow pastures. This was a decade
before the movie people came, but now the southern border is the
gigantic walls of the Paramount sound stages. Also, since this is an
old place, they had segregated neighborhoods. The southwest corner
is the Jewish ghetto. It's packed, and so is the long mausoleum that
borders Paramount and contains the mortal remains of
Benjamin "Bugsy"
Siegel. I suppose that's better than some places, where Jews weren't
welcome at all. But there were limits.
Hattie McDaniel wanted to be buried
there, but it was against the law to bury "colored" with whites. Not
that the owners would likely have welcomed her ... but in 1999 they
put up a nice monument, acknowledging that it was wrong, and
welcoming her there. Her survivors nixed the idea, not wanting to disturb her, but it was a nice thought.
Things are truly ecumenical now. There is no segregation, old graves
are mixed with new, Jews are with Christians. There is a separate
alcove, very pretty, for Thai Buddhist shrines, but I'm sure it's
because the Thais wanted it that way.
Some cemeteries are very strict, very uptight about what you do
around a grave. Only one small vase of flowers, for instance, and
they will be removed when they start to wilt. No plastic flowers
allowed. No erect headstones to get in the way of the lawnmowers.
Not here. I'm sure they must have some rules, but
they're pretty lax. They seem to recognize that different cultures
deal with death in different ways. What is gaudy and tasteless to
some is perfectly appropriate to another. Some graves seem to
explode with flowers. Some are massive edifices; you expect a garage
and a swimming pool. Then there are some simple wooden crosses.
Against the east wall is the hardest part to visit. There was a
narrow strip of land, not big enough for an adult coffin, and it
looks like the management decided to bury children there. About half
of them have Hispanic surnames, and I couldn't help but wonder if
the plots were donated.
This is not an inexpensive
cemetery. The wall is covered with ivy, and the ivy is covered with
plastic flowers and the ground is covered with toys and papers and
... well, just about anything you can imagine, as long as it's
bright. We encountered a young latina there with her two young boys.
Her third boy, killed in an accident, was a few feet away. I think
she came there frequently. Lee lost it, and I had a lump in my
throat, too. The headstones told the story. This one lived for 6
months, this one for 2 years, this one for 2 weeks ...
Onward
The grounds are full of birds, including a very aggressive, giant
white swan, a lot of black swans, big fearless geese, ducks, and a
few peacocks. All day long we heard the songs of mockingbirds.
Not as many famous people here as at stuffy Forest Lawn, but quite a
selection, and a lot easier to find. Here's the ones we found:
The biggest pile by far holds the bones of
Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.
and
Jr. "Good night, sweet princes, and may flights of angels sing
thee to thy rest." There's a brass profile of Sr., looking like a
Roman Emperor. I've often wondered if the size of the stone is
proportional to the size of the ego. Or the insecurity.
In a far corner is
Florence Lawrence, "The Biograph Girl," the first
movie star. Once she got her name into the credits of a film (the
actors used to be anonymous) the star system was born, and it became
possible for someone to become as famous as Fairbanks.
But no question, the star of the show is
Rudolph Valentino. He's in
one of the mausoleums, and as chance would have it, we were there on
the day after his birthday! Fans have been coming here for 80 years
after his death to honor him, and the piles of flowers were still
fresh from the day before. You have to figure that none of these
fans were even born when he kicked the bucket, in 1926. That's
stardom!
Favorite epitaphs:
Mel Blanc: That's all, Folks!
Joan Hackett: Go away – I'm asleep.
Marion Davies is here, and
Jayne Mansfield. So are
Darla Hood and
Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer.
Janet Gaynor, first Best Actress Oscar
winner. Fay Wray, who was 97.
Adolph Menjou.
Constance and
Norma Talmadge.
Victor Fleming, director of both
The Wizard of Oz
and
Gone With the Wind ... both in 1939! Amazing!
Charlie Chaplin's mother and son are both here.
John Huston and his
mother.
C.B. De Mille and
Harry Cohn, founder of
Columbia Pictures,
and their wives, in tombs that look very much alike.
Keeping up with
the mogul next door, I guess.
Tyrone Power provides a bench for his
guests to sit on. Thanks, Ty, I needed it!
Then there's
Iron Eyes Cody, the "Weeping Indian,"
Nelson Eddy,
Peter Finch,
Peter Lorre.
Eleanor Powell's ashes are in a bronze
book, as are many others. She is one of my two favorite female
dancers. (The other:
Cyd Charisse.)
Johnny Ramone (the former John
Cummings) has the coolest monument, laying down some heavy punk rock
on his guitar.
The second most notorious resident, after Bugsy, is probably
Virginia Rappe, who would not be remembered at all except that she
died at a party with
Fatty Arbuckle (possibly from a botched
abortion), and Roscoe was accused of raping and killing her. After
two hung juries
he was acquitted ... with a written apology from the
jury. But he had already been hung by a slander campaign from the
Hearst newspapers, and his career was over.
There's a lot of history in a graveyard. One part that doesn't show
is that
George Harrison was cremated here. It is rumored that his
ashes were scattered in the
Ganges, but I can't confirm that.
I made an astonishing and totally accidental discovery while we were
looking for
Charlie Chaplin's son. In a little niche, behind glass,
was a photo of a guy holding a helmet that, I was pretty sure, was
used in that awful serial from the '50s:
Radar Men From the
Moon. I had Lee take a picture because I couldn't read all
of the name on the other picture, just ORGE D. ACE. I went to the
IMDb and sure enough, it was
George D Wallace.
Commando Cody!
He died less than a year ago, and worked right up to "Joan of
Arcadia" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." 180 screen appearances and
... who do you suppose has 6th billing in Radar Men From the
Moon? Why, it's my old friend,
Peter Brocco!
Small world.
May 15, 2006