The Whole Death Catalog

by Harold Schechter

  ADDRESS: 1712 S. Glendale Avenue

  Glendale, CA 91205

  HOURS: 8 A.M.–5 P.M. daily

  TEL.: 323-478-2339

  9. HOLLYWOOD FOREVER,

  Hollywood, California

  Founded in 1899—a dozen years before the pioneers of the nascent film industry began setting up shop in southern California—Hollywood Memorial Park (as it was originally called) became the preferred final resting place for the early stars and moguls of the silent screen. With the advent of Forest Lawn, however, the older cemetery lost much of its cachet and eventually declined into one of those sad relics of former Tinsel-town glamour, like the Brown Derby restaurant or the character played by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. It hit its nadir in the mid-1990s when it fell into bankruptcy and lost its license to sell its remaining plots. Some families—alarmed at the sorry state of the increasingly decrepit graveyard—went so far as to disinter their loved ones and bury them elsewhere. Fortunately for film lovers and taphophiles alike, this historic cemetery was saved by a pair of farsighted funeral home entrepreneurs, the Cassity brothers of Forever Enterprises, who bought it for a song in 1998 and set about restoring it to its former glory.

  Among the many Hollywood legends who repose on its grounds are Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Cecil B. DeMille, and Jesse Lasky, founder of Paramount Pictures. Other permanent residents include such minor (but intriguing) figures as Virginia Rappe (the victim at the center of the notorious Fatty Arbuckle murder trial, one of the most sensational criminal cases of the Roaring Twenties); the beloved cowlick-sporting Little Rascal, Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer, shot dead in a sordid altercation over $50; and William Randolph Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies.

  In contrast to Forest Lawn—whose “Builder” regarded headstones as a blight on the landscape—Hollywood Forever is also graced with some exceptional mortuary markers, including a monument shaped like a rocket ship and the tombstone of the inimitable Mel Blanc, who provided the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and countless other classic cartoon characters and whose epitaph reads: “That’s All Folks.”

  ADDRESS: 6000 Santa Monica Boulevard

  Hollywood, CA 90038

  HOURS: 8 A.M.–5 P.M. daily

  TEL.: 323-469-1181

  10. HOPE, Bar re, Vermont

  This 85-acre cemetery was established in 1895 when it became clear that the town’s original graveyard, Elmwood, was about to reach its limit. The burial place of choice for the town’s large population of immigrant Italian stonecutters, Hope features hundreds of stunning monuments carved from its world-famous granite. Among its sculptural highlights are a half-size replica of a racing car, a biplane on its way to the heavens, an enormous soccer ball, an upholstered armchair, and a set of twin beds with the pajama-clad husband-and-wife occupants sitting up and holding hands. (For a good online guide to the various monuments, go to www.central-vt.com/visit/cemetery/.

  Hope Cemetery Memorials: chair, car, soccer ball, and marriage bed. Courtesy of Jim Eaton.

  ADDRESS: 201 Maple Avenue, Barre, VT

  05641 (entrance on Merchant Street)

  HOURS: Daily, dawn to dusk

  TEL.: 802-476-6245

  RECOMMENDED READING

  To learn more about these and many other outstanding burial sites, check out the excellent series of illustrated guidebooks by Judi Culbertson and Tom Randall, Permanent Parisians (Cheslea Green, 1986), Permanent New Yorkers (Chelsea Green, 1987), Permanent Californians (Chelsea Green, 1989), Permanent Londoners (Chelsea Green, 1991), and Permanent Italians (Walker and Co., 1996).

  Legends of Père-Lachaise

  A place as creepily atmospheric as Père-Lachaise is bound to spawn all kinds of bizarre urban legends. In This Must Be the Place (Collier, 1989), his engaging memoir of Paris in the 1920s, Jimmie Charters—bartender at the famed Montparnasse watering hole The Dingo—recalls a regular named Leaming, a mysterious American who “loved to tell weird stories which he always insisted were true.”

  One of the weirdest involved a beautiful Russian princess who had escaped the revolution with a fortune in jewels and settled in Paris in 1919. When she died just two years later at the age of twenty-five, she left “a most curious bequest.”

  “It provided,” claimed Leaming, “that a large vault should be built in Père-Lachaise cemetery She herself was to be placed, totally nude, in a coffin made entirely of glass. The coffin was to be sealed hermetically in such a way that her body would be preserved in perfect condition for many years” and arranged in an upright position so that the body would appear “to be that of a lovely woman standing in a natural way.” The remainder of the vault was to be “furnished with a fine bed, table, bookshelves and books, and even a bath with running hot and cold water.”

  The strangest part of the story, however, was yet to come. As Leaming explained to his rapt barroom audience:

  Her fortune of well over a million francs is left to a man who shall pass one entire year within the vault, along with the lovely ivory-skinned lady. He will not be alone, for her eyes are wide open and they seem to follow one to every part of the room. During that year, the lucky man is to have whatever he chooses in the way of books and phonograph records; he may work on sculpture, painting or writing, anything he chooses. He may have what materials he likes. There is no window in the vault, but ample air and light is provided by a skylight. In the door is a small sliding passage by which his food will be brought to him three times a day. He may order of his heart’s desire of meat or drink. The lucky man will even be allowed to take half an hour’s exercise in a garden nearby which is closed to everyone except himself and his guard. He may not speak to the guard, for the latter is deaf and dumb.

  There was one other crucial feature of the vault, said Leaming: an electric buzzer near the door. “The man who lives there has but to push the button and at once the guard will come, open the door, and give him his liberty. But of course, if he leaves before the end of one year, he forfeits his claim to the inheritance.”

  According to Leaming—who insisted that he might take up the challenge himself—only two men had made the attempt, “a Dutchman who stayed two months and later went insane” and a Russian who lasted only one night before fleeing.

  “Both said that the terrible part was the night, in the dark,” reported Leaming, “when the body of the nude girl seemed to take on a luminous quality”

  ASK DR. DEATH

  Dear Dr. Death:

  In reading the discussion of Hollywood Forever Cemetery, I was shocked to learn that Carl Switzer—the beloved, cowlicked Alfalfa of Our Gang fame—was “shot dead in a sordid altercation over $50.” Can you elaborate?

  Devastated Alfalfa Fan

  Dear Devastated:

  Certainly. Once his Our Gang days were over in 1940, Switzer had a spotty career, landing bit parts in various movies, including Lassie, It’s a Wonderful Life, and The Defiant Ones. He also popped up occasionally on TV, appearing a few times on The Roy Rogers Show, where he reprised the comical off-key singing that had endeared the character Alfalfa to millions. For the most part, however, he had become one of those Hollywood has-beens who are forced to scramble for ways to keep body and soul together. In Switzer’s case, he worked at various unglamorous jobs, including bartending. He also bred hunting dogs and hired himself out as a professional hunting guide.

  In January 1959, Switzer borrowed a dog from a friend, Moses “Bud” Stiltz. When the dog ran away, Switzer posted a $50 reward for its return. A few days later, someone found the dog and claimed the reward, which Switzer promptly forked over. It wasn’t long, however, before Switzer—a notoriously prickly personality who became even nastier when he drank—decided that Stiltz should reimburse him the $50. On the evening of January 21, a drunken Switzer showed up at Stiltz’s Mission Hills home and demanded the money. A violent quarrel ensued. It climaxed when Switzer drew a knife and charged Stiltz, who shot him in the belly with a handgun. Switzer died of blood loss o
n the way to the hospital at the age of thirty-two. Stiltz was ultimately acquitted, the incident being ruled a justifiable homicide.

  For more information about the depressing demise of Alfalfa and scores of other celebrities, see James Robert Parish’s The Hollywood Book of Death: The Bizarre, Often Sordid, Passings of More than 125 American Movie and TV Idols (McGraw-Hill, 2001).

  The Only Travel Book

  You’ll Ever Need

  (Assuming You Spend All

  Your Vacation Time

  Visiting Cemeteries)

  Making a pilgrimage to Graceland to stand in awe of Elvis’s collection of gold records, marvel at the magnificence of the Jungle Room, and stand reverentially at the King’s grave is, of course, part of the patriotic duty of every right-thinking American. But where do you go if you want to pay your respects to one of the lesser deities of rock and roll—Buddy Holly, say, or Roy Or-bison?

  DEATH DEFINITION: Taphophile

  ARE YOU THE KIND OF PERSON WHO LOVES TO SPEND YOUR FREE TIME TOURING CEMETERIES? ARE TOMB-stone rubbings your favorite genre of visual art? While other people devote themselves to ending hunger in Third World countries and promoting global peace, do you regard the preservation of old graveyards as the single worthiest cause a human being can embrace?

  If the answer to any or all of these questions is yes, then you are almost certainly a taphophile.

  A combination of the Greek words for “tomb” and “lover,” a taphophile is a person who has the same kind of passionate interest in graveyards that bibliophiles have in books, cinephiles in movies, and oenophiles in fine wines. Taphophiles love to study, read about, and visit cemeteries, often in the company of like-minded enthusiasts.

  If you’d like to get to know other taphophiles and maybe even join a club and organize group trips to various picturesque graveyards (an activity known in taphophile circles as “cemetery crawls”), there are any number of websites you can check out, including www.taph.com and www.alsirat.com/taphophile. Particularly good is www.thecemeteryclub.com, whose founders also publish a magazine for taphophiles, Epitaphs: The Magazine for Cemetery Lovers by Cemetery Lovers.

  Not to worry. Thanks to Tod Benoit, tireless tracker-down of the “final resting places of the famous, infamous, and noteworthy,” you can easily locate the burial sites not only of America’s greatest musicians but also of major figures in nearly every field of human endeavor.

  Organized into a dozen useful categories—including “Sports Heroes,” “Television and Movie Personalities,” “Baby Boomer Icons,” and “Greats of Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts”—Benoit’s comprehensive guide, Where Are They Buried? How Did They Die? (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2003), provides a capsule biography of each of its more than 450 subjects, along with details of his or her death and—best of all—precise directions for finding the gravesite.

  Let’s say that, like so many other people, you’ve always dreamed of visiting the grave of the beloved Stooge Jerome “Curly” Howard. Benoit will tell you how. (Proceed to Los Angeles’s Home of Peace Memorial Park at 4334 Whittier Blvd., just west of the intersection of I-5 and I-710. Then “enter the park, bear right, take the next right and the next left. Stop on the drive about 100 feet before it makes an abrupt left. On the curb to the right are markers for the Western Jewish Institute. Jerome’s stone can be found five rows back.”) Want to pay your respects to Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling? You’ll find him at Lakeview Cemetery in Interlaken, New York, north from town on Route 96, then east on County Road 150. “Enter the cemetery and bear right at the first two forks. Go past the concrete holding house on the left, turn right at the four corners, and stop at the twin cedar trees on the left. A hundred feet further left is the flat stone that marks Rod’s grave.”

  Though Benoit’s book is a must-have for every serious dead-celebrity sightseer, another indispensable resource is the Find a Grave website (www.findagrave.com). Although its biographical entries are briefer and its burial plot directions not as obsessively precise, Find a Grave will tell you where to find the graves of more than fifty thousand deceased notables, divided into more than thirty categories—everything from actors to architects, magicians to Medal of Honor recipients, Supreme Court justices to organized crime figures. (Benoit will tell you exactly where to find the graves of Al Capone and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, but if you have a hankering to see the final resting place of “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn—one of the perpetrators of the St. Valentine’s Massacre—you’ll have to consult Find a Grave.)

  OTHER RECOMMENDED READING

  Besides Benoit’s book, other fine, somewhat more specialized guides are available to the dedicated necrotourist. These include James Dean Died Here: The Locations of America’s Pop Culture Landmarks (Santa Monica, 2003) by Chris Epting; Hollywood Remains to Be Seen: A Guide to the Movie Stars’ Final Homes (Cumberland House, 2001) by Mark J. Masek; Stairway to Heaven: The Final Resting Places of Rock’s Legends (Wener, 2005) by J. D. Reed and Maddy Miller; and The Tombstone Tourist: Musicians (Pocket, 2003) by Scott Stanton.

  Cemetery Shopping Tips

  If you plan to be buried in the traditional way—as opposed to opting for some newfangled alternative such as cryonic preservation or getting turned into a synthetic diamond—it’s a good idea to purchase a cemetery plot well in advance of your demise. By doing so, you will spare your grieving survivors a lot of last-minute stress when they’re least capable of coping. You will also save your family a significant amount of money. According to experts, a plot purchased “pre-need” can be half the price of what the same piece of real estate will cost when it’s urgently required—that is, when the purchasers are in no position to shop around for a better bargain.

  A TAPHOPHILIC TREAT FOR

  TITANIC TOURISTS

  If you’re a serious Titanic buff—or a hard-core fan of James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster—you’ll certainly want to make a pilgrimage to Fairview Lawn Cemetery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the final resting place of more than one hundred people who died aboard the doomed luxury liner.

  As viewers of the movie know, drowning was not the only cause of death when the Titanic went down. Some passengers and crew members—kept afloat by life preservers—died of exposure in the frigid water. In the days immediately following the disaster, several ships were dispatched from the nearest port city, Halifax, to retrieve whatever bodies could be found. Altogether, 328 corpses—men, women, and 2 children—were recovered. Of those, 119 were buried at sea. The rest were brought back to Halifax, where they were embalmed by volunteer undertakers from around the Maritime Provinces.

  Fifty-nine of these Titanic victims were shipped back home for burial. The remaining 150 were interred in three Halifax graveyards: 10 bodies in the Jewish cemetery, Baron de Hirsch; 19 in the Catholic cemetery, Mount Olivet; and 121 in the nondenominational cemetery, Fairview Lawn. The plots and simple gravestones were paid for by the doomed ship’s owner, the White Star Line.

  In choosing a cemetery, there are a number of questions to ask yourself. To begin with, in what manner of graveyard do you wish to spend your decomposing years? The two main types are the traditional cemetery with upright gravestones and the memorial park as pioneered by Forest Lawn—the kind whose expansive lawns are free of unsightly tombstones and that rely instead on ground-level bronze markers to signify the presence of departed loved ones.

  Next, as with all real estate purchases, you must consider the issue of location. A cemetery adjoining a suburban industrial park in Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, is likely to charge less for a grave than one located on a beautiful hilltop with a sweeping view of San Francisco Bay.

  Similarly, plots within a given cemetery often vary significantly according to location. A grave near a piece of sculpture, a fountain, or some other special feature of the cemetery will almost certainly be more expensive than one in a “nonfeature section” (to use the lingo of the trade). The question to consider is: Do you really want to shell out all that extra money for the
privilege of spending eternity in the vicinity of a half-size replica of Michelangelo’s David—particularly when you will be spending it as a decayed mass of organic matter encased within a tightly sealed container several feet underground?

  If the cemetery features an aboveground mausoleum, you might want to consider it as an alternative to earth burial, particularly if you, like so many people, have an aversion to the thought of ending up as subterranean worm fodder. Being entombed in a nice, clean, dry mausoleum crypt is generally no more expensive than traditional burial since it eliminates the various fees involved with the opening and closing of a grave, as well as the cost of a tombstone or other memorial marker.

  As with all other major purchases, it’s incumbent on you to be an educated consumer. Find out who owns and manages the cemetery, if there is an endowment care fund for the perpetual maintenance of the premises, and what the various ancillary costs of burial amount to. Grave-shopping mavens agree that it’s wise to pay a personal visit to any prospective cemeteries so you can tour the property and check out its condition for yourself. If you find, for example, that a particular cemetery is distinguished by its blighted trees, badly overgrown plots, and vandalized tombstones defaced with swastikas, you’ll probably want to pass on it.

  RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

  For solid information on cemetery shopping, check out the Consumer Resource Guide compiled by the International Cemetery and Funeral Association at www.icfa.org/cemeteries.htm. The Alton Memorial Sales Company of Alton, Illinois, also maintains a very informative site at www.altonmemorialsales.com/faq.htm. A brisk, seven-step guide, “How to Purchase a Cemetery Plot,” can be found online at www.ehow.com/how_3461_buy-cemetery-plot.html.