Where Are They Buried? (25 page)

At 49, Bob was found savagely beaten to death in a Scottsdale, Arizona, apartment. Though his swinging video-technician friend, John Carpenter, was a prime suspect, the police were never able to assemble a solid case. In 1994, realizing that the passage of time was jeopardizing their already tenuous case, the authorities decided to proceed with the circumstantial evidence and Carpenter was charged with Bob’s murder. But Carpenter was acquitted and Bob’s murder remains unsolved.

Bob was originally interred at a cemetery in Chatsworth, California, but twenty years after his death, the Crane family removed their beloved Bob and buried him at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Follow Wilshire Boulevard a half-mile east from I-405, then turn right onto Glendon Avenue. The
cemetery is immediately on the left. Or, you may want to park your car along Wilshire and walk to the cemetery behind the office complex at 10850 Wilshire Blvd.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Bob’s marker is in the central lawn of the cemetery. Counting from the drive bordering the top of the lawn, it’s in the fifth row, approximately in the middle.

MARCH 23, 1908 – MAY 10, 1977

Joan Crawford was a Broadway chorus-line dancer and progressed to Hollywood, where she found success in silent films. In 1928 she starred in
Our Dancing Daughters
as a flapper—that liberated, devil-may-care, flirtatious, high-society creature of the period—and the role catapulted her to major stardom.

She easily made the transition to “talkies” and the next two decades brought Joan a string of successes playing socialites and rags-to-riches shopgirls opposite many of the biggest male leads of the day. Her personal life mirrored her roles in some ways; Joan’s love affairs and public break-ups with the likes of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Clark Gable made gossip headlines. Perhaps her most brazen and scandalous tryst was with Franchot Tone, an involvement that found her in a love triangle with Bette Davis. Both women fancied themselves the sole object of Tone’s affections, yet Joan emerged victorious and married him. Marked by two miscarriages and frequent beatings, the marriage lasted just four years, with Joan finally divorcing Tone after she caught him and a young starlet in a compromising position.

Through the fifties, Joan’s career slowed and she was relegated to more menial roles, until 1962 when she starred with her arch-rival Bette Davis as a pair of nutty sisters, showbiz has-beens living in a decaying Hollywood mansion, in
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
The popular black comedy brought brief new life to each of their waning careers, afforded gossip journalists a field day, and reignited their old feud as well, prompting a remark from Joan that Davis had “slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie.”

The last years of Joan’s life were devoted to Christian Science and vodka, and she died of cancer at 69.

She is interred at Ferncliffe Mausoleum in Hartsdale, New York.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-87, take Exit 7 in Ardsley and follow Route 9A north for 1½ miles. Turn right onto Secor Road
at the traffic light, and the Ferncliffe Cemetery is a short distance on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter Ferncliffe at the first entrance, bear left, and park toward the left-hand side of the main mausoleum. Enter the mausoleum through the front bronze doors and turn left, right, left, left, and right. Joan is in Alcove E on the right in the Steele crypt, which was the name of her last husband.

FEBRUARY 8, 1931 – SEPTEMBER 30, 1955

The handsome and brooding actor James Dean had one of the most spectacularly brief careers of any screen star. In just more than a year and in only three films, James created a sensation and became an instantly recognizable image with his blue jeans, dangling cigarette, and characteristic slouch, personifying the restless American spirit of 1950s youth. Immortalized through at least a dozen biographies and songs, fan clubs, and a postage stamp, he’s deeply etched into American pop culture.

After growing up in Indiana’s farm country, James relocated with his father and stepmother to California in 1949 and attended Santa Monica City College, majoring in pre-law. But the only class in which James shined was drama, and he left after two semesters to live precariously as a parking-lot attendant, chasing auditions wherever they were available. After a few television commercials and bit film roles, young James took the advice of an actor’s workshop and in 1951 moved to New York in pursuit of a career. While earning a living as a busboy, he appeared in several television shows and landed parts in two Broadway plays.

The New York exposure paid off. In 1954, James won the role of troubled adolescent Cal Trask in the screen adaptation of John Steinbeck’s
East of Eden
, which shortly led to the swaggering James being cast in a new but similar role as the angst-ridden Jim Stark in 1955’s
Rebel Without a Cause
.

In March 1955 James celebrated the universal praise he was enjoying for his
East of Eden
role by purchasing his first Porsche, a 356 Super Speedster convertible. By June, he was an aspiring race-car driver, with three amateur road race events under his belt. When
Rebel
finished up that month, he met up in Texas with fellow cast members Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson
to shoot his third film,
Giant
. Again, James was directed to be charming but restless, this time as the tough, half-genius ranch hand, Jett Rink.

The day before filming was completed in September, James bought another Porsche, a silver 550 Spyder, and had the nickname he had earned on the set of
Giant
, “Little Bastard,” hand painted on its back end. Now with a bit of free time on his hands, James anticipated racing his new car and, at the end of the month, he and his mechanic, Rolf Wutherich, jumped in the Porsche and headed from Los Angeles to a race in Salinas.

But they never got there. James delighted in his new vehicle and along the way, he intermittently goosed the high-performance car up to its speed comfort zone. At 3:30 p.m., his driving caught the attention of a patrol officer who pulled the star over for driving in excess of 80 mph and warned him to slow down. But 2½ hours later, when James was traveling west on Route 466 just before the city of Cholame, he was speeding again when a Ford Tudor driving in the opposite direction with Donald Turnupseed at the wheel made a left turn onto Route 41 in front of him. The impact was direct and the Porsche was demolished. Rolf suffered serious injury and Donald walked away with only superficial harm, but James was dead on arrival at Paso Robles Memorial Hospital.

Less than a month later,
Rebel Without a Cause
opened in New York City, and the James Dean legend was born.

At just 24, James was buried at Park Cemetery in Fairmount, Indiana.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-69, take Exit 55 and follow Route 26 west for five miles. Make a right turn onto Main Street and the cemetery is a half-mile on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery at the entrance after the culvert, bear right at the fork and take the next right. At the crest of the hill, James’s grave is on the right.

Rolf Wutherich died in another traffic accident in 1981. Donald Turnupseed passed away of cancer in 1995.

DECEMBER 5, 1901 – DECEMBER 15, 1966

From his fertile imagination and factory of drawing boards, Walt Disney, himself only a mediocre artist, turned
animation into an art form and in Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck fashioned the most popular stars ever to come out of Hollywood. His film company became
the
provider of family entertainment, and from the base that Walt built, Disney Studios has grown into one of the most successful film companies in the world.

Walt first scored big in 1928 when he and long-time associate Ub Iwerks developed Mickey Mouse. The first two Mickey shorts were silent and for the third, which featured sound, Walt himself provided Mickey’s squeaky voice. With
The Three Little Pigs
he was the first to gamble on Technicolor’s expensive new three-color system and, after testing animation’s appeal in a full-length format with
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
, he quickly followed with
Pinnochio
,
Dumbo
, and
Bambi
. Every film required the creation of new, lovable, and unsophisticated cartoon characters and Walt created nearly all of them.

In the fifties, Walt diversified from animation and produced live-action films like
Treasure Island
and
Old Yeller
. Later, his visionary and wildly successful amusement parks perpetuated the Disney magic.

In November 1966 Walt’s cancer-ridden left lung was removed but, within a month, at 65 he succumbed to the disease anyway. Walt rarely attended funerals and no announcement was made for his own, which was attended only by relatives. The secrecy initiated a rumor that Walt, instead of being buried, was encased in a deep-freeze cryogenic vault to await a cure for his lung cancer, at which time he’d be thawed and resume living. But such stories are pure fantasy. Walt was cremated and his ashes interred at ground temperature at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From Highway 2, take the San Fernando Road exit and turn northwest. After a mile, make a right onto Glendale Avenue and the park’s entrance is immediately on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Stop at the booth for a map of the cemetery’s roads, then drive to the Freedom Mausoleum. Walt’s plot is in the garden just to the left of the Freedom Mausoleum’s main entrance. His marker, you’ll see, is quite cleverly positioned and visible only when you’re standing on the mausoleum’s front steps.

OCTOBER 19, 1945 – MARCH 6, 1988

Harris Glenn Milstead, better known by his stage name and alter ego, Divine, was a drag queen and a high-profile character in the overwrought gay culture of the sixties and seventies. With Divine as the star and neighborhood pal John Waters directing, a series of films that crossed every taboo and charted an exceedingly bizarre course of self-expression bred a distinctly new genre that, even by underground standards, was intensely offbeat.

Dreamland Studios, the production company that Waters operated out of a basement, churned out about a dozen shorts and features that quickly enjoyed the status of cult classics. Perhaps their crowning achievement was 1972’s
Pink Flamingoes
, the premise of which is that Divine, as Babs Johnson, is in a competition of sorts to prove she is the dirtiest person alive. Film history is made in the final scene when Divine eats dog feces on camera—straight from the dog, without any edits.

By 1988 Divine and Waters had toned their work down a few notches and the mainstream release,
Hairspray
, won critical acclaim. Divine, however, failed to enjoy this breakthrough as he died in his room at the Regency Hotel in Los Angeles of an enlarged heart caused by obesity.

At 42, Divine was buried at Prospect Hill Cemetery in Towson, Maryland.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-695, take Exit 26A and follow Route 45 (York Road) south for a mile. The cemetery is on the left. The entrance comes up quick as you crest a steep hill and be careful turning into it.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Follow the drive to the lower area of the cemetery and stop when you see on your left an old set of stairs that lead back to the upper area. Opposite those stairs, in the lawn on the right and about 30 feet off the pavement, is Divine’s grave.

SEPTEMBER 16, 1927 – JUNE 23, 2011

Actor Peter Falk rose to fame in a rumpled raincoat as the polite and absent-minded, dumb-as-a-fox, one-eyed
detective who outwitted high-society murder suspects at their perfect-crime game for some 35 years on the television program
Columbo
.

The glass eye was the result of a cancerous tumor when he was just three years old, but despite the missing eye Peter was a standout on his high school baseball team. After bouncing around at a few colleges and serving a stint with the Merchant Marines after WWII, he went to work as an efficiency expert for the State of Connecticut, though on his first day of work he couldn’t find his building so his boss had to retrieve him at the local post office. “Oh, I was some efficiency expert,” he recalled.

It was in Hartford that he began acting, joining an amateur troupe called the Mark Twain Masqueraders, and in short time moved to New York to pursue the craft fulltime. On Broadway he was cast as the bartender in a revival of
The Iceman Cometh,
and his first on-screen splash was as Abe Reles, a vicious mob hit man in the film
Murder, Inc
for which he earned an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.

In 1968, Bing Crosby turned down the role of Columbo in the television film
Prescription Murder,
and fate came knocking for Peter who delivered a unique spin to the character. “I was attracted to the idea of playing a character that housed within him two opposing traits,” he said. “On the one hand he was a regular Joe Six-Pack, the neighbor like everybody else. But at the same time, he’s the greatest homicide detective in the world. That’s a great combination, and you can do a lot with that combination.” Besides the lead character, the other appeal of the show was that its structure was unlike that of any previous mystery program. In traditional “whodunits,” the audience works side-by-side, gathering clues in tandem with the sleuth, but the
Columbo
creators showed both criminal and crime in great detail during the opening scenes. It was then up to Columbo to stumble on the scene and figure out how it had happened—something viewers already knew. “What are you hanging around for?” Peter, addressing viewers, wrote in his memoir. “Well, just one thing—you want to know how he gets caught.”