Where Are They Buried? (27 page)

Worn out at 50, Errol died in Canada under dubious circumstances, supposedly while having sex with a teenaged lover.

Before Errol was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, friends slipped a bottle of whiskey into his coffin.

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, get a map, drive to the Freedom Mausoleum and walk up to the courts. Errol’s grave is in the Garden of Everlasting Peace, opposite the garden’s entrance, in the grass near the wall.

DECEMBER 9, 1922 – OCTOBER 11, 1991

The cantankerous Redd Foxx is best remembered as the irascible junk dealer Fred Sanford in the 1970s television series
Sanford and Son
. Before he made it on television, though, Fred had a long career as a very “blue” stand-up comedian. In the tell-it-like-it-is style that hallmarked his personality, he was one of the first to broach the taboo topics of sex, race, and religion on more than 50 of his own “party records”—spoken comedy with no music—a genre he originated in 1956.

As Fred Sanford he often feigned heart attacks, so when he collapsed of a real heart attack while filming a new series, the people on the set initially thought he was joking. It was no joke—Redd was dead at 68 and is buried at Palm Memorial Park in Las Vegas, Nevada.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-515, take Exit 73, follow Eastern Avenue south for 8½ miles. The cemetery is on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and immediately on your left will be an island, a drive, and a lawn area, the Garden of Devotion. From the drive, count nineteen rows into the lawn and there, 50 yards from Eastern Avenue, is Redd’s grave.

FEBRUARY 1, 1901 – NOVEMBER 16, 1960

OCTOBER 6, 1908 – JANUARY 16, 1942

Clark Gable and Carole Lombard epitomized that most allegorical picture of marital bliss, two famously gorgeous people sharing the world as their oyster in the fullest and most fortuitous time of their lives.

Carole’s start in show business came when she was twelve; a natural rough-and-tumble tomboy, she played a mischievous spitfire in a 1921 silent film. By sixteen, she had seven credits on her silent film resume but after suffering extensive facial injuries in a near-fatal 1926 automobile accident, her film contract was cancelled. Within two years, scar tissue on her face had lightened considerably and, with a lot of camouflaging makeup, she returned to the big screen.

Meanwhile, across town lived Clark Gable, a struggling actor with big ears and little visible talent who for a dozen years had honed his craft in minor roles, dreaming of the day he’d make it big. After working together briefly in 1932 on the set of
No Man of Her Own
, Clark and Carole began a friendly and eventually romantic offscreen relationship while, during those Depression-era years, both of their careers raced for the stratosphere.

Clark found his springboard to superstardom in 1934 with an Oscar-winning role in a comedy opposite Claudette Colbert,
It Happened One Night
. Carole, a more natural and steady talent, earned her fan base through a long string of solid performances. In March 1939 Clark and Carole were wed during a break in the filming of Clark’s latest movie,
Gone with the Wind
.

The newlyweds settled in the relatively rural San Fernando Valley and balanced high-profile public appearances with a country-style personal life. Following the entrance of the United States into World War II, Clark was made chairman of the Hollywood Victory Committee and he arranged for Carole to headline a War Bond rally. But on January 16, 1942, the 33-year-old Carole, her mother Elizabeth, and 21 others were killed when their airplane crashed into Mount Potosi, 30 miles outside of Las Vegas. Clark drove to the crash site and, after a search for his beloved’s body, Carole and Elizabeth were interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

Clark was devastated and felt absolute responsibility for Carole’s death as he had arranged the tour. Perhaps to blunt his grief and guilt, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and served out his time as a tail-gunner. After the war, he returned to Hollywood to make a number of undistinguished films and in 1960, Clark signed on to the making of a “modern Western,”
The Misfits
. During filming, he performed several grueling stunt scenes with wild horses that perhaps proved too much; on November 16, 1960, just two days after completing the film, Clark died of a heart attack. At 59, he was interred alongside Carole and her mother.

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:
Get a map at the information booth and make your way to the Great Mausoleum. Except for a small area where the public is invited inside to view a slide show, this enormous mausoleum is closed to the public. But as it turns out, that inch of invitation yields just enough of a toehold for you to see where Clark, Carole, and Elizabeth lie.

Walk into the mausoleum, tell the woman at the booth that you’d like to see the Last Supper slide show that’s offered at regular intervals throughout the day, and she’ll direct you to the area where it’s shown. Once there, you’ll see an entrance on the right that leads into the Columbarium of Prayer. If you look in there you can see the Sanctuary of Trust. There will be a sign in the entrance that states the area is restricted to property owners so at this point, you’re on your own. Clark, Carole, and Elizabeth are in that Sanctuary of Trust, on the left wall at waist height about halfway into the first room.

Remember, this is private property and there are cameras around (in fact the woman in the booth has surveillance monitors at her disposal). Really, it’s not worth it to trespass and there’s not much to see anyway, just three plain nameplates.

SEPTEMBER 18, 1905 – APRIL 15, 1990

The photophobic and reclusive Greta Garbo began her career as a model for a department store, then moved into film during its silent era, in her native Sweden. In 1925, Mauritz Stiller, an acclaimed director who had been mentoring Garbo, was offered a Hollywood contract by MGM that he accepted on the condition that the unproven and inexperienced Garbo be offered a contract as well, so taken was he with her talent. MGM agreed and at just nineteen Garbo came to the States.

In 1925 Garbo began shooting her first MGM film,
The Torrent
, and with breathtaking incandescence, revealed to the studio’s executives the exciting qualities that Stiller had recognized. The camera loved her from any angle, and she projected an intoxicating eroticism. Stiller, though, was finished. MGM replaced him and he returned to Sweden, where he died two years later.

After a few more silent films, Garbo debuted in a “talkie” in 1930,
Anna Christie
, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. She was thrilled that she’d successfully made the transition to sound in a language not even her own. During the next several years, Garbo’s work was distinguished by increasingly intense performances and in 1935 she gave the performance of her life in
Anna Karenina
, playing the title role of a woman torn between her lover and her son.

Never a publicity hound, Garbo defied Hollywood convention by refusing to sign autographs or grant interviews. In fact, she would not even attend her own premieres and her studio never managed to obtain her telephone number. Never married (she once stood up John Gilbert at the altar), her sexual orientation was ambiguous and Garbo herself may have deliberately fed the rumor mill by juxtaposing torrid affairs with her leading men with whispered liaisons involving beauties of her own gender. Of course, the more reclusive the actress became, the more her public wanted to know about her private life—but Greta was unyielding.

By 1941 though, it was all over. Greta’s last film was
Two-Faced Woman
, a domestic comedy that flopped. The Swedish Sphinx gradually withdrew into an isolated retirement. In virtual seclusion for the next 50 years, she painted, gardened, wrote poetry, followed a daily exercise routine, and most determinedly, perpetuated the Garbo mystique from her Manhattan
home. Appearance and interview requests never let up, but Garbo never wavered.

At 84, Garbo died of natural causes and was cremated. For almost ten years, her ashes remained in an urn entrusted to her sole heir, but in 1999, they were buried at Woodland Cemetery (Skogskyrkogarden) in Sweden, which is on the southern city limits of Stockholm. Marked by a beautiful and elegant, sandstone-like slab simply inscribed, “Greta Garbo,” her ashes are now eternally alongside her parents.

DECEMBER 24, 1922 – JANUARY 25, 1990

The dark and sultry Ava Gardner was a popular actress of the 1950s and ’60s and her catalog includes memorable roles in 61 classic movies including
Mogambo
, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award,
The Sun Also Rises
, and
Showboat
.

But despite her accomplishments as an actress, Ava was better known for her offscreen whirlwind marriages and high-profile romances with the days’ most coveted men, not all of them single. At just nineteen she wed Mickey Rooney, but they divorced within a year. Two years later, Ava and bandleader Artie Shaw went to the altar, but with Artie as with Mickey, a year together proved to be plenty and the couple split up. Ava’s next romance made for wonderful tabloid fodder as whisperings of a torrid affair with the then-married Frank Sinatra eventually proved true. Sinatra divorced his wife and married Ava, but after three years of tumult and three years of separation, this union also ended.

Ava moved to Madrid in 1958. She had discovered Spain’s allures while filming
The Barefoot Contessa
in 1954, and at her new retreat she dated high-profile playboys and matadors. Ava’s last major film was
The Night of the Iguana
in 1964, and in 1968, Ava moved to London. She lived the remainder of her life there, only occasionally returning to the U.S. to act in one minor role or another. A notable but short-lived role of that era was as Ruth Galveston, the manipulative matron on
Knot’s Landing
, a popular 1980s nighttime soap opera.

Ava suffered a stroke in 1989, and the next year died of pneumonia at 67.

She was buried at her family’s plot at Sunset Memorial Park in her hometown of Smithfield, North Carolina.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-95, take Exit 95 and follow Business Route 70 west for 2¼ miles, at which point Sunset Memorial Park will be on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and at the “T” make a left turn and stop. On the right is a cement walk, and at the end of this walk is Ava’s plot.

FEBRUARY 26, 1916 – JUNE 25, 1987

Growing up in a downtrodden Brooklyn neighborhood, Jackie Gleason hung with the Nomads, an “athletic club” one knife fight away from being a street gang, and there he developed a keen flair for rough verbal play, sharp dress, and virtuoso pool playing. Upon being orphaned at sixteen, during the Depression, those street smarts were his sole asset, and he used them to finagle himself a position as master of ceremonies at a vaudeville house. That gig led to others, and for the better part of the next twenty years Jackie jumped from one opportunity to another in a continuous search for a berth that might perfectly suit his professional persona. He worked as an emcee, a carnival barker, and a bouncer; he was a house comic and a disc jockey; he landed bit roles on Broadway and minor parts in Hollywood films; but by 1950 he’d plateaued and was at a crossroads.