Where Are They Buried? (32 page)

It was also in 1940 that Vivien and Laurence married, after they left their respective spouses. The couple acted together on
stage and film but, after miscarrying in 1944 and battling tuberculosis in 1945, Vivien became manic-depressive and their marriage became strained. As was customary for those times, Vivien underwent electroshock therapy to ease her depression, but the treatment seemed only to worsen her condition.

Because of her illnesses, Vivien appeared in only a handful of film and stage productions after
Gone With the Wind
. In 1951 she appeared on Broadway as Cleopatra in two separate shows, alternating nightly (Shakespeare’s
Antony and Cleopatra
and George Bernard Shaw’s
Caesar and Cleopatra
). But Vivien’s best-received work was in film, particularly
A Streetcar Named Desire
, in which she played another Southern belle, the aging Blanche DuBois, a touching role in light of Vivien’s own deteriorating mental health. For this she earned a second Academy Award.

Vivien never really shook the tuberculosis, and it plagued her repeatedly, recurring to varying degrees for the remainder of her life. By 1960, when Laurence was long gone, her condition had substantially worsened and she developed a persistent, hacking cough. But even then, perhaps due to the breakup of her marriage, Vivien tried to rejuvenate her stage career. Her illness, however, changed her from the Scarlett O’Hara audiences expected to see, and her coughing prompted numerous absences. In May 1967, Vivien suddenly began to lose weight and cough up blood. Her tuberculosis had advanced considerably and she was ordered on bed rest. Finally, Vivien was found on her bedroom floor, dead of the disease that had drowned her lungs in fluid.

At 53, Vivien was cremated and her ashes scattered over the waters of the mill pond at her estate, Tickerage, outside of London in Blackboys, England.

FEBRUARY 8, 1925 – JUNE 27, 2001

John Uhler Lemmon III was born in an elevator; his mother went into labor during a bridge match and the closest she got to the delivery room was the hospital lift. Jack’s father had high hopes that his anxious progeny would follow him into the doughnut business, but Jack was more interested in “the theayatuh,” as he called it.

After a stint in the Navy, he graduated from Harvard University in 1947, and immediately took off for the bright lights of New York, where he supported himself mainly by playing piano in a local saloon. Seven years later Jack nabbed his first Hollywood role in
It Should Happen to You
and, after an exceedingly steep learning curve, he played the anxious-to-please Frank Pulver in
Mister Roberts
the next year and won the Oscar, firmly establishing his career. Next came a string of fifteen comedies, including
Some Like It Hot
and
The Apartment
, but Jack ached to show what he could really do and, in 1962, he did; after his harrowing portrayal of an anguished, alcoholic husband in 1962’s
Days of Wine and Roses
, roles were Jack’s to pick and choose.

Though fans still seemed to love him most in comedic romps as one or another neurotic in anxious conflict with his better instinct, Jack’s style matured and he particularly found his center in 1973 when he portrayed the desperately cornered garment maker, Harry Stoner, in
Save the Tiger
. After Jack played the lead in
The China Syndrome
in 1979, he was universally admired. After he nailed the part of the washed-up real-estate hotshot Shelly “The Machine” Levine in the brilliantly dark
Glengarry Glen Ross
, he became a vivid and permanent part of American pop culture.

Jack’s vulnerability and wounded grace mirrored an uneasy generation’s passage from eager upward mobility to embittered confusion borne of age and social upheaval. His public identified with his dubious characters that crossed the line, and it’s hard to find anyone who flatly disliked him. His biographer summed it up nicely: “Everybody likes Jack. Attacking him would be like pulling a chair out from under your mother.”

Of complications from cancer, Jack died at 76 in the company of his family.

He was buried at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
This little cemetery holds numerous celebrities and is peculiarly located behind the office complex at 10850 Wilshire Blvd., just about a half-mile east of I-405.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn left at the office and, just after the chapel on the right, you’ll see Jack’s stone along the drive.

SEPTEMBER 14, 1914 – DECEMBER 28, 1999

MAY 26, 1918 – MARCH 5, 1980

Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels are infinitely better-known by their on-screen names: the Lone Ranger and Tonto from the long-running television series,
The Lone Ranger
. The show debuted in 1949 as a descendant of a hit radio program of the same name, and it was one of the first shows to be filmed exclusively for television. Its premise was that the Lone Ranger was the sole Texas Ranger to survive an ambush by the vicious Hole-in-the-Wall gang. With his identity protected by a mask and his loyal American-Indian sidekick Tonto by his side, the Lone Ranger exhibited unparalleled integrity and bravery as a maverick ridding the Old West of its outlaws.

Clayton hailed from Illinois and was offered the lead role after a stint as a high-flying aerialist in a circus troupe and working his way through the acting ranks into afternoon serials. Jay also had an athletic background; the full-blooded Mohawk Indian from Ontario had been a runner-up Golden Gloves boxing champion and played on the Canadian national lacrosse team. Upon landing in Hollywood in 1938, he secured work as a stuntman and extra, most of his roles earning him credit solely as “Indian.”

The Lone Ranger
ran for eight years and after its 1957 cancellation, Jay made occasional film appearances until he died of a heart attack in 1980, at 61. He was cremated and his ashes spread over the Six Nations of the Grand River Reserve near Brantford, Ontario.

Clayton never really gave up the role of the Lone Ranger when the series was cancelled. For the rest of his days, Clayton thrived on a self-made Lone Ranger cottage industry, making countless appearances in the famous black mask championing the TV character’s merits. In 1975, Jack Wrather, who actually owned the Lone Ranger rights, sued to prevent Clayton from making such personal appearances because a new Lone Ranger feature movie was in the
works and Clayton no longer personified the youthful hero. In a court compromise, Clayton was forbidden from wearing the mask and he instead resorted to equally ridiculous mask-like sunglasses. The movie bombed and ten years later, Clayton went back to wearing the real trademark mask.

In 1999, Clayton died of a heart attack at 85 and was buried 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:
Get a map at the information booth and proceed to the area of the Freedom Mausoleum. In front of the mausoleum is the walled Garden of Everlasting Peace. Walk into this garden and you’ll find Clayton’s grave in the top row of the big grass area in front of the Morgenroth statue.

OCTOBER 20, 1882 – AUGUST 16, 1956

Bela Lugosi was a serious and successful stage actor in his native Hungary for almost two decades before he moved to America in pursuit of a silent film career. In 1927 Bela garnered the lead in the Broadway production of
Dracula
, and three years later, Universal Pictures bought the rights. As the first huge horror hit of the sound era, the film
Dracula
was an instant sensation and the role made Bela, with his black cape, dark menacing eyes, and velvet voice, a star.

The next year Bela passed up an offer to play the lead role in
Frankenstein
and, unwittingly, gave Boris Karloff his big chance. From then on, the two actors were rivals for the public’s attention as heir to the horror genre throne that had been vacated with the passing of Lon Chaney. Over the next twenty years, Bela appeared in dozens of horror films, from
White Zombie
to
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
. While plenty of them had very questionable scripts, others were just downright awful.

In the mid-1950s, when Bela’s morphine addiction had kicked into overdrive and Hollywood wanted nothing to do with the 70-something-year-old has-been, he met up with the transvestite schlock director Edward D. Wood Jr., who today is ignobly known as the worst director of all time. Bela appeared in several of Wood’s films, including 1955’s
Bride of the Monster
, but after Bela’s
death, Wood cobbled together miscellaneous footage and made the worst film of all time,
Plan 9 from Outer Space
. For scenes in which Wood was unable to find pertinent footage of Bela, he employed his wife’s dentist as Bela’s double, his face completely obscured by the ridiculous cape.

In these later years, Bela had become increasingly strange and began taking his horror image rather seriously. He often gave interviews while lying in a coffin. In April 1955 Bela committed himself to a hospital to kick his morphine addiction and left in August, supposedly clean as a whistle. But Bela’s days were numbered anyway and, just a few months after marrying his fifth wife, he died of a heart attack—a wooden stake or silver bullet wasn’t necessary after all.

Bela was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California, and, as he requested, he’s wearing his Dracula cape. Not surprisingly, he died a pauper, but, supposedly, Frank Sinatra wrote a check to provide him a decent burial.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-405, follow Slauson Avenue east for a half-mile and the cemetery is on the left at #5835.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn left and start up the hill. A hundred yards on the left is the Grotto lawn and altar and, four rows from the altar, is Bela’s grave.

APRIL 19, 1933 – JUNE 29, 1967

Jayne Mansfield took her place in Hollywood as a caricature of the blonde stereotype starlet. Though a married mother at just seventeen, she parlayed her 40-22-34 curves into bit television parts, but superstardom on the order of Marilyn Monroe was her real goal and much of her career was an unending campaign of self-promotion.

During one memorable ploy, Jayne was “stranded” on a desert island. But her most successful gimmick was a carefully designed scheme that unfolded at a press junket to promote a new Jane Russell film,
Underwater
. On that day she “fell” into the pool while sunbathing, causing her bathing suit strap to break. Upon coming up for air her endowment was captured by the scrambling press. “I worried about becoming famous first, then an actress,” Jayne later confessed in an interview.

Though her stunts were successful to a degree—she eventually secured a contract with Warner Brothers—moviegoers never
really went for Jayne’s limited acting ability, and her resume is fleshed out with a string of flops. Her striking looks did help sell merchandise, however, and she promoted an array of products ranging from maple syrup to nylon sweaters to electric switches. Her ample proportions were not lost on
Playboy
magazine either, and Jayne was one of the first stars to take it off for the monthly.

Jayne later toured the country with a burlesque nightclub act that featured show tunes and comedic skits and climaxed with a striptease routine. In the early morning hours after she’d performed the act at the Gus Stevens Supper Club in Biloxi, Mississippi, Jayne and three of her children, plus her boyfriend and a driver, glided along a narrow country road (now Highway 90) on the way to New Orleans. The road became obscured by the white haze of a mosquito fogger and, unable to discern its presence, the twenty-year-old driver slammed the Buick Electra into and under the slow-moving truck. The three adults in the front seat were killed instantly, but Jayne’s three children asleep in the back were spared serious injury.

After a blonde bouffant wig was photographed lying on the ground at the accident scene, it became contemporary lore that Jayne had been decapitated but, for the record, though her death was gruesome, she was not actually beheaded. Her death certificate notes a “crushed skull with avulsion (forcible detachment) of cranium and brain,” which in layman’s terms means that her skull was cracked open and a piece of it and her brain were
separated. Her “death car” has been exhibited in several far-flung museum collections.

At only 34, Jayne was buried at Fairview Cemetery in Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania.