Where Are They Buried? (52 page)

After 1934 they would never live together again and soon Scott, hopelessly in debt, in poor physical health, and often incapacitated by excessive drinking, had what he described as his own “crack-up.” In 1937, almost in spite of himself, he won a contract as a screenwriter for MGM, fell in love with another woman and, after finding new spark in his writing, quit drinking altogether.

In 1940 Scott was living in Hollywood and working on a new novel,
The Last Tycoon
. In November he suffered a mild heart attack and was ordered to bed rest. He continued to work on his novel and, a month later, collapsed of a massive attack as he rose from a living room chair. At the time of his death at 44, all of his novels were out of print and he believed himself a failure. But by the 1960s, a Fitzgerald resurrection had occurred, and he’s since achieved a secure place among America’s acclaimed writers.

Zelda continued her unsteady course after Scott’s death. In March 1948 she was staying at Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, in a room on the top floor, when a fire broke out in the middle of the night. She and eight others were killed, trapped behind the mental institution’s locked doors.

At 47, Zelda was laid to rest alongside Scott at Saint Mary’s Catholic Church Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-270, take Exit 6 and follow Route 28 east for two miles. Immediately after crossing Route 355, turn left into the church and school grounds.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Their graves are in the eighth row from the church, just a few rows behind the two old tombstones surrounded by an iron fence.

MAY 28, 1908 – AUGUST 11, 1964

In almost every way, Ian Fleming’s life mirrored that of his best-known fictitious progeny, the dashing man of intrigue and British secret agent, James Bond 007.

Ian hailed from an extremely wealthy Scottish family. His father was a military hero and member of British Parliament, and after a childhood of privilege and exclusive schooling, Ian sought a career in the foreign service. But he was rejected as an operative and turned to journalism instead, working for Reuters for a year before gaining an esteemed banking position in London. There he enjoyed the life of a playboy, entertained by high-stakes bridge games, elaborate meals, and carefree romances.

As Hitler’s war machine steamrolled on in 1939, Ian was unexpectedly sent to Moscow to report on a trade mission for the
London Times
but, surreptitiously, he followed an ongoing espionage trial. Next, Ian was recruited by British Naval
Intelligence to work with the super-secretive Ultra network, which, among other things, cracked the Nazi’s Enigma code and ultimately changed the course of the war. But it wasn’t until ten years after his death that the extent of Ian’s wartime intelligence work emerged and, even now, it’s unclear exactly when he began working as an operative. Was it when he was in Moscow with the
Times
, or did his service begin while he was living as a banking playboy in London? It’s now believed that Ian was never rejected as an operative in the first place and, from the time he went for Reuters, he was slyly working to establish an everyman guise.

At war’s end, Ian built his Goldeneye estate on Jamaica’s north coast, and he traveled there each winter to lounge in paradise and chase divorcées. However, one particular conquest turned out to be married, and after she ended up pregnant with his child, Ian decided it was high time he made some coin. In seven weeks he wrote
Casino Royale
, a spy thriller set in the tropics with a debonair, womanizing British secret agent named James Bond as its central character. Ian had woven his own elite existence, arrogance, and acid wit into the character and the resulting book, published in 1952, was a smashing success. Ian penned eleven more Bond novels, including
Goldfinger
,
Dr. No
, and
From Russia with Love
, and the Bond hero with vodka martinis “shaken, not stirred,” became immortalized in celluloid and, ultimately, in popular culture.

In 1961, Ian suffered a heart attack and, recognizing that perhaps his time was near, put to paper an entirely different kind of story, a tale of a flying car with a bubbly personality, a story he had been carrying around in his head for years. Based on bedtime stories he used to tell his son, the children’s classic,
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
, was published just a few months before Ian’s August 1964 death, at the age of 56, to heart failure. A year later, his final Bond thriller,
The Man with the Golden Gun
, was released, it’s last few chapters completed by a writer who still remains anonymous.

Ian was buried near the stone church at St. Andrews Churchyard in Sevenhampton, England, a picturesque village 60 miles west of London.

His monument, a simple, four-foot-tall obelisk, contains the Latin inscription, “
omnia perfunctus vitai praemia marces
,” from Lucretius, an Roman who wrote the words around 50
B.C.
, in his third book,
de rerum naturae
, (
On the Nature of Things
). Translated, it means: “After enjoying the gifts of life, you lack ambition.”

MARCH 26, 1874 – JANUARY 29, 1963

As one of America’s most widely read and critically acclaimed poets, Robert Frost was a master at using the natural rhythm of informal American speech to portray ordinary people in realistic situations. As is usually the case with grand success though, Robert’s prosperity didn’t come easily, and his career as a poet languished for the first half of his life when publishers showed little interest. At 40, he’d not published a single book of poems, and his work had been seen in just a handful of magazines. To support his family, Robert ran a chicken farm in New Hampshire.

But in middle age he made a daring decision to sell the farm and use the proceeds to make a new start in London, where publishers might be more receptive to his talents. He was almost immediately successful; within a year,
A Boy’s Will
was published and it was quickly followed by
North of Boston
. In London, Frost was in vogue within literary circles, and the sensation soon crossed over to America.

In 1915 the Frosts returned to the States, an edition of the “new” poet’s work became a bestseller, and Robert never looked back. He embarked upon a long writing career and, in the remainder of his life, received an unprecedented quantity of honors for his work, including four Pulitzer Prizes. Never before had an American poet achieved such rapid fame after such long delay.

In the twilight of his life, his political conservatism caused him to lose favor among literary critics, but his reputation as a major poet remains secure. He succeeded in realizing his life’s ambition to write “a few poems it will be hard to get rid of.”

Robert was a chronic sufferer of cystitis and he died of a pulmonary edema. At 88, and was buried at the Old Bennington Cemetery in Bennington, Vermont.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From the junction of Routes 7 and 9, follow Route 9 west for ¾ mile and you’ll see the cemetery on the left. But go past the cemetery to the top of the hill and park in front of the Old First Church.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Follow the path on the left of the church into the cemetery. There, on the far right-hand side of the cemetery, about 100 yards behind the church, is the Frost plot.

JANUARY 31, 1872 – OCTOBER 23, 1939

Pearl Zane Grey attended the University of Pennsylvania on a baseball scholarship and after graduation, set up a dental practice in New York City while retreating to the Delaware River region on weekends. After meeting his future wife Dolly there, his first piece of writing,
A Day on the Delaware
, which Dolly had encouraged, edited, and presented to publishers, found publication in 1902. Three years later Zane and Dolly married and settled in the river valley, leaving dentistry behind as Zane pursued a fulltime writing career financed by Dolly.

In 1906 the couple took a late honeymoon to Arizona and California and, during that trip, Zane’s imagination was stimulated. Upon his return, he pioneered the new Western literary genre and, from his
Riders of the Purple Sage
to
The Last Round-Up
, he reinvented the public’s conception of the West, presenting it as a moral battleground where the desperados and the righteous were alternately destroyed and redeemed.

Zane sold some 17 million copies of over 100 different books, and his works became the basis for almost 100 Western films. But even the most dedicated admirers of Zane’s work admit to his character-development limitations. Still, there is a consensus that Zane deserves recognition as a custodian of the West’s history, as a sort of proto-environmentalist, and as an interpreter of the outdoors.

Zane expired quietly in his sleep at 67, and, after Dolly died at 73, almost two decades later, the ashes of both were interred at Union Cemetery in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, fulfilling their wish to rest together at the edge of the Delaware River.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-84, take either Exit 34 or Exit 46 and proceed north to the intersection of Routes 6 and 434. From this intersection, head north on Route 434 for two miles, then turn left on Route 590, following it almost five miles to Beisel Road, where you’ll turn right. After passing under the railroad tracks, the cemetery is a short distance on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
In this small cemetery, the Grey plot is easy to find on the right-hand side about three-fourths of the way to the rear.

Just before the cemetery, the Zane Grey Museum on the right is open seasonally.

AUGUST 11, 1921 – FEBRUARY 10, 1992

While serving with the Coast Guard during the Second World War, Alex Haley, a voracious reader, ran out of things to read, which prompted him to start writing. Alex toiled over his short stories for several years, suffering hundreds of rejections until one was finally accepted by a magazine in 1947. By 1952 the service had taken notice of their budding author and created for Alex the new rating of chief journalist, and he began writing for the United States Coast Guard’s public relations office. In 1959, after twenty years of military service, Alex retired from the Coast Guard and launched a new career as a freelance writer.

Alex wrote for
Reader’s Digest
and then moved on to
Playboy
, where he initiated the magazine’s trademark in-depth interview feature. One of the personalities he interviewed was Malcolm X, a meeting that inspired Alex’s first book, 1965’s
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
.

His hundreds of intriguing conversations with Malcolm prompted Alex to search out his own genealogy, an endeavor that proved to be an exhaustive, eleven-year odyssey. As Alex searched further and further back in time, he eventually landed in the village of Juffure in Gambia, West Africa, where a native oral historian, a
griot
, recounted to Alex seven generations of Mandinka tribal history. In the griot’s account, Alex’s early ancestor, sixteen-year-old Kunta Kinte, was wrested from the forest while searching for wood to make a drum, then sold into slavery.

Alex painstakingly chronicled his ancestors’ passage from slavery to freedom and, in 1976, his acclaimed book,
Roots: The Saga of an American Family
, jolted America’s conscience with its powerful affirmation of black history and shattering view of slavery.
Roots
became a phenomenon. The book became a number-one national bestseller, the twelve-hour television miniseries broke ratings
records, lesson plans based on
Roots
were used in schools, and a new interest in African American genealogy was stimulated. Alex was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize, received honorary degrees, was lauded with a resolution by the U.S. Senate, and labeled a “folk hero” by
Time
magazine.
Roots
was indeed a cultural milestone, bringing the issues of slavery and racism to the forefront of American consciousness. It was groundbreaking and monumental but, unfortunately, it was also fiction.

In 1977 Harold Courlander filed a suit charging that
Roots
plagiarized his novel,
The African
. In fact the history of Kunta Kinte closely resembled that of a character named Hwesuhunu as chronicled in Courlander’s work, and several passages in
Roots
were copied almost verbatim from
The African
. After a threat of perjury from a trial judge, Alex settled out of court for $650,000.

And there were even more unsettling discoveries. Subsequent investigation of tapes in Alex’s own archives revealed that Kunta Kinte was a historical imposter invented with the full cooperation of Gambian government officials. From a review of Alex’s private papers, virtually every genealogical claim in Alex’s story has been shown to be false. Even his attempt to recreate the Middle Passage experience of enslaved Africans by sleeping on a “rough board between bales of raw rubber in the hold” of a transatlantic ship is fundamentally inaccurate; he sailed the
Red Star
from Dakar to Florida in 1973, but never stayed in the hold, according to the ship’s first mate, Frank Ewers. “I had the keys to the hold and Haley never went down there at night. He would have died from the cocoa fumes.”