Where Are They Buried? (80 page)

In 1965 she got a break when the
Country Boy Eddie
TV show signed her on as a regular act, and within two years Tammy had a contract with Epic Records. In 1968 she released her defining song. Not only was the song the biggest hit of her career, but 35 years and a fortune in royalties later, “Stand By Your Man” remains the biggest hit ever recorded by any female country singer. But though “Stand By Your Man” was her biggest hit, it certainly wasn’t her last; Tammy racked up nineteen more number ones and sold more than 30 million records.

Tammy also collaborated with other country music artists and her most notable partner was fellow country-singer George Jones, whom she married in 1969. (She’d eventually marry five times.) The couple became the king and queen of country music, recorded ten albums together, and enjoyed many chart-topping singles, including “Take Me,” and “We Loved It Away.” Though their stormy marriage ended in 1975, they continued to record together occasionally.

Much of Tammy’s life was spent in relatively poor health, and she had numerous operations for a variety of ailments. One of her long-term afflictions was severe stomach cramping, and for this condition she had been prescribed Versed, a particularly strong sedative. Tammy took the sedative one evening and during her sleep died of a blood clot in the lungs. She was 55. Three years later, the physician who prescribed the drug settled out of court with Tammy’s four daughters, who had charged that the Versed contributed to her death.

Tammy was buried at Woodlawn Memorial Park in Nashville, Tennessee.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-65, take Exit 79 and follow Armory Drive to Powell Avenue. Turn south on Powell, turn right on Thompson Lane, and Woodlawn is a short distance ahead on the left. Or, from I-40, take Exit 215 and follow the Briley Parkway
6½ miles south. (It will turn into Thompson Lane.) The cemetery will be on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn at the second left, and park in front of the main building. Enter through the double-oak doors and go up the short flight of stairs on your left. Proceed down this corridor, turn right at the second hallway, and go through the glass doors. Tammy’s crypt is about three-fourths of the way down this hall, at eye level, on the right.

OCTOBER 30, 1893 – DECEMBER 24, 1972

Anemic and weak as a youth, Charles Atlas brought bodybuilding into the mainstream. He developed a workout system of pitting muscle against muscle that he called “dynamic tension,” and, using this system, built himself up to become “The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man” in the 1920s.

Later he would launch an enormously popular bodybuilding course that featured in its advertising the now-classic image of a 97-pound weakling who loses his girl to a bully at the beach, only to win her back after using the Atlas techniques.

Charles died at 79 of a heart attack and rests at Saint John’s Cemetery in Middle Village, New York.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Middle Village is a neighborhood of Queens, New York. From either I-495 or the Interboro Parkway, take Woodhaven Boulevard to Metropolitan Avenue. The cemetery is then just a few blocks west of Woodhaven Boulevard at Metropolitan Avenue and 80th Street.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Charles is interred in the enormous mausoleum that sits in the cemetery’s center. Drive past the office, turn right, then take the next right and the next left to get to the mausoleum. Drive around to the side and park near the doors to the right of the entrance with a red awning. Enter the bronze doors and go up one flight of stairs. Down the long hall in front of you, the Atlas crypt is about 150 feet away at eye level on the right—Unit 5, Floor 3, Section 1, Crypt 3A.

MARCH 7, 1942 – JULY 20, 2007

Tammy Faye Bakker was the diminutive, elaborately coiffed gospel singer who, along with her first husband, Jim Bakker, built a commercial empire around television evangelism only to see it collapse in sex and money scandals.

Amid a strict religious upbringing, Tammy had an epiphany of sorts when she was ten: at her Pentecostal church she began speaking in tongues, prompting her to promise to devote her life to religion. At North Central Bible College in Minneapolis several years later, she went on a date with Jim who was the night monitor
at her dorm. He proposed to her that very night, and they married the following month.

In the early years of their marriage the happy couple worked as traveling evangelists; he preached while she sang and played the accordion. In 1966 they joined Pat Robertson’s fledgling Christian Broadcasting Network as the original hosts of
The 700 Club
—but left Pat in 1974 and began
The PTL Club,
the initials standing for “Praise the Lord” or “People That Love.” The PTL Network, and especially its
Jim and Tammy Show,
was tremendously popular with people who enjoy giving their money to self-righteous evangelists. Though Tammy and Jim never quite made clear what God was doing with the $100 million-plus in donations the PTL received annually, the cynics in the crowd were fairly certain the bulk of it was funding the Bakkers extravagant lifestyle.

Tammy Faye, who stood just 4 feet 11 inches tall and presented herself in overstated outfits and heavy makeup, became a caricature, a parody for dabbing at mascara-tinted tears while Jim prayed to the heavens for the salvation of sinners. Openly emotional, Tammy often broke down in tears, long black streaks of mascara on her face as she pleaded for the health of an ailing viewer or recognized a particularly generous financial contribution. Off camera, her spendthrift shopping sprees became as famous as her makeup and the Bakkers enjoyed matching Rolls-Royces and lavish homes—even Fido got in on their largess, sprawled in his air-conditioned dog house. Tammy hoped heaven would include a giant shopping center “where there’s no limit on your charge card.” And, as if all that weren’t enough for the tabloids and late-night comedy shows, in 1986 Tammy was treated at the Betty Ford Center for prescription drug addiction.

In 1987, cracks in the Bakker facade appeared when it was revealed that Jim not only had a sexual encounter with a young church secretary named Jessica Hahn, but also paid her $265,000 to keep quiet about the affair. Two years later, Jim was convicted of defrauding supporters of his PTL ministry of more than $150 million, including a diversion of some $4 million to support his and Tammy’s opulent lifestyle. In spite of all this Tammy vowed to stand by her man and, at a news conference, in tears, sang, “On Christ the solid rock I stand/All other ground is sinking sand.” In 1992 though, while Jim was serving a 45-year prison sentence, she divorced him and married one of his former business associates.

After the PTL was exposed as a sham and crashed, Tammy launched herself as a newer, more hip celebrity persona. Gay
men had embraced her as a camp figure in their gender-bending look-alike contests for years, so Tammy embraced them back and began attending gay pride events. When asked about her attitudes toward gays she said, “We’re all just people made out of the same old dirt, and God didn’t make any junk.” A 1999 film about her called
The Eyes of Tammy Faye
was submitted for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and in 2004 she appeared in the offbeat reality series
The Surreal Life,
in which her role involved living with a group of other faded celebrities that included the rapper Vanilla Ice and porn-flick star Ron Jeremy.

Dying of colon cancer that had spread to her lungs, and weighing just 65 pounds, Tammy appeared on
Larry King Live
in July 2007 to say goodbye to her fans. She told Larry she had instructed her doctors not to tell her how much time they believed she had left. “I don’t have any date written on me anywhere that says I’m going to die at any time, and so I just give it to the Lord,” she said. At 65, Tammy died the next day, just hours after the show was broadcast. She was cremated and her ashes buried at Waldron Cemetery in Waldron, Kansas.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Even by Kansas’s standards, Waldron is pretty small, with a population of 17. You’ll about trip over the cemetery coming into “town.”

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Tammy’s flat granite marker is easy to find, about halfway to the back and on the west side.

MARCH 24, 1909 – MAY 23, 1934

OCTOBER 1, 1910 – MAY 23, 1934

One hot Texas day in July 1930, a small-time thief named Clyde Barrow visited a friend. While there he happened to meet his friend’s neighbor, Bonnie Parker. The two quickly became
inseparable, and when Clyde was incarcerated for robbery some months later, Bonnie smuggled a gun into the jail. And so began the infamous saga of Bonnie and Clyde.

Through several books and four movies, their exploits have been romanticized endlessly, taking on bigger-than-life status. But, actually, it’s hard to find anything very romantic about Bonnie and Clyde. In short, the Barrow gang, made up of Bonnie, Clyde, and the other outlaws who drifted in and out of their circle, traced a violent path through the south-central United States. Preying not only on “rich” banks, they robbed service stations, hardware stores, and fruit stands as well. As police loops grew tighter and their situation became increasingly desperate, they stepped up their fury and, by the time they were themselves killed in a hail of bullets, twelve innocent people had died.

By November 1932 Bonnie and Clyde were wanted for the murder of two storekeepers and one policeman and, tiring of nickel-and-dime holdups, they robbed their first bank. By March Clyde’s parolee brother, Buck, and his skeptical wife, Blanche, had joined them, and the Barrow gang stepped up their assaults. The law did, too, and the next year was a succession of shootouts staged in dusty, Depression-weary towns. When the smoke cleared, Buck was dead and Blanche was in custody, but Bonnie and Clyde remained on the lam.

In February 1934 Texas authorities had had enough of the duo’s crime spree, and they hired bounty-hunter Frank Hamer to end it. In May, Bonnie, Clyde and a new gang member, Henry Methvin, began a stay with Methvin’s father, Iverson, at his farm near Gibsland, Louisiana. Hamer, who was hot on their trail, soon pulled into town and, in a secret meeting, hatched a plan with Iverson: In return for a reduced sentence for his son, Iverson would direct Bonnie and Clyde into the crosshairs of an ambush led by Hamer.

While staying with Iverson, Bonnie and Clyde had fallen into a routine. Early each day they drove to the nearby town of Sailes to gather a few supplies, always returning by 10:00 a.m. In setting up an ambush for the outlaws, Iverson’s distinctive, beat-up lumber truck was parked along the route to Sailes as if it had broken down, while across the street a half-dozen shooters and an unarmed Iverson concealed themselves in the overhanging moss of the dense woodland. Right on schedule at 9:15 a.m., Bonnie and Clyde ambled up the road, first slowing and then stopping at Iverson’s curiously parked truck. Once they were plainly identified, Hamer calmly gave orders to fire, and 167 bullets ended the lives of Bonnie and Clyde.