Where Are They Buried? (86 page)

Ray sensed that a nation of people who ate on the go wanted something different. He changed American business and eating habits by giving them what they wanted or, perhaps what
he
wanted. The ultimate salesman, Ray defined salesmanship as “the gentle art of letting the customer have it
your
way.”

Ray served as senior chairman of McDonald’s until his death at 81 after a series of strokes.

He was buried at El Camino Memorial Park in La Jolla, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-805, take the Mira Mesa Boulevard exit and follow it for a quarter-mile east to Scranton Road. Turn right and the road will shortly turn into Carroll Canyon Road. The park is ahead one mile on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn at the first left and go all the way up the hill. Turn left at the “T,” follow this drive all the way to its end, and park at the loop. Walk toward
the three big bells and turn into the mausoleum on the right. Proceed all the way through the mausoleum, exit the rear door and, once you’re back outside, turn right and look up to see Ray’s crypt.

SEPTEMBER 26, 1914 – JANUARY 23, 2011

Long before Richard Simmons, Jane Fonda, or the Atkins diet, Jack LaLanne popularized the idea that folks should exercise regularly and maintain a proper diet to retain youthfulness and vigor. He started working out with weights when they were an oddity, opened what is considered the first-ever health spa complete with its own juice bar and health food store in 1936, and launched the then-laughable idea of a television exercise program in 1951. He invented the forerunners of modern exercise machines, like leg-extension and pulley devices, and sold exercise videos and fitness books. He even proposed what was once a radical idea: that women, the elderly, and the disabled should work out to retain strength. “People thought I was a nut,” Jack remembered. “When I started, it was believed there were health benefits to smoking, and even doctors were against me, saying that working with weights would give people heart attacks and cause them to lose their sex drive.”

Growing up, Jack himself was in poor shape, a self-described “sugarholic” with a violent temper and suicidal thoughts. And that was only the beginning: he was failing in school, he was nearsighted and had terrible headaches, he was weak and skinny, and he had pimples and boils on his body. But at 15 his mother took him to a talk by Paul Bragg, a well-known speaker on nutrition, and that talk turned Jack’s life around. He took Bragg’s message fully to heart and, by his own testimony and that of
everyone around him, he never had any sweet of any kind from that day forward, nor did he drink a single cup of coffee or tea. He also lifted weights and performed calisthenics relentlessly. Within months all of Jack’s maladies disappeared, he became a varsity athlete and he even stopped wearing glasses. “I was a whole new human,” he said of this transformation. “I liked people and they liked me. It was like an exorcism, kicking the devil outta me!”

After high school Jack became a pitchman for good health, starting a business selling his mother’s healthful bread and cookies, and setting up a rudimentary gym training police officers and firefighters, “the fat and skinny ones who couldn’t pass their physicals,” he recalled. Word of his success spread, and business was good enough for him to open other gyms, eventually more than a hundred of them. The gyms led to
The Jack LaLanne Show
exercise program; when the show debuted, his props consisted of merely a broomstick, a chair, and a rubber cord, though Jack characteristically offset his frugal set by employing a rapid-fire banter full of exuberance and good cheer. In his signature belted jumpsuit that showed off his impressive biceps, he tirelessly pranced through routines that ran the gamut from jumping jacks to fingertip push-ups. The program lasted thirty-four years, airing more than 3,000 episodes.

Jack saw himself as a combination cheerleader, rescuer, and savior, but he felt too that many people viewed him as an imposter, so in 1954 he decided to perform a variety of “feats of strength” stunts that ended up making him a household name. “I had to get people believing in me,” he said. His first feat, performed in 1954 when he was forty, was to prove he wasn’t “over the hill” and consisted of swimming the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, underwater while carrying 140 pounds of air-tank equipment. Future feats included swimming from Alcatraz to shore wearing handcuffs, pulling a paddleboard thirty miles from the Farallon Islands to San Francisco, and completing a thousand pushups in twenty-one minutes. At 70, handcuffed and shackled, he towed 70 boats, carrying a total of 70 people, a mile and a half through Long Beach Harbor. Why continue with such feats? “I care! You cannot
believe
how much I care! I want to help somebody!” Jack explained.

Though his feats tapered off after his 70th birthday, Jack retained a high level of energy well into what many would consider “old age,” beginning each day at 5
A.M.
with two hours of workouts: weight lifting followed by a swim against an artificial current. Promoting both himself and his calling into his final years, the seemingly eternal master of health and fitness brimmed with optimism and restated a host of aphorisms for an active and
fit life. “I can’t die,” he most famously liked to say. “It would ruin my image.”

But Jack finally did ruin his image: he died of respiratory failure at age 96 and was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From Highway 134, which is the connector between Highway 101 and I-210, take the Forest Lawn Drive exit. Proceed west for a mile and the park’s entrance will be on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Get a map from the information booth and drive to God’s Acre, which is the lawn in front of the Old North Church. Jack is buried there is Section 2019, Grave 1, though that area isn’t marked very well. If you stand in front of the church and, with your back to it, walk in the ten-o’clock direction for about 150 feet, you’ll be getting close to his flat tablet.

MAY 16, 1919 – FEBRUARY 4, 1987

Best remembered for his extravagant costumes and the trademark giant candelabrum atop his piano, Wladziu Valentino Liberace was loved by his audiences for his musical talent and his unique showmanship. Throughout his long and lucrative career—much of it spent in almost ridiculously glitzy costumes consisting of jeweled capes, sequins, bright beads, and even hot pants—the critics found it hard to make fun of him because he always seemed to be having so much fun performing what he called “
Reader’s Digest
versions” of familiar classic melodies. Liberace whipped through Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” in 37 seconds. Tchaikovsky’s 45-minute Piano Concerto No. 1 took him just four minutes. His secret, he said, was “cutting out the dull parts.”

But Liberace wasn’t without classical credentials: He attended Wisconsin College of Music, followed by a three-year stint in the Chicago Symphony. During a chancy encore after a 1939 recital, he stumbled upon the musical formula that made him famous by breaking with concert tradition and performing the popular novelty song “Three Little Fishes.” It drove the audience wild and Liberace later recognized that as the defining moment on his road to rhinestones and Rolls-Royces. In 1952 the
Liberace Television Hour
introduced him to middle America, and for the rest of his career he sold out dozens of shows each year as an American music icon and Las Vegas fixture.

By 1986 though, Liberace had lost significant weight and was in exceedingly poor health. Tabloids soon screamed that he was suffering of AIDS and, as expected, Liberace’s camp denied it. But after his death at 67, his death certificate stated that Liberace had died of “cytomegalic virus pneumonia and human immunodeficiency viral disease.”

Pictures of his most-recent boyfriend, and of his dog, Wrinkles, were placed in Liberace’s casket and, wearing a white tuxedo and full makeup, he was entombed at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood Hills, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From Highway 134, which is the connector between Highway 101 and I-210, take the Forest Lawn Drive exit. Proceed west for a mile and the park’s entrance is on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Stop at the booth and after getting a park map, go to the Courts of Remembrance. Walk into the courtyard and you won’t miss Liberace’s large white tomb against the wall on the right.

JANUARY 10, 1949 – APRIL 22, 2002

After matriculating from a Catholic middle school to a public high school, Linda Boreman, the daughter of a New York police officer, picked up the moniker “Miss Holy Holy” for keeping her dates at a safe distance. But by the time she was twenty she’d loosened up a tad and had begun to develop a following for her work in underground bestiality flicks such as her most revered one, whose fitting and right-to-the-point title was
Dog
. But in 1972, after conjuring up the stage name Linda Lovelace, she was reinvented and became synonymous with an erotic subspecialty akin to sword-swallowing by virtue of a landmark flick named
Deep Throat
.

The 62-minute XXX-rated film was smutty enough to score a perfect 100 from
Screw
magazine, but it somehow managed to cross over from the narrow universe of covert stag-film addicts into the wider sphere of solid-citizen types. With an aura of girl-next-door availability, Linda was catapulted to “stardom,” moved into the Playboy mansion, and became the darling of a newly permissive society.

“I did it because I love it,” Linda told anyone who asked, but after just a few more hardcore features she left the business and recanted her nymphomaniac image in two hardcover memoirs,
Ordeal
and
Out of Bondage
. The books offered a harrowing
account of physical abuse and sexual degradation at the hands of handlers who got her hooked on drugs and forced her to appear in the porno movies at gunpoint. While some observers viewed her revelations as brave, more than a few cynics suggested Linda deserved an Academy Award for her on-screen antics, which belied any alleged off-screen duress. Today, the term “Linda Syndrome” is a reference to former porn stars who disavow their careers.

By the last year of her life some of her anti-smut convictions softened in the face of economic necessity and she appeared on the cover of a porn magazine and autographed newly minted
Deep Throat
memorabilia while busily gathering Linda Lovelace display material for Manhattan’s Museum of Sex grand opening.

Suffering massive head trauma after losing control of her car and smashing into a concrete post, Linda survived on life support for three weeks before family members opted to turn the machines off. As a postscript to her sad and sordid life, Linda received a total of $1,200 for her film work and died penniless. At 53, Linda was cremated and her ashes scattered.

MARCH 22, 1923 – SEPTEMBER 22, 2003

The roots of pantomime stretch back to the Greeks five hundred years before Christ, and the Romans later used the art to depict current events or mock the gods. Mime also had its heydays during the Renaissance but, with the advent of the talkies, its future looked grim. However, in 1947, after escaping deportation to a Nazi death camp by altering his Mangel surname and thereby surviving to fight alongside fellow French resistors during WWII, Marcel Marceau initiated his dreamy harlequin-inspired clown named Bip and, in the nick of time, rescued the art form from history’s dust bin.

Though some cynics may sneer, “Thanks for nuthin’,” legions of admirers praised Marcel, clad as Bip in an ill-fitting striped shirt, too-long pants, and smashed hat topped with a jaunty red carnation, through more than 15,000 performances. Marcel created dozens of situations for his little white-faced character through the years, ranging from taming a lion to being stuck in an elevator to characterizing an old gossipy woman knitting a sweater. There were also “mimodramas,” including “The Overcoat,” the story of a Russian clerk who works for a decade to buy a coat only to have it stolen, as well as innumerable sketches like “The Creation of the World” and, his most revered, one showing
the four stages of life—youth, maturity, old age, and death—all communicated beyond the barrier of language.

Delighted by those who emulated him well, such as Michael Jackson who famously borrowed his moonwalk from Marcel’s “Walking Against the Wind” sketch, Marcel also lamented that some of his less talented copycats had given mime a bad name, especially ruing street mimes who work popular tourists areas. After a long-winded disparagement of their skills when a reporter once asked his opinion, Marcel caught himself and concluded the exchange with, “Never get a mime talking. He won’t stop.”

At 84, Marcel was buried at Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery.