Where Are They Buried? (89 page)

Typically, one or the other would introduce a clip and give his opinion, and then the other would weigh in. Their disagreements were more entertaining than their agreements, complete with knitted brows, are-you-serious headshakes, and humorous barbs. For all their combativeness, however, they actually agreed on a movie’s worth much more often than they differed. “We liked each other; we even loved each other,” Ebert said. “Though we also had days when we hated each other.” Finally came their signature denouement: both thumbs up, both down, or, in a split decision, one of
each. Ebert was the one who had come up with the all-or-nothing gestures, and Siskel thought of trademarking them, which they did. “The phrase ‘two thumbs up’ was not in the vernacular. And now, of course, it’s part of the language,” explained Ebert. The highly coveted endorsement that had the power to lift or sink the fortunes of a film inevitably ran at the top of movie advertisements, while Siskel and Ebert’s fortunes soared.

In May 1998 Siskel underwent surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his brain and returned to the show soon afterward. Eight months later he announced he was taking time off for additional recuperation but soon died of complications at 53. He was buried at Westlawn Cemetery in Chicago, Illinois.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Westlawn is located on Montrose Avenue, a mile west of Route 43.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and get a map at the office. In the Memorial section at street marking 22-24, about halfway down, look for Arthur Gitler’s grave along the curb. Siskel’s flat, bronze marker is in the same column as Arthur’s, eighteen rows back.

After Siskel’s death, the show was renamed
Roger Ebert & The Movies
and Ebert began rotating co-hosts as a way of auditioning them. In 2000, Richard Roeper became the permanent co-host and the show was renamed Ebert & Roeper.

Ebert estimated that since 1967, which is the year he began reviewing movies for the
Chicago Sun-Times
, he had viewed an average of perhaps 500 movies per year and written reviews for about half of them—some 10,000(!) movie reviews. But besides that overwhelming volume of accomplishment, he also published more than twenty books on a variety of subjects ranging from a book about rice cookers,
The Pot and How to Use It
, to a tome about being a pedestrian in his favorite city:
The Perfect London Walk
. In 2011, his autobiography,
Life Itself
, won rave reviews. A fixture at film festivals around the world—Sundance, Cannes, Telluride—he even created a festival of his own: the Overlooked Film Festival, or just “Ebertfest,” which began in 1999 and was dedicated to highlighting neglected classics. Way back in 1975 he had won the Pulitzer Prize for film criticism, believe it or not, and in 2005 he was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In 2002 Ebert underwent surgery to remove a malignant tumor in his neck and by 2006 cancer had taken his thyroid, salivary glands and chin. He had lost his ability to eat, drink, and speak (a prosthesis partly obscured the loss of much of his jaw, and he
was fed through a tube), and he became a gaunter version of his once-portly self. Despite his misfortune, Ebert continued both his TV show and his lifelong pride and joy, his job at the
Sun-Times
. Doubling down, he began a new chapter in his career, chronicling the journey of his illness on Facebook, Twitter, and his blog, and gaining for himself a slew of new fans. Never a defeatist, he analyzed his medical struggles courageously. “No point in denying it,” he wrote. In 2008 a contract dispute ended
Ebert & Roeper
, but Ebert revived his television career two years later with a new film-review program on public television. Using a computer-generated facsimile of his own voice, he discussed classic, overlooked, and new films while co-hosts handled the “thumbs” judgments.

The last year of his life was his most prolific as he wrote 306 movie reviews and a blog post or two a week. But in April 2013, after fracturing a hip that was determined to be cancerous and requiring radiation, he announced he was taking “a leave of presence,” and he died at 70 just two days later. The last words Ebert wrote on his blog were, “I’ll see you at the movies.”

He was cremated and his ashes entrusted to his family.

Three years before his death he wrote: “I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder, and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.”

NOVEMBER 28, 1967 – FEBRUARY 8, 2007

Famous for being famous by virtue of a ditzy-blonde persona and exaggerated Marilyn Monroe looks and curves, Anna Nicole Smith played out the train wreck that was her life in made-for-reality-TV style.

After quitting high school, Anna (whose name then was Vicki Lynn Hogan) married at seventeen, was a mother by eighteen and fell into topless dancing when jobs at Wal-Mart and Red Lobster didn’t pan out. Entering her photos in a search contest, the voluptuous and not-quite-natural blonde made the cover of
Playboy
magazine in 1992 and was crowned Playmate of the Year in 1993. With Madison Avenue in hot pursuit of the pinup with
advertising contracts in hand, Anna became America’s favorite new bombshell overnight.

In 1994 Anna married a man almost four times her age, J. Howard Marshall II, a Texas billionaire whom she’d met at a club named Gigi’s in the course of her dancing career. “He had no will to live so I went over to see him and he got a little twinkle in his eye,” Anna once remembered wistfully. As she never actually lived with Howard, married life amounted to not much more than an overflowing stream of cash but, alas, after just fourteen months of bliss the newlyweds’ dreams shattered when 90-year-old Howard was called to the great gig in the sky. His death set off a feud with her deceased husband’s 67-year-old son, E. Pierce Marshall (who held the illogical distinction of being stepson to a 26-year-old model), concerning Anna’s right to inherit half of his father’s estate. Over the next decade a series of court victories and reversals decided Anna should be awarded $474 million, then zero, and then $88 million, until in May 2006 when the Supreme Court decreed, more or less, that the whole convoluted affair should be started all over from scratch. And then in a surprising twist, Pierce, who apparently had had enough, checked out of this world for good the very next month. Still today, the ever-dwindling fortune is wangled over by a handful of heirs from both sides and their armies of lawyers, guaranteeing only that an assortment of Texas Bar Association members will be among the winners.

As litigation over her share of her husband’s $1.4 billion estate wound through the courts, the acting career Anna had been nurturing in such bombs as
The Hudsucker Proxy
and
Skyscraper
stalled and then stopped, though Anna herself became increasingly famous as a pop-culture punchline buoyed by late-night television shows in which she appeared in over-the-top revealing outfits that strained to contain her ever-expanding circumference. In 2002, she enjoyed a celebrity resurgence of sorts with
The Anna Nicole Show
, a reality-TV program chronicling the minutiae of its heroine’s daily life. Viewers watched while her miniature poodle was administered Prozac to stop him from humping everything in sight, her impoverished and toothless Cousin Shelly appeared at the doorstep begging for a handout, and a spaced-out Anna slurred that she “suffered” from celibacy because willing victims were turned off by her obesity while her calculating attorney offered comfort and a purple-haired personal assistant hinted at a lesbian hookup.

In 2006 relief washed over the tabloid-buying public when they learned Anna’s celibacy had been cured; she was pregnant and in September gave birth to a daughter, Dannielynn. But joy of the girl’s birth was tempered three days later by the death of Anna’s
son, Daniel. While visiting his mother and newborn sister in their Bahamian hospital room, the twenty-year-old collapsed and died from what an autopsy discovered was a lethal combination of Zoloft, Lexapro, and methadone.

To the delight of keyed-up gossip columnists for whom Anna provided endless fodder, the identity of Dannielynn’s father had been unclear since the day Anna announced her pregnancy and a three-ring circus of would-be fathers had since stepped forward to claim her baby’s paternity. Anna’s attorney, Howard K. Stern, was recorded as the father on the birth certificate but, though the two claimed a longtime secret affair, not too many were buying it. Three weeks after the birth Stern and Anna wed but that hardly stifled conjecture and the following months brought a whirlwind of speculation, accusation, and litigation as various parties sought to align themselves for the near-certain windfall awaiting Howard Marshall II’s not-quite granddaughter, Dannielynn.

Five months after the birth of her daughter, Anna was found unconscious in Room 607 of the Hard Rock Hotel in Seminole, Florida. She was whisked through the lobby and out the front door on a gurney by responding paramedics, one of whom rode atop her while frantically pumping her chest, but their efforts were in vain and at the hospital Anna was DOA. After finding a variety of drugs in her body, including muscle relaxants, pain relievers, and anti-anxiety medicines, the medical examiner declared the 39-year-old died accidentally of combined drug intoxication, the primary drug being a sedative called chloral hydrate.

After a ceremony at Mount Horeb Baptist Church where hundreds of fans watched from behind steel barricades, Anna in a pink gown and tiara inside a mahogany coffin topped by a pink satin cloth with rhinestones spelling her name was brought to Lakeview Memorial Gardens in Nassau, Bahamas for burial in the plot next to Daniel.

Loosely organized by local cabbies, the most popular tour on New Providence Island is now the Anna Nicole Tour which includes the hospital where Daniel died, the church where her funeral took place, her seaside “Horizons” estate, and the cemetery. The whole thing is a waste of money, from what I hear, and you’re better off just taking a taxi to the cemetery—though there’s really nothing to see there either, as of this writing. Reluctant to turn it into a tourist stop, caretakers maintain that the cemetery is for the “common people of the Bahamas” and they’re boorish to tourists, rightfully so, perhaps. Still, if you insist, you can stare at Anna’s unmarked patch of grass in the Garden of Eternal Peace, just a few yards from the northwest corner of the white Citadel gazebo.

After DNA tests established with 99.99% certainty that Larry Birkhead was the father of Dannielynn, an amended birth certificate listing him as the father was issued and he assumed rightful custody.

APRIL 18, 1965 – SEPTEMBER 16, 1989

In 1973, at seven years old, Steven Stayner was approached by a man who told him that his parents had abandoned him. The kidnapper ordered Steven to call him “Dad,” and for the next seven years, secreted in a series of remote California cabins, Steven was psychologically and sexually abused.

After the kidnapper forcibly brought home another victim in 1980, Steven, who by this time was fourteen, recognized what was really happening and he escaped with the other boy in tow. After hitching a ride 40 miles to the nearest police station, Steven tried to explain their plight to the on-duty officer. He started his explanation by saying, “I know my first name is Steven.”

The boys’ story made news reports around the world and Steven went back home hailed as a hero, while the kidnapper was arrested and ended up doing hard time. Despite what had happened to him, Steven became a fairly ordinary teenager and later married and had two children of his own.

Eight years after the incident, a television mini-series about Steven’s drama called
I Know My First Name Is Steven
, was broadcast to much critical acclaim and earned four Emmy nominations.

Tragically, though, the day before the Emmy Awards were held, Steven was killed in a hit-and-run motorcycle accident.

At 24 years old, Steven was buried at Merced District Cemetery in Merced, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
In Merced, 13th Street runs parallel and just to the west of Route 99. Follow 13th Street to its southern end and the cemetery will be in front of you.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Drive to the section of the cemetery that is farthest to the left and the rear. Near a small tree you’ll see a sign that denotes this section as the Garden of Peace. Under this sign is the marker for Steven’s grave.

Later the Stayners were cast into the limelight again when another publicly shared tragedy beset the family. In 2002 Steven’s brother Cary was sentenced to death after a jury found him guilty of
murdering three women in Yosemite National Park. The details of the crime were particularly heinous, and Cary was caught only after he struck again, beheading a park naturalist. Included in Cary’s defense was the notion that his younger brother’s kidnapping had so deeply affected him that it contributed to the decline of his mental health.

JULY 2, 1932 – JANUARY 8, 2002

In 1956 Dave Thomas was working at a Fort Wayne, Indiana, barbecue restaurant when a bespectacled, white-haired, gentleman stopped in and offered Dave’s boss the opportunity to participate in a new chicken franchising deal he was cooking up. The gentleman turned out to be Colonel Harland Sanders, and the franchise was, of course, Kentucky Fried Chicken. But in 1956 neither of those names carried any weight. Still, Dave’s boss entered into an agreement with the Colonel and added his chicken to the menu.