Where Are They Buried? (10 page)

JANUARY 20, 1896 – MARCH 9, 1996

JULY 26, 1902 – AUGUST 27, 1964

George Burns’ early show biz attempts were not very successful. He played “lousy little theaters that played lousy little acts—and I was one of them,” he said. Often the performances were so bad that he’d have to change the name of his act in order to be booked for a second engagement. “I was what you call a disappointment act,” George later explained. “If an act got sick, I’d take their place.”

But in 1923 George met a soft-spoken dancer, Gracie Allen, and, after a little coaxing, she agreed to team with him in a comedy act. They specialized in the humor of illogical logic; Gracie played the daffy but unflappable wife, while George was the unruffled but confused straight man whose simple questions elicited her nitwit answers. The combination was magical and for the next 35 years, including the twenty-year run with their
Burns and Allen
radio show, the first-class comedy pair delighted audiences with their hilarious homespun routines. George himself described their act as “having more plot than a variety show but not as much as a wrestling match.”

In ill health, Gracie retired in 1958 and she died of a heart attack in her sleep six years later, at 62. George was devastated upon the death of his “Googie,” the love of his life, and he retreated from the spotlight, never to remarry. He later allowed that he’d kept the light on at her side of the bed for three years
and, for the remainder of his life, he visited her grave once a month. “I just talk to her and tell her what has happened. I don’t know if Gracie can hear me, but it certainly does me a lot of good,” he said.

Throughout the 1960s, George tried to revive his Burns and Allen act with Carol Channing and a few others, but the chemistry was never the same. George’s career was finally revitalized when he replaced his ailing friend Jack Benny and costarred in
The Sunshine Boys
, winning an Academy Award in 1975. Soon, George was a fixture of television and film, and he adopted the role of raconteur, telling funny stories that he maintained were true but had been embellished over the years. Using his cigar for punctuation, George was a master of one-liners and sardonic wit: “Too bad all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxi cabs or cutting hair,” he noted.

As George approached his 100th birthday, the media clamored around, asking the comic his secret to longevity. “Fall in love with what you do for a living,” he said, taking a sip of a martini and a light puff of his cigar. “I don’t care what it is. It works.”

More than three decades after Gracie passed away, George curled up in their bed and died of natural causes at 100 years old.

According to his butler Daniel Dhoore, he was buried in a dark blue suit with a light blue shirt and a red tie. Dhoore continued, “We put three cigars in his pocket, put on his toupee, put on his watch that Gracie gave him and his ring. And, in his pocket, his keys and his wallet with ten hundred-dollar bills, a five, and three ones, so wherever he went to play bridge he’d have enough money.”

In a companion crypt, George and Gracie lie together 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. The park’s entrance is immediately on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Stop at the booth for a map of the cemetery’s roads, then drive to the Freedom Mausoleum. Walk in the front entrance of the Freedom Mausoleum, proceed down the hall on the right, then turn left into the Sanctuary of Heritage. On the right at eye level is the companion crypt that George and his Googie share.

APRIL 16, 1889 – DECEMBER 25, 1977

Born in England, Charlie Chaplin built his career in America and made some 80 films in which, often as the legendary Little Tramp, he elevated popular slapstick to the realm of artistry and tickled the fancy of millions for half a century.

In 1915
The Tramp
was released and film comedy was never the same. For the film, Charlie was told to wear something funny, and he assembled a grab-bag costume from other members of the company consisting of pants belonging to Fatty Arbuckle, size-fourteen shoes placed on the wrong feet, a tight coat, a derby, a prop cane, and a false, square mustache. On the spur of the moment he added a splayed, shuffling walk and with this combination found the comic means of expressing himself. Through the 1920s, he made a number of classic shorts and probably his most famous feature,
The Gold Rush
. But by the beginning of the next decade the silent film era had ended and “talkies” were the rage. Though Charlie ignored the new technology for ten more years, his releases managed to remain among the top grossing.

But moviegoers weren’t the only ones to take an interest in Charlie. Proud to retain his British citizenship, he refused an offer of U.S. citizenship in 1924. That, coupled with his left-of-center political views in films like 1921’s
The Idle Class
, brought him unwanted attention from paranoid federal officials who began compiling a file on the curious, baggy-pants actor. By the time Charlie had released
Modern Times
, a pointed commentary on the alienation of capitalism, and
The Great Dictator
, a satire of Hitler whose humor was lost on the sober and staid director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, Charlie was a marked man and fingered by Hoover as a Hollywood “parlor Bolsheviki.”

The feds accused Charlie of “un-American activities” and tried to remove his residency rights but, failing that, Hoover simply directed the INS to invalidate Charlie’s reentry visa after he briefly left the United States to visit London in 1952. FBI documents that have since been made public show a concentrated effort to compile a deportation case against Charlie, but memos between agents reveal that there had been no evidence to support his visa’s revocation should he have chosen to challenge the decision. In any event, a bitter Charlie decided not to pursue the matter and instead moved to neutral Switzerland.

Charlie got revenge, of sorts, with a satirical look at the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the 1957 film
The King in New York
, but he was still clearly broken by what he rightly perceived to be a snubbing by America. Charlie and America made brief and strained amends in 1972, when he returned to receive a special Academy Award for “the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century.” In 1975, after many years of self-imposed exile from his native England, he was knighted Sir Charles Chaplin.

At 88, on Christmas day 1977, Charlie died of “old age” at his estate in Switzerland and was buried overlooking Lake Geneva. But not for very long.

Kidnapping is a risky business, and it can be difficult to keep the struggling victim from escaping while the ransom payment is arranged. In March 1978 two enterprising would-be criminal geniuses circumvented that quandary by kidnapping a dead victim: Charlie Chaplin. A few weeks after his coffin, with him in it, was dug up and spirited away, Charlie’s widow, Oona, received a ransom demand of $600,000 for its safe return. She refused to consider the ransom but, with police at her side, bargained with the grave robbers over a tapped telephone. Two men, a Pole and a Bulgarian, were captured and charged with, among other things, “disturbing the peace of the dead.” The Pole, regarded as the brains of the operation, was jailed for four years while the Bulgarian was given a suspended sentence.

Charlie, after being dug out of a cornfield ten miles away, was reinterred back in the small town cemetery of Corsier-Sur-Vevey, Switzerland, but, this time, in a concrete vault.

APRIL 5, 1908 – OCTOBER 6, 1989

In some 90 films, most of them unmemorable, Bette Davis played an unusually wide range of characters with a brassy but controlled edge, from drunks to glamour queens to retiring old maids and lunatics. Filmgoers loved her portrayals of these fiercely independent characters that usually suffered nobly but, in her real life, she acquired an often-justified reputation as bellicose and impossible to work with. Bette herself once said, “I adore playing bitches … there’s a little bit of bitch in every woman, and a little bit of bitch in every man.”

Bette’s acting debut came in 1929, and three years later Warner Bros. signed her to a long-term contract. In 1935 the studio began
giving her decent parts, and that year’s release of
Dangerous
established her, after 22 forgettable films, as a major actress. Bette won her first Academy Award and quipped that the statue’s backside resembled her husband’s, Oscar Nelson, which some say led to its nickname “Oscar.”

By the end of the thirties, Bette was the industry’s top-ranked female draw, but her popularity peaked in the early forties and began to sag under the weight of weak pictures by the end of the decade. By the fifties her career was seriously faltering, but in 1962, after a pairing with her nemesis Joan Crawford in
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
, Bette found a new audience and worked steadily thereafter on the big screen, as well as in theater and on television.

A survivor of four unhappy marriages, a heavy drinker, and a five-pack-a-day chain smoker, Bette suffered from numerous ailments in her later years and succumbed to cancer at 81 while in France.

In a large white crypt inscribed,
“Bette Davis—She did it the hard way,”
she rests 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. In the grass on the front left is her resting place.

FEBRUARY 10, 1893 – JANUARY 29, 1980

After an early career as a hot ragtime pianist, the gravelly voiced Jimmy Durante established himself as a lovable comedian and enjoyed a unique audience rapport that flowed from his compassion for “da little guy.” His prominent proboscis earned him the nickname “Schnozzola,” and he used it to comic advantage in a couple dozen movies and countless appearances on television variety shows. For a while, Jimmy even had his own show and, of course, children of all ages recognize him as the narrator of “Frosty the Snowman.”

Jimmy is best remembered for the nonsense song “Inka Dinka Doo” and for his peculiar sign-off. Walking away from the camera in the spotlight, with his coat slung over his shoulder, Durante would turn back and say, in his wonderfully raspy voice, “Good night Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.”

The mystery of Mrs. Calabash was long the subject of speculation. After his death it emerged that she probably was a waitress, Lucy Coleman, of Calabash, North Carolina. In 1940, Lucy ran a restaurant in the town of Calabash, and Jimmy’s touring entertainment troupe stopped in for dinner one evening. The always-gregarious Durante engaged Lucy in some lively chitchat and vowed, “I’m going to make you famous.” Shortly afterward, Jimmy began signing off his radio shows with the message and he stuck with it to the end.

Following several years of ill health, Jimmy passed away at 86 and rests at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-405, take Slauson Avenue east for ½ mile. The cemetery is on the left at #5835.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn left, start up the hill and 100 yards to the left is the Grotto lawn and altar.
Jimmy’s grave is in Section F, which is the next patch of lawn, another level up and to the right of the altar. Just walk around the right side of the low rock wall and you’ll find it there against the wall.

SEPTEMBER 26, 1898 – JULY 11, 1937

DECEMBER 6, 1896 – AUGUST 17, 1983

In a career tragically cut short by a brain tumor, the composer George Gershwin, who bestrode the realms of both pop music and concert music, proved himself to be one of the great songwriters of his extremely rich era.

George left school in 1913 and, combining his classical piano training with the popular ragtime style, he became a major figure in the Tin Pan Alley tradition, composing for Broadway shows under the pseudonym Arthur Francis during his teens. At twenty came his first real hit, “Swanee,” and the same year saw his first Broadway musical,
La, La, Lucille
. During the next eighteen years, George produced an impressive amount of music and, with lyrics written largely by his older brother Ira, their songs came to define the 1920s and ’30s while musicals like
Strike Up the Band
and
Of Thee I Sing
delighted Broadway audiences.