Where Are They Buried? (33 page)

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From Route 33, take Route 512 north to Pen Argyl. At the third light, turn right onto South Main Street and the cemetery is a short distance past the town garage.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery at the second entrance and go around the U-shaped drive. Two hundred feet before the stone pillared exit, you’ll see Jayne’s heart-shaped grave on the right.

OCTOBER 1, 1920 – JULY 1, 2000

Graduating from high school during the Depression, Walter Matuchanskavasky took a series of government jobs—as a forester in Montana, a gym instructor for the WPA, a boxing coach for policemen—before enlisting in the Army Air Corps and serving as a radio cryptographer during World War II. One of the senior officers on the base was none other than Jimmy Stewart and, after sneaking in to watch Jimmy do a morning briefing, Walter decided that he wanted to become an actor.

After the war, Walter took some acting lessons and, after a stint on Broadway, by 1955 was sharing film credits with some of the great stars of the day including Burt Lancaster in
The Kentuckian
and Kirk Douglas in
Lonely Are the Brave
. But Walter really hit his stride in 1966 as an unscrupulous lawyer trying to win an insurance settlement opposite Jack Lemmon in
The Fortune Cookie
, for which he won an Oscar for best supporting actor.

That collaboration also marked the first of many memorable teamings with Lemmon. The duo, whose banter was as playful offscreen as on, worked together on some of Hollywood’s funniest flicks, usually featuring Walter’s character mercilessly tormenting Lemmon’s. In addition to
Fortune Cookie
, the duo appeared in 1974’s
The Front Page
, 1981’s
Buddy, Buddy,
and 1993’s
Grumpy Old Men
. But their most memorable face-off was in the 1968 movie version of Neil Simon’s classic
The Odd Couple
, with Walter playing the disheveled sportswriter Oscar Madison to Lemmon’s anal-retentive Felix Unger.

“Every actor looks all his life for a part that will combine his talents with his personality,” Walter once said. “
The Odd Couple
was mine. That was the plutonium I needed. It all started happening after that.”

Despite professional triumphs, Walter faced trials in his personal life. He publicly admitted that his struggle with compulsive gambling had cost him an estimated $5 million over the years and he agreed with physicians that the strain of his gambling and heavy smoking had contributed to a heart attack suffered while filming
The Fortune Cookie
in 1966. Though he gave up his three-packs-per-day smoking habit, coronary bypass surgery came in 1976, he was hospitalized with double pneumonia in 1993, and in 1995 he underwent surgery to remove a non-malignant colon tumor. In typical form, Walter attributed his maladies to his bad eating habits: “If you eat only celery and lettuce, you won’t get sick…. I like celery and lettuce, but I like them with pickles, relish, corned beef, potatoes, peas. And I like Eskimo Pies.”

Despite health issues, Walter continued to work steadily, playing his trademark codger, an irritable ailing father, in his final film, 2000’s
Hanging Up
.

Following a heart attack, America’s favorite grumpy old man died at 79.

He was buried at Westwood Memorial Park, Los Angeles, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
This little cemetery holds numerous celebrities and is peculiarly located behind the office complex at 10850 Wilshire Blvd., just about a half-mile east of I-405.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and turn left at the office. Pass the chapel, pass Jack Lemmon’s grave, and, on the right after a few more plots, you’ll see Walter’s stone along the drive.

JANUARY 10, 1939 – FEBRUARY 12, 1976

Sal Mineo became a teen idol after his breakout role in 1956’s
Rebel Without a Cause
. By playing Plato, the switchblade-wielding juvenile delinquent cloaked in an aura of smoldering boyishness, Sal was transformed from a Bronx gang member and parochial-school dropout to an Academy Award nominee who received some 4,000 letters a week from adoring fans.

The next few years were lucrative for Sal; he had plenty of offers and appeared in numerous films, most notably
Exodus
, for which he was nominated for another Oscar. But once he
matured from teen idol status, his best film offers were behind him and Sal was relegated to scraping out a living on stages in Los Angeles.

Late one evening after parking his car in the carport outside of his West Hollywood apartment, Sal was stabbed in the heart and, at 37, died on the sidewalk before the paramedics even arrived. With the absence of any apparent motive, the slaying went unsolved for two years until an inmate in a Michigan prison bragged that he’d killed Sal and that “it had been easy.” In 1979 Lionel Williams was convicted and sentenced to fiftyone years.

Despite a barrage of tabloid theories that the motive for Sal’s murder was everything from a bad drug deal to a homosexual lovers’ quarrel, the reason behind the killing has never been established, and now it’s generally believed Sal was just the victim of a robbery gone wrong.

Sal is buried at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-287, take Exit 4 and follow Route 100A north for 2½ miles (Route 100A will become Route 100 after 2 miles) to Lakeview Avenue and turn right. Follow Lakeview Avenue to its intersection with the Taconic State Parkway, turn left, and the Gate of Heaven Cemetery is a mile ahead on the left. Turn left onto Stevens Avenue, go over the railroad tracks, and make another left to enter.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn right, and follow the main road up the hill. Bear left at the fork, make a right just before section two (toward the stone tower), then turn right again at the next drive. A couple hundred feet on the right, Sal’s grave is marked with a flat stone in front of the Donofrio mausoleum.

JUNE 1, 1926 – AUGUST 5, 1962

The movies have lent a millennial shelf life to Marilyn Monroe’s most perishable qualities of youth and beauty. Had she been born before the cameras rolled, she may have existed as only a Helen of Troy legend but, thanks to celluloid, her bumping and cooing will be here to greet the Second Coming. Media stars live forever, and Marilyn is their torchbearer.

Marilyn came into this life named Norma Jean, the daughter of a film cutter who flirted with insanity. Due to her mother’s assorted delusions, Norma Jean spent most of her childhood in foster homes. At 16, when her then foster family planned to move and could not take her with them, they arranged for her to marry a family friend, the 21-year-old James Dougherty. Before James left to serve during World War II, he secured Norma Jean a job at Lockheed and she became part of the home-front war effort, working in a division that made target planes.

At some point, a magazine team visited the plant to take inspiring propaganda shots and a bright-eyed, curly haired, brunette named Norma Jean Dougherty soon found herself on the magazine’s cover. She quit her job, had corrective dental work, went on a diet, and had her dark, wool-tight curls straightened and platinumed. She divorced her husband, who had been absent for almost the entirety of their marriage, and Norma Jean became a popular photographer’s model, her likeness gracing pin-up posters, advertisements, and pulp magazine covers.

Encouraged by success, Norma Jean aimed for a career in motion pictures. Despite her lack of acting experience, she found work and bounced from studio to studio, filling out the visual landscape of lightweight comedic romps as the fresh-faced Marilyn Monroe. After nude calendar photos of her emerged, Marilyn’s star-appeal soared and she participated full-bore in the promotion of her sex-symbol image. In 1953, she secured a place in media history when she graced the premier issue of
Playboy
magazine. That sensation propelled Marilyn to the stratosphere.

Marilyn laid bare her life and begged the public to love her, and they did. Movie studios competed for Hollywood’s newest sex kitten, and the deals came in fast sequence. Predictably, Marilyn most often played the hopelessly irresistible home-wrecker or the warm-hearted floozy in a series of romantic farces whose titles—
The Seven-Year Itch
,
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
—predicated the storylines. But, because she wasn’t a trained actress, the improbabilities of her movies’ plots perfectly complemented her provocative bravado. In other films, particularly 1959’s acclaimed
Some Like It Hot
, in which she played the lovelorn singer Sugar Kane, Marilyn’s patent grandiosity and inimitable breathy singing style made an indelible mark.

In contrast to her successful professional career, Marilyn’s affairs were unsteady, to say the least. Three heavily flashbulbed
marriages and divorces, including those to Yankee clipper Joe DiMaggio and literary icon Arthur Miller, left her personal life a shambles, while tabloid tell-alls burst with abortions and off-duty trysts involving Frank Sinatra and multiple Kennedys. After her last two film releases flopped, a 30-something Marilyn must have wondered how much longer her sex-kitten status would last and, perhaps, she decided that stardom had become too much of a burden.

By August 1962 Marilyn was increasingly dependent on medication and was getting prescriptions from at least two doctors. Her housekeeper, Eunice Murray, had been sleeping at Marilyn’s Brentwood home at the request of Marilyn’s psychiatrist and, one evening, Eunice found Marilyn dead in bed. Though the coroner declared her death a suicide from ingestion of nearly fifty Nembutal sleeping pills, as well as a quantity of another sleeping potion, chloral hydrate, Marilyn’s death has since been otherwise variously attributed to accidental overdose, political necessity, and a mob hit.

After more than 300 biographies, countless documentaries, and a postage stamp, the debate over the “real” Marilyn and her untimely death has yet to be resolved. Meanwhile, adoring fans cling to the memory of the beloved actress who may have gotten some of what she wanted but not all of what she needed.

Marilyn was laid to rest at Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
This little cemetery holds numerous celebrities and is peculiarly located behind the office complex at 10850 Wilshire Blvd., just about a half-mile east of I-405.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
As you stand in the cemetery yard and look toward the cemetery office, on your far left is a series of small rooms with crypts. Marilyn’s crypt is several yards to the left of the Room of Prayer.

APRIL 19, 1935 – MARCH 27, 2002

After leaving Oxford University in 1958, Dudley Moore performed as a cabaret pianist and toured widely before founding the Beyond The Fringe comedy revue with partner Peter Cook.
The troupe’s antics opened the door to television, which, in turn, led to a screen debut in
The Wrong Box
in 1966. Dudley wrote, starred in, and composed the score for his next film,
30 Is a Dangerous Age
, two years later.

In 1979 Dudley found a wider audience when he played a composer grappling with a midlife crisis in the hit movie
10
and, with his diminutive stature, he became one of Hollywood’s most unlikely stars. Afterward he appeared in a string of comedies and is best remembered as the lovable, drunken playboy in the 1981 box-office smash,
Arthur
. Prompted by some fans to consider more serious fare, “Cuddly Dudley” once remarked, “I would love to do serious roles, but I’m just not built that way.”

In the early 1990s Dudley seemed to become unreliable and began having trouble remembering lines. It was widely believed that he was spiraling downward due to alcoholism or a drug problem and in 1995, fed up with his inconsistency, Barbra Streisand fired him from the movie
The Mirror Has Two Faces
.

In 1997 Dudley had an extended hospital stay after a stroke and open-heart surgery, and it was then discovered that his erratic behavior didn’t stem from substance abuse after all. Instead it had been caused by a rare and incurable condition called Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP), similar to Parkinson’s disease. In the last years of his life, the disease slowly robbed Dudley of his faculties; his vision became hazy, his motor control was impaired, and his speech slurred. Eventually, even swallowing became difficult.

At 66, Dudley died of pneumonia, a complication of PSP, and was buried at Hillside Cemetery in Scotch Plains, New Jersey.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-78, take Exit 40 and follow Route 531 south for three miles to its intersection with Route 22. Turn east on Route 22 and, after three more miles, make a right onto Terrill Road. After a half-mile turn right onto South Avenue. After another half-mile make a left onto Woodland Avenue and then, two miles later, the cemetery is on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and follow the signs to the office. Pass the office and bear left and shortly you’ll see Section D-3 on your left. Drive to the end of this section and stop where you see the Wodrich stone. Dudley’s grave is behind the Wodrich plot in what at the time of this writing is an unmarked plot.

JUNE 20, 1924 – MAY 28, 1971

Audie Murphy was the most decorated American combat soldier of World War II. He received 28 medals, including the Medal of Honor and three Purple Hearts, and later parlayed his war-hero status into a Hollywood career.

But in deference to the untold millions who also dedicated themselves to that war, it’s important to point out that Audie Murphy wasn’t the bravest or most courageous—he was the most decorated. He was exactly like everyone else who gallantly fought for his country but he lived to tell about it, unlike many of his fellow patriots, and he even gained celebrity from it. By that measure, then, we should say that Audie Murphy was a brave and courageous soldier, but if we wish to apply a superlative, then perhaps we should say only that he was the luckiest.