Where Are They Buried? (51 page)

The result was that Truman became ostracized from the world in which he was both working and living. He quickly declined into drug abuse and alcoholism, and the book was never finished. Shortly before his death Truman offered an apology of sorts by saying, “I am not a saint. I am an alcoholic, I am a drug addict, and I am a homosexual. But I am a genius.”

The health of his liver compromised by hard living, Truman died of heart failure at 59, and today lies at Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Follow Wilshire Boulevard a half-mile east from I-405, then turn right onto Glendon Avenue, and the cemetery is immediately on the left. Or you may want to park your car along Wilshire Boulevard and walk to the cemetery behind the office complex at 10850 Wilshire Blvd.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and turn left. On the wall just left of the Sanctuary of Tenderness is Truman’s crypt.

The subjects of
In Cold Blood
—Herbert, Bonnie, Nancy, and Kenyon Clutter—are buried at Valley View Cemetery in Garden City, Kansas.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Valley View is on Third Street on the north side of town. From Route 50, turn north at the Third Street intersection (there’s a tall water tank there) and the cemetery is ahead a short distance on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and drive to the rear northwest corner, where you’ll see a maintenance garage. The Clutter stones are in the sixth row of the section diagonally opposite the garage.

JANUARY 27, 1832 – JANUARY 14, 1898

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was the scholarly son of a vicar who at eighteen entered Christ Church College at Oxford University and, in one capacity or another, stayed there until his death some 50 years later. A student of mathematics, he later wrote a number of weighty academic texts on the subject, but Charles is more commonly remembered, of course, for the children’s stories he wrote under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.

Lewis had personal issues that many historians neglect. He purported to be called to answer holy orders his entire life but, though he was ordained as a deacon in 1861, Lewis avoided the priesthood and sermonizing, probably because of his lifelong stuttering affliction. An exceedingly undemonstrative introvert who kept his hands hidden inside black gloves, he was uncomfortable around adults and never dated or married. All of his close friendships were instead with children, especially young girls, for whom he performed marionette shows and created puzzles and word games. Lewis was able to acquire a camera by 24 (no mean feat in 1856), and photography of children became his preferred pastime. Some of these pictures were undeniably erotic and featured young girls in stages of undress.

A particular muse of Lewis’s was Alice Liddell, the eleven-year-old daughter of the Christ Church College dean. During a rowboat excursion with Alice and two of her school-aged friends, Lewis wove for them a whimsical tale about a girl who went down a rabbit hole in search of a rabbit that was late for a tea party. He later expanded the story into a full manuscript and presented it as a gift to Alice entitled,
A Christmas Gift to a Dear Child in Memory of a Summer Day
. He also suggested to Alice’s parents that he was interested in courting their daughter. By order of the Liddell parents, Lewis was forbidden from further association with Alice.

But they had to admit that he’d written quite a story, and they encouraged him to publish it. In 1865 Lewis self-published the story after renaming it
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and, seven years later, its
Through the Looking Glass
sequel came into print.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
has become one of the most widely translated and beloved children’s stories ever written and, after nearly 150 years, has never gone out of print.

At 65, Lewis died of a bronchial infection at the Chestnut, the estate in Guildford, Surrey, England, that he inherited from his
family. In Guildford, 40 miles southwest of London, Lewis’s grave is marked by a marble cross under a pine tree at Mount Cemetery.

Many years after Lewis fantasized about his real-life Alice, there came a new interest in the storybook Alice from an unlikely quarter, the acid-test counterculture. In 1967 the Jefferson Airplane rock band’s hit song “White Rabbit” graced the airwaves, and its lyrics revealed perceived drug allegories within the
Wonderland
story. That Alice’s “trip”—in which she ingests potions that change her consciousness and lead to encounters with a cast of strange characters, including a Mad Hatter and a hookah-smoking caterpillar—might have been Lewis’ allusions to an opium trip was not a new idea and had long been debated in literary circles. But the Jefferson Airplane song placed the debate squarely into the popular forum and, in short order, college students lined up for midnight showings of Disney’s animated version of
Alice in Wonderland
. In panicked libraries across the nation, the children’s storybook began appearing on lists of banned books.

SEPTEMBER 15, 1890 – JANUARY 12, 1976

The 90-plus novels and two dozen or so collections of short stories produced by mystery-writer Agatha Christie stagger even the most insatiable detective-fiction addict. More impressive yet, her works have been translated into dozens of languages, selling well over a billion copies in total. Only the Bible and Shakespeare’s works have sold more, but even the Bard has little on her; thirty years after one of Agatha’s dozen plays,
The Mousetrap
, opened in London in 1952, it became the longest continuously running play in theatrical history.

Agatha introduced her eccentric Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, in her first detective novel, 1920’s
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
. In 40 books, the comic and amiable master-sleuth astutely observed a mountain of details that invariably led him, and the reader, to the identity of the murderer. Agatha later introduced another fictitious criminologist, the shrewdly inquisitive Miss Jane Marple, who was no less sensible than Poirot but relied more heavily on her feminine sensitivity and empathy to solve crimes. In fact, the perceptive methodologies of these characters were the key to Agatha’s success. Readers were mesmerized by the unexpected twists that peppered her deliciously intricate plots until, in the end, they were surprised to find that they’d blindly ignored a vital clue that had been casually
introduced hundreds of pages earlier. Her knack for consistently fooling her would-be detective readers in such works as
Murder on the Orient Express
and
Death on the Nile
earned Agatha her fans’ allegiance.

In 1971 Agatha was made an honorary Dame of the British Empire.

Just a year after Agatha killed off Poirot in
Curtain: Hercule Poirot’s Last Case
(which earned him a front-page obituary in the
New York Times
), Agatha herself died, though merely of natural causes.

At 85, she was buried at the Saint Mary Churchyard in Cholsey, Oxfordshire, England, 45 miles west of London. Her grave is marked by a tall headstone and the 25 trees that were planted in the churchyard in 1990 to mark the centenary of her birth.

MAY 11, 1904 – JANUARY 23, 1989

The 1930s European surrealists were influenced by the cubism of Picasso and Freud’s controversial writings on the unconscious, dreams, and sexuality. Incorporating these concepts into their work, they aimed to break the constraints of realist representation and reach the fantasies and dreams that constitute inner life. Salvador Dali emerged as the leader of that Surrealist movement, and his
Persistence of Memory
(the painting with the dripping clocks) is perhaps the most widely recognized surrealist painting.

Realistic and disturbing depictions of nightmarish images on vast and uninviting landscapes became his trademark. Dali claimed his work was a product of a “paranoiac critical method,” a sort of self-hypnosis that allowed him to hallucinate freely, and that he himself was surprised by what appeared on his canvases.

Dali’s reputation swelled worldwide and was based as much on his flamboyance and flair for publicity as on his prodigious output. He worked in several media, and his legacy includes poetry, fiction, and a controversial autobiography. His works in film includes credit for the dream sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s
Spellbound
.

By the late 1960s Dali’s work was hampered by Parkinson’s disease, but his personality had so captured the public’s imagination that he continued to exert influence, if only as a source of ideas. In 1974 he championed the opening of his own museum, but the
decade also found Dali mired in financial and strategic scandals, the worst of which was his reported signing of thousands of sheets of blank paper, falsely rendering anything later added to the paper a Dali lithograph. It was eventually estimated that collectors had been bilked for at least $750 million on phony Dali prints.

Dali’s health, both physical and mental, deteriorated sharply after his wife’s death in 1982, and the remainder of his life was spent in almost total seclusion.

He died at 84 of heart failure and respiratory complications, and is entombed in the basement of his own museum, Teatro Museo Dali, in Figueras, Spain, 70 miles northeast of Barcelona.

FEBRUARY 7, 1812 – JUNE 9, 1870

In 1824 Charles Dickens’ father and family were imprisoned for debt, while the twelve-year-old Charles was put to work at a factory. This experience and his childhood of poverty and adversity haunted him for the remainder of his life, but also proved to be a source for his novels. His writings frequently delved into themes of alienation and betrayal, compassion for the lower classes, and Industrial Revolution-era social reform.

At 22, Charles joined a London newspaper and shortly thereafter began publishing monthly stories and sketches, the seeds of what would later become his novels. After the initial success of these stories, Charles embarked on a full-time career as a novelist and produced works of increasing complexity at an incredible rate, all the while continuing his journalistic activities.

In his novels—
Oliver Twist
,
A Christmas Carol
,
David Copperfield
,
A Tale of Two Cities,
and
Great Expectations
, to name a few—he created a Shakespearean gallery of characters, many of which later found life in film and theater, and all of which continue to enthrall the reading public today.

At 58, Charles died of a stroke and it was his wish to be buried in the graveyard of Rochester Castle Moat with “no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hat band or any other revolting absurdity.” Instead, he was buried in the heart of London, in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey opposite the Houses of Parliament.

An hour southeast of London, Dickens lived in the village of Rochester for most of his life. There are numerous places in town associated with him, and he’s honored with an annual festival. At the graveyard, a simple plaque says: “Charles Dickens wished to be buried here.”

SEPTEMBER 24, 1896 – DECEMBER 21, 1940

JULY 24, 1900 – MARCH 10, 1948

The early lives of the author F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda epitomized the triumphs of the Roaring Twenties in affluence, accomplishment, and melodramatic love. Unfortunately, their fable reflected both sides of the dream, and they later suffered the common tragedies of intemperance.

Upon publication of his first novel,
This Side of Paradise
, Scott married Zelda in an extravagant ceremony. They rode the crest of success and enjoyed the fame that his novel brought. Their exploits, recounted in newspapers and popular magazines, included jumping into the Plaza Hotel’s fountain fully clothed, riding in an open car through the city streets, and reveling at glamorous parties. They led the privileged lives of aspiring socialites.

Their life together though, lacked any semblance of order, and their wealth was something of an illusion. Scott, the overnight sensation, in fact earned very little for his work, and wrote for mass-circulation magazines to supplement his income. Though he endeavored to further his literary reputation, he was gaining common recognition only as an extravagant drunk. Meanwhile, Zelda struggled to maintain an identity, and her formerly charming, unconventional behavior became eccentric and bizarre.

After endless revision,
The Great Gatsby
was finally released in 1925 to critical praise, but even these sales proved disappointing, and the Fitzgeralds continued to live far beyond their means. As debts mounted, Scott plunged into alcoholism, and domestic rows triggered by drinking were frequent. Increasingly unstable, Zelda was institutionalized in 1930 and eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. She would spend the rest of her life in and out of psychiatric hospitals.