Where Are They Buried? (84 page)

Doug starred in a second Broadway show,
Merlin
, appeared at venues nationwide as the day’s best illusionist, and single-handedly revived the public’s flagging interest in magic, paving the way for the next generation of magicians. In fact, when Doug changed his direction in 1987, he sold some of his most famous illusions to David Copperfield.

In the late eighties, Doug traded his dedication to illusional magic for a lifetime study of “real magic”—his term
for transcendental meditation and levitation. “Illusion magic uses laws of science and nature that are already known,” he explained, “but real magic uses laws that haven’t yet been discovered.” With his friend Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Doug spent the remainder of his life working toward building a proposed transcendental meditation theme park called Maharishi Veda Land in India where, he promised, one of the buildings would levitate.

Doug died of liver cancer at 52 and, after cremation, finally achieved “levitation” when his family scattered his ashes.

NOVEMBER 30, 1936 – APRIL 12, 1989

JULY 14, 1938 – NOVEMBER 28, 1994

The civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s were the first social revolutions to be televised and were rocket-fueled by the reach of broadcast media. In that theatrical era, the incendiary and sharp-tongued clown prince Abbie Hoffman was the movements’ mad genius, holding court at center stage.

A member of the transitional 1950’s generation between the beatniks and the hippies, Abbie’s rebellious teenage angst was punctuated by ducktail haircuts and smoking in the boys’ room. After studying under a number of the days’ radical intellectuals at Brandeis University, his political leanings were profoundly affected. There he learned to think analytically about social change and became convinced it was his destiny to stand out and not merely blend in.

By the early 1960s Abbie was among the first wave of Northern civil rights workers ferrying volunteers into Mississippi and Georgia, but his tact soon changed dramatically and Abbie began toying with the idea of a full-on cultural revolution. Rejecting capitalism and the emptiness of American life,
he and fellow rebel Jerry Rubin founded the Youth International Party, or Yippies. The anarchist group espoused political revolution, as well as sexual and drug freedom, “just for the hell of it.” Playing it all out in a form of street theater that served to shock conservative elders, by 1967 Abbie Hoffman was a household name.

A self-styled “Groucho Marxist,” as Abbie came to call himself, he and Jerry and their minions of Yippies engaged in a variety of public stunts meant to humiliate the Establishment. They disrupted business on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange by dropping fistfuls of dollars from the gallery and filming the brokers frenzy to catch them; rallied thousands of anti-Vietnam War demonstrators to levitate and exorcise the Pentagon; and appeared before a congressional committee wearing Revolutionary War costumes. Although the pranks were often comical, Abbie’s motivation was deeply serious: “I grew up thinking democracy is not some place you hang your hat … It’s something you do,” he penned in his autobiography,
Soon to be a Major Motion Picture
.

In 1968 the Yippies nominated a pig named Pigasus for President. In August of that year, their theater reached a crescendo when thousands of protesters converged on Chicago to demonstrate at the Democratic Convention. The violence in the streets there led to Abbie and Jerry’s arrest. Soon the most famous political trial of the decade began as they and the other Chicago Seven defended themselves on charges of conspiracy to incite riot.

In the famously unruly trial, the defendants blew kisses to the jury, chewed gobs of jellybeans while answering questions, and screamed insults at the prosecutors. Abbie angered the court by noting that the presiding judge, Julius Hoffman, had the same last name and saying the judge was his “illegitimate father.” After arriving in court one day dressed in judicial robes, they were ordered to take them off. They removed the robes to reveal blue Chicago police uniforms. On another day, they somersaulted into court. Ultimately, the seven were acquitted of the conspiracy.

In the late 1960s, Abbie began putting his ideas into books.
Revolution for the Hell of It
,
Woodstock Nation
, and
Steal this Book
together sold more than a million copies. In 1973 he was arrested for cocaine trafficking and, under threat of a 15-year-to-life sentence, went underground, had plastic surgery, and emerged as an ecological activist named Barry Freed. Meanwhile, co-conspirator Jerry Rubin began a prolonged round of self-improvement that
included meditation, acupuncture, and hypnotism in his search for a “new consciousness.” In 1980 on national television with Barbara Walters, Abbie came out of hiding and, after pleading guilty, served time on lesser charges.

“I have never seen myself as anything more than a good community organizer,” he wrote. “It was just the Vietnam War made the community bigger.” But by the 1980s the community had shrunk. Where Abbie’s every word was once deemed significant, he now spoke to small and often unenthusiastic audiences. For a while, he and Jerry—who had renounced radicalism, gone to work for a Wall Street firm, promoted networking seminars, and marketed Wow!, a nutritional drink—appeared on college campuses where they split a few thousand dollars to put on their “Yippie vs Yuppie” debate, the rhetorical equivalent of pro wrestling.

In 1989 Abbie was living in a sparse but sunny plant-filled Pennsylvania apartment, that bespoke decades of rebellion: a poster of the Grateful Dead, another of a raised fist with the word STRIKE!, and a bumper sticker reading “Vote Republican. It’s Easier Than Thinking” adorned the walls. He was working sporadically with an environmental group battling the diversion of the Delaware River water to cool a nuclear reactor but future plans and purpose seemed to elude Abbie. He also hadn’t fully recovered from a bad car accident some months earlier. Perhaps this called up the old fears he once wrote about during his fugitive days of “growing old … alone and broke.” Abbie ingested a lethal mix of alcohol and the equivalent of 150 phenobarbital pills. He was found very cold and dead some days later by his landlord. He was cremated and his ashes were given to a friend who keeps them on the mantle of her New York City apartment.

In 1994, at 56, Jerry met his end after being struck by a car while jaywalking across Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. As one who all his life tweaked authority and defied expectations, it’s fitting that what led to his death was one final act of nonconformity.

Jerry was buried at Hillside Memorial Park in Los Angeles.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Hillside Memorial Park is on Centinella Avenue, just east of I-405.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the park and make your way to the Mount of Olives section, which is the grassy area on the hill to the left. There you’ll see the curb marker for 7-14. Jerry’s grave is under a tree at the end of the row directly behind this marking.

MARCH 24, 1874 – OCTOBER 31, 1926

After concocting the name “Houdini” from the famous French illusionist Jean Eugene Robert Houdin, the Hungarian-born Ehrich Weiss began his professional life as an entertainer at county fairs before becoming the foremost conjuring magician and escape artist of his day.

In 1894 Houdini met and married a struggling actress named Bess and, with her promotional acumen, Houdini’s fledgling magic show grew quickly. He did card manipulations and run-of-the-mill illusions, but when the pair realized that his particularly macabre and dangerous tricks were the real crowd pleasers, Houdini adjusted his act accordingly. First came the Needle Trick, a grisly effect involving the swallowing of needles and thread, followed by their regurgitation with the thread neatly looped through the needles’ eyes. By 1898 Houdini was escaping from any pair of handcuffs the audience could produce in his Handcuff Challenge Act, which led to his renown as an escape artist.

In full view of audiences, Houdini was soon escaping from leg irons, straitjackets, and prison cells, and, when those routines became too easy, the drama and difficulty were ratcheted upward. Houdini was thrown into rivers in padlocked crates and locked canvas mailbags, he jumped from bridges in handcuffs, he was buried alive in sealed coffins and, on stage, his Upside-Down Water Torture Cell and Milk Can Escape illusions enthralled audiences, their jaws hanging open in astonishment. For more than two decades Houdini remained in the limelight. He was the first to demonstrate illusions in motion pictures and, in later years, became a relentless exposer of unscrupulous spiritual mediums and a proud debunker of psychic frauds.

In 1926, at 52 years old, Houdini was still packing people in by the thousands, and his reputation was unparalleled. During a tour in the fall of that year, Houdini began experiencing stomach pains, but stubbornly refused to see a doctor. After an appearance at the Princess Theater in Montreal, a college-student J. Gordon Whitehead asked Houdini if the legend that he could sustain punches to his midsection without injury was true. Preoccupied with other conversation, Houdini more or less sidestepped the question, but he should also have sidestepped the blows that were to follow. Without warning, Whitehead pummeled Houdini at least three times in the abdomen, after which Houdini, grimacing in obvious pain, politely excused himself.

He struggled through the next day’s show and, after arriving in London, Ontario, for the tour’s next stop, a doctor informed Houdini he was suffering from acute appendicitis. But the showbiz veteran refused to cancel that night’s sold-out performance, which turned out to be his last. When Houdini’s ruptured appendix was removed at three o’clock the next morning, the poison had already entered his bloodstream and he died in Detroit six days later, on Halloween.

Though the oft-repeated Houdini legend holds that Whitehead’s punches were solely responsible for his death, that’s not entirely true. It seems Houdini was already suffering from appendicitis and, even if Whitehead had never struck him, Houdini’s appendix would have soon ruptured on its own. Nonetheless, his wife, Bess, was able to collect double indemnity on his life insurance policy claiming that the blows were equivalent to “an accident directly causing the premature death of Harry Houdini.”

At Machpelah Cemetery in Queens, New York, Houdini was buried in the very bronze coffin from which he had many times previously escaped. His rather large tombstone originally was topped with an imposing Houdini bust, but it was stolen many years later and never replaced.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From the Interboro Parkway, take Exit 3, turn north onto Cypress Hill Street and Machpelah Cemetery is a few hundred yards to the left. (Note: Cypress Hill Street is not the same as Cypress Avenue.)

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and you won’t miss Harry’s tomb 50 feet behind the office.

As an ultimate test of spiritualism, Houdini and Bess arranged a series of coded messages by which the first to die would—if
possible—communicate with the other. After twelve years of trying to communicate with her deceased husband through the code, Bess finally declared the experiment a failure though, every Halloween since, others have made their own attempts.

NOVEMBER 24, 1905 – APRIL 5, 1976

As the only child of millionaire parents, Howard Hughes certainly had a good start in life, but the turning of his silver spoon into platinum was the direct result of personal accomplishments.

The Hughes’ family wealth was derived from their Hughes Tool Company, which manufactured a sophisticated rotary bit used by the burgeoning oil industry for drilling through rock. When Howard was orphaned at eighteen, he took over the family business, shrewdly purchased his competitors, and, within a few years, boasted of a $2 million yearly income, quite a comfortable living for today and unheard of in 1928.

Howard later shifted his interest to making Hollywood movies, but he wasn’t content as just a silent pocketbook. Instead, he became an independent filmmaker, bought RKO Pictures, and produced a couple dozen films, turning Jean Harlow and Jane Russell into stars and earning an Academy Award for
Two Arabian Knights
. All the while, of course, Howard sampled Hollywood’s café society beauties and biggest stars, and became a symbol of Movieland’s excesses and eccentricities.

In the midst of his hectic schedule (he was still the CEO of Hughes Tool, too), Howard became intrigued with the still-young field of aviation. In typical bigger-than-life Hughes fashion, not only did he learn to fly, Howard designed his own planes, formed a company that made experimental aircraft, and personally set air-speed records. During World War II, when metal was at a premium, his company built a plane of birch wood, the Spruce Goose (though it only flew once, for a mile with Howard at the controls). In 1938 he flew around the world in 91 hours, a feat for which he earned a Congressional Medal of Honor. (Howard never bothered to pick up the prize. After FDR’s death, Harry Truman found the medal in a desk and mailed it to Hughes.)