Some friends recently visited the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, resting place of notables including Cecil B. DeMille, Tyrone Power, Bugsy Siegel, and Peter Lorre. Their site describes it as "the cemetery of choice for most of the founders of Hollywood's great studios, as well as writers, directors, and performers." Paramount Studios was built on the back section of the original cemetery, which was established in 1899 and named Hollywood Memorial Park.
The web site includes potted biographies of some of the more famous people buried there: http://www.hollywoodforever.com/stories.
Strangely, you can post messages for them. One for Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. starts, "Why are there so few messages left for this incredible man?"
Well, that would be because he's dead.
It vies with a place I visited when I lived in Los Angeles, the original Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale. Spread over 300 acres, it attracts a million visitors a year. It boasts the remains of Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow and Humphrey Bogart, among many others.
Their web site says, "No other cemetery can match the sheer number of stars buried here." I sense a rivalry.
Another recent death-related incident was getting a letter promoting a contest in which the first prize was a free cremation. I assume the winner doesn't have to use it right away. This could be a valuable prize. The Forest Lawn cremation packages start at just over $5000. If you choose to be buried instead and prefer a view, a spot on the Inspiration Slope starts at $14,000.
These are the kinds of details that inspired a book I enjoyed reading many years ago, The Loved One, by Evelyn Waugh. Here's the publisher's description:
Following the death of a friend, the poet and pets' mortician Dennis Barlow finds himself entering the artificial Hollywood paradise of the Whispering Glades Memorial Park. Within its golden gates, death, American-style, is wrapped up and sold like a package holiday-and Dennis gets drawn into a bizarre love triangle with Aimée Thanatogenos, a naïve Californian corpse beautician, and Mr. Joyboy, a master of the embalmer's art. Waugh's dark and savage satire on the Anglo-American cultural divide depicts a world where reputation, love, and death cost a very great deal.
Of course it's full of Waugh's caustic observations. One I particularly like, probably because I lived in Los Angeles for a decade: "They are a very generous decent lot of people out here and they don't expect you to listen. Always remember that, dear boy. It's the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard."
If you're looking for an amusing light read, I recommend The Loved One.
