Curtains (28 page)

N
ormal people go to Los Angeles to see Beverly Hills and the Strip. I get a room at the Holiday Inn in Manhattan Beach and spend two days crawling through cemeteries. Following directions given to me by Lisa Burks, a local “grave hunter” (one of a community of people who hang out in cemeteries, stalking the graves of the famous to take pictures, like post-mortem paparazzi), I pass what should be Hollywood Forever, on a seedy stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard. It takes three loops to find the entrance, which is next to an auto repair shop surrounded by red rusty puddles. Past the gates, it’s a huge estate of white-marble headstones and mini-mausolea and cypress trees, bordered on one side by the Paramount studio lot. Behind me are the hills, and the famous
HOLLYWOOD
sign. I sit to rest on a marble bench, which turns out to be Tyrone Power’s grave. Dee Dee
Ramone’s black headstone is lipstick-kissed in red and yellow and purple, and pilgrims have left offerings: votive candles, a plastic harmonica, a pair of lady’s pumps (also kissed). Across the pond is the Cathedral Mausoleum. Inside it’s chilly and dim with banks of crypts like marble filing cabinets. My shoes squeak on the stone floor. Every few steps reveal a familiar name. Here’s Peter Finch, already dead and walled into this spot when they gave him the Oscar for
Network
. And here’s a treat: David White, who played Larry Tate, Darrin’s long-suffering boss on
Bewitched
, in a glass niche with a life-size bronze bust of his head. With the other niches around him, it’s as if he’s a guest on an afterlife version of
Hollywood Squares
. Farther down I see a piece of paper rolled and stuffed into a bronze vase on one of the crypts (nobody special). Looking around, I pull out the paper, a page ripped from a book. Maybe Scripture? It’s from
The Big Book
of Alcoholics Anonymous, step eight, in which you repent to those you’ve wronged: “We can now commence to ransack memory for the people to whom we have given offence.”

I’d read about a Los Angeles couple, Bernardo Puccio and Orin Kennedy, who’d bought pre-need property at Hollywood Forever. They commissioned a neo-classical monument in Carrera marble for themselves and their cat Cristal, had it draped in white and purple silk, and held an unveiling for friends, including fashion maven Mr. Blackwell, at which they served wine and played Johnny Mathis singing “The Twelfth of Never.” “Tyrone Power’s is minuscule compared to mine,” Puccio sniffed to the
Los Angeles Times
.

Forever, as part of its pre-need packaging, sells tribute videos: interviews with family members, photographs and music cut in a professional edit suite and screened at the funeral (released
thereafter on DVD)—the fifteen minutes of fame Andy Warhol promised us all, according to one of the producers. This is their brand: the illusion of fame, and an entree into celebrity culture for no-name chumps like me who are willing to pay to be installed in the same theme park as Cecil B. DeMille and Mel Blanc (whose headstone in the Jewish section reads: “
That’s All Folks
!”). You get a piece of Forever: the word’s on the letterhead, and the company logo is the sideways figure-eight, the infinity symbol.

So why does the cemetery feel so lonely and abandoned? The tourists are all on the Boulevard, at the Disney store. There’s no one else here, except a man in a pith helmet watering the mausoleum wall with a hose. It’s hot, and the grass is dry in spots where the thumping sprinklers can’t reach. A threadbare white peacock pads by, pecking at something. He looks like a long-tailed pigeon. The reflecting pools in front of the Douglas Fairbanks tomb (both Senior and Junior are there) are green with moss and algae muck. As much as they’ve tried to embalm sixty-two acres of what used to be desert, fixing its features and combing its cypress hair, nature fights back, as it does in any cemetery. The idea of forever works as a sales tool, but in reality, of course, it’s a myth. The writer Geoff Dyer says the ancient Roman city of Leptis Magna in Lybia became interesting only when it fell to ruins, when history was done and all that remained was the scattered evidence of time. The only permanence is impermanence.

Lisa takes me to Grand View Memorial Park in Glendale. Grand View has a few silent film stars, but most of its dead are immigrants and Hollywood journeymen: directors and designers and focus pullers and character actors who’d bought the L.A. promise of fame and big movie money, and had to settle for steady gigs
making two-reelers, like the working-class toilers in Nathanael West’s
Day of the Locust
. Forest Lawn and Hollywood Forever have superstars. Grand View has the support staff.

Now Grand View is in trouble. The gates are locked. In 2006 the state suspended the cemetery’s licence. The state’s Department of Consumer Affairs accused Grand View and its principal shareholder, Marsha Howard, who lived in a house in the cemetery, of mishandling remains and embezzling money from the perpetual care fund. The state alleged that bodies were being disinterred at night, that 4,500 sets of cremated remains, some decades old, were stacked in storage rooms, spilled on the floor or dumped in Dumpsters, and that Grand View had been burying remains in plots previously sold to other people (according to court documents, Howard admitted that she’d been reselling graves: “I’m fucked …” she’s quoted as telling investigators. “You might as well write I’m fucked on that paper”). This being America, the next step came briskly: families of those buried at Grand View launched a class-action lawsuit against the cemetery. Then, in a final twist, Marsha Howard was found dead in her house, of natural causes, which left her business partner, the minority shareholder, to deal with the mess.

Without a licence, Grand View had no cash, and without cash they couldn’t pay for upkeep and insurance, so the city of Glendale shut them down, calling the place a hazard: the grass is tinder dry and the trees are shedding heavy palm fronds.

Lisa and I visit on a Sunday, and the gates are open. Twice a month the city opens Grand View for brief supervised visits, staffing it with volunteers who hand out maps and water bottles, making sure no one smokes or burns incense. The visitors are mostly local Armenians who have family in Grand View and are used to
tending their graves daily, like gardens. They’ve been on local TV, weeping and cramming flowers into the padlocked gates, building a shrine, breaking people’s hearts. So Glendale came up with this bimonthly compromise. Only the mausoleum remains shut, by court order.

“I talked to people who jumped the walls so they could see their families,” Lisa says.

I watch a family carry milk jugs full of water to a grave, to feed the dry plants. The grave had been decorated with white gravel and a chandelier hanging from an iron brace. Others rake their plots and sweep them with brooms. Two women sit in lawn chairs and trim flowers.

Paul Ayers, one of the lawyers in the suit, sits at a card table under a tree, so families can sign up for a piece of the class action. Two days ago, he says, he and a handful of lawyers acted as pallbearers for a court-ordered interment in the mausoleum. Nothing is allowed to come into or leave the cemetery now without a judge’s okay: everything that isn’t already buried (and some things that are) is considered evidence. “One lady,” Lisa says, “she brought in her mother’s headstone on a dolly. The rangers made her take it out. They were like, sorry, but you can’t do that.” The lady’s mother had been the last to be buried before the gates were locked.

The Armenian markers are polished black marble, many with laser-etched pictures of the dead, as sharp as photos. Behind a shed I come across an unfinished headstone, with a woman’s face partially carved into the marble. She has glasses but no eyes, a face but no mouth.

We cross the cemetery to the mausoleum, the thick cover of dry grass crunching like cornflakes under my feet. I’m slick from the
heat. We come upon an old woman in black, holding an umbrella against the sun, sitting in front of her husband’s grave on an overturned bucket. She speaks to us in her own language, pointing at the face on the black headstone, crying into a hankie. Lisa gives her a fresh bottle of water.

The mausoleum, a stucco fortress with a terra cotta roof, covers a full Glendale city block, spanning the western edge of the cemetery. When it was built in 1924 they called it the “Huge House of the Silent.” It’s locked now, but through a curtained window in the door, I can see the dark staircase where the inspector found the thousands of cremated remains. It’s not known if the remains were left here over the years by families who never came back to get them, or why they were stockpiled instead of buried. I suppose it’s a kind of perpetual care, keeping thousands in storage-room limbo for decades, but it can’t be what they signed up for.

I turn around to find a woman standing behind us. Her name is Melinda, she says, and she’s the great-grand-niece of Edna Purviance. Lisa is thrilled. I confess I don’t know who Edna Purviance is, or was. It turns out she was a silent film star, Charlie Chaplin’s favourite leading lady, who appeared in more than thirty of his films, including
The Kid
and
A Jitney Elopement
, and she’s been a resident of the Grand View mausoleum since 1958. Some of her fans have recently launched an online campaign to get her out of the troubled cemetery and into a more stable community, maybe Forest Lawn. “People live on if they’re on film,” Melinda says.

But not forever.

In Japan there’s a design concept known as
wabi-sabi
, or humble beauty. An object worn by time and weather and use, like a rough, handmade tea bowl, has
wabi-sabi
. The point is to value transience
and built-in impermanence, to appreciate the flawed and the doomed because, like you, they’re not going to last. So a paper lantern, a clay pot, a knit shawl, the ruins of Leptis Magna, and fading jailhouse tattoos all have
wabi-sabi
, but a Twinkie, iPhones, Ikea furniture, Swingline staplers and Hello Kitty do not. In the funeral world there’s no patience for
wabi-sabi
. Decay is bad for the brand and runs counter to the promise of “perpetual care.” But Grand View is crawling with
wabi-sabi
. This is at the heart of the class-action suit: families had been promised perpetual care and maintenance of their graves and crypts, it was in the contract, and now instead of forever they got wild, unkempt and chaotic
wabi-sabi
. In 2007, the cemetery settled with the state by admitting to three of the fourteen accusations. The owner agreed to reimburse $50,000 to the endowment care fund and to sell the cemetery within three years. It may still be for sale. Check eBay.

If the illusion of permanence is a North American vice, like tummy tucks, hair weaves, rust protection and TV series starring Tony Danza, a promise with commercial appeal, it’s one bound to be broken by gravity, weather, water, wind, failing memories and time. Chapel Lawn is challenging Neil over his rose garden because he can’t guarantee forever. How long is forever in cemetery time? Fifty years? A hundred? A thousand? Or until the survivors themselves die and there’s no one to visit or launch lawsuits anymore? In 2007, workers in Granite Falls, North Carolina, uncovered fifty-one graves dating back to the 1700s. The remains were moved to make room for a Walmart. In the late ’70s, developers acquired an old, overrun Orthodox Jewish cemetery in Yonkers, agreeing to move all 250 bodies to Jerusalem. Due to a logistical mix-up, the remains of 135 children were left behind, and now rest under a
Home Depot, Costco and a two-storey parking garage. And where are the dead of nineteenth-century San Francisco? In Colma. When measuring forever, it’s important to factor in human progress and shifting priorities.

Craving some noise and light, I drive out to Hollywood Boulevard to see the legendary freaks, but what I find instead are chubby happy families with fanny-packs taking pictures of one another with
Star Wars
Wookiees and Spider-Mans outside Grauman’s Egyptian Theater. Winnie-the-Pooh has a star on the Walk of Fame. Edna Purviance does not. One of the most durable myths of pop culture says that Walt Disney, who died of cancer in 1966, was cryogenically frozen and locked in a chamber under the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction at Disneyland where he’ll await science and his own team of Imagineers to thaw him, cure him and send him back to the world like a god in a Wagner opera. This too is a myth: he was cremated, had a private family service and is interred at Forest Lawn in Glendale.

I drive to the Hollywood Hills. At the bottom, pink in the sunset, are the towers of Walt Disney Studios. In Robert Stone’s novel
A Flag for Sunrise
, an American anthropologist has too much to drink and, like Khrushchev at the UN banging his shoe on the desk, warns a roomful of Central American diplomats: “In my country we have a saying—Mickey Mouse will see you dead.”

Sean Dockray, an artist and teacher at UCLA, wrote a peculiar paper about the American funeral home, which I’d found online a few months before I got to California: he argued that the modern funeral was a performance art, a kind of mass entertainment that owes more to Hollywood than it does to religion. Consider the funeral chapel, the chairs in rows, and up front, the lid of
the casket propped open like a movie screen. “The windows are traditionally blocked by curtains so that little or no natural light enters,” he wrote, “allowing the funeral director absolute control over the lighting of the environment, preventing unflattering natural light from reaching the skin of the deceased, and allowing the visitors to leave the outside world behind,” as at a Cineplex. With makeup and wardrobe and special effects (arterial embalming), the “director” orchestrates a production with a central tragic hero and a strong but simple narrative: life goes on, and he’s in a better place. The end. The mourners leave, having spent a short time in suspended disbelief.

“I’m fascinated by people who have total control over their space,” he tells me when I meet him on campus for a coffee. He’s thin and fidgety, easily distracted by birds and shiny objects as we sit in an outdoor parkette. “We all have control of our own space,” he says, “but we let it go, it gets dusty and cluttered. Time takes its toll.” But a mortuary, he says, is like a perfect diorama. They vacuum it every day. No one does that in their own home.