Where Are They Buried? (26 page)

When filming began, Peter selected a battered Peugeot convertible from the studio motor pool. Rejecting the fashionable attire laid out by the costume shop, he chose instead a raincoat from his own wardrobe and matched the rest of his character’s clothes to its shabbiness. He completed the character with a mass of quirks and peculiarities: the quizzical squint, the mild speech impediment that gave his dialogue a breathy quality,
perpetually patting his pockets for a light for his signature stogie, and constantly referring to a variety of relatives who were identified in shorthand—a cousin who operated the Los Angeles Dodgers scoreboard, say, or an aunt whose homemade quilt was on display at the state house. Typically, too, he would string his suspects along, flattering them, apologizing profusely for continuing to trouble them with questions, appearing to have bought their alibis, and, just before making an exit, nailing them with a final, damning query that he unfailingly introduced with the innocent-sounding, “Just one more thing.” It was the signal to viewers that the jig was up.

In 2008, Peter, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, was found disoriented and in his bathrobe on a Beverly Hills street. His daughter soon filed for conservatorship and a doctor testified that his condition had been worsening and the actor could no longer even remember
Columbo
. At 83, the disease claimed Peter and he was buried at Westwood 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 Boulevard, just about a half-mile east of I-405.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and turn left at the office. Proceed down this walkway just about to the end, where you’ll find Peter’s grave on the right.

Television sitcoms seem to have an affinity for single-parent households and, if that’s the recipe for comedy, then
Family Affair
, which lifted the one-parent theme to the next stratum, should have been hilarious.

The show’s premise was that six-year-old twins Buffy and Jody (Anissa Jones and Johnny Whitaker), along with their sixteen-year-old sister Cissy (Kathy Garver) were orphaned when their parents were killed in a car wreck. Their Uncle Bill (Brian Keith), a wealthy and swinging bachelor, had a bombshell dropped on him when the children showed up on the doorstep of his luxurious Fifth Avenue pad needing a place to live. Although reluctant at first, the gruff-but-lovable Uncle Bill and his fastidious butler, Mr. French (Sebastian Cabot),
acquiesced and the show’s storylines followed the new family’s predictably sweet and tame crises.

After five seasons, when the “six-year-olds” looked as if they might be soon driving their own cars to the set, everybody involved with the program, especially the viewers, seemed to have had enough. The show was cancelled in 1971.

MARCH 11, 1958 – AUGUST 28, 1976

Anissa Jones was thirteen when
Family Affair
ended and, after unsuccessfully auditioning for the part of Regan MacNeil, the possessed head-spinner in
The Exorcist
, she promptly quit show business and enrolled in public high school. Her parents had divorced acrimoniously years earlier and they still wrangled over Anissa’s custody. Eventually, she began rebelling against both of them through drugs and alcohol. Anissa moved in with a friend at sixteen and, at eighteen, she finally was able to tap into a $75,000 trust fund that had been set up during her acting days. She spent some of the money on long-pending bills, but the remainder of it financed cars and apartments and, especially, partying supplies for herself and her friends. Sadly, within just a few months the money was gone and Anissa resorted to working at a donut shop. After a day of partying in Oceanside, California, Anissa died alone, only five months after turning eighteen. Her death from an overdose of drugs was ruled accidental, though the coroner stated that Anissa’s was the most massive overdose he’d ever seen.

Anissa had no funeral but was cremated and her ashes scattered over the Pacific Ocean.

JULY 6, 1918 – AUGUST 23, 1977

The very English Sebastian Cabot got his start as an actor in British stage and films in the late 1930s. Older folks recall him as the criminologist on the 1960s TV drama
Checkmate
, while the younger generation recognizes his voice as the narrator of Disney’s
Winnie the Pooh
cartoons. At 59, Sebastian died of a stroke. He was cremated and his ashes interred at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Just about a half-mile east of I-405, this tiny cemetery is peculiarly located behind the office complex at 10850 Wilshire Blvd.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Across the drive from the park office is a cluster of small markers for cremains. In the top row, you can find Sebastian’s marker.

NOVEMBER 14, 1921 – JUNE 24, 1997

During World War II Brian Keith was a Marine fighter-pilot hero, and after the war he played secondary roles in a few dozen films. It appeared his acting career might peak with
Family Affair
, but Brian was able to parlay his popularity as Uncle Bill into many other roles, including three seasons as the cranky Judge Milton “Hardcase” Hardcastle in the somewhat popular action series
Hardcastle and McCormick
during the mid-1980s.

By 75, Brian was suffering from lung cancer and emphysema, and was overwhelmingly distraught by the gunshot suicide of his daughter, Daisy. Two months after her death, Brian shot himself to death inside his home. After cremation, his ashes were interred with Daisy’s at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles, California, the final residence of his old friend Sebastian Cabot.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn left at the office and, after the chapel, walk down the ramp into the new Garden of Serenity section. Turn left before the triple fountain and, fifteen feet along the wall on the left, in the top row, are Brian and Daisy’s remains.

Johnny Whitaker today runs a talent agency with his sister. Their company, Whitaker Entertainment, counted former child star Dana Plato as a client until her untimely 1999 death.

FEBRUARY 2, 1947 – JUNE 25, 2009

After Farrah Fawcett was voted one of the “ten most beautiful coeds on campus” at the University of Texas in 1968,
a Hollywood publicist urged her to quit school for a career in show business. Although reluctant to leave college, she soon found work in commercials for toothpaste and shampoo and landed small guest roles in a few TV shows, including four episodes of
The Six Million Dollar Man,
whose star, Lee Majors, she married in 1973.

But in 1976, Farrah’s fortune was forever changed when the idea of a poster of her was pitched to her agent. Farrah agreed, and a photo shoot at her home was arranged; she styled her own hair, did her own makeup, and heightened her blonde highlights with a squeeze of lemon juice. Searching for a backdrop for Farrah in her one-piece red swimsuit (which she chose instead of a bikini because of a childhood scar on her stomach), the photographer grabbed an old Navajo blanket from the front seat of his pickup. From forty rolls of film, Fawcett herself selected her six favorite pictures, which were narrowed to the one that made her famous.

The resulting pinup poster of Farrah in that bathing suit with a perfect smile and girl-next-door charm amid a halo of impossibly buoyant curly hair entered her into the dreams of adolescent boys everywhere. Women thronged to hair salons to copy her feathered “Farrah hair,” which remained in vogue throughout the decade. The poster sold some 12 million copies—more than twice as many copies as Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable ever sold combined. No poster since has achieved anywhere near its popularity and, arriving before the Internet era, in which now the most widely disseminated images are digital, it seems it will have been the last of its kind.

Farrah’s pinup fame led the producers of a new television show,
Charlie’s Angels,
to cast her as Jill Munroe, one of three beautiful private detective “angels” of an unseen boss named Charlie, who, in order to bring an evildoer to justice, often ordered his angels into decoy roles that put them in skimpy outfits and provocative situations. The threesome created an instant sensation—its was the highest-rated television debut in history—and its titillating and suggestive episodes such as “Angels in Chains” raced it to the top of the ratings. As the show’s most popular star, Farrah became another sort of poster girl for the “jiggle TV” of the ’70s and a lightning rod for cultural commentators.
Playboy
magazine called the show “the first mass visual symbol of post-neurotic fresh-air sexuality” but Farrah put it more plainly: “When the show was number three, I figured it was our acting. When it got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra.”

After just one season though, Farrah left the show to pursue a film career. Though she left TV for what was assumed to be greener pastures, her initial three big-screen vehicles all crash-landed. To her credit though, she reinvented herself and salvaged her reputation by finding a niche portraying vulnerable or troubled women in made-for-TV dramas such as
The Burning Bed
and
Small Sacrifices,
earning for herself three Emmy Award nominations.

Starting in the 1990s, Farrah negated much of the respect she had earned as an actress when she attempted to recapture her status as a sex symbol. She underwent plastic surgery and appeared nude twice in
Playboy
, one to celebrate her fiftieth birthday. The shoots stirred controversy, but buzz about the actress having bared all served only to make the magazine fly off newsstands. Promoting a weird body-painting
Playboy
video on David Letterman’s show in 1997, she appeared daffy and disjointed. In 2005 she tried to capitalize on her celebrity with the reality series
Chasing Farrah,
but it was a flop. One reviewer described it as “a living example of a talented actress whose career has been turned into a parody by poor decisions.”

She was often followed by tabloids interested in her troubled personal life. Having left Lee Majors years before, there were several accounts of domestic abuse perpetrated by boyfriends while her long relationship with the actor Ryan O’Neal and her contentious relationship with their son kept her front and center on gossip pages. In 2006 her reality series was overshadowed by a cancer diagnosis, and the tabloid media chronicled her next few years with constancy, including a purported deathbed marriage proposal from O’Neal, who by that time was a former companion. Her cancer battle was played out in public and her face showing the ravages of cancer became a tabloid fixture, while updates on her health became staples of television entertainment news. Farrah’s battle even became her last project,
Farrah’s Story,
a prime-time documentary chronicling her battle with cancer that featured footage shot by Farrah and her friends on a home video camera. The film showed both the ugly and the uplifting sides of her struggle, juxtaposing video of Fawcett vomiting and shaving her head with scenes of her dancing with friends during times when her health was up.

At 62, Farrah succumbed to the disease and was buried at Westwood 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 Boulevard, just about a half-mile east of I-405.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn left at the office and, just a short walk after the chapel on the right, you’ll see Farrah’s stone along the drive.

JUNE 20, 1909 – OCTOBER 14, 1959

The charming actor Errol Flynn was a well-to-do Tasmanian who, after being expelled from several fine schools in Australia and England, had his share of adventures before making Hollywood his playground. A natural athlete and a rugged outdoors-man, Errol managed a New Guinea tobacco plantation, sailed the Southern seas for months, took a turn as a gold prospector, and, for a gold-mining company, he “recruited” unwilling natives to toil in the depths as slaves.

After rave performances on English stages, the gallant Errol and his irresistible accent headed for Hollywood in 1935. In his first film,
The Case of the Curious Bride
, he played a corpse, but in the more than twenty movies following, Errol usually starred as a swashbuckling, quick-witted, romantic hero. Women were instantly attracted to his virility and dashing good looks, while male moviegoers admired his vigor, devil-may-care attitude, and witticisms. There was a native intelligence behind his affable, sometimes even self-deprecating disposition, and Errol parlayed his unusual appeal into a spectacular Tinseltown success story. His crowning achievement came in 1938 with the stupendous hit
The Adventures of Robin Hood
. When Westerns became the rage in the 1940s, Errol looked rather silly outfitted as a cowboy, but audiences didn’t seem to mind and continued to flock to his films.

By the 1950s, though, Errol’s off-screen life began to take a physical toll. That which made him a lovable, drink-sloshing knave on film transformed him into a bloated drunk in real life. The same passion with which he embraced assorted celluloid bombshells enflamed his fiery off-screen affairs. Barely fifteen years after capturing movie audiences with his dashing portrayal in
Captain Blood
, his best swashbuckling days were behind him. Errol tried more dramatic roles with little success
until 1957, when he was cast as an aging alcoholic in Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises
, in a bit of real-life typecasting that hit its mark.