Where Are They Buried? (40 page)

MARCH 17, 1895 – NOVEMBER 3, 1955

Shemp was the original Curly and seems to be the favorite of many Stooge aficionados, if there could even be such a thing. He was there at the beginning of their run, but in 1932 he left the act to pursue a solo career, only to return in 1946 after Jerome suffered a stroke. Over the next nine years Shemp made 73 shorts with the Stooges but his run came to a quick end in 1955 when he suffered a fatal heart attack while riding in a car with friends. At 60, Shemp was interred at Home of Peace Memorial Park in Los Angeles, like his brother Jerome, though they are in completely different areas of the cemetery.

DIRECTIONS TO SHEMP’S GRAVE:
Enter the park, bear right, then turn left and park in front of the mausoleum. Walk inside through the pews and turn left at the Corridor of Benevolence. Then turn right at the Corridor of Eternal Life and Shemp’s crypt is on the right, second row from the bottom.

AUGUST 12, 1907 – MARCH 1, 1988

Joe was named as Shemp’s replacement in 1956 and he certainly had his own style; he was the only Stooge who dared to hit Moe back with any regularity. But after only sixteen comedies, Columbia cancelled
The Three Stooges
and Joe was cast back into the real world.

At 80, Joe died of heart failure and, like Larry, he lies at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

DIRECTIONS TO GRAVE OF JOE BESSER:
Stop at the booth, get a map, and drive up to the Freedom Mausoleum. Joe is buried in the grass outside of the mausoleum, across the drive in the Dedication section. His grave is directly across from the Williamson plaque and nine rows down the hill from the curb.

JULY 12, 1909 – JULY 3, 1993

After the Stooges comedies were released to television in 1958, their new-found popularity provided opportunities to make films, but the fact that Joe Besser had to care for his ailing wife left them one Stooge short. That’s when Joe DeRita stepped in, helping them make six feature films during the 1960s including,
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
.

You’d think that out of the six different comics that made up the Stooges, at least one of them would have had an interesting or funny parting from this world. But it seems that relatively pedestrian passings are the theme here. When Joe died of pneumonia at 83 in 1993, an era ended: His passing marked the demise of last Stooge.

Joe was buried at Valhalla Memorial Park in North Hollywood, California.

DIRECTIONS TO CEMETERY OF JOE DERITA:
This park is easy to find at 10621 Victory Blvd., just 2½ miles east of Highway 170.

DIRECTIONS TO GRAVE OF JOE DERITA:
Drive through the gate, turn right, and stop 50 feet after the road bends to the left. Joe is buried in the grass on the right, close to the road.

DECEMBER 26, 1921 – OCTOBER 30, 2000

MAY 1, 1918 – JANUARY 27, 2004

OCTOBER 23, 1925 – JANUARY 23, 2005

MARCH 6, 1923 – JUNE 23, 2009

Originating in 1951 as a Los Angeles radio show,
The Tonight Show
moved its variety-show format to television three years later and it now lays claim to an incredible sixty-year run in delighting late-night American audiences. Though the show’s skits and comedy routines seem to fall flat as often as they soar to hilarity, the show’s strength has always been in the lively conversation of its jocular hosts with a rainbow of celebrities and interesting people from all walks of life. In that vein, the show’s reach can hardly be overstated when it’s considered that over six decades, there may hardly be a single mainstream famous person—everyone from Katharine Hepburn to Janis Joplin and Henry Kissinger to Rodney Dangerfield—who has
not
appeared on
The Tonight Show
. Nonetheless, without pleasant banter from a hard-working, quick-thinking, likable host, celebrity interviews can quickly devolve into drone-fests, so the show’s success is also testament to the skills of the following three hosts and one lovable emcee.

As a congenial radio-show host since 1946, Steve Allen caught the eye of television producers working to bring
The Tonight Show
to network and it eventually debuted in 1954 with Steve
as its wisecracking host. Though the producers had a vision for the general format of the show, Steve’s witty monologues, jocular ad-lib high jinks, comical skits, and engaging interviews with both celebrity guests and the “man on the street,” gently expanded the staid 1950’s norms and he ended up earning credit as the person responsible for creating much of the successful late-night formula. After laughing it up for two years, Steve handed the reins over to Jack Paar and hosted his own prime-time variety show,
The Steve Allen Show,
which ran until 1964 and launched the careers of a generation of comedians and personalities.

Though he is best remembered for his intelligent and informal comic style, Steve was also a gifted musician, seasoned author, and a part-time actor. An accomplished pianist who never learned to read music, he is listed in the
Guinness Book of World Records
as the most prolific composer of modern times, credited with some 7,000 tunes including such hits as “This Could Be the Start of Something Big” and “Impossible.” He wrote newspaper columns and plays, published some 50 books on everything from poetry to social criticism to humor, and a dozen novels. Steve appeared in Broadway shows and on soap operas, and he even starred as the King of Swing in the 1956 movie
The Benny Goodman Story
.

When Steve died at his home at 78, newspapers dutifully reported that he’d suffered an apparent heart attack. However, most newspapers ignored the more interesting aspect of his death, which came to light with the release of his autopsy report two months later.

Steve had actually died due to a hemopericardium, a hole in the heart that leaked blood into the surrounding sac. On the day of his death, he had been in a minor traffic accident in which another driver backed his vehicle into Steve’s car. The fender-bender bruised Steve’s chest and ruptured tissue in his heart, which wasn’t too healthy in the first place. The rupture caused a blood leakage and, when Steve dozed off after dinner, he simply never awoke.

He was cremated at 78 and his ashes remain with his family.

Remarkably, for someone who eventually made his living talking and mostly without the benefit of written material or rehearsal, Jack Paar grew up a persistent stutterer. Equally remarkable, he overcame the affliction on his own. Feeling embarrassed and ill at ease around others, Jack spent much of his childhood alone with books and one day read a story about Demosthenes, a Greek orator who cured himself of stammering by putting
pebbles in his mouth and loudly reciting passages from books over the roar of the sea. Willing to try anything, Jack filled his mouth with buttons from his mother’s sewing box and spent hundreds of hours reading magazines over the drone of a radio turned up loud. It worked, and Jack’s speech so improved that he confidently began pursuing his dream of becoming a radio broadcaster at just sixteen.

His first job in the industry consisted mainly of custodial duties, but the powers soon relented, allowing him to read the call letters: “This is station WIBM, Jackson, Michigan.” In time, Jack was spinning records and reading commercials in a kind of trademark “hemming and hawing” style he developed that helped keep his stammering at bay.

After service in World War II, Jack turned to television, hosting quiz shows and game shows, and in 1957 took over from Steve Allen the reins of
The Tonight Show,
which would prove to be the defining role of his career. Jack’s style was to simplify the format a bit—the sofa-and-desk set that remains a fixture to this day was his idea—and his own persona was shaped around witty and knowledgeable conversation. Instead of uncomfortably participating in zany sketches for which he had no talent, Jack employed a salon of eccentrics including professional hypochondriac Oscar Levant and British raconteur Peter Ustinov, and provided a nurturing ground for such young comedic talents as Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart, and the Smothers Brothers.

Under Jack’s tutelage
The Tonight Show
became a staple of American culture, but after just five years at the helm, in 1962, after confessing that “his creative field was running dry,” he left the show. A short-lived variety series of his own followed, and thereafter Jack eschewed the limelight, choosing instead to buy and run a small Maine television station and rarely making public appearances.

After undergoing triple bypass surgery and suffering a stroke, Jack died at his home at 85. He was cremated and his ashes given to his family.

At age twelve, Johnny Carson sent away for a magic kit and shortly thereafter began his show business career, billing himself to private parties as “The Great Carsoni” magician and ventriloquist. After a stint in the Navy during World War II, Johnny chased the new medium of television to Los Angeles where he hosted a handful of low-budget comedy series, conducting phony interviews and performing skits and characters. The material was quirky and occasionally naughty, yet
homespun enough to hit home with the heartland. Although he was popular, the shows weren’t, so he took a new job writing jokes for Red Skelton where he eventually graduated to substitute hosting Red’s show. In 1962 Johnny took the reins of
The Tonight Show
from a “bone-tired” Jack Paar and, with the dependable sideline chortles of Ed McMahon and easy banter of gaudy bandleader Doc Severinson filling in the rough spots, Carson hosted the show for thirty years—an astonishing 4,531 episodes.

In what became America’s late-night televised cocktail lounge, Carson combined his casual innocence and cosmopolitan wit with a well-stocked supply of facial expressions to become the acknowledged master at lampooning the pretentious and salvaging the boring all while keeping his finger on the pulse of the mainstream’s moods, attitudes, and concerns. He exploited politics but only for quick one-liners, and though Johnny was the star of the show, it was never about him. Whether he listened to a guest curiously or cavalierly shrugged off their eccentricities, the audience followed his cue. The result was a cornucopia of memories that fill the national psyche:

There was the scared marmoset that crawled onto Johnny’s head and peed on him, and the time Jimmy Stewart teared up while reading a poem about his dog. One night a man rendered the national anthem by making flatulent noises with his hands, while on another a loaded Dean Martin secretly tipped cigarette ashes into the cocktail of an oblivious George Gobel. An eccentric old lady presented her beloved collection of potato chips shaped like faces of celebrities and when Carson blithely munched a chip, the poor lady nearly suffered a heart attack, until he revealed a separate bag behind his desk.

In private life, Johnny was almost the opposite of his spontaneous, charming onstage personality. He was married four times, was private to a fault, and was reputed to be rather calculating in his dealings with others; after close friend Joan Rivers briefly competed against him with her own nightly program, the chill behind Johnny’s twinkle became ice-cold and he never spoke to her again. Nevertheless, a brilliant Mr. Middle America who changed late-night television is the man who will be remembered and, indeed, on his retirement in 1992 he was regarded as a national institution.

More than 50 million people tuned in to witness Johnny’s swan song. “And so it has come to this. I am one of the lucky people in the world. I found something that I always wanted to do and I have enjoyed every single minute of it,” Carson said to close his final show. “I bid you a very heartfelt goodnight.”

In the early days of
The Tonight Show,
Johnny could often be spotted holding a cigarette behind his desk and eventually they caught up with him. At 79, clinging to this world by the grace of a life support temporarily fending the consequences of emphysema, he opted to have the machine turned off and died within hours. Johnny was cremated, and his ashes remain with his family.

Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson’s boisterous and outgoing second banana sidekick, made his first “showbiz” appearance calling bingo games at age 15. Next came a few spare years chasing carnivals and fairs throughout New England followed by a radio station broadcasting job. Later, when World War II broke out, the affable opportunist finagled himself into a choice slot in a Marine Corps flight school, and though he received orders in July 1945 to report to the Pacific Fleet, they were quickly rescinded as Japan surrendered three weeks later.

Ed then studied drama at Catholic University on the GI Bill and on the weekends sold vegetable slicers on the Atlantic City boardwalk to make ends meet. An opportunity to work as a clown on a Philadelphia variety show presented itself, and within weeks Ed was hosting the program. Soon he had become “Mr. Television” around Philadelphia, laughing his way through a dozen different programs during the 1950s including a cooking show, a quiz show, and even a breakfast-hour program called
Strictly for the Girls
.

Finally, in 1958, Ed met a rising young comedian who would forever alter his career and fortunes: Johnny Carson. “Johnny didn’t look as if he was dying to see me,” Ed said of their first meeting that was, as he put it, “about as stimulating as watching a traffic light change.” Nonetheless, Johnny hired him to be the announcer on his afternoon comedy quiz show and when Johnny became
The Tonight Show
’s host in 1962, he took Ed with him.

Ed quickly became “Big Ed,” the good-time guy who did the audience warmups and commercials and performed in sketches, but his primary job was to be Carson’s comedy foil and straight man or, most commonly, just sit on the couch and laugh uproariously at his jokes. “I was there when he needed me, and when he didn’t, I moved down the couch and kept quiet,” Ed once explained.