Where Are They Buried? (5 page)

It’s generally reported that John was cremated and his ashes given to Yoko Ono, who sprinkled some of them in John’s hometown of Liverpool, England, and some at Strawberry Fields. However, the matter was confused when, in a 1990 interview, Yoko stated that John had actually been buried. She never expanded on the statement and didn’t say where he was buried. And she has never retracted the statement or explained that she had been misunderstood. Instead, she simply has never talked about it again.

Chapman, a former security guard from Hawaii, pleaded guilty to John’s murder and is serving a life term in prison in Attica, New York.

FEBRUARY 25, 1943 – NOVEMBER 29, 2001

A member of the Beatles since its very earliest Quarrymen days, George Harrison was the solid lead guitarist known as “the quiet one.” Though George’s presence was generally overshadowed by the songwriting talents of John and Paul, and by Ringo’s antics, he was certainly a remarkable musician in his own right, and contributed a number of songs to the Beatles’ catalog. Interested in Eastern culture, he traveled to India in 1965 to study with musician Ravi Shankar and the influence is obvious on the following year’s “Norwegian Wood.” George later contributed “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and “Here Comes the Sun,” among other songs credited to him.

After the Beatles ceased working together, George released
All Things Must Pass
in 1971, a three-record work in which he demonstrated his affinity for mixing rock and religion. Later that year he organized concert fundraisers for Bangladeshi famine victims that featured himself and such artists as Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan, and the concerts resulted in another release,
The Concert for Bangladesh
. George’s solo career seemed to peak then, and he later retreated from the public eye entirely.

In 1977, George got brief, though unwanted, attention when his marriage dissolved; his wife left him for his close friend Clapton, whom she would later marry. In 1987 George resur-faced as one of the all-star musicians in the Traveling Wilburys, and he followed that with
Cloud 9
, a solo work that included “When We Were Fab,” a nostalgic tune recalling the Beatlemania heyday.

In a bizarre December 1999 episode, an intruder broke into his home wielding a knife. George said he shouted “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna!” in an attempt to disorient him, but the crazed intruder attacked and plunged the knife four times into George, puncturing a lung. At that moment, George believed he’d been fatally wounded and a “personal memory” of a similar incident, perhaps Lennon’s murder, flashed through his mind. George’s wife beat the intruder with a brass poker and then a lamp, and moments later staff and police arrived.

Eighteen months later, reports trickled in that George was dying of cancer, though he vigorously denied them. But after a stay at a hospital on New York’s Staten Island, where he underwent radiation treatment for a brain tumor, George succumbed to brain cancer on November 29, 2001, at the home of a friend in Los Angeles.

George was 58 at his death, and, in keeping with his Eastern faith, he was cremated and his ashes scattered on the River Yamuna in India, which runs through the area of his favorite spiritual retreat.

FEBRUARY 16, 1935 – JANUARY 5, 1998

Before he wed Cherilyn Sarkisian in 1964, Sonny Bono bumbled along as a songwriter, penning such hits as “Needles and Pins.” But in 1965, the upbeat songs he cranked out became unexpected hits when he and his wife performed them as Sonny and Cher, topping the charts with “I Got You Babe” and “The Beat Goes On.”

In 1971, Sonny shed his Depression-era roots and became a born-again flower child when he and Cher landed their own television show,
The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour
. Donning suede-fringed vests and bell-bottoms, Sonny played the lovable goofball with a droopy mustache opposite his stunningly slender, sharp-tongued wife, Cher, who teased audiences in outrageous sequined outfits. Millions tuned in for their memorable on-stage bickering and the show proved to be a hit. But in 1974, as Sonny and Cher’s marriage faltered, the show ended.

The couple was divorced in 1975, and, after a brief attempt to revive the show, it went off the air for good the next year. While Cher went on to a successful music and acting career, unpretentious Sonny took another direction and morphed into Citizen Bono. He opened two restaurants and, after a disagreement with City Hall over some building plans, Sonny ran for and was elected mayor of Palm Springs in 1988. In 1992, Sonny ran for the U.S. Senate, bottoming out in the primaries. But he waged another campaign in 1994, was elected to the House of Representatives and, in 1996, voters sent him right back to Washington. Sonny’s humor, self-deprecating style, and
homespun intelligence served him well on Capitol Hill, and he became an effective and popular lawmaker.

At Heavenly Ski Resort, Sonny enjoyed some vacation time with his wife, Mary, and their two children after the 1998 New Year. Around 2:00 p.m., while Mary tended to the kids after one of them fell, Sonny skied off alone, and that’s the last time he was seen alive. Mary reported him missing when the resort closed, and at 7:00 p.m. Sonny was found dead of massive head injuries near an intermediate-level ski trail named Orion. As Sonny was wont to do, he had veered from the groomed trail in order to ski the deep powder of a wooded area, and was killed when he lost control and struck a tree. Though he was in an unmaintained area of the ski mountain, the section was not considered closed or off-limits to skiers.

An autopsy concluded Sonny was not under the influence of alcohol or drugs. On average, thirty people die in ski accidents annually, and Sonny just happened to be one of them.

At 62, Sonny was buried at Desert Memorial Park Cemetery in Cathedral City, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-10, take the Ramon Road exit and proceed south for two miles to Da Vall Drive. Turn right and the cemetery entrance is immediately on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn right, then follow the drive to the Fountain Court waterfall. Sonny’s grave is right there in the grass, just ten feet from the base of the flagpole.

Three months after Sonny’s death, a special election was held to fill his congressional vacancy. Sonny’s widow, Mary, a waitress before they met, won the seat by a significant margin. In November 2000, she was overwhelmingly reelected to the post.

OCTOBER 13, 1925 – AUGUST 3, 1966

As a stand-up nightclub entertainer, Lenny Bruce’s monologues on race relations, sexual mores, and organized religion are today admired for their trailblazing qualities—but in his heyday, from the late 1950s to his death in 1966, Lenny was more commonly denounced as a “sick comic.” He was also one of America’s most visible victims of censorship and was arrested five times on obscenity charges, though appeals courts overturned all of his convictions.

Before his legal problems began, Lenny was a fast-talking purveyor of biting political and social comedic commentary; afterwards he fell victim to his own cult of personality and validated himself, exulting, “I’m not a comedian, I’m Lenny Bruce.” He became obsessed with his own arrests and grew more and more paranoid and less and less funny. His act often became just one long harangue, a recitation of court documents, or an endless stream of obscenities. Club owners refused to book him, Lenny’s professional career spiraled sharply downward, and his personal life soon followed.

In 1964 Lenny woke up in a frenzy in the middle of the night and leaped, or fell, out of his San Francisco hotel window, breaking both ankles and a leg. After insisting that his casts be removed early, he was left partly crippled. With his body now wasted, he obsessed over his mortality, and began to lose his mind as well. Lenny became flabby and sickly, he secluded himself in his home, and injected more and more drugs to ease both his real and imagined pains.

Lenny contended that he most enjoyed shooting up while seated on the toilet. At 40, he was found lying dead in his bathroom, facedown and naked. His bathrobe’s sash was cinched tightly above the tracks in his arm, a hypodermic needle was nearby on the tile floor, and the white throne from which he’d toppled stood as sole witness.

Today, Lenny lies at Eden Memorial Park in Mission Hills, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Eden Memorial Park is at the intersection of Rinaldi Street and Sepulveda Boulevard. From I-405, this is just east of the Rinaldi Street exit.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the park and start up the hill. After the mausoleum, make a right onto Mount of Olives Drive and stop at about the halfway point. Lenny’s flat marker is on the right, six rows down the hill.

MAY 12, 1937 – JUNE 22, 2008

As George Carlin himself said, he was always swimming against the tide and always out of step. Not only did he quit school in the ninth grade, but he got kicked out of three other schools along the way. Kicked off the altar boys, kicked off the choirboys, kicked out of the Boy Scouts, kicked out of summer camp, and kicked out of the Air Force, the perennial nonconformist never fit in.

After working a fairly strait-laced comedy act and even wearing suit coats—but in his own estimation, not doing much more than shuffling along and keeping the bill collectors at bay—George took stock of his surroundings in his early thirties. It dawned on him that his friends, especially the ultra-successful ones in the music business such as Bob Dylan and Buffalo Springfield, had transitioned their dress and every facet of their being to express themselves politically and socially. This insight emboldened George to stop doing shtick, change his image to grungy jeans, shaggy beard and ponytail, and begin verbalizing a uniquely fearless attitude which became more authentic to audiences and more comfortable for himself. Whereas before he was saying funny things and “people-pleasing,” his new persona of a disappointed yet idealistic antiauthoritarian who smartly criticized every aspect of our culture resonated sharply with the nation’s cynical post-Vietnam mood. And his career soared.

George became a counterculture touchstone; he hosted the very first episode of
Saturday Night Live
, appeared on
The Tonight Show
130 times, and put out a couple dozen albums—plus three best-selling books—while constantly touring. During the 1970s, when his wild comedic style accelerated and then permeated his offstage lifestyle, his drug use became excessive to the point of initiating a heart condition. By the ’80s George had
evolved into more of a curmudgeonly uncle whose humor was observational and in the next decade he tacked to the political side. Later, he grew increasingly dark. “I sort of gave up on this whole human adventure a long time ago,” he said. “I think the human race has squandered its gift, and I think this country has squandered its promise. I think people in America sold out very cheaply, for sneakers and cheeseburgers. And I don’t think it’s fixable.”

Nonetheless, his humor could never be categorized as a bummer and he proved that no subject was off-limits for insightful comedy. George Carlin legitimized the medium of humor for every social and intellectual tier, and when he passed of heart disease at 71, all of America noticed.

George was cremated and his ashes entrusted to his daughter.

AUGUST 21, 1936 – OCTOBER 12, 1999

The 7-foot-1 Wilt Chamberlain so dominated the game of basketball that, in direct response to his abilities, the NBA changed some of its rules in order to give everyone else a fighting chance. The lane under the basket was widened, the offensive-goaltending rule was implemented, and regulations regarding inbounding and free throws were revised. Though the changes served their purpose to some degree, Wilt “the Stilt” continued to be a heavy presence. By the time of his 1973 retirement, he’d set a number of records, two of which will probably never be broken. First, Wilt never once fouled out through 1,205 games. Second, in 1962 he scored an astonishing 100 points in a single game.

In 1991 it came out that Wilt also held one other pseudo-record, though it was somewhat nefarious and hard to verify. In his autobiography,
A View from Above
, the lifelong bachelor devoted an entire chapter to sex and there made the revelation that, if he had to count his sexual encounters, he’d be closing in on 20,000 women. “Yes, that’s correct, twenty thousand different ladies,” he wrote. “At my age, that equals out to having sex with 1.2 women a day, every day since I was fifteen years old.” Some fans recoiled at Wilt’s macho accounting and roundly criticized him, while others contemplated that, even if he was exaggerating by a factor of ten…

At 63, Wilt died of congestive heart failure. He was cremated and his were ashes entrusted to his family.