Where Are They Buried? (82 page)

Retreating to a middle-class lifestyle, he married, had children, and worked selling paint and siding. But the idyllic suburban life soured and, after a divorce and as middle age approached, the paunchy, goggle-eyed comedian returned to the stage with an absurd name dreamed up by a New York club owner: Rodney Dangerfield. In a rumpled suit and one hand perpetually loosening his trademark red necktie, he took the stage as a hapless, self-deprecating everyman slapped around by life and searching in vain for acceptance. “Last week my house was on fire. My wife told the kids, ‘Be quiet, you’ll wake up Daddy,’” he quipped.

Rodney’s popularity grew steadily and in 1969, after his ex-wife died, he opened his own comedy club so he could stay close to home and raise his children. With its namesake owner as a regular headliner, Dangerfield’s soon became one of the city’s hottest comedy showcases. In 1972, after seeing
The Godfather
, he made the final adjustment to his persona. “All I heard was the word ‘respect’,” he recalled. “‘You’ve got to give me respect,’ or ‘Respect him.’ I thought to myself, it sounds like a funny image—a guy who gets no respect.” The perennial loser, fidgety, and with a too-tight collar who elicited “no respect,” struck a chord with fans and Rodney’s career launched to the stratosphere. “Even the doorman gives me no respect. Every time I get in the elevator he asks, ‘Basement?’”

With his image firmly established, it was one laugh after another for the next three decades. Rodney became a talk-show
favorite, starred in more than a half-dozen HBO comedy specials, and appeared in several movies from a nouveau-rich boor in
Caddyshack
to a belligerent and sadistic father in
Natural Born Killers
. Despite good reviews, Rodney claimed he didn’t like doing movies. “Too much waiting around, too much memorizing; I need that immediate feedback of people laughing.” And probably their immediate respect, too.

After a stroke following heart valve replacement surgery, the end was near for Rodney and not even his fictitious friend Dr. Vinny Boombatz could save him. Rodney soon “developed infectious and abdominal complications from which he did not recover,” and at 82, 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, about a half-mile east of I-405.

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

SEPTEMBER 5, 1850 – OCTOBER 10, 1911

The nation’s oldest registered distillery and its renowned sipping whiskey take their names from Mr. Jasper Newton (Jack) Daniel. At the age of seven, Jack was hired out to work with a local Lutheran minister, Dan Call, who also happened to own a whiskey still. In 1863 Call’s congregation persuaded him to concentrate on uplifting folks through sermons and not spirits, and Call sold his still to his young partner, who was then just thirteen. “Mr. Jack,”
as he came to be known, continued the tradition of handcrafted whiskey making, and within his lifetime his Tennessee Whiskey become world-famous.

He was known to be kind and generous but he wasn’t always patient. Legend has it that once, in a fit of anger, Jack kicked his safe and broke his toe. An infection set in and six years later he died as a result of complications from blood poisoning.

At 61, Jack Daniel was buried at the Lynchburg Cemetery in Lynchburg, Tennessee.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
A half-mile south of the distillery on Route 55, turn west onto Elm Street and follow it into the cemetery.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Drive straight into the cemetery, then turn right at the first intersection. At the next intersection, Jack’s grave is immediately to your right.

JUNE 28, 1902 – JULY 22, 1934

OCTOBER 24, 1900 – FEBRUARY 29, 1960

For all the notoriety enjoyed by bank-robber John Dillinger, his life of crime was exceedingly short, and until he went to prison at age twenty for assault, he had no criminal record at all. But it seems that prison soured him, and after his release at 29, he orchestrated the escape of ten of his inmate cronies, and with them established a potent gang. In a seven-month Midwest crime spree, they were responsible for eleven bank robberies and fifteen deaths before their capture in Arizona.

But much to the embarrassment of law enforcement officials, Dillinger quickly escaped from prison using a wooden gun covered with black shoe polish and resumed his violent ways. A foiled Wisconsin ambush killed three more innocents and Dillinger managed to escape the law’s grasp yet again. J. Edgar Hoover, then
director of the FBI, tagged him as “Public Enemy Number One,” thus assuring his status as a kind of folk hero.

Dillinger’s capture became the top priority for the agency and especially for Melvin Purvis, head of the FBI’s Chicago office. After the Romanian landlady of Dillinger’s girlfriend contacted Purvis and agreed to betray Dillinger in return for leniency in her own upcoming deportation hearing, a plan was devised to apprehend him as he and the two women were leaving a Chicago movie theater. As planned, Dillinger walked out of the theater and Purvis lit a cigar to signal the surrounding agents that the man was in fact him. As the agents approached, Dillinger was spooked and pulled a .38-caliber pistol from his belt. But before he could fire a shot he was hit by four bullets, three in his chest and one that entered the back of his neck and exited through his face. When agents arrived at a hospital with the very-dead Dillinger, the hospital refused to allow the gangster inside and he was laid on the lawn to await the coroner.

At 32, Dillinger was buried at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, Indiana. For a time after his burial, a guard was posted to prevent souvenir hunters from unearthing the body. Eventually the grave was reopened to contrive a protection of concrete and scrap iron over the coffin.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
The cemetery is easy to find at Martin Luther King Boulevard and 38th Street.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery at the funeral home entrance, bear left at the mausoleum, go under the stone bridge, then turn at the next left. Stay on this road for almost a half-mile, then turn right immediately before Section 44. After about 150 feet the Dillinger plot is to the left, visible from the roadway.

After Dillinger’s death, law enforcers, led by Purvis, concentrated on capturing or eliminating the remaining members of his gang, and within months most were either behind bars or dead. But Purvis himself got into a stew with his boss, Hoover, and within a year Purvis left the agency.

When he left the FBI, his fellow agents presented him with a nickel-plated Colt .45 and, 25 years later, Purvis may have committed suicide with the weapon. He certainly shot himself to death with it, but it’s unclear whether it was intentional or if the gun accidentally went off as he tried to dislodge an odd-sized tracer round from its chamber.

At 59, Purvis was buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in Florence, South Carolina.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-95, take Exit 164 and follow route 52 south for four miles to Cherokee Road. Turn left onto Cherokee and the cemetery is immediately on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, drive past the office, and go to the end of the drive in front of the mausoleum. Turn left, then left again, then make an immediate right and stop. On the left is the tall granite Purvis marker. His epitaph reads “
Saepe Timui Sed Numquam Curri
—Always Be Afraid, Never Run.”

DECEMBER 9, 1933 – MARCH 12, 2001

Morton Downey Jr. was a singer and songwriter who recorded “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” in 1959, which was accompanied by a before-its-time video featuring Morton wandering said boulevard in a trenchcoat. In the next couple of decades, he was a sometime music producer and recorder who had a hand in writing the benchmark surf-rock tune “Wipeout,” and during the 1970s Morton emerged as a loud-mouth know-it-all deejay. But in 1987 his ship came in and his entertainment career crystallized when he surfaced as the bombastic host of a confrontational television show that set viewers on their heads.

Running for just three seasons beginning in 1987, “The Morton Downey Jr. Show” was widely vilified as trash, but it
was
groundbreaking and transformed him into a pop culture phenomenon. Raising the volume on a persona he had cultivated over years on radio, Morton was an opinionated and growling, chain-smoking bully who openly abused his guests and whipped the studio audience into a frenzy that, more often than not, turned physical. Ostensibly debating religious, political, and social topics, Downey became better known for a catalog of put-downs and angry gestures—most famously dismissing liberals as “pablum pukers,” whatever that is. The show, dubbed “part TV talk show, part public lynching,” spawned countless like-minded programs and created a genre of talk shows that paralleled blood sport.

By 1989 the show had peaked and, to revive his livelihood, Morton released a novelty album featuring the likes of “Hey Mr. Dealer,” a denunciation of the drug trade, and “Zip It,” a pithy command to his detractors. Tumbling even further from the limelight, Morton executed what some believed was a last-ditch effort to resuscitate his ratings by claiming that neo-Nazi
skinheads roughed him up in an airport bathroom, cut off his hair, and painted a swastika on his head. Authorities could never verify the attack, Downey’s critics pounced, calling it a publicity stunt, and in a short time one could stick a fork in his celebrity—it was done.

A four-pack-a-day smoker, Morton delighted in blowing smoke in the faces of guests who disagreed with him on his show. After losing a lung to cancer in 1996, he railed against the habit and appeared as an anti-smoking advocate. At 67, the lung cancer claimed Morton and he was cremated.

NOVEMBER 22, 1912 – OCTOBER 29, 1993

Doris Duke was the only child of American tobacco baron James Duke, and upon his 1925 death, the twelve-year-old Doris inherited the bulk of his $80 million fortune. Christened “the poor little rich girl,” Doris was a most reluctant celebrity and avoided the glare of publicity and cameras all her life. That’s not to say however, that her life was unengaging.

As a teen, the debutante relished the leisure of austere mansions and, in her twenties, established a reputation for indiscreet affairs. After two failed marriages that produced no children (other than a daughter who died immediately after birth), she developed a case of wanderlust and fraternized with African Massai warriors and witch doctors, studied belly dancing in Turkey, communed with Indian mystics, and worked as a European war correspondent. Through middle age, Doris led a more solitary life and emerged as a leading benefactress, marking a return to a heritage of generous Duke philanthropy.

In her golden years, Doris surrounded herself with a menagerie of characters, and it seems she began to lose her wits. Meeting Chandi Heffner, a Hari Krishna devotee, Doris came to believe that Heffner was the reincarnation of her long-dead infant daughter, and Doris legally adopted the adult Heffner. Three years later, Doris had a change of heart and reversed the adoption. Then, as part of an airplane purchase, Doris accepted two camels, which then resided at (and in) her Newport estate. Around the same time, Doris befriended Imelda Marcos and loaned her $5 million, presumably for shoes.

As Doris had no family or close friends, her alcoholic butler, Bernard Lafferty, took control of her affairs as her age advanced and health declined. Just six months before her death, increasingly frail and disoriented, Doris signed a will naming Lafferty
co-executor of her estate and sole trustee of the Doris Duke Foundation, which essentially handed him control of her fortune, then worth more than one billion dollars.

At 80, Doris died of a morphine overdose, was cremated within 24 hours and her ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean.

After much legal wrangling, Lafferty was ousted as both co-executor of the will and trustee of the foundation. He relinquished his positions for an undisclosed amount of money, retreated from the limelight, and died in 1996. Due to a wealth of speculation surrounding Doris’s death, the district attorney launched an investigation but concluded there was no credible evidence to suggest foul play.

Today, The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation continues its philanthropic efforts in support of the arts, environmental causes, and life sciences.

JANUARY 19, 1913 – JANUARY 15, 1996