Where Are They Buried? (14 page)

In 1916 Norman Rockwell’s spectacular career as America’s favorite artist-illustrator was launched when the
Saturday Evening Post
first used one of his paintings on its cover. Thus began an association spanning 317 covers and 47 years. His warm and folksy paintings made Norman Rockwell a household name.

Painting eight hours a day, seven days a week, Norman took average America as his subject. Through wars, civil strife, and the Depression, Norman stuck to his easel and recorded the awkwardness of youth, the tribulations of romance, and the virtues of loyalty and compassion. His body of work yields an extraordinary visual history of the century, portrayed with benevolent affection.

In addition to his
Post
covers, Norman contributed to many other magazines, did 53 Boy Scout calendars, and his advertisements helped sell countless products. Norman illustrated the lives of Ben Franklin, Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn, and did portraits of all the presidential candidates from Eisenhower through Carter. In 1943 he painted his famous “Four Freedoms” series and reproductions were widely distributed by the War Department. When the originals went on tour, they helped sell $133 million in war bonds.

He left the
Post
in 1963, feeling that it had changed from a family-oriented periodical to one of “sophisticated muckraking,”
and his work changed dramatically. Norman left the role of chronicler of nostalgic America and became a crusader. Instead of painting gentler scenes of peace and prosperity, he showed a strong social conscience and delved into such issues as civil rights, poverty, the generation gap, and the war in Vietnam.

In a survey of Americans, his painting of a young boy standing on a chair inspecting the doctor’s diploma while preparing to receive a vaccination in the behind was chosen by a majority as the favorite of his entire catalog. But Norman himself steadfastly maintained that he had no favorite painting. He once said, “Someone asked Picasso his favorite of all the pictures he ever painted and he replied, ‘The next one.’ I’ll echo the master.”

At 84, Norman died peacefully in his sleep and was buried at the town cemetery in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From the center of Stockbridge, follow Route 102 west for a half-mile, then turn right onto Church Street. After a couple hundred yards, turn right again and enter the cemetery at the entrance between the stone pillars.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Proceed down the corridor of pine and hemlock trees and at the first drive, turn right and stop. The Rockwell plot is on the right, surrounded by a hedgerow.

While in Stockbridge, you’ll certainly want to visit the warm atmosphere of the Norman Rockwell Museum, where a regular rotation of his paintings is on display. At any given time, the gallery is adorned with a few hundred of his works, but you’ll have to return quite a few times before you’ve seen the approximately 4,000 that comprise Norman’s catalog. The Four Freedoms series are the centerpiece of the museum and, when you look up to view them, the effect is a virtual cathedral to the American Dream.

To reach the museum, follow Church Street for another mile past the cemetery and watch for signs to the left.

NOVEMBER 4, 1879 – AUGUST 15, 1935

Around the turn of the century, the part-Cherokee Oklahoman Will Rogers joined a traveling Wild West production as a trick roper; Will had especially keen lariat skills and developed a signature stunt of throwing three lassos at once, landing one around a running horse’s neck, another around the rider, and the last under the horse to loop all four legs. He moved his routine along with a cracker-barrel
wit, and before long, his folksy observations and homespun philosophies became more prized by audiences than his expert roping.

Americans adored his perceptive satire, which never crossed the line to mockery, and Will’s persona became a pervasive cultural charm. He was a fixture and a favorite of the Ziegfeld Follies, appeared in dozens of movies and, in 1928, even ran for president on the Anti-Bunk ticket. Through some 4,000 syndicated newspaper columns and his own radio show, Will showcased an endless supply of sensibly sage, off-the-cuff quips and comments, like “I never met a man I didn’t like” and “All I know is what I read in the papers.” He remains a certified American folk hero.

Among Will’s many friends and acquaintances was Wiley Post, a one-eyed record-setting aviator, who in 1935 was exploring a new air route between Seattle and Russia. The pair decided to scout the route together; Wiley needed to fly the course to determine whether it was practical, and Will was eager to document a trip with a maverick aviator to his faithful readers in newspaper columns banged out from faraway ports of call.

But a few days after leaving Seattle, the friends’ adventure turned grim. With few landmarks to go by, Wiley had gotten his directions a little mixed up. After realizing he’d strayed from his planned course, he touched the pontoon-equipped plane down on an inlet near the tiny outpost of Point Barrow, Alaska. After getting their bearings from the locals, the pair was again on its way but, shortly after taking off from the water, the plane’s engine quit. It fell straight down, and both Will and Wiley were killed.

Will was 55 at his death and is buried at his own Memorial and Museum in Claremore, Oklahoma.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
From the center of Claremore, take Route 88 north and the Will Rogers complex will be on your right after one mile. Will’s tomb, complete with a statue of a horse, is in the front overlooking the expansive lawn.

FEBRUARY 27, 1932 – MARCH 23, 2011

In a career of some seventy years and more than sixty films, the violet-eyed actress Elizabeth Taylor was synonymous with Hollywood glamour. First appearing on screen at age ten, she grew up there and was a star her entire life. In one quick leap from
National Velvet
to
A Place in the Sun,
and from there to
Cleopatra,
Elizabeth was indelibly transformed from a vulnerable child actress into a voluptuous film queen.

Ms. Taylor’s popularity endured throughout her life, but critics were sometimes reserved in their praise of her acting. In that sense she may have been upstaged by her own striking beauty. Could anyone as lovely as Elizabeth Taylor also be talented? The answer, of course, is yes. By her own estimation, she “whistled and hummed” her way through her early films. But that changed in 1951, when she starred in
A Place in the Sun,
playing her prototypical role as a seemingly unattainable romantic vision. The film, she said, was “the first time I ever considered
acting
when I was young.” Given her lack of professional training, the range of her acting was surprisingly wide. She convincingly played predatory vixens and wounded victims, while her melodramatic heroines would have been at home on soap operas.

One prominent, perhaps surprising, dissenter about her looks was Richard Burton, who was twice her husband. The notion of his wife as “the most beautiful woman in the world is absolute nonsense,” he said. “She has wonderful eyes,” he added, “but she has a double chin and an overdeveloped chest, and she’s rather short in the leg.” Of her seven husbands, it seems he may have been the love of her life and Elizabeth said that had he not died she probably would have married him a third time. Long after his death, she kept a copy of his last letter penned three days before his death, in her bedside drawer.

Pursued by paparazzi and denounced by the Vatican, Elizabeth existed for the public and her life was played out in print: miles of newspaper and magazine articles, a galaxy of photographs, and a shelf of biographies, each one painting a different portrait. But behind the sometimes scandalous behavior was a woman with a sense of morality: she habitually married her lovers. People watched and counted, with vicarious pleasure, as she became Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky—enough marriages to be certified as a serial wife. Asked why she married so often, she said, in an assumed drawl: “I don’t know, honey. It sure beats the hell out of me.”

“I’ve been lucky all my life,” she said just before turning 60. “Everything was handed to me. Looks, fame, wealth, honors, love. I rarely had to fight for anything.” But she suffered misfortune as well. Burton died before his time and her third husband, Michael Todd, perished at 48 in a plane crash. In later years Elizabeth struggled with alcohol while an overeating problem made her fodder for late-night TV comics. Playing five doctors against one another, she managed hundreds of antidepressant and painkiller prescriptions resulting in a prolonged rehabilitation at the Betty Ford Center. According to one chronicler, she suffered more than seventy incidents that required hospitalization, including an
appendectomy, an emergency tracheotomy, a punctured esophagus, a hysterectomy, dysentery, an ulcerated eye, smashed spinal discs, skin cancer, a brain tumor, hip replacements, and a half a dozen back surgeries. In her later years she had to use a wheelchair because of osteoporosis and scoliosis.

Long after she faded from the screen, she remained a mesmerizing figure and turned to business, cannily peddling her own Passion perfume for $165 an ounce. In 1985, Elizabeth became the most prominent celebrity to back what was then a most unfashionable cause: AIDS, for which she would eventually raise nearly $300 million. For that work, in 2000, Queen Elizabeth II made her a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, an honor on the level of knighthood. Upon entering Buckingham Palace in a wheelchair, she told the media, “You can now call me Dame Elizabeth, though I’ve been a broad all my life.”

At 79, she passed away of congestive heart failure. At her request, the funeral began fifteen minutes after it was scheduled to begin. As her representative told the media, “She even wanted to be late for her own funeral.”

Elizabeth was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From Highway 2, take the San Fernando Road exit and turn northwest. After a mile, make a right onto Glendale Avenue and the park’s entrance is immediately on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Get a map at the information booth and make your way to the Great Mausoleum. Walk in its front entrance to the Hall of Memory and there you’ll see a twelve-foot-high, Michelangelo-like carved statue of an angel with arms outstretched, beneath which is the crypt of Elizabeth Taylor.

MAY 6, 1895 – AUGUST 23, 1926

Rudolph Valentino was the greatest Latin lover of the silent screen era. At eighteen he left Italy and, after arriving in New York aboard the steamer
S.S. Cleveland
, Rudolph was soon the star tango dancer at Maxim’s, a high-class New York cabaret from which he moonlighted as a gigolo. After a particular married woman with whom he was having an affair killed her husband, Rudolph conveniently left town in 1916 with the Masked Model touring tango group and ended up in Hollywood.

Blessed with hypnotic eyes and a dashing charm, Rudolph was an instant star, mainly in the role of the romantic “Sheik” in a series of desert melodramas. From his days as a dancer, he had learned to move with a sort of grace and finesse unfamiliar to moviegoers of the day, and he enchanted audiences with his exotic appearance and unconventional mannerisms. In the seven years before his untimely death, Rudolph appeared in fourteen major films, including
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
and
The Eagle
, and female moviegoers openly swooned over his extraordinary sex appeal.

By 1926 the Great Italian Lover’s second marriage had collapsed, and he set off newly single again. In the morning after an all-night party thrown in his honor, Rudolph went to the hospital with severe stomach pain. Doctors immediately performed surgery to repair a perforated ulcer and remove his ruptured appendix. However, uremic poisoning had already swept through his body and penetrated the wall of his heart. Six days later, Rudolph was dead.

Widespread hysteria among his idolizers ensued. At the Funeral Church at 67th Street and Broadway in New York, Rudolph was laid out in a silver-bronze coffin with a plate-glass barrier so fans could look at, but not touch, the man who had been the world’s greatest lover. At one point, the frenzied throng broke through the church’s front window and dozens of people were injured in the ensuing chaos. Eventually, some 80,000 people filed past the dead Sheik.

At 31, Rudolph was buried at Hollywood Forever in Hollywood, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
This cemetery is easy to find as it’s just west of Highway 101 at 6000 Santa Monica Blvd.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn at the second left, drive straight through the next intersection, and park in front of the Hollywood Cathedral Mausoleum on the right. Walk in the mausoleum’s main entrance, turn left at the second corridor, then right at the last corridor. Rudolph’s crypt is on the left at the end.

Interestingly, this crypt was supposed to be his temporary resting place until a suitably grand monument could be built. However, plans for such a memorial never materialized, so Rudolph lies in this borrowed vault that belonged to his friend and agent, June Mathis.

For a period of years, a mysterious “Lady in Black” faithfully visited Rudolph’s tomb on the anniversary of his death. Theories about her identity circulated endlessly until a movie house admitted to creating the event as a stunt intended to stoke interest in the Valentino mystique.