Where Are They Buried? (29 page)

Critics said his humor too often crossed the line from good fun into sexism but Benny was never bothered by the complaints. “I use a pretty girl the way Henny Youngman uses his violin—as a bridge between one laugh and the next,” explained Benny. Bemoaning the treatment he received at the hands of feminists, Benny answered them by pointing out that he had never chased a woman on screen in his life—they had always chased him.

On Benny’s fiftieth birthday he told his small, bald sidekick, Jackie Wright, that he had had a very good life, that he’d been lucky, and that he would not mind if he died the next day. However, even with the astounding success that Benny would enjoy in the subsequent decade, it is hard to see his life as anything other than sad and lonely.

Benny lacked confidence in the medical profession as a whole and, in a case of life imitating art, he entrusted his health to a gynecologist with a pathological obsession with pinching women’s bottoms. Despite his wealth, he shied from the responsibility he associated with property ownership, and instead lived in a series of rented flats, each one sparsely furnished and scattered with cardboard boxes. Rejected by both women to whom he’d proposed, Benny never married and, it seems, may have died a virgin.

In the spring of 1992 Benny’s neighbors sensed a particularly pungent odor emanating from Benny’s apartment and, realizing they hadn’t seen the funnyman for a few days, called the police. Their fears were soon realized; Benny had died very much as he had lived his life, alone. In front of his television, he was slumped on the couch, surrounded by cardboard boxes, unwashed crockery, empty glasses, and piles of videotapes.

At his death of heart failure at 67, Benny left no survivors and was buried at Hollybrook Cemetery in Shirley, Southampton, England.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Shirley is about 120 miles northwest of London and the cemetery itself is on the high ground along Chilworth Road, two miles north of the Southampton West railway station.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
From the main gate, turn left at the chapel and Benny’s black marble tomb is the first grave in the seventh row.

After Benny’ death, his will was contested by a few parties and, since Benny wasn’t particularly trusting of traditional financial vehicles, the actual disposition of some of his fortune was unclear. (It became rumored that some had been buried with him.) In October 1992, grave robbers unearthed Benny, but only they know whether or not his coffin hid anything; when officials peered into his open grave the next day, there was no treasure to behold. Since then, a solid slab of granite has been laid across the top of his grave.

AUGUST 13, 1899 – APRIL 29, 1980

In 1919 Alfred Hitchcock joined London’s Paramount studio as a lowly title designer, but he quickly moved up the ranks. Within six years he was directing and, over the course of the next 50 years, Alfred spun a remarkably consistent thread of suspense-thrillers, a genre he virtually invented. He deftly wove sex and humor into his stories in a steady demonstration of the eternal symmetry of good and evil and, as a brilliant technician, he developed a stock of subtle techniques and clever camera tricks that inspired his contemporaries and all who came after.

Just a year after his 1925 directorial debut, he launched his breakthrough film,
The Lodger
, a prototypical example of the classic Hitchcock plot: An innocent protagonist is falsely accused of a crime and becomes involved in a web of intrigue. This was also the first film in which he appeared as an extra. Such cameo roles would later become another of his trademarks, and spotting him would become a passion among fans. In his first “talkie,”
Blackmail
, in 1929, he introduced a “selective sound” technique; a young woman’s anxiety was emphasized by gradually distorting all but the word “knife” in a scene with her neighbor. In
Murder!
, released the following year, he first made explicit the link between sex and violence. Through the remainder of the 1930s, Alfred was the leading director in Britain and garnered international acclaim as well for a series of spy thrillers, including
The Man Who Knew Too Much
.

In 1939 he moved to Hollywood where he continued his prodigious output:
Notorious
,
Shadow of a Doubt
,
Spellbound,
and
Lifeboat
exemplify his work of the next decade. The 1950s however, turned out to be Hitchcock’s decade of personal inspiration and his three masterpieces of that period,
Rear Window
,
Vertigo
, and
North by Northwest
, lifted the typical manifestations of evil to a new plane. Employing subtle male-female relationships, witty symbolism, and dramatic film techniques and scores, he expanded classic Hitchcock to something sleeker and faster-paced and, ultimately, more entertaining. By contrast, 1960’s
Psycho
, which has been held aloft as a classic of shot selection and editing, may have, in the end, only served to inspire the slasher genre.

Though Alfred seems to have had a few favorite actors—Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, James Stewart—he was also famous for his general disregard for the acting profession, and when his celebrated comment, “Actors are cattle,” stirred up protest, he issued a correction and said, “I have been misquoted, what
I really said is: Actors should be treated as cattle.” Not surprisingly, performers weren’t very enamored with him either. His meticulous planning of every shot and complete refusal to improvise or deviate from his shooting schedule ruffled plenty of feathers, but complaints to studio heads always fell on deaf ears; the strength of Hitchcock’s directorial feats and his popularity guaranteed him the last word.

Though he was nominated for an Academy Award on six different occasions, he never won one. Instead, in a gesture that seemed prompted by the common knowledge that his time was drawing near, Hitchcock received a Lifetime Achievement award six months before his death.

Severely arthritic and suffering from kidney failure for a year, Alfred expired of heart failure at 80.

He was cremated and his ashes were scattered, though no one seems to know where.

MAY 17, 1936 – MAY 29, 2010

Dennis Hopper’s acting career began in 1955 with a role credited as “Goon,” one of the high school gang members who menace James Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause
. He flowered in art films like
The Trip
during the next decade, and later specialized in psychotic villains in such films as
Blue Velvet
and
Speed
. But it was his role as the long-haired, pot-smoking biker named Billy opposite Peter Fonda’s character, Wyatt, or “Captain America,” in the 1969 counterculture film classic
Easy Rider
that gave Dennis his most enduring claim to fame.

The made-on-the-fly movie, which he directed and co-starred in, was an anti-establishment tale of two disenchanted chopper-riding hippies, who, thanks to some drug money scored from a cocaine sale, embark on an ultimately tragic odyssey from Los Angeles to New Orleans. “A man went looking for America and couldn’t find it anywhere,” went its famous tagline. The low-budget film’s exploration of the hippie counterculture and its reaction to the Vietnam War paved the way for the New Hollywood of the 1970s, vindicating Dennis’s generation. Dubbing it his “state of the union” message, he said, “None of our crowd had ever seen themselves portrayed in a movie. At every love-in across the country people were smoking grass and dropping LSD, while audiences were still watching Doris Day and Rock Hudson.”

Easy Rider
catapulted him into the pantheon of countercultural celebrities and he was soon surrounded by groupies and
acolytes which, for someone who had already been lolling in the deep end of excess since he was eighteen, became his undoing. Tales of hard drinking and drug taking often blighted Dennis’s private life, but now, his lifestyle became the stuff of Hollywood legend—or nightmare. He became the bad-boy sheriff of Hollywood, often carrying a gun and knife when he wasn’t running around the streets of Los Angeles—literally—in the nude like a madman. He was married five times, once for just seven days. He spent time on a commune firing machine guns and taking stimulants, his daily intake including thirty beers, half a gallon of rum, and a few grams of coke. His descent reached a low point in 1982, while making a film in Mexico. “I ended up walking off into the jungle, naked, in the middle of the night,” he said. “I was convinced they were listening to my mind and my friends were being gassed.” Hallucinating on the flight home, he tried to jump out of the plane and was committed to a psychiatric ward.

After rehab, his career experienced a renaissance and he earned a 1986 Oscar nomination for his role as an alcoholic basketball-team manager in
Hoosiers
. That same year, he received critical acclaim for his chilling performance as the sadistic brute in
Blue Velvet
. By his sunset years, golf, the Atkins diet, and trips to Fashion Week with his new wife replaced boozing and drugs. Dennis was also an outspoken, if unlikely, Republican in Hollywood. He regretted his wasted years, saying, “The alcohol was awful. I was a terrible alcoholic and I was only doing the coke so I could drink more. I was looked on as a maniac and an idiot and a fool and a drunkard.”

At 74, Dennis lost a long battle with prostate cancer. After a service at the chapel of the San Francisco de Asis Church, his funeral procession proceeded to Jesus Nazareno Cemetery where he was laid to rest in an Indian-style burial mound, his simple wooden coffin covered in a jumbled mound of rocks and gravel. The cemetery is located in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From the intersection of Routes 68 and 518, proceed south on 518 for a third of a mile before turning left on Espinoza Road. After a quarter-mile, just before an adobe-colored low-slung building, turn left at the cemetery’s dirt drive.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Proceed along and the cemetery will be on both sides. After a couple hundred yards, there is a dirt area big enough to turn around in on the right, and immediately in front of that is Dennis’s grave.

NOVEMBER 17, 1925 – OCTOBER 2, 1985

After a stint in the Navy during World War II, Roy Harold Scherer Jr. worked as a vacuum cleaner salesman and a truckdriver in Hollywood while awaiting his big break. It arrived in 1948 when he was offered a role in the film
Fighter Squadron
, and Roy, never one to squander an opportunity, delivered his one line flawlessly after just 38 takes. His effort went uncredited.

After his agent persuaded him to have his teeth capped and change his name to Rock Hudson, he appeared in dozens of films during the 1950s, most notably alongside James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor in
Giant
, but Rock’s defining role came opposite Doris Day in the following decade. The pair starred in a series of comedies with suggestive titles like
Pillow Talk
and
Lover Come Back
, Rock epitomizing the comely and charismatic, perpetually aroused ladies’ man, while Doris flustered as a professional virgin. In 1966 he starred in
Seconds
, a psychological thriller that was panned at the time but has since become a cult classic.

For decades, females fawned over Rock’s rock-solid good looks, fabulous physique, and imperial grace, but Rock obliged only one time, marrying his agent’s secretary in 1955 and divorcing her three years later. He afterwards engaged only in the most private of trysts and, in 1984, Rock seemed to confirm 30-year-old suspicions that he was a homosexual when he announced he was dying of AIDS, a disease that, up to that point, was mostly limited to the gay community.

The following year, at his death at 59, Rock became the first public casualty of the disease. He had no immediate survivors, but a lover, Marc Christian, successfully sued his estate for $14.5 million in actual damages on the grounds that Rock had kept his AIDS diagnosis a secret and caused him “enhanced fear” that he might contract AIDS. In 1989, Christian, who was never diagnosed with the disease, was awarded an additional $14.5 million in punitive damages.

Rock was cremated and his ashes scattered along the Pacific Coast, but ten years later friends honored his memory by having his name inscribed in the Tower of Memories at the Palm Springs Mortuary and Mausoleum 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 left, make
a quick right into Palm Springs Mortuary, and park in the office lot on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Walk back across the lane that you just drove in on, proceed past the fountain, and on the right is the Tower of Memories, just before the rest rooms. There’s a checkerboard pattern of tiles on this wall and Rock’s name is engraved on the tile that’s third from the top and third from the left.

Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball created the situation comedy
I Love Lucy
in 1951 and the show quickly achieved unprecedented popularity. The program featured Lucille’s antics as Lucy, the wacky, high-spirited wife of a struggling Cuban bandleader named Ricky Ricardo, played by Desi. Meanwhile, their good-natured landlords and best friends, Fred and Ethel Mertz, played by William Frawley and Vivian Vance, came along for the laughs. Every Monday night during its six-year run, millions of people across America gathered in front of what was usually the first television set in the house to watch their continuing comedic adventures.

Desi and Lucy weren’t just a couple onscreen, they were married in real life as well. In 1953 when Lucy Ricardo was seen going to the hospital to give birth to “Little Ricky” (who was actually Lucille’s real son, Desi Arnaz Jr.), it was a sort of national occasion. Nonetheless, all things must pass and, after illuminating the direction for years of future television programs,
I Love Lucy
ended its run in 1957, only to begin a new run of worldwide syndication that shows no sign of ending anytime soon.