Where Are They Buried? (30 page)

MARCH 2, 1917 – DECEMBER 2, 1986

AUGUST 6, 1911 – APRIL 26, 1989

Though married just twenty years, the lives of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball are inextricably linked. After marrying in
1940, they continued their own careers; Lucy was in radio and “B” movies, while Desi was a touring big-band musician. With Desi constantly on the road, the marriage was problematic from the beginning and when CBS proposed that Lucy take her popular radio program,
My Favorite Husband
, to the new medium of television, she saw a chance to save their failing marriage and agreed to the program on the condition that Desi play her husband.

CBS agreed but balked at their next demand: Lucy and Desi proposed filming their show and then beaming it to audiences at a later time. In 1951, before the perfection of videotape, nearly all television shows were live productions, fed from the East Coast because of time-zone differences. CBS agreed to their proposal on the condition they take salary cuts to cover the increased expenses, and Lucy and Desi granted that concession providing Desilu, a company they’d created, would own the programs after the initial broadcast. A few years later, the couple sold the films back to CBS for more than four million dollars, a sum that provided the economic base for building what became the powerful Desilu production empire.

The couple divorced three years after
I Love Lucy
ended and, after Lucy bought Desi’s half of Desilu for three million dollars, he soon retired to gambling and alcohol and only rarely made public appearances again. But Lucy wasted no time: She reformatted the old show into a new series called
The Lucy Show
and later,
Here’s Lucy
, which ran on prime time through 1974.

In 1986, at 69, Desi Arnaz died of lung cancer at his home in Del Mar, California. He was cremated, his ashes reportedly scattered.

A week after undergoing open-heart surgery in 1989, Lucy suffered a ruptured aorta and died at 77. She was cremated and her ashes are interred at Lakeview Cemetery in Jamestown, New York.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-86, take Exit 12 and follow Route 60 south for a half-mile to Buffalo Street. Turn left onto Buffalo, and the cemetery is immediately on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Drive straight into the cemetery and after a couple hundred yards, turn right and go up the hill. Across the drive from the grand Sheldon monument you’ll easily find the Ball stone where Lucy lies with her parents.

FEBRUARY 26, 1887 – MARCH 3, 1966

Originally a vaudeville and then Broadway stage actor, William Frawley was later known for playing supporting roles, usually as a gruff but likeable character, in over 100 films. Because of a reputation as a hard drinker, his contract with
I Love Lucy
stipulated that he’d be fired if he had more than three days of unexplained absence or if he ever showed up drunk. Bill agreed to the stipulation and for $350 a week joined the cast as landlord Fred Mertz.

Offscreen, Bill made no bones about his dislike for Vivian Vance, who played his on-screen wife, Ethel, once remarking, “She’s one of the finest gals to come out of Kansas, and I often wish she’d go back there.” Likewise, Vivian often expressed her disgust at having to play opposite a curmudgeon who was 25 years her senior.

After
I Love Lucy
went off the air, Bill appeared as Bub the housekeeper on
My Three Sons
. In 1966, he suffered a heart attack while walking down Hollywood Boulevard and, a few minutes later, died in the lobby of a nearby hotel.

At 79, Bill was buried at San Fernando Mission Cemetery in Mission Hills, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Just south of where I-405 splits from I-5, take the Rinaldi Street exit off of I-405 to Sepulveda Boulevard south. You’ll immediately see the cemetery. The entrance is accessed by making the left onto Stranwood Avenue.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn left and stop where you see a statue of Jesus on the lawn to the right. Here, five rows from the curb, is Bill’s grave.

JULY 26, 1912 – AUGUST 17, 1979

In the summer of 1951 Vivian Vance was a stage actress at the La Jolla Playhouse. At the urging of
I Love Lucy’s
director, Desi went to see her performance and, after the show, she was cast as Ethel Mertz, the Ricardos’ landlady and Lucy’s best friend. After
I Love Lucy
, she joined Lucy as Vivian, not Ethel, on
The Lucy Show
for three seasons and later retired to Connecticut.

In 1979 Vivian succumbed to bone cancer at 67. She was cremated and her ashes scattered by family and friends.

NOVEMBER 23, 1887 – FEBRUARY 2, 1969

Born the son of a wealthy British diplomat, Boris Karloff enjoyed the privileges customary to the family of an agent of the Crown in late Victorian England. His childhood included private schooling, exposure to art and theater, extensive travel, and, finally, enrollment at London University in preparation of a career in his country’s foreign service. But at 21, Boris promptly abandoned the aristocracy and eloped with the first of his five wives to Canada.

To support himself, Boris worked as a farm laborer in Ontario and joined a touring theater company. Though he became known as a skilled character actor, often donning heavy makeup and playing men many years older, he was divorced and penniless at 30 and left to find work in Hollywood. Boris had fantastic success working in Hollywood—in a dozen years he made eighty film appearances—but the quantity of work dwarfed both his monetary compensation and critical recognition for all the effort.

Finally, in 1931 Bela Lugosi refused to take a role in which he would have his face hidden by makeup and have no lines, the role of the creature in
Frankenstein
, and so the part went to Boris, who had no vanity or misgivings about his work in the horror genre. The picture became a classic and 70 years later, Boris’s is the only name readily associated with it, though he was not even credited in the original release, receiving just a question mark.

Over the next 25 years Boris reigned as the King of Horror and made countless movies in that vein—in his career he had more than 200 film credits—but by the late 1950s he abandoned the hectic pace as his health faltered. Still, he didn’t give up making movies entirely and, in the last decade of his life, though he suffered from severe emphysema and was forced to use a wheelchair and an oxygen mask between scenes, his appearance remained familiar to television viewers and moviegoers.

At 81, Boris died at his home from complications of his emphysema. He was cremated and his ashes buried in the Garden of Remembrance at Mount Cemetery, which sits high on a hill above Guildford, England. Guildford is a quaint borough located about 45 minutes southwest of London.

JANUARY 17, 1949 – MAY 16, 1984

After scoring a zero on the draft board’s psychology test, resulting in a 4-F deferment, Andy Kaufman pursued a career as a comedian of the most unorthodox variety. His act tested the audience’s discomfort threshold and during performances he alternately read passages from
The Great Gatsby
, ate potatoes, sang religious songs, and even took an extended onstage nap. Nonetheless, Andy’s mainstream potential became evident in 1975 when his “foreign guy” character was showcased on
Saturday Night Live
’s inaugural broadcast. The heavily accented, nonsensical character was the genesis of Latka Gravas, a goofy Latvian mechanic, and beginning in 1978 Andy played him to the hilt during the hit television show
Taxi
’s five-year run.

Andy was a frequent guest player on
Saturday Night Live
but his bizarre offstage antics eventually alienated fans and in a November 1982 phone-in poll, he was voted off the show by viewers, 195,544 to 169,186. The conflict had arisen after Andy took the show’s humorous Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion role to a bizarre extreme and turned it into his own alter-ego on the professional wrestling circuit. In the guise, Andy lobbed insults at the audience and baited women with a $1,000 prize if one were able to pin him. More than 60 accepted the challenge, and Andy won all the bouts, but the dirty fights garnered him few allies. In this time spent out of his element, Andy somehow developed a weird vendetta against pro-wrestler Jerry Lawler, and the whole grotesque affair promptly ended after Jerry pile-drove Andy into the hospital with a damaged cervical vertebrae.

In November 1983 Andy developed a nagging and hacking cough. After it persisted, then worsened, he was subjected to a battery of medical tests and it was finally determined that he had a rare, large-cell carcinoma in his lungs. The cancer was in its advanced stages, inoperable and incurable. Andy had never smoked and he was a strict health-food fanatic, so when this news became public, many believed that the whole thing was another cleverly crafted performance piece. The news was all too real for Andy, though, and in a search for a magic cure, he even traveled to the Philippines for help from shamans.

But Andy eventually succumbed to the cancer and, because faking his own death seemed to be the apotheosis of his bad taste, some arrived at his funeral expecting a reception from him in one or another of his personas. But instead, they found Andy’s lifeless body and, hoping that this was his strangest put-on of all, many
poked him when they thought no one was looking to be certain that he really was gone.

At 35, Andy was buried at Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, New York.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Elmont is on the very western edge of Long Island, just east of Queens. From the Belt Parkway, take Exit 26B and follow Route 24 east for a mile. Turn south on Elmont Road and the cemetery is a half-mile on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and go past the office. Make a right onto Lincoln Avenue, then turn left onto Brandeis Avenue. At Autumn Avenue turn right and stop at its end. The Kaufman plot is just to the left.

DECEMBER 8, 1953 – APRIL 10, 1992

Sam Kinison was a high-flying, patently outrageous performer who was simultaneously loved and hated from the time he found success as a comedian in 1985 with an appearance in Rodney Dangerfield’s
Back to School
until his death seven years later. On one side of the fence, gays, feminists, and conservatives howled in protest against Sam’s poisonously rude and bitter jokes, while an adoring legion of equally vocal fans thrilled at his shocking, high-decibel outbursts. Often appearing in a trademark beret and overcoat, the former Pentecostal preacher’s pitch-black routines, delivered in loud-mouthed, wildman style, were surpassed only by his real-life offstage excesses. An avid substance abuser, Sam lived a reckless life filled with drugs, alcohol, women, and controversy.

By 1992 though, Sam had revamped his comedy act to direct it toward a more lucrative mainstream television audience. He made frequent appearances on
Saturday Night Live
,
In Living Color
, and even played a starring role as Charlie Hoover on the short-lived sitcom of the same name. It was ironic then that, after years of hard partying followed by a renewed commitment to cleaning up his abusive habits, Sam was killed—while sober—in a traffic collision caused by a driver who had been drinking.

Having just returned from their Hawaii honeymoon, Sam and his new wife, Malika Souiri, a Las Vegas dancer, were traveling in Sam’s new Pontiac Trans Am to a sold-out Friday evening show in Laughlin, Nevada. Meanwhile, in the other direction, two
teenagers in a pickup truck littered with beer cans swerved into oncoming traffic near Needles, California. In the ensuing head-on impact, Sam met his demise. In the moments after the horrific crash, Sam seemed to be fine, according to his brother Bill, who witnessed the tragedy from his own car following behind. With relatively minor cuts on his face and forehead, Sam wrenched himself free of his mangled vehicle, but then lay down by the side of the road.

Sam’s face had no color and he kept saying, “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.” Bill cradled Sam’s bleeding head in his arms while Sam had what seemed to be a conversation with somebody else. “But why?” Sam asked. It was like he was talking to somebody upstairs. “Then I heard him say, ‘Okay okay, okay,’ and the last ‘okay’ was so soft and at peace like whatever voice was talking to him gave him the right answer, and he just relaxed with it. He said it so sweet, like he was talking to someone he loved,” Bill related.

Sam hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt and an autopsy revealed that when Sam’s body struck the steering wheel, his internals had decelerated so quickly that his aorta had been ripped from his heart. On the side of Highway 95, while his older brother comforted him helplessly, Sam died of a broken heart at 38.