Where Are They Buried? (31 page)

Sam was buried in his family’s plot at Memorial Park Gardens in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-44, take Exit 232 and follow Memorial Drive (Route 64) south for two miles to 51st Street. At this intersection you’ll see the cemetery on your left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and follow the yellow line that’s painted on the main drive to the chapel. Once at the chapel, you’ll see the Lakeside Mausoleum off to your right, in front of which is Section 28, Garden of the Apostles, where Sam is buried.

Section 28 is divided into quadrants by four walkways, and the Kinison plot is in the southeast quadrant. (When standing in Section 28 and looking at the mausoleum, north is to your left, so the southeast is to your right front.) Within the southeast quadrant, Sam’s grave is seven rows east of the walk and about two-thirds of the way north.

The grave location sounds confusing (there are few landmarks to use for orientation), but once at Section 28, the directions will be clearer.

JULY 26, 1928 – MARCH 7, 1999

As a young adult, Stanley Kubrick had the opportunity to attend many film screenings at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and later said that seeing so many bad films gave him the confidence to do better. “I was aware that I didn’t know anything about making films, but I believed I couldn’t make them any worse than the majority of films I was seeing,” he once said. “Bad films gave me the courage to try making a mediocre movie.”

After a couple forgettable noir thrillers, the aspiring director found his center and established himself as a filmmaker to be reckoned with by releasing
Paths of Glory
in 1957, a devastating antiwar indictment of military duplicity. Two years later came the high-budget Roman epic
Spartacus
followed by the erotic
Lolita
in 1962, but the first of his true masterpieces was the nuclear-age comic satire
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
, which imagined nuclear Armageddon as a macabre joke while Slim Pickens rides an H-Bomb like a bucking bronco.

The public and critical acclaim for
Dr. Strangelove
earned Stanley the rare freedom of absolute control over his projects and, though the reclusive artist would shoot just six more films in the 35 years preceding his death, nearly all of them have their place in screen history. From the visual grandeur and dazzling special effects of
2001: A Space Odyssey
to the emblematic images of man as a primordial beast evident in
The Shining
,
A Clockwork Orange
, and
Full Metal Jacket
, all of his films have an overpowering feel of
perfectionism, and the Kubrick innovations and imaginations lent to his coldly brilliant films ensure that he’ll be with us for a long time to come.

Four days after the final screening of what would be his last film,
Eyes Wide Shut
, Stanley died of a heart attack at 70 though, according to some fanaticists, things may have been a little less tidy than the newspapers reported. Apparently, because his swan song film broached the decadent and kinky underbelly of the rich and famous and served merely as a thinly-veiled vehicle for exposing and embarrassing a secret “Illuminati” society concerned with One World Order, Stanley paid for the transgression with his life. He was snuffed. You can read all about it on the Internet, just below the stories about children raised by wolves.

Stanley is buried on the grounds of his own 200-acre estate, Childwickbury Manor near St. Albans, England. Marked by an indigenous smooth and weathered stone inscribed “Here lies our Stanley,” his grave is in a little garden under the shade of a 150-year-old monkey puzzle tree. The stately fortress-like home and grounds, ringed by three sets of electric gates and a blizzard of notices warning of closed-circuit cameras and stiff prosecution, is not open to the public.

SEPTEMBER 10, 1934 – JULY 4, 1997

At 25, Charles Kuralt was CBS’s youngest-ever correspondent, and during the 1960s he cut his teeth on such choice assignments as Vietnam and Latin America, covering stories for which most hard-nosed reporters yearned. But, weary of hawks and doves, after just eight years Charles turned his attention to his own country and took to the road in a quest to tell the story of Smalltown, U.S.A. Eventually his poetic storytelling and curiosity led to the creation of
On The Road
, a leisurely TV news magazine that followed his travels.

As television’s Everyman, he was gifted with the ability to see poetry where others saw the prosaic, ferreting out the stories from a motor home and logging up to 50,000 miles a year. Charles got the ideas for his quirky vignettes from viewers, or he found the items himself in snippets buried in rural newspapers. He was genuinely interested in the people he profiled, even the kookiest, and spoke with them without the slightest hint of condescension.

The balding and pudgy reporter was anything but intimidating and the persona helped him get to the heart of
such stories as a high school basketball team that lost 127 straight games and a gas station that doubled as a poetry factory. Charles interviewed a country-song-singing dentist, a 93-year-old bricklayer, and a paraplegic auto mechanic. From unicyclists and professional wrestlers to lumberjacks, whittlers, and horse traders, Charles’ stories celebrated America and its everyday people.

Too, Charles’ patriotic love of America was readily apparent and, when he passed away at 62 of complications of lupus, it was fitting that he departed on the Fourth of July.

But after Charles’ death, it emerged that the best oddball story might have been one he never told. For 29 years while his wife remained at their home in the concrete canyons of New York City, Charles maintained a second family in the wild canyons of Montana. He had met Patricia Shannon, the woman of his dreams, just a year after starting his
On The Road
travels, and he visited for two or three days every few weeks. He bought Shannon a $50,000 cottage in Ireland, put her children through college, gave her $400,000 to start a London business, and together they purchased acreage and a cabin along the Big Hole River and backpacked in the neighboring mountains.

Charles’ infidelity came to light when Shannon instigated a court action against Charles’ legal wife, Suzanna Kuralt, claiming that Charles had intended for her to keep a second Montana property. Suzanna died in October 1999 (and is faithfully buried alongside Charles) but Charles’ daughters continued the court battle, which they lost in December 2000. Adding insult to injury, a judge ruled in 2002 that the daughters were required to pay the estate taxes on the second Shannon property, even though it was ultimately awarded to Shannon.

Charles, dead at 62, and Suzanna are buried at the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, on the campus of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-40, take Exit 266 and follow Route 86 south. After 4½ miles the road will divide into two one-way streets. At this point, turn left onto Cameron Avenue and then make a right onto Raleigh Street. At the next intersection, turn left onto South Road and the cemetery is a short distance on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery at the third entrance and walk 50 yards up the path. You’ll see the Kuralt plot on the left.

NOVEMBER 27, 1940 – JULY 20, 1973

FEBRUARY 1, 1965 – MARCH 31, 1993

While his parents were visiting the States, Li Jun Fan was born in San Francisco and, after claiming his American birth certificate, the happy family returned to Hong Kong. Obsessed with martial arts and bodybuilding, Li spent his adolescence turning his small body into a weapon and he appeared as a child actor in twenty movies. As he approached eighteen, his mother shipped him back stateside to keep him from fraternizing with his violent gang buddies and, after taking the name Bruce Lee, he got a job teaching the Wing Chun style of martial arts in Seattle. In 1964, at the first major American demonstration of kung fu, Bruce, an unknown, decimated his competitors and recast the martial arts culture.

After landing a role as Kato in the television series
The Green Hornet
, he attracted students like Steve McQueen and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. By 1968 he had become the patron saint for the era’s cult-of-the-body devotees; Bruce took vitamins and steroids, tortured himself with isometrics, experimented with electrical muscle stimulation, brewed ginseng teas, ate raw eggs, and drank beef blood. But despite his readiness to promote and embrace all that was American, Hollywood wouldn’t embrace him, and Bruce soon returned to Hong Kong to make films.

By 1973 Bruce had made three kung fu flicks,
The Big Boss, Fists of Fury,
and
Way of the Dragon
, which, played back-to-back, can almost be mistaken for a single, eternally long exhibition of spin-kicks and flying leaps. On this side of the Pacific the films were roundly panned. One critic wrote that they make “the worst Italian western look like the most noble achievement of cinema,” but they set box-office records in Asia, and Hollywood approached Bruce for a strictly American version.

Lest the producers change their minds Bruce cobbled together
Enter the Dragon
in a couple of months featuring the
same tired sequences; a few dozen enemies attacked Bruce only to die as soon as he karate-chopped them. But three weeks before the film opened, Bruce died in Hong Kong at the apartment of actress Betty Ting Pei, who had a role in his next movie,
Game of Death
, which they were then filming. Bruce was at her apartment “discussing the script,” as the story was later spun, and after he complained of a headache, Betty gave him a prescription painkiller, Equagesic. Bruce went to lie down in the bedroom, Betty was later unable to rouse him, and he died at the hospital later that night.

The coroner determined that Bruce had died of a “cerebral edema,” a brain aneurysm, possibly prompted by an allergic reaction to the Equagesic. But of course Bruce’s fans would have none of this. It was impossible for superhumans of Bruce’s ilk to drop dead from a mere allergic reaction, or even an aneurysm, for that matter, and it was obvious, to them anyway, that his death was the result of some conspiracy. A choice motive was that Bruce had been murdered for flouting his traditional ancestors and giving away ancient fighting secrets to Westerners. For this, Bruce had been killed either by an undetectable Oriental poison or, by “the vibrating hand,” a mysterious death touch that kills two years after it’s applied.

In any event, at 32, Bruce was buried at Lakeview Cemetery in Seattle, Washington, and, 20 years later, his son Brandon met his own peculiar end.

Following in his father’s footsteps, Brandon became a player in martial arts films, though by the time Brandon surfaced the genre had matured into a form that even viewers who weren’t karate-chop aficionados could enjoy. His first role was in 1986’s
Kung Fu: The Movie
and, after a handful of similar roles, filming for
The Crow
began in 1993.

A particular scene in that movie called for Brandon to be shot. The scene began and actor Michael Masee fired a gun containing a dummy bullet at Brandon, who collapsed to the floor exactly as the scene specified. But as the other actors continued playing out the remainder of the scene, it became apparent that Brandon’s writhing on the floor was more than an act. Brandon really had been shot and he died of his wound the next day.

After an investigation, the accident was determined to have unfolded this way: For an earlier close-up scene that required the gun to be filmed being loaded, the gun was loaded with a dummy bullet. That is, the bullet had a slug (a projectile) for visual effect, but the bullet’s casing had no gunpowder. However, when that dummy was taken out of the gun, its slug
was dislodged from its casing, and the slug remained unnoticed within the gun’s firing chamber. Next, a different kind of dummy bullet, the exact opposite of the previous dummy, was put into the firing chamber. This dummy bullet consisted only of a casing holding gunpowder for sound effect—it had no slug. The gunpowder of the second dummy bullet propelled the slug left behind by the first dummy bullet and, in effect, the two dummies conspired to produce one very smart, lethal bullet.

At 28, Brandon was buried alongside his father in Seattle.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-5, take Exit 165 to Madison Street and head east for a mile to 15th Avenue. Turn left on 15th and the cemetery is 1½ miles on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and go to the top of the hill, where there is a circular road. Near this road’s curb, on the side closer to the entrance, is the Lee plot.

NOVEMBER 5, 1913 – JULY 7, 1967

In 1937 producer David Selznick began searching for an actress to play the part of the impetuous Southern belle, Scarlett O’Hara, in the film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s epic love story,
Gone With the Wind
. After passing on hundreds of starry hopefuls, including Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford, Selznick became so frustrated that he started filming without a Scarlett. At the same time, the doe-eyed, British sweetheart Vivien Leigh was campaigning across town for the role of Cathy in
Wuthering Heights
, opposite leading man Laurence Olivier, with whom she was carrying on an affair. But Vivien was turned down for the role because she was unknown in America at the time. It became the ultimate irony that Vivien was instead cast as Scarlett O’Hara in
Gone With the Wind
, which premiered alongside
Wuthering Heights
, and completely eclipsed it at the Academy Awards for 1939. Upon
GWTW’
s premiere in January 1940, Vivien became America’s newest darling and captured the Academy Award for Best Actress.