Where Are They Buried? (4 page)

At 62, Ed died of complications brought on by hepatic hypertension.

As per his wishes, he was buried by family and friends in an old sleeping bag deep in the Cabeza Prieta Desert of southwestern Arizona. His body was transported in the bed of a pickup truck and there was no undertaker, embalming, or coffin. The exact location of his grave remains a secret known only by a select few of his survivors.

Until he was seventeen, Ed lived in the hamlet of Home, Pennsylvania, and in 1996 a private group erected a marker there to recognize him. You can see it on Route 119, about ten miles north of the town of Indiana.

MARCH 6, 1906 – MARCH 3, 1959

OCTOBER 2, 1895 – APRIL 24, 1974

Through their cleverly crafted routines featuring an unlikely pair bantering back and forth in complete misunderstanding of each other, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello became one of the most successful comedy teams in Hollywood history. Abbott played the insulting, “I am not amused” straight man, while Costello was the boisterous “baaaaad boy” and buffoon—a short and round innocent who perpetually suffered his partner’s berating and won the audiences’ sympathies amid howls of laughter. The quick-tongued tandem found fame in vaudeville, radio, Broadway, television, and perhaps most famously, on the silver screen.

Their official teaming was in 1936, and the duo soon landed on radio’s
The Kate Smith Hour
. It was on this program that their classic signature skit “Who’s On First?” came to the national attention, and Abbott & Costello rocketed to fame. By 1939 they’d signed a movie deal with Universal Pictures. Their first few films, including
Buck Privates
, were smash hits, but the team’s most popular films were yet to come. In 1948, the duo developed a comedy-horror genre with the hilarious
Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein
film, which ushered in the
Abbott & Costello Meet…
era. Over the next eight years the pair made a series of beloved films in which they “met” the Invisible Man, the Mummy, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, among others.

When Bud and Lou dissolved their partnership in 1956, the tabloids went into overdrive speculating about bad blood between the two comedians. But the truth seems to be that theirs was a completely amicable parting; at 60, Bud had grown noticeably weary of the spotlight, while Lou welcomed a change of pace and had other aspirations as a talk-show host and as a dramatic actor.

But just over two years later, any such inclinations of Lou’s were put on permanent hold when he suffered a heart attack. Lou was ordered to go on bed rest, and he obliged, but a few days later the funny guy suffered a more massive coronary and died at 52.

Lou rests at Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Whittier Boulevard is just north of the intersection of I-5 and I-710. The cemetery is at 4201 Whittier Blvd., a bit west of I-710.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, bear left, and drive to the big mausoleum on the hill. Inside the mausoleum is a chapel with three short halls that extend to the right. Lou’s crypt is in the top row of the middle hall, and is marked with his given name, Louis Francis Cristillo.

In 1961, Bud suffered a sort of epileptic fit while aboard an airplane, and in 1965 he had a mild stroke. Bud was never quite the same after those calamities, but he did survive for nearly a decade, and even provided the voice for his own character in the short-lived
Abbott & Costello Cartoon Show
. At 78, Bud died of cancer.

He was cremated and his ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean.

When the Beatles made their U.S. debut on the
Ed Sullivan Show
in February 1964, playing their infectious new form of rock and roll, an entire generation realized that nothing would ever be the same again. And it wasn’t. Over the next six years the Beatles—John and Paul, George and Ringo—dominated the culture and translated their style and music into new cultural trends in self-expression, appearance, attitude, and, of course, music. No group before or since has had a lasting effect on pop music and culture even approaching that of the Beatles.

John Lennon and, to a slightly lesser degree, Paul McCartney, were generally regarded as the group’s backbone. Under their direction the Beatles tirelessly evolved and ignited revolutions at every new creative pinnacle. Each of their key albums—
Rubber Soul, Revolver
,
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
,
Magical Mystery Tour
,
The White Album
,
Abbey Road
—was an increasingly honed masterpiece and introduced new areas of musical exploration and penetrating lyrical introspection. Public appearances by the band elicited a hysterical response that came to be known as Beatlemania. The hysteria became so tiring to the band members, and created such a barrier to any semblance of a “normal” performance, that the Beatles concert of August 1966 in San Francisco became their last, just 2½ years after their American debut on
Ed Sullivan
.

The band started to come apart after their manager, Brian Epstein, died in April 1967. They suffered a protracted, slow-motion breakup, and had totally disbanded by the autumn of 1970. John, Paul, George, and Ringo each pursued his own solo career with varying degrees of success, though none ever reached the popular heights enjoyed by the group as a whole.

JUNE 23, 1940 – APRIL 10, 1962

Stuart Sutcliffe was a friend and fellow art student of John Lennon at the Liverpool Art College when John suggested that Stu buy a bass guitar and join his band—never mind that he couldn’t play. Stu bought a bass and became a sort of pseudo-band member. (George, Paul, and drummer Pete Best were already in the band and Stu’s services weren’t absolutely essential.) Nonetheless, Stu played with them for about a year at a number of Liverpool engagements, during a brief May 1960 tour of Scotland, and at some nightclub gigs in Germany.

Stu is generally credited for naming the band; it was he who suggested “Beetles” as a play on Buddy Holly’s Crickets. Stu’s girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr is generally credited for the Beatles “mop-top” hairstyles; she first cut Stu’s and then George’s hair in the distinctive style, and the other band members soon adopted it.

When the band went back to Liverpool after an extended 1961 booking at a nightspot in Hamburg, Stu stayed in Germany with Astrid, effectively bowing out of the Beatles. On April 10, 1962, the day before the Beatles were to arrive back in Hamburg for a round of shows, Stu died of a brain hemorrhage at 21. He was buried at Huyton Parish Church Cemetery on Stanley Road in Liverpool, England.

SEPTEMBER 19, 1934 – AUGUST 27, 1967

In the fall of 1961, while running his parents’ North End Road Music Store on Whitechapel Street in Liverpool, Brian Epstein began getting an inordinate number of requests for records by the Beatles, a local band with just one single that had been released in Germany. His curiosity was piqued. Epstein went to see the band at a basement hall called the Cavern Club, and a month later Brian offered to manage them. Intrigued by Brian’s straightforwardness, John agreed on the spot and on January 24, 1962, the Beatles and Brian signed a contract.

Brian’s first order of business was to get the band a recording contract, and he used whatever clout he could muster from his family’s small chain of Liverpool record stores to get meetings with British record companies. Brian and the band had plenty of rejections, but he finally secured them an agreement; in June 1962, two months after Stu Sutcliffe’s death, George Martin signed them to Parlophone, a division of EMI. Martin later admitted that though he felt the Beatles had promise, he signed them in large part because of Brian’s boundless enthusiasm.

John, Paul, and George next asked Brian to sack their drummer, Pete, and replace him with one Richard Starkey (who went by the name “Ringo Starr”), and that was accomplished by August 1962. Then Brian set to smartening up the Beatles’ stage appearance. He put them in matching mohair suits and encouraged a rather theatrical synchronized bow at the conclusion of each song.

The Beatles were now complete, and during their almost six years with Brian as manager, they enjoyed the greatest success that any popular artists had ever achieved, and, it seemed, without a single reversal of fortune. Upon his death, however, they lost the one person who had been capable of resolving their differences and, after a tangle of artistic conflicts and personal jealousies, the Beatles broke up three years later.

Brian had suffered bouts of depression and he often took pills to help him sleep. On August 27, 1967, he died at 32 from what was ruled an accidental overdose of the sleeping pill Carbitol. He was buried at Kirkdale Jewish Cemetery on Long Lane in Liverpool, England.

OCTOBER 9, 1940 – DECEMBER 8, 1980

Through personnel and name changes during the 1950s and early ’60s, John Lennon’s band evolved from the Quarrymen, to Johnny and the Moondogs, to the Silver Beatles, before arriving at their final namesake, the Beatles. With co-helmsman Paul McCartney, John, the most blunt but thoughtful Beatle, steered the band that became a touchstone for their generation.

A year before the Beatles broke up, John married Yoko Ono and they began collaborating both creatively and as activists. He became an outspoken advocate of peace, even staging a flamboyant “Bed-In for Peace” protest with Yoko. In 1971, John again topped the music charts with his solo album
Imagine
, and through the decade he recorded with Yoko
Shaved Fish
and his final record,
Double Fantasy
.

On December 8, 1980, at around 5:00 p.m., John and Yoko left their apartment in the Dakota building in New York City and
were approached by several autograph seekers. John obliged and among the autographs he signed was one on the cover of a
Double Fantasy
album for a Mark David Chapman.

The Lennons returned to the Dakota at about 10:50 p.m. When they exited their limousine, Chapman, who’d been waiting in the shadows, called out, “Mr. Lennon.” He then fired four pistol shots, all striking John, who staggered to the concierge room, said, “I’m shot,” and fell down. Police arrived within two minutes to a surreal scene. While John lay bleeding to death and a hysterical Yoko and passersby helplessly comforted him, Chapman stood calmly where he had fired the shots, the gun on the ground at his feet. John was put in a police car, and as they raced to Roosevelt Hospital an officer asked, “Are you John Lennon?” The voice of a generation’s final word was breathed in a soft moan: “Yeah.”

At 40 years old, John was dead on arrival, and the medical examiner later announced that no one could have lived more than a few minutes with such injuries. As word of his death spread, horrified fans grappled with the seeming impossibility that their generation’s idol was forever gone in the quick flash of a gun. Later that evening, a statement was issued on Yoko’s behalf: “John loved and prayed for the human race. Please do the same for him.”

After John’s death, people from around the globe spontaneously gathered at the Dakota in a sort of communion and, naturally, they spilled into the lawns of Central Park across the street. This became
the
place to eternalize the singer and, in a 1985 ceremony, a particular two-acre patch was dedicated to his memory as “Strawberry Fields.” Located at the intersection of 72nd Street and the west side of Central Park, the triangularly shaped garden’s focal point is a beautiful circular mosaic of inlaid stones from countries the world over. The mosaic’s center spells a simple plea:
IMAGINE
.

At every hour of every day, fans of John’s music and message meander about Strawberry Fields and, on the anniversaries of his birth and death, impromptu services pay homage.