Where Are They Buried? (56 page)

The last period of Picasso’s life was itself a tapestry, a torrentially productive era whose infuriating laxity of quality control
incited controversy and criticism. Beginning in the 1950s, Picasso confronted his predicament; as an old man, he wallowed in unprecedented adoration as an artist and “national monument,” but was himself unfulfilled by his body of work. But he still yearned to indulge in his celebrity.

Having no need for the approval of others, Picasso chose in his final years to do exactly as he pleased; he took advantage of his own achievements, fanning a vulgar, cynical image of himself and became a King Midas of art—everything he touched turned to gold. Over the next two decades, Picasso’s prodigious output, some of which was certainly meritorious, was nonetheless marred by his deliberate embellishment of his own reputation; shoddy “signed” lithographs by the thousands and even throwaway doodles on restaurant napkins were gobbled by “collectors” who yearned for any piece of the restless experimental artist that Picasso had once been.

Picasso once told a visitor who admired his vigor, “A painter never finishes. Whenever you stop, it’s only because you’ve started again.” By some terms, the manic and obsessive quality of those words, and his productions, almost imply that he expected the creative act to forestall his death, though it did not.

At 91, Picasso died of a pulmonary edema.

His grave, adorned with his own “Woman with the Vase” sculpture, is located on the terrace leading to the front entrance of his castle in Vauvenargues, France. You’re welcome to visit this bucolic village in the rural wine-producing region of Provence but Picasso’s castle, its grounds, and his grave are closed to visitors.

JANUARY 19, 1809 – OCTOBER 7, 1849

Edgar Allan Poe created the narrative mystery-thriller genre and, more than any other writer, deserves credit for elevating short stories from a disrespected anecdotal form to an honorable artistic genre.

Both of Edgar’s parents died before he was three and, after being taken into the home of the wealthy Allan family of Richmond, he was baptized Edgar Allan Poe. At 17, he entered the University of Virginia to concentrate on classical languages, but after running up a $2,000 gambling debt that his stepfather refused to cover, Edgar left school and enlisted in the Army, eventually landing at West Point. While there, his first book,
Tamerlane and Other Poems
, was published, and Edgar,
uninterested in a cadet future now that his writing talent had been validated, neglected his responsibilities until he was dismissed for “gross neglect of duty.”

Edgar took up residence in Baltimore with his aunt, Maria Clemm, and her daughter, Virginia, his first cousin, whom he married in 1836 when she was thirteen. He became editor of the
Southern Literary Messenger
and there published much of his own fiction, most notably “Berenice,” but beyond his own contributions, his editorial attention was scant. As Edgar’s only other focus seemed to be alcohol, he was soon asked to resign.

The pattern of Edgar’s career now seemed prescribed, and his experience at the
Southern Literary Messenger
was mirrored at a variety of other publications in Philadelphia and New York over the next decade. Edgar contributed his best flawlessly constructed fiction, including “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The TellTale Heart,” to an assortment of literary periodicals, but his endless literary feuding, his alcoholism, and his inability to get along with people irritated employers, ensuring that his various tenures were invariably short.

In 1845, after releasing “The Raven” to popular acclaim, Edgar was pleased to find he could generate on-the-spot income by reciting the verse to paying audiences. His household’s financial situation improved to its best level ever, but just as it seemed that Edgar’s star might finally be rising, his young wife, Virginia, died in 1847, and Edgar retreated to hard drinking.

On a trip from Richmond to New York, Edgar’s steamboat made a stop in Baltimore and, six days later, in the middle of the day, he was found deliriously ill, lying half-conscious in the street by a printer who knew him. He was wearing clothes that probably were not his own and, in a delirious state, kept calling for a polar explorer of the day named Reynolds. Taken to a hospital, Edgar drifted in and out of consciousness for the next four days until he uttered his final words: “Lord help my poor soul,” and passed on at 40. The cause of death was presumed to be related to his alcoholism, and his brief obituary reported that he had died of “congestion of the brain.” Today, however, historians speculate that he may have been suffering from some other condition of which doctors of that day were unaware. As the literary community did not particularly like Edgar, his obituaries weren’t very kind and one stated simply, “We hope he has found his rest, for he needed it.”

Edgar was buried the next day in an unmarked grave at Baltimore’s Westminster Presbyterian Church Cemetery. Eventually, the literary world came around and a particular group of admirers organized a drive to purchase a suitable grave monument for the neglected poet. In 1875 Edgar and his wife, Virginia, who had been buried in New York, were exhumed and reburied at a prominent site within the Westminster Cemetery. Aunt Maria was buried with them upon her death in 1885, and the struggling family was reunited for eternity.

Since 1949, on the night of the anniversary of Edgar’s birth, a mysterious stranger known as the Poe Toaster has left a half-empty bottle of cognac and three roses at the Poe monument. The significance of cognac is uncertain, as it does not figure in Poe’s works, but it’s presumed that the three roses are for the three persons whose remains lie beneath. At Baltimore’s Poe House and Museum, several of the bottles of cognac from prior years are on display.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
At the southern end of I-83 in central Baltimore, turn right onto Fayette Street and follow it for a mile to Greene Street, where you’ll see the church and cemetery on the left corner.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Walk into the churchyard and the Poe plot is immediately to the right.

To reach the Poe House and Museum, continue on Fayette Street and, after a half-mile, turn right on Amity Street, where the Poe House is number 203.

OCTOBER 15, 1920 – JULY 2, 1999

For 48 years Mario Puzo basked in relative middle-class obscurity; he served in the Air Force during World War II and, through a variety of jobs, barely supported a wife and five children over the next couple of decades. In 1955 Mario’s income was augmented by monies earned through the sale of a novel,
The Dark Arena
, and nine years later an autobiographical chronicle of the experience of Italian American immigrants,
The Fortunate Pilgrim
. Both works were only moderately successful and Mario continued writing freelance book reviews, stories, and articles for newspapers and magazines.

But Mario’s fortunes changed after he secured a $5,000 advance for a book about a different group of Italian Americans immigrants. In 1969 he published a fictitious account of the Sicilian Corleone crime family,
The Godfather
. An instant smash hit, it has sold at least twenty million copies and became one of the bestselling books of all time.

The Godfather
and its sequels were of course also adapted for the screen, and Mario wrote the screenplays as well. Today
The Godfather
films, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, are recognized as masterpieces, and are responsible for adding such phrases to the pop-culture lexicon as “Make him an offer he can’t refuse” and “It’s not personal … it’s strictly business.”

Later, it was speculated that Mario himself must have been in the Mafia to have the depth of knowledge of its workings that is displayed in his books, but the author vehemently denied the allegation. “Where would I have had time to be in the Mafia? I starved before the success of
The Godfather
,” he once said in an interview. “If I was in the Mafia, I would have made enough money so I wouldn’t have to write.”

In 1996 he continued his best-selling traditions with
The Last Don
and, in 2000, Mario’s final installment in the mob soap-opera genre came in
Omerta
, which was published a year after his death.

Mario doesn’t “sleep with the fishes.” Instead, at 78, he was buried at North Babylon Cemetery in West Babylon, New York.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From the Southern State Parkway, take exit 37S and follow Belmont Avenue a half-mile south to Hubbards Path. Bear left and, after three-fourths of a mile and beyond the underpass, take another left onto the Sunrise Service Road, then a right onto Livingston Avenue.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Mario is in the section of cemetery to your right. As you enter the drive you’ll see the big Christopher stone in front of you, and four rows behind is the Puzo plot.

FEBRUARY 2, 1905 – MARCH 6, 1982

Born Alyssa Rosenbaum, the celebrated author Ayn Rand lived through the Bolshevik Revolution and learned to hate her Russian homeland, a country she later described as “an accidental cesspool of civilization.” Early on, she planned to escape to the United States and, after studying philosophy and history at the University of Petrograd, her opportunity came in 1926 when she was allowed to briefly visit relatives in America. She never returned.

Speaking little English and virtually penniless, the 21-year-old stayed with relatives in Chicago before changing her name and moving to Hollywood, where she eventually found work as a script evaluator at Cecil B. DeMille’s studio. By tripping him on purpose, Ayn met the tall, handsome actor Frank O’Connor, and they married in 1929.

Ayn later became a screenwriter and, having developed into a passionate, communist-hating capitalist, she spent years laboring over an ambitious novel. Rejected countless times for being “too intellectual,”
The Fountainhead
was published in 1943 and fourteen years later,
Atlas Shrugged
followed. These two 1,000-plus-page bestsellers reflect Ayn’s deep belief in a philosophy she termed “objectivism,” which glorifies the pursuit of unbridled self-interest as the right thing to do from an economic standpoint, and a moral one as well. That is, she believed that unrestrained, even arrogant, capitalist pursuit does far more to lift the world’s standard of living than does an altruistic life of self-sacrifice.

Critics consider
The Fountainhead
to be the better work, but
Atlas Shrugged
more pointedly propagates Ayn’s philosophy. It reads like a mystery, but its premise is that innovators become so fed up with those who regulate and tax and otherwise feed off of achievers that the achievers withdraw their talents from the world and threaten to send us all back to the Dark Ages. After its 1957 publication, Ayn spent the remainder of her life espousing the objectivist philosophy through lectures.

In 1979, Ayn underwent surgery for a spot of cancer on a lung, and the remainder of her life was plagued by poor health. Five days after being released from the hospital for pneumonia, she died of
heart failure in her New York City apartment. At her funeral, Ayn was laid out in a coffin next to a six-foot-tall dollar sign.

At 77, she was buried at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-287, take Exit 4 and follow Route 100A north for 2½ miles (Route 100A will become Route 100 after 2 miles) to Lakeview Avenue and turn right. After a half-mile, turn right onto Commerce Street and enter the cemetery.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Proceed down Commerce Street, make a right turn onto Tecumseh Avenue, then a left onto Cherokee Avenue. Where Manitou Avenue on your right intersects Cherokee Avenue, stop. There on the left, 30 feet from the drive, are the graves of Ayn and her husband, Frank.

MARCH 2, 1904 – SEPTEMBER 24, 1991

Returning from Europe by boat in 1936, Theodor Geisel amused himself during the long voyage by putting together a nonsense poem to the rhythm of the ship’s motion. He later drew pictures to illustrate the rhyme, and after being rejected by either 23 or 28 or 38 publishers, depending on whom you ask, the resulting children’s book,
And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street
, made it into print the following year. Ted released the book under the name Dr. Seuss—a pseudonym he arrived at by inserting a “Dr.” in front of his middle name—because he intended to keep his surname for more serious work. But when he later got around to doing a grown-up book,
The Seven Lady Godivas
, in 1939, he found that adults did not seem to care for his humor. So he went back to writing for children, and became famous and wealthy in the process.

For a time Seuss toiled as a freelance magazine cartoonist, and sold humorous prose after dropping out of an Oxford University English literature Ph.D. program in 1926 because his studies seemed “astonishingly irrelevant.” The rollicking verse of
Mulberry Street
, his first children’s book, was the prototype for his style of outlandish, whimsically illustrated stories, and its success heralded Seuss as an important new children’s writer.