The Longest Goodbye

All quiet here in the mausoleum.

It’s a summer morning at Hollywood Memorial Park, the birds chirping outside. The place is empty except for me. Well, me and a couple hundred stiffs.

But what stiffs! Peter Lorre on one shelf. Peter Finch on another. And back in the corner lies the most celebrated corpse in all Hollywoodom: Rodolfo Guglielmi Valentino, object of all those tears by the Lady in Black.

There’s probably more dead Hollywood stars per square foot here than any place on the planet. Walk around the grounds and you find Douglas Fairbanks, Cecil B. De Mille, John Huston, Jayne Mansfield. The list never stops.

But what’s this? Did those ugly stains come from rain leaking through the roof? And is that a breeze whistling through the missing panes in the stained glass?

Oh, yes.

And outside the mausoleum, over on the pond, is scum really growing thick and green on the water next to where Marion Davies and Tyrone Power take the big sleep? Could that dead rodent trapped in the scum be a rat?

Oh, yes.

Hollywood’s premier resting ground, one of the most famous in the world, is undergoing a kind of death itself. The place is flaking, peeling, disintegrating, falling to ruin, the victim of a sad fate that has left no money for repairs and upkeep.

Dust to dust.

*

The story of decline here is long and pitiful but it comes down to this: The money intended for maintenance at the cemetery seems to have disappeared a few years back. State auditors arrived one day to check the books and, whoa, no maintenance money. Zippo. Gone.

A big stink ensued, and the company that owned Hollywood Memorial soon flopped into Chapter 11. A trustee now runs the place but, without a maintenance fund, he can barely afford to water the grass, much less keep the rain and wind off the likes of Valentino.

Things are so bad, you can’t even buy plots anymore. If you go to the office with an inquiry about a “pre-need” arrangement, the receptionist politely turns you aside.

“Chapter 11, you know,” she explains. As consolation, she offers a free map to the stars’ graves. Hollywood will always be Hollywood.

Still, this ain’t right. We used to treat our dead good and proper. Criminy, people even wrote novels about our cemeteries.

It was Evelyn Waugh who wrote that people didn’t really die in Los Angeles, they became a “Loved One.” Their families and friends were transformed to the “Waiting Ones.”

The process of “passing” into Loved One status was a tad expensive, of course. It could cost a few grand for the most economical package.

Los Angeles, see, had discovered a way to turn simple burials into a growth industry. We did it big, and we did it right. Huge murals, water-spouting fountains, mausoleums the size of a courthouse. The works.

Cemeteries advertised themselves as impervious to fire, floods and earthquakes. Nothing could disturb the sweet sleep of the deceased who rested there. In Waugh’s book, a cemetery worker paints a signs that notes the residents will not be disturbed even in the event of “nuclear fission.”

Oh, that it were true for the Loved Ones at Hollywood Memorial. But no. Along the cool corridor of one mausoleum the rain has so eroded the walls that they are collapsing, threatening to spill caskets rudely onto the floor. Rickety wooden supports have been thrown up to prevent ghoulish disaster.

The roads are turning to potholes. The fountains spout water no more.

Sad, sad. To tell the truth, though, the decrepitude of the place does have a quality. It’s like something out of a cheap movie. You keep expecting Freddy Krueger to jump out of the shadows.

And how’s this for irony: The rear of the cemetery abuts onto Paramount Studios, so you can listen to the dream factory churn away while the past masters of that very realm take the long snooze under your feet.

*

No one knows what the future holds. The trustee has been attempting to find a new owner for the cemetery, but thus far no luck. After all, a new owner would be forced to spend millions fixing the roofs, rebuilding walls and roads.

There’s a good chance, in fact, that no buyer will appear. At that point, believe it or not, state law might force the city to take it over.

That’s right: The city of Los Angeles would become the owner and operator of this decaying relic of celebrity dead. The city would be forced to pony up the millions for the repairs and upkeep.

That’s all we need. A falling-down cemetery to maintain.

But, hey, maybe there’s a marketing opportunity here. We could always start charging the tourists for the grave maps.