The cemetery’s blandness is periodically disrupted: Rita Hayworth’s headstone is carved from a blue-black marble and gives off a deep shimmer. Lawrence Welk’s bears an image of a man holding a baton, treble and bass clefs whirling across the stave behind him. Hayworth’s grave is glamorous; Welk’s is jazzy enough to be blasphemous, though he was said to be very devout.
Despite the cemetery’s efforts to dissuade me, I have familiarized myself with the grounds.
If I were to take you by the hand and give you a tour of some of my favorite spots, I would start by showing you the Grotto; it’s an artificial cave, made out of actual volcanic rock, a reconstruction of the grotto at Lourdes. Inside there’s a statue of the Virgin Mary, and outside one of Saint Bernadette, hands clasped, gazing at the Virgin in awe, just like Bernadette must have gazed when she saw the actual Virgin at Lourdes, or thought she saw her, right before the Virgin told her to eat the dirt to find the holy water and gave her all those other unconventional instructions and everyone thought the poor girl was crazy. Unlike Bernadette’s ecstatic expression, the statue of the Virgin looks sort of indifferent to the miracle of her own visitation.
I like it inside the cave; it’s mossy and cool and you can barely hear the traffic. There’s a table of novena candles people have lit for the souls of the dead. It’s said that one candle takes a year off someone’s stint in Purgatory. That’s one of our years, which is the equivalent of one second down or over there. But you have to breathe lightly so as not to extinguish the flames, and after a while a cave tends to get damp and chilly, so we’d leave and head to the grave of Bela Lugosi, in the Grotto section, lot 120, plot #1, a brown headstone with a black border and a crucifix and rose etched into the left corner. Beloved Father 1882–1956.
I stumbled on his grave. Someone had left a bright-red rose for Lugosi, on the image of the rose, which you could still see behind the real flower, just as you can still see death peeping out from behind a corpse, which is real but a kind of representation. Lugosi was well aware of this: as a young soldier in the Hungarian army, he hid in a mass grave and played dead—he claimed this is how he learned to act. He’s buried in the black silk cape he wore in his vampire movies, but everyone knows that; I wonder if it has shredded by now? I’m not so clear on the rate of silk’s disintegration.
From there, we would go to the Resurrection area, and the grave of Darby Crash, tier 9, plot #115. It’s nowhere near as prestigious a location. The grass is brown and dry, not lush and green like in some other sections. Crash’s real name is etched into the dull-beige stone, JAN PAUL BEAHM 1958–1980, his stage name incised below in lowercase letters, surrounded by an engraving of brown rosary beads, an unwitting reference to the rosary of little red circles that looped around his neck and cascaded down his collarbone, the cigarette burns he stubbed out on his skin, or encouraged fans to do the same when he sang with the Germs, right up until the night he intentionally OD’d in the Spanish stucco house in Hollywood, allegedly scrawling Here Lies Darby on the bedroom wall in his own blood and laying down beneath the words, right where they found him, the phrase functioning as both an epitaph and a caption.
It would be time to get out of the sun, so we’d walk up to the Risen Christ Mausoleum and work up a sweat. Avoiding the chapel with its stained-glass monstrosities, we’d take a right to the main room, where they have the marble crypts and crematory niches, in vertical rows of six and twelve, respectively. It’s not unlike being in a bank vault, with its walls of safe deposit boxes to secure items of extreme value, or just a regular post office, an airy room of PO boxes, containing packages people didn’t want delivered to their home.
I would direct your attention to the crypt of Jimmy Durante, block #35, crypt F2. It’s indistinguishable from the others, an inscription in plain gold lettering and a gold cross at the top, so small it seems like an afterthought, though the swirls and veins in the marble break up the monotony. Maybe I’d tell you the joke about his cremation. I forget how it goes exactly, but the punch line has to do with his conspicuous nose, how they couldn’t burn it, no matter how many times they sent it back to the furnace. So they finally gave up and popped his schnoz in with the ash.
We would end the tour outside with Sharon Tate, who can be found in the Saint Anne’s section, lot 152, plot #6, nestled behind a gray headstone that used to be black. In the center, Jesus holds his hands out in supplication, so you can see the holes where the nails went in. There’s only the year of Tate’s death inscribed, 1969, not the month or the date, perhaps a deliberate omission, a way to erase the coordinates of Tate in space and time when the Manson Family dropped into her house on Cielo Drive and, per Charles’s instructions, proceeded to totally destroy everyone . . . as gruesome as you can.
Tate’s been down there for forty-two years, longer than I’ve been around up here, her little baby skeleton perched in her arms, the one that was inside her, the one Sadie Atkins couldn’t bring herself to cut out. In her acid-inflected testimony, Sadie spoke of Tate’s rapidly changing facial expressions and her pretty paisley bikini and ropes and carving forks and peace to infinity and the thought of a living being in there blowing my mind. We don’t have Tate’s account of that night—the dead have escaped language, discarded it—though in an interview shortly before she died, she said that she felt her entire life had been governed by fate, fate blows my mind, adopting the same rhetoric as her killer. Do you think everyone’s hair turns gray in death, or is Tate a skeleton with long blonde hair curled around bones that are even blonder?
As a tour, mine wouldn’t be all that different from the standard Hollywood tours of graves of the stars, though not as comprehensive. I’m just a guide with some grave locators who can share some morbid trivia.
You would probably get a better sense of my experience of Holy Cross by sitting beside me on the bench beneath the raggedy palm tree, as I touch the bench’s wood to keep the Destroyer at bay and tell you a few of the ideas and stories that are swirling in my head.