A few years ago, I saw a documentary about the Hollywood Forever cemetery. It is the final resting place of all sorts of movie illuminati, from Rudolph Valentino to Mel Blanc, but after a century was rundown and on the verge of bankruptcy. Some young dot-commers bought it for a song with the intention of transforming the funeral business with the latest new media tools. One of their new features were commemorative films of the deceased; they would edit together home movies, snapshots and interviews with the survivors and show the result at the funeral. Then one could have the movie installed into one's tombstone — with the push of a button the film would be replayed for visitors to your grave for eternity.
Driving down Santa Monica Blvd, I passed the entrance to the cemetery and it jogged my memory of the documentary so I pulled a U-turn and drove in. Patti and I have visited cemeteries all over the world; they are soothing places full of stories. I just wished I'd brought my camera.
It being Easter Sunday, there was a handful of visitors to the graves but most of the sprawling grounds were deserted by the living. I had expected that this cemetery would be fundamentally different because of the ambitions of its new owners but it really wasn't. Death is pretty much the same old same old.
There were a few new headstones, mainly Russian and Ukranians. They all featured a new sort of black marble headstone into which the portrait of the deceased was sandblasted. They were all based on snapshots, hastily taken when the subject was living and now with unintentional consequences. Many of the people were old peasants who'd probably not been photographed very often; As a result, many of the portraits were of scowling, squinting, distracted old codgers in babushkas or worn caps. It was a reminder to have one's picture taken often and to remember to smile; otherwise one may be memorialized forever as someone who might have been happier dead.
There are a dozen or so big mausoleums, the condos of the funeral world, with bodies stacked twenty feet high into individual mini-apartments. It's sad to see full lives reduced to little brass plaques, most long forgotten. Hard to imagine that a grandmother stowed away in the wall back in 1910 has many mourners these days.
As the spring sun shone down on me and coaxed forth the daffodils, I tromped over to visit Dee Dee Ramone's grave, covered with Bic lighters and packs of rolling papers, then onto the tombstone of his colleague and nemesis, Johnny, capped with a life-sized statue of the deceased playing guitar, his page boy haircut swinging over his eyes. He was a bad-tempered, conservative Republican but he sure played a mean axe.
I am not afraid to die. Nor to contemplate it. I assume that when I am gone, the ashes of my couple hundred pounds of meat will be tossed somewhere appropriate but I don't much care. Nonetheless, of all the things I saw in Hollywood, I liked the book-shaped urns best. Entire families were stored in adjoining tomes arranged on little shelves, their names carved into the brass spines, like so many volumes of illustrated journals, their pages all now inked, read and turned. Maybe that should be my fate too.