— Kenneth Kendall
A rather uncommon pastime I admit, but one I certainly don’t think is weird, it’s just different. Not like I’m doing it in the middle of the night with a spade and shovel, Igor tagging along, helping me construct the perfect man. (Trust me, it doesn’t exist.)
Opera? In Nashville?! You discovered opera in Nashville? Well, yeah, while scouring through the record shelves of the public library there I found my first Maria Callas recording, and she fascinated me, being as great an actress as she was a singer.
At the bar in Des Moines one night I was with my then boyfriend when a man walked by wearing a t-shirt on which was a woman holding a cloak up to her eyes like a sorceress. My boyfriend said, “Isn’t that the singer you like so much on that guy’s shirt?”
In Des Moines, nobody I associated with even knew who Maria Callas was, let alone what she looked like, so I approached the guy and commented on his shirt. Thus began a friendship that has lasted up until this day, it’s probably been about sixteen years now.
Val came over to our house after we closed the bar and since my boyfriend was bored as hell with us jabbering on about Verdi and Donizetti, he went to bed while Val and I sat on the floor, playing record after record of Callas. Me asking questions, finally able to release all this pent-up wonderment over her, it was the first time I didn’t feel like some nerd who loved something nobody else did.
Val invited me to Chicago to see La Traviata the following year, so I took him up on the offer. As well as the opera, he took me to Sidetrack where I walked into an entire gay bar of handsome men in lumberjack shirts singing “Oklahoma!” at the top of their lungs and I actually said the words, “I am in heaven!”
A year later I moved to Chicago and it all feels like it started with a t-shirt of Callas.
My ex-partner, Peter, thought it was just plain odd, although he would only refer to it as such when he got really angry with me.
“Everyone thinks it’s weird, visiting dead people.” Well, his family certainly laughed heartily enough at some of the stories I told them about cemeteries. If people couldn’t say it to my face then what the hell did I care?
My dad thought it was weird too, which was hypocritical as all get out, since as a child, we went to the cemetery every Mother’s Day, Christmas, Independence Day, whatever, to lay flowers. I’m surprised we never made it out to visit deceased relatives on Groundhog’s day. (I’ve got a really sick joke about them popping out to see their shadow, but I’ll leave that one alone.)
As a child, it helped create a bond with these relatives because my family talked lovingly about them when they’d leave flowers. Hell, my mom used to bake little cakes for my deceased niece and leave them on the grave, knowing the chipmunks and squirrels would get fat and happy from the offerings. It wasn’t weird at all, it was simply celebrating the past and appreciating life.
As we walked around we found an area devoted to druids. Yes, I am not kidding you, druids. I didn’t even know there were druids in America. In the very center of this area was a statue of a tall bearded man in a white robe holding a sickle, looking like a granite Father Time, the graves all in a concentric pattern, which had some religious symbolism.
Further down the path we saw a large stone Mausoleum, huge Roman pillars and two lions guarding the entrance with ten stone steps leading up to the front door. The name had been taken off the top and we wondered why. No identification at all was visible on this huge building that must have cost a pretty penny at the turn of the century.
Walking around the back, the grounds sloped and there was a back door to the mausoleum one level down…and it was open. Now, I admit, this part is a little creepy but curiosity killed the cat. (No pun intended). Val and I couldn’t resist.
As the door creaked slowly open like some Universal horror movie, sunlight filled a large empty room with abandoned areas that had obviously once held what a mausoleum would hold, crypts. Completely empty, all the bodies had been moved, but there were remnants of electric lights in the ceiling and heating radiators along the walls. Why on earth would dead people need heat? I mean, where most of my friends would be going, they’d have all the heat they needed, but Val and I were intrigued with the story of this abandoned tomb. The ceilings looked close to caving in and it was probably a pretty dumb thing to have walked in there, but when you’re nosey, you’re nosey, may as well get a good story out of it.
Val stopped at the cemetery office and got chewed out by the lady behind the desk for walking into the tomb. (It was their fault anyway, do they leave all their abandoned tombs doors open?) She told him about a wealthy Chicago family all interred there when the surviving patriarch got into a tiff with the cemetery in the early 1900’s. He took out all the bodies, re-buried them in another cemetery and refused to have anything more to do with the mausoleum. It was just sitting there waiting for time and the law to transfer it back to the cemetery’s ownership.
When I got home, Peter just shook his head and looked at me like I was nuts. So, I guess you could blame the grave hopping on my parents (they’d deny it) and Val (he’d be proud).
Once I visited a cemetery in Durango, Colorado. I didn’t go there to see it, I’m not that bad, but having time to kill (there I go again with the puns) I stopped by the local cemetery. It was early in the morning, the mist filling the sides of the mountain it was placed against.
I walked into a herd of thirty deer grazing amongst the graves. They looked up and saw me standing there, motionless. Trying to see how close I could get, I’d move every minute or so one step forward, just to have them look up again, calm down, then go back to grazing. Each step felt like I was being a little more accepted by them. A half hour I spent, moving forward, watching their beauty, some of their horns were huge. Finally disbursing when I got fifteen feet away, they didn’t run, but casually walked off. So much life right there among the graves.
What a shame, I thought, one of the top ten stars in 1930 and she didn’t know he was right nearby, even though she’d worked there for quite awhile. She was very helpful though and made a copy of the interment card for me. (I didn’t ask, she just marched over to the copier and did it).
“Oh! He was an MGM actor!” she said. “Interesting, and oh ... isn’t that nice, he’s next to his partner. Is that business partner?” reading the bio on the back of the card, “Oh…yes...oh…Oh! Oh, I see. That’s still nice. It says the partner committed suicide after Mr. Haines died. Oh, that’s so sad...”
She even got down on her hands and knees in the mausoleum helping me look for them in the lower rows of the columbarium, then left me alone with my flowers.
His niche was about seven feet up the wall and I could just barely touch the marble if I got on my tip toes. How the hell was I supposed to get my flowers up there?
Pulling a wooden, pew-like bench a hundred feet down a long hallway, the sound of it’s scraping against the floor was sure to bring some Don Knotts-type security guard running in, but nobody came. Tipping it against the wall I climbed on top the edge and placed my flowers in the little vase attached to the side of the crypt. I sat for awhile and thought about all those people he had power over.
All that history and now I was the only one near him, in a cold, massive house of the dead.
Val was so proud of me when he heard that one. “Sounds like something I would do,” he wryly commented.
After picking up Scott at his hotel, Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem got on their way, since when we travel together, that is exactly what we all are, the Muppet Show on tour.
Ben tends to be a very aggressive driver. Let’s say he screams and cusses up a storm at all the other drivers on the road. Kevin won’t be quiet, Scottie just smiles and laughs at me losing my sense of direction.
I took a wrong turn at one point when Kevin spotted a cop parked in a vacant lot. I had already seen him and was driving toward him to ask for directions, it’s obvious this was the goal, but no, the whole carload had to scream out, “That cop over there, ask him, turn here! Turn around! Back up!” If I’d followed their directions the cop would have arrested me for drunk driving with all the swerving I’d be doing.
He rolled down his window and put his donut down, “Can I help you?”
I asked, “Can you tell us which way is Ferncliff Cemetery?”
From the backseat an excited homosexual voice said, “We’re looking for Judy Garland!”
The cop gave me a long look. I could tell this one was going to be discussed with the boys back at the precinct later.
“It’s up the hill, keep going down this road. And I don’t know where Judy Garland is, Mister.”
Driving on, I looked at Kevin and said, “You know, there is a time and a place to make certain comments. That was not the time. Now he’s on the radio telling his buddies about the carload of nuts looking for Judy Garland.”
“You shouldn’t be ashamed of your heritage,” came the clipped reply from the back seat.
Driving up through the gates, I parked in front of the mausoleum, having been there once before with Peter I knew right where it was. Kevin looked up at the three-story building as he stepped out of the car, “Wow, she certainly has a big tomb.”
“She isn’t the only one in the building!” Ben said.
“Well, how the hell would I know that?”
Judy was on the second floor of the mausoleum, her tomb on the east side of one of the south halls. It was a simple marker, all of them basically the same. Hers read “Judy Garland 1922-1969” and was in the very bottom row. Just like the time I had been there a couple of years before, there were lots of flowers in front of her. All of us brought some now, so I imagine she never really went without things being left in tribute.
There was a bench in front of her, so we all sat down, Kevin getting a little teary-eyed. After a few minutes of silence, I rubbed my hand across the stone, something I always did since it seemed respectful and was a bit of a family tradition.
The last time I had quite a start because when I touched the marker it had slightly moved. My heart jumped clean out of me as I thought, “Christ, if I’ve broken Judy Garland’s marker I’ll have every homosexual on the eastern seaboard after me!”
Well, of course it moved, the marker wasn’t cemented to the tomb, it was a piece of granite attached at four ends by screws to the markers of other people around it. Sort of like a picture frame sitting there, but at the time, tell that to the heart that just dropped down into my stomach.
Everyone was really getting into the “Find the Dead Celebrity” game. We decided to drive over to Brooklyn and find Mae West. Scott really liked the play Dirty Blonde and much of it took place near Mae West’s tomb. Once there, it was in an area where there were several cemeteries, all very old and sadly run-down. We found the mausoleum, but it was locked tight and the rusty door and keyhole told you how often they got visitors. I’m not lying when I say the lady in the office commented, “I don’t even know where the key is.”
We gave up even trying to locate Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion. He was in a section where you couldn’t have found someone if you had a pack of bloodhounds with you. As it started to rain we decided he wouldn’t have spent all that time looking for us if the tables were turned, so we headed for cover.
As I drove back into the city Ben started getting on my case about driving too slow. “What the hell are you doing man, waiting for winter, let’s get a move on!”
“Are you in the driver’s seat right now?! No, sit there and enjoy the view.”
“I need to be in the driver’s seat bucko, and the view hasn’t changed for the last five minutes because if you’d drive any slower you’d be going backwards! Take a chance! Kick her up to twenty miles an hour. Keep your eye on the prize man! Keep your eye on the prize!”
The closer we got the more pissed off Ben got, like I said he’s an aggressive driver. He must have driven a Panzer during the war.
Once in Manhattan we were caught in very slow traffic and a hot dog vendor pushed his cart past us.
“For Christ’s Sake! Now the hot dog guy has more guts than you! Kick it in! Kick it in! Don’t let these assholes slow you down!”
Seriously, the traffic got so bad a man with a walker passed us on the sidewalk and Ben being the delicate soul he is, let out another tirade of judgments on my driving.
When we finally got back to the hotel, I opened the door and told him to jump out, yelling, “Oh, no! I can’t stop! Gotta keep movin’, Buddy! Gotta keep that eye on the prize, Pal! Gotta kick it in!”
After everyone piled out, Kevin patted me on the back, “Good job, throw it right back at him.” Last time I take Ben grave hopping.
Well, they wanted you to tour the grounds, see their Michelangelo reproductions and maybe buy a plot, but they frowned on people looking for dead movie stars. Many of them were outside, but the biggest names were in the mausoleum, which had a guard, an administrative person, and also lots of locked hallways.
A friend had told me to not just go up and ask about deceased movie stars, but to say you were there for the Last Supper presentation. There was a huge recreation of The Last Supper in stained glass and the lights would dim while a booming Cecil B. DeMille type voice narrated over a loudspeaker. This giant unveiling would occur several times each day.
“They won’t let you pay your respects to a motion picture artist who shaped modern culture, but want you to sit through that cheesy thing?” I asked my friend.
“Trust me,” he said.
So, I was dressed nicely in khakis and a tie, brought a bouquet of flowers along with a plan. Which movie star out of everyone in there did I want to pay my respects to the most? No question, either Clark Gable or Norma Shearer. Gable’s history was well known, so I knew I wouldn’t be able to lie without getting caught since I was an awful liar. But very few people knew Shearer’s history. Besides, with Shearer, I would get to see Thalberg’s tomb also, since they were married. Irving Thalberg had been second in command at MGM, under Louis B. Mayer.
My older friend Herb loaned me a biography of Norma Shearer to get some background on her and I was ready.
There was no way I was going to get past the administrator. It was a small little entrance and you had to walk by her and the guard in order to get in. She asked if she could help me and I replied, “Oh, I’m just visiting from Chicago and my mom wanted me to lay flowers for my great aunt.”
“Oh, that’s nice, do you know where she is located?” the woman asked.
I told her no, I had never been here before and had never met the aunt anyway, this was all just for my mother, who had been close with her.
“What was your aunt’s name and I’ll look her up in the files”
Okay, Olivier, here’s your chance, I thought. Trying to act like the name didn’t really mean a lot to me, that I wasn’t trying to impress anyone, I said, “Norma Arrouge Thalberg.” I may have gulped also, it wouldn’t surprise me.
She immediately raised one eyebrow and looked me straight in the eye. “Oh, really ...” She was on to me. “The Thalbergs are in a locked hallway and the only way to get in is with a key, we don’t allow the general public in that area.” She continued sniffing me up and down like a police dog. “Can I see some i.d., please?”
Hell, what did I have to lose? If she was a great aunt she probably wouldn’t have the same last name anyway, so I cheerfully and confidently gave her my driver’s license while smiling my best “dumb-ass” expression. (I can actually do that very convincingly.)
She took a couple of looks at it, then back at me, not quite sure if I was on the level. I wasn’t carrying a camera, no guidebook, I was nicely dressed with a large bouquet of flowers, and not a cheap one at that.
“How are Miss Shearer’s children doing?” she inquired with a sidelong glace. I ran with it, telling her the daughter was running some bookstore in Colorado and I don’t know what other b.s. I managed to add in there.
Riding on a wing and a prayer is what I was doing, sweating bullets inside, but the woman either believed my story or admired my chutzpah, since she said, “Well, let me get the guard to watch the front desk and I’ll take you back there and unlock the gate of your…” and she paused, “…aunt.”
As we walked into the huge, beautiful, dark, castle-like mausoleum, she dropped her serious tone and warmed up. It was like a movie set, something Uncle Irv would have created. My family always called him Uncle Irv. (Man, I’ve gotta get a life.)
Taking me into a little room, she pointed out a sink in case I needed water for the vase and walked me to the locked gate of a hallway. Large chains wrapped around the bars clanged as she unlocked it, the metallic sound echoing throughout the whole place.
The woman said, “She’s down at the end of the hallway in a private tomb, just lock the gate when you’re done.”
I thanked her, she left and I turned around, suddenly feeling very much like that scene in The Wizard of Oz where they walk down the long hallway to the throne room.
“Wow, did I pick the right movie star,” I thought. On either side of me as I walked down this beautiful marbled hallway were tombs of those who had once been household names. Marie Dressler, Jean Harlow, Sid Grauman, Red Skelton. And the entire way the creepy echoes of my footsteps reverberated through the area.
At the end, toward the left side, was a beautiful pink or peach colored tomb. I couldn’t really tell what color it was because a stained glass window transformed it into any number of sparkling shades. On top of the entrance were the words “Thalberg”. I opened the small gate, and on the right under the window was a little marble bench. Against the wall next to the bench was a sarcophagi, on top of which said, “My Sweetheart, IRVING,” On the wall were four markers, Thalberg’s parents, his sister and Norma.
Directly across from the bench was a beautiful stone vase on a pedestal. Containing a large bouquet of old dead flowers, it had probably been months since anyone had been back here.
I threw away the former vase occupants and substituted my own large white roses. “There” I thought. “Now there’s something alive in this gloomy old place.”
Sitting down on the bench, I suddenly realized Norma Shearer must have sat there on numerous occasions visiting her husband. Perhaps I was intruding, I thought. I had lied to get in here. But I wasn’t being disrespectful, I wasn’t posing with a camera or anything, so I decided it was okay. I arranged my flowers knowing I would be the last person to see them alive in this beautiful setting, the sunlight flowing on their petals, giving them almost a glow. Next time, they would be “those dead old flowers” some new “nephew” would throw out in a few months.
I walked back down the hallway and locking the gate behind me, was glad to be alive. As I left the mausoleum, the lady behind the desk smiled and said, “Thank you for coming. I hope you enjoyed visiting…your aunt. ” and winked.
That said, I want to be cremated and scattered to the winds. Visits to graveyards aren't on my agenda anymore, perhaps I got it out of my historical system or something, but I concentrate more on life these days....
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