Surrounded by towering house blocks, fixed visitors, and looming palms, Westwood Memorial Park is about as L.A. because it will get. This small, synthetic, and extremely manicured patch of grass appears completely misplaced at first look. However take a wander, and also you’ll uncover it accommodates the final stays of a few of Hollywood’s most iconic residents. These graves appeal to vacationers from everywhere in the world, and with the likes of Frank Zappa, Carl Wilson of the Seashore Boys, and Marilyn Monroe all sharing the identical small plot of land, it comes as no shock.
The Peirce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park wasn’t at all times residence to the world’s celeb class. The cemetery was established in 1905 however has been a burial floor because the Eighties. After Marilyn Monroe died of a drug overdose in 1962, Joe DiMaggio, her former husband, selected Westwood not as a result of it had a status for internet hosting the ghosts of celebrities however as a result of it was the ultimate resting place of her mom’s good friend Grace Goddard, in addition to Goddard’s aunt, Ana Decrease, each of whom cared for Monroe as a baby.
DiMaggio resented the leisure trade, holding it liable for Monroe’s demise. He’d spent the earlier yr desperately trying to pull her away from the corrupting affect of the trade elite and had no intention of constructing the funeral a Hollywood affair. DiMaggio selected Westwood exactly as a result of it was small and out-of-the-way. Sadly, Monroe’s grave shortly attracted imitators. Westwood has change into probably the most well-liked locations for Hollywood burial since. Truman Capote, Dean Martin, Ray Bradbury, Rodney Dangerfield, and Billy Wilder had been all buried on Westwood. Hugh Hefner went as far as to purchase a tomb subsequent to Monroe’s (crypt quantity 24 within the Hall of Reminiscences) to be near the primary Playboy bunny in dying. Immediately, Monroe’s grave is continually adorned with flowers, playing cards, letters and the lipstick marks of devotees.
Frank Zappa, one other notable Westwood resident, went one step additional than Monroe to keep away from the prying public. The rocker is definitely buried in an unmarked grave. Followers speculate that the choice was made as a result of his household had been involved {that a} extra noticeable plot may be vandalised. That they had each purpose to be nervous. Jim Morrison’s grave in Pere Lachaise, Paris, has been graffitied numerous occasions and was as soon as even the positioning of a riot that prompted officers to erect metallic gates across the star’s gravestone. Even the graves of cult figures like Nick Drake have change into websites of pilgrimage through the years. Certainly, because the late ’80s, Drake’s dying has change into one thing of an trade in itself, together with his modest grave within the churchyard of St Mary Magdalene in Tanworth attracting hordes of followers yearly. As Nick’s sister, the actress Gabrielle Drake, famous in 2014, his grave – the very image of his dying – is commonly handled as some kind of memento. “We’ve simply had the headstone eliminated as a result of it’s been fairly badly defaced a technique and one other with individuals chipping away at it,” she started. “Someone as soon as mentioned they noticed somebody taking a chunk away from Nick’s grave and being thrilled. This one who mentioned they noticed that, mentioned they tore them off a strip.”
Some would possibly name this sort of vandalism a pure bi-product of fame. However issues have been identified to get a lot darker. In 2000, the tombs of Ronnie Van Zant of Southern rock group Lynyrd Skynyrd, guitarist Steve Gaines and his sister Cassie, a vocalist, had been damaged into. The trio died in a airplane crash close to Gillserg, Mississippi, in 1977 and had been buried at Jacksonville Reminiscence Gardens in Florida; that’s till the thirtieth of June when The Florida Occasions-Union reported: “Vandals broke right into a tomb and disturbed their stays yesterday morning. Authorities didn’t speculate on a motive, nor whether or not the intruders might have been deranged followers of Lynyrd Skynyrd searching for a weird memento or just vandals out for an evening of destruction.”
A police officer, Mary Justino, mentioned that Van Zandt’s casket was discovered on the sting of the cemetery grounds alongside a plastic bag containing Gaines’ cremated ashes. “The bag had a gap in it,” Justino famous. “At the least preliminarily it appears like a really small quantity of the cremains might have spilled out of the bag after they pulled it from the urn.” Such tales make clear our darkish obsession with celeb tradition. Guests to websites like Pere Lachaise would possibly cite historic curiosity because the motivation behind their explorations of the sprawling necropolis, however in addition they permit us to dissolve the boundary between the true world and the unreal realm of celeb.
Once we stand by the grave of somebody like Morrison, we’re thrilled as a result of the proximity between us and them has been eradicated. Abruptly, we’re spectral members within the narrative; we’re the ghosts that hang-out the ghosts. Sadly, the sense of the unreal typically overwhelms us, resulting in the therapy of celeb graves as an extension of their occupants, issues that are ours to eat. Contemplating that it was the general public’s insatiable starvation that not directly led to the demise of figures like Monroe, it’s little marvel grave tourism in locations reminiscent of Westwood Memorial Park is tinged with ethical ambiguity.
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