TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/011689/01168900.046

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.9 KB | 152 lines

                                                                                SHOW BUSINESS, Page 76

And Now, Hollywood Babble-On


A Tinseltown tour limns deathstyles of the rich and famous

By Richard Corliss


    Reader, beware. This article is rated PG: Pretty Ghoulish.
Or, as Bette Davis' recorded voice advises at the beginning of
each Grave Line Tour, "Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a
bumpy night!"

    The seven passengers have paid $25 each to pile into a 1969
Cadillac hearse outside Hollywood's Chinese Theater and begin a
2 1/2-hour excursion into "the deathstyles of the rich and
famous." As the brochure promises, Grave Line "takes you back
through time to the tawdry, twisted, titillating tales of
Tinseltown like no other tour service dares! You'll see
Hollywood's Babylon at its most unflattering angle! The
sizzling scandals, jilted romances, real murder scenes, hottest
suicide spots, hospitals of horizontal dismissals and the
churches of famous funerals!"  O.K., why not? At the fag end of
an American retro-decade that filches its economic policies from
the 1920s, its deco furniture from the '30s, its favorite movies
from the '40s, its short haircuts from the '50s, its
dirty-dancing music from the '60s and its galloping egotism from
the '70s, why shouldn't the flashiest tour in Los Angeles mix
camp nostalgia with giddy grave robbing? And why shouldn't a
necromantic like Greg Smith, Grave Line's "director of
undertakings" and occasional tour guide, make some clean money
washing his Forest Lawndry in public? Grave Line is a haunt and
a howl for children of all ages and no taste. "It's like  being
in the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland," gushes Beth Arrowsmith,
a passenger on today's field trip. It's educational as well.
"When you're considering real estate," opines stockbroker
Kimberly Ross, "it's nice to know this stuff."

    You bet, Kimberly. Before you close a deal on that two-story
house near the Rudolph Valentino mansion on Bella Drive, you
should know that this was where Sharon Tate and four others were
murdered by Manson's minions. And if you're thinking of renting
an apartment in that tan building on Shoreham Drive, consider
the effect on property values of Diane Linkletter's 1969 suicide
leap from the sixth floor after a bad LSD trip. Your friendly
Realtor might not mention that the brown house on Benedict
Canyon Drive was the spot where George Reeves, TV's Superman,
"fired a speeding bullet into his brain." Or that the large
house with the armor-plated front door was Bugsy Siegel's place,
where the gangster died in a hail of gunfire.

    Grave Line does not neglect the stately homes of more
traditional Hollywood sight-sees. The hearse cruises past Jayne
Mansfield's "pink palace," the one with the heart-shaped
swimming pool, where the cantilevered comedian dwelt at the
time she literally lost her head in a car crash. It decelerates
outside Elizabeth Taylor's current home, which belonged to
Frank Sinatra when his son was kidnaped and held for $240,000
ransom. It motors around the corner, past Ronald and Nancy
Reagan's retirement villa. The original address was 666 St.
Cloud Street, but because 666 is the number of the Antichrist,
the Reagans petitioned the city council to have the number
changed to 668, perhaps after advice from Nancy's astrologer.

    Visitors to Los Angeles may want to take the Grave Line
before deciding on a hotel. Check in at the Regency Plaza,
where Divine checked out. Or the Chateau Marmont, where John
Belushi died of a drug overdose. Or the Beverly Hills, where
Peter Finch "keeled over from a heart attack in the lobby." Or
the Hollywood Knickerbocker, on whose roof Harry Houdini's widow
held seances to reach her elusive husband. Or the squalid
Highland Gardens. That's the place where Janis Joplin "landed
bottoms up in her baby dolls."

    Grave Line wrenches tears describing the last moments of
Hollywood's great ladies, like actress Peg Entwistle, who earned
lasting stardom diving from the 50-ft.-high H of the HOLLYWOOD
sign. As the hearse passes an empty lot that once held the
apartment house of Clara Blandick (Auntie Em in The Wizard of
Oz), you learn that on Palm Sunday of her 80th year she attended
church, went home and penned a note: "I am now about to make the
great adventure . . . I pray the Lord my soul to take, amen."
Then she pulled a plastic bag over her head and suffocated
herself. The Grave guide notes: "We give Auntie Em credit for
being L.A.'s first bag lady." Cheer up and swing past the
Ravenswood Apartments. Mae West owned them and lived in the
penthouse until age 88, when "God told her to come up and see
him."

    Smith, 36, had the hots for death even as a boy in Prairie
Village, Kans. He warmly recalls his dying mother's last words
to him: "She said, `You're weird. You're very weird.' It was a
wonderful send-off." A curious lad, Greg had heard that Walt
Disney's body had been cryogenically preserved, and "when
Disney's World on Ice came to town, I was hoping that they
would push Uncle Walt out on a block of ice. Instead it was
Goofy on skates." For odd jobs Greg baby-sat a unicorn,
chauffeured the local whores, served as a paramedic. He attended
-- what else? -- the Cypress College of Mortuary Science. "I
have a lot of fears about living," Smith says, "but I have no
fears about dying. After all, you're only alive for 70 years and
you're dead for billions, so I don't know why everybody is hung
up on dying. I can hardly wait."

    Smith could hardly wait to come to Los Angeles, where he
took 3-D photos of Marilyn Monroe's tombstone and located the
grave site of third Stooge Curly Howard. He felt like Heinrich
Schliemann at the dig of ancient Troy: "It's less of a thrill
now, I must admit, but at the time I was vibrating." A true
'80s entrepreneur, Smith built on the work of such fond scholars
of grotesquerie as Kenneth Anger, Elliott Stein and John
Waters, but with all Los Angeles as his theme park. "I pitched
the idea to my dad," he recalls. "First he kind of blanched and
reached for his nitroglycerin pills. Then he said, `I'll give
you the money if you don't drag my name into it.' I said, `O.K.,
you've got a deal.'"  Smith boned up on his death-defining
research and bought the hearse back in Kansas, then drove it
cross-country. One night he slept in it: "I thought, I must be
the first person to wake up in a hearse."

    These days they line up to ride in Smith's Caddy crypt. They
weave down Benedict Canyon Drive, tracing the path Richard
Dreyfuss took on Oct. 10, 1982, when he hit a palm tree and
flipped over his Mercedes, after which he pleaded guilty to
cocaine possession. They hear the strains of Dead Man's Curve as
they reach the intersection where Jan Berry, of the pop duo Jan
and Dean, crashed his sports car in April 1966 and was partly
paralyzed. They trace the route Montgomery Clift took the night
of May 13, 1956, when he lost control of his car and slammed
into a telephone pole at the bottom of the hill. The plastic
surgery he endured never restored that beautiful face.

    Yet Smith sees beauty in the Hollywood bestiary he has
compiled. "Everybody says to me, `Isn't it a morbid job?' and I
think, God, no, working in a bank would be a morbid job. That
would be death to my soul." This spring he will open a
Hollywood shop to sell audio- and videotapes, Xeroxes of
celebrity death certificates, T-shirts and mugs. "It's illegal,"
he says, "but I'd love to sell 5-lb. packets of celebrity trash.
I think they'd make great gifts."

    Is this marketing of death and detritus the ultimate in
gruesome groupiedom? Or is it just another clue to America's
fascination with its own decayed glamour? If Elvis can survive
beyond the grave, why can't Greg Smith thrive in it? As he says,
"The only certain things are death and taxes -- and nobody wants
to see where the stars paid their taxes."

    Anyway, it's a living.