TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/011689/01168900.046

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 8KB | 139 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.