Reading my François Mauriac by guttering candlelight, I re-encountered the following, from the 1962 essay collection Cain, Where is Your Brother?:
“A cemetery saddens us because it is the only place of the world in which we do not meet our dead again. Everywhere else, we carry them with us. It is enough to close our eyes to feel this breath against our neck, this faithful hand on our shoulder. The house, the garden, also remember: my mother’s easy chair still sags under her weight; the fabric looks worn where she used to rest her elbows. Our familiar universe multiplies around us as the images of those who continue to live within us.”
I can confirm the truth of the opening sentence, as I have spent innumerable hours in cemeteries, trying in vain to commune with those belowground. As often as not I have not been looking for “my” dead, though I have passed some time in what passes for a family plot in dismal Darlington, Indiana. I am, you see, a whore for dead noteworthies, for standing over the earthly detritus of the good and great.
Of course if you want to “know” these dead, you can only revisit their earthly works, but this knowledge does not prevent my paying calls. I favor authors most especially, but composers, politicians, tycoons, and painters will do—only a couple of weeks ago I ferreted out Thomas Cole in Catskill’s Thompson Street Cemetery, using a .jpeg from the invaluable Findagrave.com website as my compass.
And then of course there are the movie people. Of these, the most satisfying to find was Maurice Pialat, who has resided since 2003 in Paris’ Cimetière de Montparnasse. The cemetery’s photocopied directory of famous residents was seemingly updated only once every decade, so locating the plot took no small amount of sleuthing and halting Franglais. Some time after having paid my visit to Mr. Pialat, I heard a pertinent apocryphal story: While preparing to shoot his excruciating film about a death in the family, 1974’s La geule ouverte, Pialat took his cinematographer, the great Nestor Almendros, to see the late Mme. Pialat, who had presumably been interred in the family mausoleum in Puy-de-dome or wherever he’s from. Then, so to aide Almendros in the understanding of death which was so essential to the film they were to make, Pialat had the lid of his mother’s coffin pried open, so that the blanching cameraman could look upon the work of corruption.
Nearest to my own indigenous country is the grave of one James Byron Dean in Fairmount, Indiana, which I have thrice visited and which, come to think of it, is probably where this whole ridiculous habit got started. On the eastern seaboard, where I’ve spent the last decade, opportunities for meeting decedent movie people are certainly available, though I haven’t availed myself of many. Otto Preminger was unusual in making New York City his base of producer-director operations in life, and retains this iconoclastic distinction in death, occupying a bit of turf in The Bronx’s Woodlawn Cemetery. It’s on my to-do, for though I’ve been to Woodlawn, I did not come calling on Otto (I can, however, recommend a visit to Herman Melville and his tragic family). And did you happen to know that Montgomery Clift is buried in a secret, gated Society of Friends Quaker cemetery inside Brooklyn’s Prospect Park? If ever a piece of information demanded a grappling hook and some Dutch courage, this is it.
My favorite eastern gravesite for a movie person is for a man who is only secondarily a movie person—the novelist Nathaniel West, née Nathaniel “von” Wallenstein Weinstein (1903-1940), who in addition to writing masterful novellas A Cool Million, Miss Lonelyhearts, and The Day of the Locust—the quintessential poison pen letter to Hollywood—amassed bill-paying screenwriting credits on studio-era assembly line products like Rhythm in the Clouds and Let’s Make Music. After getting an automobile smash-up while hastily returning from a Mexican hunting trip—possibly after hearing that his friend Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald had keeled over in the apartment that he shared with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham—Mr. West has been consigned to Mount Zion Cemetery in Queens County. Mount Zion is a particularly picturesque Jewish cemetery containing many of the residents of turn-of-the-last-century tenements, as crowded in death as they were in life—210,000 burials on 78 acres. The key feature, however, is the New York City Department of Sanitation’s Queens West Garage, which stands on a hill overlooking the cemetery, the twin chimneys of its garbage incinerator jutting skyward. (I have, incidentally, visited the equally dismally situated Scott Fitzgeralds in Rockville, Maryland’s once-bucolic Saint Mary’s Cemetery, which today gives a good view onto busy Baltimore Rd. and a glass-box corporate park building across the way.)
If you want to see “more stars than there are in heaven,” of course, you must go west young man. Unfortunately, Whispering Glades, the quintessential California kitsch burying ground in Tony Richardson’s 1965 film of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, is but a contrivance of set design, whipped up on the grounds of Beverly Hills’ Greystone Mansion. But you can visit its supposed inspiration, Forest Lawn Memorial Park, where I “met” Stan Laurel and Sir Charles Laughton, before bedecking Fritz Lang’s headstone with a white rose. And just imagine—had Waugh only stuck it out during his brief furlough in Los Angeles, he might today be at Culver City’s Roman Catholic Holy Cross Cemetery, buried between Bing Crosby and Bela Lugosi.
But if you’ve only limited time for the dead, the very walkable, visitor-friendly Hollywood Forever Cemetery offers the most bang for your buck: A cenotaph of Johnny Ramone! C.B. DeMille! The ashes of Screamers frontman Tomata du Plenty! John Huston and mother Rhea, once a reporter at the preposterous tabloid the New York Graphic, alongside young Sammy Fuller! And only a short distance away from the Hustons is the gravesite that, in all of my perambulations among the dead, has come closest to arousing something like genuine emotion in me—that of Virginia Rappe (1895-1921), whose principal claim to fame was having a splendid rack and dying of a ruptured bladder after allegedly being jazzed with a Coca-Cola bottle by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. Take it away, La Merm! (Cenotaph at Shrine of Remembrance Mausoleum, Colorado Springs; ashes with family in New York, to be interred at a later date.)
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.