Celebrity Cemetery : Tinseltown’s History Comes Alive In Halloween Tour of Hollywood Memorial Park, the Last Resting Place of the Rich and Famous

Actress Marion Davies, mistress of William Randolph Hearst, has been dead for almost 30 years, but someone remembers.

Earlier this week, a fan left a red rose on her mausoleum in Hollywood Memorial Park. “Dear Marion, you are still loved and missed,” read the accompanying note.

“Practically all of Hollywood’s history can be revisited here,” said Frank Cooper, during a preview of the upcoming Halloween tour of the cemetery sponsored by the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles. This year Cooper, who began the tours five years ago, and his colleagues will take groups through the cemetery on Saturday.

As Cooper walked the 57-acre grounds, he pointed out the last resting places of Hollywood founder Harvey Wilcox and other city fathers and of dozens of celebrities, from swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks Sr., to director John Huston.

Cooper, whose day job is with a firm that mails press releases, is master of the odd Hollywood Cemetery fact.

He explains, for instance, that Davies’ handsome white mausoleum, with its stone cherubs, was not a macabre gift from Hearst to his pretty protege. Davies had the tomb, which has room for 12, built for her family.

As an anthropology student at USC, Cooper wrote a thesis on death and culture that took him to most of the area’s memorial parks. The Hollywood cemetery, an eclectic jumble of 73,000 graves, crypts, mausoleums and cenotaphs, is his all-time favorite.

“Forest Lawn,” he opined, “looks like a golf course. It has no character.” But Hollywood Memorial Park, with its miniature Egyptian temples, stained-glass windows and tombstones shaped like rocket ships, is fraught with character, he said. Like the streets of Hollywood, the cemetery tolerates dozens of different styles. “There’s room for personalization,” the cemetery aficionado explained.

Cooper insists there is nothing strange about liking cemeteries. “We’re not concerned with what’s beneath the ground. We’re concerned with lawn level and above. It’s not morbid. It’s quite beautiful.”

It’s also a cheap date, noted Cooper, who sometimes visits the cemetery with girlfriend Suzanne Tarbell.

Established in 1899, the cemetery is best known for its film-industry burials. Producer-director Cecil B. De Mille is lavishly entombed, purportedly with his feet pointing toward Paramount. Rudolph Valentino’s marker in the Hollywood Cathedral Mausoleum almost always bears the lipstick imprint of a kiss. Jayne Mansfield, who was decapitated in a car accident in 1967, is buried in Pennsylvania, but her bereaved fan club bought her a memorial plaque in Hollywood Cemetery. On it is a publicity shot of the blonde star and the inscription: “We live to love you more each day.”

As Cooper pointed out, dead moguls and stars are the cemetery’s major draw, but many of the most interesting graves have nothing to do with the famous.

In several Armenian areas of the cemetery, graves are marked with headstones decorated with photo-like portraits of the dead sandblasted on polished granite. One of the deceased is shown as a young man, wearing a rakishly angled hat. Little gardens, planted with mint and other herbs as well as flowers, flourish on some plots, many of which are edged with brick borders. The grave of a beloved toddler is decorated with his toy cars and other playthings. Some graves are topped with Eastern Rite crosses fashioned out of plastic pipe.

Cooper said Valentino’s place of interment is the one every visitor wants to see. While Cooper was standing in front of Valentino’s marker, a passer-by asked for directions to another celebrity burial place. “You can’t miss him,” Cooper answered. “He’s out on the road.”

“I hope he’s not,” the passer-by replied.

Another popular spot on the tour is the grave of Carl Switzer, who played Alfalfa in the Our Gang comedies. The burial place of Switzer, killed in 1959 in a fight over a $50 debt, is marked with a picture of Pete, the black-eyed Our Gang dog.

The nearby grave of his father, G. Fred Switzer, is marked with a picture of what looks like a gas pump. Cooper’s friend Tarbell learned from Switzer’s widow that the device is actually one of the elder Switzer’s many inventions, a contraption supposed to enlarge a woman’s breasts. “It’s one of the scariest things in the cemetery,” Cooper noted.

Cooper said he is heartened by the improved condition of the cemetery over the past year. Until recently, the California Cemetery Board was receiving more complaints about Hollywood than any other cemetery in the state, according to John Gill, executive secretary of the board. In the last year complaints, many of which charged poor maintenance of the graves, are way down, Gill said.

Although the cemetery lawn is still brown in spots, the lake has been emptied of cans and bottles and is now filled with tiny fish and water lilies, Cooper said. Exotic red and gold flowers have been planted around Tyrone Powers’ grave.

This year’s Art Deco Society tours will begin Saturday at 9:30 a.m. Tours, which will last about two hours, will depart from the cemetery entrance at 6000 Santa Monica Blvd. The society, Cooper said, is a group of more than 150 Angelenos dedicated to the preservation and appreciation of Art Deco style.

Cost of the tour is $5 per person. For more information, call (213) 735-4584.