Hollywood is a dead town
Sam McManis gets to know the darker side of Tinseltown on a macabre and fascinating tour.
EXPLOITING THE dead is distasteful. I think we all can agree on that. Let the departed, dearly and otherwise, rest in peace. For when we die – sorry to plunge you into existential despair so early in the day, but it will happen – our dignity and right to be treated with a modicum of human decency should not expire with us. And yet. . .
In spite of my better self, I was drawn to a twisted, shameless and undeniably fascinating Hollywood tour called Dearly Departed: The Tragical History Tour, which for US$50 (NZ$67) will expose the seamy underbelly (no doubt liposucked, to leave a betterlooking corpse) of the glitzy television and film industry and those often-flawed personages who populate it.
Something, probably buried deep in my childhood subconscious, makes me find allure in the lurid. Forgive me. Or, better yet, go on the tour yourself and see if I’m wrong. Discover whether the excursion into the dark side of Tinseltown truly is as tasteless as a Twinkie, and with about as much nutritional value as edifying brain food, as well.
I didn’t walk, so much as slink, into the Sunset Boulevard offices of Dearly Departed for its afternoon thanatic outing. (There are more specific packages, such as the Helter Skelter Tour of Manson Family sites and the Carpen-Tour, tracing the bright career and sad demise of seminal 70s songstress Karen Carpenter, but those are for hardened veterans; the general Tragical tour is sort of the gateway drug.)
Like a naughty schoolboy ducking into a peep show, I tightened the draw strings on my hoodie. When I opened the door, I was greeted with wall-to-wall Death of the Stars mementos, from Lana Turner’s favorite goldplated cigarette lighter (she died of throat cancer) to Marilyn Monroe’s last (unpaid) telephone bill to Rock Hudson’s bedpost and Rolodex to a chunk of the tile floor from the bungalow where Rudolph Valentino died.
I also was greeted by the toothy grin and alarmingly strong handshake of Scott Michaels, Dearly Departed’s owner, who provided me with absolution for my prurient interests – or, you might say, merely delivered cogent, if sophistic, dissembling disguised as incisive social commentary (you decide).
‘‘Ten years ago, when we started this company, everyone was giving us the stink eye whenever we passed anyone’s death house,’’ Michaels said. ‘‘Now there’s not a single company that doesn’t pass Michael Jackson’s death house.
‘‘This is 100 years’ worth of deaths. A lot of names of the dead on our tour aren’t thrown around any more. But their deaths are so interesting that perhaps somebody, after taking the tour, might be inspired to rent one of their movies. It may not be the way [the stars] wanted to be remembered, but then again, attention is attention in this town. They are public figures. Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean it stops.’’
He does have a point. When is the last time you’ve thought about William Frawley (the droll Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy) or Marie Prevost (silent-screen diva turned pop-song subject)? They are all featured on the tour, though details of their demise didn’t exactly send the hearts of the 11 women (no men, sans yours truly) on the bus fluttering like when guide Brian Donnelly got to the Whitney Houston-Marilyn Monroe-Michael Jackson tragic triad.
‘‘We love this [tour], and this is our fourth time,’’ said Kourtney Robb, part of a gaggle of gawkers from California. ‘‘It’s a guilty pleasure.’’
Once you delude yourself into thinking ‘‘Privacy be damned; these are celebrities and nothing’s off-limits by our click-bait, sleazy social-media standards,’’ you can sit back in the van’s plush seats and spend three hours being driven around the streets of Hollywood, Westwood, Beverly Hills, Century City and West LA with the running commentary of Donnelly, whose database-sized knowledge of the sites and circumstances behind stars’ deaths makes him a walking, talking celebrity pseudo-coroner – or maybe just an amateur obituary writer. (Props to Donnelly, by the way, for not once succumbing to euphemism: Stars died; they did not ‘‘pass away,’’ or ‘‘cross over’’ or ‘‘find eternal rest’’.)
Donnelly weaves a narrative around each death, peppered with pun-laden quips. Only occasionally does he resort to props, such as distressing 911 emergency recordings he cues up on the CD player. He manages to navigate through God-awful LA traffic while pointing to the architectural anomalies of a certain apartment house where a B-movie actor expired and engaging his guests in witty chitchat. His delivery resembled nothing less than the sped-up voice rattling off side effects in drug commercials.
As the oversized white and black van barrelled west down Beverly Boulevard, Donnelly rendered the crowd slack-jawed by his rapid-fire, Rainman- like litany of the celebs who were ‘‘pronounced dead’’ (note the subtle distinction) at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre: ‘‘GeorgeBurns GracieAllenMinnieRippertonFrankSinatraSammy DavisJRHarryCohnSammyKahn (breath) GildaRadnerJohnnyCarson- LucilleBallRiverPhoenixRebeccaSchaeffer (breath) EazyEBiggieSmallsElizabethTaylorSherwoodSchwartzChuckConnorsErnieKovacs (breath) MichaelClarkeDuncanErnestBorgnineGrouchoMarxDonKnotts (breath) . . . But not Michael Jackson – that was at UCLA [Medical Centre].’’
Not everybody in the van (tourgoers ranged from mid-20s to mid-50s) knew all these stars. The tour, for obvious reasons, restricts minors. Donnelly considers it his job to immortalise those forgotten of the silver screen. Take his ‘‘tribute’’ to Prevost, the sultry silent movie star who made a successful transition to talkies and made 121 films before, alas, dying alone at her nondescript apartment at 6230 Afton Place, Los Angeles. Donnelly pulled the van over and faced his audience.
‘‘There’s this book called Hollywood Babylon, and because of that book, Marie Prevost is known as ‘The Woman Eaten By Her Dog’,’’ Donnelly said. ‘‘Complete bull.... They wrote that her dachshund ate her. [The author] got three parts of the story correct. She was a woman. She owned a dog. She died. Yes, it was a while before they found her body. But a dog wouldn’t do that. The dachshund did bite her, not to consume her but to wake her up . . . the story has [persisted] for years. Nick Lowe wrote a great song about it.’’
Here, Donnelly cued up the CD player and this chorus filled the van: ‘‘She was a winner/That became the doggie’s dinner. . .’’
Before veering back into traffic, he made a final comment about the unfortunate pop-culture peccadillo of turning rumour into fact: ‘‘For instance, Mama Cass did not choke on a ham sandwich. She died of a heart attack. Now, it is true that she died in the same room Keith Moon died of a drug overdose four years later. Coincidence. That’s all it is.’’
When Donnelly rolled by the Beverly Hilton Hotel, where Houston died of a drug overdose in the bathtub of Room 434, he played the 911 tape from February 2012. Silence afterward. To his credit, Donnelly played it straight in detailing the events and even made a self-deprecating remark.
‘‘Her family bought every stick of furniture out of the hotel room,’’ he said, ‘‘and word is they had it destroyed. I don’t know if they actually did, but I heard they didn’t want the bathtub winding up some place weird – like in our office. I mean, Scott has Karen Carpenter’s sink, for God’s sake.’’
Apparently, there is no precise end to a celeb mourning period, no expiration date when it’s OK to have a little respectful fun with a death. Donnelly drove by the Highland Garden Hotel, at 7047 Franklin, in Los Angeles. In Room 105 in 1970, Joplin died of an overdose. A huge Joplin fan, Donnelly wove a story about how he has spent the night in 105 – ‘‘a 47th birthday present to myself’’ – and ‘‘laid out masking tape where Janis’ body was.’’ He said the room is a tourist attraction, and the hotel is just fine with that. ‘‘People hide notes to Janis in the room,’’ he added.
The stories just kept coming. We passed Bungalow 3 of the Chateau Marmont, where John Belushi died in 1982; saw the front entrance of the Viper Room in West Hollywood, where River Phoenix died in 1993 (and heard another disturbing 911 call, made by little brother, Joaquin); stopped
‘‘We love this tour, and this is our fourth time. It’s a guilty pleasure.’’
briefly at the Afton Arms apartments on El Centro Ave in Los Angeles where Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Hillel Slovak OD’d; and spent considerable time at apartment No 4 at 120 Sweetzer Ave in Hollywood, where young actress Rebecca Schaeffer was murdered by a stalker in 1989. To lighten the mood – and I know this sounds odd, but it helped – Donnelly drove us to Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery, where many big names are buried. He handed us maps with names and arrows – Burt Lancaster, Natalie Wood, Jack Lemmon, Rodney Dangerfield (inscribed on headstone: ‘‘There goes the neighbourhood’’), Truman Capote, Walter Matthau, Merv Griffin (‘‘I will not be right back after this message’’), Farrah Fawcett, Roy Orbison, Billy Wilder (‘‘I’m a writer, but then, nobody’s perfect’’), Dean Martin and, of course, Marilyn Monroe.
Nearly everyone made a beeline to Marilyn’s grave. Donnelly warned there might be lipstick smooches on the headstone, and there were. Robb unsheathed a hot-pink lipstick and added a new coat. Then she bent slightly over, kind of like Marilyn’s iconic pose on the subway grate, and planted a kiss next to her name. ‘‘Eww,’’ she said, ‘‘hope I don’t catch something.’’