Celebrity gravesites tend to attract fans
History suggests that Whitney Houston’s grave site in Westfield, N.J., will become a permanent destination for her fans.
Every day, workers at California’s Hollywood Forever Cemetery still clean the remnants of lipstick kisses from the gravestone of actor Rudolph Valentino, who died in 1926.
Thanks to a trust set up by a fan, flowers are delivered twice a week to singer Frank Sinatra’s grave at Desert Memorial Park in Cathedral City, Calif. — 14 years after his death.
“Fans feel a link, a closeness” when they visit their idols’ grave sites, says Bob Fells, executive director of the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association.
“Once you put up a headstone, you’re basically in the public domain,” says Noelle Berman, private estates director at Hollywood Forever, but she asks families whether they want grave sites to be public or private. The public ones are on a map the cemetery distributes to visitors and weekly tour groups.
Sometimes families seeking privacy use a celebrity’s less-recognizable real name instead of a stage name, she says.
Among Hollywood Forever’s most popular grave sites are those of actress Estelle Getty, actor Tyrone Power and mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. People leave coins at his grave for luck before heading to Las Vegas, Berman says.
Kathleen Jurasky, district manager for Desert Memorial Park, says great pains are taken to keep celebrity burials private. When Sinatra died, she says, the cemetery was “completely on lockdown” during the burial.
Tour buses call ahead to ensure they won’t disrupt services, Jurasky says, but people come from all over the world to see and leave mementos at the graves of Sinatra, singer and congressman Sonny Bono and actors Betty Hutton and William Powell. Items left at grave sites are removed weekly.
At Pierce Bros. Westwood Village Memorial Park in Westwood, Calif., memorabilia also are removed weekly, says spokeswoman Jessica Mcdunn. Marilyn Monroe, Dean Martin and many other stars are buried there. The cemetery is open to the public, but gates close at dusk and can be “closed at any other time to control access,” she says.