Image: Milwaukee Public Library - Special Collections
Liberace ad - Red Room Bar
Someday everyone you know will be dead. Your mom. Your best friend. The pizza delivery guy. Clint Eastwood.
Los Angeles, the entertainment capital of the world, has America’s highest number of famous and infamous personalities interred in vast greenspaces that provide peace from the car horns and squealing brakes outside the gates. Not surprisingly, several people with ties to Wisconsin rest in one of those parks. In a city built on illusions and dreams, being buried among gangsters, movie stars, singers, writers, composers, and people famous for nothing but being famous is the ultimate game of make-believe, isn’t it? Or is it?
Lucille Ball from Jamestown, New York and Bette Davis from Lowell, Massachusetts are in tombs near Walter Vladzu Liberace, a native of West Milwaukee. Professionally known by his last name, Liberace played the piano in the Plankinton Hotel’s Red Room cocktail lounge before becoming the world’s highest paid entertainer at the peak of his fame. Nearby is Al Jarreau, Grammy-winning jazz and R & B vocalist. Jarreau and his family lived on Reservoir Street, west of Holton Street.
Public Domain
Gilda Gray
Gilda Gray
In 1918, teenage Marianna Michalska inadvertently created a nationwide sensation when she shook her shoulders and hips while singing in a Milwaukee tavern. Changing her name to Gilda Gray, the voluptuous blonde’s provocative movements were called “The Shimmy.” She epitomized the reckless behavior of women during the Roaring Twenties. These days Gray’s neighbors at Holy Cross Cemetery include Rita Hayworth, Bing Crosby, Bela Lugosi, Sharon Tate and a saxophone player from Beaver Dam named Fred MacMurray.
Forest Lawn Cemetery in suburban Glendale comprises 250,000 residents and 300 acres of gently rolling hills. Visitors are welcome but those who behave in a disrespectful or boisterous manner are summarily ejected and warned not to return. Racine’s Ellen Corby, best known for her role on “The Waltons” and two-time Oscar winner Spencer Tracy, who grew up in the Bay View and Merrill Park neighborhoods share the park with Jean Harlow, Clark Gable and James Stewart.
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Photo: Larry Widen collection
Spencer Tracy with family circa 1910
This is a very rare original photo of actor Spencer Tracy and his family, circa 1910 in front of their Bay View home in the 2800 block of S. Logan Ave in Bay View. Spencer is the young boy bottom right.
Walt Disney is buried in Forest Lawn as well, but the city’s professional tour guides and historians are quick to point out that the city’s 50 cemeteries are not a Disneyland of the dead. Karie Bible, a tour guide at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, has been able to transform her love of movies into a job. Once a week, she escorts guests on a two-hour walk through the 66-acre garden of remembrance that’s directly adjacent to Paramount Pictures. Her tours include stops at personal favorites like Maila Nurmi, an actress and dancer who found her niche as Vampira, the hostess of a local television program that showed old horror films. Bible is looking forward to celebrating Nurmi’s 100th birthday on December 11. “These people can no longer defend themselves. I refuse to commercialize my tours with tabloid-style misinformation and half-truths,” Bible says. “They’re human beings who had friends and families like everyone else.” To respect the family of the recently deceased Anne Heche, Bible uses an alternative route when passing the actress’s marker. She brings visitors to the mausoleum where silent film actor Rudolph Valentino has rested since 1926. The handsome actor’s untimely death at age 31 caused mass hysteria among his thousands of female fans. For the next 30 years, a mysterious woman dressed in black brought a rose to Valentino’s crypt. Each August 23, Bible stages a ceremony honoring the black-clad woman’s devotion to a loved one. Bible says this is not a hokey séance or lurid homage to something supernatural. “There are no ghosts in here,” she says flatly. “Maybe that’s what the various sensational death and ghost guides say, but I don’t tell stories that aren’t true.”
Photo by Robiee Ziegler
Karie Bible
Karie Bible
Hollywood Forever is also home to a pair of performers linked to Milwaukee. The big band leader Woody Herman was born here in 1913. As a child he worked as a singer and tap-dancer in the city’s vaudeville theaters. By age 12 Herman was playing the clarinet and saxophone.
Also at Hollywood Forever is a memorial marker to Hattie McDaniel. She won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Mammy in Gone with the Wind. McDaniel was the first African American to be honored in this way. In 1929 McDaniel was a washroom attendant at Sam Pick’s Club Madrid, a Bluemound Road speakeasy frequented by athletes, politicians and Chicago gangster Al Capone. McDaniel got up on stage one evening and performed some blues songs. A decade later she made history at the 1939 Academy Awards.
Some of the stories about the Los Angeles gravesites are offbeat without being disrespectful to the dearly departed. In 1992 Hugh Hefner bought the crypt next to Marilyn Monroe for $75,000. The Playboy publisher said Monroe helped him launch the magazine and he cherished the idea of resting next to her for eternity. Maria Rasputin, daughter of the Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin, fled the country after her father was murdered during the revolution of 1917. Among her many occupations, Maria was a writer, cabaret dancer, and circus performer who was buried in the obscure Angelus Rosedale in 1977. And for fans of the Three Stooges, Jerome “Curly” Howard can be found in LA’s Boyle Heights. Once a Jewish enclave, the neighborhood surrounding Home of Peace cemetery has become one of the city’s largest Hispanic communities.
Yep. Someday everyone you know will be dead. Maybe one of them will become a permanent resident of LA.
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Bela Lugosi gravestone rubbing
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Rudolph Valentino crypt
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Curly Howard grave
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Natalie Wood grave marker
