Grave Obsessions

Yes, I’m a ghoul. I’ll admit it. I love spending time in cemeteries. I have ever since I was in my teens and used to ride my bicycle for hours to get to some out-of-the-way bone orchard in order to memorize death dates and favorite inscriptions. There is something calming and invigorating about being in a graveyard. That scene from The Fugitive Kind, the film version of Tennessee William’s Orpheus Descending, where the dissolute, slutty Carol (Joanne Woodward) entices the snakeskin jacket-wearing drifter Val (Marlon Brando) to drive her to Cypress Hill Cemetery, has always been one of my favorites: “And we’ll hear the dead people talk.”

Besides, quite frankly, live people have begun to bore me. At least dead people don’t text. And you can make quasi-religious excursions to the final resting places of your heroes. A while back, I went to visit the grave of Jack Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts. Not that I could read his books today- but when I was 15 I tore through On The Road, Doctor Sax, The Dharma Bums, Visions Of Cody, Desolation Angels. Kerouac’s beat prose served as an inspiration for a certain lifestyle which I embraced big time. I went with my lifetime friend Cynthia Hughes, who was living and working in Lowell at the time. When I looked down at his gravestone, littered with fan’s gifts- pencils, poems, pictures, and scores of empty beer cans- I must admit it helped me forget that Kerouac ended a hopeless drunk with a passion for William F. Buckley Jr. I’d rather remember the exhibition at the NY Public Library where they had the giant roll of manuscript of On The Road laid out almost the entire length of the library. I stood there staring at it with wonder and with tears in my eyes.

Right here in New York there are plenty of pilgrimages to make. Have you taken a look at Mae West’s films lately? The saucy, hip-swinging, show business legend scandalized the good folk in the 30s and single-handedly saved Paramount Studios with her riotously funny films like I’m No Angel, Klondike Annie, She Done Him Wrong. West created an entire character for herself- irresistible to men, above the law, conspiratorial with her maids and always ready to give a man the once over and say: “Come up and see me some time, big boy…” Her films have aged well, and are still hilarious. Born in Brooklyn, she’s buried there too. Take the J subway train and pay your respects to this feminist pioneer in the imposing mausoleum where she’s interred at the Cypress Hills Cemetery. I spent the day a while back with good friend Philip Baird and we stood outside her crypt and toasted West with cognac we’d brought along for the occasion.

You can wander along the sculpted hills and dales of the Cemetery Of The Gate Of Heaven in Hawthorne N.Y. (only a half hour out of the city). Visit the mausoleum where Yankee Doodle Dandy’s James Cagney is interred (easy to find because of the zillion American flags fans have taped to it). Why not bring a half a grapefruit and grind it into his nameplate in honor of what Cagney did to Mae Clark’s face in The Public Enemy. Then saunter over to the grave of Dorothy Kilgallen, the chin-challenged columnist and regular What’s My Line TV panelist, one of the last people to interview Jack Ruby before her suspicious death in 1965 from an overdose of Seconal and alcohol. Ask a few questions, specifically about her love affair with singer Johnnie Ray. Chances are she won’t answer.

Then it’s to the holiest of holy- the resting place of Sal Mineo, the sexy, talented, co-star to James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause, who was mysteriously knifed to death in an L.A. parking garage in 1976. He deserves to be visited on a monthly basis. (I sang the theme song to Who Killed Teddy Bear? solemnly over his grave when I paid my respects).

The one site I still haven’t gone to is the resting place of the great, tortured, method actor Montgomery Clift (star of A Place In The Sun, The Heiress, The Misfits, among others). It’s in the picturesque Friends Quaker Cemetery in Prospect Park, Brooklyn You have to call first for an appointment but you owe it to yourself (if you have any respect for the art of acting) to prostrate yourself at his grave site. I guess I haven’t felt sufficiently miserable enough yet to make that journey.

But these sojourns have taught me the same wisdom that “Carol” imparted in her speech about the dead in The Fugitive Kind: “They do talk there. They chatter together like birds on Cypress Hill, but all they say is one word and that one word is ‘live,’ they say ‘Live, Live, Live, Live, Live!’ It’s all they’ve learned, it’s the only advice they can give, Just live…”