Hollywood Cemetery Going Under

Burial site of early Hollywood's famous could be abandoned

By Daniel Frankel Dec 04, 1997 2:30 AMTags
If you were a movie star who died during Tinseltown's Golden Age, chances are they buried your famous bones in the Hollywood Memorial Park cemetery, right across the street from the Paramount Pictures Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Rudolph Valentino, Jayne Mansfield, Douglas Fairbank and Cecil B. DeMille are just a handful of the prominent early Hollywood players to be found among the nearly 80,000 graves, crypts, mausoleums and cenotaphs on the site's 64 palm-tree filled acres.

But now, with the cemetery's operators seriously in the red, Hollywood Memorial Park could fade to black.

The Hollywood Cemetery Association, owners of the down-and-out facility, defaulted on a $2.7 million loan last year. That put the mortgage on the 98-year-old cemetery--victimized over the recent years by poor maintenance, vandalism and an earthquake--in the hands of a bank.

But while people are usually dying to get into a cemetery, very few seem anxious to take charge of Hollywood Memorial. The bank set a minimum bid of $500,000 at an auction last month--cemetery office manager Homer Alba told Reuters the property is worth up to $3 million, but it requires at least $2 million in restoration--but the only offer was a $275,000 bid from a Vallejo, California, businessman.

Now, the bank has filed a motion to abandon the place. A bankruptcy court will conduct a hearing December 10 to decide if they can do that.

"Based on the facts I have today, unless there is a sale, the facility will be abandoned," David Isenberg, attorney for the cemetery's trustee, told the Los Angeles Times.

You might be a developer who doesn't have a problem building a parking lot on top of the eternal resting places of actress Marion Davies (longtime mistress of William Randolph Hearst) and Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer (the Little Rascals star who died at age 33 while fighting over a $50 debt).

Or, maybe you envision a sprawling gated community of crackerbox apartments stacked atop the tombs of 'toon voiceman Mel Blanc (whose epitaph reads: "Thats all, folks!") and gangster Bugsy Siegel.

Forget it.

To build anything over Hollywood Memorial Park, you'll need permission from the next of kin for every person buried there. Besides, who'd want to live with the ghosts of Siegel, or starlet Virginia Rappe (who died suspiciously during a wild 1921 Hollywood party) lurking about.