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    Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills: The Unauthorized Guide
    Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills: The Unauthorized Guide
    Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills: The Unauthorized Guide
    Ebook89 pages1 hour

    Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills: The Unauthorized Guide

    By Mark Masek

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    About this ebook

    Although Forest Lawn Memorial-Park’s Glendale location might be more popular and more widely known, the Hollywood Hills location includes the final resting places of dozens of top film and TV stars, acclaimed musicians, and legends of animation and entertainment. “Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills: The Unauthorized Guide” provides the most complete, comprehensive and up-to-date directory to find the exact burial locations of dozens of celebrities, including film legends Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel and George Raft; Academy Award-winning actors Bette Davis, Charles Laughton and Rod Steiger; television pioneers Steve Allen, Jack LaLanne, Ernie Kovacs and Edie Adams, Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, Gene Autry and Jack Webb; comedians Marty Feldman, Freddie Prinze, Morey Amsterdam and Isabel Sanford; and musicians Liberace, Ronnie James Dio, Rick Nelson, Andy Gibb and Lou Rawls; as well as recent additions John Ritter, David Carradine, Britney Murphy and Tom Bosley.

    But good luck if you want to visit and pay your respects to your favorite celebrity. The cemetery will not give out the location of any of its well-known permanent residents, and won’t even acknowledge that they’re buried there. But this book, “Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills: The Unauthorized Guide,” provides the most complete, comprehensive and accurate step-by-step directions to find the final resting place of dozens of top celebrities.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMark Masek
    Release dateDec 11, 2011
    ISBN9781452457727
    Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills: The Unauthorized Guide
    Author

    Mark Masek

    Mark Masek was born and raised in Joliet, Ill., about 40 miles southwest of Chicago. He was always interested in history and Hollywood and, when he moved to the Los Angeles area in 1999, he was able to combine his interests, and wrote "Hollywood Remains to Be Seen: A Guide to the Movie Stars' Final Homes," a detailed history and guidebook to 14 cemeteries in the Los Angeles area, as well as a guide to find the final burial locations of more than 300 entertainment celebrities. He is also a member of the Hollywood Underground, a group of people with the similar interests of finding and documenting the final resting places of celebrities. If they're famous, and they're dead, and they're buried somewhere in the Los Angeles area, he probably knows where to find them.

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      Book preview

      Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills - Mark Masek

      Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills: The Unauthorized Guide

      Mark Masek

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2011 Mark Masek

      Discover other titles by Mark Masek at www.smashwords.com

      or visit his website at www.CemeteryGuide.com.

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Forest Lawn Memorial-Park – Hollywood Hills

      6300 Forest Lawn Dr.

      Los Angeles, CA 90068

      History: After the incredible success of Forest Lawn’s original location in Glendale, Calif., Hubert Eaton purchased a 400-acre site for a second cemetery in 1944 – a beautiful piece of property adjacent to Griffith Park in Los Angeles, overlooking the San Fernando Valley. Eaton outbid both a residential developer and the city of Los Angeles, which wanted the property to expand Griffith Park.

      Decades before Forest Lawn bought the property, the Hollywood Hills location was the site of another bit of Hollywood history. The battle scenes in D.W. Griffith’s Civil War epic, The Birth of a Nation (1915) were filmed there. The location currently overlooks the Warner Bros. and Disney studios.

      But Forest Lawn had to win another Hollywood Hills battle to get permission to open the cemetery. Since the property had been zoned for residential use, Forest Lawn went to the Los Angeles City Planning Commission in 1946 to request permission to open a cemetery on the site. Thousands of area residents signed petitions against the use of the land as a cemetery, and several city commissions, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and the mayor of Los Angeles also opposed the cemetery plan, for various reasons.

      The most emotional and powerful plea came from area residents, who feared that run-off from the property would contaminate an underground reservoir, which provided drinking water for more than 300,000 city residents. Experts testified that chemicals used in embalming fluids might leak into the water supply, and the city Planning Commission denied Forest Lawn’s request to open a cemetery.

      Forest Lawn submitted the request to the commission again in 1948, and was again denied. This time, Christina Griffith – the widow of Griffith J. Griffith, who donated the 3,000-acre parcel that became Griffith Park – requested that the city oppose any development adjoining the park which might deprecate its value as a great public recreation ground.

      Forest Lawn then went directly to the Los Angeles City Council, which surprisingly voted 10-3 in March 1948 to allow the cemetery to open. While opponents considered their options, including placing the question on the ballot for a public vote, Forest Lawn took advantage of a state law to end any possible reversal of the council’s decision. The law, which was passed in 1854, stated that if six bodies were legally buried on any site, that site would immediately and forever become a cemetery.

      Immediately after the council’s vote, Forest Lawn employees quickly buried six bodies on the property – reportedly including a few unclaimed and unidentified bodies that were picked up from the Los Angeles County morgue – and a cemetery spokesman announced that the land had officially, legally and irreversibly been converted to a cemetery, and Forest Lawn was open for business.

      While the Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale has an obvious religious theme, the Hollywood Hills location is focused on American history, and features an exact replica of Boston’s Old North Church, which is often used for funeral services. At the southeast corner of the property is the Hall of Liberty, which contains the Liberty Museum, the Museum of Mexican History and a replica of the Liberty Bell. A 60-foot-high statue of George Washington stands in the nearby Court of Liberty, which also includes the 162-foot-long Birth of Liberty mosaic, depicting 25 scenes from the country’s early history. The nearby Lincoln Terrace area features a statue of the 16th president, as well as a mosaic depicting scenes from his life.

      Although singer Michael Jackson is famously buried at Forest Lawn’s Glendale location, and his public funeral service was held at Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles on July 7, 2009, a private service for family and friends was held in the auditorium inside the Hall of Liberty just before the public event.

      Like Forest Lawn’s Glendale location, the rules for visitors at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills are pretty strict. Loitering, commercial photography and photography inside buildings are all prohibited. But, in general, Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills is a little bit friendlier than its Glendale counterpart. No, the employees still won’t point out the location of a celebrity’s grave, and they might follow you, question you or kick you out if they don’t like what you’re doing. But at least there aren’t any inaccessible mausoleums or private gardens that require a Golden Key of Memory for admission.

      Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills contains the final resting places of some of the greatest, most inventive and influential comedy performers in entertainment history, including Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel, Ernie Kovacs, Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, Freddie Prinze, Marty Feldman, Steve Allen, John Ritter and animators Walter Lantz and Tex Avery, giving the cemetery both historical and hysterical themes. Well, maybe not their final resting places. Lucille Ball was originally buried here following her death in 1989, but her remains were moved in 2002 to the family plot in Lake View Cemetery in Jamestown, N.Y., where Ball's mother, father, brother and grandparents are buried. Her new grave marker contains the inscription, You’ve come home.

      In addition to the Glendale and Hollywood Hills locations, the Forest Lawn empire in Southern California also includes cemeteries in Covina, Cypress, Long Beach, Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Cathedral City, Indio and Coachella.

      Directions: From downtown Los Angeles, take the Hollywood Freeway (101) north to Barham Boulevard. Take Barham north about a mile to Forest Lawn Drive and turn right. The cemetery gates are about a mile down Forest Lawn Drive, on the right. Or take the Golden State Freeway (5) north, then west on the Ventura Freeway (134), and exit about a mile and a half down at Forest Lawn Drive. The cemetery gates are on Forest Lawn Drive, about a mile from the Ventura Freeway, on the left.

      Hours: The cemetery grounds are open every day from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (or 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., during daylight savings time). The mortuary building and flower shop are open from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., and the Hall of Liberty is open from 10 a.m. to 4:15 p.m.

      The Tour: Pick up a map of the cemetery grounds at the information booth near the main entrance off Forest Lawn Drive. (It might help to navigate if you also have a compass, but these directions should be fairly easy to follow even if you have neither.) From that point, head straight back to the southeast corner of the cemetery, following the signs to the Hall of Liberty. Stop and park on the road between the replica of the

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