Westwood is a strange place.Where else can you walk across the street from the building that your contemporary art museum workplace shares with Oxidental Petroleum and find a graveyard tucked between towering office buildings, in which the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Farrah Fawcett are buried?
His "other half" - don't worry, he was cremated - is buried in New York.
I'm not a morbid person, but I do like a nice graveyard. As one of my co-workers once told me, "If you're down and out the best place to go is the graveyard. No one will question why you're crying."
I guess I'm not getting away as much as I think I am- former president of Oxidental Petroleum and director of the Hammer Museum is buried here. (I just discovered that he had a private escalator that took him from the building's loading dock to the galleries on the 3rd floor, where he could take a gander at his art collection before heading up to his golden toilet on the 16th floor.)
This sure isn't the space befitting her iconic status, if you ask me. And those oily lip stains? Gross!
There's an interesting story behind the fellow buried above poor old Marilyn. His widow, still very much alive, decided to sell his crypt in order to pay off the mortgage on her home. She put it up for sale (on eBay for goodness sakes) a few years ago. Some Japanese dude bought it for $4.6 million. Then he couldn't pay it. I don't know what happened with the other bidders, but Mr. Poncher is still above her in his casket, face down. I guess when he said "If I croak and you don't put me upside down over Marilyn, I'll haunt you the rest of my life" he meant it!
Nineteen-year-old Norma Jean Baker during WWII and her later invention, Marilyn Monroe.
There's a great article in the New York Review of Books on Marilyn Monroe, called Marilyn. Knowing her background helped me understand her life trajectory.
Hold the phone- this one looks pretty old! Didn't know that there were people settled in the Los Angeles area during the Civil War! Must have been paradise back then.
Best epitaph ever:
Jack Lemmon
in
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