The problems that go with stardom don't necessarily die when the celebrity does. Few know this better than Courtney Love--lead singer of the band Hole and widow of grunge king Kurt Cobain--who has been involved in a dispute with Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Seattle over the ashes of the rock superstar who committed suicide in April, 1994.
The cemetery first agreed to provide a plot for Cobain, as well as reserve adjacent spaces for the rest of the family. Then Calvary demanded that Love pay an extra $100,000 a year for security to protect the grave from unruly fans, which she refused to do.
Officials at Lake View Cemetery, another Seattle burial ground, wouldn't accept Cobain's ashes either, saying that cinema's reigning martial arts father and son, Bruce and Brandon Lee, are buried there, and that is all the celebrity remains they can handle.
The incident has left many cemetery owners here in Los Angeles--where the passing of famous entertainers is more routine--shaking their heads.
"We've never charged the kinds of fees they're talking about up in Seattle," says Dick Fisher, a spokesman for Forest Lawn Memorial Park, final resting place of Humphrey Bogart, W.C. Fields, Spencer Tracy, Errol Flynn and Nat (King) Cole.
"I cannot believe any cemetery is charging these exorbitant rates just for him," says one representative of Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. The cemetery houses the remains of Marilyn Monroe, Natalie Wood, Frank Zappa, Roy Orbison and other household names. The policy here is that stars such as Monroe--who draws an average of 100 visitors a day--foot the same bill as the anonymously deceased.
The Pierce Brothers representative adds, "No cemetery in California would ever charge extra or demand security payments or anything like that."
But the question of whether famous entertainers need special treatment even when they're dead and whether those entrusted with that care can charge extra for it is far from settled. As a matter of fact, should the folks in Southern California get any ideas about slapping on celebrity surcharges, well, there's nothing to prevent it.
"These people are engaged in the free enterprise system," says Bob Dail, a complaint investigator for the California Cemetery Board, which oversees cemetery practices in this state, but does not regulate prices. "If they feel the need to charge this and the people are willing to pay, what's to stop them?
"I think it would be in the cemetery's best interest to charge them to compensate them for the trouble. Seattle is smart for doing that," Dail says.
Cemetery officials are loathe to talk about incidents involving vandalism. But cases of fans hounding the famous into the afterlife are certainly not unheard of. Nor is it strictly a modern phenomenon. The head of Viennese composer Franz Joseph Haydn, who died in 1809, was discovered stolen in 1820. His head and body were not reunited until 1954.
During the 1980s, James Dean's tombstone was stolen twice from a cemetery in Ft. Wayne, Ind. When the stone was returned the second time, the thief left a note claiming he took the marker to protect it from the ravages of the late actor's fans. "You have heroes," he wrote. "How would you like to see their grave messed up?"
In 1983, a little over a year after John Belushi was buried in a picturesque New England graveyard, his family had the grave moved to an isolated corner of the park because the vanloads of fans who descended on the site stole or damaged many of the other stones there. And at Greenwood Memorial Park in Renton, Wash., a suburb of Cobain's hometown of Seattle, Jimi Hendrix's memorial marker has also caused minor problems because of traffic and vandalism.
Here in Los Angeles, apparently, the jadedness with which locals handle celebrity encounters seems to extend to dead celebrities. Thus, the post-mortal mayhem appears to be more muted. The most shocking incident was probably the theft in May, 1982, of Groucho Marx's ashes from Eden Memorial Park in Mission Hills. They were found later that day at Mt. Sinai Memorial Park in Glendale.
The biggest problem at Marilyn Monroe's heavily trafficked grave-
site according to the Pierce Brothers representative is that, "So many people kiss the monument that we can't get the lipstick stains out of the granite."
Certainly, no grave site attracts as much mischief or partying (depending on your perspective) as that of the late Jim Morrison at Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Despite hosting the remains of such stellar figures as Honore de Balzac, Frederic Chopin, Edith Piaf and Oscar Wilde, it is the '60s rock icon, who died in July, 1971, who has the cemetery staff scrambling to cope with the vandalism, graffiti, drug use and trash caused by the tens of thousands of fans who stream to the site each year.
