Final Curtain: Eternal Resting Places of Hundreds of Stars, Celebrities, Moguls, Misers & Misfits

by Margaret Burk, Gary Hudson

Last stop for hundreds of Stars, Celebrities, Moguls, Misers and misfits, the Bad and the Beautiful. Fabulous funerals from Rudolph Valintino and Barbara LeMarr to Sammy Davis Jr. , where thousands jammed the streets; glitzy theme park fashioned cemeteries, tombstones shaped like automobiles and parking meters, weird and wonderful epitaphs; Mel Blanc's "That's all folks!" , Over My Dead Body" George Bernard Shaw, "Do Not Disturb" , Constance Bennett. Groucho's disappearing ashes and Errol Flynn's kidnapping. Strange last requests, last promises, last vengeance's. You know them all. California is the place to "go".

368 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1996

Reviews

[Willa · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're interested in old Hollywood; if you appreciate the atmosphere of cemeteries; if you find joy in excellent writing and editing; and if you like the feel of turning the pages of a book made with high-quality paper, you will like this book.

There are pictures sprinkled throughout the book as well as snippets of lives lived (and lost) in the entertainment industry. Anecdotes of the rich and famous abound. There's a bit of history of California cemeteries and California itself here.

The book is easy to read and can be picked up and put down if you only have snippets of time. I found it fascinating to read about the man who took Forest Lawn from a run-down derelict, not only turning that particular cemetery into a beautiful lush experience, and also turning the cemetery business into something completely different, and far better.

You'll read about suspicious deaths in Hollywood and who was married (and buried) with whom along with interesting inscriptions on their graves.

Recommend highly.

[MKF · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is a terrible mess that shouldn't have ever been published. It uses two different types of paper the second is that glossy type usually found in other books for photos. This isn't just a few pages this is a large chunk of the beginning and it starts randomly. After all the glossy pages it switches back to the regular so it's weird. If you can get pass the paper switch you are stuck with a book that is just filled with random stuff, cemeteries, and people. Some chapters feel incomplete while others seem to be crammed full of stuff. The names seem drawn from a hat and are just random people with a lot of movie stars thrown in. Sadly it seems many stars got honorable mentions they didn't get their own section or grave location. The very worse is a section that the authors tell you to go to for more information and finding out that section doesn't exist. How do you lose a whole section if you keep referring to it? It's just a bit confusing like the other points and shows that this book is not well thought out and incomplete.