Reader, beware. This article is rated PG: Pretty Ghoulish. Or, as Bette Davis' recorded voice advises at the beginning of each Grave Line Tour, "Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy night!"
The seven passengers have paid $25 each to pile into a 1969 Cadillac hearse outside Hollywood's Chinese Theater and begin a 2 1/2-hour excursion into "the deathstyles of the rich and famous." As the brochure promises, Grave Line "takes you back through time to the tawdry, twisted, titillating tales of Tinseltown like no other tour service dares! You'll see Hollywood's Babylon at its most unflattering angle! The sizzling scandals, jilted romances, real murder scenes, hottest suicide spots, hospitals of horizontal dismissals and the churches of famous funerals!"
O.K., why not? At the fag end of an American retro-decade that filches its economic policies from the 1920s, its deco furniture from the '30s, its favorite movies from the '40s, its short haircuts from the '50s, its dirty- dancing music from the '60s and its galloping egotism from the '70s, why shouldn't the flashiest tour in Los Angeles mix camp nostalgia with giddy grave robbing? And why shouldn't a necromantic like Greg Smith, Grave Line's ! "director of undertakings" and occasional tour guide, make some clean money washing his Forest Lawndry in public? Grave Line is a haunt and a howl for children of all ages and no taste. "It's like being in the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland," gushes Beth Arrowsmith, a passenger on today's field trip. It's educational as well. "When you're considering real estate," opines stockbroker Kimberly Ross, "it's nice to know this stuff."
You bet, Kimberly. Before you close a deal on that two-story house near the Rudolph Valentino mansion on Bella Drive, you should know that this was where Sharon Tate and four others were murdered by Manson's minions. And if you're thinking of renting an apartment in that tan building on Shoreham Drive, consider the effect on property values of Diane Linkletter's 1969 suicide leap from the sixth floor after a bad LSD trip. Your friendly Realtor might not mention that the brown house on Benedict Canyon Drive was the spot where George Reeves, TV's Superman, "fired a speeding bullet into his brain." Or that the large house with the armor-plated front door was Bugsy Siegel's place, where the gangster died in a hail of gunfire.
Grave Line does not neglect the stately homes of more traditional Hollywood sight-sees. The hearse cruises past Jayne Mansfield's "pink palace," the one with the heart-shaped swimming pool, where the cantilevered comedian dwelt at the time she literally lost her head in a car crash. It decelerates outside Elizabeth Taylor's current home, which belonged to Frank Sinatra when his son was kidnaped and held for $240,000 ransom. It motors around the corner, past Ronald and Nancy Reagan's retirement villa. The original address was 666 St. Cloud Street, but because 666 is the number of the Antichrist, the Reagans petitioned the city council to have the number changed to 668, perhaps after advice from Nancy's astrologer.