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Visitors to Los Angeles may want to take the Grave Line before deciding on a hotel. Check in at the Regency Plaza, where Divine checked out. Or the Chateau Marmont, where John Belushi died of a drug overdose. Or the Beverly Hills, where Peter Finch "keeled over from a heart attack in the lobby." Or the Hollywood Knickerbocker, on whose roof Harry Houdini's widow held seances to reach her elusive husband. Or the squalid Highland Gardens. That's the place where Janis Joplin "landed bottoms up in her baby dolls."
Grave Line wrenches tears describing the last moments of Hollywood's great ladies, like actress Peg Entwistle, who earned lasting stardom diving from the 50-ft.-high H of the HOLLYWOOD sign. As the hearse passes an empty lot that once held the apartment house of Clara Blandick (Auntie Em in The Wizard of Oz), you learn that on Palm Sunday of her 80th year she attended church, went home and penned a note: "I am now about to make the great adventure . . . I pray the Lord my soul to take, amen." Then she pulled a plastic bag over her head and suffocated herself. The Grave guide notes: "We give Auntie Em credit for being L.A.'s first bag lady." Cheer up and swing past the Ravenswood Apartments. Mae West owned them and lived in the penthouse until age 88, when "God told her to come up and see him."
Smith, 36, had the hots for death even as a boy in Prairie Village, Kans. He warmly recalls his dying mother's last words to him: "She said, 'You're weird. You're very weird.' It was a wonderful send-off." A curious lad, Greg had heard that Walt Disney's body had been cryogenically preserved, and "when Disney's World on Ice came to town, I was hoping that they would push Uncle Walt out on a block of ice. Instead it was Goofy on skates." For odd jobs Greg baby-sat a unicorn, chauffeured the local whores, served as a paramedic. He attended -- what else? -- the Cypress College of Mortuary Science. "I have a lot of fears about living," Smith says, "but I have no fears about dying. After all, you're only alive for 70 years and you're dead for billions, so I don't know why everybody is hung up on dying. I can hardly wait."
Smith could hardly wait to come to Los Angeles, where he took 3-D photos of Marilyn Monroe's tombstone and located the grave site of third Stooge Curly Howard. He felt like Heinrich Schliemann at the dig of ancient Troy: "It's less of a thrill now, I must admit, but at the time I was vibrating." A true '80s entrepreneur, Smith built on the work of such fond scholars of grotesquerie as Kenneth Anger, Elliott Stein and John Waters, but with all Los Angeles as his theme park. "I pitched the idea to my dad," he recalls. "First he kind of blanched and reached for his nitroglycerin pills. Then he said, 'I'll give you the money if you don't drag my name into it.' I said, 'O.K., you've got a deal.' " Smith boned up on his death-defining research and bought the hearse back in Kansas, then drove it cross-country. One night he slept in it: "I thought, I must be the first person to wake up in a hearse."