Not far from me is a small but tasteful cemetery that has been there for quite some time. It is beautiful in its simplicity and preternaturally quiet for something now embedded in the middle of the city. It's the Westwood Memorial miniscule in size but most interesting since it is what is known as an endowment park where people donate large amounts for its preservation.
Considering the money spent and the people buried there it is doubtful that at any time n the near future some group will decide to build a freeway through there. Nor will they build a high rise even though the tiny park is surrounded by them. Simple it is, but cheap it isn't, since even small placement of ashes starts around $20,000. There are quiet streams, old trees, and the entire park is accessorized by a tasteful landscape of flowers and shrubs. No Forest Lawn, is this.
There are burial plots and interment vaults, and there is one locked section designed like a library, where urns rest on glass shelving. There are sections marketed by a brass plate, with space allowing for little more than an urn or in some cases even a small vial of representative ashes. Some are marked individual and some collectively, where it is cheaper. The brass plates are smaller on the communal shelves.
Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau are buried there, forty yards or so from each other. Lemmon is alone, Matthau with his wife. Still, their burial in the same cemetery is perhaps the ultimate in a buddy-buddy production. Fanny Brice, Oscar Levant and Truman Capote share this small but exclusive piece of real estate with Armand Hammer and a few Civil War veterans who have been there since the park was first started.
Then there is the interment wall containing Marilyn Monroe. She rests at eye level in what is ultimately a twenty foot high open, courtyard structure. Unlike condos, interment becomes less expensive the higher up in the wall you are. Fresh flowers still adorn Marilyn's vase, which is a result of Joe DiMaggio's final wishes, since during his lifetime he had made sure fresh flowers were place there on a daily basis.
The vault's marble facing is covered by the lipstick traces from dozens, if not hundred of pairs of lips, some so faded they are barely visible. One is struck by the assortment of colors, with most replicating Marilyn's own color choices in the deep red variety. Little notes are stuck in the cracks around her vault. Clearly, it is prime real estate in a most exclusive setting.
Marilyn's year of birth is on the brass plate, June 1st, 1926, along with the year she died under mysterious circumstances, August 4th, 1962. In our collective minds we think of her death as recent, as we do of our other icons. But in fact, had she lived she would have been eighty years old, a Bonafide octogenarian. She would have been an old lady and hardly the sex symbol we yearn for in our hearts and minds.
Remember also that Marilyn was a size fourteen. Today in mainstream terms of being the sexual vixen it is a size four world. To quote the new film, "The Devil Wears Prada," a size six is the new twelve. I know we can argue about the significance of curves and the status of the Ruebenesque, in relation to the stick figures to which we are supposed to aspire. But whether you choose to eat or deny yourself the pleasure of calories and carbs, the fact remains that the models of today and our leading female actors are compelled to weigh in between a size "0" and "4."
But then there is Marilyn. She remains in our dreams if not the perfect woman then among a very small legion. In still being admired as one of the ultimate sex figures she has not only transcended her own death, but she has remained a classic in a most fickle world. She had meat on the bones. But she was so very sexy. She, like James Dean, will never age but always remain in her prime. We can never imagine Dean stooped over and struggling with a failing memory, and we can never imagine Marilyn becoming wrinkled, invisible and condemned to fade from our consciousness like many luminaries who lived in her time.
We see her still as the fascinating creature. She is still alluring and playful, the coy temptress with a remarkable sense of comic timing and the kind of wit that went with a brain we could have admired but chose to ignore. So in a country that deals awkwardly and even cruelly with its aged, Marilyn has endured by dying young.
So months from now, on another sultry afternoon, others will visit, even worship at her grave. They will find even fresher impressions of lipstick on her marble vault face, joining those that have been there for decades. Fresh flowers will spray from the vase and perhaps a note or two will be folded into the vault seam. They will think their thoughts and remember her movies, picturing in their minds what she looked like then, that for them is the same as how she looks today.
She is an icon, an international classic. And like the other classics who linger in our minds, be it James Dean or the Mona Lisa, she will never age another day. I guess death sometimes has its own rewards.
