Cars Profaning Memorial Park, Suit Charges

Claiming she was promised a haven “as cloistered as the storied Shalimar,” a West Los Angeles woman filed a $10-million lawsuit Thursday against Paramount Pictures alleging that the studio has transformed historic Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery from a paradise into a parking lot.

The lawsuit filed by Gertrude G. Allison on behalf of 1,000 other plot owners claims that the idyllic resting spot of Rudolf Valentino, Tyrone Power and Cecil B. DeMille, among others, is being used as an overflow parking area for studio employees.

Allison, who buried her young son there in 1967 when he was electrocuted, said her every-other-day visits have been marred by “hundreds” of cars lining the driveways, courtesy of a purported contract with the studio for overflow parking.

Allison said she was promised the area would be a resting place “forever fortified and protected against profanation and prying eyes.”

A brochure for the decades-old facility, Hollywood’s most famous cemetery, promises that despite its location on busy Santa Monica Boulevard, “thanks to its high walls, dense foliage and iron gates, it is, so to speak, as remote and cloistered as the storied Shalimar.”

“You have a reasonable expectation when you put a loved one in a cemetery that someone is not going to rent the streets within the cemetery for the purpose of making money,” said Allison’s attorney, Richard Knickerbocker.

Paramount spokeswoman Deborah Rosen said she was unaware of any parking contract and could not comment on any lawsuits against the studio. Cemetery manager Jay Roth, also named in the suit, could not be reached for comment.