The Missing Star : Memorial: Plaque honoring late actor Don DeFore was removed from cemetery rosebush to protect garden, raising fears it had been stolen. The granite marker is back in place--but only for a while.

Thorny, star of the rose garden, is back among the thorns in Westwood Village--at least for now.

But it was a close call for the five-pointed granite plaque that hangs from a rosebush in Westwood Village Memorial Park as a tribute to the late actor Don DeFore.

DeFore, famed for his role as jovial next-door neighbor Thorny Thornberry in “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” died 19 months ago. His family honored him soon afterward by attaching the engraved, half-foot star to a rose branch where his ashes are scattered.

The tiny rose garden near Wilshire Boulevard is an unusual place. Its bushes have become festooned since the 1960s with nearly 300 brass plaques listing names of those whose ashes have been spread nearby.

When gardeners pruned the roses this year, however, they discovered that the garden had grown too popular. Brass tablets and their chains were caught in the sticky boughs. People were beginning to place photographs and other objects among the blooms. Don DeFore’s hefty granite star was threatening to break a branch.

“It was getting out of hand,” recalls cemetery manager Barbara Parker, who ordered that the bush memorial be replaced with a more traditional concrete-and-brass monument--one suitable for name inscriptions that would sell for $156 each.

Cemetery workers tried to inform as many families as they could about the change. But they missed Marion DeFore. And when she discovered on Father’s Day that her husband’s star was missing, she feared the worst.

“I think it’s been stolen,” said the 77-year-old Brentwood resident, a Westside real estate agent, after futilely seeking information from cemetery workers about the star.

But Parker found it tucked away the other day in an envelope at the cemetery office.

She returned it to DeFore and told her the star can be rehung on the rosebush through the end of the year. After that, though, it will have to go. So will all of the other small brass tablets that the cemetery has allowed to be rehung in the garden.

DeFore explained that her husband’s star was custom-made to resemble his star on Hollywood Boulevard. Don DeFore was one of the first actors to be honored on the boulevard’s Walk of Fame.

In fact, she told Parker, her husband once worked with the cemetery’s most famous personality: Marilyn Monroe. “I have a picture of the two of them together,” DeFore explained.

The cemetery manager brightened. The cemetery has a room containing glass-enclosed niches a few steps from Monroe’s crypt, she said. Perhaps DeFore would like to purchase one of those for about $2,000 and display the star there?

“You could put the picture of Marilyn and your husband next to it,” Parker suggested.

No thanks, replied DeFore.

Back at the rosebush, DeFore carefully returned her husband’s star to its branch. Thorny would be pleased, she decided.

The man who was America’s favorite next-door neighbor had a great sense of humor, she said. “He’s probably up there laughing.”