Putting Concerns to Rest : Families Feel Secure About Graves at Hollywood Cemetery

Virginia Farha has no relatives in Carson’s Lincoln Memorial Park, but reading this week about the empty graves, trashed tombstones and missing money there worried her nonetheless.

Farha’s parents and nephew are buried among the celebrities at Lincoln’s more famous sister cemetery, Hollywood Memorial Park. The Valley Village woman and her grown daughter rushed to Hollywood Memorial on Friday morning to check the headstones of their loved ones and, after leaving pots of bright yellow chrysanthemums, went home relieved.

“I was concerned. I didn’t know if something was wrong here or not,” said Farha, whose father was buried in 1958 at Hollywood Memorial and whose mother was interred in 1971. “Then I thought, ‘Well, there are a lot of movie stars here, and they have a lot of money, so their families would raise holy heck.’ They wouldn’t dare.”

Her daughter, who declined to give her name, echoed a suspicion others have raised since problems at Lincoln Memorial surfaced.

“I’m wondering if it happened in Carson because it’s a minority area and they don’t have as much access to legal means,” she said. “When it first happened, I was thinking, ‘This wouldn’t happen in a Hollywood cemetery.’ ”

The Hollywood Cemetery Assn. owns Hollywood Memorial and the Carson cemetery, which is now the subject of two investigations. Officials at the Hollywood cemetery would not comment Friday.

“No one will speak to you. There is no statement from the cemetery,” said the receptionist, who refused to pass a message on to the director or give her name. “I have no name,” she said. “I’m nameless.”

Most mourners in the quiet palm-studded cemetery Friday morning echoed Farha’s sense of security about the safety of their loved ones in Hollywood Memorial. Some complained of intermittent vandalism or of the leaning markers in bumpy areas, but most said the resting place of movie legends Cecil B. DeMille, D.W. Griffith and Rudolph Valentino is well-run.

“Oh my God, that would never happen here,” Ismael Lopez cried upon learning of the scandal at Lincoln. “I hope they don’t try that on me.”

Lopez, 63, visits the grave of his wife, Zenaida, every day and spends weekends there. He cuts and waters the grass, and has planted a rose garden. He is buying 20 plots, at $1,600 each, not for the burial of relatives, but to give Zenaida more space.

Her grave marker, which he carved himself, says simply: “You’re my everything.”

“I’ve been changing this whole place, I’m planting flowers. . . . Now everybody’s putting something up,” Lopez said as he knelt over Zenaida, picking up stray rose petals. “Sometimes I just relax here. I have a lounge chair. Sometimes I take a nap. My friends come here and it’s cooler. My family comes, they bring me lunch. Sometimes I have a party here. I have 50 people, especially on her birthday.”

Lopez, who emigrated from the Philippines 13 years ago, has had his problems with the cemetery: people stole the long-burning candles from his wife’s shrine, and tombstones in other parts of the park were knocked down or broken. But when Lopez complained to the directors, they closed the back gate and the vandalism stopped.

“I don’t care what happens to my life since the time I lost her,” Lopez said of the woman he met at the age of 5 and was married to for 38 years. “I love her so much. I miss her so much. I’d give my life up for her.”

The cemetery was still Friday as Lopez tended his garden. There was a small funeral at 9:30 a.m., but as the mourners departed, the only sounds were the hum of the lawn mower snaking through the headstones and the rhythmic buzz of the rotating sprinklers.

Founded in 1899, the 57-acre memorial park has 77,000 graves, including those of Charlie Chaplin, gangster Bugsy Siegel and legendary cartoon voice Mel Blanc, whose epitaph says: “That’s All Folks.”

Many mourners wondered Friday how relatives with loved ones buried at Lincoln Memorial wouldn’t have noticed if grave markers had been removed or vandalized.

A man visiting his parents at Hollywood Memorial’s Jewish mausoleum was befuddled at the grim discovery earlier this week that at least a dozen compartments in the Carson mausoleum were empty.

“I would know because I would come here to visit my mother and father and the plaques would be gone,” he said as he stood under the stained glass of the mausoleum, preparing to say a prayer honoring the anniversary of his mother’s death. “Suppose they empty this one out and put someone else in there and put a new plaque on. I would know. It wouldn’t last five minutes.

“It would drive you out of your mind,” he said of the Lincoln Memorial scandal. “It’s horrible.”