Recent Taste of Controversy : Valhalla Is Home to Famous, Forgotten

Wrestler Gorgeous George is buried there, with a simple flat marker reading, “Love to Our Daddy, Gorgeous George, 1915-1963.”

Comedian Oliver Hardy, the portly half of the classic Laurel and Hardy comic team, is nearby at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park. “Oliver Hardy, 1892-1957, A Genius of Comedy. His talent brought joy and laughter to all the world,” his memorial plaque says.

They are among the celebrities, most of them with names remembered now only by a few, who are buried in the San Fernando Valley’s oldest cemetery, Valhalla Memorial Park in North Hollywood.

As cemeteries go, it is nothing like the nearby 400-acre Forest Lawn Memorial-Park in the Hollywood Hills, where such stars as actor Charles Laughton; Hardy’s sidekick, Stan Laurel, and comedians Buster Keaton and Freddie Prinze are among 67,000 people interred.

‘On Tourist Maps’

“It’s even on tourist maps,” Valhalla director Richard Steinmetz said of Forest Lawn, one of the most famous cemeteries in the country and Valhalla’s biggest competition.

But the smaller Valhalla, a former 63-acre ranch at Victory and Cahuenga boulevards, has a history of its own.

Valhalla, which takes its name from the palace of Odin, the Norse mythical god of death, was founded in 1923 by two Los Angeles financiers, John B. Osborne and C. C. Fitzpatrick.

Within a year, both men were indicted by a federal grand jury and charged with masterminding a scheme to defraud buyers by reselling cemetery plots. Some plots, the indictment charged, were sold as many as 16 times. Osborne and Fitzpatrick were alleged to have netted $3 million to $5 million from the scheme.

According to Steinmetz, that scheme and other run-ins with the law eventually prompted the state to force the two to sell Valhalla. The cemetery and mortuary were bought by Pierce Brothers in the mid-1940s.

Joe Albritton, former publisher of the defunct Washington Star, later bought Valhalla from Mark Pierce, although the Pierce Brothers sign remains atop the property.

Controversial Offer

Albritton, a millionaire Texas banker who owns six small newspapers in the Northeast, sold 20 acres of the property to private developers, who built condominiums that have a view of Valhalla over a brick wall.

The cemetery, which has 76,038 graves, landed in the middle of a controversy when its representatives agreed three years ago to inter in concrete vaults at no cost more than 16,500 aborted fetuses that were found in a container at the Woodland Hills home of a former medical laboratory operator.

Steinmetz said the cemetery consented to the arrangement because of its role as a community provider.

“The right-to-life groups came to us, and we said we wouldn’t endorse any political viewpoint but we thought that interring the bodies was a proper thing to do as a service,” he said.

Subsequent rulings by a state appellate court and the U.S. Supreme Court held that the fetuses could not be buried as humans, but ultimately a Superior Court judge ruled that the county could authorize burial as long as there was no religious ceremony. The fetuses were buried Oct. 6.

Valhalla, like many cemeteries, has changed with the times.

‘Learning to Change’

Because North Hollywood now has a large Latino population, the cemetery promotes itself through Spanish-language radio commercials. It also has yielded to the trend toward cremation, which two decades ago accounted for less than 1% of Valhalla’s business and now is about 16%, Steinmetz said.

“We said it never would be an acceptable way,” Steinmetz, a solemn man with fingers the size of cigar stubs, said of cremation. “We are learning to change as society changes.”

Like Forest Lawn, which pioneered such patriotic cemetery theme sections as the Court of Freedom, Valhalla in 1953 dedicated an area called Portal of the Folded Wings, a memorial to pilots and others connected with the aviation industry.

The memorial houses the remains of Jimmy Angel, discoverer of Angel Falls in Venezuela, the world’s tallest waterfall. Also buried there is Walter Brookins, who set a flying altitude record in 1910.

The rococo dome that shelters the memorial is directly under the flight path for Burbank Airport, with the attendant thunder of jets and the smell of diesel exhaust.

‘Soldier, Rest’

Among the monuments at Valhalla is a memorial to the 241 U.S. Marines killed on Oct. 23, 1983, in a terrorist attack in Beirut. The memorial, in an area reserved for burial of veterans, is distinctive for its traditional soldier’s grave marker--a vertical rifle with combat helmet atop--and a quote from Sir Walter Scott: “Soldier Rest! Thy warfare o’er, dream of fighting fields no more; sleep the sleep that knows not breaking, morn of toil, nor night of waking.”

Scattered throughout the flat, grassy cemetery are the graves of these actors:

Bea Benaderet, who played the mother in the television show “Petticoat Junction.”

Frankie Bailey, the film actress known as the “girl with the million-dollar legs.”

Lillian Rich, the dark-haired Cecille B. De Mille star who appeared in “The Golden Bed.”

Mae Murray, the 1920s film star whose trademark was frizzy hair and puckery lips.

Barton MacLane, the tough-talking villain who played opposite Humphrey Bogart in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

Some of the many actors who played supporting roles with Laurel and Hardy are also buried at Valhalla: Baldwin Cooke, who performed in vaudeville acts with Laurel; Mantan Moreland, who played the chauffeur in Charlie Chan films and starred in several films with the comedians, and Johnny Arthur, who played Darla’s father in the Little Rascals films and starred in films with the two-man team.

Fans Tend Graves

The Los Angeles chapter of the worldwide organization of Laurel and Hardy fans, called “Way Out West” after the title of one of the duo’s films in 1937, tends Hardy’s grave at Valhalla and Laurel’s at Forest Lawn.