A Dying Heritage

It was Wednesday. I was working day watch out of the newsroom when I got the call. (All right, so it was e-mail. This is the ‘90s.)

It seemed someone was selling the plundered ornaments of New Orleans cemeteries in the chichi decorator shops of Los Angeles.

My partner--Tom Bate. A guy from the Big Easy. He’s not my partner, actually; he’s the tipster who first spotted the merchandise, and it really scorched his etouffee. He may be an L.A. designer-hyphen-actor now, but when it came to this, he was still all Nawlins.

We headed west, in search of grave goods. “I feel like one of the Hardy boys,” he said, “and you’re Nancy Drew.”

It was misty, gray, gloomy--a perfect day to go hunting for hot crosses.

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The weirdest of scenes in “Easy Rider” had Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Karen Black acid-tripping among the marble mausoleums of a New Orleans necropolis.

The city has 31 historic cemeteries, each varied by race or religion or status. Tourists and historians adore them, for above-ground burial lent itself to a micro-architecture of death. Not for New Orleans the austere markers of Yankee graveyards; theirs are lavish expressions of grief and loss. Bronze maidens weep at the doors of tombs, marble mourning garlands drape stone sarcophagi, baroque wrought-iron crosses and ornate iron gates presage the steeples of Gaudi churches. They survived nearly two centuries of war and scrap-metal drives and cavorting hippies.

They may not survive Cemetery Chic.

Louise Fergusson, who runs Save Our Cemeteries, says New Orleans graveyards are being stripped. Metairie Cemetery had 15 or 20 thefts in a month. A man walking past Lafayette Cemetery interrupted two men hefting a stone angel over a 13-foot brick wall. Urns and vases and gates have been crowbarred loose and carted off from Odd Fellows Rest, and all but a few iron crosses in the oldest cemetery, St. Louis No. 1, have vanished, some of them sawed right off at the base.

Every week, fearfully, Fergusson visits her own family tomb, and “every week I wonder why the urn is still there. I guess it’s not pretty enough” to steal.

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Bate walked me through the first L.A. shop. The $650 cross he saw there last week had been sold. He pointed to a pair of huge, white-painted iron urns, $1,450 each. “These, definitely.” And a pair of rusty iron finials turned into lamps, $650 a pair. “And these, I think.”

“What’s the date on these?” he asked the clerk convincingly. “1850s, 1860s,” she said. “Some people really worry about the authenticity of pieces.”

It was the authenticity that disgusted Bate; he didn’t show it until we were out the door. “So, what’s sacred? Can conscience be relieved by a salesman saying, ‘It’s got a great patina’?”

A couple more shops, and then a bonanza:

White-painted Victorian cast-iron chairs and a bench. New Orleans families would set such pieces next to a tomb, so they could sit and contemplate all that proximate mortality in comfort. Cast into the bench ($1,650) was the name John M. Zurin. The chairs ($1,800 the pair) bore the names Chas. T. Vetter and Kimber Cleaver. “The Beaver’s grandfather,” the woman laughed. I laughed too.

In all likelihood, the objects were bought in good faith, in the belief that--as one clerk assured Bate--when Louisiana families abandon tombs, cemeteries auction off the movables. Absolutely not true, says Louise Fergusson. Not done.

Yet someone at the start of this food chain knew it was wrong. And if Angelenos who can afford such necro objets “knew that these crosses were important to the cemeteries in Louisiana,” Fergusson pleads, “they wouldn’t be so eager to buy them.”

Maybe, maybe not. This is not a city besotted with our own history. We make historic landmarks of coffee shops, then sell the sadly run-down Hollywood Memorial Park, where Cecil B. De Mille and Rudolph Valentino are buried, for less than what it costs to buy a house a few blocks away.

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Like Tom Bate--who spent time there “in my ‘Harold and Maude’ phase”--I love visiting cemeteries. The graveyards of Paris and St. Petersburg and even Cambria have it all over museums.

I phoned to dish this cemetery dirt with Anne Rice, who loves New Orleans and has spent “blood” money from her vampire bestsellers to preserve it. Alas, she was in Italy, which is no stranger to such pilferage; Christians paved the Appian Way with the tombstones of pagan Romans.

We Angelenos often arrive from elsewhere--Bate from Louisiana, I from Ohio. These memento mori are different. Yanked out by the roots, they are still lovely, but as dead as what they once hallowed. Hanging on a wall, set beside a swimming pool, they are no longer threads in a dense fabric of life and death, but merely this season’s decorator accessory.