John Wayne (a.k.a. Marion Robert Morrison), was born May 26, 1907, in Winterset, Iowa, and died June 11, 1979, in Los Angeles, California, of respiratory arrest brought on by gastric cancer.

Marilyn Monroe died of acute barbituate poisoning, a probably suicide, and is entombed at Westwood Memorial Park.

John Belushi's father was from Albania, his mother from Ohio.  He was born in Illinois, died in a hotel on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and is buried in Abel's Hill Cemetery in Chilmark, Massachusetts.

You don't need to know all this.  Maybe you don't want to know all this.  But thanks to Michael Steen, superintendent of Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica, California, you can know all of this.  And no matter how immune you may think yourself to celebrity trivia, reading "Celebrity Death Certificates" is a addictive as eating Lay's potato chips.

After you've noted that Jack Benny worked as an actor for 65 years, you have to see how this compares to Milton Berle: 88 years.  Wow, that's got to be the record...unless...George Burns...omigod!   He died at 100, having worked as an actor for 95 years!  Hmmmm...wonder how Mae West's career stacks up against other men?  (Talk about a workaholic: West worked 86 of her 87 years!)

You get the picture.  And soon, you can get the book, from the publisher, McFarland & Co., Inc., (www.mcfarlandpub.com), from online bookseller Amazon.com or from Steen, who will have some on hand at the ICFA Small Cemetery & Funeral Management Conference, September 18-20 in Santa Monica, for which he is the program chair.

The 208-page, softcover book includes 170 celebrity death certificates spanning every Hollywood era.  To select an example at random, look down the table of contents, an alphabetical list of the celebrities included, and you'll find River Phoenix (1970-1993), Mary Pickford (1984-1979) and Freddie Printz (1954-1977). Brief biographical notes are included for each star.

The certificates, of course, are not all exactly the same in form and content, since they were not all filed in the same place, but most include the same basic information.  As the publisher says, each certificate "encapsulates a person's life story on one page."

Before coming to Woodlawn, Santa Monica's municipal cemetery, Steen worked at Pierce Brothers Westwood Memorial Park.  In 1989, the publisher notes, "Gentleman's Quarterly called Mr. Steen the 'mortician to the stars.'"

 
Copyright © 2004 International Cemetery & Funeral Management Magazine