And Now, Hollywood Babble-On

By RICHARD CORLISS Reported Denise Worrell/Los Angeles

Reader, beware. This article is rated PG: Pretty Ghoulish. Or, as Bette Davis' recorded voice advises at the beginning of each Grave Line Tour, "Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy night!"

The seven passengers have paid $25 each to pile into a 1969 Cadillac hearse outside Hollywood's Chinese Theater and begin a 2 1/2-hour excursion into "the deathstyles of the rich and famous." As the brochure promises, Grave Line "takes you back through time to the tawdry, twisted, titillating tales of Tinseltown like no other tour service dares! You'll see Hollywood's Babylon at its most unflattering angle! The sizzling scandals, jilted romances, real murder scenes, hottest suicide spots, hospitals of horizontal dismissals and the churches of famous funerals!"

O.K., why not? At the fag end of an American retro-decade that filches its economic policies from the 1920s, its deco furniture from the '30s, its favorite movies from the '40s, its short haircuts from the '50s, its dirty- dancing music from the '60s and its galloping egotism from the '70s, why shouldn't the flashiest tour in Los Angeles mix camp nostalgia with giddy grave robbing? And why shouldn't a necromantic like Greg Smith, Grave Line's ! "director of undertakings" and occasional tour guide, make some clean money washing his Forest Lawndry in public? Grave Line is a haunt and a howl for children of all ages and no taste. "It's like being in the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland," gushes Beth Arrowsmith, a passenger on today's field trip. It's educational as well. "When you're considering real estate," opines stockbroker Kimberly Ross, "it's nice to know this stuff."

You bet, Kimberly. Before you close a deal on that two-story house near the Rudolph Valentino mansion on Bella Drive, you should know that this was where Sharon Tate and four others were murdered by Manson's minions. And if you're thinking of renting an apartment in that tan building on Shoreham Drive, consider the effect on property values of Diane Linkletter's 1969 suicide leap from the sixth floor after a bad LSD trip. Your friendly Realtor might not mention that the brown house on Benedict Canyon Drive was the spot where George Reeves, TV's Superman, "fired a speeding bullet into his brain." Or that the large house with the armor-plated front door was Bugsy Siegel's place, where the gangster died in a hail of gunfire.

Grave Line does not neglect the stately homes of more traditional Hollywood sight-sees. The hearse cruises past Jayne Mansfield's "pink palace," the one with the heart-shaped swimming pool, where the cantilevered comedian dwelt at the time she literally lost her head in a car crash. It decelerates outside Elizabeth Taylor's current home, which belonged to Frank Sinatra when his son was kidnaped and held for $240,000 ransom. It motors around the corner, past Ronald and Nancy Reagan's retirement villa. The original address was 666 St. Cloud Street, but because 666 is the number of the Antichrist, the Reagans petitioned the city council to have the number changed to 668, perhaps after advice from Nancy's astrologer.

Visitors to Los Angeles may want to take the Grave Line before deciding on a hotel. Check in at the Regency Plaza, where Divine checked out. Or the Chateau Marmont, where John Belushi died of a drug overdose. Or the Beverly Hills, where Peter Finch "keeled over from a heart attack in the lobby." Or the Hollywood Knickerbocker, on whose roof Harry Houdini's widow held seances to reach her elusive husband. Or the squalid Highland Gardens. That's the place where Janis Joplin "landed bottoms up in her baby dolls."

Grave Line wrenches tears describing the last moments of Hollywood's great ladies, like actress Peg Entwistle, who earned lasting stardom diving from the 50-ft.-high H of the HOLLYWOOD sign. As the hearse passes an empty lot that once held the apartment house of Clara Blandick (Auntie Em in The Wizard of Oz), you learn that on Palm Sunday of her 80th year she attended church, went home and penned a note: "I am now about to make the great adventure . . . I pray the Lord my soul to take, amen." Then she pulled a plastic bag over her head and suffocated herself. The Grave guide notes: "We give Auntie Em credit for being L.A.'s first bag lady." Cheer up and swing past the Ravenswood Apartments. Mae West owned them and lived in the penthouse until age 88, when "God told her to come up and see him."

Smith, 36, had the hots for death even as a boy in Prairie Village, Kans. He warmly recalls his dying mother's last words to him: "She said, 'You're weird. You're very weird.' It was a wonderful send-off." A curious lad, Greg had heard that Walt Disney's body had been cryogenically preserved, and "when Disney's World on Ice came to town, I was hoping that they would push Uncle Walt out on a block of ice. Instead it was Goofy on skates." For odd jobs Greg baby-sat a unicorn, chauffeured the local whores, served as a paramedic. He attended -- what else? -- the Cypress College of Mortuary Science. "I have a lot of fears about living," Smith says, "but I have no fears about dying. After all, you're only alive for 70 years and you're dead for billions, so I don't know why everybody is hung up on dying. I can hardly wait."

Smith could hardly wait to come to Los Angeles, where he took 3-D photos of Marilyn Monroe's tombstone and located the grave site of third Stooge Curly Howard. He felt like Heinrich Schliemann at the dig of ancient Troy: "It's less of a thrill now, I must admit, but at the time I was vibrating." A true '80s entrepreneur, Smith built on the work of such fond scholars of grotesquerie as Kenneth Anger, Elliott Stein and John Waters, but with all Los Angeles as his theme park. "I pitched the idea to my dad," he recalls. "First he kind of blanched and reached for his nitroglycerin pills. Then he said, 'I'll give you the money if you don't drag my name into it.' I said, 'O.K., you've got a deal.' " Smith boned up on his death-defining research and bought the hearse back in Kansas, then drove it cross-country. One night he slept in it: "I thought, I must be the first person to wake up in a hearse."

These days they line up to ride in Smith's Caddy crypt. They weave down Benedict Canyon Drive, tracing the path Richard Dreyfuss took on Oct. 10, 1982, when he hit a palm tree and flipped over his Mercedes, after which he pleaded guilty to cocaine possession. They hear the strains of Dead Man's Curve as they reach the intersection where Jan Berry, of the pop duo Jan and Dean, crashed his sports car in April 1966 and was partly paralyzed. They trace the route Montgomery Clift took the night of May 13, 1956, when he lost control of his car and slammed into a telephone pole at the bottom of the hill. The plastic surgery he endured never restored that beautiful face.

Yet Smith sees beauty in the Hollywood bestiary he has compiled. "Everybody says to me, 'Isn't it a morbid job?' and I think, God, no, working in a bank would be a morbid job. That would be death to my soul." This spring he will open a Hollywood shop to sell audio- and videotapes, Xeroxes of celebrity death certificates, T-shirts and mugs. "It's illegal," he says, "but I'd love to sell 5-lb. packets of celebrity trash. I think they'd make great gifts."

Is this marketing of death and detritus the ultimate in gruesome groupiedom? Or is it just another clue to America's fascination with its own decayed glamour? If Elvis can survive beyond the grave, why can't Greg Smith thrive in it? As he says, "The only certain things are death and taxes -- and nobody wants to see where the stars paid their taxes."

Anyway, it's a living.