David Lynch’s Grave, Valentino’s Ghost

Who wouldn’t want to live on the fifth floor of Los Angeles’ new Gower Court building, an architectural landmark with one of the best views in town? Looking over a vast swath of the city, with the Hollywood sign in the distance, it has the ideal vista for anyone who would like to be part of showbiz history. There’s just one thing — only the deceased can stake out a premium spot on the Sky Terrace of this mausoleum, where crypt prices start at a cool million.

This real estate, right next door to Paramount Studios, wasn’t always so desirable. Before Tyler Cassity and co-owner Yogu Kanthiah took over in 1998, Hollywood Forever Cemetery — the final resting place of legendary cinematic figures including Rudolph Valentino, Judy Garland and John Huston — had fallen into disrepair.

“It had been padlocked twice, and it had lost its license to operate,” Cassity says. Since Cassity bought the place, though, Hollywood Forever has evolved into much more than a memorial site: It’s also a parklike expanse for a city that sorely needs green spaces, an animal sanctuary, a concert venue, a movie-screening spot and an outdoor yoga studio.

“A lot of the things I’ve enacted here, we’d never enact now. But there was a certain creative desperation that gave us some leeway to pay the bills and to figure this out,” he says.

Not only its president, Cassity is Hollywood Forever’s principal cheerleader and one of its regular yoga teachers (kundalini style, on Tuesdays at 9 a.m. on the lawn). With spiky blond hair and a deep repository of stories, he’s soft-spoken and careful with his words, as befits someone who deals frequently with the bereaved. Cassity, 55, explains that Hollywood Forever has always been a magnet for the famous. “We celebrate the celebrity,” he says.

But in recent years the cemetery has become particularly known for welcoming a certain type of star — one whose family doesn’t mind a loved one’s gravestone becoming a tourist attraction. That’s certainly true of David Lynch, whose headstone has been one of the most visited since being placed in April after the director’s death in January.

The modest memorial stone is engraved with the phrase “Night blooming jasmine,” which refers to a Lynch quote about Los Angeles from 2016: “On a summer’s night … if you smell that night-blooming jasmine, you can almost see Clark Gable or Gloria Swanson.”

Cassity bought the 62-acre property for just $375,000 two years short of the millennium after his father heard about the plight of the broken-down graveyard on “Entertainment Tonight.” For Cassity, turning the cemetery into an asset to the community has been a way to repair the family name, which was tarnished when his father, who died in 2020, and his brother Brent served jail time for fraud.

“I felt if I didn’t build this building, I would be like him,” Cassity says of the new mausoleum. “And if I did, I would have delivered to my co-workers and my community.”

The Gower mausoleum, with 20,000 cremation-urn niches (starting around $6000) and 7,000 crypts ($16,000 and up), will help fund running the historic 126-year-old site and ensure it remains a vital part of the city for generations to come.

Stars of the Golden Age

Originally called Hollywood Memorial Park or sometimes just Hollywood Cemetery, the cemetery was founded in 1899, before there were movies or movie stars. A Jewish section, Beth Olam, was added in the 1920s. A few years later, Paramount bought a swampy, unused part of the grounds, where RKO Pictures later stood. The cemetery and the adjacent studio have always had a close connection; Paramount stars like Douglas Fairbanks, Valentino and Tyrone Power found their final resting places there, and Cecil B. DeMille built himself an impressive marble tomb on the site.

For decades, it was one of the city’s preferred burial places for Golden Age stars like Adolphe Menjou, Marion Davies, Virginia Rappe, Paul Muni and Norma Talmadge. Jim Morrison is said to have sneaked onto the grounds for an acid trip. And in 1974, the crematorium had to be shut down after bricks began falling during Cass Elliot’s cremation. Then there was the time in 1986 when vandals broke into a crypt and stole the decomposing head of a woman, which was found under a car outside the grounds.

The cemetery was closed in the 1990s, after families complained that the owner, ex-con Jules Roth, neglected the graves and grounds.

But after Cassity took over, Hollywood Forever once again became the place to bury the famous. “If someone was in the film industry, they like to be with their peers,” he says. These days, stars and their families often select a grassy spot overlooking Sylvan Lake in the Garden of Legends.

Additions over the past two and a half decades include Paul Reubens (“He had been coming here for years, just enjoying the animals,” Cassity says), Burt Reynolds, Fay Wray, Anne Heche, Johnny Ramone and Dee Dee Ramone, Chris Cornell, Vampira, Yma Sumac, Holly Woodlawn, Tony Scott, “Rust” cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and writers Jonathan Gold and Eve Babitz.

“Celebrity in this cemetery in particular happens often when someone dies young,” Cassity notes. Some families, such as “Star Trek” actor Anton Yelchin’s, erect elaborate statues of their loved ones (starting at $95,000). Yelchin’s family found Hollywood Forever when other local memorial parks wouldn’t allow a life-size bronze figure of the young actor. Cassity says Yelchin’s parents continue to visit nearly every day. “I’ve never encountered a vigil like theirs,” he observes somberly.

It’s not unusual for those who have already purchased their burial sites to frequently visit their eventual resting place. There’s journalist Mike Szymanski, whose memorial bench is adorned with statues of his dachshunds, and Tom McLoughlin, director of “Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives,” who wrote the movie’s screenplay on a bench at the cemetery, scribbling in a mausoleum on rainy days. “When I turned 60, my kids and ex-wife threw me a party at Hollywood Forever because that’s where I shot my first movie,” McLoughlin says.

After the party, he bought himself a crypt just a few feet from Peter Lorre’s. “I visit it quite a bit. Sometimes I bring my harmonica and play,” says McLoughlin, who for the past 12 years has celebrated his birthday in front of his crypt. The director sees his relationship with the cemetery as a sort of “psychic experiment,” laying the groundwork for possible contact from beyond the grave. He especially likes the idea of movies being screened on the wall outside his crypt.

Johnny Ramone’s widow, Linda, also arranges memorial events every year, and is known as the queen of the cemetery for her consistent presence.

It’s not all punk rockers and cult actors though. The majority of the sections, including a Thai area and Russian and Armenian enclaves, serve the diverse surrounding community and all its cultural traditions.

“If you believe in something and you live nearby, we probably know how to serve your beliefs,” says Cassity. “We serve the real Hollywood — the people who actually live here — and then we serve those who want to be buried with Judy Garland,” he adds.

When Garland died in 1969, she was buried in New York, but her children had her moved to a Hollywood Forever crypt in 2017 so they could eventually be buried near her — though it’s not known if Liza Minnelli is part of that plan. A niche in the Judy Garland pavilion starts at $13,200.

Cat Ladies and Sid & Nancy the Peacocks

Quite a few of Hollywood’s permanent residents are actually still alive: the animals. Smack in the middle of L.A.’s urban grit, Hollywood Forever has long been a refuge for wildlife.

There were peacocks back in the 1950s, when DeMille “would come and take lunch breaks and sit and look at his spot,” says Cassity. DeMille loved to incorporate feathers into his film’s costumes, and Cassity says that the late casting director and Hollywood historian Marvin Paige told him some of the plumes used in the “Ten Commandments” costumes were collected by DeMille on his lunchtime strolls.

When Cassity took over, bringing back the long-gone peacocks seemed only natural, so his assistant bought several at a swap meet. “She got two white ones and three blue ones. The white ones were Sid and Nancy,” recalls Cassity. “One of the blue ones killed Sid and then mated with Nancy.”

Now the peafowl number more than 50, and funeral coordinator and embalmer Eddie Martinez is in charge of their care. The peacocks roam freely, though they like to hang out in the back lot where the headstone engravers work, and their cacophonous honking can be heard across the grounds. They seem to coexist relatively peacefully with the ducks, geese, swans and turtles that live in the lake.

Then there are the cats. Around 50 semi-feral ones live along the north wall, cared for by Michelene Cherie, who started as a volunteer before being hired by the cemetery after what Cassity calls the “Cat Lady Wars” began. “There have always been cats, and there’s always been cat ladies,” he says. “Being a cat lover, I’ve always gotten along with the cat ladies, until the cat ladies all started to fight. They were territorial about who was feeding them; they were insulting each other. About five years ago, the Cat Lady Wars started, so we finally just hired a cat lady.”

Cherie has worked for years to trap and neuter the cats, whose numbers are down from a high of 80-plus when she came on. Cassity’s own black cat, Nina Simone, was dumped at the cemetery before he rescued her, and cats that are abandoned there are sometimes offered for rescue on Hollywood Forever’s Instagram. Proceeds from the yoga classes help pay for the animals’ food and vet bills.

“We try to be present — not just in sad ways, but in other parts of people’s lives,” Cassity says. Among other events, he’s referring to Cinespia, the outdoor screening series that started in 2002 to help pay the cemetery’s hefty water bill.

Now Cinespia attracts thousands of moviegoers on summer evenings, who lug lawn chairs, blankets and picnic baskets for one of the city’s most popular alfresco activities. The May 31 memorial screening of “Blue Velvet” played to a sold-out crowd, who were eager to commune with both the film and the filmmaker — or at least his ashes. Fourth of July weekend includes “Top Gun” with fireworks on the holiday, and more fireworks for “La La Land” the next night. Other July screenings include “It” and “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.”

Just as the Cinespia season wraps up, it’s time for Day of the Dead. On Nov. 1, one of the largest Dia de los Muertos celebrations in the country will offer multiple performance stages and food vendors from some of the city’s best Mexican restaurants.

Music is also a big part of the programming, either in the 1927 Masonic Lodge or on the lawn. Past performers have included indie artists Father John Misty and Flaming Lips. (For a Bon Iver set in 2009, concertgoers slept in the cemetery and awoke to the band playing at sunrise.) Natalie Bergman will be there on July 25.

Who are the most famous ghosts at Hollywood Forever? With so many notable souls, it’s hard to pick just one but Valentino is probably the most commonly referenced, says Cassity, “He was said to be moving back and forth” between life and death.

“There have been times when I have been told certain things that that have made me realize that there is another side here,” Cassity admits.

But this year, he is focused on securing the cemetery’s future through the new mausoleum, with its arresting Frank Lloyd Wright-influenced design from Lehrer Architects. Two more new mausoleum buildings will eventually join it on the cemetery’s south side.

“I’m just so pleased by that building, not only because it doubles the history of the cemetery going forward, but basically when it’s more than half-full, it will make sure that the endowment here is more than sufficient, so this will be cared for like a pristine museum,” says Cassity.

With such a full schedule of events, the dead might not be getting much rest. But diversification is the way to survive these days – and a way to make sure the cemetery never faces another Hollywood ending.