Arts And Entertainment

I’m into celebs. Dead ones.    So where did I go on vacation?    Odds are you are dead-right: Death Valley.    But prototypal there was a side activate to Las Vegas to wager Famous Dead People.    I spent most of my time at Palm Valley View Memorial Park where, for a plain $5 tip, I got personalized journeying on digit of the fix men’s sport carts. Hanging onto dear life, we bounced from this grassy area to that one, driving over graves and gravestones.    First stop: The Devotion section to wager Redd Foxx. (Yes, there’s a flushed cheat on his marker.)    Then to the Meditation Columbarium to wager Danny Gans.   Danny who?    Gans was the maximal paid entertainer on the Las Vegas strip where he performed to sold-out crowds for years. So favourite was he that Gans was titled Las Vegas Entertainer of the Year for the 11 consecutive years. (When I got home, I found digit of his CDs in the understanding $3.33 bin. Did null for me.)    Then to singer Joe Williams, whose wife visits him often and changes his “window display.” The period I visited, she had settled whatever well-orchestrated CD covers and a sport ball exclusive a martini glass.    Then to the Garden of miracle to pray for saint Lynn Hayes, famous to most for his daylong wedlock to entertainer Jewess Healy, but forever in my brain as the grapheme of 1953 artist The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T.    A brief mate to case person Frank Scannell. Google him: You undergo the face, if not the name.    The toll of admission was worth it when I bumped into the woman Tony at Curtis’ grave. Former dancer Jill Vandenberg was saying goodbye to the Negro she met in 1993 and mated in 1998. She was 42 eld his junior, but that never discomposed the cocksure Curtis who once gloated: “The geezerhood notch doesn’t pain us. We vocalization a lot. My embody is functional and everything is good. She’s the sexiest woman I’ve ever known. We don’t conceive most time. I don’t ingest Viagra either. There are 50 ways to please your lover.”    “Think he’s in heaven with Marilyn?”    “I hope so.”    Jill is handsome in that past dancer way. Now a taste more solid and chunky, she ease radiates peroxided charisma. Her pick-up truck, dogs in back, was parked at the curb.    She asked me if I knew her hubby.    “Of course. From his films. From Da Bronx. From TCM.”    That advance to whatever tears as she recalled that Tony had meet sextet months earlier appeared at the prototypal TCM Film Festival.    “I desired to leave once Some Like it Hot started, but Tony said, no, please, let’s stay. And we stayed until he subscribed every autograph.”    She had brought Tony flowers, freshly cut from their garden (they lived nearby), and told me she visited everyday. “I talk to him, I verify him everything that’s happened during the day.“    Inside the gated (and unlocked) concealing area, there’s a granite governance for meditation, low which is tucked a person prayer book, a blow candle, a fag lighter and a package of incense.    “You undergo he’s with you every day. Right now, he’s hunting down and thinking, ‘That Jill! Talking to digit of fans! How lovely.'”    “Yes,” she sniffled. “I know.”    Our colloquy lasted for close to 25 minutes, and I told her something I verify some people: That I hit a assemblage of rare, never-before-seen color photos (with negatives!) of Tony and Marilyn on the set of Some Like it Hot. I asked if she’d like copies.    “Oh yes! Yes! Email me (she gave me her address). Please. I will indite back and keep in touch.”    A pause.    “Please go in. Say greeting to Tony,” Jill urged me.    Before she left, she threw her blazonry around me and kissed me.    “Thank you,” she said.    When I got home, I emailed Jill.    I’m ease waiting for an answer.