Added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 14, 1999

At the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, you can find the final resting places for many of the most significant figures in LA and Hollywood history. All-time great entertainers are buried here, like Judy Garland, Cecil B. DeMille, Rudolph Valentino, Marion Davies, Mickey Rooney and Mel Blanc. The founders of Hollywood, Harvey & Daeida Wilcox, are interred in neighboring crypts; the first two publishers of the LA Times and the founder of the LA Phil both have monumental memorials. You can pay your respects at the graves of heroes (Jonathan Gold) and villains (Bugsy Siegel), or visit the cenotaphs of Hattie McDaniel, Jayne Mansfield, Johnny Ramone and Toto (the dog, not the band – they’re still alive). 

Yes, this cemetery is a who’s who of dead people – plus tens of thousands of non-famous folks who are laid to rest here, ~90,000 burials in all as of early 2022. And yet the significance of Hollywood Forever goes way beyond the people that are interred in its grassy grounds, and marble mausoleums.

When it was built in 1899, Hollywood Forever was simply called the Hollywood Cemetery. At the time, Hollywood was just 12 years old, a patchwork of citrus groves and bean fields, with a population of around 500 people. The town wasn’t incorporated as a city yet, and was still 11 years away from becoming a part of Los Angeles. 

The Cemetery Gates

The land the cemetery occupies had been owned by Mary Gower, one of Hollywood’s early residents, and its first school teacher. Gower had a huge homestead, and sold 60 acres to a Nebraska businessman named F.W. Samuelson, who set up the Hollywood Cemetery Association and purchased an additional 40 acres from Gower. The Assocation’s board of trustees included eight movers and shakers in LA business circles, including Homer Laughlin and Isaac Van Nuys – in fact the Gowers used to thresh wheat on the San Fernando Valley ranch owned by Van Nuys’s father-in-law, Isaac Lankershim. Mary Gower and her family are buried at Hollywood Forever, and their name is immortalized in a major street that runs down the west side of the cemetery. (Fun fact: photographer CC Pierce, one of the most prolific photographers of turn-of-the-century Los Angeles, was married to one of the Gowers’ daughters for over 50 years. He’s also buried at Hollywood Forever.)

The birth of the Hollywood Cemetery was a difficult one. The locals vehemently opposed its construction, complaining to the city council that it would bring morbid vibes to their growing neighborhood, and potentially lower their property values. In mid-1899 a case was brought by LA County against the Hollywood Cemetery Association, contending that they had never secured the consent of the Board of Supervisors to build a burial ground there, as required by a local ordinance. The Cemetery Association lost that case, but they appealed to the California Supreme Court, who reversed the decision and let them proceed. 

In 1901, the first Hollywood Cemetery burial took place for Highland Mary Price, the wife of a Hollywood blacksmith (and by some accounts, the namesake of Highland Avenue). The following year, they built a solid granite chapel and an adjoining belltower in the center of the grounds (both have been demolished). Also in 1902, Griffith J. Griffith paid $6000 for the cemetery’s first obelisk: a 40-foot memorial erected for himself, just a year before he shot his wife in the face, and 17 years before he died of liver failure.

A New Model of Death

Early on, the Hollywood Cemetery Association assuaged the disgruntled locals by selling them on the idea of a brand new kind of burial ground. This wouldn’t be like the grim, unkempt church cemeteries they were used to from back east, with decaying tombstones sticking up at odd angles. No, this would be a lawn park, with expansive grass lawns, lakes and natural features. Grave markers and monuments would be low, often flush to the ground; what above-ground crypts there were would be made of granite or marble, in age-old classical revival styles. The idea was to inspire reflection, not to freak you out. 

All of this reflected a new attitude towards death and cemeteries coming into vogue around the turn of the 20th century. The idea was that graveyards should be a place for the living as much as the dead, and offer space for mourning but also serenity. It is surprisingly calm at Hollywood Forever, given that it’s right in the middle of a densely urban part of LA.

The Hollywood Cemetery was one of the first lawn parks in this new style on the west coast, and its innovation has continued throughout its existence. A crematorium was first planned in 1909, very early on for that method of burial, even before cremation was first established as a workable burial method by the Cremation Association of America. Once again the public protested, led by former US Senator Cornelius Cole. This time they successfully delayed the opening of the crematorium (along with a columbarium to house urns) until January 1928. By that time Senator Cole had died, and was buried at the Hollywood Cemetery. 

Even the marketing efforts for this cemetery were ahead of their time. In 1924, they hired professional cinematographers to make a promotional video – IN COLOR, years before it was common in film – that was shown at funeral director conventions around the country.

The Hollywood Connection

We’ve seen how Hollywood Forever was intertwined with the growth of Hollywood as a region. It also played into the growth of the Hollywood film industry. An early silent film purveyor called Paralta Plays, Inc. bought 24 acres of unused land from the cemetery in 1917, later expanded by one of its executives, Robert Brunton. In 1920 an import-export company called Robertson-Cole got into the film business, and purchased another block of land south of the cemetery for their new FBO Pictures Corp., which later became RKO Pictures.

But Hollywood Forever’s legacy is most closely intertwined with Paramount, its present-day neighbor to the south. The same year that the cemetery interred its first body, in 1901, a humble barn was built by a gentleman farmer named Colonel Robert Northam, just a few blocks away at Selma and Vine (see visit #174 for the history of the barn). In 1913 that barn was purchased by director Cecil B. DeMille and producer Jesse Lasky, who created the very first Hollywood feature-length film there: The Squaw Man. 

By the mid-1920s, DeMille and Lasky’s company, Famous Players-Lasky, was in search of a larger lot. They bought the former Paralta/Brunton Studios property (called United Studios at the time) and moved their operations (including the barn) to the new site. Their company was soon renamed Paramount Pictures. DeMille and Lasky died in the late 1950s and are both buried at Hollywood Forever, just over the wall where they spent decades of their working lives.

The 1920s and early ‘30s were boom years for Hollywood, and for the cemetery too. It expanded and fancified, and developed many of the most recognizable structures that we see today. Here’s a quick rundown:

• 1920: Architect Robert Farquhar designs the neoclassical memorial for industrialist/philanthropist William Clark Jr. and his family, located in the middle of the manmade Sylvan Lake. The memorial took years to complete because of annual quarrying limits for the Italian carrara marble used for the interior.

• 1922: The glorious Hollywood Cathedral Mausoleum, designed by Marston & Van Pelt (they would later do the Grace Nicholson Building in Pasadena), is completed. Rudolph Valentino, the Wilcox/Beveridges (early boosters of Hollywood), Micky Rooney, Peter Lorre and more are interred in its walls.

• 1925: The entrance on Santa Monica Boulevard is expanded with a new three-story bell tower, housing the Eliza Otis Memorial Chimes that were moved from the sagging old tower (now demolished). Each bell was inscribed with poetry written by Ms. Otis, a journalist and co-owner of the Los Angeles Times along with her husband, Harrison Gray Otis.
• 1928: The crematorium, columbarium and adjoining chapel are finished.

• 1930: Abbey of the Psalms Mausoleum and Beth Olam (a Jewish mausoleum) open.

• 1932: The firm of Morgan, Walls and Clements designs a new Italian renaissance-style building for the east side of the Santa Monica entrance, used as a meeting place for fraternal, civic and cultural societies. Today it houses the mortuary offices downstairs; concerts are hosted upstairs at the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever.

• 1939: Memorial constructed for Douglas Fairbanks in monumental Roman style, complete with a marble sarcophagus and reflecting pool

A Half Century of Decline

In the ’30s, an ownership transfer yielded some unpromising decisions for the cemetery. After trolley passengers complained of having to look at tombstones on their morning commute, a wall was erected on the Santa Monica Boulevard side, stretching from Gower to Van Ness. To pay for the wall, the new owner tried to sell a strip of land outside to unrelated businesses – but the zoning change was never approved, so the deal fell through. 

And then came Jules Roth, the man who ground the cemetery’s decades-long growth to a halt after acquiring it in 1939. Roth’s backstory is too long and tawdry to tell in full here – get the juicy details in this Tablet piece, or read a whole book about it by Jules Tygiel. Suffice it to say, Roth was a rich career criminal who spent years swindling investors out of cash via a shady petroleum company back in the oil-mad 1920s. After his economic empire collapsed, Roth fled to Canada to escape the feds, was eventually arrested in New York and extradited back to Los Angeles, where he was sentenced to prison at San Quentin. 

After getting out on parole in 1937, Roth started purchasing stock in the cemetery from a number of unhappy stockholders, ostensibly because his parents were buried there. Within two years Roth effectively owned the cemetery, and he gave it a new name: Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery. Any hopes that he had become a more honorable businessman while in prison were soon dashed. He stole money from the cemetery’s endowment fund to pay for luxury goods. He closed the grounds to most racial minorities, even refusing the prominent Black actress Hattie McDaniel’s request to be buried there. During the McCarthy era, he told an employee – nicknamed “Operative 16” – to submit secret reports on communist activity among the cemetery staff. He even bought a yacht as a tax writeoff, explaining that it would be used for scattering ashes at sea, but used it mostly to entertain a parade of girlfriends. After Roth died, urns were found in his office, containing ashes that were never scattered. 

As you can imagine, Roth didn’t have the general maintenance of the cemetery at the top of his priority list. Under his 50+ year watch, crypts and headstones crumbled, lawns went untended, vandals ran amok and water poured through the stained glass of the Jewish mausoleum. The crematory had to shut down in 1974 due to its horrid state of disrepair. Cass Elliot, of the Mamas and the Papas, was the last person cremated at Hollywood Memorial Park, and the grounds supervisor at the time said that bricks were falling in around her remains as her body was turned to ash. 

All of this was bad for business. In 1987, the descendants of makeup impresario Max Factor moved his remains elsewhere due to their displeasure with how the cemetery was run. A Los Angeles Times article from 1988 indicates that California Cemetery Board officials received more annual complaints about the Hollywood Memorial Park than any other cemetery in the state.

In 1984 Roth was forced to sell off one of the northern corners of the property along Santa Monica Boulevard to settle some tax woes – it’s now a strip mall filled with auto repair shops. The 1980s also witnessed a growing number of Armenian and Russian families burying their loved ones at the cemetery, often with the deceased’s face carved into the grave marker. But the revenue wasn’t enough for the cemetery to remain solvent. By the 1990s, Hollywood Memorial Park was making more money DISinterring bodies than interring them. By then, California had revoked the cemetery’s license to sell its remaining burial plots, so any new burials occurred in subdivided portions of existing plots.

Death and Rebirth

Jules Roth died on January 4, 1998, and was buried near his parents in the Hollywood Cathedral Mausoleum. By that time the cemetery had gone bankrupt. Two potential buyers had made offers – both under $400,000, millions less than the cemetery was worth – but reneged after realizing what it would cost to bring it back to its former luster.  

Then in April of 1998, a successful bid of $375,000 came through from Tyler and Brent Cassity, part of a family dynasty that owned 13 funeral homes and three cemeteries in St. Louis. The Cassitys renamed the cemetery Hollywood Forever, and began pouring millions into restoring buildings throughout the property that had been damaged, whether by earthquake or neglect. They even got the crematory back up and running. 

In addition to returning the grounds to the well-kept serenity that it was known for, the Cassitys have done a lot of work turning Hollywood Forever into a cultural center. Outdoor Cinespia movie screenings bring thousands to the lawn behind the Douglas Fairbanks memorial. The Masonic Lodge hosts a carefully curated lineup of musical acts, and since 2002 they’ve offered regular tours of the cemetery, led by the supernaturally knowledgeable Karie Bible. She’s often accompanied by one of the cemetery’s feral (but friendly!) cats, just part of the in-house menagerie that also includes ducks, geese and various peafowl.

The Cassitys have also had their fair share of legal issues. Back in 2013, Brent Cassity and his father Doug were indicted for fraud and money laundering, for spending money that their clients had set aside for prearranged funerals. Brent went to prison for five years, wrote a memoir and now does consulting and public speaking gigs about his experiences. Doug was sentenced to nine years, but was let out in early 2020 under a federal program to stop the spread of coronavirus in prisons. He died of natural causes in June of that year, and is now buried at Hollywood Forever. Tyler Cassity was never implicated in the scheme, and as far as I can tell he’s the only family member actively involved in the day-to-day operations of Hollywood Forever. 

Under its current ownership, Hollywood Forever has embraced a more inclusive outlook than during the Jules Roth days. The annual Día de los Muertos celebration, now expanded to two festivals (Día y Noche de los Muertos), is one of the biggest in the country. There is a garden dedicated to Buddhist burials, filled with east Asian religious statuary. There are mixed-race singing cowboys, gay couples and trans icons buried here. And they even righted a historical wrong, by offering to disinter Hattie McDaniel’s remains and move them to Hollywood Forever, at no cost to her family. McDaniel’s family declined, but Hollywood Forever did dedicate a cenotaph to her in a choice location, just south of the lake.

It’s nice to see that the cemetery’s owners have continued the tradition of innovation that was a hallmark of Hollywood Forever in its early years. As of late 2023, construction is nearly complete on a brand new vertical mausoleum designed by Lehrer Architects, said to be one of the tallest in the world. Once open it should expand the life of this place of death for decades to come.

My undying gratitude goes to Karie Bible and Allan Ellenberger, whose expertise has shaped my understanding of Hollywood Forever.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ Bishop, Becky: Hollywood Forever’s NRHP nomination form

+ CemeteryTour.com

+ Ellenberger, Allan: The Cemetery of the Immortals: a History of Hollywood Forever (Facebook page)

+ Goldstein, Stan: “Hooray for Hollywood” (American Cemetery & Cremation, September 1, 2023)

+ HollywoodForever.com 

+ Fluellen, Micah: “How Hollywood’s final resting place found life in death” (@latimes.404 on Instagram, October 20, 2023)

+ Kantor, Loren: “The Strange History of Hollywood Forever Cemetery” (Splice Today: September 20, 2017)

+ Kines, Mark Tapio: “Gower Street” (LAStreetNames.com)

+ Meares, Hadley: “Rock ’n’ roll forever” (Curbed LA, October 27, 2017)

+ Pool, Bob: “Sale Offers New Life for Cemetery of the Stars” (Los Angeles Times, December 11, 1997)

+ Russell, Ron: “Splendor Fades at Final Resting Place of Famous, Almost Famous (Los Angeles Times, July 3, 1988)

+ Silverman, Jacob: Burial Plots (Tablet, September 22, 2011)

+ Spindler, Amy M.: “A resting place to die for?” (New York Times, November 15, 1998 – via ProQuest)

+ “THE CEMETERY FIGHT.: Motion to Argue in Bank Before the Supreme Court” (Los Angeles Times, May 17, 1899 – via ProQuest)

+ Turnbull, Martin: “Robert Brunton Studios (before it became Paramount Pictures), at Melrose and Gower, Los Angeles, 1918” (MartinTurnbull.com, May 9, 2018)