Afterlives of the Rich and Famous Read online

  There was a swimming pool in the secluded backyard of Eva’s Beverly Hills home, and Eva was dutiful about swimming laps every morning, in the nude, wearing a large sun hat to protect her alabaster skin from the sun. One morning while she was in mid-lap she was overcome with the feeling that she was being watched. Sure enough, out of the corner of her eye she spotted two workmen from the property next door who’d made their way to the fence to spy on her as she swam. Finally one of the workmen, unable to contain himself, yelled out, “Hi, Eva!” And without missing a single stroke Eva cheerfully called back, “It’s Zsa Zsa!”

  Eva loved to work, delighting in the voice-over career that began in 1970 with The Aristocats and continued through The Rescuers Down Under in 1990, and it was also in 1990 that she happily returned to the screen for the two-hour CBS Green Acres revival movie.

  In 1995 Eva went on vacation in Mexico and, in a freak accident, fell into her bathtub and broke her hip. She was flown back to Los Angeles and admitted to Cedars Sinai Hospital, suffered respiratory failure, lapsed into a coma, and, just two weeks after she fell, died of pneumonia on July 4. The youngest Gabor was survived by her mother and two sisters—in fact, Jolie was never told of Eva’s death, because it was agreed by those who were closest to the family that she wouldn’t survive the shock and grief of losing the loving, attentive daughter who brought her as much joy as she brought to everyone else who knew her.

  From Francine

  While Eva was being mourned by her countless friends on earth, we on the Other Side were euphoric to have her light, her laughter, and her kindness with us at Home again. The throngs of loved ones from her thirty-one incarnations had to wait to welcome her until what seemed like thousands of animals from those incarnations had finished saying hello, and no one was more ecstatic than Eva herself, who never doubted for a moment that she’d be returning to God’s arms and a joyful eternity the instant her body took its last breath. In typical style, she spent her time at the Scanning Machine focusing on the great fun and success she had along the way rather than the many times she struggled through family betrayals and career disappointments. She credited her mother with teaching her to be a smart businesswoman, to be responsible with her money, and to never compromise her ability to take care of herself.

  There was a time, for example, when her dear friend billionaire Merv Griffin wanted her to sell her Beverly Hills house and move in with him on the top floor of a luxurious hotel he owned. She refused, despite his displeasure. “Give up my house, my most solid investment, my security that I’ve worked so hard for all my life, to please a man? Mama would have killed me,” she says. She laughed as she reviewed another “Mama would have killed me” incident. She was sound asleep early one morning when an earthquake rumbled through Los Angeles. “I jumped out of bed, raced to my closet, took off the T-shirt I was sleeping in, put on a silk peignoir, and went back to bed. Mama didn’t raise her girls to be found in a pile of rubble wearing a T-shirt.”

  From the Scanning Machine she returned to her ecstatic life at Home: a fascinating variety of friends ranging from former U.S. presidents and esteemed actors and actresses to the most modest housekeepers and dressmakers; a Tudor house filled with animals and surrounded by a swimming pool that circles the house like a moat, where she continues swimming laps; devout worship at one of our most ancient and treasured cathedrals in what corresponds to your Italian countryside; and devoted work as a therapist in the cocooning chambers in the Hall of Wisdom. In fact, she was there for both her mother and her sister Magda, to help them through the cocooning process when they returned Home not long after she arrived.

  Eva and Merv, who are kindred spirits (her soul mate is an Egyptian man named Nitocris), are almost inseparable now that he’s here with her. He’s teaching her to play tennis, and the two of them are popular lecturers on the subject of business ethics for those who are preparing to reincarnate and become corporate managers. Merv specializes in the financial aspects of business success, so foreign to many of us on the Other Side, where money doesn’t exist, while Eva focuses on returning decency and compassion to corporate priority lists. While she rarely revealed this fact during her lifetime, she says she made it her daily habit, as essential as brushing her teeth, to perform an anonymous act of kindness. She says, “I was a smart businesswoman who looked for ways to conduct my company in that same spirit of quiet, generous giving. Why so many corporations think they have to make a choice between being profitable and being kind I will never understand. Have they never heard of karma?”

  She won’t be incarnating again, explaining with a smile, “No one ever accused me of not knowing the right time to leave a party.”

  Gregory Peck

  Eldred Gregory Peck, Academy Award–winning actor and humanitarian, was born in San Diego on April 15, 1916. His father, Gregory Pearl Peck, a pharmacist, and his mother, Bernice Ayres Peck, were divorced when the young Gregory was six years old. He lived with his maternal grandmother until, at the age of ten, he was sent to St. John’s Military Academy in Los Angeles. He returned home to his father when his grandmother died, and he graduated from San Diego High School before heading on to college, first at San Diego State University and then at the University of California, Berkeley, where he—handsome, six foot three, and strongly built—gained attention as both an athlete and an actor at the university’s renowned Little Theater.

  After graduating from UC Berkeley, he moved to New York to study at the Neighborhood Playhouse and made his first appearance on Broadway in the 1942 production of The Morning Star. Acting jobs were plentiful thanks to World War II, a war in which Gregory Peck (he left his given first name Eldred behind when he headed east) was exempt from military service due to a back injury, while so many of his fellow actors were enlisting and being deployed. Instead, he was quickly recruited by Hollywood, where his first film, Days of Glory, was released in 1944, launching a distinguished screen career that didn’t end until 1998 with a remake of his earlier classic Moby Dick.

  Both onscreen and off, he exuded a sense of strength, dignity, and decency. He was very outspoken against racial injustice, the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, and even the controversial House Un-American Activities Committee and its infamous search for alleged Communists in the film industry. He took some pride in being named to Richard Nixon’s notorious “enemies list” and even more humble pride in the Medal of Freedom presented to him by President Lyndon Johnson. And despite the fact that he was a lifelong practicing Catholic, he was an advocate for women’s freedom of choice.

  His first marriage, to Greta Kukkomen Rice in 1942, produced three sons before it ended in divorce in 1955. Their first son, Jonathan, who became a television journalist, committed suicide in 1975. Very shortly after Gregory’s first marriage ended he married a Paris reporter named Veronique Passani, with whom he had a son and a daughter, and their marriage lasted for the rest of his life.

  Gregory’s extraordinary half-century career earned him, among other honors, five Academy Award nominations; one Best Actor Oscar, for the 1962 masterpiece To Kill a Mockingbird; three Best Actor Golden Globe awards; the prestigious Cecil B. DeMille Award; a Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award; the American Film Institute Lifetime Achievement Award; and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

  During the last years of his life he traveled throughout the world on speaking tours, during which the National University of Ireland made him a Doctor of Letters; he became a founding patron of the University College Dublin School of Film; and he served as chairman of the American Cancer Society. On June 12, 2003, at the age of eighty-seven, Gregory Peck died of natural causes in his Los Angeles home with his wife, Veronique, holding his hand.

  From Francine

  Gregory was ready to come Home, as his wife will confirm, and he was ecstatic that the first to embrace him was his son Jonathan. While his Catholicism had always taught him that victims of suicide were banished from heaven, his heart and soul had always believed that
couldn’t be true, so finding his beloved son waiting for him was less a relief than a confirmation.

  Gregory was also among the few who, for the most part, enjoyed his time at the Scanning Machine. While there were countless situations he wished he’d handled differently, he was satisfied to see that he never dismissed his significant mistakes with the egocentric defensiveness so common among his peers, but instead made every effort to learn from them. By his own account, he was still amused by his place on Richard Nixon’s “enemies list,” although they’re perfectly amiable when they happen upon each other here, and he took great delight in his performance in and the whole experience of the film MacArthur. He and Jonathan were both there to greet Gregory’s first wife, Greta, when she arrived on the Other Side, and while Gregory and Greta don’t spend time together, they have laughed together over their misguided belief that two people so innately, resolutely different from each other could build a successful marriage, and they’re fondly grateful to each other for the children they cocreated.

  For the most part, Gregory is as much of a loner here as he was on earth—not unfriendly, just private and appreciative of his own company. He has returned to his position as a quadrant sentry, his house is a small cabin on what corresponds to your island of Fiji, and he never misses a performance of the opera or our popular debates among former U.S. presidents and other world leaders in search of a path to lasting peace on earth. Among his few close friends and tennis partners are his son, his father, and a very short slender blonde female whom he says his family will recognize.

  Above all, he is content, grateful for the long, full life he lived and satisfied that he put his chosen life themes—Loner and Builder—to their best possible use. He has no plans to incarnate again.

  Spencer Tracy

  Spencer Bonaventure Tracy, one of the most gifted and versatile actors of the twentieth century, was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on April 5, 1900, to Irish Catholic truck salesman John Tracy and his wife, Caroline Brown Tracy.

  Not an enthusiastic student, Spencer tried but failed to convince his parents to let him quit school at the age of sixteen to go to work. But in 1917 he leapt at the opportunity to quit school, join the navy, and serve his country in World War I. He was discharged without ever leaving the Norfolk Navy Yard, where he first served, and used his military education benefits to enroll in Ripon College with a focus on premed. Joining the debating team at Ripon led to his interest in acting, and when he successfully auditioned for the Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, he finally found a passion that was exciting and fulfilling enough to make him a good student for the first time in his life.

  He met a young actress named Louise Treadwell when he joined a stock theater company, and they fell in love and were married in September 1923. Nine months later their son John was born. They were devastated to discover that he was deaf, but they made it their mission to help him lead a normal, happy life. (In fact, they also made it their mission to help as many others like John as possible and, in 1943, founded the still thriving John Tracy Clinic, an education center for hearing-impaired infants and preschool children.) They also had a daughter, Susie, who was born in 1932.

  Spencer was performing in a play called The Last Mile in 1930 when the legendary director John Ford discovered him and promptly hired him to costar in Ford’s upcoming film Up the River with another newcomer named Humphrey Bogart. The Tracy family moved to Hollywood in November 1931, and Spencer appeared in a whirlwind sixteen films during his three-year contract with Fox Films before he was signed by MGM, the most powerful and esteemed studio in the business at the time. It was through his films for MGM that he was able to prove his renowned versatility, moving brilliantly and effortlessly from comedic scripts to dramatic works. To no one’s surprise, he made history by being the first to win the Best Actor Oscar two years in a row, in 1937 and 1938.

  It was in 1942, while making a film called Woman of the Year, that Spencer met, costarred with, and fell in love with Katharine Hepburn, who was to become his partner both onscreen and off for the rest of his life. His Catholicism prevented him from ever divorcing Louise, but she did agree to a discreet, respectful, permanent separation, thanks to which the Tracy-Hepburn affair managed to proceed without bitterness and sensationalism. He reportedly had affairs with a number of other celebrated actresses over the years, but Katharine rode them out, well aware of Spencer’s frailties and secure in her knowledge that if she simply stayed out of the way, his compulsive wandering eye would satisfy itself and he’d be back.

  Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn made a total of nine movies together, including his last film, 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. By then Spencer’s health was seriously compromised from years of alcoholism, diabetes, and recurring heart and lung problems, and his shooting schedule on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was limited to the few hours a day he had the stamina to work. On June 10, 1967, seventeen days after filming was completed, Spencer Tracy died of heart failure at his Hollywood home, leaving behind a legacy of almost eighty films, seven Academy Award nominations, and two consecutive Best Actor Oscars.

  From Francine

  Spencer actually remained earthbound for several years after his death. He was frankly too stubborn to leave Katharine, and he was also reluctant to find out whether God would welcome him after a life in which he felt he’d committed more than his share of sins. He visited Katharine relentlessly, trying to get her attention to let her know he was still there, and because he had no idea that he was dead, he couldn’t understand why she persisted in ignoring him. She sensed his presence countless times, but her Yankee practicality would never allow her to believe in something as intangible as life after death, and she would scold herself for letting the intensity of grieving the loss of him lead her to indulge in such foolish fantasies.

  His mother finally retrieved him and brought him to the Other Side. He was relieved to find himself here after a lifetime of being weighed down with the needless threat of hell, and he was also exhilarated to be rid of a body that had caused him more pain in his last years on earth than he admitted to anyone. He had a difficult time at the Scanning Machine watching the pain his personal emotional conflicts caused those around him.

  He was proud of his work as an actor except, he says, when he “caught himself at it,” but he regrets that he didn’t excel at the most important role he was ever given, the role of father. To make amends, his frequent visits to your dimension are devoted to special-needs children, who see him and enjoy talking to him, and he loves making them laugh.

  He spends most of his time here with his soul mate, Katharine. He was one of the first to meet her when she returned Home, and they promptly returned to their secluded house on the shore, where they enjoy writing plays together for themselves and their actor friends to perform. Spencer also writes historical novels with Ernest Hemingway, a friend from several past lives.

  He joyfully greeted his son when John came Home not long ago, and the two of them are very much at peace and love building and sailing boats together. Neither Spencer, John, nor Katharine has plans to incarnate again.

  Albert Einstein

  One of the great minds of the twentieth century and winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921, Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. His father, Hermann, after a brief career as a featherbed salesman, went on to operate an electrochemical factory, while his mother, Pauline, took care of the middle-class Jewish household. Shortly after Albert’s birth the family moved to Munich, where his sister, Maja, was born two years later.

  Einstein’s uniquely inquisitive mind was evident in what he recalled as the two “wonders” that fascinated him as a child. The first was the compass he came across when he was five and the “invisible forces” that moved the needle. The second, when he was twelve, was his introduction to what he came to call his “sacred little geometry book.”

  Hermann Einstein moved his wife and daughter to Milan, Italy, in 1
894, leaving Albert in a Munich boarding house to finish his education. Six months later, partly because he was miserable and partly because he was facing the prospect of being drafted into the military when he turned sixteen, he ran away and managed to make his way alone to his parents’ new home in another country.

  He gained admission to the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, where he enjoyed what he remembered as some of the happiest years of his life and met Mileva Maric, his future wife. He graduated in 1900, and Albert and Mileva were married on January 6, 1903. A daughter, Lieserl, was born to the couple in 1902, before their marriage, and seemingly vanished a year later. Albert is thought never to have seen her, and nothing was written or said about her after 1903. Two sons followed Albert and Mileva’s marriage—Hans in 1904 and Eduard in 1910. By then Albert was working as a clerk at the Swiss patent office, a job at which he was so capable that he had plenty of spare time to invest in his ongoing passion for physics.

  In 1905, which scholars refer to as his “miracle year,” he published four papers in Annalen der Physik, one of the world’s most respected physics journals. Among his accomplishments in these papers, Albert assembled various pieces of the theory of special relativity developed by other scientists into one whole theory and recognized that it was a universal law of nature. The papers, credited with changing the course of modern physics, captured the attention of the most influential physicist of the time, Max Planck, who developed the quantum theory, and thanks to that attention, Albert became a popular lecturer at international conferences and was offered a series of prestigious jobs in the academic world. He ultimately accepted the position of director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics.