Afterlives of the Rich and Famous Read online

  Tragically, his efforts were apparently too late. On March 4, 1994, after a long, hard day of filming in the desert heat, John Candy spent a few minutes on the phone with his costars to thank them for their support during some especially challenging scenes, then got into bed, went to sleep, and never woke up, dying of a heart attack at the age of forty-three.

  From Francine

  John and his father were ecstatic to be reunited when John returned Home, and among the large flock of animals waiting to greet him was an especially giddy English Yorkshire terrier. After his visit to the Scanning Machine, it was decided that John would benefit from being cocooned—his death was so sudden and came so much sooner than he’d consciously expected that once he was here and understood what had happened, he was shocked, a bit disoriented, and filled with regret that his greatest fear had manifested itself: he had left his children without their father, just as his father had prematurely left him.

  Once he emerged from being cocooned, he was completely at peace with the Exit Point he’d chosen to take. He’d gone Home at the end of an especially happy day, doing what he loved most, leaving behind a wife and children who knew he adored them and for whom he’d provided well. As it happened, though, their last memories of him are of the wonderfully funny, friendly, playful, loving, light-filled spirit they knew, who is all of that and more on the Other Side now that his cocooning is complete. John loves nothing more than gathering interesting varieties of people for parties and special celebrations. He’s thirty years old here, of course, and his visage is that of a man of medium height, dark complected, with a slender, very graceful body. There are few better, more enthusiastic social dancers than John, which makes his parties even more popular. He’s also a gifted athlete who especially enjoys baseball and skiing.

  He adores his children, he’s proud of his wife for being such a dedicated mother to them after he left, and he says he loves the collection of framed photographs.

  His “work” here is very much like work he continues on earth. Bear in mind that while all of us are thirty years old here, we return Home at the age we were when our bodies died, and becoming thirty is a process, not an instantaneous event. John’s chosen passion is to be among those who help all the newly arrived children make a fearless, happy transition to the Other Side. He also makes very regular visits to children’s hospitals around the world, reassuring the children during and immediately after surgery with that warm, loving, infectious joy he emanates everywhere he goes.

  Ingrid Bergman

  Describing her own remarkable and sometimes controversial life, Ingrid Bergman once said, “I’ve gone from saint to whore to saint again, all in one lifetime.” This astonishingly beautiful and gifted actress was born on August 29, 1915, in Stockholm, Sweden. Her German mother, Friedel, died when Ingrid was three years old, and she was raised by her father, Justus Bergman, a Swedish artist and photographer who was the first to capture her on film and encourage her interest in the arts. Justus passed away when Ingrid was twelve, leaving the child to be briefly cared for by an unmarried aunt until she went to live with her Uncle Otto and his wife and five children during her teenage years.

  She graduated from private school in 1933 and, through an audition, won a scholarship to the Royal Dramatic Theatre School in Stockholm, alma mater of the great Greta Garbo. After a year of study there, she was hired by a Swedish studio and impressed audiences and co-workers with her work in a dozen films in Sweden and Germany.

  In 1936 Ingrid starred in a Swedish film called Intermezzo. Legendary Hollywood producer David O. Selznick fell in love with the film and its star and, in 1939, brought her to Los Angeles to reprise her role in the American remake, Intermezzo: A Love Story. By then she’d married dentist and future neurosurgeon Peter Lindstrom in 1937, and she left him and their infant daughter, Pia, at home in Sweden while she made what she expected to be a relatively brief trip to America to make this one film. Selznick was bright enough not to give her a typical Hollywood makeover, embracing her name, accent, and natural beauty, and when Intermezzo became a huge hit in the United States, so did the graceful, warmly shy, exquisitely unenhanced Ingrid Bergman.

  She did return to Sweden after Intermezzo to satisfy one last film obligation, then came back to America in 1940 for an appearance on Broadway, followed by three fairly successful movies until 1942, when along came a script called Casablanca and an actor named Humphrey Bogart. Although Ingrid never considered her portrayal of Ilsa in Casablanca to be one of her best performances, she came to accept that it would always be her most talked-about film, a film that had, as she observed years later, “a life of its own.”

  Next came For Whom the Bell Tolls, the screen adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s novel, in 1943, for which she received her first Best Actress Academy Award nomination. The dark, suspenseful Gaslight followed in 1944, along with her first Best Actress Oscar. Her role as a nun in 1945’s The Bells of St. Mary’s opposite Bing Crosby made it three Best Actress nominations in a row. From 1945 through 1949 Ingrid went to work for one of her biggest fans in Hollywood, director Alfred Hitchcock, who cast her in Spellbound, Notorious, and Under Capricorn.

  Ingrid’s fourth Academy Award nomination was the result of a part she’d yearned for since she arrived in Hollywood, the title role in Walter Wanger’s 1948 production of Joan of Arc. She’d starred as the tragic heroine on Broadway in Joan of Lorraine for twenty-five weeks in 1946 and won a Tony for her performance, and she was ecstatic when the time to portray St. Joan on film finally arrived. It’s impossible to calculate how popular the film might have been if its theater showings hadn’t been interrupted by the great scandal of Ingrid Bergman’s life.

  By now Ingrid’s husband and daughter had moved to the United States, and she spent as much time as possible with them between films, both in Rochester, New York, where Peter studied medicine and surgery, and in San Francisco, where he completed his internship. America’s love affair with Ingrid, her sweet pristine beauty, and the flawless innocence she exemplified onscreen only deepened with her offstage roles as a dedicated wife and mother.

  And so it was that the American public seemed to take it as a personal betrayal when the married Ingrid Bergman met, fell in love with, and became pregnant by the also married Italian director Roberto Rossellini. She’d written him a letter to say how much she would love to work in one of his films, and his response was to create a role for her in his 1949 film Stromboli. That both of their marriages had been unhappy for a very long time didn’t diminish the harsh judgment they faced when their affair became known, and Ingrid’s pregnancy while Joan of Arc was in theaters across the United States caused a dramatic decline in attendance. Ingrid gave birth to their son, Roberto, before she and Rossellini were able to finalize their respective divorces and legally marry in 1950, which only added to the accusations of Ingrid’s immorality. She was even denounced on the floor of the U.S. Senate, where Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado proclaimed her “a powerful influence for evil.”

  Ingrid understandably moved to Italy, out of the eye of the outrage against her, and she and Rossellini made five films together there between 1950 and 1955. In 1952 she gave birth to twin daughters, Isotta, a future Italian literature professor, and Isabella, who later became a successful actress and model. Her career didn’t show visible signs of international resurrection until 1956, when her film for French director Jean Renoir, Elena et les Hommes, was released.

  It was also in 1956 that Ingrid finally returned to Hollywood to star in Anastasia, for which she won another Best Actress Oscar and made great strides in winning back the affection of America. Her marriage to Rossellini ended in 1957, and in 1959 she married Swedish producer Lars Schmidt, whom she divorced in 1975.

  The next ten years were busy and ultimately triumphant for Ingrid Bergman, beginning with a Best Actress Emmy in 1959 for the television adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. She gave critically acclaimed theatrical performances in London in 1965’s A Mont
h in the Country, and in an American production of More Stately Mansions in 1967. She further won back film audiences in 1968 with her performance in the Goldie Hawn vehicle Cactus Flower.

  In 1974 Ingrid Bergman received the rare compliment of a third Academy Award, for Best Supporting Actress in the Sidney Lumet film Murder on the Orient Express. Her seventh Oscar nomination came in 1978 for Autumn Sonata, directed by a man to whom, despite many rumors to the contrary, she was not related, the esteemed Ingmar Bergman. The beautiful film, shot in Norway, was one of her finest performances and, as it turned out, her last feature.

  Her final appearance as an actress was the 1982 miniseries A Woman Called Golda, in which she starred as Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. She won a Best Actress Emmy for her stunning portrayal. Sadly, it was presented posthumously; her daughter Pia accepted it on her behalf. It was widely known in the industry that Ingrid’s health was failing. She’d been diagnosed with breast cancer, and it was spreading. What wasn’t so widely known was how far it had progressed.

  On August 29, 1982—her sixty-seventh birthday—Ingrid Bergman lost her seven-year battle with breast cancer. Her body was cremated in London, where she died, and her ashes went home to Sweden, where some were scattered in the sea and the rest were interred beside her parents.

  From Francine

  Ingrid was greeted by her parents before she’d even emerged from the tunnel. She lingered at the Scanning Machine and in Orientation, very methodical in her determination to learn all she could from the lifetime she’d just left behind and make peace with it. She knew she felt no guilt about the Rossellini scandal, because at no time did it feel like a choice to her. Instead, it seemed to her that she was participating in an inevitability, against her wisdom and logic, but something she had to demand of herself, regardless of scandal and public censure, whether she understood it or not.

  What became very clear to her after reviewing her lifetime repeatedly at the Scanning Machine and with the help of her Orientation counselors is something that so many learn, to their surprise and relief, when they return Home: what they charted for themselves often has a purpose greater than what might have been apparent on earth. When Ingrid met Rossellini and found herself prepared to abandon everyone and everything she knew and compromise her reputation, to be with him, she mistakenly believed at the time that their passionate love for each other was the reason he had seemed so inevitable to her. That belief turned to confusion when that passionate love and their marriage began dying and it became clear she would not be spending the rest of her life with him.

  The confusion ended when, on the Other Side, she was able to reflect on that lifetime and the chart she wrote before she was born: Rossellini’s overwhelming importance to her was nothing more and nothing less than the fact that only he could give her the exact three children she charted to bring into the world. And of course Rossellini charted Ingrid for the same reason. Only secondarily was it about the magnetic attraction between the two of them. That attraction existed purely because they recognized each other on sight from the pact they’d made before they incarnated, that together they would create Roberto, Isotta, and Isabella. Once they’d satisfied that mutual purpose, there was no further reason for their relationship.

  Ingrid and Rossellini occasionally see each other here at social events, particularly the ballet and art exhibits. They’re pleasant, as we all are to each other, but there is no special connection between them. It’s interesting that Ingrid is as innately drawn to directors here as she was in her lifetime. She, Alfred Hitchcock, and Carlo Ponti, old friends from Home, are frequently together again as usual.

  Like so many actors, by the way, Ingrid’s visage on the Other Side is identical to the physical image she had on earth. Picture her as you knew her at the age of thirty and you’ll know exactly how she looks now, with the added light of peaceful bliss radiating from her, as it does from all of us.

  She says she was very discouraged when the lump in her breast was discovered and she was first diagnosed with breast cancer. Even though her doctors reassured her that they had caught it very early, she knew when her arm began to swell that she would be taking advantage of this Exit Point and heading Home, with her intended purposes on earth accomplished. She urges her daughters, particularly Isabella, to be religiously vigilant about their health, not only through regular mammograms, but also by CAT scans every two years.

  Ingrid’s chosen passion here is in Orientation, where she specializes in working with girls who come over in their early teens, particularly trauma cases and suicides related to pregnancies and bullying, for which her most recent lifetime prepared her so effectively. She has no desire to incarnate again.

  John Lennon

  One of the founding members of the historically influential rock band the Beatles, John Lennon was a singer, songwriter, writer, artist, and peace activist who, in his forty years on earth, became a legend. John Winston Lennon was born on October 9, 1940, in Liverpool, England, during a World War II German air raid. His father, Alfred Lennon, was a merchant seaman in the war and was rarely at home with his wife, Julia, and their infant son. Complicated dissension between his parents resulted in John’s living with his mother’s sister, Mimi Smith, and her husband, George, for the majority of his childhood, although his mother visited almost every day and remained an integral part of his life. (Alfred left when John was five and didn’t reappear in his life for another twenty years.) It was Julia who bought John his first guitar in 1957, taught him to play the banjo, and introduced him to American rock-and-roll records. Her death on July 15, 1958, after being hit by a car, devastated John, who was then seventeen.

  John was a brilliant and witty, but undisciplined student at the Liverpool College of Art after graduating from Quarry Bank High School, and he dropped out before his senior year. He and his future wife, Cynthia Powell, met at Liverpool College in 1957 and were married August 23, 1962, shortly after she discovered that she was pregnant with their son, Julian, who was born on April 8, 1963.

  In March 1957 John started a band called the Quarrymen. At their second concert, July 6, 1957, John met a young singer and musician named Paul McCartney and invited him to join the group. John and Paul began writing songs together, and Paul convinced John to let fourteen-year-old George Harrison play lead guitar for the band; Stuart Sutcliffe, a friend of John’s from art school, joined in as the Quarrymen’s bassist. A series of band name changes followed, finally resulting in unanimous agreement on “The Beatles.” The band achieved some popularity at a variety of clubs in Liverpool and in Hamburg, Germany. But not until they performed at the Cavern Club in Liverpool on November 9, 1961, after Stuart Sutcliffe had left the group and subsequently died and drummer Pete Best had been replaced by Ringo Starr, did the historic lightning-in-a-bottle phenomenon of the Beatles take shape. Record-store owner Brian Epstein saw the performance and convinced them to let him manage them, and his instincts effectively overcame his lack of experience. On May 9, 1962, Epstein successfully convinced producer George Martin to sign the Beatles to EMI, and their first album Please Please Me promptly became the number-one album in England.

  By January 1964 the Beatles’ second album, Introducing . . . the Beatles, reached number one in America, and John, Paul, George, and Ringo “crossed the pond” for their legendary appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, which catapulted them to international superstardom and triggered what came to be known as the “British Invasion”: the arrival of the Beatles and such other English rock bands as the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Kinks, the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, and many more.

  The Beatles shot their first film, Hard Day’s Night, in 1964, and John’s two books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, were published that same year. The Beatles’ second film, Help!, was released in 1965, and their insane whirlwind of touring finally ended with their August 29, 1966, concert in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park.

  Drug experimentation was as popular with the Beatle
s as it was with the youth in general in the 1960s, and its influence became apparent in their subsequent albums, particularly Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which is widely regarded as the greatest rock album in history. Brian Epstein’s death of an accidental drug overdose on August 27, 1967, was a shocking blow to the Beatles, and after filming the critically unpopular Magical Mystery Tour and recording the soundtrack album, the Beatles traveled to India to lose themselves in the transcendental meditation craze under the instruction of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. They returned to England to film Yellow Submarine and record The Beatles, more popularly known as The White Album.

  By now there was little if anything left of John’s marriage to Cynthia, and they were divorced in 1968. In November of that year John attended an art opening at London’s Indica Gallery and met Japanese artist Yoko Ono. They became virtually inseparable from that fateful meeting on and were married in Gibraltar on March 20, 1969.

  John and Yoko’s instantaneous partnership exacerbated the tension that was already plaguing the Beatles. John and Yoko created their own version of peace protests, spending days at a time in bed giving filmed interviews and forming the Plastic Ono Band to record the ultimate pacifist anthem “Give Peace a Chance.” In September 1969 John officially announced that he was leaving the Beatles, just as their last album Abbey Road was released.

  In 1971, after recording his critically acclaimed Imagine album, John moved to the United States with Yoko, where they were greeted almost immediately with efforts by the Nixon administration to have them deported. The excuse was John’s conviction in England in 1968 for marijuana possession. The reality, revealed in subsequent papers as a result of the Freedom of Information Act, was that the administration wanted to punish John and Yoko for their activism against the Vietnam War. Nixon resigned in 1974, and in 1976 John was granted permanent residency in America.