Afterlives of the Rich and Famous Read online

  From Sylvia

  Several years after Marilyn’s death I was asked by a nationally syndicated television show to visit her house with a film crew to see if she would communicate with me. A condition of filming on their part was that I wouldn’t be allowed inside the house or even that close to it—just inside the gate was as far as we could go. A condition on my part was, “No promises.” There are no spirits or ghosts who can be counted on to come when I call them, and I hadn’t even established yet whether Marilyn had made it to the Other Side or if she was still earthbound. For all I knew we could end up with a lot of footage of me standing in front of a house staring mindlessly into the camera without a peep out of Marilyn.

  I admit it, I’d done no research on her life before I arrived, so I didn’t think much about being introduced to a lovely older gentleman named James Dougherty until I was told he was her first husband. He was quick to clarify that he’d never been married to Marilyn Monroe; he was married to the young (pre-Marilyn) Norma Jeane Baker. He spoke of her with deep affection, and her death had touched him deeply.

  As soon as we’d arrived as close to the house as we were allowed to get, a brief Latin phrase came to me. I pronounced it as best I could, and when I saw him staring at me, I explained, “It’s in the tiles above the entryway. It means something like ‘Everyone is welcome here.’”

  He asked how I knew about that, since I’d never been to the house before, and I told him. “Marilyn’s telling me.”

  It was a nice surprise. She was definitely on the Other Side, she definitely had a lot to say, and she was ready to say it to me without preferring to talk through Francine. I can’t judge or comment on its accuracy. I’ll just report what she passed along and leave the rest to you.

  She was adamant about the fact that she did not commit suicide. She described being alone in her bedroom that night, taking too many pills and making some blurry phone calls. But she had a clear memory of a man coming in and sticking a needle of what she believed to be Nembutol into her heart.

  She never stopped loving Joe DiMaggio, and one of the sources of depression that plagued her in her later years was the fear that, because she confided so much in him about things she undoubtedly wasn’t supposed to know, which she’d written in a red journal or diary, loving her might have brought him more pain and potential danger than joy. She visited him often from the Other Side, particularly when he slept, and she was already determined to be the first to greet him when he came Home.

  Then she was gone. Even in that brief encounter, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked her and the depth of her sincerity.

  From Francine

  Marilyn was indeed the first to welcome Joe DiMaggio Home. They lead very quiet separate lives here, but they also spend a lot of time together walking on the beach. Marilyn is a voracious reader and can often be found studying the great literary classics in the Hall of Records.

  Like everyone else on the Other Side, she looks back on her most recent lifetime with increasing clarity. She knows she was bipolar. She knows that she was at her most comfortable when she was acting—pretending to be someone else. She knows that if she’d lived a long life, she would never have been the icon she’s become. She just wants those who try to emulate her not to fall into the same trap she did, the excess that comes with fame. People stop saying no to you. You stop saying no to yourself. And before long you’ve forgotten what a loving word “no” can be.

  Cary Grant

  Charismatic, debonair, and irresistibly handsome, Cary Grant epitomized the words “leading man” and “movie star” for three decades, more than earning his place among the American Film Institute’s greatest male stars of all time.

  He was an only child, born Archibald Alexander Leach on January 18, 1904, in Horfield, Bristol, England. His father, Elias Leach, barely made ends meet by pressing suits for a living, while his mother, Elsie, was a vague, unhappy presence until she disappeared when Cary was nine years old. Elias told his son that Elsie had gone away on a long holiday—somehow he decided that being abandoned by his mother would be easier on a child than the truth that she’d been institutionalized in a mental facility for a severe, crippling depression. (In fact, Cary continued to believe the abandonment story until he was in his thirties and found his mother in the asylum, where she’d been living for all those years. It was a less than joyful reunion. His mother had no interest in her wildly successful son or in getting to know him, and he never saw her again, although he paid for her care for the rest of her life.)

  Cary was expelled from school in 1918 and joined the Bob Pender Stage Troupe, a comedy circus group that traveled throughout England, where he learned stilt walking, pantomime, pratfalls, and comedic timing. The troupe toured the United States in 1920, and when they were to return to Great Britain, their young star elected to stay in America and work his way toward a stage career. After some light comedies in St. Louis and finally on Broadway, Archibald Leach traveled to Hollywood in 1931 and evolved from Cary Lockwood to Cary Grant at the preference of Paramount Pictures, who eagerly put him under contract. He was quickly cast in 1932’s Blonde Venus as Marlene Dietrich’s leading man and was already headed for stardom when a force field named Mae West selected him as her leading man in two of her most successful films: She Done Him Wrong, which was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award in 1933, and I’m No Angel, a huge box-office hit that rescued Paramount from bankruptcy. Paramount went on to cast Cary in a string of mediocre movies, and in 1936 he left the studio for a contract with Columbia Pictures, which promptly loaned him out to Hal Roach for his first real comedy showcase, Topper.

  While Cary was sharing the screen in the 1930s and 1940s with some of Hollywood’s greatest actresses, including Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, and Irene Dunne, he was devoting much of his off-screen time to the first three of his five wives. In 1934 he married actress Virginia Cherrill. She divorced him a year later, claiming that he hit her. In 1942 he married Barbara Hutton, the insanely wealthy socialite who was heiress to both the Woolworth and E. F. Hutton fortunes. Any accusations that Cary was only after her for her money (Hollywood cynics nicknamed them “Cash and Cary”) were disproved when, after their divorce in 1945, it was revealed that he’d signed a prenuptial agreement waiving any claim to a single dime of her money. Cary and Barbara Hutton remained friends for the rest of their lives, and he continued to treat her son, Lance Reventlow, like a member of his own family. His next marriage was to actress Betsy Drake, on Christmas Day, 1949. That marriage didn’t end until August 14, 1962, despite Cary’s having fallen in love with Sophia Loren while filming The Pride and the Passion with her in 1957. Sophia was already very much in love with her future husband, Carlo Ponti, at the time of the filming of The Pride and the Passion.

  These marriages took place, by the way, against persistent rumors that Cary was either bisexual or homosexual, particularly in light of his unapologetically being roommates with his great friend, actor Randolph Scott, off and on for twelve years. He was well aware of the rumors and was quoted as saying, “Look at it this way. I’ve always tried to dress well. I’ve had some success in life. I’ve enjoyed my success, and I include in that success some relationships with very special women. If someone wants to say I’m gay, what can I do? I think it’s probably said about every man who’s been known to do well with women. I don’t let that sort of thing bother me. What matters to me is that I know who I am.”

  In the meantime, on the professional front, Cary Grant also teamed up for several films with director Alfred Hitchcock, who called Cary “the only actor I ever loved in my whole life.” Their films together, which include Suspicion (1941), Notorious (1946), To Catch a Thief (1955), and North by Northwest (1959), are still considered classics, as are so many of the more than seventy movies Cary made in his lifetime.

  He was smart enough, and rebellious enough, to be the first actor to form his own production company, Grantley Productions, in the mid-1950s. This allowed him to
control all aspects of his career, and the films his company produced, distributed by Universal, included such successes as Operation Petticoat (1959), That Touch of Mink (1962), and Charade (1963; with the extraordinary Audrey Hepburn). His last movie, Walk, Don’t Run, was shot in 1965. Thanks to Grantley Productions, Cary Grant received a share of the gross profits for these films, and his estate when he died was said to be worth approximately $60 million. It’s theorized, though, that Cary’s politically unpopular decision to turn his back on the well-established “studio system” and become an independent entity cost him the two Academy Awards for which he was nominated.

  Cary’s next marriage, at the end of his film career, was to actress Dyan Cannon. They eloped to Las Vegas in 1965, and to his profound joy, his only child, a daughter named Jennifer, was born on February 26, 1966. This troubled marriage ended in a bitter, widely publicized divorce in 1968 and an ongoing custody battle over Jennifer that continued well into the 1970s.

  On April 11, 1981, Cary married his fifth and final wife, his longtime friend and companion Barbara Harris, a British hotel publicist who was forty-seven years younger than he. She traveled with him when, in the last years of his life, he began touring the United States in a one-man show called A Conversation with Cary Grant. On the afternoon of November 29, 1986, he was preparing for an appearance in Davenport, Iowa, when he suddenly seemed a bit confused and told his wife he needed to rest. When he headed off to his dressing room, she realized something was very wrong and called for an ambulance. He was pronounced dead at 11:22 p.m. in Davenport’s St. Luke’s Hospital of a massive stroke.

  Cary’s substantial fortune was divided between his wife, Barbara, and his cherished daughter, Jennifer, who, in August 2008, gave birth to her first child, a son she named Cary Benjamin Grant.

  From Francine

  Laughter spread through the large crowd that welcomed Cary to the Other Side, when he emerged from the tunnel and announced with his trademark droll wit, “Well, that was interesting.” Alfred Hitchcock was among the first to embrace him, along with his soul mate, a woman named Rachel, who looks a great deal like Barbara Hutton, but with long braided black hair and a very tall, ample body. Cary was enormously introspective about his trip to the Scanning Machine, interested to find out that he was angrier about his lifetime while he lived it than he was aware of at the time. “I didn’t much care what people thought or said about me, whether it was the studios or the fans. I knew exactly who I was and who I wasn’t. What I did care about was the astonishing number of purported experts on me and my life who couldn’t be bothered to take the simple truth for an answer. I had more than my share of faults, but lying wasn’t among them.” His life themes of Aesthetic Pursuits and Experiencer worked both for him and against him, he believes, making him a versatile, highly adventurous performer who had a marvelous career, but was “for the most part, an unfortunate choice for a husband.”

  He couldn’t wait to return to his life on the Other Side, to which those same themes seem to apply. He changes homes frequently—at any given moment he might be living in a Greek Revival captain’s house on what corresponds to your northern Atlantic coastline, a brownstone near the Towers where he goes to meditate, a simple tent in the midst of the jungle animals he adores, or a lavish castle carved into the rocky slopes of our Mount Everest. He delights in a very busy social life, never missing an opportunity to gather with everyone from actors and musicians to physicists and astronomers to former world leaders, all of whom comment after socializing with him about his charming eagerness to listen and learn, no matter what the subject. He continues to act, particularly in a brilliant stage interpretation of None but the Lonely Heart, which he performs with such “volunteers” as Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Rock Hudson, Lee J. Cobb, Anthony Quinn, and his great friends Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. He’s also an avid golfer and is learning to play the cello, the sound of which he’s always found soothing and “soul cleansing.”

  His great passion at Home, though, is his dedicated work with our many research teams determined to reverse global warming on earth and infuse solutions to your diligent scientists, researchers, and environmentalists on earth. All of us are deeply concerned, but none more than Cary, who refuses to “stand by and do nothing while my innocent grandson grows up on an endangered planet.”

  His visits to earth, by the way, are devoted entirely to his grandson, and he promises, “I’ll be watching over that precious boy all his life.”

  George Carlin

  Controversial comedian, actor, and author George Denis Patrick Carlin was born on May 12, 1937, in New York City. His mother, Mary, was a secretary and devout Catholic, and his father, Patrick, was a national advertising manager for the New York Sun. George was raised by his mother, who left his father when he was two months old. He attended parochial school and was an altar boy, to which he credited his avowed atheism by the time he reached adulthood. At fifteen he’d had quite enough of formal education and dropped out of school in the ninth grade. He also developed a pattern of running away from home on a regular basis, thanks to a very contentious relationship with his mother, and his enlisting in the U.S. Air Force in 1954, at the age of seventeen, seemed like a good idea at the time. He was stationed in Bossier City, Louisiana, trained as a radar technician, earned his high-school equivalency, and moonlighted as a disc jockey on KJOE radio in nearby Shreveport. On the downside, he also received three court-martials and several disciplinary punishments, was declared an “unproductive airman,” and was discharged in 1957.

  While working at KXOL Radio in Forth Worth, Texas, George met co-worker Jack Burns, and the two of them formed a comedy team, refining their act at a coffeehouse called the Cellar before moving to Los Angeles in February 1960. Calling themselves “The Wright Brothers,” they hosted a morning show on KDAY Radio in Hollywood, performed at West Coast coffeehouses at night, and attracted the attention of the brilliant and highly controversial comedian Lenny Bruce, whose influence opened the door for a Burns and Carlin appearance on Jack Paar’s The Tonight Show. Not incidentally, it was also in 1960 that George met Brenda Hosbrook while touring, and they were married in 1961. Their daughter, Kelly, was born in 1963.

  Burns and Carlin went their separate ways, and George became a popular guest on variety shows, most famously The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show. In fact, between appearances as a guest and as a guest host, George was booked on The Tonight Show 130 times during both the Jack Paar years and the Johnny Carson decades. He sharpened his stand-up skills in Las Vegas as well, perfecting such classic routines as “Al Sleet, the Hippie-Dippie Weatherman” and “Stupid Disk Jockeys” and recording them in 1967 on his first album, Take Offs and Put Ons.

  As his career progressed, his style and the subject matter of his routines became more and more unconventional. His short hair gave way to long hair. His clean-shaven face began sporting a beard. His conservative suits evolved into jeans and T-shirts. And on July 21, 1972, George was arrested at Milwaukee’s Summerfest and charged with violating obscenity laws for his landmark comedy routine, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” The case was ultimately dismissed. A similar Carlin routine broadcast on a New York City FM station in 1973 resulted in the station being fined for broadcasting “indecent but not obscene” material during the hours when children were most likely to be listening.

  The controversy, combined with George’s edgy, unconventional brilliance, made him even more popular, and he was a natural host for the first episode of the equally edgy and unconventional Saturday Night Live in October 1975. By then he’d already unapologetically declared himself a regular cocaine user, so it wasn’t surprising when, after an unexpected five-year semihiatus from stand-up comedy during which he filmed the first few of what would be fourteen HBO specials between 1977 and 2008, he acknowledged that he’d suffered the first of three heart attacks.

  George’s acting career took hold in the 1980s, launching an impressive list of credits that i
ncluded such feature films as Outrageous Fortune, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, The Prince of Tides, Dogma, Jersey Girl, and Cars (a Disney/Pixar production in which Carlin is the voice of Fillmore, a psychedelic VW microbus). He also provided the voice for the children’s television favorite Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends from 1991 until 1998 and appeared as “Mr. Conductor” on the PBS Shining Time Station from 1991 until 1993. And in 1993 he launched twenty-seven episodes of a Fox sitcom, The George Carlin Show.

  Tragically, in 1997, Brenda Carlin, George’s wife of thirty-eight years, died of liver cancer. In June 1998 George married Sally Wade, a marriage that lasted the rest of his life. (In fact, his death occurred two days before what would have been their tenth anniversary.)

  George enjoyed long-standing status as a headliner in Las Vegas. But in 2005 he was fired by the MGM Grand after an ugly, profane exchange with his audience, and within a few weeks he checked himself into a rehab facility for addictions to alcohol and Vicodin. He announced to his audience at the Tachi Palace Casino in Lemoore, California, on February 1, 2006, that they were witnessing his “first show back” after being hospitalized for heart failure and pneumonia.

  In mid-June 2008, George returned to his home in Los Angeles after a reunion with performing stand-up at the Orleans Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. A week later, on June 22, he was admitted to St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, complaining of chest pains. He died at 5:55 p.m. of heart failure that same day. At his request, his body was cremated and his ashes were scattered, with no memorial or religious services to mark his passing.

  George was once asked what he was proudest of in his career. He answered that it was the number of books he’d sold, totaling nearly a million copies. Beginning in 1984, he wrote six books, the last two of which—Watch My Language and his autobiographical Last Words—were released posthumously.