By Mark Melville
Did you watch the Ryan Murphy FX series FEUD: Bette and Joan and idly wonder whatever happened to the real people behind the movie Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
Wonder no longer. We have tracked the players in the real life drama between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford all the way down to their absolutely final destinations.
Most of FEUD‘s characters ended their days in Los Angeles, and being locals, we were recently able to pay them personal visits.
Hal Le Sueur
As shown in FEUD, Joan Crawford’s rather shady brother Hal Le Sueur did indeed die in surgery. Whether or not he was really blackmailing his famous sister, we cannot say.
Hal was planted in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.
Known and satirized often as the “Disneyland of Death,” Forest Lawn Glendale was THE place to be caught dead for Hollywood luminaries from the 1920s forward. Clark Gable, George Burns, Jean Harlow, Sammy Davis Jr., Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson and Walt Disney himself can be found there. Ronald Reagan was even married (to Jane Wyman) there for some reason. It was a thing.
By the 60s, however, the cemetery’s land in Glendale was filling up and it had lost much of its cachet.
Hal got a rather obscure grave location in this glamorous place, on a sloping hill near a wall, overlooking a now noisy freeway. It is an area that has been worryingly prone to rain-triggered landslides lately, but for now he seems secure.
Joan took care of him, but she didn’t exactly go all out with prime real estate.
Anna Le Sueur Cassin
Joan Crawford moved her mother to California in her declining years, and, according to FEUD, kept her at arms length in her own house, even restricting her to the service entrance.
Anna Le Sueur died in 1958 and was buried at Forest Lawn Glendale, but in much fancier surroundings than her son Hal received five years later.
Anna rests in the exclusive Garden of Memory, in the company of huge stars like Humphrey Bogart and Mary Pickford.
Her plot is overlooked by one of Forest Lawn’s many replicas of the Christus statue by Bertel Thorvaldsen, and, if you turn around, the naked butt of a replica of Michaelangelo’s David.
Joan might not have liked her mother, but she gave her a Hollywood ending, if only for appearance’s sake.
Jack Warner
The most powerful of the Warner brothers, “the last goddamn dinosaur,” studio head Jack Warner (brilliantly and nastily played by Stanley Tucci) rests in Home of Peace, a cemetery in East Los Angeles.
Once a luxurious memorial destination for the Jewish community of LA, local demographics shifted long ago. Home of Peace today is a largely forgotten, rarely visited place, far from the mind of today’s Hollywood.
Jack rests in sight of the rest of the other Warner brothers who are grouped together in two small family mausoleums a stone’s throw away. MGM head Louis B. Mayer and Universal Pictures’ founder Carl Laemmle are also buried nearby. Rivals in life, neighbors in death.
Warner bought what must have seemed a super fancy plot in 1978; it even had its own burbling water fountain. Now the fountain is broken and its pool lies dried up and crusty. What goes around comes around…
William Castle
William Castle was played with perfect cosmic justice in FEUD by his biggest fan, director John Waters.
Cult director/producer Castle (who progressed from cheap schlock pictures like The Tingler and Strait-Jacket to somewhat more respected fare like Rosemary’s Baby) rests inconspicuously, without a single gimmick, under a tree on a sunny slope in Forest Lawn Glendale.
George Cukor
In a definite case of strange bedfellows, the director of The Philadelphia Story and My Fair Lady, who had a long career of successful “women’s pictures” rests in a mysteriously unmarked private grave in the Garden of Honor at Forest Lawn Glendale.
George Cukor is buried together with studio mogul Samuel Goldwyn and Goldwyn’s wife, Frances. A gay man who had a simultaneous reputation for class, professionalism, and Sunday all-male pool parties, Cukor had been best friends with Frances Goldwyn since their youth in the New York theater scene.
So, in the end, with George dying single, Frances had her gay BFF join her and her husband in death, an ultimate awkward threesome.
What Sam Goldwyn, who predeceased them, would have thought about this arrangement, we don’t know. None of their names appear on their joint grave. Considering their impressive careers, we can’t fault them for vanity.
Victor Buono
Actor Victor Buono, a highly talented, classically trained actor, uncannily played by Dominic Burgess, ended up with a career that descended into mainly camp roles, like a telepathic mutant in Beneath the Planet of the Apes. He is now best known for playing King Tut (the silly supervillain, not the historical pharaoh) in the 1966 Batman series.
Buono sadly died at the age of 43 of a heart attack, and is buried in Greenwood Memorial Park in San Diego.
Victor Buono at Findagrave.com
Hedda Hopper
The notorious gossip columnist, played by Judy Davis, died in 1966. After a long career of scandal-wrangling, she was shipped back to be buried in Altoona, Pennsylvania, far from the reach of her friends, enemies, allies and victims.
Hedda Hopper at Findagrave.com
Robert Aldrich
“Bob” Aldrich, the struggling middle-aged director played by Alfred Molina, had a quite successful career in the end.
Robert Aldrich compensated for his campy “Hagsploitation” pictures like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte by moving on to macho testosterone-driven fare like The Dirty Dozen and The Flight of the Phoenix. He even established his own small movie studio on the back of these successes.
Aldrich didn’t completely leave “Hagsploitation” behind, however. He produced 1969’s Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice starring Ruth Gordon and Geraldine Page as clear Bette/Joan substitutes.
Robert Aldrich rests in Forest Lawn’s Hollywood Hills location, established as the Glendale facility was becoming full. Owner Hubert Eaton purchased a massive tract of land directly behind the famous Hollywood sign that allowed for expansion that continues today. Recent interments include Bill Paxton and Brittany Murphy.
Aldrich’s plot is unremarkable, but he has some nice views. Behind him lies the TV tower above the Hollywood sign. In the distance below him, you can make out the final resting place of… Bette Davis.
Joan Crawford
The former Lucille Fay Le Sueur, bravely played by Jessica Lange, died a recluse in New York.
She was cremated and her ashes were placed in a crypt in New York’s Ferncliffe Cemetery. Ironically, for someone who obsessed so much about eradicating dust, in the end, she became a box of it.
Crawford’s mausoleum neighbor used to be Judy Garland, but Garland’s family recently exhumed Judy’s body and moved it to Hollywood. Perhaps Joan is thrilled to finally be the biggest star in the joint now.
We haven’t been to visit her there, but we can have a look and pay respects virtually:
Bette Davis
Going by the fanciness of grave sites alone, it looks like Susan Sarandon’s Bette Davis won the real life game in the end. She rests in Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills in a magnificent white marble sarcophagus under a sculpture of a draped woman standing alone.
Colleagues in Bette’s final neighborhood include Charles Laughton, Liberace, Sandra Dee, Andy Gibb, Ronnie James Dio (!) and, most recently, Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher.
Davis’s epitaph is a phrase she used often in interviews late in her life, “She did it the hard way.”
Davis’s grave has a permanent view down onto a Burbank movie lot.
It’s not her old Warner Brothers stomping ground, though. Instead, Bette keeps eternal watch over the Animation building of Walt Disney Studios.
Postscript:
Olivia de Havilland
Played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, Gone With the Wind star de Havilland is not on this list of burial places of FEUD‘s main characters. That is because she is alive and well in Paris, and is 100 years old as of this writing in April 2017. The real FEUD winner. Now can we get a sequel series about her own lifelong feud with her sister Joan Fontaine?
The Mercy Cube 