{Hollywood} Forest Lawn: Hollywood Hills

Our trip to Forest Lawn: Hollywood Hills was a quick one. Founded in 1906, it is younger and smaller than its big Glendale cousin (blog on Glendale this week!) but is still gorgeous in its own right. The best part of the cemetery is the view; you could see for miles from the top of the hill.

Our main objective here was the legendary Bette Davis, who was not at all hard to find. I left her a bouquet (dedicated from some dear friends of mine); she had already been given several flowers and also a big lipstick print.

She’s entombed with her mother Ruth and sister Barbara.

Right around the corner from her, in a wall in the outdoor mausoleum is a modest marker for renowed actor Charles Laughton. Charles was the tyrannical Captain Bligh to Clark’s mutinous Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty, and starred with Carole in White Woman (1933) and They Knew What They Wanted (1941). Carole reportedly nicknamed him Cuddles, but apparently neither she nor Clark cared for him very much personally.

Not too far from there is George Raft. George was known to have Mob connections and was quite the womanizer. Him and Carole were rumored to have had a thing or two while filming Bolero (1934) and Rumba (1935) together. George also dated Norma Shearer and, briefly, Clark’s ex-wife Ria Langham shortly after their divorce.

Cool fact about Forest Lawn: Hollywood Hills is that during the silent era its massive fields were used as a filming location. Battle scenes for D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation
(1915) were filmed here.