http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5429-2003Jul30.html
I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for old folks. They’ve got lifetimes of stories to tell, and experiences out their flabby, wrinkled whazoos.
Wouldn’t living near this place be great? “I think I’ll pop over to the home and talk to X about what it was like to work with Humphrey Bogart.” Given how old people appreciate the company, and how they can talk your ear off, I’d be in old movie heaven.
Lots of very famous old-timers wound up there: Mary Astor, Mae Murray, Norma Shearer . . . It was founded after a number of scandals in the 1930s, when former stars and film workers died broke and alone (often by suicide). There’s another, similar, home in Englewood, NJ.
I got a chance to do this once, years ago. I was at, erm, a summer camp of sorts (OK, it was a psychiatric hospital) and got to chatting with this lonely old lady named Marjorie. She started telling me about going shopping in Chicago with Zazu Pitts and dating Buddy Rogers. (Fortuitously, I was the only person in the joint who’d heard of Buddy.) My boyfriend chided me for being naive, saying she was probably making it all up, but who cared?
I work in the funeral biz in LA, and I used to make pickups there all the time. It was usually in the middle of the night, so no one was really out and about. Very nice place, like a large convalescent home, but equipped more like a full service medical center. I don’t remember picking up anyone I’d heard of though. It seemed to be mostly craftspeople who worked behind the camera. I’ve since changed jobs to a mortuary in Whittier, so I’m more or less out of the celebrity loop these days.