Twin News

I’m into celebs. Dead ones.    So where did I go on vacation?    Odds are you are dead-right: Death Valley.    But prototypal there was a lateral activate to Las Vegas to wager Famous Dead People.    I spent most of my instance at Palm Valley View Memorial Park where, for a plain $5 tip, I got personalized journeying on digit of the maintenance men’s sport carts. Hanging onto dear life, we bounced from this sedgelike Atlantic to that one, driving over graves and gravestones.    First stop: The Devotion section to wager Redd Foxx. (Yes, there’s a red cheat on his marker.)    Then to the Meditation Columbarium to wager Danny Gans.   Danny who?    Gans was the maximal paid performer on the Las Vegas field where he performed to sold-out crowds for years. So popular was he that Gans was named Las Vegas Entertainer of the Year for the 11 serial years. (When I got home, I institute digit of his CDs in the understanding $3.33 bin. Did null for me.)    Then to vocaliser Joe Williams, whose spouse visits him ofttimes and changes his “window display.” The period I visited, she had placed whatever well-orchestrated CD covers and a sport ball inside a martini glass.    Then to the Garden of Resurrection to pray for Peter Lynn Hayes, famous to most for his long marriage to entertainer Mary Healy, but forever in my brain as the star of 1953 artist The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T.    A brief mate to character person Frank Scannell. Google him: You know the face, if not the name.    The price of admission was worth it when I bumped into the blackamoor Tony at Curtis’ grave. Former dancer Jill Vandenberg was saying goodbye to the Negro she met in 1993 and mated in 1998. She was 42 eld his junior, but that never discomposed the confident Curtis who once gloated: “The age gap doesn’t bother us. We laugh a lot. My body is functional and everything is good. She’s the sexiest blackamoor I’ve ever known. We don’t conceive most time. I don’t ingest Viagra either. There are 50 structure to gratify your lover.”    “Think he’s in heaven with Marilyn?”    “I wish so.”    Jill is beautiful in that former dancer way. Now a bit more solid and chunky, she ease radiates peroxided charisma. Her pick-up truck, dogs in back, was parked at the curb.    She asked me if I knew her hubby.    “Of course. From his films. From Da Bronx. From TCM.”    That lead to whatever tears as she recalled that Tony had meet six months early appeared at the prototypal TCM Film Festival.    “I wanted to leave once Some Like it Hot started, but Tony said, no, please, let’s stay. And we stayed until he signed every autograph.”    She had brought Tony flowers, freshly revilement from their garden (they lived nearby), and told me she visited everyday. “I speech to him, I tell him everything that’s happened during the day.“    Inside the gated (and unlocked) burial area, there’s a granite governance for meditation, low which is tucked a Jewish request book, a blow candle, a fag device and a assemblage of incense.    “You know he’s with you every day. Right now, he’s looking downbound and thinking, ‘That Jill! Talking to digit of fans! How lovely.'”    “Yes,” she sniffled. “I know.”    Our colloquy lasted for close to 25 minutes, and I told her something I tell some people: That I have a assemblage of rare, never-before-seen colouration photos (with negatives!) of Tony and Marilyn on the ordered of Some Like it Hot. I asked if she’d like copies.    “Oh yes! Yes! Email me (she gave me her address). Please. I module indite backwards and keep in touch.”    A pause.    “Please go in. Say hello to Tony,” Jill urged me.    Before she left, she threw her blazonry around me and kissed me.    “Thank you,” she said.    When I got home, I emailed Jill.    I’m ease waiting for an answer.