Author of Hollywood Cemetery Guidebook Was 68

Mark J. Masek, who wrote Hollywood Remains to Be Seen: A Guide to the Movie Stars’ Final Homes, an insightful 2001 book about 14 Los Angeles-area cemeteries and their celebrated residents, has died. He was 68.

Masek died on New Year’s Eve of an apparent heart attack inside his home in Alhambra, California, his girlfriend of 19 years, Jayne Osborne, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Masek, who moved to Southern California in 1999 from the Chicago area, was “always a fan of old movies and history, and I thought cemeteries were a way to combine those two,” he explained in a 2011 interview.

So, he embarked on his book, with each of its 14 chapters devoted to a walking tour of a cemetery: Forest Lawn Glendale (the final resting place for Michael Jackson and Jimmy Stewart, one of Masek’s favorite actors); Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills (Buster Keaton, Freddie Prinze); Hollywood Forever Cemetery (Tyrone Power, Mel Blanc, Hattie McDaniel); Westwood Memorial Park (Marilyn Monroe, Walter Matthau); Holy Cross (Mary Astor, Bing Crosby); Hillside Memorial Park (Jack Benny, Lorne Greene); Mount Sinai Memorial Park (Phil Silvers, Brandon Tartikoff); Oakwood Memorial Park (Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers); Calvary Cemetery (Pola Negri, Ramon Novarro); Home of Peace Memorial Park (Curly Howard, Louis B. Mayer); Eden Memorial Park (Groucho Marx, Lenny Bruce); Inglewood Park Cemetery (Betty Grable, Cesar Romero); San Fernando Mission Cemetery (Walter Brennan); and Valhalla Memorial Park (Oliver Hardy).

Masek said one of the most impressive gravesites he encountered was that of Douglas Fairbanks Sr., who is buried at Hollywood Forever in a white mausoleum complete with Roman pillars and his profile in brass in front of a 120-foot-long reflecting pool. He stood on the same spot where Charlie Chaplin delivered a eulogy in 1939.

He also admired Al Jolson’s resting place at Hillside, a domed monument featuring a life-sized statue of the entertainer atop a cascading waterfall, and Liberace’s tomb at Forest Lawn Hollywood, which features a musical score set on white marble.

Masek’s work “was never about spectacle,” Allan R. Ellenberger wrote on the website The Hollywoodland Revue. “It was about documentation — names, locations, dates, stories — quietly ensuring that Hollywood’s dead were not erased simply because their careers had faded.

“No place held his expertise in higher regard than Hollywood Forever and other Southern California graveyards, where he had a near-cartographic sense of who was where and why. To historians, preservationists and aficionados, Masek was viewed as an expert — a person who not only knew the facts but the patterns: which stars got honor, which shame, which oblivion, and what that says about what the industry held dear.”

Mark Joseph Masek was born on June 13, 1957, in Joliet, Illinois. In high school, he and teammates entered the Joliet Correctional Center — once the home of Baby Face Nelson and James Earl Ray — to play baseball against the prisoners there.

He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1979 and served as a local news editor at the Daily Herald in Arlington Heights. And after coming west, he worked for The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group and the Los Angeles Times before getting laid off in 2008.

Hollywood Remains to Be Seen includes about 400 Hollywood luminaries who have left us, among them Rudolph Valentino, Clark Gable, Clara Bow, Jean Harlow, Elizabeth Taylor and W.C. Fields.

He noted that he often dealt with security guards at cemeteries while doing research — he said he was asked to delete photographs he had taken of Jackson’s grave soon after the performer’s death in 2009 — and sometimes asked to leave the premises.

And when he told people what he was writing about, he would typically get one of three reactions: some could not care less, others were “shocked and horrified by it” and others were “closet grave hunters; they thought they were the only people that do this and wanted behind-the-scenes information.”

More recently, Masek published several e-books on individual cemeteries — including one on Graceland Cemetery in Chicago — for visitors to take with them to gravesites.

Survivors include his brothers, Rick and Terry. He will be cremated, with his ashes buried next to his parents in Joliet, Osborne said.

In his 2011 interview, Masek said “cemeteries are like libraries, and every grave is a story. Some are more interesting than others, but the deceased deserve to be remembered.”