not quite almost job: with the Fairbanks family in hollywood

Yes, I worked in Hollywood, with Douglas Fairbanks Sr and Jr, but not until they had gone to the big sound stage in the sky.

Hollywood Memorial Cemetery housed the remains of many of Hollywood's elite in the 30s and 40s. By 1994, however, the place had fallen into great decline, made much worse by an earthquake that year. A family from St. Louis, MO bought the cemetery and set about to restore it. They renamed it Hollywood Forever Cemetery. 

A year after the death of Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s death in 2000, I was hired to carve his portrait, one that was to match his father's portrait, carved by this sculptor. 

the Fairbanks memorial. That's the old Paramount Studios in the background.

The idea, or Mr. Fairbanks Jr.'s widow's idea, was to remove Fairbanks Sr's portrait from the central panel, add marble panels on the left and right, and put up a matching wreath and bas relief profiles of father and son. 

The Fairbanks memorial today, almost exactly the way it was 70 years ago. Almost.

I was flown to LA, given a rather sportif red coupe,  and put up in a pleasant hotel about a block from all those bronzes in the sidewalk. I felt a bit grand, perhaps, and a bit far from my small town in frozen Ontario. This was early March. I could have been skiing instead of trying to look famous in Hollywood.

At the memorial site workmen were busy prying off the wreath, using wedges to bust the anchors loose from the marble. They had wedges in place to pop the portrait off, too, but one of us stopped that operation.  You can see the remains of the wedges behind the portrait, and the outline where the wreath was.

I used a bunch of masking tape and a stick to establish thicknesses and measurements, taking photos from many angles. I was supposed to match the original bas relief.

I took the wreath into a little room in a kind of tower on the property to make a copy mould. I'd bought materials online from a California store and had them shipped to the cemetery. The mould was made in pieces and sent via courier to my studio back home.

I was nicely treated by the owner, but I suspect he was surprised to find such a famous sculptor with such a shiny car to be so boring. It wasn't me who oversold me, honest.

The wreath in the tower:

So I had a free day to drive around, hiking the 
Will Rogers State Park (pretty cool. I called my Mom on my mobile) and driving up past Malibu and on up the coast. It was the ocean, the dry hills and the many friendly Mexican workers gathered at the exits to Home Depot that I'll take away from Hollywood.

the wax ready for casting, rubbed to make it bronze-y

And... no fanfare, please. I did the portrait and the wreath. It got cast and shipped. We heard, eventually that the widow either did not like it, or that the cost of changing the marble elements of the memorial was going to exceed the California debt. At any rate, after all these years, I have finally found out that they put the wreath back and simply carved Jr's name below his father's. Er, and put Jr. with his dad. At bit awkward, that thought. Bet they were never that close in life.

Another almost-job, except that I got the Hollywood tour, met a few characters and got to feel famous-y for a bit. Oh, and I got paid. Whew, that's great praise in small town Ontario.