Link to article: http://www.suntimes.com/entertainmen...eath05.article#
Dying gives him a living
EXPIRATION EXPERT | Ex-Chicagoan knows all about the carnage of the stars
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October 5, 2009
BY MIKE THOMAS mthomas@suntimes.com
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Scott Michaels (inset) leads tours of Los Angeles devoted entirely to the killing sprees of Charles Manson and his minions, including the home (above) where Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were murdered.
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Celebrity death expert
He even leads death tours via bus in Los Angeles, dropping by infamous sites where famous folks -- River Phoenix, Sam Cooke, Karen Carpenter, Ed Wood, Jean Harlow, Janis Joplin and others -- bought the farm in sometimes ghastly fashion.
And business is booming.
"[Death] is everywhere: the 'E! True Hollywood Stories' and even the news," says Michaels, 47. "And with Twitter and Facebook, when Michael Jackson died, we all found out about it at the same time. Death has become really trendy."
While living near Irving Park and Sheridan in the 1990s, Michaels "stumbled upon" Chicago's vast and fabled Graceland Cemetery, with its monuments and mausoleums and many notable residents (Marshall Field and Daniel Burnham among them). He also explored the lesser-known Wunders Cemetery across the street.
"I was a bit of a loner, I didn't have a whole lot of friends going on at that point in time," he says. "It was just kind of a comfort being in there. It's kind of hard to explain."
As part of his tour offerings, Michaels also leads an excursion focused entirely (and chronologically) on the Charles Manson murders. This summer marked the 40th anniversary of the bloody L.A. slayings carried out by Manson's young minions.
Among the victims was budding movie star Sharon Tate, the pregnant wife of movie director Roman Polanski. Her killer wrote "Pig" on the front door in Tate's blood. Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, the last resident before Tate's former home was razed in 1994, took the door with him upon leaving.
Rolling Stone has reported that the door was reinstalled at Reznor's Louisiana recording studio. (Welcome!)
"I think the Manson [case] has all the ingredients," Michaels says, explaining the public's ongoing fascination with the brutal crimes. "It has movie stars, it has rock stars, it has gossip, it has the tabloids, it's hippies, it's the kids. Before, we all knew what the bad guys were like. And now it became kids. It was just shocking upon shocking upon shocking. And this was 40 years ago, so we hadn't been conditioned at that point with slasher movies and things like that. And now when you think about them writing words with people's blood on walls, it's not that shocking. Forty years ago, it was incredible."
Having grown up in Detroit at an intersection where fatal and near-fatal car crashes occurred regularly, Michaels was conditioned early on to see death as a part of life. But even a hardened veteran like himself gets creeped out every once in a while. He grew nauseous and uneasy in the Wonderland Drive apartment where porn star John Holmes was present during horrific drug slayings in 1981.
Scenes of past violence typically don't affect him like that. Witnessing violence is another story.
"I still can't watch somebody get shot," he says. "I have a problem with that kind of stuff. I can see still photographs of the most gruesome things you can imagine, and it doesn't bother me. Seeing something horrible actually happening, I can't look at that. When they have those videos of sporting events when people's legs twist a certain way, I can't even look at those things. It makes me sick to my stomach.
"But people misinterpret my interest in death. They say, 'Oh, you're gonna love this video,' and it's some soldier getting his head hacked off. It's like, 'I don't wanna see that!' However, if it was Marilyn Monroe getting her head hacked off, yeah, I'd wanna see it."
Besides culling stories about scandal and death, Michaels also collects artifacts. He owns a slice of flooring from the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles where Bobby Kennedy was gunned down in 1968, and a 5-by-5-inch chunk of singer John Denver's ocean-shattered plane.
A generous fan sent him swatches of material (Michaels thinks they're authentic) from the car in which Hollywood bombshell Jayne Mansfield was scalped and killed in a 1967 wreck. And hung in his home is a painting of the seven dwarves by Chicago's most notorious psychopath, John Wayne Gacy. Between 1972 and 1978, the part-time clown (Gacy entertained at birthday parties) killed 33 young men and boys. Most of them were buried in a crawl space beneath his house on West Summerdale in Norwood Park Township, east of O'Hare Airport.
"It's called 'Seven Little Friends,' and they all have little shovels in their hands," Michaels says. "I wrote Gacy and I got a letter back from him because I wanted one of his paintings. So I got a nice note back from him on his little clown stationery and it said, 'My sister does all this, here's a catalog.' [The painting] was only, like, 100 bucks. If I had the money back then, Gacy would have painted anything for 350 bucks. You could send him a picture of your dog and he'd paint it for $350. It's crossing a line a lot of people have. And admittedly, mine's a bit blurry."
Michaels says some people are confounded -- and even offended -- by his morbid passion. Libby Jagger, daughter of Rolling Stones rocker Mick Jagger, has called him "absolute scum," and the late Tammy Wynette's husband, George Richey, questioned his manhood.
"There are some times when people go, 'How can you live with yourself?' and that sort of thing," Michaels says. "But I just think, 'Well, quite well, thank you.' I'm comfortable in my own skin."
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Originally Posted by Scott Michaels
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