Burt lancaster where is he buried

A crowd of friends and neighbors gathered outside in the street cheered at the news shouted down from the bay window. The baby was named for Lizzie's brother, Stephen, and the attending physician, Burton Thom.

Though Thom was a well-loved doctor in the neighborhood, known for his generosity and stiff white collars, mothers did not usually name a child for the doctor unless he had done something extraordinary, such as save the life of the baby — or the mother. The young Burton became acquainted with death early. On April 28, , Florence, Lizzie's last child, barely a year old, died at Willow Park Hospital of diphtheria, a victim of one of the epidemics that frequently ravaged the slums.

Four-year-old Burton was back to being the baby of the family. Four months later, Dr. Thom was called to the house on the night of August 12 to confirm James Roberts's sudden death of apoplexy at the age of seventy-two. Lizzie buried her father, the last direct link with Ireland, next to her daughter at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn. The house was legally the property of the two sons; each would sell his share to Lizzie, who would own the house outright by But to his uncles George, now a stockbroker living in upper Manhattan, and Stephen, a manager of Gents Furnishing living north of Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, East Harlem was a place you left.

This consciousness of being a holdover in the old neighborhood produced in the boy a jumpy belligerence. He was never sure just where he fit in. As he approached the age of seven, the raggedy, dissonant city that defined him was growing up too. The U. When mass immigration was stopped in , only one million of New York's six million residents were white, native-born Protestants, and only a handful of these lived in East Harlem. Arbiter of all that was new and fresh and dangerous, the city was the nexus of popular entertainment during the s.

Led by the vaudeville revue, a slick mannered pose was elevated to iconic status. The city sort of ran itself; Prohibition was a joke. The "City on a Still" sobriquet mocked not only the civic ideals of the previous generation but the decade's compulsion, as Frederick Lewis Allen would write, to use the Bible to "point the lessons of business and of business to point the lessons of the Bible. By the end of the decade, Walter Winchell and Mark Hellinger were creating in their enormously popular newspaper columns the idea of the urban wiseguy on whom nothing — scandal, pathos, politicians, showgirls, cops, criminals — was lost.

Growing up in this Manhattan was like growing up in imperial Rome. You were marked for life as someone unique, elite, ready for anything the planet might dish out. East Harlem, however, existed on the fringe of the whirl and light. When Washington politicians went on about America's universal postwar prosperity, Fiorello La Guardia, the neighborhood's contrary Twentieth District congressman from to , leapt to his feet and yelled, "Not in East Harlem! Though Eastern European Jews remained a significant presence in the neighborhood east of Third Avenue — Burton's first childhood pals were Jewish — immigrant Italians from Naples, Calabria, Sicily, and Salerno now dominated the quarter.

Burton, who would play the Sicilian Prince of Salina in The Leopard and would truly regret that he did not get the part of Don Corleone in The Godfather, may as well have, he often recalled, grown up Italian. East Harlem's Little Italy was not only three times more populous than the downtown section, it was the largest concentration of Italians in the country. More than three-quarters of them unskilled, almost half illiterate, these Italians were refugees of la miseria, the perpetual poverty and disease that centuries of mezzogiorno peasants in the south of Italy had accepted as their destiny.

Entire Italian villages occupied a given block making the East Harlem street grid a patchwork of the southern Italian boot. Slowly making his way along th Street, the U. The Sicilian Black Hand, a precursor to the Mafia, thrived just south of the Lancasters on Second Avenue between th and th Streets; the greatest concentration of the city's Neapolitan organ grinders lived on th and th Streets.

From th to th Streets the pushcart vendors and hawkers at the First Avenue market offered oils, cheese, sea urchins, olives, bread, garlic, macaroni hung on racks to dry — the smell of minestrone, espresso, cigar smoke like a rich ether come all the way from Palermo. The house on th Street had been further subdivided during the wartime housing shortage with the result that five families, thirty-seven people, now lived in the building.

All, except for the seven Lancasters, were Italians. On the top floor, the Marsalise family with eight children and a grandfather squeezed into little more than two rooms. Outside was the clatter of the Els, all night long, sirens shrieking, trucks roaring down Third Avenue, the clop of horses' hooves on cobblestones, the reek of the toilets out in the hall, the stench of the East River at low tide. No secrets, no phony attitudes, no pretensions. The density enveloped Burton with the raw sustenance of a womb.

Burton's father was what the family called a "fun father," with a family trip to the great amusement parks of Steeplechase and Luna Park at Coney Island a rare treat. The usual routine was for Jim to arrive home after a day's work at the post office, change into overalls, and patch plaster, paint, fix the plumbing, or repair the roof of the house. He was a fine mason with fingers so calloused he could pick a piece of coal from the fire with his bare hands.

Burton's job was to bring tea and sandwiches to a busy father who seemed to work all the time. Like thousands of other hardworking East Harlem dwellers, Jim's favorite relaxation was to sit on the front stoop on a summer's night and sing.

The Victorola was new, most music was still self-made, and the poignant sound of the human voice, needing no money or position or influence to be beautiful, was revered by both Italians and Irish as a divine gift. Jim sang tunes like "Kathleen Mavourneen," popularized by the ardent tenor John McCormack, and sometimes little Burton, with his wavy pompadour hair and boy soprano voice, would join in with his party piece, "My Wild Irish Rose.

The applause was a revelation. Later, his famous speaking voice would always have an Irish, cocky, romantic lilt — with an Ulster edge. Once a five-foot-nine-inch beauty, Lizzie after five children weighed pounds, and she had a terrifying temper. Her bulk loomed large in the dark, narrow rooms of the flat and her extremism, like a genetic wild card, was inherited by her youngest son. I was always in mortal fear of her. The exchange of music for mercy created a profound emotional response in the little boy.

All his life music had the power to take him back to that primary connection with his mother, back to the inchoate center where the rages began, and bring calm, even when he, who would have an exceptional memory, could no longer recall any clear image of her.

The old building overflowed with props and costumes, with extra sets placed out on the sidewalk. The backstage bustle and onstage drama were an exaggerated version of the peaks and valleys of life he saw every day on the streets of East Harlem, an art form he would love with a religious intensity.

Jim, home from the post office, would often trip over Burton, sprawled out on the sitting room floor, his head stuck all the way under the Victrola, his legs twitching to the music.

With the fanatic self-consciousness of the displaced ethnic, Lizzie insisted that her children distinguish themselves from the hoi polloi by scrupulous honesty. Coming out of the local Corn Exchange Bank one day, Burton saw a twenty-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk.

Instead of grabbing it and taking off, he decided to cover the bill with his foot and wait twenty minutes to see if anyone came. When an elderly Jewish neighbor appeared, obviously distressed, and asked if he had seen a twenty-dollar bill, Burton reluctantly handed it over and cursed himself all the way home.

More than sixty years after the fact he would recall in detail on the Donahue television show, hosted by Phil Donahue, when his mother, furious, made him return five cents in incorrect change to the local grocery store. An old man by then, as he acted out the story he stood poised, ready to dodge a blow.

With a strong dose of noblesse oblige, Lizzie showed by example that the Lancasters had an obligation to give to those less fortunate, which covered just about everyone in the neighborhood. The word on the street was that Mrs. Lancaster, after chewing you out for being a bum, would feed you and send you on your way.

Burton watched these transactions, listened as his mother purposely simplified her speech to "Second Avenue English," had black neighbors in to tea, and shared what little they had. The actions became what he would call his "Bible. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.

Namespaces File Discussion. Views View Edit History. Main page Welcome Community portal Village pump Help center. Upload file Recent changes Latest files Random file Contact us. Following two minor heart attacks he had to undergo an emergency quadruple heart bypass in , after which he was extremely weak, but he still managed to attend a Congressional hearing with old colleagues such as Jimmy Stewart. This website makes use of cookies to ensure that the website works properly.

He appeared as a supporting player in a number of his productions: Local Hero and Field of Dreams were the best. Upon his death, as he requested, he had no memorial or funeral service.

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