A Beverly Hills widow is selling her husband's crypt to pay off her mortgage, writes JEFF GOTTLIEBin Los Angeles
RICHARD PONCHER’S eternal sleep will soon be disrupted. The one-time Beverly Hills resident, who died 23 years ago at 81, will be moving out of the crypt above Marilyn Monroe’s resting spot at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park cemetery.
Poncher’s wife intends to sell the crypt, said to have once been owned by Monroe’s former husband, Yankee baseball great Joe DiMaggio.
So while the plaque on Poncher’s crypt reads: “To the man who gave us everything and more,” his wife Elsie is hoping he has just a little more to give. She wants to use the money to help pay off the $1.6 million (€1.1m) mortgage on her 1¾-acre Beverly Hills home.
“I can’t be more honest than that,” she says. “I want to leave it free and clear for my kids.”
Elsie Poncher plans to start the bidding at $500,000 when she places the crypt on eBay, making it – per square foot – one of the most expensive pieces of real estate on the market.
Richard Poncher was a serial entrepreneur, to hear his wife tell it, who made a fortune with a variety of electronics firms and once sold surplus US army aircraft and parts. She claims he built two bullet-proof cars for Al Capone and owned 12 Rolls Royces in his lifetime.
“He wasn’t afraid to tackle anything,” Elsie says. “Besides that, he was a helluva nice guy.”
They lived a colourful, outsize life after meeting in Chicago and moving West. “He knew all the gangsters,” Elsie adds.
The couple ate at the legendary Los Angeles restaurants that catered to Hollywood – the Brown Derby, Chasens, Perinos. They owned an apartment at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong.
The house where Poncher’s widow still lives is something of a museum, with a Picasso drawing tucked away in a back hall and signed prints by him and Chagall on the living room wall.
When Elsie brings out a photo of her husband dressed in a conservative black suit and herself wearing a saucer-sized pendant with rubies and diamonds, she tells a story of how it came from a deal her husband did with a relative of King Farouk of Egypt.
Elsie says her husband bought the crypt from DiMaggio during the former ballplayer’s 1954 divorce from Monroe. The actress didn’t commit suicide until 1962, so Poncher had no way of knowing what an icon Monroe would become in death or that she would some day be entombed at the Westwood cemetery.
The Ponchers were at the Regency Hotel in New York talking to DiMaggio, Elsie says, when the retired ballplayer asked, “You want to buy two crypts?”
“Who the hell wants two crypts?” her husband replied.
He later bought them, one for himself and one for his wife.
Elsie isn’t sure how her husband knew DiMaggio. “He knew a lot of people,” she says with a wave of the hand.
Wearing gray sweats and with long, pink fingernails, she admits to being in her 70s but is quick to add, “I do 20 laps in the pool every day”. She says when she sells the crypt, she’ll put her husband’s remains in the one reserved for her and, when her time comes, she’ll be cremated.
When he was dying, Poncher approached his wife with a request.
“He said, ‘If I croak, if you don’t put me upside down over Marilyn, I’ll haunt you the rest of my life’,” says Elsie.
Right after the funeral, she says, she told the funeral director of her husband’s wish. “I was standing right there and he turned him over,” she says.
The cemetery, which is hidden away off Glendon Avenue, is the final resting spot for many celebrities, among them Natalie Wood, Dean Martin, Rodney Dangerfield, Merv Griffin, Mel Torme, Truman Capote and – most recently – Farrah Fawcett.
Monroe’s spot, though, is the most popular. Admirers leave roses and lipstick marks on the crypt, marked with a simple plaque, “Marilyn Monroe 1926-1962.” For several decades, DiMaggio had a dozen roses delivered to the crypt regularly.
Playboy’s Hugh Hefner bought the crypt next to the actress in 1992 for $75,000. He said he had many friends buried there and, living close by, it’s almost the neighbourhood cemetery.
"I'm a believer in things symbolic," Hefner said. "Spending eternity next to Marilyn is too sweet to pass up." – ( Los Angeles Times-Washington Postservice)