CEMETERY TO STARS BOUGHT; FUNERAL DIRECTOR RESCUES HOLLYWOOD MEMORIAL PARK FROM PROBABLE CLOSURE.

Byline: Carol Bidwell Daily News Staff Writer

Hollywood Memorial Park, which holds the remains of some of early Hollywood's brightest stars, was purchased Wednesday by a Central California funeral industry executive, saving it from possibly shutting down.

Buck Kamphausen, a licensed embalmer and funeral director who owns the Neptune Society of Central California as well as several funeral homes and cemeteries, offered a high bid of $275,000 - well below the minimum suggested bid of $500,000 for the old cemetery - at a trustee's auction in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in downtown Los Angeles.

``We've been working with him for over a year to help us find interested buyers, and when nobody else was interested, he said, `Oh, well, I'll buy it,' '' said cemetery broker Maureen Hoagland. ``I think he hates to see the cemetery in disrepair. He's very competent and capable of turning the place around.''

There is a crematorium on the property, but it has not been used for years. Kamphausen could not be reached for comment on whether he plans to start using the facility.

Kamphausen wrote a check for 5 percent of the purchase price - $13,750 - and will have time to fully inspect the cemetery and examine its books before paying the remaining $261,250 in a few weeks, she said.

``He can still back out if he feels he's in over his head,'' the broker said. ``But he's got the resources and he's got the know-how and I think he's going to do a good job.''

The cemetery, at 6000 Santa Monica Blvd. between Gower Street and Van Ness Avenue, holds more than 79,000 graves, including those of Hollywood figures Rudolph Valentino, Tyrone Power, Cecil B. DeMille, John Huston, Peter Lorre, Marion Davies, Carl ``Alfalfa'' Switzer and others.

It's worth an estimated $2 million to $3 million, but it will take $1 million to $2 million to restore damage from vandalism, daily wear and tear, and the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, Hoagland said. It takes $75,000 to $80,000 a month just to break even, said cemetery office manager Homer Alba, but since the bankruptcy court prohibited the sale of new grave sites, income has slipped to $25,000 to $30,000 a month.

There is a $2 million endowment fund for cemetery maintenance, but it can only be used for upkeep of the graves.

If no one had purchased the cemetery at Wednesday's auction, the trustee was prepared to wash his hands of the old facility, which has fallen into disrepair since its owner, the Hollywood Cemetery Association, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy nearly two years ago. That would have left the fate of the cemetery in the hands of the cash-strapped owners, and they likely would have closed down the facility and padlocked the gates, said David Isenberg, attorney for the trustee.

The possibility the cemetery would close worried both Hollywood economic and tourism officials and families of those buried there.

But they were relieved at the news that the cemetery had been sold.

``I'm very happy,'' said Laurie Lopp, business development and marketing director for the Bank of Hollywood, who was trying to win support from film studios to bail out the old cemetery. ``The alternative would not only have been a lot of work, but there would have been an uncertainty - and nobody needed that.''

JoAnn Davis, whose father, Morris Laskowitz, was director of the cemetery's Beth Olam Jewish section from the mid-1930s until his death in 1959, said she feared that if the cemetery closed, she would have been barred from visiting her parents' crypts there.

``I think of those horror stories of cemeteries that are closing and burying people on top of each other,'' she said. ``Then you hear something like this and it's good news.''

Ed Wilkes, funeral director at Kamphausen's Skyview Memorial Lawn in Vallejo, said his boss of 20-plus years, Kamphausen, has a love of history, and that's perhaps why he decided to buy Hollywood Memorial Park.