DIG, MUST WE?

By Roger Rosenblatt

Among the stranger pursuits of science these days is the effort to exhume dead celebrities. Meriwether Lewis, of the pair of famous Northwest explorers, is the latest to be marked for elevation. He joins a lengthening list that includes President Zachary Taylor, the parents of Lizzie Borden, John Wilkes Booth, Jesse James, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Marilyn Monroe and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion.

The reason offered for unearthing these notables is to determine how they died, or if they were as dead as they were originally said to be. Forensic experts wanted to exhume President Taylor to discover if he was poisoned, and Booth and James to see if in fact they occupied the graves that were assigned to them. One assumes that in the case of the Bordens someone wanted to count the number of whacks.

Are these undertakings necessary? They may be sound environmentally, as they involve soil rotation, but things could easily get out of control. Picture the earth as one vast upturned boneyard. Did Isadora Duncan actually hang herself? Did Trotsky walk into a door? One dead President deserves another. Some overeager investigator may lobby to dig up Calvin Coolidge, to determine if he was ever alive. Now that one mentions it, who is buried in Grant's tomb?

Concern over this trend may be alarmist, but with heady modern science one cannot be too careful. One scientist said it was high time that history was taken away from the historians. History is guesswork, but science will set us free.

That so far has hardly been proved. President Taylor, whom more people wanted to look at in 1991 than did in the first place, was believed to have been done in with arsenic. On July 4, 1850, he ate a bowl of cherries and downed a glass of buttermilk; a few days later he was dead. In 1991 the subject was brought up again, his tissue samples were assailed with neutrons, and the forensic conclusion was that he had not been poisoned after all. Scientists were disappointed. But historians guessed rightly that a glass of buttermilk without arsenic is enough to kill anybody, much less when it's a chaser to a bowl of cherries, which, as history has indicated, life is just.

They rolled over Beethoven to get a lock of his hair and concluded that he was blond.

Yet there are a great many conspiracy theorists who insist that alongside the buried famous are buried secrets that, once disclosed, will change our view of history. If Taylor's Vice President and successor, Millard Fillmore, was found to have injected arsenic into one of the President's cherries, it would have provided the one memorable event in both careers. A "second-cherry theory" would have pointed to two or more assassins.

John Wilkes Booth has become a candidate for unearthing because 22 of his descendants claim that an innocent man was gunned down by soldiers and that Booth was permitted to escape. That would suggest a government plot to kill Lincoln. The crackpot notion that Booth did not shout, "Sic semper tyrannis" after the shooting, but rather "Sic semper tyrannosaurus," thus suggesting that he was buried under the American Museum of Natural History, has been dismissed out of hand.

An attempt to dig up Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in a Bolivian graveyard yielded a German miner named Gustav Zimmer, a natural mistake. A researcher said, "I think Butch and Sundance will sleep peacefully now." Let us hope so.

As for Leo, the MGM lion, he is buried on a New Jersey farm that has recently been put up for sale. Under the same real estate lies Cheetah, Tarzan's chimp. (This is no mere coincidence; the farm belonged to the animals' trainer.) Fearing that disrespectful developers will plow under the lion, the Rutgers University archaeology department has offered to move the remains to a safe place. So far no one has suggested that Cheetah was involved in Leo's death.

The assumption driving these excavations is that the public will be delighted to learn of the results. Yet how many citizens will fling down the morning papers, lean across the breakfast table and sigh, "Darling, thank God! Zachary Taylor wasn't poisoned, after all!" Besides, would not most people prefer to exercise their imaginations about the fate of celebrated figures? The question of whether the Grand Duchess Anastasia survived the Czar's executioners was the only interesting thing about her.

If, decades after their burial, somebody will always be wanting to bring celebrities to the surface, the solution may be not to bury them in the first place. A simple freezing would save future investigators much sweat. Or just leave them where they fall.

Two popular figures have been notably overlooked by the forensic pursuers. One is Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science Church, who was said to have been interred with a telephone in her crypt in case she needed to phone long distance. Rather than visit, the exhumers may be trying to call her collect. The other, of course, is Elvis. But why bother?