Celebrity Crackups Continue

LOS ANGELES – Something is killing the great stars of Hollywood.
This doesn’t involve serial celebrity murders or the plotline of a Lifetime TV potboiler. The crime involves that noted stroll of the stars: the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
In the past year, the stars began to buckle. And, while some people in the entertainment industry may always seem a bit unsteady, this is a story of the real icons – the pink and black stars in terrazzo that honor 2,240 film and television stars, singers, musicians and others in the Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles Times reports that the stone in some of the stars is cracking and buckling. It’s also not a matter of age; while many of the original 1,558 stars installed in 1960 appear normal, the one for film star Anthony Hopkins – dedicated in October, already shows some cracks.
The star problem became obvious in the past year to Johnny Grant, the jovial white-haired honorary “Mayor of Hollywood” familiar to anyone who’s seen a photo or TV report about the Walk of Fame. When Grant saw a tourist nearly take a tumble tripping on the terrazzo of Whoopi Goldberg’s star this summer, he knew something was serious amiss.
Just what’s causing the cracking is a mystery, although one large clue possibly lies underneath the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue. It’s where most of the damage is occurring … and it’s also where the Red Line subway passes through. Local transit officials, however, don’t believe the tunneling and operation of the decade-old subway line is at fault.
A Los Angeles city council member is calling for a study of the problem in an attempt to preserve the world-famous walk, which attracts millions of tourists annually.
So far, there are no known injuries due to the walk’s deteriorating condition; in fact, in the history of the Walk of Fame, there’s only been one star-related fatality. In 1966, William Frawley, the long-suffering Fred Mertz of I Love Lucy fame, died of a heart attack at his place of sidewalk veneration on Hollywood Boulevard (although other Hollywood lore claims he collapsed around the corner at the Knickerbocker Hotel).