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Guiding star: tour driver Brian Donnelly is Hollywood's biggest, most voluble fan.

Article Excerpt
THIS IS GOING TO SOUND A LITTLE CREEPY," Brian Donnelly tells his passengers as he steers a powder blue Starline Tours van north off Hollywood Boulevard onto Sycamore Avenue. "I spent the night of my 47th birthday in room 105 of the building just ahead"--the Highland Gardens Hotel, where Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose on October 4, 1970. The evening, he explains, was a gift from his girlfriend, Christine Davis. Following dinner at Barney's Beanery, site of the singer's last supper, the two checked in. Accompanied by several friends, they listened repeatedly to Pearl, Joplin's final album, downed a bottle of Southern Comfort ("I was ripped to sin"), and in consultation with the coroner's report, outlined in masking tape the spot where her body was found. "We did this out of respect," Donnelly assures the group as he turns east onto Franklin Avenue.

What the 13 men, women, and children who will spend the next two hours with Donnelly think of his story is hard to say. By embarking on a Hollywood tour, they are already embracing the view that movie and television stars and just about everyone else in show business are not only worthy of fascination, but their homes and death sites are shrines. Before departing, they had spent a half hour in line outside Grauman's Chinese Theater, where the Starline kiosk occupies the original ticket booth. An Austin, Texas, physician and his wife, in town to supervise their son's attempt to break into child acting, ogled the outline of Whoopi Goldberg's dreadlocks pressed into the movie palace's courtyard floor. A Russian couple stepped into Warren Beatty's footprints. An 84-year-old former Mount St. Mary's College teacher, retired to Vancouver and back on vacation, betrayed his age by lingering over the impression of Monty Woolley's signature.

Bearded and balding with short-cropped graying hair and outfitted in black slacks and a navy blue jacket adorned with Starline's red-and-white logo, Donnelly looks like a cross between a high school teacher and a security guard, except there's a diamond stud winking from one ear. Of the scores of tour drivers who ply their trade in Hollywood, he's widely acknowledged as the best, the one who combines an encyclopedic knowledge with an irresistible patter. Not that he would put it that way "I'm a fount of some of the most useless information in the world," he declares as he pulls away from the Highland Gardens. Only ten minutes into the excursion, he's intoned into his headset microphone that the El Cadiz Apartments on Sycamore serve as the home for Jennifer Garner's character on the ABC series Alias, the Magic Castle on Franklin was built as a private residence in 1908, and the Hollywood United Methodist Church next door provided the setting for the interior photography for the film Sister Act. To Donnelly, the proper subject matter for a Hollywood tour includes the trivial and the profound, the macabre and the sublime, and a bit of the revolting, too. He also believes that the past and the present in the entertainment capital coexist. Yesterday's stars are as relevant as today's, while long-defunct haunts are as alluring as current hot spots. "I don't know if it's possible," he says, "but if there are past lives, I think I lived in Hollywood in the '20s and '30s, died here in the '40s, and now circumstances have brought me back."

Stopped at a light on Highland, Donnelly turns from the driver's seat and, focusing on one of his younger passengers, asks, "How old are you?"

"Ten," the girl replies.

"Are you skipping school?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I've got bad news for you. I'm gonna use the E word--for education. A lot of you...

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