Oscar Levant - Later Life and Death

Later Life and Death

Levant drew increasingly away from the limelight in his later years. Upon his death in Beverly Hills, California of a heart attack at the age of 65, he was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. Interestingly, his death was discovered by his wife when she went to get him from their bedroom to sit for an interview with Candice Bergen, in her photo-journalist days. In their routines, some comics have claimed, apocryphally, and citing an old joke, that hypochondriac Levant's epitaph was inscribed, "I told them I was ill."