One of the graves at which Sam and Frankie pay their respects belongs to Judy Garland. Frankie remarks, "What a legend. I mean, can you believe the kind of harassment she put up with at work?" When Garland biographer Gerald Clarke was researching his 2000 book Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland in the Columbia University archives, he stumbled on Garland's notes for (and incomplete first draft of) her own, never-published autobiography. In that draft, Garland outlines the constant sexual harassment and groping she suffered at the (literal) hands of many Hollywood executives--including Louis B. Mayer, then one of the most powerful men not only in Hollywood but in the whole country, and Garland's boss since she was a child. Clarke recounted the abuse in Get Happy: "Between the ages of sixteen and twenty, Judy herself was to be approached for sex-and approached again and again. 'Don't think they all didn't try,' she said. Top on the list was Mayer himself. Whenever he complimented her on her voice-she 'sang from the heart,' he said-Mayer would invariably place his hand on her left breast to show just where her heart was. 'I often thought I was lucky,' observed Judy, 'that I didn't sing with another part of my anatomy.' That scenario, a compliment followed by a grope, was repeated many times until, grown up at last, Judy put a stop to it. 'Mr. Mayer, don't you ever, ever do that again,' she finally had the courage to say. 'I just will not stand for it.'"
Sam and her daughter, Frankie, visit Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Pamela Adlon's former father-in-law, Percy Adlon, has an uncle who is interred there - Louis Adlon, a German-born actor who passed away in 1947 at the age of 39.
One of the monuments that Sam and Frankie visit in the Hollywood Forever cemetery is to Hattie McDaniel, the first Black performer to win an acting Oscar (she won Best Supporting Actress for her role in the 1939 blockbuster Gone with the Wind). Upon seeing the memorial, Sam and Frankie both note aloud that it was not dedicated until 1999. The reason that this monument is a cenotaph and not an actual burial site is that when McDaniel died in 1952, her dying wish to be buried in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery (then just known as "Hollywood Cemetery") could not be carried out because at the time it was racially segregated and only accepted white burials. (These instructions were included in McDaniel's will: "I desire a white casket and a white shroud; white gardenias in my hair and in my hands, together with a white gardenia blanket and a pillow of red roses. I also wish to be buried in the Hollywood Cemetery.") McDaniel is actually buried at the Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery in the Pico-Union neighborhood of Los Angeles; Angelus-Rosedale was the first racially integrated cemetery in the LA area. In 1999 the management of Hollywood Forever Cemetery offered to have McDaniel's remains re-interred there; when her family declined to disturb her remains, Hollywood Forever and her family instead erected and dedicated the cenotaph visible in this episode.
When Sam and Frankie visit Sam's father's grave, they each put a stone on his gravemarker. There is a Jewish tradition that when one visits a grave, one leaves a small stone on the marker as a sign of respect. This is a cultural, rather than halachic or biblical, Jewish mourning tradition (albeit a very old one), and its origins and purposes are disputed. Non-Jewish audiences may be familiar with this tradition from the epilogue of the 1993 movie Schindler's List, in which many Holocaust survivors who were saved by Oskar Schindler, along with the actor who played each survivor, visit Schindler's grave and cover it with small stones.