Stone Gardens: A timeless Hollywood love story found its final chapter written in a Muskogee County cemetery
James Noble spent seven decades on stage and screen, most memorably as the scatterbrained yet decent Governor Eugene Gatling on the long-running sitcom Benson.
He was born in Dallas in 1922, trained at the Actors Studio in New York after World War II Navy service, and built a career that took him from Broadway to soap operas to guest spots on everything from The Love Boat to Law and Order.
He died in Norwalk, Connecticut, in 2016 at age ninety-four. None of that history points toward Oklahoma. Yet he lies buried in Greenhill Cemetery in Muskogee, in a plot with no connection to his Texas childhood or his East Coast and California residences. The reason sits beside him in the same grave: his wife of nearly fifty years, the actress Carolyn Owen Coates.
Carolyn was born in Oklahoma City in 1927, the younger daughter of Glenn Clinton Coates and Jessica Owen. Her father, known locally as Cactus Coates, served as mayor of Elk City and president of its Chamber of Commerce until his death in 1943 at forty-three.
The family’s Oklahoma ties ran through that brief period of civic prominence in the western part of the state and through an earlier decision to secure a burial plot in Muskogee, some two hundred miles east in the old Creek Nation country.
Glenn and Jessica divorced soon after Carolyn’s birth. She left Oklahoma as a child, grew up mostly in Santa Monica, California, and began acting in children’s theater there before studying at UCLA and heading east for stock-company work. The Oklahoma chapter of her life seemed to close early, yet the family plot in Muskogee remained.
She met Noble in 1951 while they were playing Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins in a summer-stock production of Pygmalion in Worcester, Massachusetts. They married five years later and spent the next four decades appearing together in plays across the country: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Night of the Iguana.
Their daughter, Jessica, grew up watching rehearsals from the wings.
Carolyn earned a reputation for roles that demanded presence and force, Madam Irma in The Balcony, Hecuba in The Trojan Women. She kept performing until the mid-1980s, then paused for nearly a decade to volunteer full-time with AIDS organizations in Los Angeles and New York. She returned to the stage one last time in 2001 at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre.
She died of cancer in 2005 at the Connecticut Hospice in Branford.
Noble chose to bury her in the Muskogee family plot. Eleven years later, after a stroke, he died on the anniversary of her passing and was laid beside her in Block 115, Lot 7. The back of their shared headstone carries a short verse he selected: I BESEECH YOU SPRING COME HEAR THE RING OF LAUGHTER HIGH AND JOLLY AND NE’ER LOOK BACK OR REGRET ANY OF MY FOLLY.
The placement feels out of place for a man whose public life never touched Oklahoma. He had no relatives there, no property, no filming locations, no college years, no speaking engagements. His story was Texas birth, wartime service, New York training, New Jersey home, California work.
Yet the decision was not random. It was the final gesture in a marriage that had already joined their professional lives on dozens of stages.
Carolyn’s Oklahoma origins may have been brief and interrupted by divorce and relocation, but they were real, anchored by her father’s short term as mayor in Elk City and by the quiet plot the family had kept in Muskogee.
Noble honored that tether. In doing so he turned a small Oklahoma cemetery into the unexpected endpoint of a career spent almost entirely elsewhere. The television star with no other links to the state rests there now, next to the woman whose family once claimed it as home.
