King of 80s Pop Michael Jackson will be buried two hours before the gala memorial service at the Los Angeles Staples Centre gets underway today.

Acting Los Angeles mayor Jan Perry let the funeral arrangements slip while discussing the upcoming Michael Jackson memorial service with a local TV channel.

Her comments, which she later described as a “misspoke”, end speculation that the family may have been trying to clear legal hurdles to bury Jackson at his Neverland Ranch – his fantasy estate north of Los Angeles that some fans wanted to turn into a memorial.

The funeral will take place at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Hollywood Hills, the burial place of many former Hollywood personalities, at 8am and the coffin then transported to the Staples Centre where it will be on display during the memorial.

The Forest Lawn memorial park and mortuary at Hollywood Hills is on the lower north slope at the far east end of the Santa Monica Mountains range overlooking North Hollywood and Burbank in the San Fernando Valley, in a park dedicated to the preservation of American history.

Before it was a cemetery Forest Lawn was used as a filming location, with the climactic battle scenes for D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, just one of the productions to use it.

Other Hollywood personalities interred in the lushly landscaped, gently rolling hills and manicured green lawns there include Bette Davis, Lucille Ball, Telly Savalas, William Conrad, Buster Keaton, Liberace, Freddie Prinze, Andy Gibb, Jack Webb, Stan Laurel, Ricky Nelson, and more recently David Carradine.

News footage shot from a helicopter and aired by a Los Angeles TV station last night showed a coffin arriving at the cemetery, and La Toya Jackson, wearing sunglasses, was seen leaving.

Only family and close friends will attend the private service and a large police cordon has been put in place to keep fans and media out.