Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (21 page)

At the cemetery, I instructed the pallbearers to carry the casket down a fairly steep hill. By the time we reached the lowering device, I saw that the fancy knobs at each end of the handles had broken off. The pallbearers didn’t seem to know what to do with them, so one man placed the broken knob on the “casket piece,” which is what the floral arrangement on top of the casket is called, and the other three men did the same. Fortunately, the other family members seemed unaware that this had happened.

Another embarrassing event occurred on a military service at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego. We had just leased six new Dodge station wagons and had not yet received the license plates. Almost all car dealers deliver a car to you with a temporary license plate insert showing the name of the dealership or the manufacturer, as a way to get some free advertising. A male family member came up to me just as the
pallbearers were about to step up to the rear of the conversion. He was visibly angry and told me that he was extremely upset over the license plate insert. Having never really paid any attention to it, I was caught totally off-guard. That year, Chrysler Corporation’s national slogan was “Something wonderful is happening.” I tore the license inserts off the car and apologized profusely.

At the conclusion of a veteran’s funeral, the final procedure is presenting the folded American flag to a member of the family and telling them, “On behalf of the president of the United States and a grateful nation, we are presenting you with this flag.” The person chosen to receive it is usually the closest relative. On one occasion there were two daughters, resulting in a very emotional fight between them as to who would get the flag.

When film director John Farrow died, I drove the family car for his big celebrity funeral. I picked up his actress wife, Maureen O’Sullivan, and daughter Mia Farrow, who was still in her teens. She hadn’t started making films yet, so I had no idea who she was. It had rained most of the morning when we arrived at a church in Beverly Hills. When the Mass ended, the family was instructed to return to the limo for the trip to Holy Cross Cemetery. However, a friend of the family decided that since it had been raining and the grass was wet, the children first had to be taken a few blocks away to a store to buy galoshes. Meanwhile, everyone who had attended the funeral waited for us to return before they started forming the procession.

Another incident of
funeralis interruptus
also occurred at Holy Cross Cemetery. The priest had given the usual committal service, but when he finished everyone remained at the graveside, apparently waiting for something. I finally asked the funeral director what was going on. He informed me that actor Peter Fonda was supposed to give the eulogy. Peter finally showed up twenty minutes later, and the graveside service continued.

Forest Lawn owned the most famous mortuary and cemetery combinations in the country, located in Glendale and the Hollywood Hills. They also owned Mount Sinai Mortuary & Cemetery, in the same area, which did nothing but Jewish funerals, and the staff there was well trained in those traditions.

We had been furnishing Mount Sinai with family cars and first calls for years. The mortuary chapel was just outside the entrance of the cemetery, and I will never forget the day that every funeral director dreads. There was a special portico to park the family limo just outside the chapel door, where people would walk to their cars and form a procession to drive
into the cemetery grounds. Everything seemed normal that day, as the people filed out and walked past me without saying a word. Then the side door was closed to give the immediate family a few minutes of privacy. A minute later I heard a woman screaming, “That’s not my Hoiman!”

It was apparent that they had placed the wrong body in the chapel. This was confirmed a minute later, when the side door flew open and the director, sweating profusely, came outside. He asked everyone to get out of their cars and come back into the chapel. They had two male cases that were in the same gray octagon casket, and they placed the wrong one in the chapel. After some hastily spoken prayers, people started filing out again, and they were all talking a mile a minute. You would think someone would have noticed it was the wrong body as they filed past the casket, but if the widow hadn’t recognized him, they might have buried the wrong person.

Another factor that could seriously hamper a funeral service was the traffic accidents that inevitably took place, because processions didn’t stop for red lights. The motorcycle escorts didn’t always stay in the intersection but would often race ahead to break the next stoplight.

At one funeral that concluded with a graveside service at the Veterans Administration cemetery in Westwood, I drove a limo behind one of our own hearses. It was a miracle we didn’t have a disastrous chain-reaction pileup that day. We were traveling along in the second lane from the fastest on the San Diego Freeway, which comes to a peak at the Mulholland Bridge. Just before we reached the hump, a small Porsche blew past us in the fast lane.

Moments later we passed over the peak, enabling us to see down the freeway, and it wasn’t pretty. The traffic ahead of us was at a dead stop so the Porsche driver slammed on his brakes, spun around 180 degrees and came to rest directly in the lane of the hearse ahead of me. White smoke was coming off the hearse’s rear tires as the driver, Wayne Beckner, locked up the brakes and started to skid. There was only a split second to check if I could switch into the fast lane and prevent the limo full of family members from crashing into the back of the hearse. Just as I swerved over, there was a thundering crash as the hearse slammed into the Porsche. I heard the young girl in the back seat of the limo yell out, “Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” If it hadn’t been so frightening and I’d heard these incantations bursting out under some less severe
circumstances, it might have actually been funny. When I later recalled the incident with my son Greg, he remarked hilariously, “Your karma ran over her dogma!”

The whole freeway came to a screeching halt. I piled out of my limo to see if Wayne was okay. The front end of the hearse was caved in, and huge billows of steam were pouring out of it. I let the people in the procession know we would have to pull over to the side of the freeway and noticed that about twelve cars behind us a tow truck was sitting in the backed-up traffic. I ran and asked him if he could tow the damaged hearse to the VA cemetery at the bottom of the hill. Wayne, who was not injured, got into my limo and proceeded to take the rest of the procession to the cemetery. We hooked up the hearse to the tow truck in about ten minutes, and the driver was willing to take me as well. When we arrived at the cemetery with the smashed vehicle, Wayne had all the cars lined up and parked in front of the cemetery office.

As luck would have it, there was a hearse exiting the cemetery driven by an old friend from Utter-McKinley. I told him what had happened and that I needed to borrow his hearse. Wayne and I transferred the casket into his hearse and we drove it to the grave. The tow truck driver agreed to take the mangled hearse back to our body shop. Back at the office, Wayne said he hadn’t had this much excitement since he had retired from the Los Angeles Police Department’s vice squad.

On other occasions, accidents occurred at cemeteries with surprising results. A director who worked for one of the Jewish mortuaries had just concluded a service at Hillside Cemetery. Milton Glatt was Groman Mortuary’s most senior employee and one of the nicest, friendliest individuals imaginable. The cemetery was fairly new and had storm drains just like the ones on city streets. One day Milton stepped from a curb and slid down into one of the drains, which had no grate covering it. They finally pulled him out and sent him to the hospital. Steel grates were installed the following week.

In sharp contrast to Milton was another of Groman’s directors whom all of our drivers hated to work with, Leon Gerber. Not only was he very demanding, he never had a kind word for anyone. We provided the cars for Jack Benny’s service and by that time had assisted Groman’s for over fifteen years. Leon called on the phone the day before the service and told our dispatcher, “If you guys f*** up on the Benny service tomorrow, you can kiss your ass good-bye.”

All cemeteries provide 2" x 12" wooden planks, placed parallel to the length of the grave, so the pallbearers can walk on either side of the lowering device. After a grave is opened, the soil on either side of the grave is inherently unstable. On a few occasions, when one of the pallbearers stepped a little off the plank as they were placing the casket on the lowering device, that side of the grave would cave in. On rare occasions, even a pallbearer would slip into the grave up to his hips. Kind of gives new meaning to expression
grave
danger.

When the patriarch of the Utter-McKinley Mortuaries chain died, we were called upon to furnish the equipment. The first thing they asked was “How much weight can your hearses accommodate?” We told them we had some coaches with airlift shocks that could be inflated to carry about 900 pounds. Maytor McKinley was placed in a silver deposit casket that had been flown in from Texas. All metal caskets with which we were familiar were made from sheets of copper, bronze, or steel. However, Maytor’s casket was cast in much the same manner as statuary. When you
cast
something, it ends up being much thicker than sheet metal. His casket weighed in at about 850 pounds, and it took ten pallbearers to carry it instead of the usual six. I drove a limo, but it was not the primary family car. They used Maytor’s own Rolls-Royce, which I followed to Inglewood Park Cemetery. Ron drove the hearse that day and was instructed to pull up to the family plot. The casket was to be placed into one of two aboveground concrete vaults beneath an ornate wrought-iron gazebo. One had Maytor’s name on it and the other had that of his wife, Varri.

One of the cemetery workers was helping with the alignment of the casket into the vault. When it seemed correctly positioned, the pallbearers started lowering it. Unfortunately, the workman had gripped the bottom of the casket just as this was being done and the heavy casket chopped off one of his fingers. Ron loaded him into the hearse quickly and took him to nearby Daniel Freeman Hospital. At the hospital, they asked if Ron could retrieve the finger, so he made a mad dash back to the cemetery On his hasty return trip to the hospital, he ran into a woman’s car. He explained his mission to her as fast as possible, which shook her up so much that she didn’t even ask him for insurance information.

Afterward, the Rolls and my limo were driven to another part of the cemetery to wait until everyone left, before returning to the grave. At Maytor’s request, they opened the trunk of the Rolls and got out some silver chalices to toast him with champagne.

Maintaining a large fleet of cars took a great deal of ancillary support, including mechanics and a cleaning crew. From the time we had purchased our large garage, most of my days were spent there—overseeing the fleet, keeping records, going on movie drives, and converting station wagons. Ron was at his desk every day, staying in touch with our clients, brainstorming on opportunities, and conducting all manner of PR activities. He was the businessman extraordinaire. Every day around noon he would call me at the garage to say that he was on his way to pick me up for lunch, which was often the only time we would see each other. We would typically discuss business then. It seemed the only way we were going to stay in the game was to be more competitive than anyone else.

For me, automotive costs were something that had to be watched at every turn, so my mission was to be tighter than the bark on a tree. My childhood was spent watching my family struggle through the war years. This no-frills lifestyle hardened my resolve to not spend money on anything that I could do myself. My credo was: If it’s broke, fix it. If you don’t know how, keep at it until you do.

Our garage was equipped with fifty-five-gallon drums of oil and transmission fluid. A truck would deliver motor oil in bulk every few months. Large quantities of waste oil eventually made it necessary to create a place to store it. The garage had a mechanic’s pit that was never used, so I capped it with a 4' x 8' half-inch steel plate, poured concrete over it, and added a center hole, creating a reservoir that could hold over 1,000 gallons of used oil. Every six months a vacuum truck would come and pump it out to be recycled. We would get compensated with a bag of absorbent material, called dry sweep, to mop up spilled oil. Today, that much waste oil would fetch a pretty penny.

During our first eight years, taking cars to the tire shop took up much of my time. An inventory one year revealed that we had purchased 365
tires that year, which meant we were wearing them out at a rate of one per day. Just standing around getting them installed was wasting time, so I purchased a machine for mounting and balancing and started doing it myself. Purchasing twenty to thirty tires at a time brought the price down substantially as well. Some of the mortuaries also started asking me if they could purchase their hearse tires from us, because they had difficulty finding the odd-ball size whitewall tires.

There came a point at which we were consuming so much fuel that I contacted Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) about buying gasoline wholesale. They had a program where they would install a tank with a pump, and the fuel would cost three cents a gallon above wholesale. The tank held 6,500 gallons, which lasted only ninety days.

The 1973 oil crisis severely affected the price and availability of gasoline, which took a particular toll on our business because it was so transportation oriented. The crisis arose when the Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) began an oil embargo in response to the United States assisting Israel during the Yom Kippur War.

We could not take a chance on one of our vehicles being unable to refill at a station that had run out of fuel, so I had extra gas tanks installed in ten of our wagons. Our drivers would go along until the engine started to sputter, and then they could reach down on the floor to flip a lever that would change tanks. We also acquired thirty-gallon fuel cells made of a heavy rubberized canvas that were being used in the racing industry. These were placed in any car or out-of-town vans that didn’t have a second tank permanently installed in them.