Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (36 page)

The valley had many great restaurants like Jerry’s Famous Deli in Studio City, where we would see the likes of Loni Anderson posing for tourists by her gold Mercedes or six-year-old Drew Barrymore eating a hot fudge sundae. Peter Falk seemed to prefer dining out at his friend’s restaurant down the street called Art’s Deli.

Kathy and I thoroughly enjoyed living in the Hollywood Hills, with all of its opportunities to observe the famous and infamous. Rob Lowe purchased the house next door to us and completely remodeled it. He also paved over the upper yard directly adjacent to ours to turn it into a half-court for basketball. His doorbell was hooked up to his phone so whenever someone would arrive, we could hear his phone ring. Then he would push a button that unlocked the front door and let the visitor in.

Along Nichols Canyon, each house was about twelve feet above its neighbor’s. Our kitchen windows faced directly down into his kitchen, hallway, and dining room. One evening we witnessed Rob and his guest disappear toward his bedroom, but half an hour later he showed up naked in his kitchen and got a bottle of champagne out of the refrigerator. It appeared that he was celebrating his latest conquest by dancing a little jig, like the one Humphrey Bogart watched Walter Huston perform in
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
.

Rob’s scandal came during the 1988 Democratic National Convention after he videotaped himself having sex with a 16-year-old girl, who then took the tape from his room and showed her girlfriends. One of them told her mother about the tape, and the cat was out of the bag. In no time, the paparazzi set up shop in front of his house. Because of all the construction in progress there was still a Porta-Potty sitting alongside his driveway. I’m sure this was a blessing to the news media because when they
had to go
, they didn’t have to go.

For a while, he almost became a hermit because he didn’t want to set foot outside his house. Food was delivered from a deli in Beverly Hills or the local pizza parlor. About a week into the siege, Rob was sunning himself on a lounge chair in his yard as the paparazzi bided their time out front. Kathy saw him while watering plants in our patio and decided to tell him that if he wanted to he could climb over our common fence and exit through our driveway. When she called his name he almost jumped out of his shorts, thinking that someone had gotten into his yard. He explained that he had a car parked at the bottom of the canyon, so he could climb over his back fence and hike down to it.

Kathy was usually reluctant to talk to people about my profession, but I certainly wasn’t, and she knew that. The thing that annoyed her the most was when I would discuss it with complete strangers. One year we took a three-week trip to Europe and she asked me to not talk about my line of work during the vacation, which was fine with me. I didn’t want to annoy her.

When the tour group assembled in Rome, we met our fellow travelers. One man mentioned to me that he had worked for a mortuary, so naturally we had something in common to discuss. Later on, he mentioned to the whole group that we had both worked in the funeral business. Oh, no! Our group was fairly small and we became friendly quite quickly. By the time we had been on the road for a week, a number of people on the bus would holler, “Look, Allan, there’s a cemetery,” every time we passed one. It got to be such a joke that even Kathy couldn’t help but laugh about it.

One terrible day, I discovered how emotionally devastated someone can be when they lose a loved one. On May 23, 1990, while I was returning from getting a DC signed, the office called on my cell phone. They notified me that Kathy had been taken to North Hollywood Medical Center from her gym, where she had been working out. Ron was waiting for me when I arrived at the hospital. Kathy was in intensive care, and they had no clear diagnosis at that time. When they told me she was on life support, it didn’t seem possible, because Kathy was only 48.

The hospital determined that she had suffered a brain aneurism. I stayed at her side, leaving only for meals and sleep. They continued to monitor her condition for three more days but said that there was no brain activity. Many times in the past that diagnosis appeared on death certificates that I had gotten signed, listing the cause of death as CVA, or cerebral vascular accident. The doctors told me that without brain activity there was no possibility of recovery, but in desperate hope I had them run
another series of brain scans, which all came back negative. The doctors said the only option was to disconnect her life support. It was like having a terrible nightmare from which I could not be awakened, and it was by far the hardest decision I would ever make.

It was impossible for me to stoically accept what fate had handed out, and I entered into a state of deep depression. My doctor had put me on a tranquilizer and my thinking was not clear, so Ron stepped in to make the necessary arrangements. For the first time in my life, I felt completely hopeless. My own men picked up Kathy, and our manager, Jerry, did the embalming.

I finally saw her the day before the visitation. The only thing that wasn’t right was her makeup. I had watched Kathy apply her makeup for over thirty years and knew exactly how she liked it. After the mortuary closed for the evening I went home, gathered her cosmetics, and returned to the mortuary by myself to apply her makeup as she would have done. My hands were shaking and my heart felt like it was about to burst, but I really needed to do it right.

I felt suicidal and the only way I could function was with tranquilizers. I recalled Natalie Wood’s funeral and how sad I felt for Robert Wagner losing the woman he loved. He appeared to be under sedation at the service and I could certainly understand why. I had no desire to continue living for another day without Kathy. If it weren’t for my sons and their support, I’m sure I wouldn’t have survived that terrible period in my life.

I called Ron the day after the funeral and asked him to call my real estate agent in Monterey to put our Pebble Beach summer home up for sale. The house had been our private hideaway and held many treasured memories. Since our boys were both in college, we would often leave them in LA and go to Pebble Beach, where we would spend time alone together. We would visit the many places we loved, free of work and time constraints. Sometimes, we would drive to a private beach near the house where Kim Novak lived. We had the key to a private gate where a trail led to the ocean. We would sit in silence there, mesmerized by the ocean and lost in our thoughts.

Life without Kathy was unbelievably difficult. I drank alcohol every night until I could finally fall asleep. After years of being in control of my own destiny, someone who could come up with a solution to any problem, I found myself at a total loss and wondered how I would ever
get through without her. Kathy was four years younger than me, and most women outlive their husbands by ten to fifteen years, so I never expected to face her death. It has now been over twenty years since I lost the love of my life, and she is still in my thoughts every day.

One thing that seemed to help with the grief was to keep as busy as possible. I placed an ad in the paper offering to sponsor a new venture, and it didn’t take long for someone to take me up on it. A man calling himself Chris Radford called and said he was an investigative journalist writing a book about Howard Hughes. After a number of phone conversations, we met and reached an agreement for me to help finance his research. He even started driving a limo for me on movies, which gave us an opportunity to discuss his findings during the long lulls between shots.

Chris recounted how he had been hired by a Hollywood ghostwriter to work on a manuscript about Howard Hughes. The client was actress Terry Moore, Hughes’s former girlfriend, and the book was called
Howard Be Thy Name
. The ghostwriter was an alcoholic and wasn’t up to the job, so he didn’t tell anyone about Chris’s involvement, and Terry Moore never knew that Chris was in possession of her manuscript. After Moore canceled the project, Chris was told to destroy the manuscript, but he kept it instead.

Some years later, he was moving to another apartment and came across the manuscript. His phone and TV service had already been shut off, so with nothing to do and all of his belongings packed in boxes, he decided to read the chapters he had not yet reviewed when he was told to stop working on the book. The more he read, the more interested he became, until he decided to research the insights revealed by Moore and publish a book about his findings.

Hughes’s office was on Romaine Street, just east of La Brea. Chris pointed the building out to me as we were heading to my house one evening. He explained how they had developed an interesting system for receiving certain documents there by having someone lower a basket on a string from a second-floor window.

Moore, who had a close relative who was a Mormon, suggested that Hughes hire a member of that faith to be in charge of his security because they didn’t drink or smoke, and they certainly didn’t carouse with other women if they were married. He particularly liked the latter reason because he knew that illicit sex had been used for decades to blackmail someone into revealing closely guarded secrets. This was an important consideration since Hughes worked on secret government projects like the Glomar Explorer, an effort to raise a sunken Soviet submarine.

He took her advice and hired Frank “Bill” Gay to be in charge of security. As Hughes lost employees by attrition, Gay hired other Mormons, and soon some people started calling Hughes’s closest aides the “Mormon Mafia.” In 1972, after he sold the tool division of Hughes Tool Company, the Mormons renamed the remaining company to Summa Corporation.

When Hughes died in 1976, Moore claimed that she and Hughes had secretly married in 1949, but she had no documentation to prove it because Hughes had signed the marriage certificate with an assumed name and the skipper of a private yacht had allegedly performed the ceremony. The attorneys for the corporation did not recognize Moore as a legitimate heir, so she marched into the lawyers’ offices with her own attorney and a copy of her manuscript. Repeatedly, she threatened to tell what she knew about them, but they only took notice when she did an interview with a small-town newspaper in Arkansas.

In a final showdown, she showed the article to the lawyers and claimed that she would be holding a news conference in a few days in which she would reveal everything about the Mormons’ control over Hughes’s estate. At that point they announced that an out-of-court settlement had been reached with her, which has been estimated at several million dollars. Terry did publish a book called
The Beauty and the Billionaire
, but there was no mention of the Mormon Mafia or any other scandalous material.

In his research, Chris had learned of Suzanne Finstad, a paralegal and author who worked on the Hughes estate for a prolonged period of time. She had apparently been privy to the Moore case and was present at every meeting with the attorneys. She had written a book in 1984 about all the legal proceedings entitled
Heir Not Apparent
. When we contacted her to do an interview, she claimed that she had been badly beaten after its publication and warned us not to pursue our investigations further, or we might suffer the same consequences. She refused to tell us anything more, other than that she was still in fear of her life.

A friend of mine told me about a man he knew named Peter Hurkos, who was a well-known psychic. Peter and his wife got a surprise visit to their home one evening by their friend John Meier, who had been employed by Hughes for many years. Meier had a suitcase with him and asked Peter to keep it for him. He told Peter that it contained a great deal of money and numerous documents. Meier explained that this suitcase was his insurance policy, in case there were any repercussions as a result of his terminating his employment with Hughes.

We tracked Meier to his home in Canada and phoned him, explaining, that we were planning to publish a book about Hughes. Surprisingly, he agreed to work with us on the story. Chris flew to Canada and spent two days there, and Meier was enthusiastic about helping us. When we tried to follow up with him, we got a recording that the line had been disconnected and there was no referral number. Meier apparently rethought his participation and decided that he didn’t want anything to do with our project.

I found out that the harbormaster at Marina del Rey, Chase Ramsgate, had once worked for Howard Hughes in the Bahamas. He told me he would get meticulous notes from his boss every day, written on yellow legal pads, and he seemed to be willing to talk about his experiences while employed as a secretary. However, when asked for an interview with Chris for possible use in a book, he was no longer willing to discuss any of the details. It was very evident that he was fearful of having his name mentioned in any way.

At this point, Chris began to develop some noticeably paranoid behavior. Every time he left his apartment, he would watch his rearview mirror to see if anyone was following him. He was afraid that if the wrong people found out about the book, his life could be in danger.

When his car broke down, I provided him with an old station wagon. The rear window had become disconnected and fallen down inside the tailgate, which needed to be fixed right away to keep fumes from entering the car. In the meantime, we decided to go with a temporary patch, so the window was held up with clear plastic packing tape.

One day as he was leaving his apartment, Chris noticed a car that seemed to be following him. He proceeded to make a series of right-hand turns, and the suspicious car made the same turns. Soon, they had made a complete circle, which confirmed that he was being followed. In
a complete panic, Chris sped up in an attempt to outrun the suspicious vehicle. Just as it seemed that he lost the car following him, a car pulled out from a parking lot and he T-boned it. Chris was only stunned, but the passengers in the other vehicle sustained some serious injuries.