Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (10 page)

A body that remains in an open environment, as opposed to one in a house or car, is much more likely to be subjected to all variety of insects. Anyone who has ever watched
CSI
knows that insects, particularly blowflies, can be used to determine the approximate date of death. This is done by examining a fly larva, which transforms from a maggot to a fly at a known rate. Picking up a body thoroughly infested with maggots is disgusting. You can hear the sound of them feasting on the body from ten feet away. Maggots are very hard to kill because they seem to be unaffected by embalming fluid, but someone did discover that ordinary gasoline could be used to exterminate them. We never did find out how many maggots you can get to a gallon of gas.

Our relationship with the coroner’s office was always a love-hate one. We loved the money but hated the work—the very worst being the “decomps.” When a body is well into this stage, we referred to it as being “ripe.” At a later stage of decomposition, the body undergoes a condition called “skin slip.” It is very much like what happens to a tomato’s skin that has been left in the refrigerator too long.

One of my earliest coroner calls was to pick up a deputy at the downtown morgue and assist him on a suicide call. We went in one of our first-call cars, and he directed me to the Yucca Motel in Hollywood. The deceased was a weekly renter and when the maid went into the room to bring fresh linen, she discovered him dead. The decomposition was so far along that the body had many fluid-filled blisters. Without saying anything to me, the deputy went into the kitchenette and brought back a sharp pointed can opener. He calmly walked over to the bed and started using it to pop the blisters. He must have seen the expression on my face because he said, “Do you want these to break while we’re moving him and get this stuff on us?” You really have to have a strong stomach to do this kind of work. We referred to it as the infamous “Yucca Motel Call,” but it should have been the “Yucky Motel Call.”

Some of the more unusual places we have made first calls were business facilities like the Procter & Gamble factory. We also made a number
of removals from famous San Quentin State Prison during the times they were holding executions. We were even called to make a removal at a candy factory after an employee had fallen into a chocolate mixing vat and drowned. Some devout chocolate lovers out there probably dream of meeting their end that way.

One common place where many people die is in the bathroom, still sitting on the toilet. Apparently, many people become ill with symptoms like nausea, chest pain, light-headedness, perspiration, shortness of breath, and stomach cramping. These may be symptoms of common conditions, like high blood pressure or congested arteries, but many people mistakenly equate them with gastrointestinal problems, which make them feel that they need to get to the bathroom. That’s an insight that will give readers something new to ponder each time they visit the restroom.

Almost everyone has seen images of the famous Hollywood sign, but no one I’ve spoken to remembers the small building with a forty-foot antenna next to it just to the right of the sign. This was owned by one of TV’s first broadcasters in Los Angeles, Don Lee. Everyone living in Southern California in the ’50s had heard an announcer saying, “This program has been brought to you by Don Lee Broadcasting Company.” One of our earliest death calls from somewhere other than a hospital, sanitarium, or residence came from this location. Ron and I arrived there in the dead of night to pick up the night watchman, who had died on his shift.

One night there was a call from my office to inform me that one of our drivers had called in requesting assistance. He had picked up an extremely overweight woman at the hospital with the help of personnel there, but he needed someone to meet him at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills for delivery. After I arrived, we removed the covers. It was clear that the only thing keeping her in the middle of the stretcher was the nylon strapping.

When we attempted to transfer her to the embalming table, her stomach was so large that it wouldn’t stay in place. If we moved the body in one direction, her massive stomach would start to roll her off the table on one side, and the same thing happened on the other side in the opposite direction. We finally borrowed a roll of duct tape, and with help from the night attendant we were able to stabilize the moving mass. I’ve heard of many practical uses of duct tape, but this was one for the books.

One call I’m glad I missed was from a mortuary in Long Beach. Ron and one of our employees responded to a coroner’s case at a residence. The deceased man had been extremely thoughtful of his family by going into his backyard before shooting himself with a shotgun, thus avoiding a very messy cleanup. He had placed the barrel at his temple and somehow reached the trigger with his right hand. As they placed what was left of him in a disaster pouch, there was a blood-curdling scream from the next yard. They looked over the fence and saw the neighbor lady standing in front of her barbecue grill, which had a large piece of the man’s brain sitting on it.

There came a time when we realized that our linen costs were getting out of hand. On each removal we would use two sheets, one to cover the cot mattress and the other to cover the remains. Keeping my eyes out for an alternative, I noticed on the new homes being built that each exterior wall was covered with a white synthetic material as a moisture barrier. It was a strong sheet-like material that said “Tyvek” on it. We found out where it could be purchased in large rolls that weighed about 100 pounds. It would have been impractical to have someone cut seven-foot sheets from the roll, one at a time, so we had a carpenter build a roller apparatus out of wood and we purchased a professional fabric-cutting tool. As soon as we deployed our Tyvek sheets we began getting requests from many mortuaries to sell them quantities of the material as well.

David Malloy called us for a removal in the town of Lancaster, fifty miles north of Los Angeles. He directed us to deliver the remains to the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office. I arrived at the private residence and noticed that the air was thick with the odor of death. After entering the house, which was unlocked, I realized that some assistance was going to be needed to complete this call. There was a local funeral home owner in town who owed me a favor because he was in Los Angeles one night on business and ran short on money—so I loaned him some. Now it was payback time. After a quick phone call, he agreed to have me pick him up at his mortuary, along with one of his employees to assist us on this difficult call.

The deceased was lying in his bed, his body totally black and twice its normal size. Fluid had saturated the carpeting, so we rolled out a large sheet of plastic that we planned to wrap him up in before placing the body in a cremation box. The area was relatively rural at that time, and there weren’t any fences between the properties. The couple who lived
next door was standing in their backyard observing our activities and finally the husband’s curiosity got the best of him. He walked over and started to talk to me as the plastic was being unrolled in the yard. He didn’t seem surprised that the old man had died, but nothing was brought up about the condition of the remains.

When I reentered the house, he followed me toward the bedroom. Because he was doing all the talking, he hadn’t taken a breath until we reached the bedroom. He stopped dead in his tracks, grabbed his throat with his hands, let out a gagging sound, and ran for the backdoor. A few minutes later it was necessary to go back to the car. The man’s wife came running over screaming, “What did you do to my husband? I’m going to have to take him to the hospital.” You know what they say about curiosity being a killer.

Dave had instructed me to be sure to get the deceased’s Social Security card, which was on the dresser. As the three of us drove back to the mortuary, something unforgettable happened. We were sitting three abreast on the station wagon’s bench seat, and Dave’s helper was seated next to the passenger door. He quietly rolled down the passenger’s window and, without saying a word, took off his damp shoes and threw them out the window.

I dropped the body off at the coroner’s office, went home, took a shower, and went to bed, because the call had kept me out until 1:00 in the morning. The next morning, I went to drop off the Social Security card and noticed a terrible smell. I was in my own personal car. Where was it coming from? Then it struck me. Even though the wallet was many feet away from the body, it had absorbed the smell and was sitting in my shirt pocket.

For the first few years in business, we hadn’t taken a single day or night off and had no social life whatsoever. We were on call twenty-four hours a day, and when we ate out we would always tell the person answering our phones where we could be reached. My only evening off was on Wednesdays, when I would drive to my parents’ house for dinner.

One night my brother brought a beautiful girl named Kathy to our house. He had just started dating her, and all I could think of was, “Where in the world had he found this gorgeous blue-eyed blonde?” It turned out that he met her through our mother, who managed the basement of the J.J. Newberry dime store in Inglewood, where Kathy was employed as a part-time worker.

During high school, Kathy was working to supplement her family’s income. At that time, many schools allowed students to participate in a program that enabled them to go to school for half a day and work the other half. There were four girls working at the store from Washington High, but Kathy was definitely our mom’s favorite, and it was obvious that she would have liked to have Kathy as a daughter-in-law. My brother and Kathy dated for about five months, at which time he had proposed to her. She was still in high school and declined. Mom wasn’t about to give up so easily, so she asked Kathy if she would accompany her to see our newly refurbished Auto Club building. At the end of our visit I asked Kathy if I could call her sometime, and she agreed.

John was now serving in the Marine Corps, so I wrote him a letter and asked if he had any objection to my dating Kathy. He didn’t seem to care, so we started spending time together, and it was great to be dating after a three-year drought. Although it was difficult to take time off, it was very important to finally get some semblance of a personal life back. I had no car and Kathy didn’t even have a driver’s license, so if we wanted to go somewhere we would go in a company car. Imagine picking up your date in a first-call car that looked like a small hearse!

After we had dated for about four months, Kathy told me that the first few times she saw me at my parents’ house, arriving on my motorcycle, wearing my gray uniform and leather jacket, she thought that I must have been the black sheep of the family.

When Kathy graduated from high school, I taught her how to drive and had a private phone installed in her bedroom. I purchased a five-year-old Buick from my brother and gave it to her. The only thing that was weird about the situation was that we were now dating in the same car that she and John had been going out in. Talk about hand-me-downs.

When we got engaged, our business was still straining to expand and Kathy was still in high school, so we set our wedding date for the following June. A year later, her parents were not well-off financially, even though Paul, her Russian immigrant father, was an excellent engineer. He worked for another Russian man who owned an engineering firm, but received a fairly low salary because he hadn’t yet mastered the English language.

Paul would later get a good job with the City of Los Angeles in their streetlighting department, but at the time he could not afford the kind of wedding Kathy had always wanted. In the ensuing year, she hoped to earn enough money for a traditional Russian Orthodox wedding. Kathy got a job working for the United States Air Force as a secretary. Once she received a security clearance, she was given a job at their Space Systems Division in Inglewood, working on the Gemini and similar projects in the early years of the space program.

Kathy and Allan at her high school prom in 1960.

I wrote a letter to John again, but this time I was requesting that he be best man at our wedding. He wrote me a letter back that simply said, “Go to hell,” so Ron volunteered. The choir from Holy Virgin Mary Russian Orthodox Church in Silver Lake that performed the traditional singing for our wedding later sang the background music for the film
Cinerama Goes to Russia
. That church was quite small, so we rented Saint Sophia’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral for the ceremony. It is probably the largest cathedral in Southern California and had been built largely from contributions by Spyros Skouras, who had been the president of 20
^th
Century Fox Studios since 1942.

We went to Hawaii for our honeymoon, which was the first real break I had taken in four years. It was time for some connubial bliss. Our plane was delayed, so we arrived late on the night of June 11, 1961. We finally got to sleep about 2
A.M
., awoke around 9:00 the next morning, and were doing what newlyweds do on their honeymoon. The front desk called to tell us that the King Kamehameha Day Parade was going to pass down the main street in case we wanted to come down and watch. I thought, “On our honeymoon, are you serious?”