Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (11 page)

Ron had given us an 8-mm movie camera as a wedding present, which was perfect for recording our wonderful time there. They were building an eleven-story hotel on the main street called the Princess Kaiulani Hotel. It was the only high-rise hotel in Oahu, and it towered over everything. We snuck up the stairs to the top floor, even though it was still under construction, and from an observation deck we filmed the whole coastline.

On the numerous occasions we had dinner at Kathy’s parents’ house, the only language spoken was Russian. Most of the time, I had no idea what they were talking about. After dinner, we would sometimes watch TV. When we changed channels, a war movie would sometimes come on the screen and Kathy’s mother, Vera, would immediately get up and go to another room, mumbling something in Russian. Paul eventually explained that Vera reacted that way because of their terrifying experiences fleeing Yugoslavia during the war. Vera had lost her mother and four-month-old baby during the war, and she didn’t want any reminders.

Paul was 17 when he joined the White Russian Army, fighting against the Bolshevik Red Army in the Russian Civil War that followed the 1917 revolution. After one battle, he found himself the sole surviving soldier in a town surrounded by the Bolsheviks. His only escape was to swim out to a freighter anchored in the port. He was permitted on board after he told the ship’s crew that if captured he would have been executed immediately.

He was subsequently asked to get off the ship at the first port they reached, located on the island of Malta, which has been described by historians as one of the most bombed locations during World War II. He then made his way to Zagreb, Yugoslavia, where he attended a university. Four years later, he received an engineering degree and met Vera, his future wife. After they were married, Kathy was born in Skopje, Yugoslavia. They became quite well-off. Every morning, a driver would pick Paul up and take him to the government engineering office, where he would oversee all the other civil engineers.

In 1944, the Red Army invaded Yugoslavia, driving out the occupying Germans. Paul and Vera were told they had twenty minutes to evacuate because White Russian expatriates and their families would be imprisoned or killed. They grabbed two suitcases and filled them with some of their possessions and valuables that could be traded for food,
like jewelry and gold coins. When they got to the Skopje train station, the only passage available was a train heading in the direction of Germany, because all the other trains were already filled with people fleeing the country.

Kathy at age 3, in Europe during World War II in 1944.

At the end of the railroad line, the family came upon a group of German army trucks being loaded with troops fleeing back to Germany. Paul could speak several languages, so he approached a German officer and asked if he and his family could get asylum in Germany. He was told that it was totally against regulations to transport civilians in these troop trucks, but Paul pleaded that he had a wife, two daughters, and Vera’s mother, who were all trying to escape imprisonment or death. Kathy was 4 and her baby sister, Tatiana, was only four months old. The officer compassionately agreed and proceeded to put Paul, Kathy, and her grandmother in the first truck, while Vera and the baby were loaded into the second one.

The troop truck’s headlights were taped over with just small slits to let light out to make them more difficult for the enemy to observe. On a winding road in the mountains of Yugoslavia they came to a sharp curve that the driver couldn’t see and his truck plunged off the steep grade, rolling over. A large gun crushed Kathy’s grandmother and broke Paul’s leg. The survivors were subsequently loaded into other trucks and they continued on to Germany, without anyone even attending to the dead.

Paul ended up in a hospital in Berlin, while Kathy, her baby sister, and Vera were interned in a displaced persons (DP) camp in Munich. They were transferred to additional locations, under very tenuous circumstances, because it was not known who was going to win the war in Europe. After two months they were finally reunited.

Kathy clearly recalled the many times sirens wailed as they were herded into a train tunnel serving as a bomb shelter. Paul said that the Americans bombed during the day and the British bombed at night. Even though Kathy was barely 4 at the time, she could clearly recall the many hours spent underground until the all-clear siren would sound, and they would come out and see the death and destruction from the bombings.

In wartime Germany, disease was rampant. During my childhood you would often hear the expression, “Good night, sleep tight, and don’t let the bed bugs bite.” In the DP camp, biting bugs were not the only problem. Along with malnutrition, there were a number of deadly diseases, so crews would go through the housing quarters spraying disinfectant. As a result of this spraying, Kathy’s sister, Tatiana, died.

German measles was by far one of the worst diseases in the camps. Any children running a temperature were immediately taken from their parents and usually never seen again. One day, Kathy started getting sick and showing signs of a fever. The camp nurse told Vera that she was going to have to take her away, but Vera pleaded with her to wait at least until the following morning. She promised that if Kathy still had a temperature the following day, she would let her go. Vera stayed up the entire night praying that if Kathy’s temperature would just go down, she could get the measles at any other time, just not here and now. Vera kept repeating this prayer over and over, all night long. When the nurse came in the following morning, her daughter’s fever was gone. Kathy did come down with the measles two years later, but by then she was in America.

When the war ended, the DP camps were taken over by American forces that were much more lenient. Kathy and Vera would stand in line day after day, trying to get permission to immigrate to another country. The World Church Organization eventually sponsored the family for passage on a ship to the last place still accepting immigrants, which was America. Kathy was seasick the entire trip, but when they sailed into New York Harbor and got their first look at the Statue of Liberty, it was one of her life’s greatest rewards.

Paul, Vera, and Kathy were processed on Ellis Island. When asked their family name, Paul said “Tzarenko,” from the root word “tsar” or “czar,” the recognized title of Russian emperors who ruled before 1917. (The word “tsar,” in turn, came from the word “caesar.”) Spelling being what it was during this mass influx of foreigners, they were tagged as the Zarenko family. Kathy was only 6 when they arrived in New York, but she had a vivid recollection of something they had eaten there, which was Lipton’s instant chicken soup. She remembered that it was the best thing she had tasted for years, except for the chocolate given to her by American soldiers at the camp.

When Kathy entered Catholic school, she was held back one year because she couldn’t speak English. This school had Dominican nuns as
teachers who, fortunately for Kathy, spoke German, which she had picked up in the camps. Kathy met a nice classmate in school, and they became friends. In spite of knowing very little English, Kathy and Sandra Gehl seemed to communicate without much talking, as kids often do. On the first day of school Sandy took Kathy by the hand, got on the school bus, and took Kathy home with her. Sandy’s mother had to call the school to find out where Kathy’s family lived so she could get her safely home. Sandy was eventually one of Kathy’s bridesmaids.

In 1976, we took Kathy’s parents to Yugoslavia and Greece with us. Although many years had passed since the war, you could still feel the tension between the Serbians and the Croatians. Our guide pointed out the large number of old women walking on the streets and highways, dressed all in black. These were the widows of soldiers who had died in the war, thirty years earlier.

As we were traveling down the Yugoslavian coast, our tour guide made a significant announcement. Because of tour bus robberies in Albania, we were going to have to take a 200-mile detour. During a conversation with the regional guide in Yugoslavia, it came to light that he was originally from Skopje, where Kathy was born, and that our new route would take us within fifteen miles of that town. It was as if fate had intervened. A passenger on the bus suggested that it would be nice to drive through town, so Kathy could see where she was born. He was quick to explain that it would not be proper to divert the other passengers just for her sake, but everyone in the group chimed in and said, “We all want to go there!”

Skopje was beautiful, but it had been mostly rebuilt after a terrible 1963 earthquake had destroyed much of the town. However, a single brick structure was purposely left standing. It was one wall of the very same train station Kathy’s family had gone to in their attempt to escape from Yugoslavia decades before. The section of a wall still standing had a large clock that was frozen at 5:17, the exact time the earthquake had struck, so the people of Skopje decided to leave it as a permanent memorial. I photographed the wall so that Kathy could have a picture of the train station where her family’s long and desperate journey to freedom had begun.

The last movie that Clark Gable appeared in was
The Misfits
, which was written by Marilyn Monroe’s third husband, Arthur Miller. Gable died a few days after it was completed, and it turned out to be Marilyn’s last film as well. It was an odd coincidence for me to have been involved in both of their funerals. I drove a family car for Gable’s funeral at Forest Lawn Glendale in 1960 and would also be very involved in Marilyn’s service two years later.

It took many years before enough limousine services were operating in Los Angeles to cover the high demand in a city that had more celebrities per capita than anywhere else in the world. We started doing backup orders for some of the existing limo services, like Tanner Gray Line and Playboy Limo Service.

Tanner Gray Line offered travel services in many large cities and was one of the three limousine companies that tried to keep us from entering the limousine business. They had a contract with Matson Lines, which had a large cruise ship called the
Lurline
that ran from Los Angeles Harbor to Hawaii and other ports. There were numerous occasions when we would meet the ship arriving back in Long Beach to pick up the corpse of someone who had died while on a Matson Lines cruise. They simply placed the deceased in one of their large refrigerators until the ship arrived back in LA. I hope it was not the same refrigerator they used for food storage, as William Petersen’s character Gil Grissom did in
CSI
.

Years later, in the ’80s, an entrepreneurial young man started a service in Hollywood taking tourists around in a limousine-style hearse that had windows all around, much like a station wagon. He toured people from one cemetery to another, showing them where famous people were buried. He called his new venture Grave Line Tours, a takeoff on the Gray Line limos and buses that had been known throughout the area.

Doing backup work for the high-profile limousine services gave me an opportunity to drive celebrities we would have never gotten on our own unless they happened to be dead. As I look back, it seems a little strange that they trusted us enough to give us these celebrity drives and not worry about the possibility that we might start soliciting them ourselves. Had the movie studios given us these drives directly, there are many that I would never have farmed out to another limo service. No matter how busy we were, I would have taken these drives myself.

A good example of this was an order from another limousine service in the early 1960s to pick up television and film star Inger Stevens and take her to LAX to fly to Chicago for a meeting with her production company. At the time, Inger Stevens had a popular television show called
The Farmer’s Daughter
, which we watched. Her studio apartment was just off Hollywood Boulevard, and her unit was on the corner as you enter the complex and it had the bedroom on the second floor upstairs. After I knocked on the door, a man spoke to me from behind it and asked, “What is it?” I told him that the limo had arrived to take Miss Stevens to the airport, but he informed me that she had already gone in her own car.