Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (14 page)

Ron and I drove the next morning to Westwood in one of our newly acquired 1962 Eureka hearses. They had me stand at the front door of the chapel, checking invitations and passing out memorial folders. The Los Angeles Police Department had cordoned off large parts of the cemetery with yellow tape. Most of the well-known gossip columnists like Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper, and Louella Parsons showed up for the funeral, but they had also been present on that first day, when the Pinkerton officers were ordered to control the crowd.

The service in the chapel was recorded. A musical selection of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” was played, with the casket open so that friends and family could pass by and pay their final respects. After that, James and Clarence Pierce closed the casket and brought it to the back of the chapel. They asked me to direct Sydney and Whitey to prepare for placing it in the hearse. Ron and I were pallbearers.

Marilyn Monroe’s 1962 funeral procession, with Allan and Ron behind their hearse.
Photo by Leigh Wiener. Reprint permission granted by Devik Wiener
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It was quiet as I opened the chapel door, but the moment we started through the door, with the casket resting on a church truck, all hell broke loose. In an instant, the silence exploded with the sound of a thousand camera shutters clicking simultaneously, and the sky lit up as if lightning struck. Soon, the clamor of hundreds of people screaming from the cordoned-off areas became so loud you could hardly hear the sound of the cameras.

Ron and Allan stand next to Marilyn Monroe’s casket as it is positioned just prior to her cryptside service.
Photo by Leigh Wiener. Reprint permission granted by Devik Wiener
.

It was a short drive from the chapel to the lawn crypt as we walked behind the hearse, flanked on either side by the Pinkerton guards. I could see that Sydney was crying, using his handkerchief to wipe tears from his eyes. The hearse stopped slightly past the wall crypt, leaving us enough space to remove the casket from the hearse and carry it about ten feet to the crypt, assisted by Clarence Pierce and Chris Kreminski as the last two pallbearers. We then placed it on a second church truck, where it remained throughout the short cryptside service.

Joe and his son, who was wearing his military attire, were seated on folding chairs with friends seated behind them. A curtain was covering the open end of the vault so that no one could see into the crypt. By now, the crowd was so loud that throughout the service you could hardly hear the minister. James Pierce tried to get the fans to stop all the noise to no avail.

In the end, Marilyn’s service had the largest number of fans and press of any funeral on which we ever assisted. According to Clarence Pierce, Marilyn was a frequent visitor at Westwood Cemetery in the late ’50s, where she would sit on the grass and read a book while eating her lunch. It seems fitting that she now rests in a place where she sought peace and solace.

Kathy kept the items I had given her in our safe and would get them out only to show some of her girlfriends. She ended up with the falsies, a lock of hair, and two memorial folders left over after all the invited guests were seated. She even kept the white carnation boutonniere that I wore at her service. She kept all of the items inside a gift box, with the falsies protected in a plastic bag. For a number of years, when the plastic bag was opened, you could still smell Marilyn’s perfume emanating from them. Of all these remembrances, the one Kathy most treasured was the falsies, because Marilyn had probably stitched the little round pieces of cloth on their backs, which helped keep them in place. Kathy was extremely happy that she could have something so personal of Marilyn’s.

Ron and Allan standing near Joe DiMaggio and Joe DiMaggio, Jr.
Photo by Leigh Wiener. Reprint permission granted by Devik Wiener
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After their introduction, we started using the Chevy Sedan Delivery and Ford Courier to make death calls, but the automakers produced these types of cars for only a few years. The main difference between these vehicles and a station wagon is that they don’t have side windows in the storage area, only passenger and rear windows. The body above the belt-line is solid metal.

Immediately, we got great resistance from some mortuaries in using this type of vehicle because the cot could be loaded only through the rear of the car. Some firms used their rear-loading hearse to make death calls, so it seemed like our service cars fit in well. However, many other mortuaries would only do first calls using a specially built, side-loading Cadillac limousine conversion. These vehicles were very expensive because first you had to purchase the limousine, then you had to pay a company to do the necessary modifications so that a cot would fit inside.

There were no car modification companies in California doing this kind of work, which presented a big problem. In order to serve every mortuary in Southern California, we would need at least six removal cars to start. We really had to put on our thinking caps and figure out the financial ramifications and efficacy of solving our diverse customers’ needs. Eventually, Ron’s PR work established the mortuaries’ objection to these vehicles. Some of the funeral directors were equating this new vehicle with the proverbial “meat wagon,” which was a police or morgue vehicle used to transport the dead after disasters or terrible accidents.

This was the inspiration that led us to produce our first conversions from station wagons to mini-hearses. Wagons were reasonably priced, and by covering the large rear side windows with sheet metal, placing chrome landau bars on the panels, drapes in the passenger windows, and sandblasted palm leaves in the rear window, everyone was at last satisfied.

Now, there was only one small but important problem left to solve: where to get a pair of thirty-eight-inch landau bars. The ones on the hearses were much too long to use on the smaller wagons, so I drew a scale model pattern and submitted it to a carpentry company that made right- and left-side wooden bars from my drawing. These were then given to a bronze foundry that started casting pairs of bars and chrome-plating them. In the ensuing years our conversions went through a number of permutations, from painted metal panels and landau bars to covering two-thirds of our crown model’s roof, to a complete black vinyl roof covering.

Before drapes could be made up, it was necessary for me to fabricate a curtain frame out of welding rod material to match the exact shape of the passenger door windows. There was a large fabric warehouse in downtown Los Angeles, so it was possible to find the perfect material: a black fabric with silver metallic thread running through it. The great thing about this material was that it had a loose-enough weave that the driver could see out, but no one could see inside the interior of the wagon. Unfortunately, after we lost our initial resource for drapery fabrication we weren’t able to find anyone to do the sewing, so it was up to me to do it myself.

We made these conversions solely for our own use to have service cars that were new, fairly inexpensive, and acceptable to the firms we were serving. However, these Ford wagons were mechanical disasters and deserved their “FORD” acronym, “Fix Or Repair Daily.” We switched to Dodge wagons that were far superior. After our drivers started showing up in our new conversions, the mortuaries would call and ask where we had gotten them. When they found we made them, they began asking if we would consider making conversions for them as well. By now, over half of my workday was devoted to working on our fleet, which was growing rapidly. Converting wagons, mounting and balancing tires, and customizing vans to enable them to carry four stretchers with electric lift tables were all part of the routine.

As soon as we rented floor space to demonstrate our first station wagon conversions at the mid-’60s California Funeral Directors Association Convention, we began receiving orders immediately. By a sheer stroke of luck, the booth next to us was occupied by the owner of a company called Ferno-Washington that produced mortuary equipment. When we didn’t have any attendees looking at our conversions, we would speak with the
gentleman in that booth, whose name was Elroy Bourgraf. In his booth, El was featuring the newly created one-man cot. He had hired an attractive young model to lie on the cot as he demonstrated the ease with which it would collapse when pushed into a rear-loading vehicle.

We struck a deal with El to become a dealer for Ferno Washington’s products. El had purchased the company from Dick Ferneau (pronounced “Ferno”) just one year after we started our business. He kept Dick on staff as head engineer, which was the best business decision he ever made. A funeral director in Cincinnati, Ohio, had approached El and Dick about developing and manufacturing a new cot that would do exactly what this new model now did. Some of the people in the industry said it was “the best thing to come along since sliced bread.”

After we replaced all of our old cots with Ferno equipment, we began prototype-testing for Dick, because we could put as much use on a cot in one month as an average mortuary would in a year. Every time we came up with some new brainstorm, I would send Dick some drawings and he would figure out a way to build it. They also started producing and selling the identical pairs of landau bars from my pattern.

Most mortuaries had a station wagon that they used for flower deliveries, first calls, and general utility. Some of these firms didn’t want a car that was obviously made just for doing death calls. We asked Dick to make a large rectangular-shaped cart on wheels covered with vinyl that could be placed in an unconverted station wagon. From the outside, no one could see a cot or casket being transported. After completing a transport, the mortuary would simply remove it from the wagon. This became the “cover-up,” and Ferno-Washington built and sold them for years.

Over the years, the one-man cot was improved on. For years it was rated at 400-pound capacity, but more recently Ferno-Washington have added a new model rated at 1,000 pounds, because of more frequently encountered morbid obesity. Incredibly, the incidence of adult-onset diabetes is now rampant among teenagers. (It sounds rather simplistic to remind your kids about the importance of healthy eating. My mother advised me to stop consuming soft drinks because of the large amount of sugar in them, or else I would get fat and my teeth would be rotten by the time I was 50. It was good advice, because I still weigh 160 pounds and have all my teeth.)

Ford was the first to come out with a tailgate that could be opened like a door. The problem was that it only opened out forty-five degrees, making it almost impossible to get two Ferno cots in if they had bodies on them. After I scrutinized the hinges, it appeared that the doorstop post could be cut, allowing the door to open ninety degrees, but the spring pressure was lost. Some careful modifications of mine restored the pressure to hold the wider-opening door. Ford found out about it and sent an engineer from Detroit to see my work. They didn’t use the idea because there were only about 20,000 mortuaries in the United States, and they replaced their service vehicles only about every ten years.