Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (15 page)

The conversions that we built served as removal cars and inexpensive mini-hearses for long-distance graveside services. After the word got out about these conversions, we started getting inquiries from Mexico. Since the Mexican government would not allow its funeral homes to have a vehicle that was not built in Mexico, Cadillac hearses and station wagons were not permitted. However, Chrysler and Ford both had assembly plants in Mexico, so the cars we converted for the Mexican funeral homes were the only hearses that they owned.

The well-known entertainer Danny Thomas had seen one of our conversions on a visit to Dick Cunningham’s mortuary. As a result, he asked us to build him a wagon conversion to hold a traveling wardrobe, with no landau bars, curtains, or frosted glass in the tailgate. We covered the entire roof and rear side windows with vinyl, and then we had Ferno build two custom-made metal clothing cabinets attached to multilevel cot frames.

In addition to serving all of Los Angeles County for local and long-distance removal, we were regularly serving adjoining counties. We even began interstate work, with frequent trips to Nevada, Arizona, and Oregon. Los Angeles County alone is nearly 5,000 square miles, and there were never any times that we didn’t have someone on the road or making local calls. On rainy days or when the traffic was particularly congested with accidents, it could take a driver over an hour to get to the San Fernando Valley. The problem was that from downtown, the only way to get there was through the Cahuenga Pass, which could be a real bottleneck. We had more than enough business in the valley to warrant getting a facility there for some of our vehicles.

As luck would have it, we found the perfect location in the valley to set up an office and garages. We purchased a property called The
Cedars Motel, a long one-story structure with many individual garages, which was unique because no other motels furnished garages for their customers. It was to our advantage to continue to run it as a working motel, but we always wondered what the customers thought when they looked out the windows and saw our funeral cars pulling out of the garages each morning. We operated this as a working motel for twenty years, and only sold it when we got out of the funeral car livery business many years later. After we sold it, they added X-rated in-house TV programming. Now why didn’t we think of that?

Meanwhile, we switched to a different hearse builder whose cars were more reasonably priced. Almost immediately we began having problems with the electric tables, which were powered by a worm gear like those used on electric garage doors. The motor that powered the table was connected to the gear by a rubber coupling that would sometimes break. I soon found a coupler that wouldn’t break. I sent one to the company, but they said they couldn’t use it. At the next convention, its new hearse had this coupler. Another letter went out and another $1,500 was paid to us, which funded another vacation in Hawaii.

Every day brought new surprises, and some of them were very good. After the scandal brought on by the filming of
Cleopatra
, the most expensive film ever made up until that time at $44 million (the equivalent of $330 million now), Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor had the entertainment media going berserk. Their very public affair during the filming made them front-page news all over the country, particularly because of its open and salacious nature, which seemed to titillate everyone at home and abroad. This was made even more so by the fact that Burton was still married. When they arrived at LAX shortly after the film’s premiere, a crowd in the hundreds was there to greet them. While pushing through the mob of fans, they were accosted and even had their clothing and hair pulled.

Sometime later, they returned to California from their East Coast residence because Elizabeth wanted to spend time with her two boys. Hoping to avoid a repeat of the unruly reception on their earlier trip, they arrived by train. They didn’t even want to risk coming into the main Los Angeles terminal, so they arrived in San Bernardino, sixty miles east of Los Angeles. As we were crossing the vast, empty parking lot, Elizabeth began looking all around and she said, “I wonder where all the people are.” Burton replied, “God damn it, woman, we went to all this trouble to not be seen and now you’re disappointed,” followed by: “I need a drink.” They were going to be staying at the home belonging to Elizabeth’s former husband, British movie actor Michael Wilding, while Wilding was in England.

After we arrived at the home at the end of a very long driveway, they got out of the limo and she asked me to help her look for her cat. Richard couldn’t be bothered and went in the house for that drink. The things that still stand out in my mind were the unusual and beautiful color of her eyes, and her sexy voice. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find her pussy.

Allan picking up Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in 1963.

The following day was Sunday, and Kathy and I would often go for a drive after church. Kathy asked me to take her to see the estate, but I explained that the home couldn’t be seen from Carolwood, the street that intersected Sunset Boulevard. The house was one lot over from the corner, which was a vacant lot with an eight-foot-high chain-link fence. Kathy then made a proposal that was gutsy even for her, because she was usually up for almost anything. She proceeded to climb over the fence and through the bushes to take a peek. She saw Elizabeth lying on a chaise lounge, while the two boys were running around the swimming pool, all of which I got on film.

Elizabeth must have been pleased with my driving, because we received a call from her male secretary, requesting me to report to his apartment in West Hollywood. He wanted to know if it was possible for me to drive him to a premiere party that weekend, with one minor hitch. He had just purchased a black London taxi in England a few months earlier and wanted to be taken to this soiree in his London cab. It appeared to be about forty years old and had a body style resembling some of our sedans produced before the war, only smaller. The really tricky part was the manual transmission and right-hand drive, which were both totally foreign to me.

Shortly after I parked in front of his apartment, he came out to greet me, wearing a formal black tux and carrying his tiny fuzzball Yorky. He and Elizabeth were very taken with this breed of dog at the time, and he wanted to drop the dog off temporarily at a lady friend’s apartment. After leaving her place we headed off, and it finally dawned on me that the friend was actress Patricia Neal, who was in a number of movies in the ’40s and ’50s, the most memorable to me being
The Day the Earth Stood Still
. We were finally on our way to the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel where they were hosting a post-premiere party for
The Sandpiper
, a corny movie about a love triangle, starring Liz and Richard.

The security people at the entrance of the ballroom were carefully checking everyone’s printed invitations. Since it didn’t include their drivers, the secretary probably expected me to just sit in the limo for two or three hours. That’s no fun. There had to be a way to sneak into the party, but it was going to be a real challenge. The waiters were all dressed in black suits just like me—so why not become a waiter, right? They were using a separate door from the area where the cocktails were being prepared, so that was the key to getting inside.

Once inside the ballroom, I picked up a half-filled highball glass left on a table, so it was time to act like a guest instead of a waiter. This was the perfect opportunity to become the proverbial fly on the wall. As people mingled around, many of their faces were familiar from recent movies and TV shows. What made it especially funny was when Liz’s secretary approached me and said, “The drinks are pretty bad here, don’t you think?” My response was “Awful.” For some reason, he didn’t even question that his driver was attending the party. Whooda thunk?

In the early ’60s, Sophia Loren starred in a World War II movie called
Two Women
. She won an Academy Award, a Cannes Film Festival award, and a British Academy Film Award for the film. Shortly after she received these recognitions, the Movieland Wax Museum in Buena Park invited her to visit and unveil her likeness from a scene in the movie.

I picked her up at LAX with her small entourage and one man who was there to greet her. The scene from the film was heartrending and caused many viewers to tear up when they saw it. She lay on a paved highway with her young daughter in her arms after they were raped, screaming and crying as the soldiers passed by them. It seemed like a rather unconventional scene to choose for the likeness of her, but it was very moving.

She looked exceptionally beautiful that day, and her official photographer, who was sitting up front, kept leaning over the seat and taking pictures of her as we drove. Sophia immediately began complaining about an incident at a party she attended, where Frank Sinatra had made an insensitive comment to her. He suggested that instead of pursuing a movie career, she should be barefoot and pregnant at home in Italy, cooking spaghetti. She was absolutely infuriated and let everyone in the limo know how offended she was.

None of the people in this small group realized at the time that Frank had borrowed a line his character delivered in a 1959 war film called
Never So Few
. The title of the film was based on a widely reported speech that Winston Churchill made about the war, saying that never did so many people owe so much to so few. The setting in the film was war-torn Burma, with Frank Sinatra portraying an American soldier. Gina Lollobrigida played the vivacious young concubine of a much older gentleman. Frank was trying to put the make on her and told her she would stay barefoot and pregnant if she married him. This movie was playing on TV one evening, and the line rang a bell for me from chauffeuring Sophia in 1961. It only took me fifty years to discover where his remark had really come from.

This was a great drive and made even better because someone had arranged to have us escorted to the wax museum by two uniformed California Highway Patrol motorcycle officers. Talk about red carpet treatment—we never even had to stop for red lights. When we arrived back at LAX, Carlo Ponti, Sophia’s husband, was waiting to return with her to Italy.

Chauffeur Abbott in 1964.

Another celebrity event in which we participated was the 1962 funeral for Ernie Kovacs,
where Frank Sinatra and Jack Lemmon were two of the pallbearers. I drove the hearse and directed the two of them and the other four pallbearers during the ceremony. At that time I didn’t realize it was Frank Sinatra, but I clearly recalled one very short pallbearer with a strange profile because of his oddly shaped nose. The following month, a celebrity magazine called
Photoplay
printed a full-color cover photo of us walking to the grave. Kathy purchased the issue and asked why I hadn’t told her Frank Sinatra was there.

Kim Novak also attended Ernie’s funeral. She had appeared in a movie with him called
Bell, Book and Candle
, and they had apparently become good friends. The car that Ernie Kovacs was driving when he got killed was a Chevrolet Corvair, one of the first rear-engine American cars ever built. It was very controversial because many of them were wrecked when the car had gone out of control after hard braking. Shortly after his death the production of this car was discontinued, partly because of bad press and partly because of Ralph Nader’s criticism of it in
Unsafe at Any Speed
.