Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (17 page)

In the early 1900s, Forest Lawn Glendale changed the face of cemeteries across the country. This happened because of Dr. Eaton. He imagined that rather than a forest of standing stones, called “marble orchards” in the industry, a flowing, friendly, “memorial park” setting could be created. This new concept emphasized tranquility and beauty instead of heartbreak and sorrow. Forest Lawn was started by a group of businessmen in 1906 in Tropico, just before the area was annexed by the city of Glendale. Dr. Eaton gained management control in 1917 and set out to completely change the concept of how these cemeteries were designed. The grounds were decorated with beautiful statuary, many of which were re-created from famous examples in Europe. Most cemeteries now use only flat grave markers their lawnmowers can travel over, rather than maneuvering around each monument, and this technique was copied by most cemeteries.

Forest Lawn also featured magnificent artwork and quaint chapels, some of which were modeled after famous English ones, like “Wee Kirk o’ the Heather” and “Little Church of the Flowers.” To add to the charm, some of the chapels’ ceilings were made from materials carved hundreds of years ago. Dr. Eaton collected, shipped, and reinstalled a number of these at the Glendale facility. They also have some spectacular structures like “The Church of the Recessional,” where I drove a family car for the funerals of Clark Gable and David O. Selznick. Forest Lawn Glendale boasts a very large stained glass window depicting Leonardo da Vinci’s
Last Supper
in the Memorial Terrace of its Great Mausoleum, and its Hall of the Crucifixion-Resurrection features a painting of Christ’s ascension. Ron and I attended Dr. Eaton’s funeral in this hall. During his funeral, the hall was filled to capacity and they had even arranged for the famous Mitchell Boys Choir to sing at the service.

At one point, Forest Lawn was the center of a great controversy when they proposed to open a new cemetery in Covina Hills, an unincorporated county area just east of Los Angeles. The local residents of Covina Hills vowed that they would fight to the end to prevent the creation of a cemetery in their exclusive neighborhood. A lot of the controversy was the result of plotting by Lee McNitt of Rose Hills. Lee arranged for horseback riders to parade up and down the street before a city council hearing on the matter. The horse riders did not want any type of development on the property as they had been using it for horseback riding while
it was raw land. The riders were also tasked with patrolling the grounds to obstruct any burials, because of a provision in the law that designated an area as a cemetery if it already had six interments. However, very quickly after securing zoning approval from the County of Los Angeles, Forest Lawn surreptitiously conducted enough burials to ensure its legal status as a cemetery.

Forest Lawns memorial parks are the only ones with a booth at the entrance, where an attendant will give you a printed map showing the many points of interest. This is where we would pick up the “take man” to direct us. Very often they would tell us to go to the Doheny Memorial (which is an aboveground, vault-like structure covered with an elaborate white gazebo made of wrought iron) and bear right or left. Our drivers passed this memorial hundreds of times and all knew its location. There was always a large fresh floral piece shaped like a star, made out of red and white carnations.

The name Doheny is well known to anyone interested in California history. The family’s prominence grew when they funded the building of the beautiful St. Vincent’s Catholic Church in Los Angeles. The surprising thing was that Forest Lawn isn’t a Catholic cemetery, which would have been a requirement for Catholic burials at the time. One of their employees informed me that a priest had gone there and consecrated the plot of ground on which the memorial stands, because of the family’s closeness to the Catholic Church.

Everyone remembers the Y2K scare as we approached the year 2000. Fortunately, many computer engineers predicted the problem well in advance and took measures to prevent computers everywhere from crashing. Not so in the cemetery business. When people purchased a family plot or adjoining graves, it was common to purchase only one grave marker. It usually had the family name in bold letters and two places beneath to etch the names of husbands and wives. For the first one interred, the marker would give birth dates and a death date, but also the birth date of the spouse, and then the first two digits (“19”) of the spouse’s future year of death. However, if the spouse passed away after 1999, those digits would be filled with epoxy and a new date of death carved. It never made sense to me to have a spouse’s information inscribed on the headstone while they were still alive, unless someone was afraid that inflation would make it more costly to complete the work in the future.

When the Watts Riots broke out in 1965, none of us were too happy with our chosen profession. The riots took place in South Central Los Angeles, and we ended up having to send one of our new conversions to pick up remains near the hot zone. One of our drivers, Newlyn Brunton, came around a corner, and to his surprise, the locals had dragged some old furniture and trash into the middle of the street and set it ablaze. Rioters were running all over and started hurling objects at the car. Newlyn had people rushing him from behind, and with a raging fire blocking the street, he made a quick decision to drive the car over the curb and down the sidewalk. Needless to say, the car sustained a great deal of damage from flying debris.

At one point the riots got so far out of hand that the National Guard had to be called in. Even though our office was at least ten miles from Watts, an army jeep was parked in the center of the intersection of Figueroa Street and Washington Boulevard, with a large-caliber machine gun mounted on it. This was only fifty yards from our office, and everyone was on edge about our proximity to this roadblock. A woman tried to crash into the jeep, but a reservist unloaded his machine gun into the vehicle and the woman.

Our worst incident during the riots was when one of our drivers dropped off a body he had picked up for McGlynn’s Mortuary. They were located approximately a mile from the edge of Watts, and we didn’t feel good about reentering the area after what had already happened. One of our employees volunteered to do the drive and said he would be especially careful. After he dropped off the remains, he made a beeline for the office along a main business street. He even began running red lights, because along the way he could see looters breaking into stores. Then he noticed in his rearview mirror that a police car was about half a block behind him. Reasoning that he had better start observing the law, he
stopped at the next red light. Four young men rushed out, opened the car door, and dragged him from the car.

One of the guys said, “Do you have anything to say before you die, white boy?” He realized that the only way he was going to survive this terrifying situation was to talk his way out of it. As fast as he could, he explained: “I’m just doing my job, which is transporting bodies. I have no axe to grind with you guys.” At this point, the rioter who was holding him released his grip. Our driver dove into the car and sped off. Apparently, the police car had turned off Vermont just before the assault took place. But our fellow wasn’t taking any more chances, so he didn’t stop for another red light all the way back to the office.

There was a hospital in Culver City where we made numerous removals over many years. Newlyn made a call at the hospital, after which we received a serious complaint about him. Veteran movie actor Jeff Chandler had died there from a staphylococcus (staph) infection following minor surgery. The hospital was found guilty of malpractice, and the notoriety was so severe that its name was changed from Culver City Memorial Hospital to Brotman Medical Center. Newlyn was there just after the name change, and while a nurse was giving him some information, he jokingly remarked that they should have named it Jeff Chandler Memorial Hospital. After hearing that comment, the nursing supervisor called Ron and raked him over the coals.

Chandler’s death caused the media to start asking some hard questions, which ultimately revealed that you are about ten times more likely to get exposed to staphylococcus germs in a hospital than you are in your own home. Americans didn’t seem to learn the lessons provided by the Civil War. If a soldier was taken to a field hospital to be treated surgically, he was eight times more likely to die from infections or gangrene than he was from dying in battle.

In 1965, California passed a law allowing families to have the ashes of their loved ones scattered at sea. The new regulation required that it be done from an aircraft that was three miles out from the shore and flying at an altitude of 5,000 feet. This was the only procedure allowed for ocean scattering at that time. Seizing the opportunity to offer this service, we purchased a new red and white Piper Cherokee airplane. If we were going to buy an airplane, I wanted it to look like a World War II fighter. The Cessna was a less expensive alternative, but it looked hokey to me.

We signed a lease with Pacific Airmotive Corporation, which had a private area at Lockheed-Burbank Airport. We rented space there, where we had the plane fueled and maintained. They also provided us with an instructor and flight school training. For our first lesson, our flight instructor, Don Lorenti, told us that he had to make a pickup at LAX in their company plane. Rather than cancel our lesson, he said we would have to pay only for the instruction time and nothing extra for using the company plane. On the way there Don let me fly the plane, which was really nothing but holding the stick steady. I was shocked when he said he was going to have me land the plane at LAX. My first thought was, “Are you out of your frickin’ mind?” This seemed like a daunting task on my first instructional flight.

I could feel the sweat running down my sides as we made the final approach, while Don just sat there and calmly told me what to do. He never touched his stick, but as soon as the wheels touched down, he took over and taxied quickly at this busy airport. At this time my brain was running at full tilt, wondering if my second instructional flight was going to require a carrier landing.

Don was a former fighter pilot instructor in the United States Air Force, but not even he had a clue about the Lockheed “Skunk Works” that produced the spy planes our country used to protect America and gather intelligence on the Soviet Union. These planes included the brainchild of Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, the SR-71 Blackbird, which still holds the world’s record for the fastest plane ever built, and the U-2, which was responsible for taking pictures of the missile sites in Cuba and flyovers of Russia authorized by President Eisenhower during the Cold War.

Allan in front of their 1965 Piper Cherokee “Air Hearse,” used for scattering ashes.

Kathy didn’t know we were taking lessons, and our dispatchers knew not to say anything. One day, she called the office and one of our hearse drivers answered the phone. Not knowing about my policy, he said he would have me call after my flying lesson was over. By the time I walked in the door that evening, she had the shotgun locked and loaded—speaking figuratively. We debated and she finally agreed to my continuing the lessons, but in the following two weeks she lost four pounds, so I quit.

Cremation was starting to become a very popular alternative, and we knew that scattering ashes at sea was going to be the wave of the future. I designed a container to hold ashes prior to disposal, with a long snout and two end caps. My prototype was made of cardboard, so I had a sheet metal shop use the pattern to construct one out of stainless steel. It looked very professional, and the extension at the bottom fit perfectly out the small opening in the plane’s left window.

We hired Ray Champion as a pilot to do all our air scatterings. We knew him because his family had a casket-manufacturing business. We went through the entire procedure with Ray and couldn’t think of any possible complications. On his first day, Ray picked up three members of a family and flew the plane to the proper location three miles out to sea. He picked up the container holding the cremains, removed the lower end cap, pushed the snout out the small opening, and tipped it up to let gravity and wind take over. It worked perfectly, just as I knew it would. However, as soon as the ashes reached the rear of the plane, they passed by the ventilation scoop, which brought some ash back inside the plane. The family had to brush “Uncle Charlie” off their clothing. A family member even joked that it was just like him to stick around. From that day on, Ray was paranoid about checking the air vent to make sure it was not open.

Several years later, California passed a new law that allowed scattering at sea by boat, which was a much smarter way to do it. We sold the plane and purchased a yacht that we named
Tribute
. The Piper still looked almost new, but before selling it we had the tail assembly painted because it was sandblasted from all the scatterings we had done.