Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (20 page)

One of my most memorable limo drives was to pick up singer-song-writer Carly Simon, along with a female friend, from her swanky home in Brentwood. I drove them to the Shrine Auditorium, where she was going to be a presenter at the Grammy Awards that night.

About halfway there, Carly opened her purse and retrieved two joints, which they lit up and began smoking. I’m no prude, but I thought that
this was pretty inconsiderate. My only choice was to raise the divider window or risk getting stoned myself. With the window up it was no longer possible to hear their conversation, which had been quite interesting. Carly was telling her companion that she and her boyfriend had quarreled over a song she had written. Apparently, he resented it, but she told him that the song was not about him. It must have been a one-in-a-million chance to actually hear her talking about this subject.

During his senior year at Dorsey High School, Ron had gotten to know Mike Love of the Beach Boys. Mike would occasionally visit our office and started using our limo service. He was a product of the hippie generation who believed he could enhance his self-awareness by following gurus like the Hindu Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Mike did come off as being extremely calm and mellow the few times he visited us. On a number of occasions, our drivers would drop him off at Ron’s house after a night of partying so he could sleep off whatever was influencing him. This continued until we received a call from the group’s manager, instructing us to stop taking orders from Mike because the manager was going to discontinue authorizing limo service payments for him.

For years we had a verbal contract with the manager of Diana Ross and the Supremes, whom we furnished limo service to when they were performing locally or arriving in Los Angeles from out-of-state concerts. They had signed a deal to perform at a casino in Lake Tahoe’s South Shore. He wanted to know if we could transport all their band equipment to a hotel, and some of Diana’s personal items to the private home at which she would be staying. We had a walk-in van that we used on large flower deliveries that could easily do the job, so we accepted the order.

Steve Nimz was a relatively new driver of ours in his teens, and he volunteered to make the trip. Steve was told to report to the band equipment company in Los Angeles to pick up instruments that afternoon. After that stop, he continued on to the residence of Diana Ross to pick up her luggage and other personal items. She greeted Steve in a nightgown, smoking a cigarette, with no makeup on and cussing like a drunken sailor.

Steve drove all night, and around 6
A.M
. he was almost to the town of Truckee when he heard a loud bang, and the truck wouldn’t go any further. After an inspection, it was determined that the rear axle had broken. There was a U-Haul truck rental facility nearby, and he was able
to transfer all the contents from our van to the rental truck, but that delayed him. He didn’t arrive in Lake Tahoe until noon the following day.

Steve’s trip back to the rental company took him through the Donner Pass, named for the Donner Party that became stranded in the winter of 1846 on their trek west to California. It was bad enough that Steve’s rental truck had no air conditioning to combat the summer heat, but to make matters worse, he hadn’t slept for about thirty hours. As fate would have it, he fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into three parked cars, damaging them badly. The truck was still drivable, but Steve was required to stay in Truckee to wait for the California Highway Patrol to make their report. At least Steve didn’t have to resort to cannibalism to survive, as the Donner Party had.

On January 21, 1969, Kathy had our second son, Greg, and the delivery was much more peaceful for her. It was enjoyable witnessing how the kids learned to speak and hearing the cute creations they came up with. When Greg could recite the whole alphabet, he couldn’t pronounce the letter
r
, which would come out as “cow.” Even when you would coach him by clearly enunciating the sound “arr,” he would follow slowly and repeat the sound correctly, but when he went back through the entire alphabet, it was back to “cow.” Meanwhile, Mischa could not pronounce the Russian version of Greg’s name, Greisha, so he called him Geeta instead, and that became his permanent nickname.

Either my mom or Kathy’s would babysit, but it was a lot more convenient for us to take them to Ron’s house because he lived only about five minutes away, near Lake Hollywood. The first time we asked Ron to babysit for us, I think he was a little nervous, but eventually he sat for both of the kids, mostly when Kathy and I would go to a movie. Since Greg was almost three years younger, he gave Ron a bit more of a challenge. One night Ron had been trying to entertain him but wasn’t having much luck. He had given him a large serving spoon to play with. That didn’t turn out to be a good idea, because Greg whacked Ron on the head with it, catching him just above his eye. The following evening, Ron spoke at a large function sponsored by the Los Angeles County Funeral Directors Association. His whole eye had turned a deep purple. He explained to the audience how he got the shiner, so Kathy and I got a recap in front of the whole crowd.

Kathy and Allan with their sons, Greg (left) and Michael, in 1974.

The single biggest leap forward in our business also took place about this time when our next-door neighbors, the Frank Taylor Ford dealership, started pressuring us to move out of our location so they could expand into it. In compensation for leaving, Ron asked them for $30,000 to take over the remaining seven years of our twenty-year lease. They thought his request was unreasonable, but this was on Figueroa Street in downtown Los Angeles, with dealers that represented almost every major car manufacturer. In the thirteen years we had been at this location rents in the area had skyrocketed, while we had been getting only small increases in our rent each year. Therefore, if we relinquished our lease to them, they would save a tremendous amount over the remaining years. The lease we had signed in the ’60s did not prevent us from transferring the lease to a second party. After conceding this point, they agreed and we began our fourth search for a new base of operations.

It wasn’t long before we started inquiring about a glorious old abandoned funeral home. It was one of the most beautiful mortuary buildings in California, colonial in style, with two stories and large white columns across the front. We knew it would cost a great deal of money and take a lot of work to get it into usable condition, because it had been sitting unused for a very long time. The building dated back to the ’30s and in its heyday was the home of the Edwards Brothers Colonial Mortuary. The chapel seated about 100 people and every Sunday the mortuary hosted a religious radio broadcast from there, which included religious music performed by the well-known Edwards Brothers Singers.

As times changed, the mortuary’s business started to wane. Typically, the three most important events to be celebrated in the first half of the twentieth century were weddings, births, and deaths. In those days, funeral arrangements had a very simple fee structure. A family would purchase a casket and that price included almost everything provided by the funeral home, including the hearse, limo, casket, embalming, makeup, hairdressing, visitation, and flower delivery to the cemetery, whose internment costs were separate from the funeral home.

During the mid-’60s, the significance of funerals lessened and the industry fell under tremendous scrutiny after Jessica Mitford’s book,
The American Way of Death
, appeared. The book heavily criticized the funeral industry and evidently struck a chord with the American people. Even before the book was published, the trend began to shift toward lower-cost services. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower died in 1961, he was placed in an inexpensive casket. The news media took notice of this in the many articles appearing across the country. Many families even asked mortuaries if they had an “Eisenhower” casket they could purchase for their loved one. After all, if it was good enough for him, it had to be acceptable for them as well.

A large San Diego firm called Goodbody Mortuary had purchased the Edwards Brothers business after the owners had passed on. They had contracted with a married couple to run the business. We had been providing Edwards Brothers with equipment and staff for years, and we realized that they were having financial difficulties when it became harder to collect what they owed us each month. Everything in the mortuary was leased, right down to the drapes and carpets.

One day there was a big buzz in the industry because the couple had apparently absconded with $80,000 from the pre-need funds—prepaid funeral arrangements held in trust accounts at a bank. They were both in their sixties and must have decided it was time to retire in sunny Mexico. As a result, the State Board of Funeral Directors and Embalmers (as it was then called) had an investigation and pulled their license to practice as Edwards Brothers. The San Diego office realized that the main draw of the mortuary had been its name recognition and that even under a new name, the mortuary would still have to furnish free funerals to all the swindled families, so they just shut it down.

Goodbody Mortuary didn’t know what to do with the property, so it sat empty for years. Homeless people started living in the building and drug addicts were also taking refuge inside, so the police department wanted the building torn down. We contacted the San Diego firm to see if the property might be for sale, and they were delighted. Owing to its deplorable condition we were able to purchase it for just over $100,000, although it would take many months and thousands of dollars to refurbish it.

Since the property had been abandoned for so long, the weeds had grown tall and most of the windows had been broken. Someone even broke into the building after it had been locked up, dismantled the entire
marble fireplace, and carted it off. An extremely large casket display room took up about one-third of the second floor. Since we had no use for it, we had a hallway constructed down its center with four small rooms built on each side. That gave us dormitory rooms for our students and night help.

This building, which we called “The Mansion,” became our livery service base of operations for many years. It had more than twice the square footage of our previous location, but the garage had space for ten cars only, and we had thirty, so we still needed a garage for our other twenty cars.

We purchased a large garage not far from our office, which was ideal for us because it could accommodate about twenty-five cars and a mechanic’s facility. We acquired a great deal of equipment that made us totally self-sufficient in handling all of our repairs. We also added a body and paint shop, which allowed me to further expand our activities. With our own body shop, we could refurbish funeral cars for mortuaries that could not afford to buy new ones. It also made it possible for me to purchase older hearses to fix up and export to other countries. After the word got out, we received much more of this type of business, most often from callers overseas, including Guam, American Samoa, and the Philippines.

In 1973, Allan and Ron purchased the Edwards Brothers Colonial Mortuary, featured on this postcard in its heyday.

People in the funeral profession have to be particularly mindful of the emotional state of families when they are bereaved. An incident that may be insignificant under different circumstances may become a serious issue at a time when emotions run high and tolerance low. Inevitably, things go wrong and mistakes are made in this business, just as in any other.

A family-owned mortuary that we assisted for years gave us an order for a hearse. One of their employees told me that the firm had purchased some caskets that might have been freight damaged or have other defects. Inexpensive caskets have six small metal handles and are referred to as cloth-covered caskets, or just “cloths.” They are made from inexpensive wood, which is why you never see the wood itself, only the fabric covering it. The more expensive hardwood or polished woods have one long handle on each side, which may be wood or metal. The casket for the service this day appeared to be expensive because the handles were made of extruded metal, which is very sturdy—but the decorative end caps were pot metal, about two inches in diameter.