Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (24 page)

I’ve always been fascinated by movie productions. Even as kids, when my brother and I wanted to do something exciting, we would ride our bikes to the back lots of some of the movie studios in the area and climb over the fence. We would also go to the movies almost every Saturday. In many films they would show a late-model 1940s cars speeding down a highway, but as it was about to get in a wreck or go over a cliff, it would become a tall, square 1930 model, because of budget restrictions. I couldn’t have imagined at the time that I would eventually be providing Hollywood with funeral cars for demolition in crashes and other disasters.

We provided two matching hearses for a production that was being filmed at a mortuary in downtown LA that we had served for many years on their larger funerals, including those of Mario Lanza and Jimmy Durante. The mortuary was almost unrecognizable because the set decorators had already covered the outside of the building with a trellis and climbing vines.

The reason the studio needed two vehicles, or “doubles,” was that they wanted to have a clean one as the “picture car” and a high-mileage cheap one as the “crash car” they could damage, which saves the studio from wrecking an expensive car. They had already picked up the two hearses, which looked identical. My concern was that you couldn’t tell them apart, and there was a chance the studio might use the wrong one for the crash. One hearse was in our current rental fleet and the other one was a rust bucket from the East Coast that I had cleaned up and painted. After I explained my concern, the transportation captain used a grease pencil to write in the upper left corner of the windshield of the good hearse “picture car” and on the other, “crash car.”

The heroine in the story, played by Nanette Fabray, was going to run from the mortuary into their garage, jump into the hearse, and crash through the door as she made her getaway. They had replaced the original
garage door with one that would easily break apart. Since filming is frequently shot out of sequence, the director decided to first shoot the scene showing the hearse
after
it was supposed to have crashed through the garage door. He instructed the female stunt driver to make a hard turn from the side street, where the garage faced onto Washington Boulevard, a main thoroughfare. For some unknown reason, he instructed her to drive the hearse that had been marked as the picture car.

The traffic had been stopped and replaced by cars with stunt drivers. As she came barreling around the corner, the hearse got away from her and she struck two of the stunt cars. Obviously, she had never driven anything like this hearse, which weighed in at over 6,000 pounds. Once the picture car got damaged, the director used it to crash through the garage door as well. All of their trouble could have been avoided if they had just given me a wig and put me at the wheel, because I was used to driving a hearse like a maniac.

Another production, called
The Outside Man
, with Angie Dickinson and French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, featured several limousines and a hearse for a funeral scene. It was being filmed in the town of Calabasas at a Catholic retreat that was to double as a cemetery. I arrived at 6
A.M
. with nary a soul from the studio present. There were rolling hills covered in grass and a Spanish-style structure well back from the entrance, but it didn’t look much like a cemetery. Soon the prop trucks arrived, fully stocked with flat grave markers and flowers in vases. They dyed the grass greener and set out the props. In an hour, it looked exactly like a real cemetery.

In addition to our vehicles, they rented a Mercedes stretch limo from another vendor to serve as the main family car. I had also arranged for a friend of mine, John Brady, who was a real funeral escort, to arrive in full uniform on his motorcycle for a procession scene. His equipment included a two-way radio and handset for the hearse driver. The director, who was French and spoke almost no English, really liked the radio because he could communicate with the escort directly.
Bad idea!

After a couple of shots of the procession entering the cemetery, he kept insisting that the vehicles get closer together and increase their speed. I walked over to the assistant director and stated my concern about this risky request, but he told me the director was insistent on doing everything his way. Then, as if on cue, an employee of the retreat got in her car and started driving away, apparently unaware that she was about to
cross directly in front of the procession. The director suddenly spotted her and yelled, “Stop!” into the radio. He knew that word! John slammed on his brakes and threw up a hand signal for the other drivers. Everyone tried to stop, but it happened too fast. Bam, bam, bam! Two limos and the Mercedes got creamed.

The transportation captain came over to me and asked if we could come up with two more identical limos for the next day. My immediate concern was about our two limos that were already smashed. He told me to turn a claim into my insurance company, to which my reply was “No pay, no cars tomorrow.” He reconsidered the matter and agreed to cover the damages. That was the last time we ever released a vehicle or prop to any studio without requiring that they obtain an insurance policy that covered all rentals up to $1 million.

In the film, Jean-Louis played a hit man brought over from France to handle a killing for the Mob. Just after a shootout at the cemetery, the police came roaring in. They screeched to a halt as Jean-Louis jumped into the hearse and drove across the cemetery grass for his getaway. On this day, I brought Kathy and the boys, who were about 6 and 4, to watch the film being shot. As we sat observing this scene unfold, Mischa got up and brought back a big cup of lemonade from the craft table. When the police began firing their shotguns at the fleeing hearse, the shots were so loud that he threw the whole cup up in the air and drenched himself in lemonade.

Studios typically wanted the newest cars for their shots. Since Cadillac would sometimes go many years without a major body change, it was possible for me to match our limousines to the newest models by installing updated components. These parts were typically the grille and rear bumper, which housed the taillights. The retail price of a Cadillac rear bumper and grille was about $1,500, but a growing number of wrecking yards would allow customers to remove parts themselves. I would frequent these yards, taking along a large piece of cardboard for lying on my back. Other mechanics would walk by wearing their grubbies and look bewildered by the sight of me lying on this cardboard in suit pants, white shirt, and tie. I could obtain a complete Cadillac rear bumper and grille for only $150 after removing it myself.

The studios always thought they were getting limos that were newer than they actually were because they couldn’t tell the difference. They wouldn’t have cared anyway because the public’s perception of what they were seeing was the only thing that really mattered.

In 1977, Cadillac and all the other auto manufacturers were required to downsize their cars because gasoline consumption had become a significant issue. As a result, the 1977 Cadillac limo was smaller than the 1976 Cadillac Sedan DeVille. Funeral directors were totally dissatisfied with the new smaller version, which held only five passengers instead of the previous seven.

This downsizing triggered the birth of the stretch limo. A company called Lehmann-Peterson had been producing stretch limos for many years, but they were special-order presidential and executive bulletproof cars. Now that the standard Cadillac limos had been reduced to little more than a sedan, the industry kicked into gear to produce what the car manufacturers could no longer make. Companies called cut-and-stretch builders started popping up across the country. They began by cutting a Sedan DeVille in half and adding thirty-six inches in the center. Next, they added an additional forty-eight inches, or sixty inches, and so on to the limos, which were known as super-stretches. From this point on, no government restriction would limit the size of a limo. Providing identical cars had been simple until the advent of the stretch. After that, the same year, make, and model didn’t match because the amount of stretch varied with each builder.

Studios usually preferred to order stretch limos once they become prevalent. We got an order to furnish two identical limos to serve as picture car and crash car, but they hadn’t specified that they wanted stretch limos. After locating a high-mileage standard limo, it was painted black to match one of the factory limos in our fleet. Two days after the studio picked them up, the limos were returned because the director wanted a more impressive-looking stretch. I was pretty committed to having this work out after purchasing the second car. We had a high-mileage Lincoln stretch limo, but no identical second car. I told the transportation captain that I had purchased this second standard one for them and spent money to make it match our good limo, so he finally agreed to swap the two cars for our Lincoln stretch to be used for both shots.

For many small communities across the country, mortuaries offered both funeral and ambulance service. For small-town funeral homes that couldn’t afford a separate hearse and ambulance, the manufacturers produced a limousine-style hearse with windows all around, referred to as a “combination.” It was painted black but wired to accommodate a portable red light on the roof, held in place by a magnet.

Cadillac hearses lasted for many years because of their limited mileage, but ambulances rolled out twenty-four hours a day, making it necessary to replace them more frequently. As a result, a company called Stoner Manufacturing in Santa Fe Springs set the pace for major changes in ambulance production. This was the dawning of the modular ambulance, which was a truck cab and chassis to which they added a large box, or “module,” filled with all the necessary equipment. The cab, engine, and chassis had to be upgraded every so often to meet the standards of the municipalities, but the modular part could still do the job for many years by installing it on a new front end.

We had four limos in a film called
Scavenger Hunt
that had many well-known actors but did not do well at the box office. I had worked with the transportation captain before, and he was delighted when all the cars were ready for pickup. They all ended up being destroyed during filming.

In 1981, United Artists made a film called
True Confessions
, starring Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall. It was a period film about a murder in Los Angeles that was committed in the 1940s. They rented our vintage hearse and filmed it arriving at Union Station to deliver a casket for a rail shipment. The casket wasn’t in a shipping box as it would have been, but it was nice watching the scene play out. Ron’s 1949 Pontiac hearse pulled into the LA train station and passed in front of the camera, with our Abbott & Hast Mortuary nameplates showing clearly in the hearse window. When the manager of Bob’s Tire Town saw the movie, he recognized our nameplate and asked me if we had been in business in the 1940s. Come on, I’m not
that
old.

The studio that produced the popular series
Dynasty
was trying to locate a Lincoln stretch that they could blow up. On my trips to different studios it was helpful to always keep my eyes peeled for anything that might be acquired for future use. I knew of an abandoned stretch being stored by a studio. I acquired the limo, but it was not in running condition, so I suggested towing it to where they were filming the show. In the episode, the lead character, Blake Carrington, is being pressured by the Mob to sell his interest in a football franchise. When he refuses, they give him a dire warning. Since the limo did not run, they just filmed the actors walking away from it after they had arrived at their destination. To demonstrate that they were deadly serious, a mobster drives by and throws a bomb into his limo, knocking everyone down and blinding Blake Carrington.

All the cemetery shots on
Dallas
that featured our vehicles were filmed at Valhalla Cemetery in Burbank, just one block away from the end of the runway at Lockheed-Burbank Airport. Every time an airplane took off they would have to stop filming because of the noise. On one occasion Larry Hagman said to the cameraman, “Next time a plane takes off, catch it on camera and I can probably get free airline tickets for the rest of my life.” His joke was a reference to product placement, a multimillion-dollar business in which the studios are paid to show a specific brand on camera.

The various studios kept such a hectic pace of trying to shoot new episodes each week that having multiple cars allowed them to film in different locations at the same time. For one episode of the popular TV series
Knight Rider
, they rented four identical limos.

One hearse we furnished for the popular Lee Majors TV series
The Fall Guy
was going to be used to make a jump. This show always opened with a clip of his four-wheel-drive truck doing a jump, but hearses don’t jump well. It came back from the studio on a flat-bed truck, looking quite “V” shaped and well beyond repair.

Universal called one day, asking for something that we would not normally have provided. They were trying to locate two ten-year-old Cadillac Coupe DeVilles to use as double cars for a new detective series called
Crazy Like a Fox
starring Jack Warden. My friend Doug Scott was a licensed car dealer as well as a funeral car salesman. I asked him to bid on a couple of Caddies at a big dealer’s auction, and he was the high bidder on two sedans.

The only problem was that the cars weren’t the same color, so I took the dark brown car to Thompson Lacquer and asked them to mix up a gallon of paint to be used on the light brown one. George, our painter, picked up the paint later that day and began prepping the beige one the same day, because the studio was in a big hurry to get them. After he finished painting the car he called me at the office to say it was ready, but to my total disbelief it was the wrong color.

The paint store representative had just used the color code from the tag on the driver’s door of the dark brown car to save time matching the color, but he had no idea that a previous owner had changed the original factory color. The next day, George painted the car again, and this time it was correct. In the pilot episode, Warden is involved in a high-speed chase and loses control of the car, rolling it over and destroying it, along with its two new paint jobs.