Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (25 page)

It is surprising how seemingly intelligent dictators—I mean directors—make some really dumb decisions because they get so used to having their way. In an episode of
Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer
, starring Stacy Keach, the studio said they needed a 1970 hearse, which was going to be stolen from a graveside service. The script called for a scene where Hammer shoots at the criminal, who is trying to flee from the cemetery in the hearse. They were going to attach a device to the inside of the car that would blow three holes in the windshield to simulate the hearse being hit by his bullets. They agreed to put their own glass in the car, do the shot, and then replace the original glass. Since my hearses were newer models, it was necessary for me to get an older car from another mortuary, but I assured the owner that it wouldn’t get damaged.

I was emphatic with the transportation captain that they not damage the car. He told me not to worry. Oh, sure. As they proceeded with the shot, Mike Hammer starts shooting at the hearse. The director decided that if the driver had gotten shot, the hearse would go out of control and hit something. He directed the stunt driver to slam the hearse into a massive oak tree. The transportation captain protested but was overruled by the director, which was always the case. If you run a normal car into a large tree, you expect to get a certain bang for your buck, but with a 6,200-pound hearse there is just a dull thud. The studio must have bemoaned that bill, because after we replaced most of the front end and repainted the whole car, the repairs cost about fifteen times the daily rental rate.

When a studio needed a vehicle that they knew would be damaged, they wanted to simply purchase it. Instead, I devised a system in which they could purchase the rights to the car. It didn’t matter how badly they damaged it, because they could return it in any condition and pay no more. Apparently, no one in the industry had proposed this idea before. It was often necessary to explain that they were buying the rights to do anything they wanted to the vehicle before they returned it. Every so often a car would come back with only a few hundred dollars’ worth of damage, so it could get repaired fairly cheaply and be ready for the next destructive production.

When we were asked to supply a limo for one of the Charles Bronson
Death Wish
sequels, they invited me to come to the VA Hospital grounds in Westwood at midnight. In the story, Bronson had been sent a limo and driver to take him to a meeting with a crime boss at a remote location. As
soon as the driver stopped and exited the limo, Bronson realized it was a trap because the rear door handles had been removed so that he couldn’t escape. He shot out the rear window and fled just before the car exploded. The studio worked on the limo for hours, doing all their safety tricks so a flying hood or trunk wouldn’t injure someone.

In another sequel to
Death Wish
, they drove one of our limos off a pier and into the ocean. When the car was returned, the engine and drivetrain had been removed. The engine compartment and trunk were completely filled with Styrofoam so the limo would sink more slowly for the shot. I was curious how they had gotten it to drive off the pier without an engine. Paying close attention to the completed film, I caught a glimpse of a cable that flew by at the bottom of the limo as it became airborne.

The studio filming
Scarecrow and Mrs. King
called and wanted a hearse to blow up in Griffith Park, where the park’s famous observatory telescope resides. The plot had some Russian spies transporting an explosive device in a hearse that was to be detonated in an American cemetery. To achieve the most spectacular explosion, they would often have a crew member break all of the windows out beforehand so the flames would travel farther.

The special-effects man went from one window to the next, using a spring-loaded center punch. What he didn’t know was that one of the windows had been replaced with Plexiglas after the regular one was broken on a rental. When he got around to a Plexiglas window, it wouldn’t break. After several unsuccessful attempts he picked up a lug wrench and started whacking it to no avail. When it finally broke he looked over at me as if to say, “What the hell is going on here?” I shrugged and said, “Who knows? I’m just the driver.”

The detonation device was attached to a wire about 100 yards long being dragged behind the hearse as it came down the roadway. It was connected to something called a naphtha bomb, which blew up at the instant the car crashed in a ditch. When they returned this hearse, we had the tow truck driver drop it in the farthest stall possible. The exterior damage didn’t look that bad. The problem was that naphtha is a petroleum extract with a terribly strong chemical smell. For the next two months our parking lot reeked of mothballs, which are made from the same chemical. A man eventually purchased it to build it into a tow vehicle for towing competitions. I’m sure everyone could smell him coming.

Paramount Pictures wanted to find a custom limo for a production called
The Zamunda Project
, starring Eddie Murphy. They were attempting to duplicate some scenes that had been filmed earlier in New York with a rare Mercedes stretch limo. We didn’t have such a car, but since all they needed were some interior shots it seemed possible to match it if they brought me some photos for comparison.

I removed the center seat from one of our stretch limos to make space to accommodate a cameraman and his equipment. The New York Mercedes had a much smaller rear window with an opaque white curtain covering it, whereas ours had a very large one, so I made a template to hide the large window and cut the proper size opening in it. Once they covered it with an identical curtain, it was a close match. They returned our limo on New Year’s Eve, and it was scheduled to be used New Year’s Day for the celebrated Rose Parade. That evening, in pouring rain, I reconnected the seat from under the limo on my back in my drenched driveway.

About a year later, we went to see an Eddie Murphy movie called
Coming to America
, in which a prince comes to the United States from his country of Zamunda, which sounded familiar to me. Then I realized that
The Zamunda Project
had been the working title for
Coming to America
.

A studio that had given us numerous orders purchased the rights to a limo for a series called
Hardball
. They said that a motorcycle was going to hit it head on. When the car came back it had a metal ramp bolted to the front bumper, which they didn’t even bother removing. The windshield itself wasn’t damaged, but it appeared to have gotten shattered. They had created the illusion by shooting a capsule filled with clear petroleum jelly at the windshield. After they removed the metal ramp and cleaned off the jelly, the car was ready for the next show.

I never set out to become a used-hearse salesman, but that’s what happened. To many people, used-car salesmen rate somewhere just slightly above politicians and attorneys, but at least in my case it wasn’t necessary to tell the hearse buyer how great he would look behind the wheel. All of my sales were strictly word of mouth or referrals from other funeral directors.

Sales had picked up dramatically after 1971 because of a film called
Harold and Maude
, in which the main character drove around in a 1959 Cadillac hearse. The ’59 Cadillac was probably the most outrageous example of large fins and bullet taillights. After the film’s release, it seemed like every kid in town wanted one, which tripled the price of that model.

By the mid-’70s, people were contacting me from places like American Samoa, Guam, Australia, Sri Lanka, and especially the Philippines, where my name was being passed around from one mortuary to another. The purchase price of a hearse was used to calculate the amount of import duty that the Philippine government levied on the purchaser. Unfortunately, the mortuary owners had to pay 100 percent of the cost of the hearse by way of this tax, which doubled the total price.

Being sympathetic to my customers’ needs, it occurred to me to reduce the price of the hearses and make up the difference by charging more freight, which wasn’t taxed. That worked for a while, but eventually the government began to suspect something. Almost all of the hearses arriving in Manila had come from me, with a noticeable drop in their value. The Philippine government then set up an office in Long Beach, where all of my shipments departed.

From that point, each car had to be inspected before shipment. The first time I followed this new procedure, the inspector asked me why this hearse was being sold so cheaply. I explained that the car was a rust bucket from an eastern state where they used salt to reduce ice and snow,
causing the undercarriage and some parts of the body to rust away. It had also come from a large city, where it had been owned by a funeral car livery service like ours and therefore had an inordinate amount of miles on it. He didn’t dispute it further.

Another way to help my loyal customers was to suggest that the space between the wheel wells and the back of the front seat could be used to bring in extra mortuary hardware without having to pay any customs duty. The most unusual item I ever hid in the hearse for a customer was an entire collection of
Playboy
magazines. Not exactly the mortuary equipment I was thinking of.

In 1982, a lady called saying she understood that we sold limos to movie studios. She went on to explain that she needed a limo with no roof, no bumper, no fenders, and no hood. My only question was her budget. She asked if she had been clear about what she wanted. After I told her that she had been very precise, she said, “That’s funny, because the five people I talked to before you didn’t seem to get what I wanted.”

After locating a good candidate, she was quoted the price and seemed delighted. I purchased the limo and prepared it for the shot. It was necessary to rent an industrial-grade chop saw and cut away. The grinder was extremely powerful and threw out a stream of sparks at least fifteen feet. Of course, the sparks just had to land on a couple of shop towels in the corner that immediately broke out in a small fire because I had used them to wipe up some spilled gas. Just another exciting day at the office!

The limo was going to be used to promote the fourth Cheech and Chong movie,
Things Are Tough All Over
. It was about two dope-smoking hippies traveling across the country, selling parts of their Cadillac to have enough money to continue their trip. A flatbed truck delivered the stripped-down limo to a studio in Hollywood while I followed to make sure everything went well.

They opened a large garage door from a rear alley at the photo studio, and we pushed the limo inside a large, flat white, three-sided room. There were no ninety-degree corners in the entire room because all of the corners were curved for a seamless backdrop. If you walked far enough into the room, you lost your peripheral vision and all points of reference. It was very disorienting.

I told the photographer about my uneasiness, and he related a story to me about a telephone repairman sent over to check his phone lines. He
had inadvertently walked from the front office into this area while looking down at his clipboard. When he finally looked up, he fell to the floor and started screaming. As soon as he looked away, he got his bearings back and realized he wasn’t losing his mind.

The very successful Hard Rock Cafe chain wanted me to help them locate a 1959 Cadillac hearse as the centerpiece for their forthcoming location in Honolulu, Hawaii. Their Los Angeles location featured a 1959 Cadillac Coupe DeVille sticking halfway out of the roof, as if it had come off an elevated road and crashed there. For Hawaii, they wanted a limousine-style hearse, which has windows in the rear instead of metal panels.

I explained that this would be a very difficult car to find and if I located one, my finder’s fee would be $200. My friend Paul Nix was able to locate exactly what they wanted. They were in a great hurry to get it shipped to Hawaii because they had already started construction on the café. They could not put the roof on until the hearse arrived because it was to be lowered inside by crane. In the end, Hard Rock stiffed me on my commission because they said they thought that my fee was included in the purchase price.

The 1959 Cadillac hearse featured in Hard Rock Cafe’s Honolulu location.

When our family went to Hawaii several years later we had lunch there, and it was amazing to see what a stunning job they had done on it. They had covered the exterior of the car with simulated wood paneling, much like the old Woodie station wagons of the ’50s. It was suspended above the central bar in all its glory, with two surfboards sticking out of the rear window.

Every hearse purchased and shipped overseas went in its own forty-foot container. The freight alone was about $2,000. Hearses are about twenty-three feet long, so only one could be placed in the standard container. It occurred to me that it might be possible to construct a special wooden ramp as a solution to the single-car problem. The first hearse could be driven into the container backward until it touched the rear wall, followed by the wooden ramp, and then the second hearse could have its front end hang up over the front end of the first car. The cost of freight stayed the same whether there were one or two cars. From that point on they were sold in pairs because a mortuary in their country could then defray much of its outlay by selling the second hearse to another firm in the Philippines. The government eventually considered these mortuaries to be used-hearse dealers, so they were allowed to bring only two cars into the country per year.