Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (33 page)

Other witnesses came forward and gave testimony that David had been planning to kill his grandparents so his parents would inherit the business sooner, with the knowledge that he would be next in succession when they retired or died. One of his competitors was also allegedly on his hit list, as was the prosecutor who tried the case against him. David’s original plea bargain resulted in a prison sentence, but he would remain on probation for the rest of his life. After serving four years in prison, he moved to Arizona, where he started a counterfeit bus pass scheme. It wasn’t long before he was back in jail.

David’s parents received lesser charges, always claiming that they were unaware of their son’s numerous illegal activities. Following this outrageous case, the mortuary hired a Hispanic gentleman named Henry Reade to become their new manager. They apparently realized that by this time there had been such an influx of Hispanic people moving to Southern California that this could only help their business. Henry continued using us for accommodation services and before long we became good friends. He ended up driving for me on many films where I was driving the hearse and he was in the limo. Now, twenty years later, he has opened his own mortuary in Fresno, California, and we remain good friends.

The nature of the tasks performed by morticians, in concert with people’s emotional states over the loss of a loved one, seems to impart a negative connotation about my profession in the minds of many people, consciously or not. A perfect example of this was when Kathy first introduced me to her father, Paul. Although he was friendly to me, he never asked me anything about my business once he knew what we did.

Paul had been an engineer in Yugoslavia, an occupation held in high esteem. In Los Angeles, he was forced to retire from his streetlight engineering job with the city when he turned 68. The city had a banquet in his honor, where he was recognized for having designed the most well-lit intersection in the United States at Wilshire and Westwood boulevards. He tried staying home for about a year, and it certainly didn’t agree with him. When we would go to Kathy’s parents’ house for dinner, he would complain about his inability to find work.

Pierce Brothers Mortuary had a contractual agreement with a husband-and-wife team to get their death certificates signed, much as we had done for Utter-McKinley. I would often run into Mr. or Mrs. Hess at the health department while filing a DC for our own mortuary. During one chance meeting, she said that they were looking for some retired person who might be looking for work. I mentioned the offer to Paul and he was incensed, stating, “How could you believe that I would even consider such a job?”

Paul definitely didn’t want the job, but my approach was “Try it, you’ll like it.” For about three weeks he got bombarded with my rationalizations, like “The DC office is only in the fleet garage and you will be out on the road 90 percent of the time,” “You can catch up with current events, because every doctor’s office has the latest magazines to read,” or “You will never have to set foot in any of their branches,” which wasn’t exactly true.
I explained if he didn’t like it he could quit with no hard feelings. He tried it for three days and then agreed to try it for two more weeks.

In less than one year he was making casual conversation about the business and would ask me questions like “Did you hear that Pierce Brothers just acquired two more units?” By the second year he was spending many of his lunch breaks in the embalming room at the Pierce Brothers’ main branch, discussing religion with their embalmer, who was a Mormon. Now that we had something in common, he caught up on all the unasked questions from earlier years.

Fortunately, we were able to travel to Russia together in 1987, during the period of glasnost and perestroika. The Russians were embracing tourism, but there were a few times when things got hairy. When we arrived, one of their stone-faced customs officers in Moscow asked to see the magazine Kathy was holding. It was an issue of
Redbook
, a nonpolitical women’s magazine, but probably not the best one to have brought. The officer said, “What is this
Redbook
and why are you bringing into our country?” She showed him the magazine and flipped through it so he could see that all the articles and ads were about the latest trends in women’s fashions.

We experienced a few more instances that made us quite aware of where we were. Moscow was quite sophisticated compared to many other cities in the USSR. The vehicles used to transport dignitaries and politicians were called
Chaikas
, and they came in every shade of black. It was like stepping back in time, because they looked exactly like the last Packard Patrician cars built in the U.S. in the ’60s. It made me wonder if the Russians had used old Packard blueprints to produce the car without having to invest any money in research and development. After all, the Russians had a long history of reverse engineering.

When three American B-29 bombers made emergency landings in Russia in 1944, the Soviets refused to return them to the United States. It must have been embarrassing when they became aware that their new bomber, the Tupolev Tu-4, had metal plates riveted in places where our air force had merely patched holes from shrapnel damage. Stalin’s engineers had made him exact copies, just as he demanded.

One evening after attending an opera, as we entered our hotel in Moscow, Kathy turned to say good-night to her parents walking behind us. When the two guards at the front entrance heard her say “Spokoynoy
nochi” to them, they grabbed her arms and started dragging her back down the stairs. This was an Intourist Hotel, which didn’t allow locals to enter. I showed them our room key, but it didn’t help. Paul stepped in and said to them in Russian, “Take your hands off my daughter, we’re Americans.”

We quickly learned about the desire of locals to get into the tourist-only gift shops, but even more so into the Intourist Hotels, which had the best food and entertainment. As we were about to enter our hotel in Saint Petersburg, we were even approached by two well-dressed young men in suits, who spoke English and asked us to enter the hotel with them. Paul declined and explained in Russian that doing so might get us into trouble.

Saint Petersburg, which was given back its original name after being called Petrograd and Leningrad, was unequivocally the most beautiful city we visited, and the Hermitage Museum was breathtaking. Large riverboats were used to transport tour groups beside some of the most architecturally beautiful structures in all Russia, including Catherine the Great’s summer palace.

Another unpleasant experience occurred in Kiev and by this time my tolerance level was running out of steam. We were preparing to enter our rooms, which were just across the hall from each other. The maid had just finished cleaning Kathy’s parents’ room and was about to lock their door. Paul told her in Russian not to lock it because they were going right in. She shook her head no and continued to fumble with the large set of keys, so he repeated himself. She pointed at a switch in the doorjamb and, without saying a word, pointed to her ear and then down toward the basement, letting us know we were being monitored whenever someone entered or left the room. When we opened our own door we noticed a sensor there as well, so I reached up and toggled it rapidly a dozen times. Kathy said, “Are you out of your mind, do you want to get us arrested?” Fortunately, we weren’t hauled off to a Soviet gulag.

Over the years, we took Paul and Vera on many vacations with us. They always had interesting stories to tell, which ran the gamut from life in Russia and Yugoslavia to their arrival in America. Paul also told me a funny joke about the Soviet philosophy of never wanting someone else to have something you didn’t have. He said the Germans guards in World War II had to watch the American POWs every second, but if the Russian prisoners were being held in a large pit in the ground, the Germans
wouldn’t even have to post a guard because if one of them tried to climb out, the other Russians would pull him back down.

After Paul died, I tried to get Vera to write their story, but she said it was far too painful to recall those unhappy memories. I’m grateful that Paul took the time to relate these experiences to me, which must have been difficult for him as well.

After our name became synonymous with funeral vehicles throughout the film industry, the studios started asking us to appear in their shots as extras. We were never allowed to speak during filming, but they did compensate us for the use of our image on camera. At the end of the shooting day they would issue us a voucher, which entitled us to receive some additional compensation.

For an episode of
Moonlighting
, we provided a hearse and a limo at a church where there was a funeral scene. The filming took place in Toluca Lake, adjacent to North Hollywood, where the location manager had found a church with a New England flavor to it. Even the trees around the church were without leaves, as they would be on the East Coast in fall and winter. Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis were filmed arriving there by car. Bruce rubbed his hands together and blew into them, which was funny to see since it was quite warm that day.

Another episode was filmed in one of the chapels at Inglewood Park Cemetery. In the plot they accused a wife of having murdered her husband, just as his funeral service was about to begin. The widow ran outside to make her getaway and jumped into the hearse that still had her husband’s casket in it. The chase went from the chapel all the way through the Century Drive-In Theater, where Kathy and I used to go when we were dating, and ended at a local baseball diamond where a game was in progress. The hearse went out of control and swerved, causing the rear door to fly open and the casket to be ejected. It slid across the field and then came to rest. Bruce had already jumped out of his car realizing she was cut off, so as the casket slid up and stopped at home plate, Bruce waved his hands in the familiar baseball gesture and shouted, “Safe!”

Until the late ’80s, the most cars we ever provided for a movie were three or four. Then we received an order for ten limos for a miniseries called
Lady Mobster
, which starred Susan Lucci and covered two generations
of the five Chicago crime families. It began with the head of each family arriving for a big meeting. We pulled up a long ramp and into a warehouse, driving five early ’70s limos. A daytime shot stood out for me because one of the actors was Joseph Wiseman, who played the part of Dr. No in the first of the James Bond films.

We then waited until dark for the second-generation bosses to have their meeting in the same warehouse, supposedly a generation later. This time we used current model limos, but the scene was rendered more complicated by a rain machine and the darkness. It was interesting to see these scenes all shot on the same day but representing such a long time apart.

We also furnished a white hearse and three white limos for the filming of the TV movie
Elvis and Me
, based on Priscilla Presley’s book by the same name. They wanted to re-create a funeral procession that looked exactly like the real one for Elvis. They showed me still shots of the actual white funeral cars and wanted me to duplicate them with the proper year and color. I called every mortuary in LA that had white cars of the proper year. These were firms we had been serving for years, so they were willing to rent me their cars for this memorable scene.

They used a house in Glendale that was supposed to be Graceland, where the studio personnel broke out their equipment and dyed the grass greener. As the procession pulled away from the house, we drove through Graceland gates that looked exactly like the real ones. We then drove to a city park in swanky San Marino that had a roadway and grassy areas that looked like the long drive from Elvis’s house.

For years, moviemakers have enhanced their work by adding actual footage from historic events. Being aware of this technique didn’t prepare me for what they had done in the Elvis miniseries. We had apparently matched his real funeral procession so well that they decided to merge this scene with actual color newsreel footage of the real funeral. It surprised me to see our procession going through town with hundreds of adoring fans waving and screaming.

Home of Peace Cemetery had a mausoleum where they filmed a scene for
Bonfire of the Vanities
, starring Tom Hanks and Melanie Griffith. After lunch I went looking for my friend Henry Reade, who was driving one of the three limos. They told me he was in the chapel playing the organ, so I headed over there. At the front of the chapel was a casket they had picked
up from me the previous day. I recognized the body in the casket as being that of Alan King, but he wasn’t moving a muscle or visibly breathing. I thought that maybe he was getting into the spirit of playing a corpse, but Henry told me it was actually a rubber replica of him. Even at just five feet away, it looked unbelievably lifelike—or should that be death like?

Rosedale Cemetery was used a great deal for location filming, and we were given instructions to report there quite often. One shoot was for a
Columbo
Movie of the Week episode, costarring Ian McShane. He told me that
Columbo
was so popular in Europe that the revenue from there alone paid for the show’s production.

We got an order for a hearse to report to Rosedale Cemetery for a new series called
Over My Dead Body
. It starred Edward Woodward, who had previously appeared in the popular TV show
The Equalizer
. The report time was the usual 7
A.M
., but there wasn’t a soul there, so I parked the hearse in front of the grave they had opened the night before, just as I would on a real service. Quite a while later, they arrived with the casket and cemetery props they’d picked up from me the previous day.

The set decorator started yelling, “Who the hell parked this hearse here?” Not only was he rude, but only the two of us were standing there, so it was a pretty stupid question. He told me to get the damn thing out from in front of the grave so the prop and camera trucks could start unloading.