Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (35 page)

The studio that produced
Tales from the Crypt
for HBO asked me to supply them with a polished hardwood casket. They wanted the top of the casket to be flat, but hardwoods are always expensive woods with rounded lids. The opposite is called a flat top-casket, made of pine and covered with an inexpensive cloth material. After contacting about six casket companies, we found one that had exactly what the studio wanted. The bottom of the lid started out with a curve, which then flattened out near the top. The flat part was eighteen inches wide, just enough for someone to lie on.

The story is about a man who wants to fake his own death to collect on an insurance policy through his wife. However, she is having an affair with his brother, a mortician, so they hatch a plan of their own to kill him and collect the money for themselves. The wife, played by Teri Garr, has
purchased a beautiful hardwood casket for his funeral and is about to bid him a fond farewell. At the end, she and her lover are alone in the crematorium. They are so turned on by having pulled off their plan that they start canoodling on top of the casket as it moves inexorably down the conveyor, toward the flaming furnace’s open door.

The most props and cars we ever rented was for a Universal feature called
Death Becomes Her
, starring Bruce Willis, Goldie Hawn, and Meryl Streep. In the film, Willis plays an alcoholic plastic surgeon who lost his practice because of his drinking problem, so the only job he can get is doing cosmetology at a high-class funeral home modeled after Forest Lawn.

The studio rented a hearse, three limos, and everything that you would find in a mortuary, including caskets, urns, and a variety of embalming equipment, all of which required three large studio trucks to retrieve. The set decorator wanted everything we had, so he even got some older prep room equipment. When he called me the next day, something told me he was going to complain about the older equipment, but he surprised me by saying that everything was great and that he wanted even more prep room props, so I purchased another $500 worth of instruments for the embalming room shots.

For five afternoons straight, I would drop something else off because every day the set decorator was calling me for more items. On one visit, he took me to a stage and showed me the room they had built to represent the morgue. It had marble walls and floors and stainless-steel refrigerator doors, and was shaped like a giant octagon. He told me they had spent $60,000 to build it. Unfortunately, the morgue scene in the film was less than two minutes.

The studio rented the famous Doheny Mansion in Beverly Hills and we shot there for three days, the longest shoot in which we ever participated. In one scene, the hearse was parked under the portico of the mortuary with family members standing behind me as I was pushing the casket into it. Meanwhile, the funeral director was telling Bruce they had just picked up the body of a famous movie producer who died from a heart attack while in bed with a young starlet. Willis was asked to start working on him immediately and to take the smile off his face.

Film work was a very pleasant diversion from funeral work, even though there was often a common theme between my real-life funeral-related
activities and the fictional film productions I participated in. People have often asked me if my line of work was depressing. Sometimes that was the case, but all things considered, it was certainly never dull. There were numerous times when humorous things would occur that would take the edge off, and it was interesting to see how often those types of moments were memorialized on film.

As cremation continued to take the spotlight, we were contacted by the producers of
60 Minutes
, who asked us for an on-camera interview. We agreed and Ron hosted Mike Wallace and his camera crew. Wallace was very cordial until he started asking questions about the rapidly rising popularity and acceptance of cremation. Ron was candid about this phenomenon and explained that we welcomed anyone who chose cremation over burial. At this point Wallace evoked his famous ambush statement, saying, “Oh, come on, Mr. Hast, this is hitting you in the wallet and you can’t tell me you like what you see.”

We were well aware of what was happening in the industry and had done some contingency planning to downsize, because there was no question that the writing was on the wall. We had purchased a small rectangular building in the Silver Lake area, halfway between Hollywood and downtown. It was only a one-story building with a flat roof, so it would take at least six months to remodel the building to become our new mortuary. While still maintaining the mansion, we continued renovating this building and had an architect draw up plans for the addition of a second story with a fancy mansard roof. Our plans also included the addition of a garage to the back of the building large enough to hold four cars and a walk-in refrigerator.

Our new mortuary was so small that we didn’t even have a casket display room. Families would select a casket from a large color catalog, and some of the funeral directors who got wind of this thought we were nuts. One day, when Ron was speaking at a funeral convention (as he often did), a funeral director challenged him. He insisted that families not only wanted to see the casket they were purchasing, but they also wanted to touch it, see what the interior looked like, and compare it with other caskets. Ron asked the man where he got his caskets, and without thinking about it he said he purchased most of them from the Batesville
Casket catalog. Everyone started laughing, and the man realized he had just shot himself in the foot.

At about this time, a woman called and wanted to know if we would like to sell the small lot off Laurel Canyon that we had purchased when we were still in high school. She explained that her husband was a builder, and they had purchased the lot adjacent to ours. They wanted to buy our lot so they would have enough space to build a house. The lot we paid $200 for in 1956 was sold thirty years later for $20,000. Talk about inflation!

Our transition to the new mortuary threw a monkey wrench into my rental business. There was only a two-car garage at the new location, and nowhere to house my four funeral cars or all of the mortuary and cemetery props. A portion of the money from the Hollywood Hills land sale was used as a down payment for a small house in the Lincoln Heights area of Los Angeles. That property served as a place to store all the movie paraphernalia and cars, as well as provide living quarters for our trusty gofer and his family.

The Los Angeles Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) purchased our mansion to serve as their main facility. They paid us $1,100,000, which was great except that the government was going to take over a third of that in capital gains tax. I did a little research and discovered that we could defer the tax through a Starker 1031 Exchange. We took $500,000 and put down payments on three apartments in Hawthorne.

Hawthorne is about a mile from LAX and was the undisputed bedroom community for the aerospace industry, with many multimillion-dollar defense contractors like Northrop and TRW in the neighborhood. The apartments were all performing well until the collapse of the Soviet Union a few years later. The greater percentage of our renters worked in the aerospace industry, and many of them relocated when the contractors began to lay off employees. With the Cold War ending so suddenly, our vacancy factor tripled in six months and many low-income families became our new tenants. Soon, we had a couple of tenants who were arrested for dealing drugs from our apartments. The economy in the whole town nosedived, and the rents did the same. In the end, we lost nearly half a million dollars, but it was almost worth it to have witnessed the fall of the Soviet Union.

By our twentieth year of operating our boat the
Tribute
in Marina del Rey, we had become familiar with many of the area’s famous boating enthusiasts, or more accurately, we had become familiar with their boats—even though the owners were occasionally present. We had seen Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner’s
Splendour
and Robert Goulet’s
Rogo
, and our slip was next to Ed McMahon’s boat
Katherine
, named after his beautiful young wife, until he discovered that she was having an affair with another man. Her name was immediately removed from the back of his boat, which remained without a name for quite some time.

After some years in a side channel of Marina del Rey, we moved our boat to the main channel, just up from where the big yellow cigarette boat from
Baywatch
was tied up. The studio that filmed the show approached us about renting our boat for use on an episode. They were so pleased with the results that our boat became a regular on the show. The studio sent a photographer over to take extensive photos of the boat’s interior, mostly in the bedroom. Eventually, they built an exact replica of it on the
Baywatch
set, so they could shoot scenes without being on the boat.

Our strangest boating situation occurred on one outing when we had about thirty boxes of ashes and no families present. At the three-mile marker, which was designated as the closest to shore you could legally scatter, we spotted a Coast Guard boat approaching in our direction. We continued dumping ashes overboard, which spread out in large white pools on the water when they are not wrapped in cloth, as was always the case when families were aboard. As the
Zodiac
got closer, we could see that the young men aboard were trainees. One of them announced over his bullhorn, very dramatically, “Prepare to be boarded!”

The person in charge stepped onto our boat, prepared for a possible confrontation with his weapon at the ready. He had a rude awakening when we told him that we were scattering cremated ashes, but he wasn’t
completely convinced until we picked up some of the empty boxes strewn all over the deck and had him read a few names of the crematories that had performed the service. Now, he still could have thought that we were smuggling cocaine by representing it as cremains and dumping them as the Coast Guard approached, but that would have required him to take a little taste to make sure. That’s how Gil Grissom on
CSI
would have handled it.

Most businessmen would give anything to write off a beautiful boat on their tax return as we did. The IRS never challenged the way we filed our tax return with regard to the boat, which was listed as a “marine hearse.” Ron and I personally went on 90 percent of all scatterings at sea, and we averaged two or three per week. When serving a family on our boat, Ron would pour the ashes onto a three-foot-square piece of powder blue satin, fold it up into a small pillow, place it in a wicker basket, and arrange some white carnations on top, which were then given to family members to place in the water as well. After that, we would turn around and slowly pass between the carnations that were still floating.

Since we closely controlled the parameters during committals at sea, we felt that the possibilities of something going wrong were remote. Having performed the procedure hundreds of times, we had it down pat, or so we thought. Unfortunately, there was always that wild card with the possibility that some family might interject something into the equation. Once, we picked up a family as usual at the Marina del Rey guest dock. As they boarded the boat, they showed us some white doves they had purchased and planned to release after the ashes were placed into the water. We felt that it wouldn’t be fair to refuse them this final remembrance, so we agreed. As the blue satin wrapping started to unfold in the water, some of the family members released their hold on the doves. Since they appeared hesitant to take flight, the family members assisted by launching them into the air. The doves fluttered awkwardly and crash-landed into the sea. Apparently, the pet shop that sold them the doves had failed to mention that their wings had been clipped to prevent them from flying away.

Abbott & Hast’s “marine hearse”
Tribute
scattered ashes off the Los Angeles coast and later in San Francisco Bay.

Because of its problems, the rules pertaining to burial at sea had become very specific. Scattering of ashes at sea was quite popular, but whole body burials were very infrequent. Some naval officers choose this method and the Navy now has a complete protocol for the entire procedure, including who is eligible for this type of burial. One of the first sea burials to be conducted using this protocol was for John Carradine, the well-known father of actors Keith and David. I noticed that they banded the casket with metal straps so it wouldn’t come open, and they also used a barrel saw drill to cut three-inch holes in a dozen or more places to make sure it would sink. David had lived just down the hill from us, and we saw him many times.

The Hollywood Hills had so many well-known people that we frequently saw many of them taking a walk in late afternoon on our way to dinner. They included Sally Kellerman; Susan Clark and her husband, football star Alex Karras; Anthony Perkins; and actor-director John Cassavetes and his wife, actress Gena Rowlands, to name a few.