Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (42 page)

A recent opportunity to take a return trip to LA gave me a chance to reflect on some of our experiences there. I had received a call the week prior with a request to be interviewed about Marilyn Monroe. Having arrived in town a bit early, I took the opportunity to wander through Westwood Village Cemetery. I visited Natalie Wood’s grave. To my amazement, it was decorated with arrangements of fresh flowers and a balloon. Someone had also placed a birthday card there, which was addressed to her in loving memory and was signed with only the name Tom. All these years later, she is still being remembered.

Judging from our half-century involvement in the funeral profession, I see how people’s attitudes have broadened about death and funerals. In 2005, a book called
Celebrity Death Certificates
was sent to me. The creator, Mike Steen, knew me from about thirty-five years earlier, when he was working in the industry. Mike then produced two more books covering hundreds of other famous people’s DCs.

Looking through these books, I was surprised to realize that we had provided the equipment for so many of the listed funerals. Most were for celebrities who had died during the mid-’60s and early ’70s, like Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Mario Lanza, Jack Warner, and Jimmy Durante. Others included Ernie Kovacs, Jeffrey Hunter, Jack Benny, Karen Carpenter, and Natalie Wood. The only celebrity whom we served directly at our mortuary was the swimming and film star Esther Williams, when her husband, Fernando Lamas, died and we handled the cremation. We also provided services for a musician killed in a car crash on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Luther Vandross came in personally to make the funeral arrangements.

One night, just as it was time to turn off the TV, my compulsion to channel-surf won out. As I flipped through the channels, a familiar face stopped me in my tracks. On the screen was Carol Vitale, a former
Playboy
Playmate turned broadcaster who had interviewed me several years earlier on her
Carol Vitale Show
. The instant she appeared on the screen she said, “The most interesting person I ever interviewed was Allan Abbott, the funeral director to the stars.” Carol was talking to Joe Franklin, the famous East Coast interviewer who was familiar to me because his show was syndicated in Los Angeles. The improbability of turning to the channel at the exact second she made that statement was absolutely uncanny.

Looking back, I find it hard to believe that two friends could become involved in such a variety of unusual endeavors for half a century. Back in 1958, when we accepted the offer from Utter-McKinley to handle all their DC work, we were already similarly serving the three Jewish-owned mortuaries. They referred to my job as “schlepping” death certificates all over town on my motorcycle. That word wasn’t in my vocabulary, but was an obvious reference to the tedious job of running from place to place. While I was watching a documentary about World War II recently, the narrator said the Germans were schlepping their large artillery pieces from one area to another. It was time to consult the dictionary to confirm the definition. It’s a Yiddish word that was adopted by other languages, meaning to move things around, but the definition contained another, rather negative, connotation. The example given was a person who would carry around an umbrella on a sunny day. That’s just great! Because of my willingness to risk life and limb in traffic daily, the inference was that only a total dork would do this. Now I’m really insulted.

We witnessed many major changes take place in the funeral industry over the half century since we began, the most significant of which were the trends toward cremation and cost reduction. It reached a point by the late ’90s that cremation represented the vast majority of services in metropolitan areas, particularly on the West Coast. We saw the writing on the wall early and embraced cremation through our scattering services. Price consciousness became so commonplace that Costco and Walmart began selling caskets and urns through their websites, or small displays in their stores.

When funeral directors realized how much traditional burials were declining, many began to furnish beautiful and unique cremation urns that could be almost as expensive as caskets. A company called LifeGem even began offering to take a small portion of the cremated remains and turn them into a man-made diamond. Another enhancement in
cremation included new methods of scattering in some very creative and unusual ways. One company offered to pack a portion of a hunter’s ashes into shotgun shells so a loved one could blast them into the woods. Another company, named Celestis, began offering the launching of cremated remains into space. The company’s maiden launch in April 1997 included ashes from
Star Trek
’s Gene Roddenberry, destined for Earth orbit.

In the movie
The Big Lebowski
, there is a very comical portrayal of two friends’ efforts to keep their funeral costs down. When a good friend of Jeff Bridges and John Goodman dies, they decide to have him cremated. While they are seated in the arrangement office, the funeral director explains that the ashes must be placed in a “suitable receptacle” and that the urns they have in their display area range in price from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. After Bridges and Goodman quickly head over to a grocery store, the next scene shows them leaving the mortuary with a five-pound coffee can that was emptied out to fill with their friend’s ashes.

The characters then take a short trip to the coast, where they stand on a rocky cliff overlooking the ocean, preparing to scatter the cremains. These places are always windy, but there was no expectation on my part that they were going to portray this realistically. Goodman recites a fairly nonsensical eulogy about their friend, which irritates Bridges, standing several feet behind him. When Goodman finally pops the lid off the can and ejects the ashes, the wind picks them up, blowing them completely past him and hitting Bridges directly in the face. I busted out laughing so hard that tears were coming out of my eyes. For once they got it right.

By 2000, the industry had undergone major transitions and some of them began to have a significant impact on our publication business. The bread and butter of
Mortuary Management
’s revenue came from advertisers. In the ’80s and ’90s, the consolidators had all advertised aggressively, each enticing independent owners to sell to their conglomeration, while a bidding war often ensued that rose funeral home values to unrealistic levels. By the late ’90s, it was clear that the earlier estimates of demographic explosion from Baby Boomer deaths were not translating into lucrative profits because of the transition to less expensive funeral choices.

Then a final straw broke the conglomerate’s collective back. The Loewen Group of Canada, the second largest of the funeral companies, was sued after purchasing a family chain of businesses and allegedly violating
its agreement with them to retain their services for pre-need funeral coverage. Loewen not only lost the suit but was hit with a massive punitive damages judgment. The funeral company stocks dropped into the single digits, which was a sad outcome for the sellers who had accepted mostly stock in exchange for their life’s work in the family business. Loewen later went into bankruptcy and the various conglomerates’ ads were never to be seen again.

Greg had been with Abbott & Hast Publications since the mid-’80s and had taken over management of the company in 1994. He had seen us through choppy waters before, but by 2005, changes in the industry and the economy brought many businesses some very thin margins. In 2007, Greg and Ron decided to move the company to Michigan, where our art director was located and where the cost of labor was much less. Since Greg and Ingrid intended to stay in Monterey, they discontinued their service with the publications and transitioned into property management, a field they had already been involved with on the side.

Ironically, the last issue of
Mortuary Management
that Greg worked on featured a fiftieth anniversary commemoration of our partnership in which Ron wrote a nice feature, complete with photos from our archives. In retrospect, our partnership worked because whatever needed to be done in our business, one of us was there to focus on that need. Without question, Ron would come up with brilliant ideas of how to better serve the funeral industry, whereas my ten-hour days were spent taking care of the myriad tasks that needed to be done. In fact, many of Ron’s ideas caused me to do all the grunt work to bring them to fruition.

I informed Ron of my decision to write about our adventures together, but I didn’t expect his response. In the years we have been friends and partners, we never found it necessary to sugar-coat anything we said to each other. In that vein, Ron’s reply was “What makes you think that the public would have any interest in what you have to say?” Well, thanks for the vote of confidence, partner. But I figured the proof would be in the pudding. Sadly, Ron didn’t see the day that our complete story was published. In August 2013, Ron died of heart-related complications. Nearly 200 friends, family members, fellow yachtsmen, and funeral directors attended a festive memorial service held for him at the Tiburon Yacht Club. There’s no doubt that he will be missed by many.

You often hear the expression that “everything in life is timing.” If this book had been written much earlier, it probably would not have been well
received because of the nature of the subject matter. In order to tell the inside story it’s often necessary to be quite graphic, something that the public is much more open to now, at least if television programming is a sign of the times. In the last decade, there have been numerous forensics shows, including
Crossing Jordan
, three versions of
CSI, Body of Evidence: From the Case Files of Dayle Hinman, North Mission Road
, and
Dr. G: Medical Examiner
, in addition to the Bill Kurtis investigative documentaries
American Justice
and
Cold Case Files
.

CSI
has come very close to realistically duplicating some of the things occurring in actual cases. As this show grew in popularity, it was apparent they also grew bolder as to what they were willing to depict with special effects. The show has presented plausible stories in great detail, using special effects for lifelike recreations of people who had lost their lives in some unusual way. They have many detailed shots showing scenes that are a true representation of what we had witnessed over the years. The show’s realism is further enhanced because the team uses the proper jargon in conjunction with postmortem examinations. My only question is, where did all these hot-looking babes running around the forensic lab come from, and where were they when I was making calls at the coroner’s offices?

In 2007, Ron and Allan commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of their partnership.

You may have surmised from my soliloquies that music and movies have always been my personal opiate, so this might also be an appropriate time for another quote from my favorite film,
Blade Runner
. Rutger Hauer’s character, Roy Batty, grabs Harrison Ford’s wrist at the last second, saving him from falling off the roof of Los Angeles’ Bradbury building. Ford’s character, Rick Deckard, can’t understand why Roy saved him. Deckard looks at Roy in wonderment because they had just been fighting each other to the death. But Roy was already programmed to die, and in his final moments, he explains, “I’ve seen things that you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched sea beams glitter in the dark, near the Tanhauser gate. All of these moments will be lost in time . . . like tears in rain.” Now that I have committed so many of my memories to this book, there will be no tears lost in the rain from these blue eyes.

Fade to black . . . that’s a wrap.

Abbott, Allan

Abbott & Hast Company, beginning,
11
–15

arrest,
19
–22

birth,
1

car accident,
47
–48

childhood,
1
–4

early business ventures,
5

education,
4
–6,
8
–9

first body pickup,
12
–16

first hearse purchase,
7
–10

first motorcycle,
17
–18

legal troubles,
260
–263

marriage to Kathy,
58
–60

marriage to Olga,
235
–238

motorcycle accident,
18
–19

move to Hollywood Hills,
108
–111

parents,
2
,
4
,
11
,
25
,
33

Pebble Beach summer home,
226

police complaints regarding hearse,
11
,
16

prop rentals,
256
–258

trip to Alaska,
253
–255

trip to Death Valley,
9
–10

Trip to New Mexico,
44
–45