Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (5 page)

Ron immediately called the coroner’s office and talked to one of the senior deputies, who assured him that he would call the CHP and ask them to simply write me a traffic citation. The officer came over to the bus, where I was still handcuffed and told me that a deputy coroner had called in, but explained that once someone has been placed on the bus, nothing could be done until it reached the city jail.

On the longest twenty-mile ride of my life, one thing was driving me bananas. How in hell did that CHP officer know I was hiding behind that stupid bush? I had pulled into the driveway well before he had turned the corner. But then it finally came to me, in a moment of clarity. It was almost dark, and I had failed to take my foot off the brake pedal. As he rounded the corner, he saw my rear brake light shining like a beacon in the night. Was that stupid or what?

When we arrived at the city jail parking lot, all the deputy coroners on duty were looking out the windows to see me. There I was, chained to all these other prisoners as we departed the bus. It’s one thing to have news cameras record your “perp walk,” but much worse when your friends are watching you in the flesh. I’m not sure what was more embarrassing, being seen like that or taking a shower with the prisoners and getting dusted for lice. They fingerprinted me and took my mug shot. Unfortunately, my hair is extremely fine, and without any Brylcreem my hair looked worse than Nick Nolte’s did in his mug shot.

My incarceration in the city jail began in 1958 and ended in 1959. Well, actually, it was New Year’s Eve and totaled only about four hours. When I appeared in court, the charges against me were reckless driving and evading arrest. My explanation emphasized the importance of the documents and the fact that I was self-employed at the age of 18 and had a great deal of responsibility. After I explained the circumstances with the faulty headlight switch, the judge let me slide on the evading arrest
charge, but the reckless driving charge was upheld. Whew! Thank goodness my grandparents had enough cash to make my bail.

Following that incident, the senior deputy at the coroner’s office, Phil Schwartzberg, called me “jailbird” for a while. It wasn’t so funny at the time, but a few years later he made up for it. He dropped off a broken stretcher for repair, expecting to leave it with me for a few days, but it was going to take me only about fifteen minutes to fix. I repaired it on the spot and he said, “It’s always a pleasure to watch an expert at work.” By this time I had already repaired many broken cots for the coroner’s office, so they didn’t have to send the cots back to the manufacturer in Ohio.

We hired my brother full-time to take phone calls and transcribe vital statistics onto blank DCs. Every morning I would plan my schedule using a map and the information attached to each DC stating the doctor’s name, address, and his hours for that day. The most frustrating thing was sitting in a doctor’s office, waiting for him to get around to signing it. It amazed me that some doctors even asked me into their office to explain the procedure. After their years of medical training, they wanted an 18-year-old kid to tell them how to do it properly. At other times, the problem was reversed when a doctor used medical terminology unfamiliar to me. In those cases, it was necessary to wait until the county health department reviewed the diagnosis to determine whether I could file it, or whether it would be referred to the coroner’s office for a ruling.

A death certificate is a matter of public record that serves many purposes. It’s a legal certification declaring a person dead. The listed cause of death provides information for public health statistics. But the most important function of a DC is to obtain a permit, without which you can’t bury, cremate, or ship the remains to another state. Another common necessity is the basic requirement that legal proceedings depend on proof of death in order to close estates and proceed with financial activities. Over the years, DCs have been used to fake a death to collect insurance benefits or evade law enforcement investigations. According to Dr. Kenneth Iserson’s book
Death to Dust
, in the mid-’90s people could purchase an “official-looking” Los Angeles County DC for a fee ranging from $500 to $1,000.

As forensic science improved greatly over the years, it became much more difficult to cover up the actual cause of one’s death. With the invention of the gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer, it is possible to detect minute amounts of chemicals in blood. Although it was developed during
the ’50s, these devices were fragile, bulky, and expensive, so only the largest medical examiner’s offices could afford one. This machine allegedly found as many as sixteen different drugs—in minuscule quantities—in Elvis Presley’s body after his death.

The expression “deep six” refers to the disposal of something in a way that makes its reappearance unlikely, the “six” representing the depth in feet at which graves are dug. With today’s sophisticated forensic tools, it is no longer an applicable expression. Law enforcement officials have often obtained court orders to exhume bodies for further examination in cases where new facts have come to light. Exhumations are now performed even years later, after newly discovered information has aroused suspicions.

When we began getting requests to transport flowers for the rich and famous, we decided to get a high-capacity flower truck. From then on, we always maintained a large flower truck in our fleet of vehicles. Over the years, we used it for the funerals of Mario Lanza, Jack Warner of Warner Brothers, and Jimmy Durante. Mario Lanza was entombed in the mausoleum at Calvary Cemetery, which didn’t allow flowers to be placed inside the hall of their mausoleum, so we placed them on both sides of the stairs leading up to the mausoleum entrance. So many flowers were there that in today’s dollars they would probably have cost about $40,000.

For a year Ron and I were still living with my parents. We had hired my brother full-time, so it was just the three of us and a few students. Most of our mortuary customers were in downtown Los Angeles. It was convenient to have our office close to where we lived, but it wasn’t very practical. That became painfully clear one afternoon when we got a call from Utter-McKinley. Someone from its central dispatching office had forgotten to order a flower truck for its Glendale branch, which was twenty-five miles from our office in Inglewood.

Upon my arrival, the funeral had already concluded and the flowers were in the parking lot. Since I had never been to this branch, I opened the rear door, which was unlocked, and started opening doors to alert someone. The second door happened to be the embalming room. A body was on the table, which wasn’t covered with a sheet. The embalmer must have been called away quickly, because a large chrome-plated sword was sticking out of the body’s stomach. I had no idea what this was or its function, and my reaction was probably comparable to a person discovering the body of someone who had been brutally murdered. In other words, it startled the crap out of me. I hightailed it out of there so fast nobody even saw me.

I found out later that this instrument is called a “trocar,” which is about two-and-a-half feet long and used in the embalming process. It’s basically a hollow metal tube with a very sharp point on one end and a handle on the other end. The opening in the handle is connected to rubber tubing, which in turn is connected to a device called a hydro-aspirator. As soon as the embalmer turns the aspirator on, water begins flowing through it into a sink drain and the sheer flow of water creates a vacuum that is transferred to the tubing and trocar. The function of this instrument is to remove any fluids and gasses from the vital organs. On this occasion, the hose wasn’t attached to the handle of the trocar, so it appeared as though something had harpooned the corpse. It never occurred to me that we would soon be knee-deep in the minutiae of this unfamiliar technology.

The funeral director from Utter-McKinley was very displeased that his dispatcher had forgotten the flower truck order. That was one of those moments when you realize that much of your future business may depend on your ability to respond quickly, so back at the office we started discussing the possibility of moving our office closer to the highest concentration of potential customers.

Each evening at home, the whole family would sit around the dinner table discussing the day’s events. From out of the blue my mom and dad asked us if we would consider taking my brother, John, in as a full partner. One reason this seemed like a bad idea was that we had already invested a year into our business, and there had been many occasions when even the two of us had a hard time deciding something.

Another indicator of potential problems with my brother came from the teachers whom John had before me. They had a bad opinion about me by proxy, before they even got to know me. The most significant reaction came from my Spanish teacher during roll call the first day, asking me in front of all the other students if John was my brother. When she got her answer it was clear that it didn’t sit well with her because her exact words were “Not another Abbott.” That evening, when I talked to my brother, it became evident why she was so upset. She had scolded John on a number of occasions for talking during class. Once, when he didn’t stop, in total frustration she blurted out, “John, John, John,” and in response he hollered back, “Marsha, Marsha, Marsha.”

In 1951 an aspiring comic named Stan Freberg recorded an extremely funny skit called “John and Marsha.” The only dialogue involved the couple repeating each other’s names. At first it was “Oh John” and “Oh Marsha” in anger, but eventually they started mellowing out and lowering their voices. Marsha’s next utterances were more lovey-dovey, followed by something sounding naughty, with him responding in kind. In the ensuing sexual tryst, it was easy for the listener to imagine what was going on. The skit was not censored because the only dialogue was their names, although the inflection in their voices said it all. Capitol Records sold a quarter-million copies of this brilliant spoof, and it began Stan Freberg’s long career.

Having seen the clues, I didn’t want my brother’s role to deteriorate into a family problem. Ron and I decided that it was the right time for us to move, which meant that we could end the discussion and simultaneously find a more centralized location for our business.

Our new base of operations turned out to be an old abandoned two-story Victorian funeral home, located right in the center of what was referred to by many in the industry as “Death Row.” During the ’30s and ’40s, only two streets were zoned for mortuary operations in Los Angeles and they were two blocks apart, running parallel to each other. Washington and Venice were main business streets, and between them there were approximately thirty mortuaries. They were mom-and-pop operations, and this old building was right in the middle of all these firms.

It was built around 1900 and had operated for many years as the Ivy Overholser Funeral Home. Since it had been closed for three or four years, the estate was anxious to get it rented. We negotiated a monthly rate of $300, which wasn’t very expensive considering it was a large building with multiple offices, a spacious kitchen, and a garage large enough to accommodate seven cars. It also had some amenities that we didn’t need, including a chapel and an embalming room. The one feature of this old Victorian structure that stood out the most was the old cast-iron bathtub that sat in the center of the kitchen. It was intended to be covered during meals with a dining table top and uncovered when someone needed to take a bath. Now we were able to live in an apartment inside our large building.

In the cellar we found a large quantity of old mortuary paraphernalia, including artificial arms, legs, and hundreds of old dentures. Many family members would bring in granny’s false teeth after she was already embalmed, so it was too late to use them, but they were always accepted without explanation. We also discovered one adult and two infant wicker caskets. There was a strange funnel-shaped glass container with a large opening at the top that slowly tapered toward the bottom. Before the invention of the embalming machine, mortuaries used this bottle, which
had a metal stand that kept the glass about six feet off the floor, so that pressure would be generated from gravity. This apparatus was eventually supplanted by the much more efficient use of an electric pump known as a Porti-Boy Embalming Machine.

We soon found out that these different-size wicker caskets were taken to private residences and used as temporary caskets because many people, even after the turn of the century, were still being embalmed in their home. In the Victorian era, many people had a room in their home called the “parlor,” where the deceased would often be laid out in state so the family could invite guests to stop and pay their respects. This gave rise to mortuaries using the words “funeral parlor” in their title. The only mortuary in Los Angeles that was still using this somewhat outdated nomenclature was the Culver City Funeral Parlor, whose only competitor was Smith and Salsbury, who had the distinction of being the one that had the word “Undertaking” on their sign.

The funeral practices of the Victorian era produced expressions that are still used today, though not always in their original context. For instance, the term “graveyard shift” was coined as a result of someone being paid by a family to stay up all night with the body, in case the person might awaken from a misdiagnosed death. This is also where the word “wake” came from, which designates a gathering held the night before the funeral. Today, a graveyard shift refers to an all-night job in any line of work.

Because of the lack of sophisticated diagnostic equipment in the Victorian era, such as electrocardiograms and encephalograms that detect heart and brain activity, people in a coma were sometimes mistaken as being dead. The fear of someone being buried alive gave rise to the invention of a coffin with a small bell aboveground, tethered to the deceased’s hand through a small tunnel from the casket, which they could ring upon regaining consciousness and finding themselves “six feet under.” This led to the expression “dead ringer,” used to describe someone who looks just like another, implying that they really are one and the same, having come back to life after being assumed dead. What’s most interesting about these expressions, many of which have become clichés, is that when you examine their origins, the original meanings were literal.