Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (9 page)

Ambulances arrived and transported some of us to Merced General Hospital. A nurse sterilized my wound and covered my face with a cloth that had a hole in it so the emergency room doctor could access the gash. After the first few stitches, the doctor said “Oops,” which sounded pretty ominous. My immediate response was to tell him, “Please do not use that word while you’re sewing up my face, okay?” He never did explain himself.

Ron came from Los Angeles and picked me up at the hospital along with the two bodies, which were in the hospital’s morgue. Wasn’t that smart of me to crash near a place that had a refrigerated morgue? Months later, a plastic surgeon reopened the wound and removed the scar tissue that had formed. After the surgery, they rolled me into a room occupied by another patient. The next morning, after I woke up and was getting dressed to leave, my roommate asked me: “Are you all right to be getting up? I thought you were seriously injured because the minute they rolled you into the room yesterday afternoon, you never opened your eyes until just now.” “Not to worry,” I explained. “This was just my first full night’s sleep in over two weeks.”

When I appeared in court before a judge to determine responsibility for the accident, the only eyewitness was the man driving the pickup truck. He explained, “Ah was leavin’ the farm and headin’ fur the highway at a
pretty good clip, and Ah guess this old guy thought Ah wasn’t gunna stop, so he swerved in front of this here station wagon. After the crash, Ah got out ta see if the guy in the wagon was okay, and he was a-draggin’ these dead bodies inta the back of his wagon, and he was bleedin’ all over ’em. He said it was okay ’cause they was already dead, so Ah just went back to ma truck, sat down, and got sick until the powlice showed up.” His testimony got a good laugh out everyone in the courtroom, including the judge. Thanks in part to his hilarious testimony, the opposing attorney decided to settle in my favor.

On another trip to Ohio to pick up two new hearses, one of our employees, Duane Graham, accompanied me. Duane knew what I’d done the previous years, so he suggested we also do a banzai run this time as well. He must not have realized that this was a bit more difficult than it sounded. When we crossed into Arizona, he flashed his lights at me and asked for a short nap. An hour later, I woke him so we could continue. After several minutes talking to him, he finally said, “I need some coffee.” When we made a coffee stop, he said he didn’t know where we were or what was going on for the first few minutes. That’s what happens when you drive yourself crazy.

We continued getting busier by the week while Cal Hearse was declining. We realized that the addition of Jimmy, with his superlative guidance, put us on a fast track to success because he was able to augment our expansion with his knowledge and experience.

When Utter-McKinley opened a mortuary inside Inglewood Park Cemetery, the public was very receptive. This meant that it was no longer necessary to escort a large procession of cars across town. The cemetery had three chapels. Chapel of the Chimes was the busiest and also housed the crematorium in the basement. During hundreds of services there, the only place you could sit down was about eight steps down a staircase into the room that housed the furnace, called a retort, used for cremations. The thing that was always eerie was that you would be in a room that had these furnaces going constantly. There was a ten-inch window in the door of each retort that a worker peered into to check the status of a cremation in progress. That room could give some people the creeps, but it was a great place to sit while waiting, especially on cold days.

On many occasions, we were requested to furnish six pallbearers, as we did for the funeral of retired CIA director John McCone’s wife, Rosemary. John McCone was the acting head of the CIA during the White House meetings when President John F. Kennedy implemented the blockade of Cuba. It was going to be a very formal service, and we had been instructed to rent funeral director “stripes,” which consisted of slacks with black, gray, and white stripes, and a formal black jacket. Most funeral directors had pretty much stopped wearing this attire, except for the two big Catholic firms, Callanan and Cunningham and O’Connor.

Another tradition that seemed to fade away with time was a practice followed by both the Catholic and Episcopal Churches. The altar boys would place a large fabric covering over the casket called a pall. This was the origin of the word “pallbearer,” denoting the people who carry the casket.

Movie studios would call mortuaries to rent hearses, and they started referring them to me. Our first rental was a ’48 Packard to be used in a horror film called
The House on Haunted Hill
, starring Vincent Price. The opening shot showed our hearse being followed by about five cars, arriving at a home that had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the Hollywood Hills. Soon every studio in town was calling us for funeral cars.

After three years of doing calls for the coroner’s office, we inquired if it might be possible to get some type of official identification or some kind of badges for our employees to carry, because they did not wear the tan uniform and shoulder patches that identified them as deputy coroners. We got absolutely no response to our inquiry, so I finally decided, “We don’t need no stinking badges.” As I look back, we had become de facto deputy coroners, with all the powers and authority of the fully trained and uniformed deputies. In our case, the only training our young crew members received was what we taught them.

In 1960, many mortuaries began inquiring if we would be willing to add limousine service to our fleet. The city required us to buy one permit for each limo we wanted to put into service in LA. We were hoping to start with four new limos, but at $5,000 per permit that was out of the question. The California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) was the agency that issued these permits, so we decided to make an appeal to them. We explained that our intention was not to compete with the three existing limousine services in Los Angeles, but to make our cars available exclusively to mortuaries. They said that we still needed to buy permits and that if we wanted to pursue the issue further we would need to appear before a PUC hearing board. Yikes.

Five members were on the board and one of them, Morton Silverman, happened to be a partner at Malinow and Silverman Mortuary. They had been renting cars and drivers from us for over two years and urged us to add this service, so they wouldn’t have to use the three existing limo services. Morton assured us that we would get his full support. In addition, one of the brothers who owned Callanan Mortuary in Hollywood was an attorney and offered to assist us.

We contacted numerous funeral directors who appeared with us at the hearing. Each had horror stories to tell about the untrained and disinterested services being provided by the limo drivers who were employed by the three companies. There was a great deal of live testimony from mortuary owners who supported the premise that Los Angeles needed a
limo service that specialized in funeral work. After about thirty minutes of testimony, we were a little surprised when Morton said we had made a good case, and he placed a motion to do away with the permit system. He asked if anyone would second the motion, and another board member said, “I do.” After a quick vote, the gavel hit the bench and Morton announced that the motion had passed.

We never dreamed that our efforts would result in a discontinuance of all limo permits. In a town the size of Los Angeles, there had to be a good reason for having only three limousine services and the permit system was that reason. Now there were going to be four providers, and without realizing it at the time, we had opened the door for at least fifty future limousine companies to start renting limos. In an ironic twist, the three existing limo services eventually began calling us to do backup drives for them.

Our limos were busy during the day on funerals, but at night they were idle, except for Catholic rosaries and Japanese funerals. From that time forward, we sent all ten of our limos out for the Academy Awards, Grammy Awards, Emmy Awards, the Rose Parade, and the Rose Bowl football game on New Year’s Day. When
Playboy
magazine started their own limo service we helped them cover their drives for many years, although I never got to meet a Playboy Bunny.

One of the most notable orders was from the Democratic National Committee. Two of our new limos were kept busy for about a week taking nominee John F. Kennedy and his entourage all over Los Angeles during the 1960 Democratic Convention. Unfortunately, it took months for them to pay us for our services. They must have been deficit spending.

Even UCLA and two chiropractic colleges contracted with us to pick up willed bodies that had been donated to them for medical research. The donor cards that were given out didn’t even have UCLA’s phone number on it, only ours. We couldn’t help but observe UCLA Medical Center’s rather unique way of storing cadavers.

In the ’40s, many people still had an icebox, which was nothing more than a tin-lined wooden box with insulation to keep in the cold. People would put an Ice sign in their window to get a delivery, and a truck would drive down residential streets and stop whenever the driver saw the sign. The driver would get out large ice tongs, grab a large chunk of ice, throw it over his leather-covered shoulder, and carry it to your front door.

The UCLA Medical Center used a device that looked very similar to these ice tongs in their large walk-in refrigerator. The only thing
distasteful about this method was that cadavers were suspended in place by having the tongs placed in the ear canal. This was done because storing cadavers for long periods of time creates unique problems. If a cadaver is kept too long on a slab, mold grows where the body rests, but this is lessened if the entire body is kept in a cold, dry environment. It was rather upsetting the first time we observed all these bodies hanging in this fashion, covered with transparent plastic bags.

In a book called
Lenin’s Embalmers
, the author discusses the scientists who kept the body of Russia’s most well-known citizen from getting moldy in his tomb. They had to bathe him in a special solution they developed, and it had to be reapplied quite often so the people walking by him wouldn’t be aware of the inevitability of his condition worsening with time. After all, nobody wants to look at a moldy national icon.

The Secret Service arranged for us to provide limousines when Prime Minister Miki Takeo of Japan visited LA. They sent agents to thoroughly search each limo and run background checks on all our drivers. The Dalai Lama also availed himself of our services on his visit to Los Angeles. When we drove the Rolling Stones, fans mobbed our two limos and they sustained a great deal of damage. When the Beatles came for their first American tour in San Diego, we decided that it would be much wiser to take them in a vehicle that no one would suspect. Ron contacted an associate of ours, Eldon Gabor, who agreed to have them stay at his home in the Beverly Hills area. Eldon also owned a motor home, which we used, knowing that it would be much more discreet.

When we returned the Beatles to Eldon’s residence after the concert, to everyone’s surprise, a whole group of girls was waiting outside for their return. Ron was astounded when the Fab Four didn’t invite any of the young ladies to party with them that night. Instead, they just wanted to go into Eldon’s game room to shoot pool. Some years later, the Beatles rented a limo from us for over a month while producing the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, but they provided their own driver.

Soon after that we got a drive for the revered actor Robert Young, of the
Marcus Welby, M.D
. TV show. I wanted to make a great impression, but at the first main intersection from Young’s Beverly Hills home, I made a right turn that cut too sharp and the rear tire jumped the corner of the curb. Kerplop!
That’s right, Allan, demonstrate your professional driving skills
. Thankfully, the rest of the drive went smoothly.

Over the years we responded to a great variety of suicide calls, which included death by hanging, shooting, wrist slashing, and carbon monoxide poisoning. We once made a call in a very secluded part of Baldwin Hills, with spectacular views of the city lights at night. All the high school kids called this area “Pecker’s Point,” because this was where all the guys parked to make out with their girlfriends. A man had consumed an entire bottle of whiskey, written a suicide note, and done the deed. We wondered why the body looked like an overripe tomato, with red blotches all over his face. We found out later that this was the body’s reaction to carbon monoxide poisoning.

Some people get quite creative in choosing a method of suicide. One person we picked up had swallowed a pint of fluid used in Ditto machines, which were the forerunner of photocopiers. This must have been an agonizing way of saying “good-bye cruel world,” so I wouldn’t advise anyone to copy that. We also discovered that people who commit suicide often try one strategy unsuccessfully, or with painful results, and then switch to another method. This concept was depicted in Arthur Miller’s play
Death of a Salesman
, when Willy Loman makes a couple of attempts before he is successful.

Some of the most unusual calls that mortuaries got were the result of industrial accidents. One of these involved an electrical worker who was high up on a power pole, along the side of a dirt road used only by the utility company to service their equipment. Being in such a remote area, when he had to urinate, he didn’t bother climbing down. Big mistake. A surge of electricity traveled up the stream and electrocuted him.

One of America’s claims to fame comes from its early Wild West history, when our heroes were gun-toting lawmen with their lightning-speed fast draws. This was the inspiration for the successful cartoon series
Quick Draw McGraw
, a favorite of thousands of boys. It got to a point
where young men across the country began entering quick draw contests. One casualty of this craze was a boy practicing in front of his mirror. He drew so fast that when he fumbled the draw, his revolver discharged and shot him through the eye. His hysterical mother explained to us that he always practiced with live ammunition in the weapon, so its weight would be the same as it would be in a contest.