Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood by Allan Abbott, Greg Abbott Page B
Authors: Allan Abbott, Greg Abbott
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soldiers who had died in the war, thirty years earlier.
As we were traveling down the Yugoslavian coast, our tour guide made a significant announcement. Because of tour bus robberies in Albania, we were going to have to take a 200-mile detour. During a conversation with the regional guide in Yugoslavia, it came to light that he was originally from Skopje, where Kathy was born, and that our new route would take us within fifteen miles of that town. It was as if fate had intervened. A passenger on the bus suggested that it would be nice to drive through town, so Kathy could see where she was born. He was quick to explain that it would not be proper to divert the other passengers just for her sake, but everyone in the group chimed in and said, “We all want to go there!”
Skopje was beautiful, but it had been mostly rebuilt after a terrible 1963 earthquake had destroyed much of the town. However, a single brick structure was purposely left standing. It was one wall of the very same train station Kathy’s family had gone to in their attempt to escape from Yugoslavia decades before. The section of a wall still standing had a large clock that was frozen at 5:17, the exact time the earthquake had struck, so the people of Skopje decided to leave it as a permanent memorial. I photographed the wall so that Kathy could have a picture of the train station where her family’s long and desperate journey to freedom had begun.
15
Secrets of the Stars
The last movie that Clark Gable appeared in was
The Misfits
, which was written by Marilyn Monroe’s third husband, Arthur Miller. Gable died a few days after it was completed, and it turned out to be Marilyn’s last film as well. It was an odd coincidence for me to have been involved in both of their funerals. I drove a family car for Gable’s funeral at Forest Lawn Glendale in 1960 and would also be very involved in Marilyn’s service two years later.
It took many years before enough limousine services were operating in Los Angeles to cover the high demand in a city that had more celebrities per capita than anywhere else in the world. We started doing backup orders for some of the existing limo services, like Tanner Gray Line and Playboy Limo Service.
Tanner Gray Line offered travel services in many large cities and was one of the three limousine companies that tried to keep us from entering the limousine business. They had a contract with Matson Lines, which had a large cruise ship called the
Lurline
that ran from Los Angeles Harbor to Hawaii and other ports. There were numerous occasions when we would meet the ship arriving back in Long Beach to pick up the corpse of someone who had died while on a Matson Lines cruise. They simply placed the deceased in one of their large refrigerators until the ship arrived back in LA. I hope it was not the same refrigerator they used for food storage, as William Petersen’s character Gil Grissom did in
CSI
.
Years later, in the ’80s, an entrepreneurial young man started a service in Hollywood taking tourists around in a limousine-style hearse that had windows all around, much like a station wagon. He toured people from one cemetery to another, showing them where famous people were buried. He called his new venture Grave Line Tours, a takeoff on the Gray Line limos and buses that had been known throughout the area.
Doing backup work for the high-profile limousine services gave me an opportunity to drive celebrities we would have never gotten on our own unless they happened to be dead. As I look back, it seems a little strange that they trusted us enough to give us these celebrity drives and not worry about the possibility that we might start soliciting them ourselves. Had the movie studios given us these drives directly, there are many that I would never have farmed out to another limo service. No matter how busy we were, I would have taken these drives myself.
A good example of this was an order from another limousine service in the
As we were traveling down the Yugoslavian coast, our tour guide made a significant announcement. Because of tour bus robberies in Albania, we were going to have to take a 200-mile detour. During a conversation with the regional guide in Yugoslavia, it came to light that he was originally from Skopje, where Kathy was born, and that our new route would take us within fifteen miles of that town. It was as if fate had intervened. A passenger on the bus suggested that it would be nice to drive through town, so Kathy could see where she was born. He was quick to explain that it would not be proper to divert the other passengers just for her sake, but everyone in the group chimed in and said, “We all want to go there!”
Skopje was beautiful, but it had been mostly rebuilt after a terrible 1963 earthquake had destroyed much of the town. However, a single brick structure was purposely left standing. It was one wall of the very same train station Kathy’s family had gone to in their attempt to escape from Yugoslavia decades before. The section of a wall still standing had a large clock that was frozen at 5:17, the exact time the earthquake had struck, so the people of Skopje decided to leave it as a permanent memorial. I photographed the wall so that Kathy could have a picture of the train station where her family’s long and desperate journey to freedom had begun.
15
Secrets of the Stars
The last movie that Clark Gable appeared in was
The Misfits
, which was written by Marilyn Monroe’s third husband, Arthur Miller. Gable died a few days after it was completed, and it turned out to be Marilyn’s last film as well. It was an odd coincidence for me to have been involved in both of their funerals. I drove a family car for Gable’s funeral at Forest Lawn Glendale in 1960 and would also be very involved in Marilyn’s service two years later.
It took many years before enough limousine services were operating in Los Angeles to cover the high demand in a city that had more celebrities per capita than anywhere else in the world. We started doing backup orders for some of the existing limo services, like Tanner Gray Line and Playboy Limo Service.
Tanner Gray Line offered travel services in many large cities and was one of the three limousine companies that tried to keep us from entering the limousine business. They had a contract with Matson Lines, which had a large cruise ship called the
Lurline
that ran from Los Angeles Harbor to Hawaii and other ports. There were numerous occasions when we would meet the ship arriving back in Long Beach to pick up the corpse of someone who had died while on a Matson Lines cruise. They simply placed the deceased in one of their large refrigerators until the ship arrived back in LA. I hope it was not the same refrigerator they used for food storage, as William Petersen’s character Gil Grissom did in
CSI
.
Years later, in the ’80s, an entrepreneurial young man started a service in Hollywood taking tourists around in a limousine-style hearse that had windows all around, much like a station wagon. He toured people from one cemetery to another, showing them where famous people were buried. He called his new venture Grave Line Tours, a takeoff on the Gray Line limos and buses that had been known throughout the area.
Doing backup work for the high-profile limousine services gave me an opportunity to drive celebrities we would have never gotten on our own unless they happened to be dead. As I look back, it seems a little strange that they trusted us enough to give us these celebrity drives and not worry about the possibility that we might start soliciting them ourselves. Had the movie studios given us these drives directly, there are many that I would never have farmed out to another limo service. No matter how busy we were, I would have taken these drives myself.
A good example of this was an order from another limousine service in the
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