Pardon My Hearse

Greg Abbott, Allan Abbott

Description

Even celebrities die—and he was the man who picked up the bodies! Allan Abbott ran the leading hearse, mortuary, and funeral services company in Hollywood and got an unprecedented glimpse of how celebrities really live and die. The Forrest Gump of the funeral industry, Abbott was everywhere celebrities died, from helping to prepare Marilyn Monroe’s body for burial to standing next to Christopher Walken at Natalie Wood’s funeral. Now in his memoir “Pardon My Hearse,” Abbott tells the rags-to-shroud story of how we went from a young man with a hearse to the funeral driver to the stars—a rollicking, unexpectedly hilarious story of glamorous funerals, mishaps with corpses, and true-life glimpses of celebrities at their most revealing moments. ”Pardon My Hearse” is an eye-opening look at secret Hollywood from the man who literally knows where the bodies are buried.

Sujets

• Dying
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Business
• Natalie Wood
• Christopher Walken
• Death
• Marilyn Monroe

Informations

• Publié par: Linden Publishing
• Date de parution: 15 juin 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781610352666
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

PARDON MY HEARSE
A COLORFUL PORTRAIT OF WHERE THE FUNERAL AND ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRIES MET IN HOLLYWOOD
PARDON MY HEARSE
A COLORFUL PORTRAIT OF WHERE THE FUNERAL AND ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRIES MET IN HOLLYWOOD
A LLAN A BBOTT G REG A BBOTT
Pardon My Hearse Copyright 2015 by Allan Abbott and Greg Abbott. All rights reserved.
In memory of Kathy, the love of my life. My deepest appreciation to Greg, whose expertise and countless hours of dedication made this book possible .
Marilyn Monroe back cover image by Macfadden Publications. All images copyright by the authors unless otherwise noted.
Published by Craven Street Books An imprint of Linden Publishing 2006 South Mary Street, Fresno, California 93721 [phone] / [phone] CravenStreetBooks.com
Craven Street Books and Colophon are trademarks of Linden Publishing, Inc.
ISBN 978-1-61035-248-2
135798642
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file.
Contents
Foreword
Chapter 1: Humble Beginnings
Chapter 2: Our First Hearse
Chapter 3: Our Career Begins
Chapter 4: Life in the Fast Lane
Chapter 5: All in the Family
Chapter 6: Death Row
Chapter 7: Reluctant Hearse Driver
Chapter 8: Medical Examiner Misadventures
Chapter 9: Levity Rules
Chapter 10: Driving Myself Crazy
Chapter 11: Breaking New Ground
Chapter 12: What a Way to Go
Chapter 13: Man Does Not Live on Bread Alone
Chapter 14: Lessons on Freedom from Kathy s Family
Chapter 15: Secrets of the Stars
Chapter 16: Marilyn Monroe
Chapter 17: Growing Needs in the Industry
Chapter 18: Behind the Scenes of the Rich and Famous
Chapter 19: Going into Overdrive
Chapter 20: Where Have All the Graveyards Gone?
Chapter 21: Another Day at the Office
Chapter 22: Flying into the Unknown
Chapter 23: New Beginnings
Chapter 24: The Sky s the Limit
Chapter 25: Handling the Big One
Chapter 26: Dealing with the Unexpected
Chapter 27: Onward and Upward
Chapter 28: Embarrassing Moments
Chapter 29: Life Gets Tegious
Chapter 30: More Disasters Than an Irwin Allen Production
Chapter 31: Someone s Gotta Do It
Chapter 32: Expanding Our Business
Chapter 33: Rental Carmageddon
Chapter 34: Not Your Typical Used-Car Salesman
Chapter 35: Digging in the Dirt
Chapter 36: Open to the Public
Chapter 37: Natalie Wood
Chapter 38: Curious Happenings
Chapter 39: The Devil s in the Details
Chapter 40: Strange Traditions
Chapter 41: A Good Laugh in a Somber Profession
Chapter 42: Cremation and Consolidation
Chapter 43: New Ventures
Chapter 44: Lambs to the Slaughter
Chapter 45: A Family Affair
Chapter 46: Movies and TV Abound
Chapter 47: What Makes You the Expert?
Chapter 48: Downsizing
Chapter 49: Living in La La Land
Chapter 50: Lost Love
Chapter 51: Howard Hughes
Chapter 52: My Russian Fascination
Chapter 53: Some Memories Never Die
Chapter 54: Moving On
Chapter 55: Surviving Alaska
Chapter 56: Just Like Old Times
Chapter 57: Screwed by the Government
Chapter 58: An Odyssey to Remember
Index
Foreword
Enter the mysterious world few have known in this candid, true story of two young men s lives in the funeral industry. Beginning in their late teens, Allan Abbott and Ronald Hast formed a lifelong friendship and business partnership as they hurtled through unusual challenges in an unlikely venture-the funeral and limousine business. You will be captivated by their inspiring, humorous, intriguing, graphic, and occasionally irreverent stories, spanning forty years of business in the Los Angeles area. These two young entrepreneurs took on the arduous challenge of breaking the monopoly held by three licensed limousine providers in Los Angeles, which opened the door for the numerous limousine services currently operating there today.
This book documents tragic and surreal disasters, including earthquakes, riots, and airline catastrophes. The book also demonstrates the vast differences between varied segments of our society in religious rites, the correlation of these practices and traditions, and how diverse cultures care for their dead.
Abbott personally transported some of Hollywood s brightest stars, like Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Sophia Loren, Connie Stevens (and her actor husband James Stacy), Robert Taylor, and Robert Vaughn. The book includes fascinating stories about overheard conversations, including one concerning actress Inger Stevens s secret interracial marriage, which ended with that beautiful and talented Hollywood star s tragic suicide.
Abbott Hast Company provided funeral cars and overland transportation of human remains throughout California, Nevada, Oregon, and Arizona. The company provided support to over 100 funeral establishments in Southern California, where it assisted in conducting services for dozens of celebrities, including Marilyn Monroe, Natalie Wood, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Ernie Kovacs, Jeffrey Hunter, Jack Benny, Jack Warner, Jimmy Durante, Mario Lanza, Karen Carpenter, Fernando Lamas, film director John Farrow, Los Angeles Chief of Police William H. Parker, and the wife of former CIA director John McCone. Allan has been interviewed by magazines in Germany, Japan, and England, and has done on-camera interviews spread over the last forty-plus years regarding his participation in every aspect of Marilyn Monroe s funeral.
The book will also take you behind the scenes to learn intimate details surrounding macabre newspaper headlines, such as two friends whose deaths became cold-case homicides that would take years to solve. It also delves into the strange circumstances surrounding the death one of America s wealthiest and most well known businessmen, Howard Hughes. This uniquely vivid portrait of the mysterious funeral industry proves that in life as well as in death, truth is indeed stranger than fiction.
-Karen Reider, former editor of Four Corners Magazine
1
Humble Beginnings
My mother s plans to spend the holiday at home got bombed by my own sneak attack, four years before the bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor. Her anticipated delivery date of December 7, 1937, had come and gone with nary a peep out of me until the 28 th of the month, in a beautiful downtown Burbank maternity hospital. This procrastination on my part saved me from having to celebrate my birthday each year on the anniversary of December 7, 1941- A date which will live in infamy.
My parents, brother, and I lived humbly in a middle-class Los Angeles neighborhood. When World War II started I was only 2, but as it progressed I couldn t help but hear about it continually and experience its effects on the population. The sights and sounds of the war were everywhere. For a young boy, it was an exciting time.
We practiced for blackouts by going into our windowless hallway with our gas masks and closing all the doors. We could see barrage balloons in the skies from our backyard, and almost any night you could go outside and see searchlights combing the sky. There was great speculation that LA may be a strategic target because of its many industries supplying war-related materials, including a great deal of aircraft manufacturing.
We would witness numerous types of aircraft in the sky. There would often be groups of single-engine fighter planes heading east that made an unforgettable sound. The P-38s, with their double hulls, were one of the first twin-engine fighters seen in the skies over LA. These aircraft carved out their own place in history when a small squadron of them intercepted and destroyed Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto s aircraft during an inspection tour in the Solomon Islands.
The most surprising thing we ever saw in the sky was the Lockheed prototype of the famous flying wing propeller-driven aircraft, which was never produced in quantity because it needed a jet engine and jet technology was still in its infancy. However, it did serve as the inspiration for the B-2 stealth bomber five decades later.
Every kid in the neighborhood spent a great deal of time on scrap drives collecting prodigious amounts of anything made of metal, cotton, and newspapers. My dad even turned bacon grease in to the butcher each week because it was used in the production of explosives. Meanwhile, he used ration stamps for difficult-to-acquire items like sugar, meat, and coffee. Many things, such as leather goods or anything made of rubber, were in short supply or completely unavailable. Even some new expressions were born, like kicking the tires when you were about to purchase a used car, because all of the natural rubber went toward the war effort. Tires and other rubber products were produced using synthetics of substandard quality. You were lucky if your new shoes lasted two months.
My father had received $2,000 mustering-out pay when he returned at the end of World War I, which he used to buy the house in which I grew up. When the Los Angeles Times ran a photo during my elementary school years, in commemoration of the Great War s end, my father submitted an image of himself. As he sat in his easy chair, with my brother and me on either side, he pointed his pipe to a famous Times front page headlined with the armistice signing. He won the contest.

Allan (left) with his father and brother in a 1942 contest-winning photo that commemorated the end of World War I.

Allan (left) and his brother John in a backyard foxhole, with machine guns handmade by their father.
Every Saturday we