Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (14 page)

However, film folk generally manage to have their way. “There is a certain magic in the words ‘Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer,’ ” said John Calley. Enough magic, it seems, to corrupt the morgue attendant in a community at some distance from Los Angeles, and to persuade him to become the company’s technical adviser at a hundred dollars a day.

Initially, John Calley told me, there was quite a battle in the production department over how to handle the photography of corpses. Some favored the use of wax models and masks, but these would have been expensive and perhaps unsatisfactory. Nobody in the company had ever actually seen corpses on film; nobody knew how they would photograph. A screen test for corpses, who turned out not to be exactly easy on the eyes, was therefore the first essential. Calley called up his morgue man: “We want to see some dead bodies, and take moving pictures of them.” “
Moving
pictures? But they don’t move, you know,” quipped the morgue man. “You’d better come over to the morgue and look around, we can have lunch here.” Calley, though already strangely uninterested in lunch, concurred.

For some reason everybody wanted to be in on it, and a dozen members of the company repaired to the morgue. They took along one of the film extras, as a sort of control, to see if a live one posing as a cadaver would look any different from the real thing.

There were wild goings-on at the morgue that day. At one point Haskell Wexler, shooting from a stepladder, got corpse and live actor mixed up; when the latter opened his eyes for a moment, Wexler screamed and almost fell off the ladder.

The most shattering experience of all occurred when Tony Richardson, insatiably curious, opened a double door leading from the walk-in freezer where the “recent expirations” (as the morgue man called them) lay ranged on shelves. Behind the mysterious door were scores of bodies hung by their ears from what appeared to be huge ice tongs or hooks. “Tony was very upset, couldn’t sleep for weeks,” said John Calley. “I had weird dreams for ages afterwards. Haskell threw up and passed out.” The morgue attendant, described by Calley as “a very eerie, spooky man,” got into the spirit of things. He reached into a cupboard, pulled out five or six dried-up legs and arms, and waved them about like a handful of branches. He explained that they freeze the corpses as quickly as possible “to discourage people from playing grab-ass with them.” “Tony’s eyes lit up at this,” said Calley. “Although none of us knew exactly what was meant.”

So thoroughly have the screen writers done their homework that their ideas are beginning to echo those of
Casket & Sunnyside
. In the screenplay, a casket salesman displays the latest in shrouds, “a Texas-style embroidered cowboy windbreaker.” Leafing through the current issue of
Casket & Sunnyside
, which I had brought along to Hollywood, I came across this: “An innovation in the burial industry is Western tailoring in burial garments designed in authentic ranch style.” Great minds think alike. It is indeed hard to top the crazed inventiveness of the American funeral industry.

Tony Richardson hates studio sets on principle. Whenever possible, he prefers to film the real thing: airport scenes at the Los Angeles airport, a newspaper office at the
Times-Mirror
building. M-G-M’s enormous facilities are only used briefly in
The Loved One
, for some scenes which are in fact a spoof on a movie company very much like M-G-M.

The production people combed Los Angeles for suitable locations which might be leased for the major action: Whispering Glades cemetery-cum-mortuary, the home of Mr. Joyboy and his revolting old Mom, the Happier Hunting Ground pet cemetery. As with everything connected with this film, luck was with them all the way.

The Joyboy home is a late-Victorian horror in a run-down section of Los Angeles. It was no trouble at all to persuade the large family who lived there to move into a motel for a few weeks at M-G-M’s expense, while the prop men refurbished the house with monstrous art-nouveau lamps, tortured-looking carved chairs, and other Mom paraphernalia.

A perfect Whispering Glades has been created at Greystone, one of those bad-joke mansions that abound in Southern California. Teams of M-G-M gardeners have greened up its dying shrubbery and vast neglected lawns, which are now dotted with tons of frightful Forest Lawn-type statuary. A patio has become an “indoor-outdoor”-style mausoleum, its walls plastered with fake memorial plaques. The sizable recreation area of the house has been transformed into a mortuary. The erstwhile bowling alley is now the cosmeticians’ room, divided into cubicles like a beauty parlor. The billiard room has become a “Gothic slumber room” decorated with medieval knights, heraldic flags, and other insignia of Merrie Olde England.

The immense kitchens are awash with embalming fluids and cavity solutions, for here Mr. Joyboy and his team of embalmers hold sway. Life-sized diagrams of human anatomy and circulatory systems decorate the wall. The observant filmgoer will catch glimpses of a variety of embalming aids procured by the diligent prop men from undertakers’ supply houses. “Tony specially likes those big sticker things, what d’you call them?” said Haskell Wexler, who showed me round. “Trocars?” “Yes, trocars, he loves those.” (A trocar is a murderous-looking giant hollow needle attached to a pump, used for extracting the fluid contents of chest and abdomen. Not everybody loves them. John Calley told me he thinks trocars are depressing.) There are also boxes of Trocar Perfect-Seal Buttons (shaped like thick, squat screws, for stopping up the hole made in the stomach by the trocar), K-T Hand Holders for Easy, Sure, Exact Positioning of Hands (glorified rubber bands), Cranial Caps, Perma Cosmetics, Infant Finishing Powder, and a gross of eye caps for fastening eyelids down.

Caskets have been rented from a local casket company which, for obvious reasons, prefers not to be listed in screen credits. Wexler is critical of their construction because they tend to fall apart when people get in and out of them: “They’re definitely only intended for a one-time use.”

The prop man told me he had been unable to obtain any ladies’ burial dresses. A manufacturer of these garments, which cost from $100 to $275 wholesale, explained apologetically that her style is so well known that the designs would at once be recognized. Shades of Christian Dior!

Richardson’s greatest coup of all was arranging to film at the premises of Pet Haven cemetery for a fee of two hundred dollars a day. It was at Pet Haven, where I spent several days watching the filming, that the validity of Richardson’s stand against studio sets was borne in on me. The truth of Pet Haven is infinitely stranger than any fiction that could have been devised by the most imaginative of screen set designers.

Pet Haven is situated in one of those desolate, nondescript wastelands on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The acre or so of tightly packed animal graves is a riot of grubby artificial flowers. Statues of gods and dogs mingle indiscriminately, here a plaster Jesus, there a cuddly kitten, a blue-robed Virgin Mary cheek by jowl with a group of pottery poodles. Mr. Griffiths, founder and owner of the cemetery, told me there are 9,800 pets buried there, plus $20,000 worth of pre-need contracts. He delights in pointing out the resting places of the pets of stars: “Jerry Lewis has got four here, Edward G. Robinson’s got three, and Mickey Cohen’s dog is over there.” The Cohen grave marker reads, “Mike—Always in Our Hearts, Mickey and Lavonne.” Nearby is a memorial inscription, in Spanish, to “Diana, Cuba 1952—Los Angeles 1963, Political Refugee, Another Victim of Fidel.”

Fact and fancy melt into each other in the most peculiar way at Pet Haven. Sometimes it is hard to tell whether the scene you are watching is part of the film or part of the routine business of the pet cemetery.

In a far corner of the grounds the film company is at work, equipment is scattered among the graves, and Dennis, in his seedy-looking nondenominational minister’s garb, is saying a prayer over the casket of a deceased mynah bird: “Bird born of egg ...” Seeking relief from the glaring sun, I drop into the cemetery office. A weepy blonde, evidently a past patron of the cemetery, is discussing plans for the funeral of her boxer Donnie-Boy. She is mildly grumbling between sobs: “I could’ve save thirty-nine dollars and fifty cents if I’d bought Donnie-Boy’s grave pre-need twelve years ago, when I buried Woofie.” Mr. Griffiths suggests she could still cut $7.50 from the price by omitting the white satin casket lining. “No, I couldn’t do that to my Donnie-Boy,” she says with a fresh burst of tears. “It’s a funny thing: I knew he was gone when I saw how his jaw had gone rigid. It was just the same when my mother passed away,
her
jaw went rigid, just like that.” After she left, Mr. Griffiths remarked to his secretary, “She’s real touchy. Remember when her other dog passed she wouldn’t even let you fix his face?”

I left these extraordinary scenes and this unusual film company with regret. I shall be curious to know how
The Loved One
is received. Based on past experience in these matters, I have some predictions:

The Loved One
will be denounced as Communistic, Socialistic, Atheistic, Anarchistic, Unaltruistic, Pessimistic, and a few other istics by
Casket & Sunnyside, Mortuary Management, Concept: The Journal of Creative Ideas for Cemeteries
, and a dozen or so other funeral trade publications.

These denunciations will be echoed in meetings of the John Birch Society, the American Legion, the D.A.R., and in the halls of Congress by representatives from Cemetery Land—Southern California.

Forest Lawn will loudly and publicly threaten to sue but will think better of it.

Liberace will laugh all the way to his pre-need memorial estate.

Tony Richardson and his merry men will live happily ever after—but they will never quite forget what they saw in the embalming room.

Anjanette Comer will survive being Aimée and will star in many livelier roles in the future.

For my own part, I ain’t gonna study Waugh no more—gonna study Terry Southern, Christopher Isherwood, and Tony Richardson instead.

COMMENT
ON
THREE
FUNERAL
PIECES

After
The American Way of Death
was published in 1963, I found myself in the delightful position of being America’s leading authority on funerals. This was not as difficult an accomplishment as it might seem; had I been writing about, say, the medical profession or public education, I should have been up against the competition of myriad experts in those fields. But precious little had been written about the American funeral; I was more or less the first that ever burst into that silent sea, so it was fairly easy to float up to the head of the class.

As a result, editors of a wide range of magazines—the
Nation, Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, Show, Atlantic
—asked me for articles. Needless to say, I milked the subject for all it was worth—and continue to do so; as recently as 1977,
McCall’s
commissioned an update on
The American Way of Death
—Death Warmed Over, so to speak, although that was not their title. (This piece is now permanently enshrined in a new paperback edition of
The American Way of Death
).

For a number of reasons I found those assignments highly enjoyable. In the first place, I was itching to make use of the stunning copy furnished by the funeral trade magazines in their denunciations of
The American Way of Death
—their branding as “atheistic Communism” my proposals for funerary simplicity, their incomparable prose style. I got deep pleasure out of once again crossing swords with such old adversaries as Howard C. Raether, Executive Secretary of the National Funeral Directors Association, who unwittingly supplied some of the best lines for
The American Way of Death
, including the epigraph: “Funerals are becoming more and more a part of the American way of life.” Since much of
The American Way of Death
is a pastiche of their pronouncements, one might have thought the funeral industry spokesmen would have learned to keep their mouths shut, or at least to moderate their rhetoric; not a bit of it, their counterattack provided colorful material for any number of follow-up articles.

Secondly—all those clergymen flocking to my defense! Judging by their response to
The American Way of Death
, it seemed that for once in my life I was literally on the side of the angels, or at least their temporal representatives. I think that only those who have been, as I was, a target of the Truman-McCarthy-era assault on radicals can appreciate the feeling of decompression on having one’s work accepted at its face value, no longer subject to the
ad hominem
(or should it be
feminem?
) attack that was such a depressing feature of those years.

Indeed, for the undertakers, their inability to shake clergy support for my position must have been a cruel blow; but cruelest of all was the publication of my articles in such Middle America magazines as
Good Housekeeping
and
Saturday Evening Post
—an enemy invasion of the undertakers’ own turf, so to speak.

I, of course, went all out to consolidate my alliance with the clergy (and to exploit my new-found respectability) by lacing the articles with occasional references to “the spiritual aspects of death,” a bit specious coming from me, as the undertakers may have divined, but there was nothing they could do about it.

The first two pieces included here, “Americans Don’t Want Fancy Funerals,” from the
Saturday Evening Post
, and “My Way of Life Since
The American Way of Death
,” from
Nova
, illustrate my efforts to make maximum use of the funeral trade journals while not overdoing it—always a danger because there is such a plethora of marvelously comic material. My system in deciding what to include, in this or any other case where I am making extensive use of quotation, is to type out as fast as I can all the possibly useful passages, only a fraction of which will ultimately be used. That way I have the material before me in manageable form, and don’t have to keep turning back to the magazine or other source in which it appeared. In the margins of the many pages of typescript thus assembled I scribble pencil notations of the subject matter, e.g.: “Mitford syndrome,” “residual use of Mit. material—passing poisons among the citizenry,” “Communism vs. memorialization,” and so on.