The confessions of a Hollywood undertaker
Hin Los Angeles E WAS the last man to hold Marilyn Monroe naked in his arms. He has comforted Hollywood’s biggest celebrities as they wept. Many he accompanied on their fi nal journey, including Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Jack Benny and Jimmy Durante.
Now retired Allan Abbott was the funeral director to the stars and in his eye- opening new memoir Pardon My Hearse he reveals the secrets of the rich and famous he dispatched to their eternal rest.
“I’ve been to more than 10,000 funerals and I’ve seen more dead stars than the Hubble telescope,” says Abbott, 77, who literally knows where the bodies are buried. “I’ve been to celebrity funerals and seen the stars break down and cry like everyone else. But I’ve also seen things behind the scenes that would shock most fans.”
He was the last man to see Marilyn Monroe naked, laid out on a slab in the Westwood Village Cemetery in Los Angeles.
“I was shocked when the sheet was pulled back,” he recalls. “She had died of a drug overdose facedown and blood had pooled in her face and chest like deep bruises.
“You could see the psychological stress that she must have been under, letting herself go in those fi nal days. She looked like a middleaged woman who wasn’t taking good care of herself. Marilyn hadn’t bleached her hair for some time and her light brown roots were showing. Her lips were chapped, she badly needed a manicure and pedicure and she hadn’t shaved her legs for three or four weeks.
“Her throat was horribly swollen where the coroner had been surgically checking whether she had been strangled and the embalmer decided to pull the skin together at the back of her neck to reduce the swelling. That’s how I was the last man to have Marilyn Monroe naked in my arms as I leaned her body over the side of the table so that the embalmer could put a couple of stitches in the back of her neck to make her presentable.
“Marilyn’s executor brought clothes for her to wear in the casket but didn’t bring any panties – evidently she didn’t own any and never wore them. They even sent Marilyn’s falsies, two round foam pads to boost her bust. Age and gravity had taken their toll and she liked to tuck the falsies under her sweater so that her fake nipples showed through, suggesting that she wasn’t wearing a bra.
“We dressed her for her funeral with the falsies but funeral director Mary Hamrock took one look at her and said, ‘ What happened to her boobs?’ They just looked too small and fl at after the autopsy.
“She reached into Marilyn’s chartreuse dress, grabbed the falsies and threw them in the trash. Then she pulled clumps of cotton wool off a roll and stuffed Marilyn’s bra until it was full. ‘ Now that looks like Marilyn Monroe,’ she said.
“While nobody was looking I reached into the trash can and pulled out Marilyn’s falsies. Without realising it I also picked up a EXIT STAGE RIGHT: Marilyn Monroe’s fi nal journey in 1962. Abbott has some souvenirs of the star, top right. He also drove the family of Karen Carpenter, right with brother Richard, to her funeral few locks of her hair, which had been trimmed by the embalmer. I thought my wife would like them as a souvenir. For years afterwards, whenever I opened the plastic bag containing them, I could smell Marilyn’s fragrance.”
Abbott watched as 20th Century Fox hair and make- up artists covered up Monroe’s facial bruising and put her in the wig she had worn for her hit movie Something’s Got To Give. “It was an astonishing transformation,” he says. “Marilyn looked beautiful.”
Abbott launched his funeral limousine service as a teenager and quickly grew to command a fl eet of 40 hearses and his own mortuary. He was often a pallbearer to the stars, leading the casket to its fi nal repose.
“I was a pallbearer for Natalie Wood and at the graveside everyone was seated including her husband Robert Wagner but one mourner came and stood right beside me at her grave throughout the service. It turned out to be Christopher Walken, who was on the boat when Natalie died and REVEALS ALL: Allan Abbott who many believe may have been her secret lover.
“Karen Carpenter was just skin and bones when she died of anorexia. I drove her family to the funeral. Her brother Richard Carpenter had been her partner in so many hit songs but all he kept asking his parents was, ‘ Does my hair look good? Is it neat?’
“At the funeral of American comedian Ernie Kovacs I was a pallbearer along with Jack Lemmon but I was worried about one of the pallbearers being too short, thinking he might struggle carrying the casket. I didn’t realise until later that it was Frank Sinatra.
“Celebrities are no different from anyone at a funeral, they usually cry their hearts out – except for one. I drove The Man From U. N. C. L. E. star R o b e r t
Vaughn to a funeral and all he discussed with friends was his career and his expectations of stardom, showing no emotion at all. Unbelievably it was his own mother’s funeral.
“But it wasn’t all glamour. I got the call to pick up the body of actor Peter Lorre, who died in a $ 3- a- night fl eabag Hollywood hotel, very sad.”
In his new book Allan Abbott reveals the secrets of celebrity funerals and why nothing could prepare
him for seeing Marilyn Monroe in the morgue
SOON Abbott and his fl eet of hearses became Hollywood stars themselves. “I’ve been in more than 300 movies and TV shows, driving hearses and acting as funeral directors,” he says. “You’ve seen me on Murder, She Wrote, Columbo and Dallas.”
With his fl eet of limousines, the stars often called on Abbott for his services beyond funerals.
“Sophia Loren hired me to take her to a wax museum unveiling a new model of her but when she got in my limo she was very upset, raging about Frank Sinatra. She’d just fi lmed the movie Two Women, playing a rape victim, when she met Sinatra.
“Loren raged, ‘ He had the nerve to tell me that instead of pursuing my career I should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen cooking spaghetti.’
“It was only later that I learned that was a line from a movie he’d just fi lmed, Never So Few. Sinatra couldn’t even come up with his own original insults.
“Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had just fi nished fi lming Cleopatra but had been terrifi ed when mobs of fans tried to tear the clothes off their backs so when they returned to Los Angeles instead of fl ying into the airport they asked me to pick them up from a sleepy railway station about 20 miles outside town,” Abbott recalls.
“They got in my limo but Taylor seemed very upset, saying, ‘ I wonder where everyone is.’ Burton was livid. He said, ‘ Damn it woman! We went to all this trouble not to be seen and now you are disappointed! I need a drink.’
“I drove Carly Simon shortly after she had a hit with You’re So Vain, when everyone wondered who it was about. She was in my limo about to tell a friend the real story when she lit up a marijuana joint and there was so much smoke I had to close the divider or I would have got high. Only years later did I fi nd out the song was about Warren Beatty.”
Abbott still has Monroe’s falsies, tastefully framed, and says: “They are among my most prized possessions. And they’re worth a fortune.”
Pardon My Hearse, by Allan and Greg Abbott is available from Craven Street Books or amazon. co. uk, priced £ 10.98