Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (13 page)

The reception accorded my book and the nation-wide explosion over funerals that followed were so totally unexpected that I still have not recovered from the excitement of it all. I had assumed that a book on this somewhat unpleasant subject would have very limited appeal.
Mortuary Management
, an influential trade journal, agreed with this forecast in an editorial which appeared just before publication of
The American Way of Death
, entitled, “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Book?” The editor pointed out that books about “the funeral directing profession” (which is how all good American undertakers refer to their trade) are notoriously poor sellers. He knows this, he said, because his old Dad once wrote a book about the Profession; and although the Dad took an advertisement in the
Saturday Evening Post
, it only sold three hundred copies. With the sad example of the poor old Dad before me, I was utterly unprepared for what happened.

Not only were the sales gratifyingly huge, but newspapers all over the country took up the cudgels against the death industries. So did television and radio, in a number of coast-to-coast network programmes and in innumerable local programmes. So did the big, mass-circulation magazines—
Time, Life, Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping
, and the like. So did the clergy; I have a bulging file of sermons preached on the subject, advocating a return to simpler funerals. All over America funerals suddenly became Topic A, a new subject for dinner-party small talk. There was a fictionalized episode about a wicked undertaker on the
Dr. Kildare
programme.
That Was the Week That Was
, newly imported to America from England, ran a skit in which the undertaker’s assistant informs the bereaved widow, “I am your Grief Lady.” On more than one occasion, our house in California was transformed into something like a Hollywood movie set (to the delight of the neighbours’ children) by television crews filming interviews about the book.

I was inundated with letters, they poured in by every post. A young English friend living in California agreed to help me answer them. As I am not adept at dictating, she read the letters and composed the answers for me to sign. She only slipped up once, perhaps from the exuberance of youth. An earnest old soul in Kentucky had written, “I have thought the whole thing over and have decided to avoid a funeral altogether by bequeathing my body to a medical school.” My English secretary wrote back, “What a smashing idea! I’m sure they’ll be delighted to get it.”

The reaction of the death industries to the curious national storm that is brewing over funerals in America has been fascinating. Of course they rounded on me in absolute fury. I still subscribe to their magazines with lyrical titles like
Mid-Continent Mortician, Casket & Sunnyside
, and
Concept: The Journal of Creative Ideas for Cemeteries
. In these journals I read month after month about “the Mitford bomb,” “the Mitford war dance,” “the Mitford missile,” “Mitford blast,” and “Mitford fury.” They have condemned the movement for cheaper funerals as a Red Plot, and have found an ally in Congress: Congressman James B. Utt of California, who read a two-page statement about my subversive background into the
Congressional Record
. Of undertakers he said, “I would rather be buried by one of our fine, upstanding American morticians than to set foot on the soil of a Communist country,” and of my book he added cryptically, “Better dead than read.”

Has it all done any good, and have the grief-therapists (latest self-designation of American undertakers) been forced to mend their ways? It may be too early to tell. There are, however, some indications. The mortuary press report a decrease of 30 percent in the average funeral sale. A big New York trades union reports an average decrease of $134 in funeral bills of members. Casket manufacturers in New York State say there has been a “run on cheaper boxes.” In four American states, official investigations of the entire funeral industry have been launched by the legislatures. Clergymen tell me their congregations are beginning to insist on funerary moderation.

There are people on both sides of the controversy who say the funeral furor may prove to be a short-lived flash in the pan, that when people get bored with the subject there will be a return to Funerals as Usual. Others think that profound changes in American funeral customs may result. I have no predictions. Yet, a remark made by the pastor of a wealthy suburban church in New York might seem to offer some hope for the Ultimate Consumer. He said, “I think funeral fashions are changing. The cognoscenti are beginning to think it’s gauche to put on a big show because there’s been so much ridicule lately of fancy, expensive funerals.”

“SOMETHING TO OFFEND EVERYONE”

SHOW /
December, 1964

In his preface to
The Loved One
, Evelyn Waugh described it as “a little nightmare produced by the unaccustomed high living of a brief visit to Hollywood.” Under the tutelage of some freewheeling and original comic talents the little nightmare is growing into a monstrous incubus with new dimensions of satire, new and crazy turns of the screw.

A coalition ideally suited to this sort of skulduggery is master-minding the film, which is now being made in Hollywood: Christopher Isherwood, long a wry observer of the Los Angeles scene; Terry Southern, who did the script of
Dr. Strangelove;
Tony Richardson, fresh from his international success as director of
Tom Jones
. Haskell Wexler, cinematographer, and John Calley are co-producers.

I went down to Hollywood to watch them at work, feeling a little like an old salt watching a group of landlubbers struggle with the unfamiliar technical problems of a nautical movie. Having been immersed in mortuary lore myself for so long, I wondered how deeply the film company would succeed in penetrating the inner workings and techniques of that world; and also how they would resolve the problem of toning down the subject matter of the book so it could be shown with propriety on film to mass audiences. I found they are not concerned with propriety. Far from toning down the material, they have made it wildly more outrageous.

The Loved One
, originally published in 1948, has been tossed around Hollywood for many years as one of the hotter potatoes. The story option has changed hands many times. Some film companies were afraid of this curiosity of literature, others cast lustful looks but did not know quite how to approach it. Half a dozen scripts were written and discarded over the years: Buñuel had a crack at it, so did Elaine May. At one point Alec Guinness wanted to play the male lead. More recently Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton wanted to do it, but that fell through.

Perhaps we should applaud these earlier hesitations and reservations. According to John Calley, the film as it is now shaping up could not have been done two years ago. He thinks it has become possible in 1964 because of the sudden popularity of iconoclastic, strong satire of the
Dr. Strangelove
genre, and because of last year’s wave of publicity about the excesses of the funeral industry: “The subject is no longer taboo.”

Waugh’s novel describes the predicament of Aimée Thanatogenos, a young mortuary cosmetician at Whispering Glades cemetery, who is unable to decide between two suitors: Mr. Joy-boy, chief embalmer, and Dennis Barlow, a young English poet who has found temporary employment at the Happier Hunting Ground pet cemetery. In the background is the Dreamer, founder and guiding genius of Whispering Glades. Aimée eventually commits suicide by cyanide injection.

In embellishing this basic theme, Terry Southern & Co. have stuck the knife into many other American institutions besides mortuaries. The founder of Whispering Glades, now called the Blessed Reverend, hits on a plan to “get rid of the stiffs” so he can transform his cemetery into a more profitable Senior Citizens’ Retirement City. With the help of General “Buck” Brinkman and other top-ranking space program chiefs, the loved ones are to be rocketed into outer space with the slogan “Resurrection Now!” There is a sex orgy, planned by the Blessed Reverend in his casket selection room, in which alluring mortuary hostesses tumble in and out of caskets with Air Force officers. Mr. Joyboy’s Mom has become a food-crazed glutton who achieves orgasm by watching the food commercials on television. Aimée, having donned corpse maquillage, commits suicide by embalming herself alive.

As Liz Roberts, assistant to Tony Richardson, said dreamily, “There’s something in the film to offend everybody.”

Evelyn Waugh was one of the first to be offended. When he read in the papers that Tony Richardson was planning to update and expand the plot, he caused his agent to write a letter demanding that Richardson should be replaced as director. This curmudgeonly gesture of crabbed age has been ignored by the film company.

The City of Los Angeles is offended. An official of that township telephoned to John Calley to urge that the name “Los Angeles” not be used.

M-G-M’s own legal department is worried stiff, and keeps peppering the filmmakers with anxious memoranda: “Goldwater Nut Flip [an ice-cream sundae in the commissary scene]: Delete. Our New York office advises that, while the mention of ‘Goldwater Flip’ was approved, the word ‘nut’ must
not
be used.” Tony Richardson, a preoccupied young man whose mind is riveted to his work, appears to be paying not the slightest attention to these words of caution.

The Interment Association of California, an organization of cemeteries, reports nervously, “It looks as if they are getting closer and closer in producing a motion picture called ‘The Loved One.’ They now have a full sized billboard in the Beverly Hills area advertising the fact that the picture is being produced.” The bill-board in question reads, “MGM Presents THE LOVED ONE ... For Those Who
Really
Care.”

If the film has already, halfway through production, attracted an unusual amount of opprobrium, it has also engendered that special sort of excitement and enthusiasm that people feel for a masterwork in the making. The press, although excluded from the sets by Tony Richardson, is watching fascinated from the side-lines, and stories about the film have appeared in papers from
The New York Times
to the San Francisco
Chronicle
.

It seems that everyone wants to get into this odd act. Sir John Gielgud and Robert Morley flew out from England to take small parts. Liberace is in the mood to be cast as casket salesman. Jonathan Winters is the Blessed Reverend, Rod Steiger is Mr. Joyboy, Robert Morse is a super-caddish Dennis. An almost unknown twenty-three-year-old actress with the marvelous name of Anjanette Comer (her real name) has the lead role of Aimée.

All seem happy in their work. Liberace, with whom I discussed his part, sounded very sincere, like a casket salesman should. He once visited a funeral parlor and evidently felt at home there; he said the make-up and wardrobe departments were “just like in a studio.” He advanced the really novel view that undertakers will be pleased with the film: “It will make everyone more cognizant of the Funeral Profession, which is one of the most prominent professions in the world.”
“Prominent?”
“Well, I mean it’s so
alive
,” answered Liberace with a giggle. About his own funeral plans he said that, while he has not as yet decided on the details, he would want to “be as glamorous in death as in life, people would expect it of me, I expect I’ll go all out.”

Anjanette Comer, a lovely pale girl with dusky hair and huge green eyes, has embraced her role with alarming zeal. She thinks she is very much like Aimée in some ways; after all, Aimée was so in love with her work! Anjanette has read a number of books and manuals on embalming; indeed she seems, at this stage, “half in love with easeful death” herself. “In the suicide scene I’m like a woman going to meet her lover,” she explained. “There’s something very sexy about the whole embalming thing.” Other members of the company to whom I repeated this raised their eyebrows and looked slightly worried.

Knowing something of the difficulties of getting firsthand information about the inner workings of the funeral industry (for if dead men don’t talk, still less do their custodians), I was particularly interested in how Southern, Richardson, and their many assistants had gone about researching the subject. Judging by their descriptions of forays into cemeteries, casket rooms, and eventually into the forbidden territory of the embalming room, it must have been an extremely unsettling experience both for the film company and for the mortuary world.

Sometimes as many as ten or fifteen would invade a cemetery, deploying over the grounds with notebooks in hand to record every detail of statuary, grave markers, mausoleum crypts. This was easy, for cemeteries are open to the public and anyone can wander around in them at will. To gain access to the casket sales room, where normally only those strictly on business are admitted, they found it necessary to break up into small family-sized groups pretending interest in “pre-need” arrangements. Terry Southern, Tony Richardson, and Richardson’s actress wife, Vanessa Red-grave, went on a pre-need shopping expedition in Los Angeles’s best-known memorial park. They were bent on studying selling methods, casket styles, arrangement of merchandise. “For some reason, at the last minute Tony switched plans and insisted that Vanessa and I should pose as husband and wife,” said Southern. “Well, of course Vanessa is an actress, and she got absolutely carried away by her role when we got up to the casket room—shed real tears, thinking of her poor old mother, who was supposed to be dying. I felt sorry for the poor salesman, she almost had him in tears, too.”

A far more difficult problem was that of breaching the mortician’s ultimate stronghold, the embalming room, and witnessing the embalming procedure. It is against the California state law for anyone save the next of kin to be present during an embalming. This law, passed as a result of funeral lobby pressure, was presumably intended to shield the embalmer and his work from prying eyes, and particularly such irreverent eyes as those of Tony Richardson and his crew.