Over the next year and a half, the ant situation worsened considerably, in spite of the spraying: “I could see more ants than ever, and there is a lot of little hideous black bugs jumping around there. Well, I had seen these hideous black bugs before, like little gnats, instead of flying they seemed to jump like that.”
This time, he had a long, heart-to-heart talk with Mr. Nieri. The latter insisted that the body would still be just as perfect as the day it was buried, except for perhaps a little mold on the hands. Ants would never “tackle” an embalmed body, Mr. Nieri said. To prove his point, he produced a bottle of formaldehyde; he averred that he could take a piece of fresh horsemeat of the best kind, or steak, or anything, saturate it with formaldehyde, and “nothing will tackle it.”
The idea had evidently been growing in Mr. Chelini’s mind that he must investigate the situation at first hand. With his wife, his family doctor, and an embalmer from Nieri’s establishment, he went out to Cypress Lawn Cemetery and there caused the casket to be opened; upon which the doctor exclaimed, “Well, this is a hell of a mess, and a hell of a poor job of embalming, in my opinion.”
In court, the undertaking fraternity rushed to the defense of their embattled colleague. Defense expert witnesses included several practicing funeral directors and Mr. Donald Ashworth, then dean of the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science. They were in an undeniably difficult position, for in order to build a case for Mr. Nieri they were forced to reveal some truths ordinarily concealed from the public. The defense theory—perhaps the only possible one under the circumstances—was that there is no such thing as “eternal preservation”; that the results of embalming are always unpredictable; that, therefore, Mr. Nieri could not have entered into the alleged agreement with Mr. Chelini. Before the case was over, the theory of “everlasting security for your loved one,” an advertising slogan gleefully flung at them by Mr. Belli, was thoroughly exploded by the reluctant experts. They also conceded that the expensive metal “sealer type” caskets, if anything, hasten the process of decomposition. The jury awarded damages to Mr. Chelini in the sum of $10,900.
For another view of what the public wants, let us turn to a man-in-the-street survey conducted by the San Francisco Chronicle in 1961. The method of interviewing could hardly claim to be scientific, for it consisted merely of stopping the first eight people to come along the street and posing the question “What kind of funeral for you?” The answers are, however, interesting. All eight spoke up for the minimum: “A very cheap one …” “Just a plain Catholic service …” “I would like a quiet funeral …” “I don’t care for pomp and circumstance …” were typical responses. One man said, “They can heave me in the Bay and feed the fishes for all I care,” and another, “As long as they make sure I’m dead I don’t care what they do next. A corpse is like a pair of old shoes. It’s ridiculous to put your family in hock over it.”
Oddly enough, the funeral men, long aware that these attitudes are more commonly held than that of Mr. Chelini, are not particularly worried. After all, these people will not be around to arrange their own funerals. When the bell tolls for them, the practical essentials—selection of a casket and all the rest—will be in the hands of close relatives who will, it is statistically certain, express their sense of loss in an appropriately costly funeral.
This point was made rather forcefully by a funeral director in the course of a radio interview. The interviewer remarked that it is the law in some states that the express wishes of the deceased as to the mode of his funeral must be observed. What happens then, he then asked, if the deceased has left instructions for a very simple funeral, but the survivors insist on something more elaborate? The funeral director answered with rare candor, “Well, at a time like that, who are you going to listen to?”
Odds are that the undertaker will be the arbiter of what is a “suitable” funeral, that a decedent’s own wishes in this regard may not be the final word. Even if he is the President of the United States.
Franklin D. Roosevelt left extremely detailed and explicit instructions for his funeral “in the event of my death in office as President of the United States.” The instructions were contained in a four-page penciled document dated December 26, 1937, early in his second term, and were addressed to his eldest son, James.
The instructions included these directions:
• That a service of the utmost simplicity be held in the East Room of the White House.
• That there be no lying in state anywhere.
• That a gun-carriage and not a hearse be used throughout.
• That the casket be of absolute simplicity, dark wood, that the body be not embalmed or hermetically sealed, and
• That the grave be not lined with brick, cement, or stones.
Regarding the latter instruction, James Roosevelt writes, “So far as we can learn, he never had discussed this with anyone. Knowing Father, we can only speculate that he regarded the embalming procedure as a distasteful invasion of privacy, and that perhaps he had an inner yearning to follow the traditional funeral liturgy, ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection.’ ”
Nobody in the Roosevelt household knew of the existence of this document. It was found in his private safe a few days after his burial. It is a common occurrence that when death comes unexpectedly to the ordinary home, burial instructions are found too late tucked away in a safe-deposit box or contained in a will which is not read until after the funeral; it seems ironic that the same mischance could occur in the White House itself. Furthermore, White House aides charged with arranging details of the funeral seem to have been as much at a loss, and as tractable in the hands of the undertaker, as any average citizen faced with the same situation.
News of Roosevelt’s death, flashed around the world on April 12, 1945, meant many things to many people. To millions of Americans it signified the sudden and disastrous loss of the most commanding figure of the century and with him the disappearance of an era. To Mr. Fred W. Patterson, Atlanta undertaker, at home enjoying an after-dinner pipe that evening when his phone rang, it was (in the words of the Southern Funeral Director) “THE CALL—probably the biggest and most important ever experienced by a contemporary funeral director.”
The Call was placed by Mr. William D. Hassett, a White House aide who was with Roosevelt in Warm Springs, Georgia, at the time of his death. He was charged by Mrs. Roosevelt with the task of buying a coffin; being entirely without experience in such matters, he consulted Miss Grace Tully, FDR’s secretary, and Dr. Howard G. Bruenn, who had attended the President in his last moments. Both were sure that Mr. Roosevelt would have wanted something simple and dignified, possibly a solid mahogany casket with copper lining similar to the one used for the President’s mother.
From accounts of the placing of the order for the solid mahogany casket, it appears there was more than one telephone conversation between Patterson, the undertaker, and the harassed presidential assistants. The following account of Hassett’s conversation is given by Bernard Asbell: “Hassett said he wanted a solid mahogany casket with a copper lining. Patterson told him that copper linings had disappeared early in the war. He did have, however, a plain mahogany one, but—Hassett broke in to ask if it were at least six feet four inches long. Patterson said it was—but it was already sold. It was to be shipped the next day to New Jersey to accommodate another undertaker. He added that he had a fine bronze-colored copper model that would—Hassett, in his gentle but most firm Vermont manner, said he wanted the mahogany brought at once to Warm Springs. Patterson asked if he could bring both. Perhaps, on reconsideration, they would choose the bronze-colored copper one. Hassett said he could.”
Patterson, writing in the Southern Funeral Director, describes a further conversation about the coffin, this time with Dr. Bruenn: “After he [Dr. Bruenn] consulted with William D. Hassett,… he requested that only the mahogany be brought; but on my request, in the event a change was desired, we were a
llowed to bring, in addition, the copper deposit.”
Mr. Patterson’s very understandable desire to acquit himself creditably and with honor in this situation comes through strongly between the lines. There he was, caught in the spotlight, before his colleagues and before the nation. He must have suffered a nasty moment before permission was granted to bring both caskets to the Little White House.
Patterson and his assistants drove to Warm Springs with two hearses, one containing the plain mahogany casket, the other the “fine bronze-colored copper model,” a National Seamless Copper Deposit No. 21200. Patterson relates how the question of which casket to use was finally resolved: “After Mrs. Roosevelt arrived at 11:25 and had seen the President’s remains, a conference was held as to funeral arrangements. Dr. Bruenn was asked what they wished to do about the casket. He consulted Admiral McIntire who came with Mrs. Roosevelt. In the conversation, the Admiral was heard to use the word ‘bronze’ and as the copper deposit had a bronze finish, of course that was the casket to be used.”
Did the presidential aides feel that one had been put over on them, albeit discreetly? We do not know.
In one important respect, Mr. Roosevelt’s instructions were observed: there was no lying in state. Mrs. Roosevelt felt sure that he would not have wished it. She said, “We have talked often, when there had been a funeral at the Capitol in which a man had lain in state and the crowds had gone by the open coffin, of how much we disliked the practice; and we had made up our minds that we would never allow it.”
Failure to carry out certain of his other instructions can only be laid to the unlucky circumstance that they were found too late. It is, however, interesting to compare President Roosevelt’s words with accounts given by participants in the funeral:
MR. ROOSEVELT: That the body be not embalmed.
MR. FRED PATTERSON: All three assistants worked incessantly five hours to give the President the proper appearance, and to be certain of proper preservation.… We had a difficult case, did our best and believe that we pleased everyone in every respect.… Saturday morning Mr. William Gawler (a Washington undertaker) phoned me stating that the tissues were firm, complexion was fine and those who saw him remarked, “He looks like his old self again and much younger.”
MR. ROOSEVELT: That the body be not … hermetically sealed.
MR. WILLIAM GAWLER: The casket was closed and the inner top bolted down at 8:30 p.m. Saturday night. The outer top was sealed with cement.
MR. ROOSEVELT: That the grave be not lined with brick, cement, or stones.
MR. JAMES ROOSEVELT: The casket was placed in a cement vault.
MR. ROOSEVELT: That a gun-carriage and not a hearse be used throughout.
MR. PATTERSON: As the caisson did not arrive at the last minute the casket was taken in our Sayers and Scoville Cadillac hearse.
In November 1963, three months after the first edition of this book was published, it became once more the unhappy task of presidential aides to supervise the obsequies of a president. Two writers give particulars of negotiations with undertakers in Dallas and Washington over arrangements for John F. Kennedy’s funeral.
In Robert Kennedy and His Times (Houghton Mifflin, 1978), Arthur Schlesinger describes RFK’s arrival at Bethesda Hospital:
There were so many details. The funeral home wanted to know how grand the coffin should be. “I was influenced by … that girl’s book on (burial) expenses … Jessica Mitford (The American Way of Death).… I remember making the decision based on Jessica Mitford’s book.… I remember thinking about it afterward, about whether I was cheap or what I was, and I remembered thinking about how difficult it must be for everybody making that kind of decision.”
While Yours Truly was, needless to say, most gratified to learn that her message had been absorbed in high places, further exploration reveals that—much as in the case of FDR’s funeral—the best-laid schemes of Robert Kennedy and his assistants went agley. The undertakers prevailed after all.
William Manchester in The Death of a President (Harper & Row, 1967) goes into far greater detail when discussing this situation. Of the Dallas undertaker who supplied the coffin in which JFK’s body was transported to Washington, he writes:
Vernon B. Oneal of Oak Lawn funeral home is an interesting figure in the story of John Kennedy. Squat, hairy and professionally doleful, with a thick Texas accent and gray hair parted precisely in the middle and slicked back, he was the proprietor of an establishment which might have been invented by Waugh or Huxley. It had a wall-to-wall carpeted Slumber Room. There was piped religious music, and a coffee bar for hungry relatives of loved ones.… (p. 291)
Instructed by a member of JFK’s entourage to bring a coffin to Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital, Oneal ran into his selection room and
chose his most expensive coffin, the Elgin Casket Company’s “Britannia” model, eight hundred pounds of double-walled, hermetically sealed solid bronze.
The scene now shifts to Washington. Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh told Robert Kennedy that the solid bronze casket had been badly damaged in transit: “It’s really shabby. One handle is off, and the ornaments are in bad shape.” RFK decided that “he could scarcely permit a state funeral to proceed with a battered casket.” Four aides were dispatched to Gawler’s, the selfsame old, established Washington firm that had supervised President Roosevelt’s funeral. They reported their findings to RFK.
Manchester’s description of the casket-price negotiations roughly parallels Schlesinger’s, but with elaboration:
Robert Kennedy had read Miss Mitford’s carefully documented exposé of the gouging of bereaved relatives, and so had Dr. Joseph English, the Peace Corps psychiatrist who stood at Sargent Shriver’s elbow Friday afternoon. Robert Kennedy … believes he spoke to O’Donnell … (special assistant to the President) about price … and he has a clear memory of a girl who told him … “You can get one for $500, one for $1,400, or one for $2,000.” She went on about water-proofing and optional equipment. Influenced by the Mitford book, he shied away from the high figure. He asked for the $1,400 coffin, and afterward he wondered whether he had been cheap; he thought how difficult such choices must be for everyone.… (p. 432)
This, as Manchester points out, was already almost twice the average bill for “casket and services” only two years earlier … $708 in 1961. But there was worse to come, as he discovered on further investigation.
In the end, Gawler put one over on the White House staff members. He sold them a “Marsellus No. 710, constructed of hand-rubbed, five-hundred-year-old solid African mahogany,” for which he charged $2,400. He then slipped in the most expensive vault in the establishment, for a total bill, rendered and paid, of $3,160.
And what about Oneal? His bill to the Kennedy family was finally settled, after some haggling over “services rendered”—spotted by a sharp-eyed CPA—for $3,495. Thus, despite Robert Kennedy’s laudable efforts to avoid a price-gouging, he was outmaneuvered; the family ended up paying a total of $6,655 into the coffers of undertakers.
His curiosity piqued by these nefarious transactions, Manchester pursued the subject further, visiting Vernon Oneal in his Dallas establishment:
Actually, as he conceded to this writer, he was hoping for a return of the coffin. He made two trips to Washington in the hope of retrieving it. Word of this reached the right quarters, and to avoid an exhibition he was paid. The wholesale prices of coffins are a closely guarded trade secret, but at the request of the author a licensed funeral director and a cemetery manager made discreet inquiries at the Elgin Casket Company about its Britannia model. Both were quoted an identical figure: $1,150. Thus Oneal’s fee represents a markup of $2,345.
Lastly, William Manchester records some reactions to the embalmer’s art as practiced by Gawler’s:
Arthur Schlesinger and Nancy Tuckerman went in through the Green Room. “It was appalling,” Arthur reported. “When I came closer it looked less and less like him. It is too waxen, too made-up.” Nancy
echoed faintly that the face resembled “the rubber masks stores sell as novelties.” He urged Bob to “close the casket.” … Walton [William Walton, artist, friend of Kennedy’s] looked as long as he could, with a growing sense of outrage. He said to Bob, “You mustn’t keep it open. It has no resemblance to the President. It’s a wax dummy.”
And closed the coffin did remain. UPI commented as follows:
When Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy decided that President Kennedy’s casket would remain closed while his body lay in state, she acted as many religious leaders wish that all bereaved families would.… They feel that it is pagan rather than Christian to focus attention on the corpse. It is worth noting that in other particulars as well, the conduct of the Kennedy funeral represented a departure from the prevailing funerary practices fostered by the American death industries. There were no flowers, by request of the Kennedy family. At no point did a Cadillac hearse intrude; the coffin, covered by a flag, was transported by gun carriage.
* Today such a funeral would cost $8,000 or more. Bronze sealers begin at $4,000 and run up to $25,000 for the heavier gauges.
12
Fashions in Funerals
Disposal of the dead falls rather into a class with fashions, than with either customs or folkways on the one hand, or institutions on the other…. [S]ocial practices of disposing of the dead are of a kind with fashion of dress, luxury and etiquette.
—A. L. KROEBER, “Disposal of the Dead,”
American Anthropologist, July-September 1927
One of the interesting things about burial practices is that they provide many a clue to the customs and society of the living. The very word “antiquarian” conjures up the picture of a mild-eyed historian groping about amidst old tombstones, copying down epitaphs with their folksy inscriptions and irregular spelling, extrapolating from these a picture of the quaint people and homey ways of yore. There is unconscious wit: the widow’s epitaph to her husband, “Rest in peace—until we meet again.” There is gay inventiveness:
The American Way of Death Revisited Page 17
