Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking

by Jessica Mitford

  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 House
keeping, 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.

  The next trick was to see where these fit into the general scheme of the article, how best to pare them down for space reasons, and ruthlessly to sacrifice those passages that—hilarious though they may be—might appear to have been dragged in out of context. Then I tried to juxtapose the eminently sane, reasonable advice of the memorial societies (“led for the most part by the clergy,” as I sanctimoniously put it) alongside the apoplectic outpourings of the funeral men. A few startling statistics don’t hurt either (again, provided you don’t overdo it) such as the aggregate savings in one year to 250 funeral society members of $75,000.

  A word about style. Rereading the first two of these pieces, I note that I did somewhat tailor the writing to what I perceived as the readership. For the Satevepost, with its alleged circulation of ten million—always an inhibiting thought to me, those millions of faceless folks!—I see that I adopted a plonking one-two-three approach, setting the scene for the reader with a number of rather obvious rhetorical questions, and proceeding from there to my eminently logical (if self-serving) answers as furnished by the response of the American public to my book.

  The piece for Nova, then a trendy English glossy mag, is a good bit more relaxed. The clergy have virtually disappeared to be replaced by cocktail party talk. The Nancy Mitford reference, the young English friend who answered my letters, the generally chatty and personal tone would hardly have struck the right note for the Satevepost, whose readers would be looking for solid information rather than jokes and anecdotes. (I had written to tell Nancy about the Jessica Mitford Casket. She replied that an American friend of hers had just died and was expected to be buried in a Mitford: “The on dit is that you get ten percent royalties.” But her letter came too late to work it into the Nova article.)

  “ ‘Something to Offend Everyone’ ” was yet another spin-off from The American Way of Death. Again I was called in as an expert on mortuary practices, this time by Show magazine, who wanted an article on the filming of The Loved One. The circumstances were idyllic: M-G-M put me up in the Beverly Hills Hotel, height of Hollywood luxury, for ten days in which I trailed around with the film company. I was to have an “exclusive”; all other reporters (including, to her displeasure, Hedda Hopper) were barred from the set. From time to time, I even fed the film company lines; Liberace, cast as casket salesman, borrowed the one in my Saturday Evening Post article about the undertaker explaining the difference between casket linings: “We find rayon is a lot more irritating to the skin.” All this was most gratifying: being in on the ground floor of a Hollywood production, a childhood dream come true. This time I had no inhibitions about the potential readership of the piece; Show was a magazine of the theatre and movie world, consequently I felt pleasantly free of constraint in writing it—perhaps a trifle too free? For the editors cut out one of my favorite passages, the morgue man’s reference to “playing grab-ass” with the corpses.

  There is a footnote. After the Show article appeared, John Calley phoned my husband’s office. “M-G-M has decided to use Jessica’s title ‘Something to Offend Everyone’ as the sole advertising slogan for the film,” he said. “We’d love to send her a present—how is she off for watches?” “Oh, she’s got a watch,” said Bob, which was true; one of those good old-fashioned tick-tocks, a stout timekeeper on a plain but serviceable band. Calley sounded disappointed, and murmured that he’d been looking at some very nice diamond watches in Cartier.

  “I could have bitten my tongue off,” Bob told me later. “How could I face you with this awful lapse of judgment on my part?” But, making swift recovery, he had deftly replied to Calley “... but she is fresh out of brooches.” Calley said that was a great idea, and what is her favorite color? “Blue-white,” said Bob, now fully on top of the situation.

  In the course of time a lovely little diamond brooch, shaped something like a funeral wreath, arrived from Tiffany—the only piece of real jewelry I possess, a valued (and valuable) memento of my brief sojourn in Filmland.

  DON’T CALL IT SYPHILIS

  McCALL’S / September, 1965

  Scene: Blair General Hospital. Mr. Novak, teacher at Thomas Jefferson High School, enters an isolation room where Paul, a student, is recovering from a suicide attempt.

  MR. NOVAK: Anything I can get you?

  PAUL: Not a thing. What’re you doing here?

  MR. NOVAK: I had a feeling you might need a friend today.

  PAUL: You know something, Mr. Novak? I’ve got syphilis.

  What is Mr. Novak doing in Dr. Kildare’s hospital? Why have Novak and Kildare fans never seen this enacted on television?

  “A hopeful view of relief from their dangerous malady might be more welcome to the half-million persons in th
e United States who acquire this disease each year than the veiled obscenity permitted by Columbia in the vaudeville acts of certain of their commercial programs.”

  These angry words which today, perhaps because of their forthrightness, have a slightly old-fashioned ring, were uttered in 1934 by Dr. Thomas Parran, Jr., then New York State Commissioner of Public Health. Because it contained the words “syphilis control,” a radio talk he was to give on venereal disease had just been banned by the Columbia Broadcasting System. CBS explained the position: “In deciding what is proper for us to broadcast we must always bear in mind that broadcasting reaches persons of widely varying age levels and reaches them in family and social groups of almost every conceivable assortment. We do not believe that it is either wise or necessary to discuss and sometimes to mention some things....”

  Three years later Dr. Parran tried again, this time in the capacity of Surgeon General of the United States, to which office he had been appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt. He prepared a speech on the rising incidence of syphilis, particularly among young people, to be given over the NBC radio network by General Hugh S. Johnson. Johnson arrived at the studio, script in hand; three minutes before broadcast time, NBC officials decided to ban the speech. NBC explained it this way: “While the broadcasting company is in sympathy with the objective of the war against V.D., it finds itself unable to contribute to this campaign without seriously embarrassing the family group.” Which moved Dr. Parran to comment, “Nice people don’t talk about syphilis, nice people don’t have syphilis, and nice people shouldn’t do anything about those who do have syphilis.”