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The author, Elizabeth Meyer, photographed in Trinity Church Cemetery. Helayne Seidman
It’s the place New York City’s elite are dying to get into:
Frank E. Campbell, the illustrious funeral home that has waked everyone
from Rudolph Valentino to Biggie Smalls, John Lennon to Joan Rivers,
Walter Cronkite to Heath Ledger.
At Campbell, confidentiality is key, and even in death — that great
equalizer — celebrities are supposed to go out with more elegance and
style than the rest of us. Jackie O, for example, was embalmed in her
apartment so that the press wouldn’t get a photo of her in a body bag.
Instead, she was removed from her Fifth Avenue apartment building in a
casket.
“High-five figure services were regular,” says Elizabeth Meyer, a
30-year-old socialite who spent five years working at Campbell. “But we
had some six-figure funerals as well. There’s no right or wrong — it’s
what you want to spend.”
In her new memoir, “Good Mourning”
(Gallery Books), Meyer writes about the strangest services and corpses
she pulled together — and things at Campbell, or “Crawford,” as it’s
called in the book, aren’t as chic as you might think. Modal Trigger“Rich
people rarely die in the summer,” Meyer writes. “I guess parties in the
Hamptons kept them living it up. Winter? We were booked solid.”Helayne Seidman
There was the room she converted into a replica of Bungalow 8,
replete with palm trees and a DJ, so mourners could properly send off an
infamous party boy. His family buried him in his favorite things: a
Snoopy T-shirt and bright green sneakers, a bottle of absinthe in his
hand.
On the guest list: royalty and rockers, socialites and designers. “It
all felt a little empty,” Meyer writes. “My fears were confirmed when I
saw guests coming out of the bathroom with red noses. Suddenly it made
sense why the family had asked if the upstairs bathroom had marble
countertops.”
There was the tour bus parked outside for guitarist Les Paul; the
$100,000 Ferrari placed next to the casket of a millionaire car
collector, who was buried with a black Ferrari jacket and a gold chain.
(Names have been changed, but identifying details remain.)
There were the two women who called for the same husband, each
completely unaware of the other. Meyer was at a loss; her boss, on the
other hand, had seen just about everything. He called one widow, then
the other, explaining that two identical phone calls had come in about
the same man.
“These people, I tell ya,” Meyers’ boss said. She asked if the widows
were surprised. “Even when they don’t know, they know,” he said.
He had two wakes for two families, though the widows rode to the cemetery in the same car.
Then there was the phone call from the son of a socialite who had
just passed away and was about to be embalmed at Campbell. Meyer didn’t
know she was there.
“I have a favor to ask,” he said. “I need . . . my sister and I . . .
we need . . . Can you tell me that my mother’s brain is in her head?” Modal TriggerThe author was asked by socialite Martha “Sunny” Von Bulow’s son to check to see if her brain was in her head.AP
Meyer ran downstairs to check the autopsy report. The brain had been listed as still in the body. She raced back to the phone.
“Yes,” she told him. “The autopsy report says that the brain is —”
“No, no, no. Not the autopsy report . . . I need you to physically see the brain. I’ll hold.”
Meyer ran back down to the embalming room, where she flipped through
the file and realized who this corpse was: the infamous Sunny von Bulow,
whose husband, Claus, had been tried twice for her attempted murder and
had since fled the country.
“The only way to see what, exactly, was left was to cut open her
skull,” Meyer writes. The embalmer “started to cut with extreme
precision while I braced myself for an eyeful of brains.”
Instead, balled-up pieces of Bounty paper towels fell out. Meyer freaked.
“Take it easy,” the embalmer said. “It might be in her stomach.”
“Her stomach? Why would her brain be in her stomach?”
“Sometimes after an autopsy, they take all the organs and stick ’em
in a bag, then sew it up in the stomach. It’s just what they do.”
The bag was there, but the brain wasn’t. Her son took the news remarkably well, and Meyer never heard about it again.
“Before working there, I’d probably seen three dead bodies in my
life, all at wakes,” Meyer says. “And they all looked like they were
supposed to in America — beautiful and sleeping. Which is ridiculous.”
Meyer grew up in wealth and privilege on the Upper East Side. She
went to school at Trinity (current yearly tuition averages $45,000),
where she met her best friend, Ali Hilfiger, daughter of designer Tommy.
After graduation, Meyer attended NYU while partying all over the world.
Then her beloved father died. He’d been sick for five years with
lymphoma, but Meyer never believed he wouldn’t make it. She threw
herself into planning his funeral and walked a few blocks from the
family’s apartment to Campbell, where someone immediately tried to sell
her a $90,000 bronze casket.
My fears were confirmed when I saw
guests coming out of the bathroom with red noses. Suddenly it made
sense why the family had asked if the upstairs bathroom had marble
countertops.
Meyer declined. “But I did buy a beautiful and costly mahogany casket
for my dad,” she says — and then had him cremated. She refuses to blame
the funeral industry for taking advantage of those overwhelmed by
grief, though she herself fell prey.
“Would my dad have preferred a clean, non-ornate casket, and that I
donate the rest of the money to charity? Yes. But at the time I thought:
This is the last thing I can ever buy him.”
Her father was an entertainment lawyer, and famous people packed the
room at Campbell. At that moment, she realized that unlike most of her
friends in attendance, she’d actually been raised and loved by her
parents — not nannies or sundry household staff.
“It should have been my father,” one friend told Meyer at the wake. “It’s not fair.”
Meyer spent much of the next year lost, mourning her father and
thinking constantly about working at Campbell. She’d never had an
interest in death or the funeral industry until he died, and her mother
was horrified: “But Elizabeth,” she said, “you could work in fashion!”
So Meyer did what girls in her circle do: “I took a job at a PR
company,” she says. “I did a nonprofit in South Africa — one of my
passions had always been doing charity work in Africa — and then one of
my friends said, ‘You know what? The funeral home makes complete sense.
It’s charity work, and it’s on the Upper East Side.’ ” Modal TriggerThe Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home on the Upper East Side.Google Street View
Meyer walked herself over and asked for a job; she pitched herself as
a party planner with social connections no one at Campbell had, and she
was hired. On one of her first days, she showed up in designer clothes
and $600 Gucci shoes, and jumped at the chance to help with removing a
body from a luxury co-op.
No sooner was the body on the gurney than it excreted waste all over Meyer’s new shoes.
“I definitely had a throw-up-in-your-mouth moment,” Meyer says,
laughing. Before that, she didn’t know that most dead bodies leak. “I
tried really hard to wash those shoes — I was too embarrassed to take
them to shoe repair.”
She threw them out and bought a pair of Aerosoles.
“No matter how much you read about dead bodies, it’s about going in
and smelling,” Meyer says. At Campbell, smelling salts were used in the
embalming room only some of the time — “like if a body came in and had
gangrene,” she says. “That smell is just beyond.”
Yet there were perks and quirks. Families would spend tens of
thousands on floral arrangements and leave them behind; Meyer would take
them home. Summers were blissfully slow: “I guess parties in the
Hamptons and trips to Martha’s Vineyard were enough to keep the
clientele living it up,” Meyer writes. “Winter? We were booked solid.”
As her boss explained, “it was the total opposite in lower-income
areas, where the heat seemed to stir up trouble on the street and could
be dangerous for the elderly. But [we] didn’t get that kind of
business.” Modal Trigger
At Campbell, Meyer was both in and out of her element: The clientele
were people she knew, who lived very similar lives and had similar
tastes, while the employees were largely working-class and
outer-borough.
Despite her obvious empathy, Meyer can seem tone-deaf when it comes
to how the other half lives: After the crash in 2008, Campbell took a
hit and tried to incentivize their employees by offering expensive
dinners and trips to Cancun. “Cheap perks felt desperate,” she writes.
She was really put off when the company treated the staff to a retreat
in Montauk.
“I had never been a fan of the Hamptons — the two-hour drive through
traffic just to see the same people I ran into on Fifth Avenue was not
appealing,” she writes. “I was much happier to hole up in my family’s
house in the Berkshires . . . Montauk was even farther east that the
Hamptons, and not worth it, in my opinion.”
Yet Meyer was so good at her job that she was promoted, and even when
the funeral home lost a cadaver — a UN ambassador’s body had gone
missing while in transit from New York to Africa — Meyer writes that it
was she who tracked it down, in the middle of the night, sitting in
storage at Charles de Gaulle.
Here, she was an asset: She’d been through that airport enough times
to know where they could be keeping a body. But at the funeral home,
tensions were mounting, and rumors began spreading that Meyer was having
an affair with her boss, who had mentored her and defended her.
“Even he knew it was ridiculous,” Meyer writes. ‘The guys I went out
with were twenty years younger, ten times richer, and a hundred times
more attractive . . . an overweight, graying family man was hardly the
guy I was trying to bag. Mom had suffered enough already.”
So she quit. Modal TriggerMeyer says that cremation is on the rise, and costs much, much less.Shutterstock
Today, Meyer has started her own private consulting firm
and has things she’d like to share, things the industry doesn’t
typically publicize. For example: You can buy a casket online at Costco,
and in New York you can bring your own casket into any funeral home and
they’re not allowed to charge you.
You don’t have to embalm a body unless you’re having an open-casket
wake, and you don’t have to pay for drainage, either. The idea that a
funeral is at least a $15,000 affair is untrue; it can be done for much,
much less, and cremation — which is on the rise — is often the cheapest
option.
“Especially with cremation — you don’t have to do a funeral home,”
Meyer says. “You can just do dinner in a restaurant and Mom’s in the urn
— she can come along.”
Most importantly: “If I could give one piece of advice, especially to
people in New York, it’s to look into prearranging a funeral for
yourself or your loved one,” she says. Fifty percent of people who are
planning a funeral are doing so for the first time, hobbled by grief and
trauma.
“I always compare it to weddings,” Meyer says. “Funerals are the
ultimate celebration. You can have more than one wedding, but you’ll
only have one funeral.”
