Judy Garland’s Casket Handles

by Marc Charbonnet

My assistant put the call through. A man named Steve, he said, had found me on the internet and had something that belonged to Judy Garland for sale. Something to do with handles.

“What kind of handles?” I asked Steve. “Door handles? Handles from a train case?”

I visualized Ms Garland stepping up into a train car with porters laden with her monogrammed luggage.

“CB radio names?” I added as he interrupted.

“Listen, mister, I said handles! These were the handles to her casket.” And then, as if enunciating to a very small child or hearing-challenged oldster, he shouted, “HANDLES” far too loudly.

We arranged to meet for lunch the next afternoon at Sparks Steak House. As soon as we sat down at a table in the center of the restaurant, he removed a package from his bag and placed two casket handles on the table. They had been painted black and were very worn.

Without pausing for my reaction, Steve said, “I have to begin by telling you a little bit about how I came to work at Campbell’s.”

The Campbell’s he was referring to was The Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel, the most exclusive funeral home in New York at the time of Judy’s death. It was the obvious location for her prior to her interment in Ferncliff Cemetery.

“I was twenty-one years old at the time,” he continued, “going to school here in the city. But having grown up in Buffalo, I knew very little about Manhattan. So, one morning, I was walking down Madison Avenue, and at one point I looked up and saw a sign that said ‘Funeral Home.’ Now, I needed a job when I graduated, so I walked in and went up to the woman who was the receptionist, and said, ‘Hello. I’m in school and I’d like to apply for a job.’ The woman looked up at me from her desk without moving her head, and with a pursed smile and a slight chuckle, she said, ‘My dear young man, do you know where you are?’ Totally missing her gibe, I answered, ‘Well, the sign outside says funeral home.’ She put her pen down and replied loudly, ‘My dear boy, you’re in the Tiffany’s of the funeral business!’ And I said, ‘What’s Tiffany’s?’ That’s how naïve I was. So, she looked down at her desk again and, dropping her fake smile, she said flatly, ‘I’m sorry. We don’t hire anyone without experience, at least a minimum of ten to fifteen years in the business. And we’re not hiring anybody now.’ And then she just kept looking down at her writing.”

“And they say New Yorkers aren’t really rude,” I said.

“Anyhow,” Steve continued, “I was about to walk out. But suddenly across the lobby walks Teddy Thorne, the director of Campbell’s Funeral Home at the time. Now it turns out he was from upstate New York too, and he recognized my accent, and he said, ‘Hey, kid! What are you doing here?’ I said I was looking for a job. And he said, ‘You know where you are?’ So, I said, ‘The lady tells me I’m in Tiffany’s.’ He laughed really hard, and said, ‘I get a kick out of ya, kid. I’m gonna give you a job!’ And I got hired. So, when I graduated school, I went to work there…, and that’s how I got started. I became the personal page and assistant to the director of Campbell’s. He immediately took a liking to me because I followed orders without missing a detail or asking any questions.”

“Okay,” I asked as I squeezed a lemon wedge into my glass of iced tea, “what did all this lead to?”

“Well,” he went on, “I had been working there for about four or five months already, when one night at about eight, one of the strangest evenings began. First of all, the director appeared, who rarely was there after five. When he saw me, he pulls a ten-dollar bill from his wallet and, as he hands it to me, says real serious-like, ‘Go buy yourself a steak dinner. And when you finish, go home, change into your best suit, and come back here at eleven.’ Well, being the good soldier I was, I did exactly as he said and was back right before his deadline.”

“Okay, go on,” I said, trying to mask my growing impatience with his detailed story.

“Well, I see that there’s a hearse there, and also a New York City police car. And besides Teddy, the driver is standing there. Following the hearse driver, Teddy and I get in. I hardly shut the door before the big hearse pulls away from the funeral home, staying close behind the police car, which appears to be leaving Manhattan. Keep in mind, I don’t ask questions. I have no idea what’s going on at eleven at night, for God’s sake! This whole thing seems strange!”

“Go on, go on!” I prompt, far past concerned with rudeness.

Taking a long sip of his tea, he settled back in his chair, continuing to look upward as if viewing a mental teleprompter, oblivious to my desire to get to the point. He reminded me of old friends and family in the Deep South, whose measure of a good story corresponds to length of narration.

“I realize,” he continued, “that we’re driving out to Kennedy Airport. Okay, so we get there, and then we hook up with a Port Authority police car. Now we’ve got one in the front of us and one in the back, and I still don’t know what’s going on. And we start driving all through the airport, but not any way that I have ever seen before. All of a sudden, I see blue flickering lights on either side of the vehicle, and I realize we’re actually out on the runway! Now, I’ve never done anything like that. I mean, I’ve barely ever been on a plane before, and I’m thinking, ‘My God, what are we doing out here?’”

“Yeah?” I say.

“I wondered if Teddy was going to fly me off to some undisclosed location or something!”

“Oh,” I said, suddenly snapping back to the restaurant we were in. Looking to my left, I noticed that an elderly woman at the next table was staring right at me, smiling. She had on a Margaret Thatcher wig, a beige corduroy blazer over a white silk blouse, and super-thick glasses that magnified her eyeballs — which were set dead center right into mine. I just couldn’t look away from her gaze, so I said, “Hi!”

“You can’t get a steak dinner in New York for ten dollars anymore!” the old lady crooned with a friendly face, interrupting Steve’s story.

I looked back at Steve.

“You can’t get a steak dinner in New York for ten dollars anymore!” she repeated, waiting for anyone to respond. “I’m sorry, I just couldn’t help but overhear!”

I looked over at her lunch companion, an even older woman, who was gazing at us fondly over the top of her cream spinach. I mentioned something about the value menus at McDonald’s, which made them both laugh and go back to their meals. It suddenly occurred to me how loud Steve’s voice was, even over the din of the restaurant.

“Well,” he went on, “what we eventually did out there on the runway is, we pulled up to a parked plane, before it even had approached the Jetway. And the cops and security are all there, lights are flickering…, the works. And extending from where the plane is stopped, there’s a long conveyor belt jutting out. And, of course, by now I kind of have a general idea, but I still don’t know exactly what’s going on and am too intimidated by this point to inquire about the details.”

“It all sounds very clandestine,” I offered.

“Yeah, like top secret! I mean, I was stunned! So I just kept my mouth shut. And then, out on the runway, I overhear the airport personnel and some of the police saying, ‘Blah, blah, Garland, blah, blah, Judy, blah, blah, Judy, Judy.’ So it took me a minute, but soon I figured out that it must be Judy Garland! I remembered seeing in the headlines, a day or two before, that she had died. But I was twenty-one years old and, you know, I just knew she was a famous person, that’s all. I didn’t know the extent of her fame at that time. But I was about to learn even more after that day.”

“Wow!” I said, noticing that the two old women to my left had now grown incredibly quiet as they ate.

“So,” Steve went on, “eventually out came the container, out of the airplane, with her in it. It was just a big wooden crate, coming down the conveyor belt. And we all get out and reach over and heave the crate off the belt and carefully put it into the hearse!”

“Uh-huh,” I say, hearing what sounds like a fork dropping on a plate to my left.

“So,” Steve said, “now we have to drive all the way back to Campbell’s. It’s about one in the morning, you know, and on the long ride I’m getting a little bit excited and anxious. We get into Manhattan, and as we’re pulling up to Campbell’s, there was already, like, fifty or sixty people out there on the sidewalk in front of the place! It was a pilgrimage outside the funeral home! I mean, word hadn’t gotten out about the services or anything really. Even we didn’t know the details. But these were the types of fans that knew that if Judy Garland’s funeral was going to be in New York, Campbell’s was going to do it. So there they were, just standing, waiting, and staring.”

“She had, or has, a really dedicated fan base,” I said, knowing that Steve knew I was in their ranks.

“Yeah. I mean, it kind of hit me at that moment as we were pulling up. It was so late at night! I got even more anxious! So, we pull in, take the shipping container into the funeral home, uncrate it. And inside was this casket. And I say casket because it was a European burial container, like in Dracula movies.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, a European casket is human-shaped, wider at the shoulders and narrow at the feet. And that’s technically called a casket. What we traditionally have in America are more long rectangular boxes, called coffins. There’s a difference. It was a pretty ugly casket, because it was dark-stained mahogany. But it was so darkly stained that it was nearly black. It was almost black on black.”

“And these are the handles?” I asked, pointing down.

“Yes,” he said.

“Why only two?”

“I’ll get to that. So, anyway, we took her out of that casket. And, well, when we did, we could feel that her body and all her clothing were wet. I mean, really wet. It was because of the container the casket had been shipped in. It was sealed too tight. She had literally flown across the Atlantic in an airtight bubble. So, the whole effect over that period of time was like a high-altitude terrarium. Heavy condensation. Her dress was ruined, which at the time I thought was a gray knit jersey material, but I later learned it was her wedding dress. Well, that was all soaked, ruined, you know, blech! And we peeled that off of her. We put the muggy garment in a bag and just threw it in the corner, I assumed for the incinerator later.”

“Wait!” I said. “Judy Garland was buried in a blue chiffon dress. That was her wedding dress.”

“Oh, I’ll get to that,” he continued. “So, then we got a really good look at all of her, and we realized she was in bad shape. They hadn’t done a good job embalming her in England. She was turning green…, gray and green.”

“Didn’t they perform an autopsy on her in England?” I said, gulping.

“Oh, yeah,” he said.

The waiter arrived to take our orders. I glanced half-commiseratingly over at the two elderly women next to us. They were both looking down at their coffee cups, stirring them with lips pursed, totally silent.

“So then,” Steve said, piping up, “Teddy says, ‘She’s never gonna last long in this condition!’ So he put us to work on her right away. Myself and a more experienced guy, we literally re-embalmed her all over again to preserve her properly, so she would last. She was turning into a swamp! And while doing this, we discovered that, at her wrist and the crux of her elbow, the medical examiner in England had taken out swatches of her flesh to diagnose the cause of death. And it was leaking stuff, so those missing pieces had to be reconstructed. Well, she had been in bad shape, and when we finished she looked better, but still looked pretty bad in the face and stuff, green and all, because, you know, we couldn’t repair the damage that resulted from the poor embalming.”

“Jesus!”

“So, anyway, she’s just laying there like that, and now it was about three in the morning. Teddy tells me to go home. ‘Come back at eight,’ he says. ‘I’m canceling all the funerals that we’ve scheduled.’ And when he said come back, he meant the whole staff! I’m talking thirty to thirty-five people there. So everybody was to report in the morning. Oh, I hardly slept that night! And when I got back there at eight in the morning, the police had towed all the parked cars from Madison Avenue to Fifth Avenue, on both sides of the street! And they had barricades that would snake up and down the street because they knew what was coming next. And it had already started: At eight, there were probably five hundred people there already. Police were there patrolling, obviously.”

“Wow!”

“So, all the employees assembled, and Teddy says, ‘Okay, this is what we’re gonna do: When we open at one today, we’re gonna be open for as long as it takes. Miss Garland will be displayed for the public, starting at one. We’re going to open the doors for fifty-five minutes at a time. Let the crowds in. Close for five minutes to rearrange the flowers, go to the bathroom, do whatever you have to do, and then open them again.’ So it was going to be fifty-five and five, fifty-five and five, twenty-four-seven!”

“Oh, my God!” I said, “They could’ve had a drive-through!”

“Believe me, if Teddy could’ve arranged that, he would’ve, because it would have saved time! They were anticipating a massive show of people, and it was a good thing they did, as you’ll see.”

“So, what happened next?”

“Teddy said to me, ‘Stay close to me. Mickey Deans is coming in at nine for arrangements.’ And, of course, I had no idea who Mickey Deans was!”

“Here are your tossed salads,” our waiter interrupted, slightly brushing one of the casket handles across the tablecloth as he set the bowls down in front of us.

“Mickey Deans was her husband at the time of her death. He managed a disco,” I stated, realizing he probably knew that by now.

“Yes!” he said, pointing up and smiling. “But at the time, I just did what Teddy asked! So, at nine, in walked three people. Mickey came in with an attorney, and also a minister, who I think was the minister who married them in England. So I was just standing in the arrangement room, and Mickey’s there with the three of them making the arrangements. They went over how long the funeral’s going to be, and that it was going to be by invitation only, and what the rules were going to be, et cetera, et cetera.”

“That hadn’t even been decided?” I asked.

“Nope. Not exactly. She wasn’t being displayed yet. She was still downstairs and not looking great. But I’ll get to that in a minute. So, Mickey’s there to make arrangements, and right away he said, ‘I don’t want her displayed in that ugly thing that she was shipped in from England.’ And we said, ‘Fine. We’ll be glad to sell you another coffin.’ So Campbell’s at that time had three display rooms with coffins for sale. And when Teddy or one of the funeral directors under him was making arrangements, he was kinda sizing up your role in life and your monetary worth, for all intents and purposes. And you would either go into room A, B, or C. It’s a bit of a selling job, obviously. But it was also a sensitivity issue. I mean, you couldn’t have everything in one room. You wouldn’t want to parade families that didn’t have much money past the really lavish, expensive coffins and say, ‘Oh, come down to this end of the room, where all the cheap garbage is!’”

I laughed.

“But, as it turns out, this technique weirdly backfired a little bit in this case, surprisingly.”

“How?”

“Okay, I’ll get to that. So, obviously, Teddy escorts Mickey and crew right into room A, which has the most expensive coffins. In there, they started at five thousand bucks and went up to about fourteen or fifteen thousand. And this is 1969, remember.”

“Wow!”

“Yeah, the most expensive one, now that would be over a hundred thousand bucks. And, at the time, that would be a solid cast-bronze coffin that weighed about eight hundred pounds. Anyway, we’re in the super-expensive coffin room, and Mickey Deans goes straight over to a very, very fancy silver-plated coffin. Very filigree, ornate, theatrical…. You know, very heavy design and, for lack of a better term, Italian-style. And it seemed apropos that someone looking for the grandest funeral treatment possible would like it. And, of course, Mickey said, ‘I think we’ll take this.’ So Teddy told them it was ten thousand dollars. So then, here’s the weird part, the attorney kind of shook his head. That causes Mickey to go over to another coffin, a less fancy one, which was five thousand bucks. And he said, ‘How about this one?’ And the attorney again shook his head.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, with this, Teddy interrupted and said, ‘Hold on, fellas. What’s going on?’ Campbell’s knew that having this funeral was not about money, actually. At that time, they used to do between eight and fifteen funerals a day. They were really busy. But as I said, they turned away an awful lot of people during this, because it wouldn’t be fair to other families to have mobs of Judy Garland fans trampling their services. So, they knew turning away all that business was going to be a huge loss, no matter what.”

“So, what happened?”

“Well, the attorney pulls Teddy aside and explains the facts…, that there’s just not much money there. To put it more bluntly, Mickey’s totally broke!”

“Oh, God!” I groaned.

“Yeah, Teddy didn’t flinch. But inside I knew his jaw just hit the floor.”

Our waiter brushed by our table to give the two elderly women their check. He also sat two middle-aged men in business suits to our right. “Is everything alright here?” he asked, turning to us. We both smiled and nodded.

“So, what did you do?” I said, looking back at Steve.

“Okay,” he said, “so now remember the clock’s ticking. The time was ten, and we were gonna open the doors at one, so there’s only a three-hour window until showtime. Anyone in the business would tell you that’s just not enough time, even if things were running smoothly. So, we didn’t even bother looking at any other coffins with them in any other rooms, even room C. We immediately left the three of them and went downstairs. And this is where it gets interesting. Teddy just picks up the telephone and calls a coffin company in Brooklyn. ‘I want the so-and-so coffin,’ he says, ‘and I want you to paint it white. I want you to put gold highlights on it, and I want you to put such and such hardware on it, and’ — now the real key, he says, ‘I want you to put a full glass liner on it!’ It’s a full-length glass lid that goes on top! Now, full-glass liners, in those days and even today, they go only on very expensive coffins. And even back then, that top probably cost eight to nine hundred bucks, and the coffin didn’t cost more than fifteen hundred.”

“A glass top?” I said. “Lenin, Stalin…, and Judy Garland.”

“Yeah, people in the industry actually sometimes call them ‘sneeze guards.’”

“Really?” I said, widening my eyes just as one of the old women to my left coughed.

“Yeah,” Steve said. “This was a first for me. I didn’t realize it at first, but in cases where a body of someone with great significance is going to be exhibited, well, they need to kind of guard against people who are gonna want to touch the body, or maybe even steal stuff or whatever.’”

“Steal stuff?”

“Oh, yeah! It used to happen to the bodies of saints all the time when their corpses were put on display for public expositions, because pieces of them supposedly held holy power. You know, in the seventeenth century, one of Saint Francis Xavier’s toes was bitten off by a Portuguese woman as she bent down to kiss his corpse during an exposition. She wanted it as a relic!”

“Oh, Lord!”

“So, with someone like Judy…, well, with her fans, I mean, you just can’t be too careful.”

The waiter cleared our salad bowls and put our entrées in front of us.

“Okay, okay…, so what happened with the coffin business?” I asked.

“So,” Steve went on, “we have less than three hours to go, and we don’t even have the coffin in the building. It doesn’t even exist yet! And Teddy’s on the phone, giving the specifics. And I can hear the guy in Brooklyn through the phone, saying, ‘But, Teddy, it’s ten a.m.!’ And Teddy just hangs up the phone.”

“Did he tell them it was for Judy Garland?”

“He didn’t need to. He just hung up because we’re the guy’s biggest customers. We’re Campbell’s! And whatever has to be done, you’ll just get it done and get it to me by one, you know? So this poor guy had to go get a coffin, paint it, put different hardware on it, line it with white velvet, get it on a truck, and get it to Campbell’s by twelve-thirty, not one! Plus, even if Teddy had told him it was for Judy Garland, I mean, that doesn’t really make a difference in this case, because Mickey had no money! This was a rush job on really low-end stuff. Teddy wasn’t getting the kind of money or prestige you’d get for a really famous person’s high-end coffin.”

“I wonder if, after that, he ever listened to a Judy Garland album again,” I said.

Ignoring my question, Steve continued: “Okay, so now the pressure was really on, and Teddy kind of took control. He had to, obviously. He says to Mickey Deans, ‘I noticed you didn’t bring any clothing in.’ And Mickey just flatly states, ‘Well, what’s wrong with the dress she’s wearing? It’s her wedding dress. She loved the ostrich feathers.’ Ostrich feathers were a perfect detail for this loony tune. Anyway, Teddy just turned his head slyly, glanced at me without a word, turned back to Mickey, and said, ‘Oh, we’re going to lay her out in that?’ And Mickey’s like, ‘Of course.’ So Teddy says, ‘Okay. Fine, then!’ But I didn’t even need to hear that, because that look he had given me said everything. I knew that this thing was wet, and in a corner, in a grimy bag downstairs…, if it hadn’t crawled away by now on its own. So, I was already swiftly out of the room, and I went to the assistant manager, and I said, ‘You won’t believe this, but they want to lay her out in that gray wet rag she arrived in from London with.’ It’s downstairs, all mildewy, and now it’s getting on ten, ten-something! I’m panicking, and he says, ‘Okay, c’mon.’ And we go downstairs, and we put it in another bag, a little black bag…, probably to seal the smell. And he says, ‘Quick, go take it down the street to the cleaners and have them do the best they can. Tell them, ‘ASAP.’”

“Oh, Lord!” I said.

“So, I walk out the door, just really focused and hurrying. And I forget, you know, I walk out onto the sidewalk, and I look up, and there’s thousands of Judy Garland fans in the street! Thousands! There’s TV cameras and all these newspaper reporters and photographers…, and now I’m completely paranoid. I have this lumpy sodden thing in a little black bag! And, of course, the fans have already spotted me, and I’m thinking, ‘I can’t walk out of here and go one block to these dry cleaners, filing past this mob. Everybody’s watching me!’ So, quickly but gracefully, I make a complete opposite left…, like I’m just some guy leaving the place, you know, and I go all the way around the big block, and come to the cleaners from the other direction, because I’m paranoid. I mean, this is crazy!”

“Right!”

“So, I walk into the cleaner’s, and a there’s a little Chinese man working behind the counter, and I hold up the musty bag and say, ‘I’d like to have this dress cleaned, and I’d like to have it back ASAP, please.’ And he just looks at the bag and says, ‘Okay, come back four.’ So, obviously, I say, ‘No, no, I need it before four!’ And he goes, ‘Okay, come back two.’ So, now, at my young age, I’m finally learning, and I say the magic words: ‘It’s Judy Garland’s dress!’ He stopped what he was doing, gave me his undivided attention, and half-shouted, ‘Who’s Udee Gakin?’ Then he shrugged his shoulders slightly, paused, and went back to his task, adding ‘Okay, come back one hour.’”

“Whew!” I said.

“So, I thank him, and as I’m walking out, I’m thinking that when this dry cleaner opens that little bag, he’s probably going to think I murdered someone! And I just forget about that for the moment and go back to the funeral home, and now things are almost in chaos outside. Flowers are coming in by the cartloads, and I mean by the cartloads. There’s nowhere for all of them! I then learned that she was going to be laid out on the ground floor, because Campbell’s had a chapel on the ground floor facing Eighty-First Street. Thank God! That’s perfect, because people are lined up on Eighty-First Street. The family will have a private service for the first two hours, and the public, or as we say in the business, ‘the banks of mourners,’ will follow suit. They’re gonna just walk right in the building from Eighty-First, and exit on Madison, so this won’t disrupt anything. And that’s good news, but the clock is still ticking.”

“You must’ve been crazy!”

“Oh, I was nervous, very nervous. Especially since they had basically put me in charge of fixing the dress…, that ruined dress that this woman had basically begun to decompose all over. They put me in charge of erasing what had happened to it, so this star…, who all these thousands of people had come to see, and every TV camera and newspaper reporter in New York City had come to document for the world to witness, could be buried in it forever, just looking as picture perfect as a poppy! Yeah, I was a little bit flustered, alright! By this point, I was fully aware of how important Dorothy was. Yeah.”

“So, the chaos was mounting,” I said.

“The whole building was like a whirlwind. I mean, we had thirty-some people working there, and everybody was running like mad, working Eighty-First Street on mostly carrying flowers into the building. I mean, they were practically backing dump trucks full of them up to the place and unloading. Also answering phones, and whatnot. Some people were actually helping the police with a little bit of crowd control and stuff, because sometimes people outside would cry or wail a bit and maybe freak out some…, and that just added to the tension. The whole place was controlled but frantic. Meanwhile, the clock is like tick…tick…tick, and right outside the door, the crowd was like swell…swell…swell. And I’m thinking, ‘The whole world is watching, and this is not going to happen on time.’ I mean, the body wasn’t even prepared! She was still green, for Godsake! On top of everything else, Campbell’s reputation is at stake. But Teddy’s keeping cool, and he says, ‘Okay, let’s get back to the arrangements.’ And I wasn’t there for that, because I went to the dry cleaners, but apparently Mickey said, ‘Okay, we’re going to have this public viewing last as long as it takes, and the actual service will be by invitation only.’ And he gave Teddy the list of who they’re going to invite and whatnot, and it was filled with Hollywood celebrities, the likes of her co-star Mickey Rooney, Lauren Bacall, Ray Bolger, who played the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, and a few members of the Kennedy family. And who’s giving the eulogy but James Mason. I’ll tell you about Mr. Mason a little later on.”

“Wow!” I said.

“So, before I even know what’s what, it’s time to go get the dress, and I hightail it to the dry cleaners, going the same way. I walk in, really just expecting the worst, and the man pops out from behind a curtain in the back with the dress on a hanger! And it’s as good as new! I mean, you would have never known what had happened in it! I mean, this guy is like the most brilliant dry cleaner in the world, hidden away on Eighty-Second Street in 1969. He can remove death itself from a wedding dress! Ostrich feathers and all. In under an hour! And he doesn’t even say a disparaging word. He just smiles real big and says, ‘Don’t winkie it!’ while holding it out to me.”

“Oh, my God!”

“And I’m grateful, but I say, ‘Wait! I can’t walk down the street with this thing displayed like this! You don’t understand!’ So he gets a little annoyed with me, but he kindly puts it in a box, puts tissue paper all around it and everything, and sends me on my way.”

“I can’t imagine trying to walk past that crowd! I would’ve been clawed!” I said, glancing over at the two old women to my left, and noticing that they’re still sitting there, totally motionless, even though they’ve paid their check.

“So,” Steve continues, “I do the whole thing around the other side of the block again. I come in the front door, and now it’s getting between twelve and one. Oh, God! Oh, God! And when I go downstairs, what do I see? There are these two guys hovering over Judy Garland’s body! One is fiddling with these brightly colored plastic things in her hair, with wires hooked up to them, and this is 1969. Back then, women curled their hair with a hot curling iron. This was the first time I saw a bunch of electric curlers, and he’s got them all in her hair. And she’s dead! It looked like Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory! I mean, I didn’t know, I thought maybe it was some crazed fan who had sneaked into the basement from outside. It’s as though he was trying to reanimate her. And I looked at him aghast, and I just go, ‘What in the world are you doing to her?’ And he just calmly says, ‘They’re curlers.’ And I said, ‘Oh.’ Later, Teddy told me that both of these guys were flown in from California at a second’s notice to fix her up! Professional movie makeup and hair artists. And they’re working on her like mad. Later, this completely miffed Teddy, who said, ‘They got enough money to bring in people from California, and they’re buying a chintzy coffin?’”

“What a scene!”

“Yeah! In any event, there’s the guy doing the hair with those weird electric things. And the makeup artist is truly, truly amazing. I mean, as I said, Judy was green, and he has a box with at least forty to fifty brushes in it. It was about two feet wide, and when he opened it up, my eyes went out of my head ’cause I never saw such makeup in my life!”

“Hmmm.”

“And he started to paint her! I mean, he literally painted her, base after base, layer after layer. He brought her back to life. I mean, as I said, she looked really bad as a result of the botched embalming in London.”

“Did he do a really good job?”

“Oh, my God, he absolutely painted a picture of her face on top of her face! As if she was coming back to life! When he was done with her, she was magnificent. Truly magnificent.”

“In your experience,” I said, “do you think that was one of the finest makeup jobs ever?”

“Oh, yeah, yeah! I’ve never seen makeup done on a dead person like that. He literally painted a portrait. He virtually reanimated her! She looked like she was just sleeping when he was done. I mean, I’m sure the people observing the body later were impressed. But if only they knew how fake it all was! But I guess this is showbiz right?”

“The show must go on!”

“Yeah, postmortem!”

“Amazing,” I said. “But can I ask you a question? She was very, very thin, wasn’t she?”

“Oh, yes!” His voice went up. “She probably weighed eighty-five or ninety pounds. Nothing. Very thin and frail. You know, it sounds a little bad, but in the embalming industry when we say someone’s ‘about to snap,’ we mean they are about to snap! She was like a glass twig. But with that thick layer of makeup, I’m sure we added an extra twenty pounds!”

“Frances Ethel Gumm was in there somewhere!” I said.

“Who’s that?”

“That was her real name.”

“Oh. Anyway, the cosmetics probably ended up hardening, like armor!”

“Well, if her funeral procession had driven past the Stonewall Inn downtown that day, she may have needed it. Her death sparked a riot!”

“Yeah. And, you know, I’ll bet you anything that layer of makeup is still intact! Still sealed in her grave like a perfect body cast, looking great.”

“The last thing to survive Earth’s annihilation…, Judy Garland’s Max Factor shell,” I concluded philosophically.

“Yeah, really. I was being very careful. Like I said, I was too young at the time to know the full extent of her career and all. But all the guys working on her knew! And you could tell. She was a goddess to them, which I learned even more about at the end of this event, due to the thousands outside the door.”

“Wow!” I say, one ear slightly cocked as I swear I overhear the two businessmen at the table to my right both discussing “surviving munchkins.”

“But, of course,” Steve goes on, “there’s no time to gasp at anything, because when the makeup artist has applied the last coat, it’s twelve-thirty! So, I have the dress there, and we slip it onto her. The hair guy takes the electric curlers out of her hair…, fluffs it up, fixes it. The dress is on, last makeup touches are done. At a quarter to one, suddenly the coffin arrives…, and it looks great! Really simple and perfect, with the clear glass on top! The guy did a terrific job!”

“Great!”

“And this was the part of the day that almost felt like some sort of surreal magic. It was uncanny, but it felt just like a Broadway production. Everyone was going boom, boom, boom, boom, boom! All this tension leading up to one final moment. Here comes the coffin. Boom! We roll it downstairs. Boom! Pick her up. Boom! Put her in, put the glass top over her. Literally, it’s five to one. We roll her right into the room, which is a jungle of flowers. I mean, from floor to ceiling, enough to fill two chapels…, the whole funeral home actually! And the aroma! And just like that, it all falls into place like a Hollywood production! With not a second to spare, literally at one p.m., we just walk over and open the doors, and it’s perfection. No one would have been the wiser! And right then, when we opened the doors…, I mean, the whole world just poured right in. Throngs of people! And it went on for two days.”

The waiter arrived to take our plates away. I swear I hear the old women to my left discussing funeral service package prices.

“I knew there were all kinds of people coming to see her,” I said. “Tell me about it.”

“It was surprising, yes,” Steve said. “Everyone…, young, old, black, white. It was a real general cross-section of the population…, all different sizes, shapes, and ages.”

“Did they have any emotional outbursts, the people that came through?”

“Oh, yeah. I mean, it was just me and three other employees standing around the coffin during the viewing. If you can imagine, all of Eighty-First Street was solidly packed with people for over twenty-four hours. They waited in the June heat to just walk in and file past her. And it was nonstop. Just like Teddy said…, open for fifty-five minutes, closed for five. Just like that over and over. Some people fainted. Some people just got very choked up and emotional and couldn’t walk. Not everyone, but there was a lot of stuff like that.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” our waiter said to one of the old women at the next table, “but we’re very crowded, and we actually do need this table now!”

The other woman inquired about a dessert menu.

I turn back to Steve. “What about the actual funeral service?” I ask.

“The day of the funeral,” he says, “which was by invitation only, all of these famous people are walking in. So, outside there’s even more cameras and police and everything than since that first day. But nothing like that inside, obviously. It was very formal. Everything was scheduled to happen at a certain time. And at one point we were supposed to have James Mason standing up by the other guests, speaking at the service. You know, all slotted to go on at a certain time. James Mason was giving the eulogy. And the service is already under way, and we couldn’t find him! No one had seen him, and we couldn’t find where he was. And then we realized that no one had actually seen him that day. You know, he hadn’t introduced himself to Teddy, or anything. So, we really started to panic. Like he was a no-show, and there was going to be no eulogy. Oh, my God, where’s James Mason? But right when it was time for him to speak, and we had all just about fainted, all of the sudden this big guy with a giant beard stands up in the crowd…, and it’s him! He had grown a full beard, so no one had recognized him! He just walked up to the front like clockwork, cleared his throat, and with that baritone, trained Shakespearian voice, he gave this moving eulogy.”

“Oh, Lord!”

“Yeah, really. And when he was done, that was when the pallbearers came in. They hoisted her on their shoulders and walked her out of the funeral home. And the song they were singing was ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ You know, ‘Thine eyes have seen the glory.’ And outside she went, into the hearse, and from there she went to Ferncliff Cemetery. It really was something to behold.”

“Gee!” I said. “How were her children? Do you remember?”

“I was standing next to Liza Minnelli during the service, in the side aisle of the chapel, when she was trying to sing. It was as if they were taking her mother out of the chapel, and she couldn’t sing along. Her voice kept breaking, and she couldn’t sing the song. I’ll never forget that. The family was really pretty much removed from the whole situation until the day of the service. The whole rush of planning and activity was really for the public…, and the public came!”

“The actual service was on a Saturday, wasn’t it?”

“Hmmm…. I can’t remember if it was a weekend or not.”

I heard two dessert menus plop down on the table to my left, and looked up to see the waiter stomping away.

“Did you have any other celebrity funerals there?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. Let’s see…. When I was there, J. C. Penney was a famous person, but not like a celebrity. I was there for a famous football player who died of cancer, named Brian Piccolo They later made a movie about him called Brian’s Song. I actually embalmed him, too. That was another big funeral. J. C. Penney and Brian Piccolo. That’s it, I guess.”

“Were they like Judy’s?”

“Oh, no! Nothing like that. Nothing. Judy’s was the biggest.”

“Now…, about the handles,” I asked, pointing down. “On a casket, how many would there be? Just two?”

“No,” he replied, “there would be two on the other side also. But those were badly damaged.”

“And how did you come by holding onto these?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, relaxing his shoulders and tilting his head a bit, “later that day, Teddy told the maintenance people to break up the casket she was shipped in from London. He told them to break it up, bundle it, and put it out in the garbage. And by the time I walked down to the basement, the whole thing was in pieces. So, I thought, ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait!’ This was the only thing I could salvage. I wanted something…, if not from her, at least from that day. So that’s how I came by them.”

I picked up the check for lunch and thanked Steve for a fantastic story. Did I buy Judy Garland’s casket handles@? Surprisingly, I did not. Not because I didn’t want them, but because I was outbid by the two old ladies sitting next to me!

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