For the famous and infamous of New York City, 1076 Madison Ave., at 81st Street, is a mandatory stop.
For all of them, sadly, it’s the next to last stop.
It’s the headquarters of Frank E. Campbell, the “funeral director to the stars” whose most recent RIP VIP was comedy legend Joan Rivers, who died this month at 81.
Her daughter, Melissa, watched as Campbell’s efficient men in black carried Joan’s mahogany casket to the funeral home’s sleek Cadillac hearse, where she kissed the coffin before the vehicle drove off.
A few weeks earlier, the funeral for Lauren Bacall, who died at 89 on Aug. 11, was held in the Frank E. Campbell chapel. Only close family and friends, about 50 in all, were invited for the closed-casket ceremony.
Rivers and Bacall are just two of the untold hundreds of A-listers and one-percenters — movie stars, sports heroes, politicians, media figures, socialites and even mobsters — to have been eulogized and prepared for burial or cremation at the exclusive undertaker establishment.
The list of clients reads like a Who’s Who: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Robert F. Kennedy, Ed Koch, Judy Garland, Leona Helmsley, Ed Sullivan, James Cagney, Greta Garbo, George Gershwin, William Randolph Hearst, Malcolm Forbes, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Joan Crawford, Rita Hayworth, L’Wren Scott, Heath Ledger, gangster Frank Costello and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Made by Valentino
Frank Campbell was born on July 4, 1872, in Illinois. He got his training making caskets in what he called “an undertaker’s shop,” and when he was 20, he came to New York and worked in funeral parlors owned by a minister.
He soon opened his own parlor, on 23rd Street near Eighth Avenue, becoming part-mortician, part-showman, the PT Barnum of death.
Before Campbell, funerals were usually held in the homes of the deceased. He introduced the first funeral-parlor chapel and was probably the first to advertise such a business.
Where horse-drawn wagons usually carried the deceased, Campbell began using motorized hearses and limousines.
Seemingly as a publicity stunt, he took out a $1 million policy on his 15-year-old son, Frank Jr., making him “the most heavily insured boy in the country.”
By 1915, Campbell was the No. 1 undertaker in town to “create a service so sublimely beautiful, in an atmosphere of such complete harmony, as to alleviate the sorrow of parting.”
But the funeral that changed everything was the sudden death, in 1926, of 31-year-old silent-film idol Rudolph Valentino.
The day he died, following surgery for a perforated ulcer, was termed by the press “the day Hollywood wept.” In New York, Valentino’s body was laid out for viewing, and craziness ensued.
Thousands of fans stormed Campbell’s, then at Broadway and 66th Street, causing a near-riot in which dozens were injured. One newspaper ran a huge banner headline: “75 HURT IN RUSH TO SEE VALENTINO.” An aerial photo of the scene around Campbell’s showed it littered with trash, and cops holding back a mob of men in straw hats.
There were reports that some fans had even attempted suicide, and rumors spread of fears that the star’s body was on the verge of being damaged by mad fans throwing themselves on it.
When New York’s Finest were called in to deal with the throng, Campbell’s was said to have spirited away Valentino’s body and put in its place a wax figure.
“The crowds were huge and all this craziness was going on,” says Frank E. Campbell’s current president, George Amato.
But Campbell wasn’t satisfied.
“He actually paid women to swoon and faint so the newspapers would pick that up and give him more publicity,” Amato says.
Privacy Above All
After Valentino, Campbell’s became known as the funeral home of the stars.
In 1969, when Judy Garland died, as many as 1,500 fans stood vigil outside Campbell’s during a heat wave, with a line of cops keeping them from entering. At some point though, 20,000 fans went past her glass-enclosed coffin to view her in repose. Mourners included Bacall, then-Mayor John Lindsay, Patricia Kennedy Lawford and Garland’s daughters, Liza Minnelli and Lorna Luft.
The press, however, was barred, which was part of Campbell’s appeal — the promise that secrets will be kept.
When John Lennon was killed in 1980, Campbell’s employed a decoy hearse and coffin and used another vehicle to take Lennon’s body to a crematorium.
Campbell’s top selling points, Amato says, “are privacy and confidentiality, and we are able to maintain that 100 percent so that the family’s wishes happen.”
Campbell’s top selling points, Amato says, “are privacy and confidentiality, and we are able to maintain that 100 percent so that the family’s wishes happen.”
It has its own security team and supplements them with off-duty New York City cops.
“We make sure our entranceway, as far as ingress and egress, is taken care of properly without having the family being inundated,” Amato says. “In the building, we have a private elevator and a private floor for the visitation that takes place. We have our security men on the front door checking the people arriving to make sure they are on the list, and they are escorted properly upstairs.”
Cellphones, meanwhile, are banned from the main chapel.
Amato says one of the most complex recent funeral arrangements involved the accidental-overdose death of 28-year-old actor Heath Ledger in January 2008.
“I was very closely involved with the people who were handling him, because he was going to be sent to Los Angeles and then Australia,” Amato says. “There was the Warner Brothers private jet that was being used for him and the family, so there was a lot of coordination to make sure that it all went exactly the way they wanted it, and we had to maintain the privacy and confidentiality that they wanted.”
Golden send-offs
Families can dictate whatever service they want, and Campbell’s promises that no legal request is ever denied.
When we have a high-profile funeral, we’re all on super-alert, and it’s more stressful.
- George Amato, funeral home president
At one odd service, the family of an artist placed an airplane tire on an easel in the front of one of the rooms, and during the service, mourners took turns painting it. Otherwise, there was not a word spoken or music played.
At another service, the deceased’s two Doberman pinschers stood at the foot of their master’s casket. They never moved or barked.
Other funeral directors often refer their high-profile clients to Campbell’s because they don’t have the facilities to handle the necessary security and privacy.
“When we have a high-profile funeral,” Amato says, “we’re all on super-alert, and it’s more stressful. High-profile families always have specific things they want, and we have to work with their handlers, their planners, their attorneys, their publicists, and we’ve got to be sure we’re coordinating all of that with the family’s wishes. Each one is unique.”
They’re also not cheap. Although Campbell’s refuses to disclose prices, some have been reported, including a silver-plated, seamless copper coffin that cost $69,500 and a combination memorial bust and urn for $7,000.
They also will sell you a piece of gold jewelry containing a lock of your beloved’s hair — for $2,000 to $10,000.
Although his legacy lives on, Frank E. Campbell’s family no longer owns the business.
Today it’s run by Service Corporation International, a Houston-based “death care” conglomerate that’s the largest provider of funeral, cremation and cemetery services in the nation. It’s big business, at least a billion dollars annually, and Frank E. Campbell is the star in its portfolio.
Campbell himself died on Jan. 19, 1934, at age 62 of heart disease.
His obituary stated that his interment would be private at the New York and New Jersey Mausoleum in Union, NJ, where the body of his mother, Malvina Campbell, had been placed.
But in 2001, Campbell’s remains were buried in The Bronx, at Woodlawn Cemetery, courtesy of the then-president of Campbell’s, Gene Schultz, who was put off by the poor condition of Campbell’s original resting place.
“To see our founder not properly taken care of after all these years,” Schultz told a reporter, “it seemed personal.”
Jerry Oppenheimer is a best-selling author who is completing a biography of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. His most recent book, just released in paperback, is “Crazy Rich: Power, Scandal, and Tragedy Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty.”