AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW. PUBLICATION DATE: JUNE 15, 2015
Even celebrities die — and he was the man who picked up the bodies!
Allan Abbott ran the leading mortuary in Hollywood and got an unprecedented glimpse of how celebrities really live and die. The Forrest Gump of the funeral industry, Abbott was everywhere celebrities died, from helping to prepare Marilyn Monroe’s body to standing next to Christopher Walken at Natalie Wood’s funeral. Now in his new memoir Pardon My Hearse, Abbott tells the rags-to-shroud story of how he went from a young man with a hearse to the funeral director to the stars — a rollicking, unexpectedly hilarious story of glamorous funerals, mishaps with corpses and true-life glimpses of celebrities at their most revealing moments.
When he wasn’t transporting celebrity corpses, Abbott used his funeral limos to transport living celebrities to Hollywood parties and rented his vast collection of cars and funeral props to movie and TV productions. Pardon My Hearse presents a dazzling A-List of celebrities, living and dead, whom Abbott encountered during his career, including Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Joe DiMaggio, Robert Redford, Frank Sinatra and others.
Pardon My Hearse takes readers behind the scenes to tell the secrets of Marilyn Monroe’s funeral (where Abbott acquired the most unlikely souvenir of Monroe’s falsies) and dishes the inside story of disgraced crematorium operator David Sconce, who ordered an attack on Abbott’s business partner Ron Hast to cover up Sconce’s criminal mishandling of bodies and remains. Abbott also shares gruesome details of removing corpses from the devastation of the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, reburying corpses dislodged from the 1978 mudslide that swept through the Verdugo Hills Cemetery and more.
A treasure trove of insight and gossip you can’t get anywhere else, Pardon My Hearse is an eye-opening look at secret Hollywood from the man who literally knows where the bodies are buried.
About the Authors: Allan Abbott is the co-founder of Abbott & Hast Mortuary, Inc., Southern California’s leading funeral service accommodation company. Abbott has participated in the funerals of numerous celebrities, including Marilyn Monroe, Natalie Wood, Clark Gable and Karen Carpenter. Gregory Abbott is the former managing editor of Abbott & Hast Publications, producers of Mortuary Management magazine.
$16.95 ($17.95 Canada) • Trade Paperback • 6" x 9" • 270 pages
ISBN 978-1-61035-248-2
BIOGRAPHY/Entertainment • BISAC BIO005000
AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW.
PUBLICATION DATE: JUNE 15, 2015
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The story of the San Joaquin California's heartland river its people, its places, its past. In the maiden embrace of Thousand Island Lake, Garnet Lake and Shadow Lake sparkling gems of the John Muir Trail country the collected droplets of what will become the San Joaquin River gather. At these first resting spots, the waters stand clear and cold, but this pristine distinction is not to last. Wending its way down towering mountains, through deep canyons and between undulating foothills, the river passes some of the most beautiful country in America, yet by the time it reaches the San Joaquin Delta, nearly 400 miles and 10,000 vertical feet later, it has become little more than a public sewer, a fouled, controlled drain for agricultural and municipal wastewater. While nearly all of America's major rivers have been compromised, few have been so misused as the San Joaquin. In its comparatively brief history it has been dammed, diverted and depleted beyond comprehension. Some see the San Joaquin as a river betrayed. This book is not an academic history; rather, it is the story of a real river its people, its places and its past based on the lives and letters of those who have known it firsthand. More than anything, this book seeks to identify the forces and figures who have shaped, altered and corrupted the course of a once mighty river. So come, step back in time and travel along; there's one of the old river steamers now. Hop onboard and journey up the river. You can reflect on the river's rich and colorful past and visit its backwaters and byways. You'll also have a chance to stop and examine those places where the water barons and power brokers left their mark, as well as the spots where government intervention went awry. And perhaps during the journey you'll gain a bit of insight about the hard choices to be faced if the wise use of this essential resource is to prevail.
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California Badmen is a exploration of little-known Western frontier gunfighters. Billy Mulligan, Sam Temple, Peter Olsen, Joe Dye, Bob McFarlane and those responsible for the Rancheria killings are brought back through the pages and taking their stand in Californian history. The riotous lives of these unique collection of mean men with guns spill over the California frontier and rival the likes of “Wild Bill” Hickok, Billy the Kid, and the Earp Family.
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$18.95 $11.37 |
Volume IV: Stories include Clovis, Madera, Sanger, Academy, Hanford, Fresno, Grangeville, Centerville, Fowler, Dos Palos
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$22.95 $13.77 |
When Josephine Knowles left for the Klondike gold fields with her husband in 1898, she didn’t know she would be facing a constant battle with cold, disease, malnutrition and the ever-present possibility of death. Gold Rush in the Klondike is Knowles’s true story of her year in the Yukon territory, a revealing, never-before-published personal memoir of day-to-day life at the height of the Klondike Gold Rush. Written in a clear, forthright, nineteenth-century style, Gold Rush in the Klondike presents terrifying struggles against a hostile environment, picturesque descriptions of an untouched Arctic wilderness and Knowles’s keen observations of men and women on the frontier. A Victorian gentlewoman of refinement, Knowles found herself among swearing, whoring, sometimes violent miners, whom she won over with her grit and compassion. Deciding to never moralize or condemn, Knowles writes frankly of the intense hardships that drove miners into lives of drink and dissipation and the frontier women who were forced to make stark choices between prostitution and starvation. Knowles’s adventures include encounters with author Jack London (Knowles firmly disapproved of London’s cruel mistreatment of his sled dogs), nursing miners during a typhoid outbreak until she fell ill herself, witnessing savage fights among the miners, dangerous travel through the mountain passes and river rapids of the Yukon, and a daring surreptitious visit to a gambling saloon. Amid all hardships, Knowles formed warm relationships with the mining community, for, as she put it, “All the diseases and other troubles had knitted us into one large family.” Illustrated with period photographs, Gold Rush in the Klondike is an invaluable historical document of a lost time and place and an admirable portrait of one woman’s determination in the face of danger.
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To commemorate the 75th anniversary of this amazing year in Hollywood history, “1939: The Greatest Year in Motion Picture History” profiles of six of the greatest films of the year: “Gone with the Wind,” “Stagecoach,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and “The Wizard of Oz.”
Each of these films was based on a great story, and “1939” reveals in detail how those stories came into being, how long they waited to find fame in film, and how the movies inspired by them eventually made motion picture history. “1939” also describes the behind-the-scenes story of how the film was made: how the story was adapted to a film script; the writers, producers, directors, actors, and technicians who made the film; how the film was received by critics and the public; and the later careers of the people who made the film.
“1939” plunges deep into the reality behind the Hollywood dream factory. Besides giving a full account of the artistic creation of each film, “1939” also describes the business deals that made each film possible and the Hays Office censorship that mandated careful handling of social and sexual themes — plus the colorful personalities in front and behind the camera and their sometimes disordered personal lives. Hollywood in the 1930s was crass, commercial, restrictive, and frequently dysfunctional — but it produced immensely enjoyable films that are still watched with pleasure today.
The perfect combination of film history, artistic appreciation, historical insight, and gossip, “1939: The Greatest Year in Motion Picture History” is a book that no movie fan should miss.
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As countless thousands poured into the fertile San Joaquin Valley of California in the decades following the Civil War, some brought visions of man's darker side to this new Eden. Murder in the Garden is the absorbing examination of fifteen notorious crimes from the not-too-distant past of Fresno, California.