Inside the funeral home for New York’s luminaries

Written by Alex Vadukul

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. John Lennon. Greta Garbo. Jean-Michel Basquiat. Mae West. Arthur Ashe. Ivana Trump. Luther Vandross. Heath Ledger. George Balanchine. George Gershwin. Mario Cuomo. Biggie Smalls. Nikola Tesla. Celia Cruz. Joan Rivers. Aaliyah. Ayn Rand. Lena Horne. Norman Mailer. Philip Seymour Hoffman. Logan Roy.

What do these people have in common?

The answer is that, shortly after their deaths, they passed through the Frank E. Campbell funeral home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

For more than a century, Frank E. Campbell has been the mortuary of choice for New York’s power brokers and celebrities. In some circles, to end up anywhere else would be a fate even worse than death.

The writer Gay Talese, a longtime Upper East Sider, has lost count of how many services he has attended there.

“For a certain kind of person, they must end up at Campbell as a matter of honor and status,” Talese, 92, said. “And Campbell is the rare New York business that might never close, because it will never run out of customers — because everyone dies.”

“Eventually, sure, I’ll probably have my own moment at Campbell,” he continued. “I’ll enter reclined on my back and have a moment of silence there while friends and relatives come to stare at me. It’s the final stop. The last picture show.”

Frank E. Campbell, the Funeral Chapel, occupies a five-story building at 1076 Madison Avenue, in the heart of one of the city’s most expensive shopping districts. Black SUVs idle in the no-parking zone out front as clients consult with funeral directors.

A service might include horse-drawn carriages. Private jets and Rolls-Royce Phantoms can be reserved for grieving family members. The gold-hued coffin used for Ivana Trump’s service in 2022 at Frank E. Campbell cost a reported $125,000. The home also offers a sarcophagus casket for more than $150,000.

After Judy Garland’s death in 1969, the streets nearby were swarmed with fans who waited hours behind police barricades. An estimated 20,000 people went in for a glimpse of the body, which was dressed in a chiffon gown and silver slippers with buckles.

Mourners included Mickey Rooney, James Mason, Lauren Bacall and Otto Preminger. (When their own time came, Bacall and Preminger ended up at Frank E. Campbell, too.) After the service, pallbearers carried the coffin, which had been covered in yellow roses, to a hearse. Photos depict Garland’s three children — Liza Minnelli, Lorna Luft and Joey Luft — all dressed in black.

“I was 16 and still remember being scared of the crowds,” Lorna Luft recalled. “I remember Liza saying, ‘We’ll do this together. It’s the three of us.’ She was the oldest and had more awareness of what the media was saying about Mom’s death. But the crowds were sad about losing the legend. She was Dorothy to them. We lost our mom, and we had to share her with the world that day. I still can’t look at yellow roses.”

“My family will always be grateful for how Campbell protected us as kids,” she continued. “One reason they’re still considered the best is because of their code of silence. They don’t let anything leak out. That is extremely rare in this day and age.”

In 1980, after the murder of John Lennon, the Frank E. Campbell team arranged for a decoy hearse to lure away the swarms of journalists camped out front.

In 1994, when Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died in her Fifth Avenue apartment, a Frank E. Campbell undertaker slipped through the crowds outside her building and embalmed the body in her home.

The inner workings of Frank E. Campbell are almost as mysterious as the afterlife itself. Its pallbearers, doormen, cosmeticians and embalmers honor a code of silence when it comes to clients. Its website makes no mention of its illustrious customers.

William Villanova, the president of Frank E. Campbell since 2018, says that discretion is a crucial part of his job.

“We appreciate that people are curious, but privacy is our standard,” said Villanova, 54. “But people try. They sure do try. We’ve seen them hiding inside cars, behind cars, behind trees. Anything to get a glimpse.”

“I never discuss our clients,” he added.

Last year he served as a consultant on the HBO drama “Succession.” Fittingly, the memorial service for the show’s media-baron protagonist, Logan Roy, was handled by Frank E. Campbell, and Villanova appeared as the funeral director.

In a break with tradition, Frank E. Campbell allowed a reporter from The New York Times to spend some time within its walls. The decision to loosen up a bit coincided with a $20 million renovation that brings the home into the 21st century.

On one of my return visits, Villanova re-created a client planning meeting in his office, a plain room furnished with little more than a wooden desk, funeral industry excellence awards and a painting of the founder, Frank Ellis Campbell. We were joined by a fellow funeral director, James Pescitelli, and a representative from the Rubenstein Public Relations firm.

Pescitelli walked me through a services and amenities portfolio filled with images of private jets and security agents. He paused at a photo of a scuba diver placing a starfish-shaped sculpture made out of human ashes on the ocean floor.

“We have the ability to send a client’s ashes to a coral reef off the coast of Miami,” he said. “It’s a segment of reef we have access to.”

Frank E. Campbell can also arrange to have a loved one’s ashes blasted into outer space, as the section titled “An Out-of-This-World Memorialization” made clear. The description of the service noted: “There’s no more compelling send-off for someone who loves science fiction, marvels at space or simply longs to be at one with the cosmos.”

The home has also handled services for notorious figures like Jeffrey Epstein and the crime boss Frank Costello. Is everyone welcome at Frank E. Campbell?

“We do not judge the dead,” Villanova said. “Maybe the public saw someone a certain way, but to someone else, that was their father or their mother. We see the grandchildren crying.”

Long ago, funerals in New York tended to be simple affairs held in private homes. Services for average citizens became less austere — and more expensive — thanks, in part, to Frank Ellis Campbell, a death-industry pioneer who popularized innovations like motorized hearses, paid death notices and sumptuous viewing suites with names like the Broadway Room.

He made his reputation as the mortician to the stars in 1926, when he arranged the funeral of the silent film heartthrob Rudolph Valentino.

Valentino, 31, was in New York to promote his latest adventure romance, “The Son of the Sheik,” when he collapsed at the Hotel Ambassador and died of sepsis a few days later. His fans were inconsolable. There were reports of women dying by suicide, including the account of an actress in London who fatally ingested poison surrounded by pictures of the star.

Campbell had Valentino’s body prepared for a public viewing in his Gold Room. He reportedly enlisted women to faint for photographers and offered $1 to barflies to add heft to the crowd.

His preparations proved unnecessary. On a drizzly Tuesday, thousands of people, watched over by police officers on horseback, gathered outside the home. When the doors opened, there was a stampede. Windows were shattered, brawls broke out and people were trampled as mourners fought over souvenirs like flowers and strips of wallpaper.

Campbell died eight years later, but his name would live on. Twentieth-century figures who made stops at his home en route to the golden shore included William Randolph Hearst, Irving Berlin, Elizabeth Arden and Igor Stravinsky. As celebrities began to guard their privacy, the home made discretion part of the service.

Campbell’s wife, Amelia Klutz Campbell, carried on the business and moved it to its current address in 1938. After her death in 1954, the death industry underwent a change as conglomerates began to take over family-run homes. Frank E. Campbell was eventually acquired by one of these concerns, Kinney Services. In 1971, it was bought by Service Corporation International.

Service Corporation International, a Texas-based conglomerate that went public in 1969, now operates more than 1,900 cemeteries and funeral homes. Its founder, Robert L. Waltrip, said he aimed to do for the death industry what McDonald’s and Burger King had done for the food business. And he was not shy about trumpeting his company’s profits.

“People that don’t buy our stock just don’t like money,” he told the Times in 1993. “It’s the greatest buy I’ve ever seen. People are always going to die.”

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