Monthly Archives: August 2025

Quietly (and how!), Frank E. Campbell, ”The Funeral Chapel Inc.,” the city’s undertaker to the stars, is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year. It is a hushed affair. There will be, according to an official, ”no formal celebration, no formal acknowledgement” outside the building at 81st and Madison – and not much within. That is the place where, at the end, one could find Rudolph Valentino, Elizabeth Arden, George Balanchine, Bernard Baruch, James Cagney, Terence Cardinal Cooke, to alphabetically name-drop but a few.

”To create a service so sublimely beautiful, in an atmosphere of such complete harmony as to alleviate the sorrow of parting, is to render a service to mankind,” Frank E. Campbell himself said an exceedingly long time ago. Mr. Campbell got his start at age 12, in 1884, at a funeral home in Camp Point, Ill., helping to make caskets. By 1893 he was earning $10 a week in New York at the Stephen Merritt Undertaking and Cremation Company.

By 1898 he was in business for himself on West 23d Street. The rest is the stuff of mortuary legend.  According to an in-house history of the concern, it was the founder’s business genius to recognize a need peculiar to New York and fill it. The custom at the time was to have funerals at home. That may have played well elsewhere in the land, but the majority of New Yorkers lived in apartments or residential hotels. This made for a cramped, to say nothing of crabby, funeral. Mr. Campbell ”combined the facility of viewing with the atmosphere of the church” and set the industry on its ear. Most funeral parlors of the period were simply basic storefronts. Mr. Campbell’s place was a showcase of mellow light, decorative furniture, potted palms, and art. By the time he buried Enrico Caruso, in 1921, the parlor had been moved to Broadway and 66th Street. By the time he buried Rudolph Valentino, after a riot at the bier, in 1926, his reputation was writ in stone, after a fashion. The parlor outstripped the competition for celebrity trade. By the time the business moved to 81st and Madison in 1938, Mr. Campbell was dead and buried four years (solid bronze sarcophagus placed in the family mausoleum in North Bergen, N.J.). His widow, Amelia Klutz Campbell, ran the business until she died in 1948 (cremation, ashes in the mausoleum) and it was sold off.  There have been three owners since, but the name has remained, because of the reputation. Long after his death, Frank E. Campbell was quoted widely, particularly after Jessica Mitford’s savagely witty 1963 expose, ”The American Way of Death,” helped shore up a national assault on undertakers by clergymen. Writing about these critics in The New York Times, Homer Bigart said: ”They demand a curb on what they call the neo-pagan corpse worship of the modern funeral. Never keen on embalming, cosmetology, fancy coffins and other frills of funerary art, they want a return to simple, inexpensive, and austere rites.” Eventually the din died down, and funerals got neither cheaper nor less elaborate – they are still the third biggest-ticket purchase for most Americans, after homes and cars – but not before one president of Frank E. Campbell told the press: ”These dames that write these books – they do not want to hear anything good. If you kill sentiment, you are a dead pigeon. The world runs on sentiment.”

Today the business is owned by a Houston outfit, Service Corporation International, the largest funeral parlor operator in the country, whose chairman has characterized it as ”the True Value Hardware of the funeral service industry.” The chain, according to Eugene Schultz, assistant regional manager of the funeral division, considers Campbell the jewel in its crown. Having said that, Mr. Schultz offered a tour of the facility, volunteering that the 90th anniversary has been duly marked with a $500,000 restoration. Mr. Schultz walked somberly, at a loss for anecdotes, saying the famous dead are brought here because of quality and service and the knowledge that ”we will do everything possible to carry out any family request.” Asked if he could recall any extraordinary requests, he said, ”Not offhand.” The five-story funeral home was cool, with air-conditioners humming on each floor, quiet, and lovely, even though the elevator was exceptionally narrow, given its depth.