- Funeral arrangements for Robert De Niro's grandson Leandro will be taken care of by Frank E. Campbell.
- The chapel has tended to the deaths of major celebrities, politicians, and socialites in New York City.
The day after Robert De Niro's grandson Leandro died in his Manhattan apartment at the age of 19, the actor was spotted precisely where you'd expect: Frank E. Campbell.
As The New York Post once quipped, the Frank E. Campbell funeral chapel is the place New York City's elite are dying to get into.
It's been an institution, now located on Manhattan's Upper East Side, for over a century. The funeral chapel's staff have tended to the corpses of Rudolph Valentino, Nikola Tesla, Judy Garland, Ayn Rand, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, William Randolph Hearst, Aaliyah, Heath Ledger, John Lennon, Biggie Smalls, Jeffrey Epstein, Ivana Trump, and too many other boldfaced names to list here.
Frank E. Campbell, the chapel's founder, got his reputation as the "undertaker to the stars" with the death of actor Rudolph Valentino, who was found dead at 31 in a New York City hotel room in 1926, following complications from appendicitis.
The death shocked fans and elevated Valentino to the status of an icon, according to a history of the funeral home from the New York Public Library.
A skilled marketer, Campbell capitalized on the death.
"He actually paid women to swoon and faint so the newspapers would pick that up and give him more publicity," George Amato, a former president of the company, told the New York Post.
A press agent working for Campbell "swept through nearby saloons and flophouses and rounded up dozens of bums to stand in the drizzle outside Campbell's Taj Mahal for a buck apiece," according to the New York Daily News.
The crowd begat more crowds and the scene turned into a riot, the Daily News reported.
Police officers turned up, but "they couldn't stop a great wave of citizenry from crashing through Campbell's plate glass window and surging upstairs to pay their respects," according to the Daily News. "The dead man's coffin was quickly sealed as his fans sought to rip locks of hair from his head."
According to the library, 100,000 people ultimately showed up. "Pickpockets did well," one newspaper reported.
Since then, the Frank E. Campbell funeral home has been known for its crowd-control skills. When Judy Garland died of an overdose in 1969, the building operated for 24 hours straight to allow the public to pay its respects, another former president, Gene Schultz, told ABC News.
We did run 24 hours non-stop. People paying respects sometimes walked through as many as three times, the same person," Schultz said.
There were complications. Garland's body was flown into New York from London, and the funeral home's staff found she wasn't embalmed properly. A makeup artist was flown in from MGM and "painted a picture of her face on top of her face" while a staffer whisked her dress to a local dry cleaner to restore the decay, a former assistant for the company told Air Mail.
After John Lennon's assassination in 1980, the funeral home arranged for a decoy hearse to clear away members of the media, Schultz told ABC News.
"Five minutes later, the correct hearse came in, pulled up to the door, and Mr. Lennon was brought out in the alternative container, and the director carried with him the urn that was going to be used, and proceeded to Ferncliff Crematory in Hartsdale," Schultz said.
Sometimes, the hearse hits a pothole
The funeral home's white-glove service makes it a draw for high-profile families. It has its own security team, a private elevator for families, and a staff that knows how to work with publicists and lawyers to carry out each family's wishes. It's been known to charter flights for mourners if families want to hold multiple services in different places. Its website brags that Frank E. Campbell has "arranged horse-drawn carriages, displays of personal art collections and yachts of all sizes for services at sea."
"We live only once," the website says. "All the more reason a memorial service should be extraordinary."
In the final season of HBO's "Succession," Logan Roy's children plan the funeral through Frank E. Campbell.
"We can do Reagan's with tweaks," his son Kendall suggests.
That kind of service doesn't come cheap. Elizabeth Meyer, a former employee, wrote in her memoir "Good Mourning," that services were regularly priced in the high-five figures and would sometimes cost six figures. But they can be extravagant: The funeral of one infamous partier was transformed into the nightclub Bungalow 8, including palm trees and a DJ, she wrote in her book.
Despite Frank E. Campbell's exacting standards, mistakes happen.
In 2016, two brothers agreed to pay $12,000 for the funeral home to handle their mother's cremation. According to a lawsuit they filed in Manhattan state court, her "cremated remains were mistakenly combined and mixed together with the cremated remains of an unrelated adult male," making it "impossible to distinguish or separate Decedent's ashes from those of the individual with whom her ashes were combined." The suit was settled in 2019, court records show.
Frank E. Campbell's own death had its complications, too. According to the New York Public Library, Campbell requested to be buried in a casket of solid bronze. When he died, in 1934, the 1,400-pound casket was too large to be moved to his family crypt and was simply left sitting in the mausoleum above.
It was Schultz, in 2001, who tracked down a surviving family member and made arrangements for a proper burial at a different cemetery.
''To see our founder not properly taken care of after all these years, it seemed personal,'' Schultz told the New York Times.