Inside the Funeral Home for New York’s Elite

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 over 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,” Mr. 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.”