Books: Disneyland of Death

FIRST STEP UP TOWARD HEAVEN (293 pp.)—Adela RogersSt. Johns—Prentice Hall ($4.95).’

Nestled among the warm brown hills of the San Fernando Valley, hardly a bone’s throw from some of the wealthiest Los Angeles suburbs, lies a brilliant green oasis of more than 300 acres, which at first glance seems to be a golf course. On closer examination, the oasis turns out to be none other than Forest Lawn Memorial-Park, the Versailles of cemeteries that Novelist Evelyn Waugh (The Loved One) celebrated as the supreme expression of the American Way of Death.

Forest Lawn is a cemetery in which nobody calls a spade a spade. Here the loss of life is known as “leavetaking,” a corpse is “the loved one” or “the revered clay,” the dead are merely “out of sight.” Here 1,500,000 visitors a year wander, secure in the knowledge that they can avoid seeing a tombstone; graves, marked only with bronze plaques set level with the ground, are clustered in such consoling sites as Sunrise Slope, Slumberland, Resthaven, Sweet Memories, Everlasting Love. Infants are buried in Babyland, which is “shaped like a mother’s heart,” and Lullabyland; every Christmas toys and tinseled trees are placed upon the graves. All day long, soft symphonic music is broadcast from loudspeakers concealed in the shrubbery; in fact, Novelist Waugh reported hearing recorded bird songs as well as the Indian Love Call.

In First Step Up Toward Heaven, Author Adela Rogers St. Johns, a loyal plotholder in Forest Lawn, has provided a gushing biography of Hubert Lewright Eaton, 78, the man who made Forest Lawn what it is today. As Biographer St. Johns, 65, sees her subject, Eaton is not only the Henry Ford of the business, a man who has “revolutionized cemetery development throughout the English-speaking world,” but also a major prophet who has helped to change mankind’s conception of death.

Lovers in the Sunset. The prophet came to earth on June 3, 1881, in Liberty, Mo., the son of an ordained minister and professor of natural sciences at a small Baptist college, who died on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land when Hubert was 16. The boy managed to finish college, got a job as a mining engineer, finally bought a promising silver mine in Rawhide, Nev. When the vein ran out, he looked around for a job, after due consideration signed on as manager of a rundown cemetery near Los Angeles. One day in 1917, as Eaton surveyed his “depressing patches of devil grass, straggling untidy pepper trees [and] grim granite headstones,” he was seized with a thrilling vision of “a great park, devoid of [the] customary signs of earthly death,” where the dead might, in the biographer’s prose, have “a beautiful passage to eternal life,” a place, said Eaton, “where lovers new and old shall love to stroll and watch the sunset glow.”

Already convinced that “the most important thing of all is salesmanship,” Eaton rushed right home and set down The Builder’s Creed: “I believe in a happy Eternal Life … in a Christ that smiles and loves you and me, [in] an immense Endowment Care Fund … to care for and perpetuate this Garden of Memory.” The Creed, combined with a pay-now-die-later arrangement soothingly described as a Before Need Plan, boosted plot sales by 250% in the first year.

Selling Immortality. Next came “shock tactics,” a series of suave radio commercials about what Eaton later called “the one purchase everybody has to make.” Next, the builder boosted sales by offering waterproof, fireproof, wormproof and even quakeproof vaults. Every morning he called his salesmen together and started the day with a prayer and a pep talk. They must always remember, he told them, that they were selling immortality.

To his regular sales force Eaton added a staff of “silent salesmen,” as he called the works of art he assembled at Forest Lawn. The first of these was Edith Barrett Parson’s Duck Baby, later followed by a vast sculpture group called The Mystery of Life, in which 22 figures watch a baby chick as it hatches out of an egg. From Europe, Eaton also brought back plans of three famous British churches—the one where Gray wrote his Elegy, the one where, according to legend, Annie Laurie prayed for her lost lover, the one where Kipling was (possibly) inspired to write Recessional—and had them rebuilt in Forest Lawn. The churches were intended for funerals, but last year 183 weddings were held in Eaton’s cemetery.

By the 1930s, Eaton’s vision had caught the California eye. On weekends, happy Californians packed the place like an amusement park, a sort of Disneyland of death. Some came to see the statues or to inspect the graves of their favorite show people—Tom Mix, Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, Irving Thalberg, Marie Dressier, Flo Ziegfeld are buried in Forest Lawn. Many found that the 100.000 shrubs provided plenty of quiet places to neck in. Eaton encouraged them all, and reached them all with the Forest Lawn message: “Everything at time of sorrow, in one sacred place, under one friendly management, with one convenient credit arrangement and a year to pay . . . ONE TELEPHONE CALL DOES EVERYTHING.”

Missing Symbol. Last year some 8,000 loved ones, about 22 a day, were buried in Forest Lawn. Some were interred. Some were entombed. Some were inurned. (Soon, if plans for flying funerals work out, some may be enhelicoptered.) All en joyed the services of the finest available morticians and a staff of makeup artists who can hold their own with any in Hollywood. Members of all creeds were welcomed, even atheists, but Negroes and Chinese were regretfully refused (the restriction was nullified this year by California state law).

At 78, Biographer St. Johns reports, Builder Eaton still has one foot in the graveyard. He takes a paternal interest in some 900 well-paid employees and issues periodic denunciations of other cemeteries, which, as a Forest Lawn Art Guide once put it, “cry out men’s utter hopelessness in the face of death.” To this statement Novelist Waugh somewhat tartly replied that “by far the commonest feature of other graveyards is still the Cross, a symbol in which previous generations have found more Life and Hope than in the most elaborately watered evergreen shrub.”