Religion: Film Funeral

While hotspots from coast-to-coast observed moments of silence in her memory, while Broadway pitchmen hawked little copper medals stamped with her image and a Hollywood boy was gnawed by a 15½-in. rat which crept up his pants during a memorial revival of one of her pictures, the late Jean Harlow went to her last rest last week in a manner which has come to be regarded by the film colony as quiet, conventional good taste. With a reliable force of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer company detectives on guard to see that there was no repetition of the mob scenes at Rudolph Valentino’s obsequies in 1926, the body of Miss Harlow lay on a couch in the Tennyson Room of Pierce Brothers Mortuary, Hollywood’s largest. A portrait of the author of In Memoriam and a volume of his verse were arranged, as usual, nearby. In a “very beautiful but not overly expensive casket” purchased by the late star’s mother, Mrs. Jean Bello, Miss Harlow’s remains were taken to Forest Lawn Memorial Park’s Wee Kirk o’ the Heather, a nondenominational shrine in the nation’s most extraordinary cemetery, which has become, in the last decade, the Valhalla of the cinema business.

MGM, Glendale and Forest Lawn patrolmen kept the public well out of sight as 200 of Miss Harlow’s friends, relatives and colleagues gathered at the Wee Kirk, whose nave had been converted into a scented bower by $15,000 worth of flowers. Clark Gable,* Miss Harlow’s Business Manager Edward J. Mannix, MGM Producer Hunt Stromberg, Director Jack Conway, Cameraman Ray June, Director William S. Van Dyke were pallbearers. Jeanette MacDonald sang Indian Love Call. Nelson Eddy sang Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life. A Christian Science reader-practitioner named Mrs. Genevieve Smith, longtime friend of Miss Harlow, read from the Psalms and from Science & Health by Mary Baker Eddy (Nelson Eddy is no kin), recited the Lord’s Prayer and a trenchant 48-word eulogy. The body was then taken to a $25,000 mortuary chamber purchased by William Powell, the inconsolable actor who was to have become Miss Harlow’s fourth husband. Thus was concluded another notable interment at the institution which Promoter Hubert Eaton has made as indispensable to Hollywood’s great dead as a footprint in the cement at Sid Grauman’s Chinese Theatre is to its living.

Twenty years ago Forest Lawn was a debt-ridden, unprepossessing necropolis. Hubert Eaton, a realtor and onetime mining engineer, was assigned to manage it. He was immediately struck by the ugliness of its tombstones, by the fact that most cemeteries are “unsightly stoneyards, full of inartistic symbols and depressing customs.” Mr. Eaton placed a ban on stones, substituting bronze markers laid flush with the grass. He forsook the word “cemetery” for more euphonious Memorial Park. Today under his chairmanship it has expanded to 200 acres,contains in one form or another the dust of some 55,000 humans, with room for about 150,000 more, and is divided into sections with names like Babyland, Vale of Memory, Resthaven, Eventide, Slumberland.

Chairman Eaton has spared no expense to beautify his Park. At the foot of Mount Forest Lawn is an enormous marble group called Mystery of Life, at its top an 87-ft. Tower of Legends. Over the threats and legal objections of California morticians, Forest Lawn was the first large cemetery in the U. S. to install its own mortuary. There is also an Administration Building, copied from an English manor house and full of antiques, a flower shop, a crematory where last year 16% of the dead were received and a towering $4,500,000Mausoleum-Columbarium, with a Memorial Court of Honor, Memorial Terrace, Sanctuaries of Meditation, Vespers, Benediction, Trust and Truth. For Jean Harlow, William Powell chose the Sanctuary of Benediction.

Forest Lawn’s first funeral chapel was the Little Church of the Flowers, a quarter-mile downhill from the Wee Kirk. When asked in 1923 if a marriage might be performed in the Little Church, Chairman Eaton replied, “Why not?” Since then 7,000 nuptials have taken place, to the increasing distaste of Southern California ministers, in that church and in the Wee Kirk which was built in 1929 as a copy of the Scottish church where Annie Laurie worshipped. Ginger Rogers married Lew Ayres in the Little Church of the Flowers but there have been no cinemarriages at the Wee Kirk. The latter, however, has an impressive record of interment ceremonies. It was the scene of services for Will Rogers and Marie Dressier. Prior to last week, last big film funeral at Forest Lawn was that of Irving Thalberg, whose remains were taken from B’nai B’rith Synagog for interment in a $25,000 room in the Mausoleum. Jack and Lottie Pickford are in a family room in the Mausoleum, Flo Ziegfeld and Marie Dressier in crypts. Other famed Forest Lawn dead: Lon Chaney, Wallace Reid, Rudolph Valentino, King Gillette, Senator Frank Flint, Edward L. Doheny Jr., Alexander Pantages, Guy Bates Post. Harold Lloyd, Composer Carrie Jacobs Bond and Jess Willard will lie in the Mausoleum some day.

*Often Miss Harlow’s leading man, Mr. Gable was working with her on Saratoga when she was stricken. One sequence in this racehorse film prophetically required Miss Harlow to be gravely examined by a physician with a stethoscope. Saratoga, announced M-G-M last week, will now be re-written to suit a “new and entirely different persona”ty.” According to Louis B. Mayer, she will be a comparatively unknown brunette from Worcester, Mass., named Rita Johnson who won recognition on Broadway this season in George M. Cohan’s Fulton of Oak Falls. Miss Johnson thereupon declined the role.