Forest Lawn in Glendale: Life, Death, and Resurrection among Palm Trees and Movie Stars

This very L.A. cemetery revolutionized design with big art and an emphasis on life’s joys.

T his past fall I started a series on historic cemetery landscape architecture with a piece on Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass. It’s the first purpose-built garden cemetery in America, dedicated since the 1830s to memorializing the dead in a setting with beautiful trees and gardens, elegantly arranged plots, and nice sculpture. The Boston Brahmins might walk the earth no more, but Mount Auburn’s the place to go to channel them. In Washington, Arlington National Cemetery is unequaled for reflection on patriotism and sacrifice for country. It’s got its own unique history, carved as it was, for the Union Army’s dead, from General Lee’s plantation.

Both cemeteries are lovely and moving. So, too, is Forest Lawn in Glendale in Southern California. It’s the newest of the three, incorporated as a cemetery in 1906. It’s unique, too, as a product of California and of Hollywood. It’s the closest this simple Vermont soul will ever get to a critical mass of Oscar winners, however still, horizontal, and subterranean they might be. At least no one has to worry about getting slapped.

The Academy Awards are next week, and we in Vermont have just gotten a foot of snow. Mud-season is upon us. What better time to revisit a place with perfect weather. Oscar winners in perpetual residence include Marie Dressler, Clark Gable, Rex Harrison, Mary Pickford, Bette Davis, Jennifer Jones, Victor McLaglen, Norma Shearer, Jimmy Stewart, Elizabeth Taylor, Humphrey Bogart, and Spencer Tracy.

Silent-film star Tom Mix rode off into the sunset here. Dam-builder and water czar William Mulholland is near a sprinkler. Joan Rivers, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Red Skelton, and Ed Wynn add comic relief. Clara Bow, Theda Bara, Errol Flynn, Lauren Bacall, and Jean Harlow add dash and sparkle. Michael Jackson is in an undisclosed location. I found Bette Davis’s, Clifford Odets’s, and Rex Harrison’s graves using GPS. W. C. Fields’s marker doesn’t say he’d rather be in Philadelphia. Ralph Edwards, host of This Is Your Life, is there, and rightly so.

Forest Lawn is around 300 acres set at the sloping base of the Verdugo Hills a few minutes from the Arroyo Parkway in Glendale. It’s the forever home to about 350,000 people. As cemeteries and their art and architecture go, there’s no place like it.

The visionary behind Forest Lawn is Hubert Eaton, an engineer and metallurgist from Kansas City whose grandfather was the president of Colgate and who made and lost a fortune mining silver. Only 30 but still broke, Eaton grabbed an opportunity to go into another line of excavation. He got a job in St. Louis selling cemetery plots “before need,” a radical idea.

Few except the rich and ancestor worshippers planned for the inevitable. As a salesman, Eaton had the most success when he pitched what he called “a moral need,” the foundation of which was peace of mind and the avoidance of emotional trauma. He did well and soon went west. He landed at Forest Lawn, which was already a few years old and having so-so success. He bought the place and transformed it.

His vision is “The Builder’s Creed,” which Eaton wrote in 1917 — it’s carved in a stone wall with his etched signature. It starts with a one-line paragraph: “I believe in a happy Eternal Life.” A few lines later, he tells us he believes, “most of all, in a Christ that smiles and loves you and me.”

Eaton continues with an explicit philosophical and aesthetic critique of other cemeteries. “The cemeteries of today are wrong because they depict an end, not a beginning,” Eaton wrote. They’re “unsightly stoneyards filled with inartistic symbols and depressing customs, places that do nothing for humanity, save a practical act.” He promised to build a Forest Lawn “as unlike other cemeteries as sunshine is unlike darkness, as eternal life is unlike death.” His modern cemetery would be “filled with towering trees, sweeping lawns, splashing fountains, singing birds, beautiful statuary, noble memorial architecture with interiors full of light and color.” Death wouldn’t and shouldn’t be sad. Death signals eternal life but also a celebration of life.

Having come from a devout, Christian, New England background, I understand this without cynicism. There’s no fire and brimstone. Atonement, much less punishment, is hard to find. It’s upbeat, therapeutic, ecumenical Christianity. I’m judging the place as a work of art.

Forest Lawn was new in other respects. At Eaton’s insistence, tombstones were almost entirely eliminated in favor of engraved bronze tablets set flush with the ground. This infuriated the cemetery-monument business, and he later mortified the local funeral-home industry when Forest Lawn opened its own mortuary, casket-selling business, and florist’s shop. It pioneered the vertically integrated business model for cemeteries and a cemetery brand with branches throughout the Southland.

As cemeteries go, Forest Lawn is a Gesamtkunstwerk — a total, unified work of art — as practiced at points during the Art Nouveau, Arts & Crafts, and Modernist movements. An array of arts — landscape design, sculpture, mosaics, stained glass, church architecture, and even the flat grave markers — is synthesized and integrated to achieve a work of art more powerful than its disparate parts. Not to dwell on Wagner, but this concept was his invention and first applied in the Ring cycle, where music, singing, costumes, and stage design reinforce one another.

The ban on most tombstones was aesthetic. It created the look of a park and facilitated Eaton’s plan for a coordinated look from big monuments that the cemetery designed. The rolling hills emphasize these monuments but also the gardens. Buyers of big plots can get a small monument, but the graves are arranged in a sunken space, like a sunken living room designed by Richard Neutra. There are spaces for monuments set flush with buildings, too, and a gated cemetery-within-a-cemetery where traditional, sculpture monuments are allowed. That’s where Mary Pickford is buried. Overall, though, the eye looks at the hills and sees trees, flowers, and, here and there, a themed monument. Other features of Forest Lawn cut the cost of burials. From Eaton’s time, most of Forest Lawn’s customers were people of modest means. Movie stars and moguls aside, this is still the case.

Before too long, Forest Lawn built two small, on-site churches. The first, the Little Church of the Flowers, was inspired by the church in Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire, England, where Thomas Gray penned “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” It opened in 1918. The Wee Kirk o’ the Heather, built in 1929, reconstructed a small church in Dumfriesshire in Scotland. Eaton commissioned a 30-foot-wide stained-glass window based on Leonardo’s Last Supper for a mausoleum building completed in 1929 and patterned after the Campo Santo, Genoa’s main cemetery building. It’s packed with reproductions of Michelangelo sculptures.

In 1948, Forest Lawn opened the Hall of the Crucifixion to display a 195-foot-wide painting of Jesus on Golgotha done in 1894 by Jan Styka, a Polish painter working in High Victorian style. In 1965, a painting depicting the Resurrection by Robert Clark was added. In 1965, Forest Lawn opened another church. It’s a version of Old North Church in Boston, of the “one if by land, two if by sea” lanterns that launched Paul Revere’s ride.

Is all of this schmaltzy? Isn’t it a theme park? Well, it’s in Southern California, a few miles from Hollywood, and it’s of its time. I suppose I draw on my years as a curator at the Clark Art Institute. Sterling Clark was idiosyncratic in his tastes, buying great things by Homer, Sargent, the Impressionists, and the best English silversmiths from the 1730s into the 1750s. He also collected lots and lots of pictures of pretty young women and 600 Sèvres teacups. He said he looked for “the best of its kind.” And no one was more idiosyncratic than Dr. Barnes, whose collection and setting comprise a theme park of its own, in Philadelphia, and whose dozens of late Renoir nudes are both head-spinning and nauseating.

Forest Lawn is certainly “the best of its kind,” but what is its “kind”? At Forest Lawn, The Last Supper and The Crucifixion are at home with Cecil B. DeMille’s grandiose, epic religious films from the ’20s and early ’30s, like King of Kings and Sign of the Cross. Call it piety-on-steroids, fantasy, or melodrama, but these big religious moments at Forest Lawn are effective. A Roundhead will find them idolatrous, but Eaton, though a Midwest boy, cannily captured the aesthetics of the big screen to appeal to a customer base that exists in the movie-business milieu. The two churches, derivative as they are, are pretty. Over the years, thousands of couples have been married there.

If the architecture and art program are over the top, well, Frank Baum, who wrote The Wizard of Oz series, is buried at Forest Lawn. So are Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, and Walt Disney, one of Eaton’s closest friends. Aimee Semple McPherson, the Pentecostal preacher, inventor of the megachurch, and Angeleno is buried there. McPherson, who died in 1944, got a splashy above-ground monument at Forest Lawn. It’s an amalgam of an altar and a stage.

The Court of Liberty, dedicated in 1960, would give Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and their ilk the heart flutters, and I have to say that it needs to be seen to be believed. And if their heart flutters proved fatal, I’d say God moves in mysterious ways mostly but sometimes directly and obviously. They’d be appalled.

It’s a 162-feet-by-28-feet mosaic portraying influential events in American history from the Pilgrims to the ratification of the Constitution. Each event gets a bubble. The mosaic is bookended by two tablets, one engraved with the Preamble to the Constitution, the other with the Bill of Rights. Nearby is Thomas Ball’s sculpture of George Washington, displayed at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

It’s certainly overwhelming, and the mosaic reminds me of a drive-in movie screen, or a screen built for CinemaScope. The mix of civic and religious subjects at Forest Lawn didn’t jar me, though, since I’m a scholar of 19th-century American art, much of which conflates patriotism and Christianity freely and without embarrassment. Mostly, I see it as Cold War art visualizing one side of an ideological struggle to the death. It’s art from an era when most of us had fathers who fought in the Second World War, a military draft tended to grab every young man, and Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were just around the chronological corner.

Many of the graves near the Court of Liberty and the nearby Lincoln Terrace, another mosaic program, are those of military families but also immigrant families. They find value in patriotic themes and don’t have a woke bone in their six-feet-under bodies.

I’ve read all of Evelyn Waugh’s novels, including The Loved One, his 1948 satirical novel based on his study of Forest Lawn. Waugh was in Hollywood for a couple of months to pitch Brideshead Revisited for a movie version made by MGM. Waugh and MGM couldn’t agree on a philosophical take. MGM saw the book as a love story while Waugh viewed it as a book driven by theology and class. I can’t imagine author and studio finding common ground. In the late ’40s, MGM’s big projects were The Postman Always Rings Twice, Easter Parade, The Barkleys of Broadway, On the Town, and Adam’s Rib.

It’s a fun read. Waugh despised Americans, even resenting The Loved One’s success here since he thought Americans were too dumb to appreciate his work. Waugh’s focus on theology aside, I don’t think the English have much of a spiritual life. They’re natural materialists concerned largely with class. Kings and queens aside, their cemeteries are ragged.

Forest Lawn has a museum that’s doing good exhibitions. I saw a great show on Judson Studios, one of the country’s best makers and restorers of stained glass. Judson opened in Los Angeles in 1897, so it’s one of Southern California’s oldest businesses. The museum has a very good collection of stained glass. A new show on the history of panorama paintings — an old genre — will open at Forest Lawn in May. The best-known example in America, now at the Met, is John Vanderlyn’s 165-foot-long panoramic view of Versailles from 1818. It’s early immersive art. The museum has a smart, young curator with an art history Ph.D. so it’s a serious place.

When I was at Forest Lawn, I watched a burial service near Bette Davis’s grave. It seemed to have a motorcycle theme since that’s how most of the mourners arrived, and black T-shirts and black leather pants abounded. There was a small pyre, too, or maybe it was a barbecue. I couldn’t tell. I’m not beyond crashing a funeral, but this wasn’t my crowd, and I was wearing a plaid short-sleeve shirt, khaki shorts, and a cap depicting a jug of maple syrup. Still, for all the black, it looked like someone was getting a good send-off. The minister, who might have been a Druid, delivered some laugh lines.

The ubiquitous old New England tombstone reads,

As you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, so you must be.
Prepare for death and follow me.

True, certainly, and gloomy by California standards. There’s nothing wrong with wanting, as I like to see in movies, a happy ending.