has small retail value today, because the cut of the stones has been obsolete for many years, and it would be difficult to sell it except as an antique.” But it is when he speaks of the need to care for the black opal (named by whom “The Pride of Australia,” one wonders) that he is at his most affecting: “We do hope that you bathe it every few weeks in glycerin to prevent it from shattering.” Kidnappers! From the bottom of a mother’s heart I beg you to give my baby his daily cod-liver oil!
A deeper purpose for the maintenance of a museum in a cemetery is also explained by Dr. Eaton: “It has long been the custom of museums to sell photographs, post cards, mementos, souvenirs, etc.” The visitor is summoned to the gift shop (“while waiting for the next showing of the ‘Crucifixion’ ”) by one of those soft, deeply sincere voices that often boom out at one unexpectedly from the Forest Lawn loudspeaker system. Among the wares offered are salt and pepper shakers in the shape of some of the Forest Lawn statuary; the Builder’s Creed, printed on a piece of varnished paper and affixed to a rustic-looking piece of wood; paper cutters, cups and saucers, platters decorated with views of the cemetery; view holders with colored views of the main attractions. There is a foldout postcard with a long script message for the visitor rendered inarticulate by the wonders he has seen. It starts: “Dear———, Forest Lawn Memorial-Park has proved an inspiring experience,” and ends: “It was a visit we will long remember.” There is a large plastic walnut with a mailing label on which is printed “Forest Lawn Memorial-Park In A Nut Shell! Open me like a real nut… squeeze my sides or pry me open with a knife.” Inside is a miniature booklet with colored views of Forest Lawn. There is an ashtray of very shiny tin, stamped into the shape of overlapping twin hearts joined by a vermilion arrow. In one of the hearts is a raised picture of the entrance gates, done in brightest bronze and blue. In the other is depicted the Great Mausoleum, in bronze and scarlet with just a suggestion of trees in brilliant green. Atop the hearts is an intricate design of leaves and scrolls, in gold, green, and red; crowning all is a coat of arms, a deer posed against a giant sunflower, and a scroll with the words JAMAIS ARRIERE. Never in Arrears, perhaps.
Forest Lawn pioneered the current trend for cemeteries to own their own mortuary and flower shop, for convenient, one-stop shopping. The mortuary “is of English Tudor design, inspired by Compton Wynyates in Warwickshire, England. Its Class I, steel-reinforced concrete construction is finished in stone, half-timber and brick,” the guidebook says. There are twenty-one slumber rooms and a palatial casket room, with wares ranging in price from $325 (gray, cloth-covered wood flattop) to $25,000 (48-ounce bronze, protective lock, plush beige velvet interior).
The Forest Lawn board of trustees says of Hubert Eaton, “Today, Forest Lawn stands as an eloquent witness that the Builder kept faith with his soul.” It is to the official biography of Eaton, and to his own writings, that we must turn for a closer glimpse of that soul.
If a goal of art is the achievement of a synthesis between style and subject matter, it must be conceded that
Dr. Eaton, apparently born under whichever star it is that guides a man to seek his fortune below the earth’s surface rather than above, started life as a mining engineer, and in short order acquired a gold mine in Nevada. He and his cousin Joe organized the Adaven Mining Company and built a company town named Bob. It was here in Bob that Dr. Eaton ran slap-bang into his first miracle—the first of many, it turns out. One night a group of union organizers (or, in Mrs. St. Johns’s words, “a gang of desperadoes bent on murder”) came threateningly up the hill towards the mine—no doubt, Eaton thought, armed with dynamite. “ ‘Unless God takes a hand,’ Hubert Eaton said, his voice cracking, ‘there’ll have to be bloodshed.’ The foreman beside him nodded grimly.”
Just when all seemed lost, the strains of “Home Sweet Home” suddenly filled the night air. This proved to be too much for the desperadoes; silently they slunk away back down the hill. “ ‘Looks like He took a hand,’ the foreman said grimly, wiping the tears from his cheeks unashamed. ‘We’d better give thanks, the way I see it,’ Eaton said.”
From then on, miracles dogged the footsteps of Hubert Eaton. The next thing that happened to this Child of Destiny was that his mine failed. “That night Hubert Eaton spent longer on his knees, which he had been taught was the proper way to say his prayers, than usual. Since the earth was created for man’s use, a man had a right to ask God to help him locate the vein of gold that’d been in his own mine.” To no avail, however. Fortunately for Eaton, Destiny had other plans for him this time. He had lost a mere million in the mining venture, a trifle indeed compared with what lay in store for him in future years as he pursued his Dream. And it is to the site of the Dream that we are now led.
The year was 1917; the place, a run-down, weed-infested cemetery called Forest Lawn. Hubert Eaton, as he stood regarding this scene, was trying to make up his mind whether or not to accept a job as manager of Forest Lawn. “If you suggest to Dr. Eaton, in his late seventies, that Destiny led him there, he will give you an I’m-from- Missouri look and say gruffly, ‘There doesn’t seem to be any other explanation, does there?’ ” In any event, he went back to his hotel room and there wrote out his vision of a future Forest Lawn: “filled with towering trees, sweeping lawns, splashing fountains, singing birds, beautiful statues, cheerful flowers, noble memorial architecture… where memorialization of loved ones—in sculptured marble and pictorial glass—shall be encouraged…. This is the Builder’s Dream; this is the Builder’s Creed.”
The Memorial-Park idea was born. Thus it has come about that today Forest Lawn is “a garden that seems next door to Paradise itself, an incredibly beautiful place, a place of infinite loveliness and eternal peace.”
Dr. Eaton lived by certain moral precepts learned in childhood at his daddy’s knee. They are: Perseverance Conquers All; A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place; Anything That Is Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Well; and Let the Chips Fall Where They May. In the course of pursuing his Dream, he also developed a sort of informal business partnership with God. For “unless God was with him, this was a pretty lonesome business.” As he told a Rotary Club meeting, “Christ in Business is the greatest thing that can happen to business. We must in return give business to carry on for Christ.” In his own bluff, Missouri way, he interprets the New Testament, including his Partner in his plans, at every turn: “No, he could not see anything in the Teaching against abundance…. Everybody wasn’t called upon to don the brown robe and sandals of St. Francis.”
Eaton’s search for art treasures with which to adorn Forest Lawn led him to Europe on several occasions, and was frequently aided by divine intervention. There was some difficulty getting permission from the Vatican authorities to have a copy made of Michelangelo’s
If much of the Forest Lawn statuary looks like the sort of thing one might win in a shooting gallery, there’s a reason for that, too. Some of it was bought at fairs—over the objection of the board of directors—but “as [Eaton] became a benevolent and paternalistic dictator and despot over his Dream Come True, he always met opposition with a gay and somehow endearing determination to win.”
While the Builder’s soul is something of an open book, facts about the temporal aspects of the Dream—how the “nonprofit” association works, the amount of money involved, how it is distributed—are harder to come by. Forest Lawn executives have shown a marked disinclination to discuss the financial side of the operations. Such reticence, understandable in the world of business, seems not in keeping with the nonprofit, tax-exempt status of Forest Lawn Memorial-Parks, which, declares the Dreamer, “are builded… for the living sacredly to enjoy and be benefited and comforted by.”
There are some, however, cynical enough to assert that Eaton’s cemeteries are builded for profit, and the occasional glimpses of the financial structure of Forest Lawn afforded by disclosures made in legal proceedings in which it is from time to time embroiled support the view that the memorial parks are, for Eaton, a fantastically profitable form of real estate development.
The United States Board of Tax Appeals, in a 1941 decision, describes the advent of Hubert Eaton to Forest Lawn more prosaically than does Mrs. St. Johns. He was hired in 1912 not as manager but as sales agent for “before-need” sales of cemetery lots. Before he arrived, most of the sales had been made at the time of death—“at need”—and total sales had amounted to only $28,000 in the previous year. Eaton’s door-to-door selling efforts on behalf of that mean, ugly little cemetery upped sales by 250 percent—and this was five years pre-Dream.
By 1937 annual sales of cemetery space had passed the $1 million mark, and sales of other commodities and
