The Bier Barons

"Show me the manner in which a people bury their dead and I shall measure with mathematical exactness the degree of civilization attained by these people." The gent who uttered these ringing lines was British Prime Minister Gladstone, and it is a crying shame that we will never have the benefit of his mathematical measurement of the level of civilization of a certain city in the Western portion of the United States, in the sixth decade of the Twentieth Century.

That city is Hollywood, California, justly famous as a world-wide symbol of glamor and make-believe, and now equally famous for another major industry, the packaging and peddling of that most unsalable of all commodities: death.

The mortuary business has become a whopping industry, ranking just behind the making of motion pictures and the sale of used cars. The merchants of death – the plot salesmen, the tombstone hustlers. the embalming parlor proprietors – have turned what once was a quiet, necessary service and a solemn religious rite into a streamlined, klieg-lighted multi-billion-dollar industry. The hustlers of death, who have run an embalming school diploma, six feet of dirt plus the ethics of a snake-oil salesman into a bonanza, can give your old corner undertaker cards and spades in the business of merchandising his product, a product described in unctuous tones in Hollywood radio commercials as "the one purchase we must all make."

The facts of death, to even the casual tourist, are as inescapable as the facts of life in Hollywood. Billboards on all the major highways proclaim the virtues of one or another of the mortuary establishments competing for the death buck.

"We treat every woman like our sister. Every man like our brother or son. Female attendants!"

"Funerals on credit. As little as (continued on page 58)Bier Barons(continued from page 33) $2.85 a week. Nothing down."

"Spend Holy Week at Forest Lawn."

"Utter-McKinley – the only funeral home in the entire world located on internationally famous Hollywood Boulevard, near Vine."

"Paste this number on your telephone. Service twenty-four hours a day. One phone call does everything."

"In time of sorrow, understanding and experience are important."

Full-page ads in newspapers announce the opening of the newest, flashiest, smartest burial ground. Searchlights poke at the sky and door prizes (imitation-leather wallets with the name, address and phone number of the mortuary stamped in gold) are distributed to the first five hundred visitors. Radio commercials, practicing the soft sell, punctuate the rock-'n'-roll recordings seventeen hours a day. Ads on the benches at bus stops along Hollywood Boulevard tell you in detail what to do "when sorrow comes." The classified phone books have pages of mortuary listings and a growing listing for "Pet Cemeteries." (This subsidiary branch of the industry has become a profitable sideline. A funeral for a run-of-the-mill pound mongrel starts at a hundred and fifty bucks but can go into the thousands if you want refinements such as copper-lined caskets, a headstone carved in the image of the loved one or a chic plot close to some canine celebrity in residence in the burial ground. One enterprising hustler, tapping the parakeet-owning population, has specialized in funeral services for this species of bird. His most popular item is a gold urn for the ashes in the shape of the dear departed feathered friend that retails for a neat $2500.) One mortuary chain, striving for what Madison Avenue calls the corporate image, has designed all its buildings as replicas of Mount Vernon, not forgetting, however, to floodlight the palm trees at night. Another chain has as its identifying logo a clock with no hands. The hands have been replaced by a swinging pendulum and the legend, chiseled in the granite over the doorway, "It's later than you think."

In a town that worships success in any form, where the ridiculous is given only a passing glance, the major figures in the mortuary industry have become solid, respected citizens. You will find them on most civic betterment committees, receiving honorary degrees from universities and as guest speakers at local service club meetings. Forest Lawn, for instance, awards an annual prize at a local university. It is, fittingly enough, called "The Forest Lawn Award for Creative Writing."

Occasionally, the two major industries of Hollywood, death and movies, collaborate. The death of a famous motion picture figure starts a lot of quiet string-pulling to land the corpse (and the subsequent international newspaper stories) for one or another of the memorial parks. Some enterprising operators, planning ahead, invite motion picture figures to become members of their board of directors, or guest speakers on special occasions, with the understanding that, if, and when, they get first refusal on the remains. In this caste-conscious town, a cemetery with a good share of box-office names buried beneath its carefully manicured sod has great appeal to the average customer. Salesmen will frequently mention in their soft sell how close the Loved One will lie for eternity to a world-famous sex symbol. Reflected glory has its use in Hollywood, even after death.

One of the major improvements in the whole business of burying the dead originated in Hollywood. In the jargon of the trade it is called B.N., Before Need. Most residents of Hollywood have had at least five respectful phone calls a month from an understanding, warm, friendly voice suggesting that it is time to think of immortality. "How much better it is," intones the voice, "to pick out your final resting place now, while you are alive. To know where you will spend eternity. To find the kind of surrounding you want and deserve. How reassuring to know, and not worry about, where you will be buried and how." This is an excellent source of income to unemployed actors who made a specialty of playing the kindly judge or the understanding family physician in the boom days of B pictures. This successful technique is important to the operators of Hollywood's cemeteries. By California law, a cemetery pays taxes only on unsold plots. Once a plot is sold, filled or not, it is taken off the tax rolls.

Another new source of revenue is the Funeral Insurance Plan set up by the industry. You make regular monthly payments for your own funeral in a sort of pay-as-you-go death plan.

In tracing the development of this concept of soft-selling death, it is impossible to ignore the high priest of the industry, Dr. HubÈrt Eaton, a bespectacled man of seventy-eight who likes to (continued on page 90)Bier Barons(continued from page 58) be called "The Builder" but is frequently referred to, irreverently, as "The Digger," and his creation, Forest Lawn. In Dr. Eaton and Forest Lawn we have the dream, the plan and the fulfillment. He is the elder statesman of the eternity hustling dodge and his creation is the General Motors of the Memorial Parks.

Forest Lawn itself dates back to the early days of Hollywood. When Eaton, who had just gone broke operating a silver mine in Nevada, arrived on the scene, it was just another run-down cemetery. In the forty-three years he has been its guiding spirit, he has turned it into a model (or a horrible example, depending on your point of view) of its kind.

Let's take a close look at this Paradise of Burying Grounds, with its nine hundred employees, its staff of cosmeticians who are better at gilding the lily than anyone who ever turned out the cooky-cutter glamor queens at the major studios. In the process, you may get a greater insight into the revolution that has taken place in the old-fashioned, frock-coated, serious business of burying the dead.

At Forest Lawn, beauty is a key word. It is a marketable image. The illusion is built that the Loved Ones go directly from the chic slumber room to Eternity, and must look the part.

Naturally, with this emphasis on beauty, one of the most important artists is the cosmetician. And the word artist is not used flippantly. In a land where violent death is frequent enough to become commonplace, the Forest Lawn cosmeticians are masters at what is rather pleasantly described as "reconstruction work." Many famous plastic surgeons have spent many profitable hours in the white-tiled workrooms of Forest Lawn, picking up pointers. Cosmeticians at Forest Lawn are also at the service of the Loved One's relatives and will spend patient hours discussing the exact dimensions of a smile or the exact angle the head is to be tilted. On particularly difficult cases they will work from a color photograph in a strange example of art imitating art.

Another specialist will discuss the problem of props. A pipe in the hand of a male Loved One is considered ideal. Toys are available to be clutched in the hand of a child. Special prop requests are considered and discussed. A man who loved horses may seem undressed, even in death, without a riding crop clutched in his hand. Forest Lawn welcomes this kind of creative thinking on the part of its customers, and no suggestion for a prop is summarily dismissed as long as it is not obscene or, in their words, undignified. There is also a large choice of leave-taking clothes available in the Forest Lawn wardrobe, clothes that run the gamut from shrouds to tails. Again the choice is limited only by the imagination of the relative. Burying a railroad tycoon in an engineer's overalls is considered colorful and appropriate.

• • •

Physically, Forest Lawn is overpowering. More than eighty miles of pipes are used to water and drain its three hundred acres. There are more than 100,000 shrubs and an uncounted number of evergreens (no leaf shall fall at Forest Lawn to remind anyone of death, even in the plant world). Hidden behind the shrubbery are loudspeakers that play recorded birdcalls and music (Indian Love Call and Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life are the two top tunes on the Forest Lawn Hit Parade). There are eight miles of winding roads and twenty-eight separate buildings with 370 stained-glass windows. There are no headstones and no crosses visible. Graves are marked by flat plaques.

There are separate areas called Eventide, Babyland (shaped, in Forest Lawn's words, like a mother's heart), Lullabyland (every Christmas, small decorated trees and toys are placed on each grave), Graceland, Inspiration Slope, Slumber Point, Sweet Memories, Vesper Land and Dawn of Tomorrow. Obviously the namers of housing developments could take a couple of lesÈons from the Forest Lawn phrase-makers. Dr. Eaton has gone in for architectural reconstructions in a big way. The three churches within the geographic limits of his Memorial Park are not just churches, they are replicas of historical buildings. There is, for instance, a reconstruction of the church in Stoke Poges, England, where Thomas Gray wrote his famous Elegy. There is another that is a replica of the Wee Kirk in the Heather, and the third resembles the parish church in Rottingdean, England, where Rudyard Kipling worshiped.

These transplanted churches are not only available for funeral and memorial services, but, for some inexplicable reason, a good percentage of the citizens of Hollywood baptize their children and sanctify their marriage vows inside the iron gates of a cemetery. The statistically minded might want to know that, to date, more than 43,000 weddings have taken place in these three churches.

Forest Lawn has one section set aside for the VIP trade, the Garden of Memories, which the trade magazine American can Cemetery describes as "a room with the lawn for a carpet and the sky for a ceiling." Owners of memorials in this area are given Golden Keys to open the bronze gates that keep the casual tourists and gawkers out. Jean Harlow is buried here in a $25,000 mortuary chamber purchased by William Powell, who was to have been her fourth husband. Miss Harlow's tomb has been closed to the public. Too many of the worshiping pilgrims came to say a prayer and wound up chipping hunks of marble off the tomb as souvenirs. The Garden of Memories also contains the mortal remains of such names as Florenz Ziegfeld, Tom Mix (his horse, Tony, is buried in an equally posh Hollywood cemetery specializing in four-footed celebrities), John Gilbert, Joe Penner, Irving Thalberg, Marie Dressler, Carole Lombard, King Gillette (the inventor of the safety razor), Theodore Dreiser, Atwater Kent, Aimee Semple McPherson and Carrie Jacobs Bond.

Lon Chaney is buried beneath an unmarked marble plaque, the anonymity being explained this way: "Mr. Chaney was a rather retiring person who valued privacy." Despite that, Forest Lawn salesmen drop his name into a sales pitch that suggests that what's good enough for the top stars of Hollywood is certainly good enough for your old dead Uncle Charley. The celebrities buried in Forest Lawn also contribute to the public acceptance of it as an institution with that elusive something Hollywood calls "class." Evelyn Waugh, who wrote a scathing satirical novel on Forest Lawn called The Loved One (the press agent who showed him around was fired on publication day) summed it up this way: "At Forest Lawn, the body does not decay. It lives on, more chic in death than ever before."

Available in the more classy category are such refinements as a ventilating system and arrangements to have taperecorded music played to the Loved One for all eternity. For the shoot-the-works, you-only-die-once crowd, the tab can crowd a million dollars, as was the case with the Irving Thalberg Mausoleum.

Until 1958, Forest Lawn was a restricted cemetery. Its facilities and services were available only to Caucasians. By dint of a California State Law, passed in 1958, this kind of posthumous segregation became illegal. Forest Lawn now accepts Negroes and orientals, and to date there has been no evidence of any old-time resident of a Forest Lawn plot turning over in his earthquake-proof, copper-insulated grave.

Dr. Hubert Eaton, the guiding spirit behind this Technicolored Valhalla, looks at first glance like the last man in the world you would cast for the role he has been playing so successfully. Physically, he would not be out of place leading the pep songs at any Rotary Club meeting in the country, or as a member of Dale Carnegie's faculty. Beneath the benign, slightly cornball exterior is a shrewd mind, cold-blooded determination and what one Hollywood critic described as "the divine gall ofthe successful card shark." As befits a leader of industry, he is È man of awesome influence. To wit: the Eaton home used to be just across the geographic boundary line of Beverly Hills, a much-sought-after address to the status seeker in Hollywood. Dr. Eaton is now, however, legally a resident of that prestigious community without having moved a stick of furniture. A zoning change happened to take place that annexed the block he lived on and made it part of Greater Beverly Hills. On one occasion his influence extended as far as Europe. During a vacation trip, the Eatons turned up in Rome to look over some local works of art with an eye toward taking a few of them back to Forest Lawn. (The Eatons collect statuary and other works of art the way most tourists collect match covers or picture postcards.) They lusted after Michel-angelo's mammoth masterpieces David and Moses displayed at St. Peter's in Chains, but they realized they were beyond the reach of even a mortuary millionaire. They decided to settle for replicas. Not copies. Replicas. In order to cast these, it was necessary to move in a pack of experts to measure and survey in preparation for making the necessary molds. That meant that Rome's famous Church of St. Peter's in Chains would have to be closed for a day. Eaton's agents admit to spreading a little money around Rome on cocktail parties and to making several contributions to worthy causes. Whether this was effective or not (it had always worked back home), the fact is that for the first time in history, the church was closed for a day so that the casts could be made. The David statue (with fig leaf added) is on display in a section of Forest Lawn called – no surprise – the Court of David. The Moses statue is displayed in an area called the Cathedral Corridor in the Memorial Terrace, and Dr. Eaton uses either replica as a backdrop when he poses for official press pictures.

Dr. Eaton's influence even extends to the press of Los Angeles, and he is frequently identified in photos as "Great Humanitarian" or "Great Benefactor." One exception to the kid-glove handling of Eaton and Forest Lawn occurred when showman Earl Carroll was killed in a plane crash. With him at the time was a young lady named Beryl Wallace, described in newspaper accounts of the crash as "his closest friend." Carroll's will made provisions for his burial at Forest Lawn and contained a request that a marble monument for himself and Miss Wallace be erected over his grave at a cost of $50,000. Dr. Eaton and his staff looked through their available stock of marble memorials in the warehouse and came up with something they considered appropriate. A rumor got out that the statue had precious little clothes on it. One newspaper gossiped that Miss Wallace herself had posed for the statue Eaton had chosen and blue-noses screamed about nude women being put above a tomb in a memorial park. One enterprising photographer sneaked into the tomb (it had been closed on Dr. Eaton's orders, like a Garbo set) and took a flashlight photo of the statue. Dr. Eaton cried dirty pool. He claimed that the wings and drapes of the gown on the statue had been removed by retouching the photo. Finally, a press conference was held and the statue was shown for the first time. It was a five-foot bronze sculpture of a female angel wearing a flowing gown and a pair of elongated wings. It was the work of Alexander Weinman, and since it had been executed in 1915, before Miss Wallace was born, the rumors about its model died down. Dr. Eaton, as an example of his vision, said he had purchased it in 1916 and kept it for just such an occasion as this. Everyone agreed that it was more artistic than vulgar, and the Earl Carroll incident was closed.

The incident did, however, focus the spotlight on the one gimmick that lifted Forest Lawn head and halo above its competitors. It was a sure-fire gimmick in a town that genuflects in the presence of anything that is said to be Art or Culture. Dr. Eaton loaded Forest Lawn with more works of art than the Louvre (more, not better). His globe-troÈting vacations and the art savvy of his Mills College wife fulfill the dual purpose of adding culture to his business enterprise and supplying him with still another source of revenue. Dr. and Mrs. Eaton return from Europe loaded down with works of art. They buy them in wholesale lots, by the ton. Each new acquisition is placed around the park (with a little sign that says, "This statue may be purchased as a private memorial and moved to another location in Forest Lawn"), the way merchandise is put on display in a department store. The memorial shopper has his choice of nudes, angels and pieces of sculpture glorifying motherhood, marriage, old age, togetherness, innocence, cleanliness and joy. In Madison Avenue parlance, when the Eatons put them on display they are "sustaining" memorials. When they're sold and moved to another location, they're "sponsored."

The sale of these artifacts is just so much gravy to the basic purpose behind the culture gimmick. Like that guy with the tailgate truck selling snake oil, a businessman has to get within lapel-grabbing distance of his customers. Dr. Eaton has latched onto art and culture as his equivalent of the hula-dancing girl on the truck who attracts the customers within earshot of the commercial. His competitors have tried to climb onto the bandwagon (it is not uncommon to have an art show in a mortuary slumber room or to invite a local chamber-music group to give its concerts in the oak-paneled reception room of most any funeral parlor), but Forest Lawn and Dr. Eaton are miles ahead of their competitors in this race for wedding culture and commerce. His two biggest coups that have turned Forest Lawn into a tourist attraction second only to Disneyland grew out of his art-scavenging trips to Europe. There, he found the last surviving member of a family of stained-glass-window artists, Rose Moretti. He commissioned her to make a thirty-foot by fifteen-foot replica in stained glass of Da Vinci's Last Supper. It took five years to complete and the process was not without its dramatic moments. The figure of Judas cracked five times and Miss Moretti had to start all over. After the fifth crack, Miss Moretti, taking this as a sign from a force more powerful even than Dr. Eaton, thought of abandoning the whole project. After much persuasion by cable she agreed to make one more try. This time, Judas stayed in one piece and today, The Last Supper, by Moretti, out of Da Vinci, backed with tape-recorded music and narration, is unveiled every hour on the hour in the Memorial Terrace. The performance is free. However, a goodly number of the tourists stop in the curio shop on their way out and carry away a souvenir of their visit. The curio shop does a hefty business in what carnival men call "slum." Some of the top-selling items include: money clips, cocktail napkins, jigsaw puzzles, charm bracelets, plastic wallets, cuff links, perfume and powder sets, jackknives, demitasse spoons, crayon coloring books for children, and cups and saucers, all, of course, with the Forest Lawn name on them. Dinner-ware, with selected color scenes of Forest Lawn baked into it, is also available. The newest item is a plastic walnut shell with hinges on one end. The shell opens and inside are a series of color slides of Forest Lawn. The legend on the cover says, "Forest Lawn in a Nut Shell."

The current most popular attraction at Forest Lawn is a huge painting of the Crucifixion that finally found its way to Memorial Park after the kind of chase sequence in which Alfred Hitch-cock specializes. It all began when the Eatons heard tantalizing rumors of a huge religious painting by a certain Jan Styka. It had been painted at the suggestion of Paderewski and at one time had hung in one of the Czar's palaces in Russia. Eaton discovered that Styka had brought it to America for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904. There was no building large enough to house it there, and further inquiry disclosed that Styka had returned to his native Poland without the picture. It was presumÈd that he had sold it, but the trail ended in New York in 1905. Acting on the assumption that a painting as wide as a twenty-story building is high can't remain hidden forever, Eaton continued the search. He stalked the picture for five years, hiring people to follow the trail through Customs declaration, bills of lading, warehouse receipts, freight manifests, and finally found it in the warehouse of the Chicago Civic Opera Company, wrapped around a telephone pole and hidden behind the discarded scenery of a forgotten opera production. After paying the tabs it had accumulated since 1904, he had it crated and shipped to Los Angeles to allow his Board of Regents and the Forest Lawn Directors to inspect it. The only building large enough to display it in was the Shrine Auditorium. It was rented for the day. But even the largest stage in Los Angeles was not wide enough for it. It extended around the sides of the auditorium when it was displayed for the Forest Lawn brass.

Jan Styka's painting was a smash.

The Board of Regents and the Directors of Forest Lawn gave Eaton the go-ahead to build an appropriate shrine to house it. The Hall of the Crucifixion (which cost a million-and-a-half dollars to build) was opened in 1951, and since then the painting has played to full houses seven times a day. Frequently the line waiting outside for admission resembles the line outside Radio City Music Hall on Christmas week, with Brigitte Bardot on the screen and God on the stage. Once inside the Hall of the Crucifixion (fifteen hundred seats), the spectator discovers that it is wider than it is long. The lights dim, the inevitable recorded chorus begins singing and a deep-throated announcer intones the story of the painting as the huge curtains roll open and reveal the giant canvas. An illuminated arrow points out salient features as the recorded lecture proceeds. There is a small admission charge.

Dr. Eaton and Forest Lawn have recently received the final accolade, a reverent, genuflecting book called First Step Up Toward Heaven. Written by one of the all-time great sob sisters of journalism, Adela Rogers St. John, it contains the kind of gushing, purple prose that went out of style when Mary Pickford finally cut off her curls and ended an era. Miss St. John has written a volume that in its own quiet way has the importance of Mein Kampf. Just as Hitler's volume served as a blueprint for future dictators, First Step Up To-ward Heaven offers the world the step-by-step, inside story of how it all happened. The merchant princes of death have found, in Miss St. John, their Bos-well. She is an apt choice.

If the old Hollywood, the movie capital of the world, is disappearing (and one survey trip through the idle sound stages confirms it), a new Hollywood is growing up in its place. The land that has spawned many a fantastic, cynical, cold-blooded enterprise in its gaudy history is well on its way to becoming identified to future generations as the natural habitat of commercialized, gimmicked death, what one leader of the corpse brigade aptly calls "the packaging of immortality."