Forest Lawn: The Cemetery That Rejected Mourning

Dr. Hubert Eaton took over Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale in nineteen seventeen and set out to reinvent what an American cemetery was allowed to be. The Victorian tradition he was replacing was characterized by weeping angels, dark obelisks, gothic ironwork, and an aesthetics of perpetual mourning. Eaton found this intolerable.

His alternative, which he set out in a document he called the Builder's Creed, was a cemetery that celebrated life rather than mourning death. No tombstones. Flat markers flush with grass. Reproductions of famous works: a full-scale copy of Michelangelo's David, a stained-glass reproduction of Leonardo's Last Supper assembled from about seven hundred thousand pieces of Italian glass, a replica of the Scottish church where Andrew Carnegie was baptized.

Evelyn Waugh visited in nineteen forty-seven and wrote The Loved One, a satirical novel about a cemetery called Whispering Glades, the following year. Waugh found Forest Lawn simultaneously grotesque and irresistible, and so has virtually every visitor since.

Clark Gable is buried here. Humphrey Bogart. Walt Disney. Michael Jackson, whose interment was widely reported. The cemetery is still in active use, still accepting the newly dead, still maintained in the style Eaton described in nineteen seventeen. The grounds are open to the public, and it is genuinely pleasant, which is precisely the point and precisely what troubles people about it.