Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory

JUST NORTH OF LOS Angeles is the city of Glendale, home to such diverse offerings as one of the largest populations of Armenians in the United States, the Baskin-Robbins ice-cream chain, and arguably one of the most important cemeteries in the world—Forest Lawn. Forest Lawn is not just a cemetery, but a “memorial park,” with expansive, rolling hills and nary a headstone in sight. Its soil houses a Who’s Who of Hollywood celebrities: Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Humphrey Bogart, Nat King Cole, Jean Harlow, Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson, and even Walt Disney himself (despite the legend, he was not cryogenically frozen).

Founded in 1906, Forest Lawn got a new general manager in 1917 named Hubert Eaton, a businessman with a forceful dislike of the drab European model of death. His vision was to create a new, optimistic, American “memorial park,” waging an all-out war against traditional cemeteries, which he called “depressing stoneyards.” Eaton removed Forest Lawn’s headstones and replaced them with flat identification markers, as “you wouldn’t want to mar [the cemetery] with tombstones. It would spoil everything.” He littered the grounds of Forest Lawn with art and sculptures, which he referred to as his “silent salesmen.” His first major purchase was a sculpture called Duck Baby, a naked toddler surrounded by ducklings. As Forest Lawn’s artistic acquisitions grew, he offered one million lire to the Italian artist who could paint him “a Christ filled with radiance and looking upward with an inner light of joy and hope.” To be more specific, Eaton wanted “an American-faced Christ.”

Eaton was the original upbeat undertaker. His goal was “to erase all signs of mourning.” Forest Lawn was the genesis of some of the American funeral industry’s most beloved death-denial euphemisms. Death became “leave-taking,” a corpse became “the loved one,” “the remains,” or “Mr. So-and-So,” who, after elaborate embalming and cosmetic treatment, awaited burial in a private, well-furnished “slumber” room.

An article in a 1959 issue of Time called Forest Lawn the “Disneyland of Death,” and described Eaton as starting his day off by leading his staff in prayer and reminding them that “they were selling immortality.” There were, of course, limits to who would be allowed to purchase immortality. The same article tells us that “Negroes and Chinese were regretfully refused.”

Forest Lawn became well known for its aggressive, beautiful-death-at-all-costs policy, satirized in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One. Waugh described in verse how Eaton’s army of luxury embalmers ensured that every corpse coming to Forest Lawn was “pickled in formaldehyde and painted like a whore, / Shrimp-pink incorruptible, not lost or gone before.”

Hubert Eaton implemented his plan for the beautiful death with a dictatorial air. He was known to his employees (by his own decree) as “The Builder.” (This reminds me of the surreal nomenclature of my middle school orthodontist, who had his dental assistants refer to him not as “the doctor” or “Dr. Wong” but just “Doctor.” The title is still imprinted on my mind, though my teeth have long since migrated back to their original crooked configuration. “Doctor will be with you in a minute,” or “When is the last time you saw Doctor?” or “I’ll have to ask Doctor what he thinks about that . . .”)

Due in no small part to the influence of Forest Lawn, the 1950s was a glamorous time for the death industry. In the ninety years since the end of the Civil War, undertakers had managed to shift the public’s perception of their occupation. They went from local coffin makers forced to supplement their income in other ways to highly trained medical professionals, embalming bodies for the “good of public health,” and creating artistic corpse displays for the family. It didn’t hurt that the postwar economic boom gave people the expendable income to keep up with the postmortem Joneses.

For almost twenty years after the end of World War II, the national cremation rate hung out in the scandalously low 3 to 4 percent range. Why would a family want a cremation when they could impress their neighbors with sleek Cadillac-style caskets, flower arrangements, embalming, and elaborate funerals? The embalmed body was art, heading down into the grave on pastel pillows in gauzy burial gowns with bouffant hairdos. It was pure kitsch, a perfect fit for the postwar aesthetic. Stephen Prothero, professor of religion and scholar of the American cremation industry explained, “The 1950s represented a wonderful opportunity for gaudy excess.”

But the “gaudy excess” could not last forever, and by the early 1960s, American consumers began to feel swindled by the funeral industry’s absurdly high prices. Where once the funeral home was a pillar of righteousness in the community, people started to suspect that perhaps undertakers were unscrupulous charlatans taking advantage of grieving families. The undisputed leader of the movement against the funeral status quo was a woman named Jessica Mitford.