The Happy Cemetery

America's gayest graveyard began a new broadcast last fortnight (Bible readings) with a new announcer, Scottish-burred Bill Hay, announcer for 16 years of the Amos 'n' Andy program. When Announcer Hay finished his first reading, the story of the Creation, listeners heard a genteel plug for his sponsor, Los Angeles' Forest Lawn Memorial-Park: its wrought-iron gates are bigger than those of Buckingham Palace.

Bill Hay knows his Bible. He won a Bible prize at the age of ten, has read his well-thumbed copy of the Scriptures over the radio some 2,500 times since the late '20s. He likes to skip around in the Bible, adds a psalm if he has finished a reading before his time is up. The 23rd Psalm is a favorite. It "is always good," he says, "for a 45-second filler."

This is right in the insouciant mood of his sponsor. Grief is sometimes inevitable at Forest Lawn, but never welcome. There "no signs of sorrow linger." This was the vision that came 25 years ago to a young engineer, Hubert Eaton, as he viewed with disfavor a debt-ridden, unprepossessing little necropolis he had been assigned to manage on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Promoter Eaton decided he would turn the 55-acre graveyard into "The Happy Cemetery." As a first step, he banned stones, substituted bronze markers laid level with the grass. Later he discarded the word cemetery for the more euphonious Memorial-Park.*

Now, after a generation of expansion, construction and landscaping, diligent Promoter Eaton (he prefers to be known simply as The Builder) has developed Forest Lawn to the point where "nature herself seems to have planned these acres for their consecrated purpose." Over the grounds which Copywriter Bruce Barton once dubbed "a first step up toward Heaven" are ranged "the greatest collection of large marble statuary figures in the country." Other works of art include a vast stained-glass window reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, an 87-ft. Tower of Legends which is also a reservoir holding 165,000 gallons of water.

No gloomy statues are allowed in The Happy Cemetery--and the ban extends to representations of Christ on the cross. The Builder is impatient with portrayals of The Master as "a suffering being, of joyless visage." He is still hunting a marble Christ "who really smiles." Pursuing his ideal, Promoter Eaton once inspected 998 Christs of all sizes in Italy. None of them smiled.

Forest Lawn also boasts a huge, earthquake-proof mausoleum inspired by Campo Santo in Genoa. Its Wee Kirk o' the Heather exactly reproduces the church where Annie Laurie worshipped. Its Little Church of the Flowers reproduces Stoke Poges, where Gray wrote his Elegy. At Forest Lawn, says the prospectus, "undertaking is combined with all forms of interment in one sacred place, under one friendly management, with one convenient credit arrangement for everything."

The Builder has given various parts of his handiwork such symbolic names as Vale of Memory, Sunrise Slope, Slumberland, Resthaven, Whispering Pines, Babyland. The result is sensational and Forest Lawn (disguised as "Beverly Pantheon") has achieved the minor immortality of an acid portrait by Aldous Huxley in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.

Forest Lawn's self-appraisal is somewhat different: "Carlyle said he owed the greatest inspirations of his life to the hours spent in silent meditation at his mother's grave. How much greater would have been his inspiration had he been surrounded by the beauty of Forest Lawn and prompted by its spirit!"

* Ordinary necrotic terms are frowned on at Forest Lawn. Burial is interment; grave is interment space; ashes are incinerated remains. The dead await burial in slumber rooms.

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