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    Forest Lawn Memorial-Park: The Unauthorized Guide
    Forest Lawn Memorial-Park: The Unauthorized Guide
    Forest Lawn Memorial-Park: The Unauthorized Guide
    Ebook96 pages1 hour

    Forest Lawn Memorial-Park: The Unauthorized Guide

    By Mark Masek

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    About this ebook

    Forest Lawn Memorial-Park in Glendale, Calif., is one of the best-known cemeteries in the world, and one of the top tourist attractions in Southern California. Covering more than 300 acres, its more than 300,000 permanent residents include dozens of top film, TV and entertainment personalities, from Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, to Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor, and everyone in between. But good luck if you want to visit and pay your respects to your favorite celebrity. The cemetery will not give out the location of any of its well-known permanent residents, and won’t even acknowledge that they’re buried there. But this book, “Forest Lawn Memorial-Park: The Unauthorized Guide,” provides the most complete, accurate and comprehensive directions to find the final burial locations of nearly 100 celebrities, including Jimmy Stewart, Humphrey Bogart, Walt Disney, Mary Pickford, Ted Knight, Tom Mix, Spencer Tracy, W.C. Fields, Carole Lombard, John Gilbert, Red Skelton, Clara Bow, Errol Flynn, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Sammy Davis Jr., Irving Thalberg, Norma Shearer, Alan Ladd, Chico Marx and Larry Fine, plus dozens more, along with detailed personal and professional biographies, as well as historical information about the cemetery where former President Ronald Reagan was married to his first wife, actress Jane Wyman. In a city where celebrity is the only really important currency, Forest Lawn Glendale is still at the top of the cemetery “A List,” and this book will guide you to its most famous permanent residents.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMark Masek
    Release dateApr 27, 2011
    ISBN9781452484402
    Forest Lawn Memorial-Park: The Unauthorized Guide
    Author

    Mark Masek

    Mark Masek was born and raised in Joliet, Ill., about 40 miles southwest of Chicago. He was always interested in history and Hollywood and, when he moved to the Los Angeles area in 1999, he was able to combine his interests, and wrote "Hollywood Remains to Be Seen: A Guide to the Movie Stars' Final Homes," a detailed history and guidebook to 14 cemeteries in the Los Angeles area, as well as a guide to find the final burial locations of more than 300 entertainment celebrities. He is also a member of the Hollywood Underground, a group of people with the similar interests of finding and documenting the final resting places of celebrities. If they're famous, and they're dead, and they're buried somewhere in the Los Angeles area, he probably knows where to find them.

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      Book preview

      Forest Lawn Memorial-Park - Mark Masek

      Forest Lawn Memorial-Park: The Unauthorized Guide

      Mark Masek

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2011 Mark Masek

      Discover other titles by Mark Masek at Smashwords.com or visit his website at http://www.CemeteryGuide.com.

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Forest Lawn Memorial-Park

      1712 S. Glendale Ave.

      Glendale, Calif.

      Introduction: Forest Lawn Memorial-Park in Glendale, Calif., is one of the most well-known and frequently visited cemeteries in the United States, perhaps in the world. Though it’s hard to imagine a cemetery being a tourist attraction, Forest Lawn attracts more than 1 million visitors every year. Before Disneyland opened in Anaheim in 1955, Forest Lawn was the top tourist attraction in Southern California.

      Although many visitors come to pay their respects to a loved one or friend, the vast majority of people who pass through the main entrance gates on Glendale Avenue come hoping to find the grave of their favorite celebrity. (The entrance gates, erected in 1932, are reportedly the largest wrought iron gates on the world, taller by five feet than the gates at Buckingham Palace – get ready for an endless string of superlatives when you visit Forest Lawn.)

      Actually, Forest Lawn’s Glendale cemetery is one of 10 Forest Lawn properties in Southern California. But it’s the first, and the most well known. The lush, beautifully landscaped, 300-acre cemetery, with more than 300,000 permanent residents, forever changed the look of cemeteries across the country. In fact, Forest Lawn was the first cemetery to call itself a memorial park.

      Forest Lawn, of course, is best known for its celebrity clientele, from Jean Harlow and Clark Gable, to Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor. Unfortunately, while many other cemeteries in Southern California acknowledge and even promote their celebrity residents, and welcome fans to come and pay their respects, Forest Lawn does not. They officially prohibit loitering and photography on the grounds, and employees will not tell visitors the location of any celebrity grave. In fact, officially, Forest Lawn typically doesn’t even acknowledge that the celebrities are there.

      But for a discreet, careful and well-prepared visitor, Forest Lawn is a unique, fascinating and unforgettable experience, and one that shouldn’t be missed for anyone interested in old Hollywood, film history, art, architecture, or just spending a day in a location that offers two things rarely found in Southern California – free admission and free parking.

      History: Hubert Eaton started his career as a mining engineer in Nevada, but found his fame and fortune in the ground in California. In 1912, the 31-year-old Eaton arrived in Tropico – now part of Glendale – to take a job selling cemetery plots at a struggling, 6-year-old, 12-acre graveyard called Forest Lawn. Eaton had lost a small fortune on an unsuccessful silver mine in Nevada, and he took the job at Forest Lawn so he could repay the debts to his mine backers.

      At the time, the only structure on the property was a tiny, dilapidated gardener’s shack. Shortly after he started working at the cemetery, Eaton came up with the then-radical idea of pre-need sales of plots and monuments and, within a year, sales at Forest Lawn were up 250 percent. In less than five years, Forest Lawn had increased to 55 acres and Eaton was offered a job as manager of the property.

      According to the Forest Lawn legend, Eaton stood on a hilltop overlooking the property on New Year’s Day 1917 and had a vision. While Forest Lawn was still a traditional cemetery – drab and dreary with large monuments over the graves – Eaton came up with the ingenious idea of a memorial park with no unsightly tombstones, and a philosophy of cemeteries depicting a celebration of life, a beginning rather than an ending. Eventually, Eaton’s revolutionary ideas transformed Forest Lawn into a lush, beautifully landscaped, 300-acre cemetery with 150 employees and more than 300,000 permanent residents, and forever changed the look of cemeteries across the country.

      Depending on which version of the story you believe, Eaton was either a visionary genius who transformed the American cemetery into a true garden of memories, a place to celebrate life and honor the dearly departed, or a cunning opportunist who planned and built a near-monopolistic mortuary empire that continues to rake in millions of dollars each year thanks to huge profit mark-ups on cemetery plots, coffins, grave markers, funeral services, flowers and every other aspect of the death business.

      Eaton wrote The Builder’s Creed, which is literally carved in stone and displayed on a massive wall at both Forest Lawn Glendale and Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills. The Creed outlines Eaton’s dream for Forest Lawn: I shall endeavor to build Forest Lawn as different, as unlike other cemeteries as sunshine is unlike darkness, as Eternal Life is unlike death. I shall try to build at Forest Lawn a great park, devoid of misshapen monuments and other customary signs of earthly death, but filled with towering trees, sweeping lawns, splashing fountains, singing birds, beautiful statuary, cheerful flowers, noble memorial architecture with interiors full of light and color, and redolent of the world’s best history and romances. I believe these things educate and uplift a community.

      Forest Lawn shall become a place where lovers new and old shall love to stroll and watch the sunset’s glow, planning for the future or reminiscing of the past; a place where artists study and sketch; where school teachers bring happy children to see the things they read of in books; where little churches invite, triumphant in the knowledge that from their pulpits only words of love can be spoken; where memorialization of loved ones in sculptured marble and pictorial glass shall be encouraged but controlled by acknowledged artists; a place where the sorrowing will be soothed and strengthened because it will be God’s garden, Eaton wrote.

      Eaton also expanded the range of services offered by the cemetery. Despite vigorous opposition from local undertakers, Forest Lawn opened the first mortuary within a cemetery in 1934. By adding the mortuary, coffin salesroom, crematorium, church and florist shop on the Forest Lawn property, Eaton created a one-stop burial shop. The cemetery grounds also contain a museum and a gift shop.

      There are several chapels on the Forest Lawn property, including the Wee Kirk O’ the Heather, Little Church of the Flowers, and the Church of the Recessional. The stand-alone structures were modeled on historic churches in Scotland and England, and have hosted more than 70,000 weddings, in addition to countless funeral services. Ronald Reagan and his first wife, actress Jane Wyman, were married in the Wee Kirk O’ the Heather chapel in 1940, as were Regis Philbin and his wife, Joy, in 1970.

      In a city where celebrity is the only really important currency, Forest Lawn Glendale is still at the top of the cemetery A List. As early as 1937, Time magazine described Forest Lawn as the nation's most extraordinary cemetery, which has become, in the last decade, the Valhalla of the cinema business and as indispensable to Hollywood’s great dead as a footprint in the cement at Sid Grauman's Chinese Theatre is to its living.

      Unfortunately, Forest Lawn has become a cranky, ill-tempered old celebrity, eager to enjoy the glamour and fortune, but not at all willing to do anything for fans who have made its fame a reality. But, after all, Forest Lawn is a privately owned, commercial facility, not a public park, so they can really do whatever they want. And if you don’t follow their rules, you

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