Just when all seemed lost, the strains of “Home Sweet Home” suddenly filled the night air. This proved to be too much for the desperadoes; silently they slunk away back down the hill. “ ‘Looks like He took a hand,’ the foreman said grimly, wiping the tears from his cheeks unashamed. ‘We’d better give thanks, the way I see it,’ Eaton said.”
From then on, miracles dogged the footsteps of Hubert Eaton. The next thing that happened to this Child of Destiny was that his mine failed. “That night Hubert Eaton spent longer on his knees, which he had been taught was the proper way to say his prayers, than usual. Since the earth was created for man’s use, a man had a right to ask God to help him locate the vein of gold that’d been in his own mine.” To no avail, however. Fortunately for Eaton, Destiny had other plans for him this time. He had lost a mere million in the mining venture, a trifle indeed compared with what lay in store for him in future years as he pursued his Dream. And it is to the site of the Dream that we are now led.
The year was 1917; the place, a run-down, weed-infested cemetery called Forest Lawn. Hubert Eaton, as he stood regarding this scene, was trying to make up his mind whether or not to accept a job as manager of Forest Lawn. “If you suggest to Dr. Eaton, in his late seventies, that Destiny led him there, he will give you an I’m-from-Missouri look and say gruffly, ‘There doesn’t seem to be any other explanation, does there?’ ” In any event, he went back to his hotel room and there wrote out his vision of a future Forest Lawn: “filled with towering trees, sweeping lawns, splashing fountains, singing birds, beautiful statues, cheerful flowers, noble memorial architecture… where memorialization of loved ones—in sculptured marble and pictorial glass—shall be encouraged…. This is the Builder’s Dream; this is the Builder’s Creed.”
The Memorial-Park idea was born. Thus it has come about that today Forest Lawn is “a garden that seems next door to Paradise itself, an incredibly beautiful place, a place of infinite loveliness and eternal peace.”
Dr. Eaton lived by certain moral precepts learned in childhood at his daddy’s knee. They are: Perseverance Conquers All; A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place; Anything That Is Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Well; and Let the Chips Fall Where They May. In the course of pursuing his Dream, he also developed a sort of informal business partnership with God. For “unless God was with him, this was a pretty lonesome business.” As he told a Rotary Club meeting, “Christ in Business is the greatest thing that can happen to business. We must in return give business to carry on for Christ.” In his own bluff, Missouri way, he interprets the New Testament, including his Partner in his plans, at every turn: “No, he could not see anything in the Teaching against abundance…. Everybody wasn’t called upon to don the brown robe and sandals of St. Francis.”
Eaton’s search for art treasures with which to adorn Forest Lawn led him to Europe on several occasions, and was frequently aided by divine intervention. There was some difficulty getting permission from the Vatican authorities to have a copy made of Michelangelo’s Moses, but a “Man who could tell the Red Sea to stand still so the Children of Israel could get across ahead of the Egyptians ought not to have any trouble getting his statue reproduced,” said Eaton, and “Of course, a lot of it was prayer. But I figure we got at least an assist from Moses.” The firing of the stained-glass reproduction of The Last Suppergave some trouble, but “ ‘Nonsense and balderdash,’ Hubert Eaton shouted. ‘Of course God wants it finished.’ ” And finished it was.
If much of the Forest Lawn statuary looks like the sort of thing one might win in a shooting gallery, there’s a reason for that, too. Some of it was bought at fairs—over the objection of the board of directors—but “as [Eaton] became a benevolent and paternalistic dictator and despot over his Dream Come True, he always met opposition with a gay and somehow endearing determination to win.”
While the Builder’s soul is something of an open book, facts about the temporal aspects of the Dream—how the “nonprofit” association works, the amount of money involved, how it is distributed—are harder to come by. Forest Lawn executives have shown a marked disinclination to discuss the financial side of the operations. Such reticence, understandable in the world of business, seems not in keeping with the nonprofit, tax-exempt status of Forest Lawn Memorial-Parks, which, declares the Dreamer, “are builded… for the living sacredly to enjoy and be benefited and comforted by.”
There are some, however, cynical enough to assert that Eaton’s cemeteries are builded for profit, and the occasional glimpses of the financial structure of Forest Lawn afforded by disclosures made in legal proceedings in which it is from time to time embroiled support the view that the memorial parks are, for Eaton, a fantastically profitable form of real estate development.
The United States Board of Tax Appeals, in a 1941 decision, describes the advent of Hubert Eaton to Forest Lawn more prosaically than does Mrs. St. Johns. He was hired in 1912 not as manager but as sales agent for “before-need” sales of cemetery lots. Before he arrived, most of the sales had been made at the time of death—“at need”—and total sales had amounted to only $28,000 in the previous year. Eaton’s door-to-door selling efforts on behalf of that mean, ugly little cemetery upped sales by 250 percent—and this was five years pre-Dream.
By 1937 annual sales of cemetery space had passed the $1 million mark, and sales of other commodities and services (flowers, postcards, urns, bronze tablets, and undertaking services) added another $800,000. By 1959 annual sales exceeded $7 million, of which over $4 million represented sale of cemetery space.
What happens to all this money? Is it really all plowed back for beautification of the Park? If so, it would pay for an awful lot of fertilizer and statuary.
The Forest Lawn Art Guideposes this question: “Again and again people ask: How can Forest Lawn afford to assemble and maintain all of these treasures in such a beautiful place, and open it freely for all to see and enjoy? How can it be that resting places sharing all this loveliness are well within the means of everyone?” The answer is inscribed on a sign by the steps to the Hall of the Crucifixion: “Forest Lawn Memorial-Park is operated by a non-profit association. Excess income, over expenses, must be expended only for the improvement of Forest Lawn.”
Well, yes. Only the operative phrase there is “over expenses.”
Forest Lawn Memorial-Park Association, Inc., the nonprofit cemetery corporation, was the sun around which clustered a galaxy of Eaton-controlled commercial corporations and holding companies. One of these, the Forest Lawn Company, a Nevada corporation, was a land company. Another, a holding company, owned over 99 percent of the land company’s stock; one was a life insurance company (since sold); one was a mortgage and loan company. To the nonprofit corporation, owning no land, was entrusted the actual operation of the cemetery—the mortuary, the flower shop, the sale of graves, crypts, vaults, statuary, postcards, souvenirs. Discreetly behind the scenes was Eaton’s land company, skimming off 50 percent of the proceeds of sales of lots, plots, and graves, and 60 percent of the gross on all sales of niches, crypts, vaults, and other mausoleum space (exclusive of sums collected for endowment care).
It seems curious that the additional land that is needed from time to time for expansion of the existing “Parks” and the development of new ones is not acquired by the cemetery directly. This would save for the beautification of the cemeteries and the ennoblement of mankind the middleman’s profit that is now taken by the land company. Direct purchase of land by the cemetery company would result in substantial tax savings as well, since the land which is taxable in the hands of the land company would be tax-exempt if owned by the nonprofit cemetery. More curious still is the fact that the land company buys and develops the land with money which it borrows from the cemetery at only 3 percent interest. As of 1959 Eaton’s land company had borrowed over $5 million from the nonprofit company at this exceptionally favorable rate.