The Green and the Grey

We drove across to Glendale on a whim yesterday and spent a pleasantly weird couple of hours wandering around Forest Lawn, inspiration for Evelyn Waugh and many others. The air around LA was thick with a low-lying mistiness that flattened the views across the city into planes of grey, but we were in a quiet green fantasyland. It really is Disneyland for the Dead — even Walt is there somewhere.

I’d expected some tack, I think, but not the scale. It’s a vast three-hundred acres of hilly eternity. I’d also expected to be part of a company of slightly ghoulish celebrity hunters, but it couldn’t have been any less like that. For perhaps the first half hour, we didn’t see another (ahem) soul. The immaculate stillness was eerily all ours.

So we aimlessly stepped into the Great Mausoleum, and found ourselves being boomed at by an Imposing Dismbodied Voice from the front of the chapel — if such it is. It was pleasingly like Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion timidly seeking help from the Wizard. Perhaps a couple of hundred chairs in neat rows facing the front, all empty. This chapel had no altar, though — at least no literal altar. At the business end of the chapel was a high curtain, which Imposing Disembodied Voice proceeded to explain covered Forest Lawn’s star attraction: a recreation — in stained glass, no less — of The Last Supper. A willingly captive audience, the two of us gobbled up every bathetic word of the Imposingly Disembodied story of the history of the thing, whereupon the curtains slid silently aside and we got our minute’s worth of supplication before the fake. It was all wonderful. This wasn’t a chapel at all. It was a cinema, albeit one whose moving picture didn’t move very much, and whose projection came from natural light behind the screen.

We slunk off to poke around the mortuaries themselves, confounded by locks from poking into some, and by polite restraint from poking into others. I was oddly pleased by the manner in which many of the name-plates use a facsimile signature of the deceased, as if they’re signing off on their lives. I found Robert Z. Leonard, not very famous at all by Forest Lawn standards, but that was fine.

More walking outside. It struck me that among the 300 acres there are plenty of roads, but simply no paths for those walking. This is, of course, a cemetery for a car-culture. It’s practically a drive-thru graveyard. To this end, the fanciful names of the plots are marked into the sides of the kerbstones: Sunrise Slope; Whispering Pines; Everlasting Love. I looked for Dead Man’s Curve, but was disappointed.

The lack of paths must also partly be to deter the grave-gawker, but the very size of the place performs that function quite adequately. Even the hundreds of luminaries are lost amongst a quarter of a million graves. To see more than a handful, one would be faced with a challenging day-long scavenger hunt. Perhaps the determined behave as they would at an art gallery of significance: rather than limiting themselves to only the Rembrandts today, thanks very much, they just go to visit Gable and Lombard, or Burns and Allen.

The drive back towards the gates took us past Forest Lawn’s copy of Michaelangelo’s David. Of course. Nothing here is real. That’s why it’s quite authentic.