The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [62]
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 Supper gave 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,