FIRST STEP UP TOWARD HEAVEN (293 pp.)—Adela Rogers St. Johns—Prentice Hall ($4.95).'
Nestled among the warm brown hills of the San Fernando Valley, hardly a bone's throw from some of the wealthiest Los Angeles suburbs, lies a brilliant green oasis of more than 300 acres, which at first glance seems to be a golf course. On closer examination, the oasis turns out to be none other than Forest Lawn Memorial-Park, the Versailles of cemeteries that Novelist Evelyn Waugh (The Loved One) celebrated as the supreme expression of the American Way of Death.
Forest Lawn is a cemetery in which nobody calls a spade a spade. Here the loss of life is known as "leavetaking," a corpse is "the loved one" or "the revered clay," the dead are merely "out of sight." Here 1,500,000 visitors a year wander, secure in the knowledge that they can avoid seeing a tombstone; graves, marked only with bronze plaques set level with the ground, are clustered in such consoling sites as Sunrise Slope, Slumberland, Resthaven, Sweet Memories, Everlasting Love. Infants are buried in Babyland, which is "shaped like a mother's heart," and Lullabyland; every Christmas toys and tinseled trees are placed upon the graves. All day long, soft symphonic music is broadcast from loudspeakers concealed in the shrubbery; in fact, Novelist Waugh reported hearing recorded bird songs as well as the Indian Love Call.
In First Step Up Toward Heaven, Author Adela Rogers St. Johns, a loyal plotholder in Forest Lawn, has provided a gushing biography of Hubert Lewright Eaton, 78, the man who made Forest Lawn what it is today. As Biographer St. Johns, 65, sees her subject, Eaton is not only the Henry Ford of the business, a man who has "revolutionized cemetery development throughout the English-speaking world," but also a major prophet who has helped to change mankind's conception of death.
Lovers in the Sunset. The prophet came to earth on June 3, 1881, in Liberty, Mo., the son of an ordained minister and professor of natural sciences at a small Baptist college, who died on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land when Hubert was 16. The boy managed to finish college, got a job as a mining engineer, finally bought a promising silver mine in Rawhide, Nev. When the vein ran out, he looked around for a job, after due consideration signed on as manager of a rundown cemetery near Los Angeles. One day in 1917, as Eaton surveyed his "depressing patches of devil grass, straggling untidy pepper trees [and] grim granite headstones," he was seized with a thrilling vision of "a great park, devoid of [the] customary signs of earthly death," where the dead might, in the biographer's prose, have "a beautiful passage to eternal life," a place, said Eaton, "where lovers new and old shall love to stroll and watch the sunset glow."