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Already convinced that "the most important thing of all is salesmanship," Eaton rushed right home and set down The Builder's Creed: "I believe in a happy Eternal Life ... in a Christ that smiles and loves you and me, [in] an immense Endowment Care Fund ... to care for and perpetuate this Garden of Memory." The Creed, combined with a pay-now-die-later arrangement soothingly described as a Before Need Plan, boosted plot sales by 250% in the first year.
Selling Immortality. Next came "shock tactics," a series of suave radio commercials about what Eaton later called "the one purchase everybody has to make." Next, the builder boosted sales by offering waterproof, fireproof, wormproof and even quakeproof vaults. Every morning he called his salesmen together and started the day with a prayer and a pep talk. They must always remember, he told them, that they were selling immortality.
To his regular sales force Eaton added a staff of "silent salesmen," as he called the works of art he assembled at Forest Lawn. The first of these was Edith Barrett Parson's Duck Baby, later followed by a vast sculpture group called The Mystery of Life, in which 22 figures watch a baby chick as it hatches out of an egg. From Europe, Eaton also brought back plans of three famous British churches—the one where Gray wrote his Elegy, the one where, according to legend, Annie Laurie prayed for her lost lover, the one where Kipling was (possibly) inspired to write Recessional—and had them rebuilt in Forest Lawn. The churches were intended for funerals, but last year 183 weddings were held in Eaton's cemetery.
By the 1930s, Eaton's vision had caught the California eye. On weekends, happy Californians packed the place like an amusement park, a sort of Disneyland of death. Some came to see the statues or to inspect the graves of their favorite show people—Tom Mix, Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, Irving Thalberg, Marie Dressier, Flo Ziegfeld are buried in Forest Lawn. Many found that the 100.000 shrubs provided plenty of quiet places to neck in. Eaton encouraged them all, and reached them all with the Forest Lawn message: "Everything at time of sorrow, in one sacred place, under one friendly management, with one convenient credit arrangement and a year to pay . . . ONE TELEPHONE CALL DOES EVERYTHING."
Missing Symbol. Last year some 8,000 loved ones, about 22 a day, were buried in Forest Lawn. Some were interred. Some were entombed. Some were inurned. (Soon, if plans for flying funerals work out, some may be enhelicoptered.) All en joyed the services of the finest available morticians and a staff of makeup artists who can hold their own with any in Hollywood. Members of all creeds were welcomed, even atheists, but Negroes and Chinese were regretfully refused (the restriction was nullified this year by California state law).