The real estate blog network, Curbed, has issued its latest Pocket Guide to Los Angeles. This may be of interest to those of you planning to attend the Evelyn Waugh Conference next spring at the Huntington Library near Pasadena. The Curbed Los Angeles Pocket Guide contains 25 entries, listed roughly from east to west. Here’s entry 9:
Forest Lawn Glendale
If you’re going to get to know Los Angeles, you have to understand its weird relationship with death, for which Forest Lawn Glendale is ground zero. The “memorial park” was founded in the 1910s by “The Builder,” Hubert Eaton, who believed that there could be joy in death and that tombstones were gloomy. Following these tenets, he developed these 300 acres of rolling grounds with copies of famous chapels and artworks, including all of Michelangelo’s statues and a stained glass version of “The Last Supper.” Today Forest Lawn Glendale (the memorial park is now a chain) is the final resting place of Walt Disney, Michael Jackson, and infamous preacher Aimee Semple McPherson. It also helped inspired Evelyn Waugh’s essential LA book The Loved One and its movie adaptation.
Given the cemetery’s new nomenclature, should we considering renaming Waugh’s fictional version Whispering Glades Burbank?