Disneyland is advertised as "the happiest place on Earth." Forest Lawn was pitched as "the happiest cemetery." The parallels between theme park and memorial park are more than skin deep, and that is the unlikely thesis of a new show at the Forest Lawn Museum, "California Visionaries: The Lives and Legacies of Walt Disney and Hubert Eaton."
It turns out that animation mogul Disney and cemetery tycoon Eaton had a lot in common. They were raised in small-town Missouri within 100 miles of each other. Each moved to L.A. to found an institution that has come to epitomize the middlebrow populism and capitalist pixie dust of the city at mid century. Disney and Eaton came to be friends; they died within three months of each other. Disney was honorary pallbearer at Eaton's funeral and soon after was laid to rest himself—at Forest Lawn, naturally.
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| Still of Walt Disney's The Skeleton Dance, 1929 |
One of the earliest objects in the show is a film, Disney's
The Skeleton Dance (1929)
. Released the year after
Steamboat Willie, it showcased the new technology of sound synchronization. The gallery text identifies
Skeleton Dance as "Walt Disney's earliest use of a cemetery in animation." This exhibition must be the first time it's been shown in a working cemetery. It prefigures a taste for the macabre that runs through the Disney oeuvre, culminating in the Haunted Mansion.
Forest Lawn was already a substantial tourist attraction when Disneyland opened in 1955. Both parks had hand-out maps and tickets for popular attractions. Forest Lawn even had a ride, a funicular railroad. (It's no longer there.)
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| Edith Barretto Parsons' The Duck Baby (about 1921, Forest Lawn Museum) with an It's a Small World Audio-Animatronic Figure by Mary Blair, Alice Davis, Harriet Burns, and Blaine Gibson (about 1964, Garner Holt Productions) |
World's fairs were a mutual influence. Eaton attended 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. There he saw The Duck Baby, a schmaltzy bronze statue by the now-obscure Edith Barretto Parsons. Eaton bought a cast for Forest Lawn, and this launched his reinvention of the cemetery as a museum without walls of the people's art. (Maybe a future iteration of this show could include George Lucas.)
Some of Disneyland's attractions were created for worlds' fairs. "It's a Small World" debuted at the 1964–65 New York World's Fair and was later rebuilt at Disneyland and other Disney parks.
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| Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Abraham Lincoln: The Man, about 1911. Forest Lawn Museum |
As Midwesterners, Disney and Eaton had special admiration for Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain. Eaton commissioned a bronze reduction of Augustus Saint-Gaudens' 1887 Lincoln monument (the original in Chicago) for Forest Lawn.
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| Fletcher Ransom, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 1938. Forest Lawn Museum |
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| Unknown photographer, Walt Disney and Sculptor Blaine Gibson with Life Mask of Abraham Lincoln, image about 1963 (modern print). The Walt Disney Archives |
Disney went further, commissioning a talking robo-Lincoln for his theme park's Hall of Presidents. He used Leonard Volk's 1860 life mask as a model, as did Saint-Gaudens.
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| Bob Gurr, Abraham Lincoln Sketch for Overall Body Assembly of Audio-Animatronic, 1964. Garner Holt Productions |
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| Herbert Ryman, Second Study for The Resurrection, about 1960. Forest Lawn Museum |
The nexus of Forest Lawn and Disneyland might just be Herbert Ryman (1910–1989). He was an artist at MGM during the studio's golden age, devising the look of the Emerald City in
The Wizard of Oz. Ryman moved to Disney in 1938, working as art director for
Dumbo and
Fantasia. In 1953 Disney recruited him for his theme park project. Ryman created the sketch of Disneyland that Roy Disney sold to Wall Street. As an Imagineer, Ryman conceptualized Sleeping Beauty's Castle and the Pirates of the Caribbean.
Meanwhile, Eaton had bought a 195-ft-long religious painting, Jan Styka's The Crucifixion, that had been shown at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. He wanted to display it in his Glendale cemetery but was concerned that a big painting of capital punishment could kill the "happiest cemetery" vibe. Eaton decided he needed a companion painting, also humongous, of the resurrection. He hired Ryman to produce sketches. The final, 70-ft-wide painting was executed by Robert Clark, an artist who had done wildlife dioramas for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Both Styka's and Clark's paintings are shown in Forest Lawn's Hall of the Crucifixion with synchronized light and sound effects. The effect is very Disneyland, and the influence ran both ways. Ryman had Disney tour the Forest Lawn show for inspiration in the early 1960s.
"California Visionaries" is at the Forest Lawn Museum, Glendale, through Feb. 7, 2027.
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| Installation view with Dumbo the Flying Elephant Ride Vehicle, 1983. Garner Holt Productions |
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