Word: hollywoods
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...associates called him "The Builder," and well they might. In the space of 50 years, Millionaire Mortician Hubert Eaton transformed 55 acres of mud, brambles and neglected tombstones into the world's most famous necropolis-Forest Lawn Memorial-Park in Glendale, Calif. Half of Hollywood is buried there, amid rolling lawns, splashing fountains, marble statuary, all of which proclaims that Death Can Be Beautiful. Eaton's handiwork evoked virulent attack (Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death) and savage satire (Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One). In fact, the reality of Forest Lawn defied parody...
Over the years, Eaton expanded the original Forest Lawn to 317 acres, opened new ones in Hollywood Hills, Cypress and Covina. But not without opposition. When his plans for Covina became known, outraged residents rushed out to picket, carrying signs reading "Drop Dead Elsewhere" and "Land of the Free or Home of the Grave?" Overnight, Eaton's men buried six bodies in the property-the exact number necessary, under California law, to constitute a cemetery...
...Hays Office, and the Hollywood Production Code it used to administer, are institutions as quaint and dated as Busby Berkeley musicals and brown-and-white shoes. Yet their demise and the present attempt to replace them tell a good deal about American show business-and therefore about American mores...
...champion of the belief that opera worth hearing is also worth seeing, he raided Broadway, Hollywood and London for directors and set designers of the caliber of Garson Kanin, Tyrone Guthrie, Alfred Lunt and Cecil Beaton, who were imaginative if not daring. And he has at least reduced the incidence of love duets between a bandy-legged tenor and an overstuffed loveseat of a so prano; only the tones, Bing discreetly has hinted, should be pear-shaped. Significantly, wardrobe mistresses at the Met report that over a few short years the average size of the women's costumes shrank...
...loving lap of an East Harlem Jewish family ("We didn't have Tennessee Williams problems," she once said. "It was more George Kaufman"), she had only to elaborate on her memories ("Yoohoo, Mrs. Bloom!") to sustain the 25-year run of her show, whose momentum carried her to Hollywood (Molly) and Broadway (A Majority of One) as leading popularizer of the formidable art of Jewish motherhood...