Not long ago, I refreshed my memory about what a hilly cemetery can look like.

Those are images of the Woodland Cemetery & Arboretum in Dayton, Ohio. Been a while since I was there (2016), but it’s still a favorite of mine.

I thought about Woodland and some of the other park-like cemeteries of the nation while on the slopes of Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California last month. The Forest Lawn slopes are arrayed with stones flush to the ground, to facilitate lawn care.

Such beauty in its hills and landscape – and such a missed opportunity for a beautiful cemetery. There are spots of beauty, but still. Flush stones, with their numbing sameness, don’t enhance a hill the way a wide variety of standing stones do. Not at all. Not only that, traces of individuality are regularly removed, as a crew is doing in the second picture above.

Even so, Forest Lawn is an interesting place. For one thing, it’s the cemetery that inspired Evelyn Waugh to produce The Loved One, his sharp satire of the American way of death, or maybe just the California way of death. I read the book about 35 years ago, I think, and don’t remember much. I saw the awful movie based on it at some point, and am glad I don’t remember much about it except, vaguely, Jonathan Winters hamming it up, as he usually did.

Looking at the trailer, I realize now how solid the cast is. I’m surprised how much talent went to waste in that movie.

“When Evelyn Waugh came to Hollywood in 1947 to discuss the film rights for Brideshead Revisited, he visited a graveyard: Forest Lawn Memorial Park,” notes Crisis Magazine. “He had heard it praised as a place unsurpassed in beauty, taste, and sensitivity; a place where ‘faith and consolation, religion and art had been brought to their highest possible association.’ But Mr. Waugh found the cemetery dripping with saccharine sentimentality, edged with macabre memorials, and repellent with cuteness.”

I don’t know about all that; I might have a higher tolerance for sentimentality or the macabre or even cuteness than the author, though I have to say that Forest Lawn doesn’t really trade in the macabre, unless you consider cemeteries by definition macabre, which I do not. If anything, it could use just a touch of macabre to tone its memorial-park lightness down a notch.

The park is expansive, its map full of named places: Inspiration Slope, Garden of Ascension, Haven of Peace, Memory Slope, Triumphant Faith Gardens, Gardens of Remembrance, Columbarium of the Christus, Court of David, Court of Freedom, Garden of Honor, Garden of Everlasting Peace, Garden of the Mystery of Life, Gardens of Contemplation, Dawn of Tomorrow Wall Crypts, Vale of Faith, Resurrection Slope, Rest Haven, Graceland, Vesperland, Slumberland, Lullabyland and Babyland, among others.

One thing not on the map is any mention of any of the movie stars buried in the cemetery, or any hint about where they might be. There are many. That’s an odd lacuna, I think, considering this is southern California and that Hollywood Forever makes a point of highlighting the famous, and does it so well with a detailed map.

A handful of famed names appeared on Google Maps at specific points in the cemetery, including Humphrey Bogart. I wasn’t far away, so I went looking for him. I wanted to pay my respects to Bogart. (I’ve seen his hand- and footprints, too.)

Soon I determined that Bogie’s ashes are behind this door to the Columbarium of Eternal Light.

A locked door. No casual admission to see one of the great actors of his time. Or Bacall, who joined him not so long ago. “Golden Key of Memory”?

I had to content myself with stones and niches of random folk.

There’s also an art museum on the grounds, which was closed when I visited, so I had to content myself with some of the freestanding public art on the grounds. There’s quite a bit of that.

A version of the Christus.

The Court of Freedom, which has a patriotic theme, is ringed with artwork. Such as the Declaration of Independence mural.

George Washington.

The chain in front of him tells a story I’d never heard.

A version of “The Republic” by Daniel Chester French.

I don’t count the statue of Washington as a presidential site for this trip, but there was one at the cemetery I did see: the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather, a lovely spot.

Couples are frequently married at the Wee Kirk, as you’d image. In early 1940, Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman were married there.