Forest Lawn was founded in 1906 as a not-for-profit cemetery by San Francisco businessmen, but it found its character when Hubert Eaton arrived in 1912 and took over management in 1917. Eaton was a visionary of a very particular American type: optimistic, entrepreneurial, and convinced that death could be rebranded. He eliminated upright grave markers — the "unsightly stoneyards" of conventional burial grounds — and replaced them with flat bronze plaques flush with the lawn. He commissioned copies of famous artworks and brought in original pieces. He was the first cemetery director to open a funeral home on dedicated cemetery grounds.

Eaton's theology shaped the landscape. He believed in a joyous afterlife and designed Forest Lawn to reflect that belief. The burial sections carry names meant to comfort: Inspiration Slope, Sweet Memories, Whispering Pines, Vesperland. One section for infants, called Babyland, is shaped like a heart. The grounds feel more like a botanical garden than a place of grief — which was exactly the point.

The Forest Lawn Museum opened in 1952 and operates today next to the Hall of Crucifixion-Resurrection, rotating exhibitions twice yearly. It has hosted solo shows for Henri Matisse, Winslow Homer, Francisco Goya, and Rembrandt. The permanent collection includes medieval stained glass windows from the collection of William Randolph Hearst, dating from approximately 1315 to 1575, purchased by Forest Lawn in 1954.

The museum's most famous possession is the oil painting Song of the Angels, by French academic painter William Bouguereau, completed in 1881. The painting shows a mother and child sleeping while three angels hover nearby. Legend holds that Bouguereau's first wife, Nelly Monochablon, posed for all the figures. The work traveled to the Getty Center in 2005 for cleaning and restoration before returning to its gothic-style frame, built by Forest Lawn craftsmen. In the Court of David stands a seventeen-foot-tall replica of Michelangelo's David. The first replica fell during the 1971 Sylmar earthquake; subsequent copies fell in 1994 and 2020. The original's head and right foot remain on display in the museum.

Forest Lawn is where Hollywood's golden age went to be buried. Humphrey Bogart is here. So is Clark Gable, Walt Disney, Chico and Gummo Marx, Larry Fine, Joseph Barbera, Michael Jackson, and Elizabeth Taylor. The concentration of celebrated names reflects Forest Lawn's deliberate cultivation of the entertainment industry — and the industry's affinity for a cemetery that treats death as something other than defeat.

The grounds originally excluded Black, Jewish, and Chinese Americans from burial — a history the institution has since acknowledged. The segregation ended, but the fact of it belongs to the full story of what Forest Lawn was: a product of its era's enthusiasms and its era's cruelties, sometimes simultaneously. Today the cemetery serves a more diverse community, and the art museum continues its work regardless of who lies beneath the lawns outside.

Forest Lawn's grandiosity has attracted satirists as well as mourners. Evelyn Waugh's 1948 novel The Loved One drew directly on his visit to the cemetery, depicting a place called Whispering Glades with affectionate savagery. Tom Paxton wrote a satirical song simply titled "Forest Lawn" for his 1970 album, poking at the institution's cheerful commercialism. The cemetery has absorbed these critiques without apparent difficulty. It remains privately owned, heavily visited, and architecturally consistent with Eaton's original vision — a great park devoid of what he called "misshapen monuments and other signs of earthly death."