Final Notes : Forest Lawn Organist Pipes the Departed Into Eternity With Vast Repertoire

The “departed,” as they call the dead at Forest Lawn, had left instructions in his will. Keep the music light-hearted; no hymns, no Bach, no tear-jerkers. Something to send the folks out with smiles on their faces even if there are lumps in their throats.

His family took it one step further. How about some Broadway show music, specifically the scores of “The Sound of Music” and “My Fair Lady”? Upbeat family fare befitting the wealthy businessman who had a jaunty side to him.

No problem, replied R. Donald Curry, the cheery staff organist at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, the California birthplace of cemetery extravaganzas. No problem in the slightest.

Played a Variety

After all, with 45 years at Forest Lawn and tens of thousands of funerals under his belt, nothing much surprises Curry any more. He’s played funeral requests for rumbas and Beatles tunes, college fight songs and sea chanteys, opera highlights and disco hits. Not to mention hymns, religious music and classics of every ethnic variety.

There was even the family, unmindful of the musical pun, who asked for “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” at the cremation service for their loved one. They got what they asked for.

“The requests are almost as unlimited as the differences in people’s tastes,” explained Curry, who was born 72 years ago in England and still has a strong accent. “It’s not our job to tell them what to want. We serve them, and want to accommodate them. If they want it, we’ll play it.

“There are a lot of things that from a religious point of view could be seen in poor taste or sometimes even amusing, but we are not going to stand in judgment or tone it down. If they want a Sousa march, I’m not going to make it sound funereal. I’m going to play it out the way Sousa wrote it.”

Toning It Down

Once in while, however, there may be a little editing. The other day, for example, Curry, wearing a most unfunereal bright plaid sports jacket, was sitting in his tiny pipe organ room next to the pulpit in the Wee Kirk O’ the Heather chapel, unseen by mourners.

It was Curry’s third, and last, service of the day. He was working his way through the songbooks of “The Sound of Music” and “My Fair Lady” at the service for the well-connected businessman. On his 18-rank Estey organ, he was piping out the unmistakable tunes of “Do Re Mi,” “A Little Bit of Luck” and “On the Street Where You Live.”

He got to “I Could Have Danced All Night,” and with a jolly smile and a wink quickly turned the page. “This might be too much,” he explained to a visitor. “We better leave it out.”

An open coffin is often just on the other side of a curtain which separates Curry from the chapel. He gets little recognition except for an occasional thank you from a minister or an attendant. Yet somehow, he has managed to maintain a sympathetic sense of humor--not sarcasm or cynicism, but a warm appreciation of how the foibles of humanity persist even beyond the grave.

Many, Many Funerals

This understanding helps him get through at least three (in his younger days, as many as eight) funerals every day, five or six days a week. Through thousands of formulaic homilies by ministers and priests who in many cases didn’t know the deceased. Through the emotional song solos of relatives and friends who need accompaniment on the organ. Through the mourners’ sobbing, which is sometimes louder than the music.

“Once in a while, a very tragic thing will get to you. Like the death of a child or a young person. We can’t do our job without feeling some emotional pull,” Curry, who lives in Montrose, explained during a break.

“You are involved while it’s happening. If you are sensitive enough to be a musician, you are sensitive to those things. But when I walk out of those gates, I walk away from it.”

It also helps, Curry says, that he is religious and believes that funeral music gives survivors “a sense of resurrection and hope.”

Music’s Mission

“Music at times like this fulfills a mission. It acts as therapy to help people over difficult times,” he said. “It may make them cry and release a catharsis or it may bear them up. Either way, I definitely feel it serves a purpose, just like a good minister.”

Indeed, ministers who officiate at funerals at Forest Lawn’s three nondenominational chapels in Glendale praise Curry and this attitude.

“He’s so good that some people don’t think the music is live. They think it’s canned,” said the Rev. Donald Wyatt, pastor of the Milo Terrace Baptist Church in Highland Park. “He’s the master, he always comes through.”

Curry, in turn, appreciates the differing styles of the clergy. After all these years, he has an uncanny ability to predict, almost down to the minute, how long their sermons will be and which parable they will choose to comfort the mourners.

Belonged to Episcopal Order

Curry came to Forest Lawn via religion and serious music. After attending junior college in California, he joined the Society of St. John the Evangelist, the Episcopal monastic order, for five years and studied liturgical music and Gregorian chants under church masters. He considered entering the priesthood, he said, until he realized that “music had a stronger pull.”

Over the years, he has composed liturgical music and adopted hymns for the organ; 10 volumes of his work have been published and he was awarded an honorary doctorate in liturgical music from Erasmus College in Surrey, England. Until recently, he also played the organ and led church choirs in the Glendale area.

In 1939, he landed what was to have been a summer replacement job which, except for three years in the Army Air Corps, turned out to last 45 years.

He has played many simple services, like one last week for an 87-year-old retired mechanic whose family requested “The Anniversary Waltz” and “O Sole Mio.” And he has played for the the rich and famous, including Hollywood stars Marie Dressler, Jeannette McDonald, Mary Pickford and Marion Davies. “They were like movie premieres at Grauman’s Chinese Theater,” Curry recalled of those lavish send-offs.

Valley of Death

One of the last old-style show-business funerals Curry played for at Forest Lawn was that of actor Robert Taylor in 1969. Taylor had been the host on the “Death Valley Days” television show; his predecessor in that role was Ronald Reagan. Since Reagan, then governor of California, was to deliver the eulogy, it was thought that the “Death Valley” theme song would be appropriate at the memorial service. Someone gave Curry a tape of the music and he reconstructed it for the organ. Again, no problem.

Like a band leader who plays for weddings and dances, Curry has kept up with big-band, folk, rock, blues and gospel music. He also has kept up with the changing ethnic composition of Southern California and Forest Lawn. The cemetery ended its one-time white-only policy more than two decades ago, and Curry has had to learn tunes for Buddhist chants, Armenian Orthodox chants, and Mexican folk songs.

Around Forest Lawn, few forget that Hubert Eaton, “the builder” of the cemetery, had left word that Curry was to play at Eaton’s own funeral, which Curry did in 1966.

Eaton turned a tiny Glendale graveyard into the enormous art-filled memorial park that now leaves visitors, depending on their outlook, in worshipful awe, fits of laughter, or somewhere between. Forest Lawn became a multimillion-dollar chain with four huge memorial parks, while Eaton’s business practices and ultra-conservative political views often landed him in controversy.

Wanted Live Music

But one thing keeps Eaton’s memory warm in organists’ hearts. Eaton (Curry calls him “the Old Man”) insisted on live pipe organ music at all Forest Lawn services. In more recent years, only the Glendale Forest Lawn still provides live organ music all the time. The other three, like many other mortuaries, offer a choice of taped music and will arrange for an organist if the family requests one.

Curry compares those tapes to automatic teller machines at banks--economical, but soulless. “I don’t think the Old Man would go for it, but he’s not around anymore, is he?”

So Curry has a suspicion that he may be the last full-time organist at Forest Lawn. For one thing, Forest Lawn officials say it may be difficult to find an organist who, like him, also is able to maintain the instruments. It may also be difficult, Curry adds, to find young organists willing to play the rumba on request: “They may just want to play Bach and let it go at that.”

Curry has not thought much about retiring yet. But he and his wife have discussed their own funerals. They already have burial plots reserved at the Forest Lawn in Hollywood Hills.

And what kind of service would he like? “I want some good, solid hymns. Keep it simple. Have it in an Episcopal church and keep the casket closed!”