The Last Good Buy : Cemeteries are fighting for business--without using the D-word. How? Easy credit, talking statues, free calculators and Westminster Abbey.

On smogless days, the view toward downtown Los Angeles is spectacular from Whittier’s Alta Vista neighborhood: lush lawns, stands of trees and--at dusk--miles of twinkling lights and the distant silhouette of skyscrapers.

Of course, nobody who moves here will ever enjoy it, but that’s a minor detail. In death, as in life, location is everything. And a tomb with a view is a great sales gimmick.

But these days, it’s not enough.

Burial grounds across the land--confronted with declining death rates, a surge in cremations and competition from cemetery chains--are trying all sorts of methods to entice customers: Talking statues. Two-for-one sales. Actors dressed as Aztec emperors or Abraham Lincoln. Graveyard concert series. Ads on “Wheel of Fortune.” Tombs with skylights. Topiary landscaping. And solar-powered calculators free to every prospective corpse.

In Los Angeles especially, the battle for bodies is so fierce that even the Catholic Church--which for years studiously avoided the aggressive marketing of its secular counterparts--has hired 185 salesmen to recapture business from other cemeteries.

“The competition,” says a spokesman for the Virginia-based American Cemetery Assn., “is brutal.”

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That’s good news to people like Larry Sloane of Albany, N.Y., a cemetery consultant with dozens of clients nationwide. When the body count dips, Sloane goes to work, analyzing demographic data and making recommendations on everything from graveyard design to advertising campaigns.

If the surrounding community is mostly college-educated, well-to-do Protestants, for instance, he advises the cemetery to gear itself toward people interested in cremation, which is more popular among that group.

If business is slow for a church-owned property, he suggests promotions appealing to a secular audience.

The goal is to sell cemetery space--lawn plots, mausoleum crypts, urn niches--long before people need it. Easy credit. And installment payments.

But the task is a tricky one.

“It’s difficult because people don’t want to think about their own mortality,” says Sandy V. Durko, executive vice president at Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier. “We try to do it in as sensitive a manner as we can.”

In Rose Hills’ case, that can also mean TV spots on “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy.” And death arriving at the door as flyers in direct-mail coupon packs, along with ads for discount pizza and manicures. One Rose Hills pitch, for instance, offers a “free super-slim solar calculator” to anyone requesting information on advance-purchase grave plots: Use it to compute “what your savings could add up to (if you buy) semi-developed cemetery property now.”

Sloane considers the coupon packs tacky and says most cemeteries can’t afford TV and radio ads. It’s more efficient to send letters to women age 50 and older, the best customers for graveyard plots. Women realize their husbands are more likely to die first, cemetery operators say, so they want things taken care of in advance.

But that doesn’t mean that younger audiences are written off.

Rose Hills sponsors an annual “Mom and Me” art contest, in which schoolchildren--60,000 last year--draw pictures for Mother’s Day. Top entries are displayed at the cemetery, and trophies and certificates are awarded. For schools with winning students, it’s a chance to collect part of $11,000 in prize money.

For the cemetery, it’s a way to “make people aware of Rose Hills in a very non-threatening manner,” says Dessie L. Wainwright, assistant vice president in charge of marketing. Contest winners in particular, she says, “will always have a warm feeling about Rose Hills.”

The cemetery also hosts a tree-lighting ceremony every December--on the helicopter pad outside its corporate offices--as well as an amateur photo contest and Easter sunrise service.

The outreach is needed. Rose Hills, the nation’s largest cemetery at 2,500 acres, has room for at least 3.2 million future corpses.

Other cemeteries, meanwhile, offer concerts, pumpkin-carving ceremonies, Cinco de Mayo festivals, Santa Claus, Easter egg hunts and--in Buffalo--a special day honoring one of America’s most obscure Presidents, Millard Fillmore, who is buried there.

Such efforts are designed to counter rapidly declining interest in cemeteries. Fifty years ago, people visited graveyards monthly, if not weekly, says cemetery historian Kenneth T. Jackson, a Columbia University professor. “But in the Pepsi generation . . . we don’t want to know about death.”

Jackson, who wrote “Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery,” says one of the first to recognize the shift in attitude was Forest Lawn.

At L.A.’s most famous final resting places, dead is the worst kind of four-letter word. “The departed” are viewed in “slumber rooms,” the embalming building is disguised as George Washington’s Mount Vernon home and cemetery plots are located in areas with names like Serenity, Paradise and Murmuring Trees.

Even the plants are all evergreens, lest their falling leaves remind someone of you-know-what.

Of course, the idea of sugarcoating death is nothing new. The Greek word from which cemetery is derived, koimeterion, means “sleeping place.” And in 1839, when Green-Wood Cemetery President D. B. Douglass was asked why he rejected advice to name his burial ground Necropolis, he said it was because a necropolis “is a mere depository for dead bodies. Ours is a cemetery . . . a place of repose.”

The art of masking death wasn’t truly perfected, however, until Forest Lawn. “The cemeteries of today are wrong because they depict an end, not a beginning,” founder Hubert Eaton wrote in 1917, when he took over what would become the first of Forest Lawn’s five branches, in Glendale. “I shall endeavor to build Forest Lawn . . . as unlike other cemeteries as sunshine is unlike darkness, as eternal life is unlike death.”

What emerged instead, according to critics and satirists, is the cemetery as amusement park. At Forest Lawn, statues are wired for sound, souvenir shops sell graveyard postcards and spoons, and Abraham Lincoln occasionally roams the grounds in stovepipe hat. At Easter, none other than Jesus Christ makes a cameo.

The overall effect is so surreal that, within the funeral industry itself, Forest Lawn’s Glendale branch has been dubbed “Disneyland.” (Yes, Walt is actually buried there.)

Other observers aren’t quite so kind. Evelyn Waugh, who savagely parodied the cemetery in his 1948 book “The Loved One,” wrote in Life magazine a year earlier: “We are very far here from the traditional conception of (a graveyard).” At Forest Lawn, the usual reminders that “beauty was skin-deep and pomp was mortal . . . are reversed. The body does not decay; it lives on, more chic in death than ever before, in its indestructible Class A steel-and-concrete shelf; the soul goes straight from the Slumber Room to Paradise, where it enjoys an endless infancy.”

The public, however, doesn’t seem to mind. Waugh portrayed the memorial park as “a gigantic joke,” says USC urban and regional planning professor David Sloane in “The Last Great Necessity,” but “Americans weren’t laughing. They were busy buying lots and visiting the Great Mausoleum.”

Today, Forest Lawn is second only to Arlington National Cemetery in attracting tourists. And its pioneering practices--billboard advertisements, headstone-free landscaping and the combination cemetery-mortuary-flower shop--are widely emulated.

While Forest Lawn positions itself for the future--it reportedly has enough land just at its Hollywood Hills location to bury Southern Californians for centuries--some other cemeteries are turning to the past.

The Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove has revived the practice of burying people on church grounds. For centuries, Christians entombed their dead underneath, outside or within the walls of churches. Westminster Abbey in England is among the most famous examples. And the Crystal Cathedral aims to continue that tradition.

But no church graveyard ever looked like this. Walls of water cascade down bone-white concrete-and-granite blocks at the entrance. And piped-in music plays from the light fixtures. For $2,400 to $5,000, a person can have cremated ashes inserted into an outdoor mosaic or a floor-to-ceiling stained glass window.

For considerably more--$150,000 and up--custom tombs with skylights are available.

Concert pianist Roger Williams bought the first, which he outfitted in white marble with black piano-style keys along the side walls. Over the crypts that will eventually house him and his wife is a back-lit, stained-glass portrait--in the shape of a grand piano lid--depicting the couple at a piano by a tree bearing “Autumn Leaves,” his signature song.

The majority of burial spaces at the Cathedral, however, are double-decker ground plots or granite niches and crypts built into the cemetery’s terraced walls.

All told, the 1.5-acre property has room for about 10,000 corpses. At an average charge of $1,100 per space, according to cemetery director Larry Davis, that translates into gross sales of $11 million.

The Rev. Robert Schuller, who bills the site “the Westminster Abbey of America,” promotes it to his flock through church bulletin inserts, special mailings and television ads on his “Hour of Power” program: “Here, resting in hallowed ground, in sheltered wall and sacred niche, lie the mortal hearts of the people of God, who will be together for eternity.”

Schuller’s isn’t the only church in the cemetery business. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles operates 11 graveyards and, as a matter of doctrine, expects its followers to be buried in them as a symbol that church unity continues after death.

In recent years, however, secular cemeteries have muscled into the Catholic market, aggressively selling space in their own “Catholic sections,” a practice local church officials consider misleading, if not deliberately deceptive.

But it works.

In 1986, though, the archdiocese started fighting back. The church created a “pre-need family counseling program”--and unleashed its sales force on the L.A. archdiocese’s 300 parishes.

“We had to get our message out to the people,” says Jerry McAdams, the archdiocese’s director of property development. “And it’s been extremely effective.”

Annual sales, he says, are up 40% since the program began.

Competition for Catholics isn’t the only challenge for the estimated 7,500 cemeteries actively operating in the United States. Cremation--an option now chosen by 40% of all Californians--has also proved troublesome.

Because most states allow ashes to be disposed of virtually anywhere, some cemeteries have watched their business literally scatter to the winds. In fighting back, industry spokesmen argue that survivors are better off psychologically if there is some permanent place where they can “visit” the deceased.

In California, that argument was turned into law in 1986. Thanks to heavy lobbying by the industry, cremated remains may only be deposited at sea or in a cemetery.

That’s a potential windfall for graveyards, where the average price for interring a body or ashes is $2,200, according to a 1990 statewide survey by the California Interment Assn.

“We can meet their needs and still be profitable,” says association President Mary Tripp. “But we’ve had to adjust.”

In addition to the mosaic and stained-glass niches pioneered by the Crystal Cathedral, cemeteries have also experimented with “scattering lawns” and “memorial walls,” where the name of a loved one can be engraved.

Rose Hills, for example, recently unveiled a Vietnam Memorial-style black wall, with room for about 10,000 names. At $125 a pop.

In Northern California, Cypress Lawn Memorial Park has taken out ads in Chinese publications, soliciting business from Hong Kong refugees who don’t want to leave their loved ones’ already-buried remains behind when Communist China takes control of the city in 1997.

Cypress is also promoting mausoleum interment, generally a much more profitable venture than ground burial because spaces worth hundreds or thousands of dollars apiece can be stacked to the ceiling.

For those who sniff at the idea of “apartment living” in the hereafter, however, Cypress also offers the private estate. In the grand tradition of the pillared, above-ground tombs housing the Hearst and Crocker clans, Cypress has begun actively promoting modern mansions for the dead.

In the past six years, four of the custom mausoleums have sprung up, and at least one other is on the drawing board. The most opulent belongs to beer baron Paul Kalmanovitz, who died in 1987 and was known for his Pabst Blue Ribbon and Falstaff brews.

Price: $5 million.