By now, the story has circulated through Hollywood and local business circles.
According to the chief protagonist, though, it’s a tale half told: Moved by a tour of the neglected but still-charming final resting place of dozens of entertainment luminaries, the scion of a minor funeral business empire, with a movie star name and the looks to match, overcomes his aversion to the death trade to bring new life to a Los Angeles landmark.
For 30-year-old Tyler Cassity, though, his much-discussed restoration of Hollywood Forever Cemetery formerly Hollywood Memorial Park is not the end of the story. Instead, it’s the first chapter in an ambitious plan to combine digital technology, competitive rates, aggressive marketing and a new standard of personal service in a business model he believes will command a larger share of the $14-billion-a-year death care industry.
Three years after snatching Hollywood Memorial Park out of bankruptcy for the bargain-basement price of $375,000, Cassity and Forever Enterprises have restored the 162-acre cemetery to its former splendor and launched an expansion project where others said none was possible. And they’ve done it while making the property profitable for the first time in decades. With interments and funerals up tenfold, Hollywood Forever generated revenues of $3 million in 1999; Cassity is projecting $5.5 million for this year.
“People come here and they have a completely different experience than what they are accustomed to having,” Cassity said. “If we excel and we give the families what they need and what they deserve, if we give them more than anyone else offers, then that works as public relations for the other 250 people that are there (to attend the funeral).”
Company officials contend the business model predicated on competitive pricing, ongoing relationships with families of the deceased and digitized memorials accessible on site or over the Internet will create a profitable niche in a market dominated by a few industry giants.
“The response has been fantastic; we’re really taking off,” said company spokesman Bill Obrock. “We’re riding the line right now, but we know it’s a viable enterprise.”
Whether Forever Enterprises can replicate the success of Hollywood Forever at other facilities that lack the allure of perpetual proximity to such Hollywood heavyweights as Rudolph Valentino, Cecil B. DeMille, Jayne Mansfield and Douglas Fairbanks remains to be seen, industry analysts say.
“The cemetery business is a very tough business and that’s going to be a tough strategy for a small company like this,” said Fran Bernstein, a New York-based analyst with Merrill Lynch Global Securities, “especially if they’re focusing on inner-city properties. A lot of those properties don’t have a lot of room to grow.”
Evolving family business
As teenagers, Tyler Cassity and his brother Brent, with whom he co-owns Forever Enterprises, discovered an audiotape of their grandmother two years after her death.
“I can’t tell you how much that preserved voice meant for our family instead of a casket or tombstone,” Cassity said. “That got us thinking.”
The brothers started a videotape biography service that turned out to be a good fit with their father’s company, Lincoln Heritage, an insurance business that offered pre-need funeral and burial services.
Encouraged by the positive response to their work but frustrated by funeral directors that refused to allow the pieces to be included in funeral services, they decided to shift their focus. Most of the insurance policies were sold off and Lincoln began to acquire properties, eventually purchasing two cemeteries and 11 funeral homes.
For more than a decade, the death care business has been dominated by three industry leaders Loewen Group of Burnaby, Canada; Houston-based Service Corp. International; and Stewart Enterprises Inc. of Louisiana with thousands of properties, tens of thousands of employees and commanding market share. In the early 1990s, all three raised substantial amounts of capital and engaged in rapid expansion.
At that time, Lincoln Heritage elected to sell off its holdings to Service Corp. for between $15 million and $20 million, Cassity said, and focus its attention on developing a video kiosk for cemeteries, which showed digitized versions of loved ones’ biographies. The name of the company was changed to Forever Enterprises.
In the past few years, a combination of factors led by unbridled spending plunged the industry giants into financial turmoil. Loewen is currently trying to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy and Service Corp. is in a frantic selling mode as it struggles to meet debt obligations. All three of the major players have seen their stock value drastically reduced in the past 24 months.
“They grew through acquisitions and they ended up paying way too much for those properties,” Bernstein said. “Right now, the industry is focused on cash flow.”
Cassity first decided to get back into the property-acquisition mode while still living in St. Louis. He came to the L.A. area to make a video-kiosk sales pitch to Rose Hills Cemetery in Whittier, and while in town, decided to swing by Hollywood Memorial.
“I realized I was ready to risk the Rose Hills deal for this strange, flooded, cracked, El Nino-ed place,” Cassity said. “I decided I wanted to start a full-service business instead of focusing on just one area.”
But neither the biographies nor the stars are Hollywood Forever’s strongest selling point, Cassity insists. Reasonable rates and close attention to the needs of the families of the deceased are what set it apart from its competitors, he said.
“You can’t build a business plan (on the stars), you can only understand how it enhances the business,” Cassity said. “People don’t really come here because of the stars.
Although Hollywood Forever values its appeal for those in the entertainment business, Orthodox Jews, Russians, Armenians and especially Latinos have been the largest source of business for the cemetery.
Drawing those groups are what Cassity contends are the lowest rates in the city. A Hollywood Forever gravesite starts at $900, averages about $1,900 and will go as high as $10,000 to $12,000 once several new lakeside plots are developed. Mausoleum space runs from about $1,900 for the top tier to $2,600 at eye level. Depending on the options, an entire funeral costs anywhere from $995 to tens of thousands of dollars.
By comparison, at Forest Lawn, one of Los Angeles’ biggest cemeteries, gravesites begin at $1,500 and the cheapest funeral runs $5,000.
Hollywood Forever has introduced a number of programs that are atypical of the cemetery business. Besides the video kiosks, the cemetery has held readings, a film festival and even a Day of the Dead celebration earlier this month.
Another key aspect of Hollywood Forever’s marketing plan is a heavy focus on pre-need sales.
Cassity said three out of four burials at Hollywood Forever were arranged in advance, a rate nearly twice the industry average.
But with limited room for new burials, the financial future of Hollywood Forever rests in its ability to market its mausoleums and cremation services. To supply the mausoleum market, a major expansion is underway that will add more than 30,000 new interment sites.
“This (mausoleum expansion) has to be the focus over the next 30 years, as land prices continue to get more expensive,” Cassity said.
Looking to the future, Forever Enterprises is in the process of acquiring nine cemeteries in the Chicago area and is also eyeing properties in Utah and Minnesota. Within a few years, Cassity said, he would like to take the company public.
Built in 1899, Hollywood Forever was and remains two separate cemeteries. The west side of the property complete with its own entrance is Beth Olam, a Jewish graveyard and mausoleum.
Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer, from the “Our Gang” comedies, was buried on the site after he was killed in a gambling dispute in his early 30s, and notorious Los Angeles gangster Bugsy Seigel has a tomb in the Jewish mausoleum.
In 1999, Hattie McDaniel was buried at Hollywood Forever nearly 50 years after her death. McDaniel, Scarlett OHara’s mammy in “Gone With the Wind,” wanted to be buried there before she died but was refused because she was black. She now rests in the high-rent district beside the lake.
Until Cassity bought the cemetery in 1998, few people, let alone image-conscious Hollywood types, clamored to be buried at Hollywood Memorial.
The property had fallen into bankruptcy and was on the verge of shutting down. The former owner, the late Jules Roth, had looted the endowment-care fund and allowed the place to fall into ruin.
“When (Cassity) bought it, the main business was disinterring bodies for angry families who didn’t want to have anything to do with the place,” Sehee said. “It was a complete mess.”
Further damaged by the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the cemetery required about $1 million in repairs. Ornate statues and private crypts were crumbling and rain was leaking into the marbled mausoleums.
“It had gotten so run down, but they’ve cleaned it up very well,” said Noel Blanc, whose father Mel, Warner Bros.’ man of a thousand voices, is among three generations of Blancs interred at Hollywood Forever.
