Sister Aimee
Epstein, Daniel Mark
L os Angeles is home to more than 7,000 churches. One of them represents more than the quiet accumulation of prayers and the steady, unglamorous work of saving souls. The Angelus Temple is the...
...Even as a toddler, Aimee had been an evangelist, working street corners for the Salvation Army with her mother, Minnie...
...Alas, the documentation is overwhelming: very sick people came to Sister Aimee by the tens of thousands, blind, deaf, paralyzed...
...And the crowds grew exponentially: "The thirty revivals Sister Aimee conducted from mid-1919 until mid-1922," Epstein writes, "had a mass appeal unequaled by any touring phenomenon of theater or politics in American history...
...The draw was her healing power...
...She should not have survived her twenty-first birthday...
...From its opening, the Temple was engulfed in lawsuits, while financial intrigues and McPherson's chaotic personal life provided "a feast of scandal...
...A scrape with death on the operating table, another close encounter with God, and she left her husband to return to her real work...
...Everyone who has studied the case, from its shocking beginning to its pathetic end, has remarked on this significant fact: Aimee's kidnapping story, with its goofy characters Rose, Steve, and Jake, and its melodramatic plot, is the only story that did not change...
...She literally kept most of the Mexican community alive for years," recalled actor Anthony Quinn, who became a follower of McPherson as a young boy...
...She made her way back to New York, married accountant Harold McPherson, and for three years struggled to adjust to an ordinary life...
...McPherson pioneered religious broadcasting, launching the Sunshine Hour on KFSG in early 1924...
...Such a deep and universal expression of grief had not been seen since the assassination of Lincoln," Epstein writes...
...Her 300-plus sermons had a live audience of more than two million, not including her radio hook-up...
...And a thorough effort to find the shack where she said she had been held failed to turn up even a hovel...
...But she did not look dehydrated...
...She died at age 53 in 1944, but the Temple and her denomination survived and prospered...
...But McPherson's celebrity and her unorthodox methods have obscured her Temple's day-to-day workings...
...The DA's case dissolved as his critical witness shifted stories repeatedly, and withdrew her claim that she'd been hired by Aimee to perpetrate a hoax...
...It had become an article of faith, with all its eccentricities and inconsistencies...
...The 10,000 members of the Angelus Temple and its branch churches went to the shore where she had been swimming to pray, and the nation's papers went into overtime...
...As Daniel Mark Epstein shows, of all the personalities and movements thrown up by American culture during the twenties and the Depression years, none left a more enduring legacy than Aimee Semple McPherson...
...With Minnie, she set out with a tent and little else to preach the Gospel...
...A reader of this book who resides in Southern California must conclude that what Los Angeles needs most now is not a tax cut, or more police, or a public-private partnership to build electric cars, or enterprise zones...
...Beginning with almost no capital, she oversaw the construction of Angelus Temple in Echo Park in two years...
...W orn down by the road, McPherson settled on Los Angeles as the home of her ministry...
...A "conversion experience" at 17—carefully reconstructed and examined by Epstein—led Aimee into Robert Semple's close Hugh Hewitt practices law in Southern California and is co-host of PBS's "Life & Times" newsmagazine...
...She would go wherever she was asked, and preach to all, regardless of race and class, developing extraordinary followings among black sharecroppers in the South, the upper crust in the northeast, and the country's gypsies nationwide...
...In 1922, one group, the Ku Klux Klan, believing that this young, white Pentecostalist represented the best of American womanhood,went so far as to abduct her in order to produce her before a huge gathering of masked Klansmen in Denver...
...Some will recall her famous "kidnapping," when she disappeared on May 18, 1926, and was feared drowned, only to walk back into public life in the desert outside Agua Prieta, Mexico, a month later...
...Neither Houdini nor Teddy Roosevelt had such an audience, nor P.T...
...CI...
...It would be convenient if we could find some evidence that Sister Aimee's miraculous healings were faked for the benefit of publicity...
...And here Epstein takes a courageous course for a late-twentieth-century author: Rather than skip over the evidence of a huge number of healings, or to surround that testimony with the comfortable disclaimers that eighty years' distance could easily have provided, he grapples with the records of those events, and shows no inclination to doubt McPherson: The power of healing, which Aimee exercised with reluctance and spectacular results, presents an overwhelming problem to historians who largely ignore it...
...When in 1915 she abandoned the home she shared with Harold McPherson, it was not because their marriage was an ordeal...
...Her first husband, Robert Semple, had taken her off to do missionary work in China, only to die of malaria in Hong Kong in August of 1910...
...Harold would join her on the evangelical circuit for a time before filing for divorce in 1919...
...She would point to heaven, to Christ, the Great Healer, and would take no credit for the result...
...On September 16 arrest warrants for corruption of public morals, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy to manufacture evidence were issued for Aimee, her alleged lover Kenneth Ormiston, her mother, and Lorraine Wiseman—who for a time would claim that Aimee's kidnapping had been a fraud...
...Left alone one afternoon, she cut her bonds, climbed through a window, and walked for seventeen hours through the desert...
...The divorce would later interest the scandal sheets, and Aimee was aware of its impact on her reputation, but the need to preach overwhelmed any concern for public relations...
...Epstein has brought Sister Aimee back to life at an interesting time...
...district attorney Asa Keyes grew suspicious and impaneled a grand jury...
...On news of her disappearance, the mourning was intense...
...McPherson herself had experienced a divine healing of broken bones in 1909...
...A competing explanation emerged: Aimee had had a monthlong tryst with a church-radio employee...
...Epstein's portrait of the two performers strolling that city's waterfront captures the preacher's combination of idiosyncratic method and overwhelming desire to reach the unchurched...
...The Angelus Bible Institute she founded continues to train evangelists to this day, now drawing largely on the Los Angeles Latino population...
...Barnum...
...Coming here in the car tonight, I thanked God that I was not a transgressor and had no need to be afraid...
...Her admirers thronged the Temple for its illustrated sermons, not only for her preaching, but also for her stage sense...
...It is a part of the art of Epstein's book that he conveys the burden of a healing-ministry on the healer: the exhaustion of the schedule, and the weight of the hopes of thousands of desperate people pushing through police barriers and against doors barred by fire marshals...
...Hollywood's elite was drawn there, often incognito...
...What the city and its neighbors could really use is another Sister Aimee and another grand revival...
...She broke from domestic routine, rather, because of a drive over which she had no control...
...She did not actively pursue a healing ministry, as did Oral Roberts...
...Her last major tour, launched in September of 1933, covered 15,000 miles and forty-six cities in twenty-one states...
...Epstein unearths that record, from her instant response to the devastating Santa Barbara earthquake of 1925 to the Temple's outreach during the Depression...
...When she returned on June 23, she brought back an incredible story: she had been abducted at the beach and held by the trio of Jake, Steve, and Mexicali Rose...
...she did not relish it...
...Even after her revivals dwindled, she traveled constantly, and brought her followers first-hand accounts of the world, including a fierce denunciation of Hitler and Mussolini, delivered early for an American (in 1935...
...Only an utterly confident evangelist could have issued such a challenge...
...How many of you," she asked, her dark eyes seeming to penetrate the hooded faces into their souls, "are living lives that would stand the full light of day...
...Controversy was her constant companion, and, increasingly, poor health...
...When the Temple opened in January of 1923, McPherson's ministry became a kind of religious theater...
...Epstein moves briskly through the legal and journalistic jungle of a six-month bonanza of headlines and countercharges, and does not allow the episode to overwhelm the life...
...She barnstormed...
...Before Aimee was conceived, Minnie had prayed for a baby girl, and offered to dedicate that child to God's service...
...This marvelous book will work for a while to rebuke amateurs who want their history drained of religious conviction...
...The kidnapping was only one bizarre episode among many...
...The Temple's commissary remains open, serving meals to the city's destitute...
...F rom 1916 on, her life was chaotic and spectacular...
...Aimee's "kidnapping" would become and remain a symbol of her turbulent career...
...But when her blindfold was removed, and flowers presented, Aimee requested permission to address the throng of white-robed and hooded men: In silence except for the sound of their breathing, the men listened as their guest delivered a brief and devastating sermon upon the text of Matthew 27: the story of Barabbas, the man who thought he would never be found out...
...After his death and her remarriage, Aimee tried to set aside her evangelistic urge, but felt pursued, hounded even, by the inner voice...
...A seasoned politician could have walked a line between embrace and rebuke...
...but there is no such evidence...
...A century after her birth in a farmhouse outside Salford, Ontario, in October 1890, the Foursquare Gospel Church she founded consists of 25,577 churches spread over seventy-four countries...
...Epstein's summary refuses a guess at the truth, but is satisfied with a retelling of other experts' conclusions: That Aimee herself believed in the kidnapping, as poetry or history, we are in no position to question...
...One patron, the relentlessly skeptical Charlie Chaplin, was stunned to have McPherson return the favor by showing up at his Marseilles doorfront...
...The Angelus Temple is the enduring monument to a remarkable life, now captured in a remarkable book...
...Her Pentecostalist view of the Gospels embraced the idea that such healing was as available in the twentieth century as it had been in the first...
...Aimee was eight months pregnant, marooned, and recovering from malaria and dysentery herself...
...company and missionary work...
...Many were healed, some temporarily, some forever...
...A mere performer would have played to the crowd...
...But when charges were dismissed in January 1927, there was no set of findings, no central conclusion, and no verdict...
Vol. 26 • August 1993 • No. 8
