Sister Aimee

By Brad Darrach

STORMING HEAVEN by Lately Thomas. 364 pages. Morrow. $10.

Aimee Semple McPherson liked to brag that she arrived in Los Angeles with $10 and a tambourine. If she'd had another ten-spot, she would probably have wound up Pope. As it was, she merely became the most famous gospel shouter of her time (1890-1944), founding mother of the enormous Angelus Temple and its 750 satellite churches, pastor to a radio parish of millions. Biographer Lately Thomas, who recounted one episode of her story a decade ago, fails to see his subject in any depth, or place her in historic context. Even so, his portrait of Sister Aimee makes grotesquely funny reading and shows the lady off as essentially what she was: a terrifying natural force.

Born on a farm in Ontario, Aimee absorbed that oldtime religion from her zealous Ma. At 17, she married a young Holy Roller who hustled her off to China as a missionary and quickly died there. A few months later, Aimee turned up in the U.S. with a weeks-old daughter in tow. She floundered around the Pentecostal circuit till a grocery clerk named McPherson proposed. After a fairly short spell of McPherson, she fell deathly ill and suffered a vision in which the Lord summoned her from the dishpan to the pulpit. So she dumped her daughter and small son on the farm in Ontario and ran away to preach. In 1918, preaching took her to Los Angeles, and Los Angeles quickly took her to its stucco heart.

Sobbing and Swooning. Her eyes were big and soulful. Her body was broad, her legs heavy, her voice a trombone blare. Propounding the "Foursquare Gospel," she dressed sometimes in gauzy robes that floated out behind her like angel wings. Sometimes she appeared in the uniform of a sailor, fireman or traffic cop ("Stop! You are breaking God's law!"). She illustrated her sermons with skits or pantomimes and composed oratorios for a chorus of 500. The effect of all this was hallucinogenic. Five thousand listeners gasped and sobbed and swooned as one.

By 1926, Aimee was the most famous woman in the West. And then suddenly she was dead. Her body, it was true, could not be found, but her secretary said she had last seen Aimee swimming out to sea at Ocean Park, Calif. The faithful mourned hysterically. Then one day word came from Douglas, Ariz., that Aimee had staggered out of the desert babbling about being kidnaped and held for $500,000 ransom.

The police were puzzled. If Aimee had wandered for hours in the desert, how come her shoes were hardly scuffed? Other questions arose. Why had the radioman at the temple disappeared at almost the same time Aimee had? And who was that thick-ankled woman who had spent ten days with him in a vine-covered cottage at Carmel? The scandal broke in six-inch headlines, and Aimee, her mother and the radioman were held for trial on conspiracy charges; but after eight months of priceless worldwide publicity, "a certain person of influence" was bought off for $6,000, according to Ma, and Aimee won a dismissal.

Aimee's congregation was now immense, and to keep it growing she promoted what turned out to be a 20-year slanging match with Ma, a simpering old party with a tongue like a blowtorch. It was a real power struggle: Ma had a loud voice in making church policy and a death grip on the temple's purse strings. To shake her loose, Aimee once went so far as to bust her nose. Ma struck back by dishing out some dirt about Sister Aimee's finances.

Aimee, the story went, skimmed the collection plate; when the congregation contributed $3,500, she acknowledged $1,200. She kept three sets of books and a secret bank account in which $100,000 was deposited (and withdrawn) in one nine-month period. What's more, she kept a double who took imaginary trips and ran up imaginary expenses.

In 1931, long since divorced from Mc-Pherson, Aimee eloped to Yuma, Ariz., with a plump baritone named David Hutton, who sang in the temple choir. On the morning after their wedding, Aimee and David cooed over the radio from the bridal boudoir in the evangelist's home and signed off with a loud wet smack. Next day David was sued for breach of promise by a "masseuse" named Myrtle Joan Hazel St. Pierre, who announced that "Big Boy" had sullied her virtue on the floor of her living room and then had failed to make an honest woman of her. A jury awarded Myrtle $5,000, which Big Boy couldn't pay and Aimee wouldn't. A few months later, in fact, Aimee wouldn't have anything more to do with Hutton, who sued for divorce and signed up for a vaudeville tour.

Showman or Shaman. In her last years, Aimee shrewdly retouched her public image by sending about 2,000,000 Bibles to servicemen and calling down biblical plagues on the Axis powers ("How many of you would like to see Hitler covered with boils from head to foot?") But her heart really wasn't in it any more, and on Sept. 27, 1944, she died of an overdose of barbiturates.

Suicide? Even in death Aimee kept the public guessing. That was her style--and perhaps her privilege. It should hardly be a biographer's privilege, but Thomas claims it. He chooses to see her as a showman; but she was also a shaman, one of the charged and chosen few in whom the divine and the demonic hold alarming dialogue. There was a chance here to deep-psych a deplorable genius and put calipers to the phenomenon of religious fervor. Because Thomas passed it up, Aimee emerges as a personality who overflows the scope of the book. At her death she left (to her loyal son Rolf) an entire church--which now claims more than 193,000 members and property valued at $59,000,000. To Ma, she left $10.

Brad Darrach

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