World Famous Cults and Fanatics (15 page)

Suddenly, hundreds of people were hobbling towards the platform, tears streaming down their faces, praising the Lord and Aimée Semple McPherson.
The next day, everyone in San Diego was
talking about the miracle.

Aimée embarked on another triumphant tour of the Pacific coast.
Then she realized it was time to stop moving around like a travelling showman.
She would build a temple in Los Angeles.
In
1923, Los Angeles was not the world’s most sprawling city; it was still an enormous village, full of country folk.
They welcomed the idea of an evangelical temple, and contributed generously.
On 1 January 1923, trumpets blared, and Aimée unveiled the floodlit, electrically rotating cross that formed the heart of the Angelus Temple; by night it could be seen fifty miles away.
The
Temple, and Sister Aimée’s house next door, had cost about $1½ million.
The Temple had a seating capacity of 5,000, a broadcasting station, a theological seminary, an enormous
organ, and a “Miracle Room” full of discarded crutches.
Groups of disciples engaged in non-stop prayer, participating in relays.
Aimée, with a genius that owed something to
Hollywood (and to which Billy Graham undoubtedly owes some of his own methods), held pageants with music, picture-shows of the Holy Land, and dramatized sermons, all accompanied by a vast choir.
Her neighbour Carey McWilliams remarked felicitously that, “Aimée kept the Ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds of religion turning night and day.”
At the end of her sermons, she
asked sinners to come forward to be saved; as the lights were lowered, and soft music soothed the audience, hundreds rose to their feet and moved down the aisles.
Then Aimée would shout,
“Turn on the lights and clear the one-way street for Jesus,” and suddenly the music would turn into a brazen blare.
Aimée was one of the earth’s great showmen.
For sheer
entertainment her meetings surpassed anything that could be seen in the cinemas.

It was in 1925 that a new radio operator took over the Temple’s radio station.
His name was Kenneth G.
Ormiston and he had a soothing, cultivated voice.
At first, Aimée spoke to him
only over the headphones; then they met by the Temple steps and she drove him home to his wife.
But soon Ormiston was no longer hurrying home to his wife once the programmes were over.
Instead, he
went to a room in the Ambassador Hotel, where Sister Aimée was waiting.
In 1926 Aimée went on a visit to the Holy Land, financed by “love offerings” from her followers.
Ormiston was absent from California during this period, although it is not known for certain whether he travelled with Aimée.
She was back in Los Angeles in May 1926, and continued her
clandestine meetings with Ormiston in various hotels.
On 14 May Ormiston rented a cottage in Carmel, told the landlord that he would be returning with his “invalid wife”, and went back
to Los Angeles.

Four days later, Aimée disappeared.
She had gone to the beach at Venice for a swim.
She sat in a beach tent, working on sermon notes, and after a while, she sent her secretary off on some
errand.
When the secretary returned, Aimée had vanished.
Her mother proclaimed from the steps of the Temple, “She is with Jesus – pray for her.”
For the next thirty-two
days, her followers mounted a frantic search.
Aircraft flew close to the waves; men in diving suits looked for her body on the ocean floor.
Two followers committed suicide – a young man
yelled “I’m going after her” and leapt into the sea.
Aimée’s mother had flowers scattered from an aircraft on the spot.
A collection of $36,000 was taken for a
memorial.

On 27 May, a newspaper mentioned that Ormiston had also vanished; his wife had reported him missing.
Further probing by reporters revealed that he had also been absent when Aimée was in
the Holy Land.
As all Los Angeles began to buzz with indecent rumour and speculation, Ormiston strolled into the search headquarters, denied all knowledge of Aimée’s disappearance and
vanished again.

The police of California began to suspect that there might be a connection between Aimée and Ormiston, and that if they could find one they would find the other.
Suddenly the search was
intensified.
On the morning of 29 May Ormiston called at a Salinas garage, near Carmel, to collect his car; he was accompanied by a woman, and later that day, they registered as “Mr and Mrs
Frank Gibson” at a hotel in St Luis Obispo.
That night their car was stopped by a suspicious newspaper reporter.
Ormiston turned and headed back towards San Francisco.
Five days later, on 23
June 1926, a resident of a cottage in Agua Prieta, just across the Mexican border from Douglas, Arizona, was awakened by a knocking at the door, to be confronted by a woman who claimed she had been
the victim of a kidnapping.
It was Aimée.

Her story was that she had been kidnapped by two men and a woman – Rose, Steve and Jake.
She had been taken to a shack in Mexico and had eventually escaped.
When she returned to Los
Angeles, 30,000 people were waiting at the station and she was carried to her car through lanes of flowers.
Her followers showed a tendency to forgive and forget, and the rest of the world might
have done the same, if Aimée had not tried quite so hard to prove her innocence.

She kept asking what the police were doing to find the kidnappers and issued challenges over the radio.
A grand jury declared that there was no evidence to indict anyone.
Soon after that,
someone tracked down her “love nest” in Cannel.
Ormiston, who was still in hiding, sent an affidavit stating that although he had stayed in the cottage with a woman who was not his
wife, that woman was not Aimée.
This seemed to be confirmed when a woman announced that the lady in question was her sister; Aimée publicly declared herself vindicated.
But when the
lady proved to be wanted by the police for passing bad cheques, the press once again showed a disposition to regard Aimee as an adulterous woman who had decided to brazen it out.
Another grand jury
was convened; this time, a follower of Aimée’s vanished to the lavatory with a major piece of evidence – a scrap of paper found in the “love nest” with
Aimée’s writing on it – and flushed it down the toilet.
The grand jury was dismissed.
Finally, Aimée was charged with conspiring with others to obstruct justice.
She
raised a “fight the Devil fund” of $¼ million, explaining to her followers that she was being crucified by the forces of evil.
The evidence against her looked overwhelming;
chambermaids testified about her sessions in hotel rooms with Ormiston and the hotel registers left no doubt about it.
She was identified as the “Mrs Mcintyre” of the Carmel “love
nest”, and the cheque-bouncing lady who had supported Ormiston’s story now admitted she had been paid by Aimée, who had carefully coached her in her story.
And yet, in spite of
all this, District Attorney Asa Keyes suddenly moved to dismiss the case against her – there was talk of a $30,000 bribe.
(Keyes was later sentenced to prison for corruption in office.)
Aimée announced that the Lord had rescued her and settled down to writing her autobiography,
In the Service of the King
, in which she repeated the kidnapping story.

Soon after this, Aimée set out on another lecture tour; this time the subject was her own life and she expected her audiences to pay for admission.
To her surprise, few people seemed
inclined to do this.
It was the same when she went on a European tour in 1928.
The faithful continued to regard Sister Aimée as a saint and a wronged woman, but the general public seemed to
regard her with a cynical amusement.
Her publicity stunts, her public quarrels (with her mother, among others) and her lawsuits began to bore even the American press.
She chartered a liner for a
crusade to the Holy Land but only a hundred followers turned up.
For this occasion, Aimée had her chestnut hair bleached to blonde; her mother was indiscreet enough to mention that she had
also had her face lifted and this alienated more of the faithful than the kidnapping escapade.
In 1931, she decided to ignore her own teaching on divorce – she had always insisted that no
divorced person should remarry during the lifetime of the other partner – and married an overweight radio announcer named Dave Hutton.
Two days after the wedding, another woman sued Hutton
for $200,000 for breach of promise.
When the case was tried, Hutton was ordered to pay $5,000.
But when she heard the news, Aimée fainted and fractured her skull on the flagstone of the
courtyard.
She went to Europe to recuperate.
Hutton sent her a telegram: “Take your time, honey .
.
.
Daddy wants a well woman.”
But she and Hutton never lived together again.

During the remainder of her life, she was sued fifty-five times in the courts of Los Angeles for unpaid bills, broken contracts, slander and other charges.
There were a number of successful
suits by relatives of Temple followers who had left their money to Aimée.
She was as flamboyant as ever and as she grew older, her style in clothes became increasingly girlish, but the world
had ceased to be interested in her.

On the morning of 27 September 1944, Aimée Semple McPherson was found unconscious in her hotel room in Oakland, California, with sleeping capsules scattered around her on the floor; she
died later in the day.
It was never established whether she had taken an overdose deliberately or accidentally.

Krishna Venta

In 1911, precisely one century after the birth of the Reverend Prince, another messiah, Francis Pencovic, was born in America.
Up to the time of World War II he had a curious
and chequered career as a boilermaker, shipyard worker and dishwasher, and had served jail sentences for burglary, larceny, passing dud cheques, not supporting his wife, and sending a threatening
letter to Roosevelt.

It was during the war, when he was a conscientious objector, that he organized a cult called the Fountain of the World, followed by the initials WKFL (wisdom, knowledge, faith and love).
When he
came out of the army he changed his name to Krishna Venta, adopted flowing oriental robes, and explained that he had been born in a valley in Nepal.

He had visited Rome as long ago as
AD
600 – although, on a more recent visit, the Pope’s guards had turned him away – and had been
“teleported” to America in 1932.
The cult, with a hundred or so members, settled in Ventura County, California, near Box Canyon.
According to Krishna Venta, America would be shaken by a
Communist revolution in 1965, and in 1975 he and his 144,000 followers would take over the country.

On 9 December 1958, two disgruntled ex-followers, Ralph Miller and Peter Kamenoff, called on Krishna Venta in his San Fernando Valley retreat, and demanded that he confess that his messianism
was basically a cloak for sexual promiscuity – their own wives having been among the messiah’s “brides”.
When Krishna declined to confess, one of the men opened a canvas bag
– and a tremendous explosion blew the “monastery” apart, killing a dozen people and injuring many more.
In a pick-up truck nearby, police found a tape recording made by the two
“avengers”, listing the prophet’s misdemeanours, and declaring: “He isn’t Christ, only a man.”
The words could serve as the epitaph of manic messiahs in
general.

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