Aimee Semple McPherson was barefoot when she left Room 202 at the Ocean View Hotel. Wearing only a bathing suit, a dressing gown, and a swim cap, McPherson—the founder of one of America’s first megachurches and just about the most famous woman in the country—had a street waffle for lunch, then settled in the shade of an umbrella just north of Venice Beach to work on a sermon.
It was May 18, 1926, and the thirty-five-year-old McPherson was known to critics and champions alike as “God’s Best Publicity Agent.” McPherson rose to prominence during the golden age of P.R., when Ivy Lee was talking up the Rockefellers and the Democratic Party and Edward Bernays was selling everything from Dixie cups to the First World War. In keeping with the times, McPherson used mass media to make herself into a master of soul craft and self-promotion, laying hands on thousands of sick parishioners and preaching practically seven days a week to thousands more until her death, in 1944. Her sermons featured elaborate sets and musical numbers, borrowed from the nearby and nascent film industry, including boxing rings in which she knocked out the Devil and a motorcycle that she wheeled across a stage with sirens wailing while calling herself one of the Lord’s patrolmen. “Half your success is due to your magnetic appeal,” Charlie Chaplin once told her, “half due to the props and lights.”
More recognizable than the Pope, McPherson was often besieged by followers, but the ocean offered an escape from their attention, and she liked going to the beach to read Scripture and to write, and then to take a break from both to swim. That May afternoon, she chose a title for her sermon, “Light & Darkness,” and wrote for almost an hour before wading into the water. Jonah was swallowed by a whale on his way to Tarshish, and St. Paul was shipwrecked off the coast of Malta, but no one knows what happened to McPherson after she wrote the following in her notebook: “It had been that way since the beginning. The glint of the sun, gleaming light, on the tops, and shadow, darkness in the troughs. Ah, light and darkness all over the earth, everywhere.”
More than a month later, and two days after her own memorial service, the lady preacher reappeared, still barefoot but now wandering around a Mexican desert, hundreds of miles away. McPherson never wavered in her version of what had occurred, but for the rest of her life her friends and family, her followers and detractors, the newspapers and even the courts debated where she went and what she did during the five weeks she was missing. She became—as the journalist Claire Hoffman argues in a new biography—a schismatic figure in religious history: blessed sister to some, conniving sinner to others.
McPherson’s Angelus Temple, in Echo Park, still stands, although her celebrity has largely faded compared with the days when she was played by Faye Dunaway in a Hallmark movie and inspired one fictional character after another: Reno Sweeney, in Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes”; Sister Sharon Falconer, in Sinclair Lewis’s “Elmer Gantry”; and Mrs. Melrose Ape, in Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies.” Not even Pete Seeger’s goofy refrains of “hi dee hi dee hi dee hi” and “ho dee ho dee ho dee ho” would reliably get the answer now that they did when the folksinger first crooned: “Did you ever hear the story of Aimee McPherson?”
With “Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson,” Hoffman has written her own ballad, resurrecting much of the glory and tragedy of McPherson’s ministry, along with the origins of Pentecostalism and the early days of L.A. At the heart of every biography, though, lies a lacuna—something unknowable, no matter how candid or heavily documented the subject, no matter how familiar or diligent the biographer. There’s a kind of vanishing act in the story of any life, but part of what makes “Sister, Sinner” so gripping—and leaves its author so ambivalent about essential aspects of her subject’s character—is McPherson’s literal disappearance, the nature of which remains contested to this day.
McPherson was born in 1890 in Ontario to Mildred Kennedy, an orphan who became a teen-age bride. When she was just twelve, Kennedy, who went by Minnie and then Ma, joined the Salvation Army, an organization not yet known for its thrift stores but storied for its promise of “soup, soap, and salvation,” which Minnie needed as much as anyone until she found work as a maid for a farmer whose wife was sick. After that wife died, the fifty-year-old farmer, James Kennedy, married the fifteen-year-old Minnie, who soon had a daughter to take with her to Salvationist meetings.
Like the future congressman John Lewis preaching to his family’s chickens as a child, the young Aimee Semple McPherson loved to play church, arranging her toys as if they were a congregation, sermonizing and singing them hymns. She claimed to have memorized most of the Bible by age five, and when she started school she made a drum kit and led the other children around the schoolyard like she was a sergeant major and they her Salvation Army band. Raised by parents who eschewed alcohol, dancing, tobacco, and anything else Lucifer might like, McPherson once persuaded her father to take her to a “Holy Ghost” revival, where she hoped to see some of the charismatic Christians known as Holy Rollers—the spiritual equivalent of catching a glimpse of Elvis on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” At first, she disapproved of the alarming teakettle-like shouts of “amen” and “hallelujah,” but soon she found herself taken by the preaching, drawn into the shaking and the swaying, rapt when much of the room fell to the floor in the ecstasy of the Holy Spirit.
By the time that spirit found McPherson, Pentecostalism had travelled a long way from Topeka, where the preacher Charles Fox Parham founded it just after the turn of the century. One of the many strengths of “Sister, Sinner” is Hoffman’s nuanced treatment of the breakaway Protestant movements of this period, when the factions of old-time and newfangled religion fought their way across the American landscape. Parham, a former Methodist married to a woman from a Quaker family, had come to Kansas from Iowa, after touring holiness camps and talking with global missionaries, some of whom told him about seeing recent converts slip into trances and speak in tongues. Convinced that these were signs of the Second Coming, Parham sought to hasten Christ’s return by training his followers in gifts of the spirit like those found in the Acts of the Apostles—everything from faith healing and prophecy to glossolalia.
Cartoon by Oren Bernstein
Parham preached that his was a new apostolic age, and he inspired a flock of notable disciples. These included William J. Seymour, the son of former slaves, who escaped poverty in Louisiana and went on to lead the Azusa Street Revival, in Los Angeles, and Robert James Semple, an Irish department-store clerk who left the sales floor for the sawdust trail, where, in the winter of 1907, he preached Pentecostalism so passionately that McPherson fell newly in love not only with Jesus but also with him. Instead of starting her senior year of high school, she married Semple and committed herself to a life of evangelism.
In 1909, she and her husband were both ordained in Chicago. They had travelled there together from Canada, and then headed to Europe, where they met his family in Ireland, before making their way to Hong Kong to spread the Gospel. While there, they got malaria, and Semple died a month before McPherson gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Roberta. It was Minnie who took up a collection to bring her stranded daughter and granddaughter home, getting them seats on a ship called the Empress of China, which carried the pair from Shanghai to California. McPherson preached aboard the ship, and its passengers, spellbound by her blossoming charisma and moved by her plight, gathered just enough funds to buy the young widow and her baby train tickets to New York City, where Minnie would meet them in the fall of 1910. All along the route, McPherson said, the train’s wheels clicked and clacked a question: “What’ll you do? What’ll you do? What’ll you do?”
At first, the answer was: not much. Mother and daughter and granddaughter fell back into the arms of the Salvation Army, with McPherson keeping some of the coins she collected while ringing a bell in theatres up and down Broadway. She still wanted to serve God, but she had left most of her nerve and verve in the Happy Valley Cemetery, where Semple was buried. Then she met Harold McPherson—neither a charismatic preacher nor a courageous missionary but an accountant who had dropped out of a Baptist college in Missouri. She was down at the heels; he was head over heels. When Harold proposed, McPherson accepted on the condition that God would be her real husband, and should He “call me to go to Africa or India, or to the Island of the Sea, no matter where or when, I must obey God first of all.”
Harold agreed, but didn’t exactly acquiesce, hoping that his bride would simply settle into life as a happy homemaker. The newlyweds soon left New York and ended up, fittingly, in Providence, where McPherson had another baby, a boy named Rolf. Although Harold encouraged his wife to dust the furniture and feed her two children, those children watched as their mother seemed to lose her mind, shuttering all the windows, refusing to leave her bed, and crying out for Christ from behind her locked bedroom door. Within a year, her condition had become so severe that she went into the hospital, the first in a series of admissions, for vomiting and heart tremors, one nervous breakdown and then another, followed by a hysterectomy. “The poor, unconscious ‘what-there-was-left-of me’ was put back in bed,” she recalled after the surgery. “I opened my eyes on the white walls of the hospital—quivering with pain from head to foot, which, instead of growing better grew worse and worse.” Minnie was summoned more than once to her daughter’s bedside to say goodbye, but, in 1915, a different voice rescued McPherson from death and despair. “GO! Do the work of an evangelist,” she heard one winter day. “Preach the Word ‘The time is short; I am coming soon.’ ”
On this occasion, McPherson’s answer to God’s call was a definitive yes. Her pain and depression disappeared as soon as she’d said it, and she felt giddy with certainty that God not only had healed her but was calling her to new ventures; when she left the hospital, it was for the streets. She took her children, abandoned her husband, and set off to preach again, starting with “hallelujah runs” near where she’d grown up, in Canada. She would stand silently on a chair on the sidewalk, then raise her hands toward Heaven until strangers stopped to ask what she was doing. Once a crowd formed, she’d jump down and shout, “Quick! Come with me,” and run into a nearby theatre. An usher would lock the door behind anyone who’d followed her into the venue, and she’d work to captivate the audience she had captured.
