She was a blend of P.T. Barnum, the colorful showman credited with declaring, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” and the infamous flamboyant televangelist couple Tammy Faye and Jim Baker who built a scandal-riddled evangelical empire — all rolled into one.
Back in the early years of the Roaring Twenties it was a charismatic lady evangelist by the name of Aimee Semple McPherson who ruled a circus-like path to heaven that enthralled audiences and worshippers alike.
Operating out of what was America’s very first megachurch — the Angelus Temple, in Los Angeles, with more than 7,000 daily visitors — McPherson, by age 33, was a star who found her calling by dazzling followers with flamboyant sermons that described a rapturous state of love with God.
A faith healer, too, McPherson’s dramatic sermons included adult baptisms by immersion in water — with stage scenery borrowed from nearby Hollywood studios, and all of it backed by her brass band or 14-piece orchestra and a hundred-voice choir outfitted in heavenly white.
And it all guaranteed that the collection plates would be spilling over at the conclusion of her services.
To the devout, Aimee Semple McPherson was a modern-day saint, more recognizable than the pope.
“Aimee sold herself as ‘the just right option’ — more comfortable than the thumpers who yelled about sin and hell, but also someone who embraced the pure fundamentals of Christian faith. She was ‘Everybody’s Sister,’ ” writes journalist Claire Hoffman in her wild ride of a biography, “Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
As Hoffman details, McPherson’s “critics called her the P.T. Barnum of Christianity. She used live camels, tigers, lambs and stately palm trees — whatever it took to bring the ancient world alive on her stage.”
She was “the Goldilocks alternative — not too hot, not too cold. The just-right message on Jesus,” Hoffman writes, as well as a queen of her realm, decked out in a white nurse’s uniform topped with a blue cape emblazoned with a cross — appearing virtuous and godly.
Thousands gathered for the greatest show in town, proclaims the author, who observes that McPherson had repackaged Pentecostalism for a mainstream, white audience that depicted a loving personal relation with God.
But the dark side of fame was about to beset McPherson.
Writes the author, “As her congregation and fortunes had grown, so too had ominous incidents: obsessed fans showing up in the middle of the night, a madwoman arrested for trying to murder her, and even a botched kidnapping plot.”
On the sunny afternoon of May 18, 1926, 35-year-old Aimee decided to work on her sermons at the Ocean View Hotel, in the beach town of Venice. She changed into an emerald green bathing suit and headed down to the shore “to take a little dip.” She began to swim further out and then disappeared in the waves of the blue Pacific.
“A squadron of police and U.S. Coast Guard searched the water from Venice to Topanga Canyon,” writes Hoffman, but the evangelist had vanished. That is until a month later when — miracle of miracles, and all hope lost — she suddenly resurfaced, not in the ocean, but walking 22 miles out of the desert in Mexico, claiming she had been kidnapped, drugged, tortured and threatened with sexual slavery.
But Asa Keyes, then-the anti-corruption district attorney of Los Angeles, had a different account. He asserted that the famed evangelist had, in reality, stepped out of a car and walked a short distance over the Texas border. How she disappeared from the ocean was never known.
Meanwhile, an eyewitness came forward claiming the godly McPherson had been shacked up with her lover, the married Kenneth Ormiston, the radio operator from her church, who quit his job shortly before she disappeared.
“Aimee defended every aspect of her life. She had battled for the world to believe her, selling herself as virtue made flesh,” writes Hoffman. “She had to cast herself as a victim, blinking and wide-eyed, held hostage and at the mercy of dark forces.”
The once fawning press called her “a weaver of fantastic tales,” the “Houdini of the Pulpit,” and described her followers as “ill-educated bumpkins, the morons of LA.”
As the author observed, “Aimee was a wolf in sanctimonious sheep’s clothing, adept at duping the masses with an artful smile and a great show.”
She was investigated for criminal conspiracy to pervert, or obstruct justice. The investigation was later dropped, but the famed evangelist couldn’t escape the continued harsh criticism by the press.
One night after an appearance in Oakland, she returned to her hotel and overdosed on hypnotic sedatives.
She was pronounced dead the following morning on Sept. 27, 1944 at age 53 and buried in Forest Lawn cemetery.
Born in 1890, McPherson was first exposed to preaching and prayer when her mother joined the Salvation Army and took her young daughter to Salvationist meetings. Aimee loved playing church, sermonizing and singing hymns to her dolls. A Holy Ghost revival drew her into the Holy Rollers circle, shouting hallelujah while swaying in adoration of the Holy Spirit.
She quit high school after falling in love with Robert James Semple, a department store clerk who left his job to preach and pray at revival meetings, and in 1908, the two married.
Blissfully, they headed off to Europe and then Hong Kong to spread God’s word, with Aimee pregnant.
But malaria caught up with both, killing Robert and sending Aimee back to the US where she joined her mother ringing a bell up and down Broadway in New York for the Salvation Army. Down at the heels, Aimee agreed to marry Harold McPherson, an accountant who was hoping she’d be a happy homemaker.
At age 23 in 1913, Aimee suffered multiple nervous breakdowns and a hysterectomy leaving her near death. It was then she would claim that she heard a voice telling her, “Go! Do the work of an evangelist. Preach the Word.”
She believed God was calling her and with her two children, Rolf and Roberta, she caught the midnight train for Canada where she began standing on a chair on the sidewalk with her hands raised toward Heaven calling for passersby to hear her preach.
Now calling herself “Sister” and wearing virginal white nursing uniforms, she began touring the East Coast preaching in revival tents and arenas.
Aimee’s mother, Minnie Kennedy, promoted her daughter’s ministry with advertising and megaphones announcing her appearances, even dropping leaflets from aircraft — bringing in thousands into arenas that became littered with castoff canes, crutches and wheelchairs of those thought to have been healed by the laying on of Aimee’s hands — and overflowing the collection plates.
According to the author, a vision had beckoned McPherson to Los Angeles in 1918 — and within five years, she had built her “Million Dollar Temple” built with “love offerings” received during years of itinerant tent revivals.
So, what really happened to McPherson when she supposedly vanished into the ocean and was thought to have drowned but later turned up alive and well in a desert in Mexico? That mystery was never solved when she was alive and remains unsolved a century later today.
