The “Lady Preacher” Who Became World-Famous—and Then Vanished

Aimee Semple McPherson was barefoot erstwhile she near Room 202 astatine the Ocean View Hotel. Wearing lone a bathing suit, a dressing gown, and a aquatics cap, McPherson—the laminitis of 1 of America’s archetypal megachurches and conscionable astir the astir celebrated pistillate successful the country—had a thoroughfare waffle for lunch, past settled successful the shadiness of an umbrella conscionable northbound of Venice Beach to enactment connected a sermon.

It was May 18, 1926, and the thirty-five-year-old McPherson was known to critics and champions alike arsenic “God’s Best Publicity Agent.” McPherson roseate to prominence during the aureate property of P.R., erstwhile 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 utilized wide media to marque herself into a maestro of psyche trade and self-promotion, laying hands connected thousands of sick parishioners and preaching practically 7 days a week to thousands much until her death, successful 1944. Her sermons featured elaborate sets and philharmonic numbers, borrowed from the adjacent and nascent movie industry, including boxing rings successful which she knocked retired the Devil and a motorcycle that she wheeled crossed a signifier with sirens wailing portion calling herself 1 of the Lord’s patrolmen. “Half your occurrence is owed to your magnetic appeal,” Charlie Chaplin erstwhile told her, “half owed to the props and lights.”

More recognizable than the Pope, McPherson was often besieged by followers, but the water offered an flight from their attention, and she liked going to the formation to work Scripture and to write, and past to instrumentality a interruption from some to swim. That May afternoon, she chose a rubric for her sermon, “Light & Darkness,” and wrote for astir an hr earlier wading into the water. Jonah was swallowed by a whale connected his mode to Tarshish, and St. Paul was shipwrecked disconnected the seashore of Malta, but nary 1 knows what happened to McPherson aft she wrote the pursuing successful her notebook: “It had been that mode since the beginning. The glint of the sun, gleaming light, connected the tops, and shadow, acheronian successful the troughs. Ah, airy and acheronian each implicit the earth, everywhere.”

More than a period later, and 2 days aft her ain memorial service, the woman preacher reappeared, inactive barefoot but present wandering astir a Mexican desert, hundreds of miles away. McPherson ne'er wavered successful her mentation of what had occurred, but for the remainder of her beingness her friends and family, her followers and detractors, the newspapers and adjacent the courts debated wherever she went and what she did during the 5 weeks she was missing. She became—as the writer Claire Hoffman argues successful a caller biography—a schismatic fig successful spiritual history: blessed sister to some, conniving sinner to others.

McPherson’s Angelus Temple, successful Echo Park, inactive stands, though her personage has mostly faded compared with the days erstwhile she was played by Faye Dunaway successful a Hallmark movie and inspired 1 fictional quality aft another: Reno Sweeney, successful Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes”; Sister Sharon Falconer, successful Sinclair Lewis’s “Elmer Gantry”; and Mrs. Melrose Ape, successful Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies.” Not adjacent Pete Seeger’s goofy refrains of “hi dee hullo dee hullo dee hi” and “ho dee ho dee ho dee ho” would reliably get the reply present that they did erstwhile the folksinger archetypal crooned: “Did you ever perceive the communicative of Aimee McPherson?”

With “Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson,” Hoffman has written her ain ballad, resurrecting overmuch of the glory and calamity of McPherson’s ministry, on with the origins of Pentecostalism and the aboriginal days of L.A. At the bosom of each biography, though, lies a lacuna—something unknowable, nary substance however candid oregon heavy documented the subject, nary substance however acquainted oregon diligent the biographer. There’s a benignant of vanishing enactment successful the communicative of immoderate life, but portion of what makes “Sister, Sinner” truthful gripping—and leaves its writer truthful ambivalent astir indispensable aspects of her subject’s character—is McPherson’s literal disappearance, the quality of which remains contested to this day.

McPherson was calved successful 1890 successful Ontario to Mildred Kennedy, an orphan who became a teen-age bride. When she was conscionable twelve, Kennedy, who went by Minnie and past Ma, joined the Salvation Army, an enactment not yet known for its thrift stores but storied for its committedness of “soup, soap, and salvation,” which Minnie needed arsenic overmuch arsenic anyone until she recovered enactment arsenic a maid for a husbandman whose woman was sick. After that woman died, the fifty-year-old farmer, James Kennedy, joined the fifteen-year-old Minnie, who soon had a girl to instrumentality with her to Salvationist meetings.

Like the aboriginal congressman John Lewis preaching to his family’s chickens arsenic a child, the young Aimee Semple McPherson loved to play church, arranging her toys arsenic if they were a congregation, sermonizing and singing them hymns. She claimed to person memorized astir of the Bible by property five, and erstwhile she started schoolhouse she made a drum kit and led the different children astir the schoolyard similar she was a sergeant large and they her Salvation Army band. Raised by parents who eschewed alcohol, dancing, tobacco, and thing other Lucifer mightiness like, McPherson erstwhile persuaded her begetter to instrumentality her to a “Holy Ghost” revival, wherever she hoped to spot immoderate of the charismatic Christians known arsenic Holy Rollers—the spiritual equivalent of catching a glimpse of Elvis connected “The Ed Sullivan Show.” At first, she disapproved of the alarming teakettle-like shouts of “amen” and “hallelujah,” but soon she recovered herself taken by the preaching, drawn into the shaking and the swaying, rapt erstwhile overmuch of the country fell to the level successful the ecstasy of the Holy Spirit.

By the clip that tone recovered McPherson, Pentecostalism had travelled a agelong mode from Topeka, wherever the preacher Charles Fox Parham founded it conscionable aft the crook of the century. One of the galore strengths of “Sister, Sinner” is Hoffman’s nuanced attraction of the breakaway Protestant movements of this period, erstwhile the factions of old-time and newfangled religion fought their mode crossed the American landscape. Parham, a erstwhile Methodist joined to a pistillate from a Quaker family, had travel to Kansas from Iowa, aft touring holiness camps and talking with planetary missionaries, immoderate of whom told him astir seeing caller converts gaffe into trances and talk successful tongues. Convinced that these were signs of the Second Coming, Parham sought to hasten Christ’s instrumentality by grooming his followers successful gifts of the tone similar those recovered successful the Acts of the Apostles—everything from religion healing and prophecy to glossolalia.

Parham preached that his was a caller apostolic age, and helium inspired a flock of notable disciples. These included William J. Seymour, the lad of erstwhile slaves, who escaped poorness successful Louisiana and went connected to pb the Azusa Street Revival, successful Los Angeles, and Robert James Semple, an Irish department-store clerk who near the income level for the sawdust trail, where, successful the wintertime of 1907, helium preached Pentecostalism truthful passionately that McPherson fell recently successful emotion not lone with Jesus but besides with him. Instead of starting her elder twelvemonth of precocious school, she joined Semple and committed herself to a beingness of evangelism.

In 1909, she and her hubby were some ordained successful Chicago. They had travelled determination unneurotic from Canada, and past headed to Europe, wherever they met his household successful Ireland, earlier making their mode to Hong Kong to dispersed the Gospel. While there, they got malaria, and Semple died a period earlier McPherson gave commencement to a daughter, whom she named Roberta. It was Minnie who took up a postulation to bring her stranded girl and granddaughter home, getting them seats connected a vessel called the Empress of China, which carried the brace from Shanghai to California. McPherson preached aboard the ship, and its passengers, spellbound by her blossoming charisma and moved by her plight, gathered conscionable capable funds to bargain the young widow and her babe bid tickets to New York City, wherever Minnie would conscionable them successful the autumn of 1910. All on 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 reply was: not much. Mother and girl and granddaughter fell backmost into the arms of the Salvation Army, with McPherson keeping immoderate of the coins she collected portion ringing a doorbell successful theatres up and down Broadway. She inactive wanted to service God, but she had near astir of her nervus and verve successful the Happy Valley Cemetery, wherever Semple was buried. Then she met Harold McPherson—neither a charismatic preacher nor a courageous missionary but an accountant who had dropped retired of a Baptist assemblage successful Missouri. She was down astatine the heels; helium was caput implicit heels. When Harold proposed, McPherson accepted connected the information that God would beryllium her existent husband, and should He “call maine to spell to Africa oregon India, oregon to the Island of the Sea, nary substance wherever oregon when, I indispensable obey God archetypal of all.”

Harold agreed, but didn’t precisely acquiesce, hoping that his bride would simply settee into beingness arsenic a blessed homemaker. The newlyweds soon near New York and ended up, fittingly, successful Providence, wherever McPherson had different baby, a lad named Rolf. Although Harold encouraged his woman to particulate the furnishings and provender her 2 children, those children watched arsenic their parent seemed to suffer her mind, shuttering each the windows, refusing to permission her bed, and crying retired for Christ from down her locked chamber door. Within a year, her information had go truthful terrible that she went into the hospital, the archetypal successful a bid of admissions, for vomiting and bosom tremors, 1 tense breakdown and past another, followed by a hysterectomy. “The poor, unconscious ‘what-there-was-left-of me’ was enactment backmost successful bed,” she recalled aft the surgery. “I opened my eyes connected the achromatic walls of the hospital—quivering with symptom from caput to foot, which, alternatively of increasing amended grew worse and worse.” Minnie was summoned much than erstwhile to her daughter’s bedside to accidental goodbye, but, successful 1915, a antithetic dependable rescued McPherson from decease and despair. “GO! Do the enactment of an evangelist,” she heard 1 wintertime day. “Preach the Word ‘The clip is short; I americium coming soon.’ ”

On this occasion, McPherson’s reply to God’s telephone was a definitive yes. Her symptom and slump disappeared arsenic soon arsenic she’d said it, and she felt giddy with certainty that God not lone had healed her but was calling her to caller ventures; erstwhile she near the hospital, it was for the streets. She took her children, abandoned her husband, and acceptable disconnected to preach again, starting with “hallelujah runs” adjacent wherever she’d grown up, successful Canada. She would basal silently connected a seat connected the sidewalk, past rise her hands toward Heaven until strangers stopped to inquire what she was doing. Once a assemblage formed, she’d leap down and shout, “Quick! Come with me,” and tally into a adjacent theatre. An usher would fastener the doorway down anyone who’d followed her into the venue, and she’d enactment to captivate the assemblage she had captured.