From left to right: Agatha Christie, Amelia Earhart,
Aimee Semple McPherson
Aimee Kennedy was a fiery, headstrong girl who dreamed of becoming an actress. Although her mother, Minnie, was an active member of the Salvation Army, Aimee gave little thought to religion.
One night, 17 year old Aimee noticed a revival meeting was in her town, and she convinced her father to take her. There, she was enraptured with the preacher – a handsome young man named Robert Semple. She experienced a religious conversion that night, hearing the call of God. She married Semple, and went with him to China, where they worked as missionaries.
Aimee found the life of a missionary’s wife to be draining and difficult, but she did her best. The couple had a daughter, Roberta Star. Tragically, Robert fell ill with fever and died, leaving young Aimee a widow.
She returned home, and attempted to live a normal life. She married a shopkeeper, Harold McPherson, and had another child – a son, Rolf. She found herself becoming more and more discontented and plagued by anxiety. Doctors could not find a medical cause for her misery; Aimee took to her bed and felt as though she would die.
She later wrote that she heard the voice of God calling to her again at this moment; she said that he called her to his service, asking Will you go? She rose from her bed, and set off to be a traveling evangelist.
Aimee had the gift of healing: she became known for her miraculous cures of the blind, the deaf, the ill and the injured. Her healing services began to attract thousands of people. Many skeptical newspaper reporters were dispatched to debunk the miracles she performed, but she astounded even the most cynical of observers by performing cures before their eyes.
By this time, Aimee’s mother Minnie was traveling with her, running the business end of the operation. Aimee was tiring of life on the road, and wanted to build a home for herself, Minnie and the children. She had a vision of a temple in Los Angeles, and set out for California.
She found a plot of land near Echo Park, and deemed it perfect for her purposes. Although realtors told her the land was held privately and other prospective buyers had been refused, somehow the owner decided to put the land up for sale the day after Aimee decided she wanted it.
The Angelus Temple, as Aimee named it, was a tremendous achievement. It had room for five thousand, and was as well equipped as any theater.
In fact, Aimee was an actress as much as anything else. She made her sermons into theatrical extravaganzas, with costumes, lights, music and special effects. The members of her church – Aimee created her own denomination, the Foursquare Gospel – were forbidden from attending movies or the theater. Aimee supplied them with all the entertainment they could want; tickets to her Saturday night illustrated sermons were snapped up as soon as they were offered.
Aimee was ordinary in looks and build, but she had a commanding personality and a powerful charisma. Hollywood actresses would pack the front rows of Aimee’s sermons, trying to learn the secret of her stage presence. The actor Anthony Quinn worked as a musician in Aimee’s stage band; later in his life he said that she was more captivating than any of the great actresses he had worked with throughout his career.
Aimee was constantly looking for ways to expand her reach; she built a radio station in the Temple, KFSG (Kalling Four Square Gospel) which enabled her to broadcast far and wide.
Aimee was becoming increasingly isolated as her empire grew. Minnie kept the Temple business running smoothly, with never a hint of financial impropriety – even though millions of dollars were flowing in and out of the church’s coffers. Aimee began to suffer from the stress of being the leader of such an enormous organization – the demands on her time were unceasing, and she was exhausted.
Rumors began to circulate concerning Aimee’s relationship with Kenneth Ormiston, her radio engineer. She had a phone connecting the radio control room with the stage, so that she could talk privately with Ormiston during times when the orchestra was playing or a singer was performing. Ormiston was an agnostic who wasn’t afraid to make off-color jokes with the sainted “Sister Aimee”; she found herself becoming more and more dependent on him – simply for a friendship and basic human contact.
In the spring of 1926, pressure was mounting. Aimee had taken a vacation and traveled abroad, but she was still drained and exhausted. On May 18. she went to Venice Beach in the company of her secretary; Aimee enjoyed swimming and the release that physical exertion gave her. She went into the water, and her secretary soon lost sight of her. Aimee never came out.
There was hysteria as Aimee’s followers mourned on the beach, some flinging themselves into the water in hopes of finding her – or at least finding her body. Police divers found nothing. It was assumed that she had been caught in the current and taken out to sea. Minnie direly proclaimed that she knew in her heart that Aimee was drowned and had been taken to the Lord.
Aimee astounded everyone when she walked out of the desert near Douglas, Arizona, claiming she had been kidnapped and held in a shack in the Mexican desert. Her miraculous escape made headlines; soon, though, the questions began. How did she survive her trek through the desert without suffering from exhaustion and dehydration? Where had she gotten the new clothes she was wearing? Where was this shack she claimed to have been held in? Who were the mysterious “Rose” and “Steve”, her captors?
Reports also began to surface that a woman fitting Aimee’s description had been seen with a man in a cottage in Carmel. Soon the feeling was that Aimee wasn’t telling the whole truth. Aimee, however, remained steadfast. “My story is as true today as the first time I told it.”
Soon, the Los Angeles District Attorney Asa Keyes began to take an interest in Aimee. Much money had been spent in searching for her when she was presumed drowned – a diver had lost his life while hunting for her body. He decided to bring Aimee to trial, charging her with perpetrating a fraud upon the public.
The trial was made to order for the papers seeking sensational headlines. Aimee was charged with masterminding an elaborate hoax so that she could run off with her lover -- it was even claimed that Aimee had hired a double to impersonate her to throw people off her trail.
Through it all, Aimee stuck to her story and claims of innocence. Suddenly, mid-trial, Keyes dropped all charges; some wondered if Minnie had managed to dig up blackmail-worthy information on Keyes.
Aimee’s fame was at its peak in the 20s and early 30s; she was the inspiration for the character of the evangelist-turned-nightclub singer Reno Sweeney in the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes! She was mentioned in songs such as “Hooray for Hollywood” (lyrics by Johnny Mercer.)
Hooray for Hollywood!
Where you’re terrific if you’re even good,
Where anyone at all from Shirley Temple
To Aimee Semple
Is equally understood,
The Broadway musical As Thousands Cheer, described as a “living newspaper” – sketch comedy something like a precursor to Saturday Night Live – had a scene in which Gandhi meets Aimee and teaches her how to tap dance – the two of them hoofing “Shuffle Off to Buffalo.”
Eventually, Aimee’s fortunes declined. She married for a third time and divorced two years later; the church suffered from financial difficulties and legal problems throughout the 1930s, although they stabilized somewhat by the 1940s.
Aimee died in 1944 from an accidental overdose of sedatives – some suspected that she committed suicide, although her health was in a fragile state due to kidney disease.
Her church, the Foursquare Gospel, continued to grow, and is stronger today than during her lifetime; the church claims more than 2 million members throughout 30 countries.
Charlie Chaplin to Aimee: "You give your drama-starved people who absent themselves through fear, a theater which they can reconcile with their narrow beliefs.... Whether you like it or not, you're an actress."
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