Harry Carr Los Angeles City of Dreams (Illustrated by E.H. Suydam), D. Appleton-Century Co.: NY, 1935, 402 pp.
Chapter XXV Characters Make a Town
" . . .
"[p. 331] One night about twenty-five years ago, the stars were straining to squirt all the light possible and the moon was doing its best, Aimee McPherson was coming to town. The business of soul-saving began to boom.
"Aimee was a lusty, rust-colored blonde with a voice that rang like a bugle, a Napoleonic instinct for publicity and an eye for the main chance.
"She began holding gospel meetings in a little upstairs room over a store; then she expanded into a small church. Finally she moved into the Philharmonic Auditorium, which she packed to the doors. Later she bought a lot near Echo Park on Glendale Boulevard and built the Angelus Temple from which the Four Square Gospel began to resound.
"From the day of the opening, the auditorium seating thirty-five hundred people had been packed to the gunwales day and night. The sick came to be healed on the platform. Everything is on the platform. The Temple Silver Band parades the streets; over the radio Aimee's electric voice makes the ether tingle.
"Aimee puts showmanship into her soul-saving. When she preaches about the ninety and nine sheep and the one little lost sheep, ninety-nine husky assistants come in with baa-a-a-aing sheep around their backs and after a dramatic [p. 332] pause, Aimee walks on with a lost lamb in her arms. The sick and afflicted throw away their crutches on the platform shouting "Amen." Aimee keeps the show moving.
"[p. 331] She collects the money with Scotch thrift. In Aimee's show the ushers do not shyly look the other way as visiting Hollywood fans put nickels in the plate. The nickels are handed back and bills are demanded. When Aimee wants a coat that will cost six hundred dollars, she says that she wants a coat and what it will cost, and the faithful will please come through. With the money in her hand, she says, "And now there is my mother. You wouldn't want me to be wearing a fur coat and a mother shivering in the cold. Now we will by a coat for my mother." Which, as far as I can see, isn't anybody else's business.
"In the summer of 1926, Aimee walked into the surf at Santa Monica and walked out at Douglas, Arizona. She said that while she was disporting in her white bathing suit, a man had asked her to come to his automobile to pray over a sick baby. As she leaned into the machine, he threw a sack over her head and whirled her swiftly away and away and away until she found herself in a shack in Mexico. Two wicked men and a woman kept her prisoner for several days, treating her kinda mean but being moved by the light of piety that shone from her sea-green eyes. Finally she escaped and walked a long, long, long, desperate walk into Agua Prieta on the border. Meanwhile a man had lost his life feeling around the surf for her in Santa Monica, and a blind lawyer at Long Beach had been approached by kidnappers demanding ransom money.
"There were so many unwilling to believe her entirely credible story thart she was arrested for perjury and tried for no discernible reason. Seeing their trade threatened if Aimee were removed frrom Angelus Temple to San Quent- [p. 333] in, the Pacific Electric Railroad sent a famous lawyer to her defense. With the help of a protecting heaven, Aimee was acquitted. Her cause was afterward before the State Legislature, where a judge who had acted as her legal advisor was tried for impeachment.
"Of course there was nothing dubious about Aimee's story. At first blush it seems strange that a lady could be kidnapped in a sack in broad daylight on a beach where thousands of people were sitting. But no doubt their attention was distracted by the waves and so on. It was noted by the reporters that Aimee's shoes after her long, desperate walk, were not even scuffled. But this is understandable. Probably they were non-scuff shoes or something of the kind. That Aimee was accused of occupying the period of time of her absence in a cottage at Carmel-by-the-Sea with a fascinating young radio operator is just one of those Hollywood stories.
"Coming back on the train from Agua Prieta, Aimee was noted by the reporters as putting what Hollywood calls "Shadow Powder" under her eyes, to the end that she looked haggard and wan.
""How come all this scenery?" they asked.
"Well, I have to look the part, don't I?" reproached Aimee. Heaven was triumphant and the charges all fell flat. The only objection that Aimee ever raised was when a reporter said she had thick ankles.
"The scandal only increased the devotion of her flock. Aimee knows that a leader of men (and women) has one cause for dread-monotony. Napoleon did not worry about his dead on the field of battle. But he did dread lest Paris should become bored. Aimee's flock is never bored.
"She knows reporters and reporters know Aimee.
"Now," she says, "This one is for you on the Herald. Cambell likes stories about love. And tell Hotchkiss on the Times about this one. He likes stories about money. And tell the Record that one about the little girl. They go for baby stuff.
"The only time Aimee made a false step with papers was when her mother, "Ma" Kennedy, fell in love with a wandering evangelist half her age and-quarreling with Aimee-threatened to "tell all." Aimee rang up the city editor of one of the papers and threatened to throw herself off the roof of Angelus Temple if the story was published. "And I am going to leave a note saying it was you who drove me to my death. And just see what that will do for your circulation."
"The city editor was grateful and enthusiastic. "That will be swell, Aimee," he said. "Give us half an hour to get a photographer out there. And be a sport. When you leap don't stand with the sun at your back, but in your face."
"But Aimee made the retort magnificient. She eloped to Yuma on a airplane with a handsome young baritone, and tipped off the rival newspaper.
"Although Aimee is what reporters call a publicity house, she is undoubtedly sincere in her religion. Once in the pulpit, she shakes and quivers with the holy zeal of a crusader.
"She would be possible in no other town. She is the Queen Bee of all the collective isms . . . meanwhile standing vociferously for the old-fashioned religion of our fathers.
"There is a reason for the amazing profusion of our religions of our pueblo, although they supply an ironic touch as being the product of a community in which it was once a prison offense to profess any belief other than the Catholic religion.
"Los Angeles rolls with the heavy rollers, shakes with the [p. 335] shakers, chases after new messiahs, patronizes fakers, charlatons, believes in vibrations, star-gazers, palmists, crystal-gazers.
"For one thing, this is a lonesome town. I don't know the name of the people who have lived across the street from me for ten years. Outdoor life tends to destroy neighborliness. No one stays home. People live, die, suffer, sorrow, have good luck and bad, and the neighbors do not know nor care.
"The result is there are hundreds of thousands of people who are starving in loneliness. They long for the friendly intimacies of the middle-west villages they have left. One man has seen this to be the case and has made a business of organizing home-state picnics for the last twenty-five years. Nearly every state in the union has at least one gathering a year, the numbers at the Iowa picnic running up past the hundred thousand mark.
"Lonesome Clubs wre invented in Los Angeles and have grown to their fullest flower here. They are patronized by elderly people who are introduced to each other and dance old-fashioned square dances and talk. It is the Emily Post etiquette of Lonesome Clubs that if the gentleman buys you an ice cream cone that is equivalent to an invitation to escort you home on the streetcar.
"The reverse side of this pattern is that they have come here from little towns where their religions were as much under surveillance as their bank balances. Out here where no one knows them, they can step out and cut up. The village churches have been so much a part of their lives that their frivolity and dissipation turns naturally to new kinds of churches.
"As to patent nostrums, health cures and freak brands of medical science, there is also a reason. Many people have [p. 336] come out here sick, or with sickness in the family, hoping for magic. When the climate fails to supply the magic, they turn to some other kind of magic.
"Los Angeles is an advertising town. It was made by advertising. It thinks in terms of bill-boards.
"Aimee supplied all needs. She runs the best Lonesome Club on earth. She supplies the excitment. She has made the saving of souls dramatic. She heals them instantaneously on the stage in front of the pulpit. And she knows more about advertising than a circus press-agent.
"Aimee is the high-pressure salesman of salvation."