Aimee McPherson The Foursquare Church

San Francisco CA

Description

Aimee Semple McPherson was one of the most glamorous women in the US in the 1920s. The evangelical preacher put on theatrical church services and used ground-breaking radio broadcasts to teach the gospel - but one mysterious episode in her life has never been fully explained. On 18 May 1926, Aimee Semple McPherson went to Venice Beach, Los Angeles, to take a swim and write a sermon. The female assistant who'd gone with her had to leave to make a short phone call from a nearby hotel. When she returned she couldn't see the evangelist anywhere. As evening fell, McPherson was still missing and her followers rushed to the beach to join the search. One young man drowned as he swam out towards two dead seals which he'd mistaken for her body. "A local newspaper even speculated that there had been a sea monster sighted off Venice Beach," says McPherson's biographer, Matthew Sutton. "They thought maybe this sea monster had swallowed McPherson whole." Others thought that the evangelist would be miraculously resurrected. For five weeks, national newspapers carried rival theories about what had happened to McPherson. Had she drowned? Had she staged the ultimate theatrical stunt? Had the weight of her own fame just become too much? Then one day in June she re-emerged in the small town of Agua Prieta on the Mexico-Arizona border. McPherson claimed she'd been kidnapped - but had she? Her story to that date had already been extraordinary. She was born Aimee Elizabeth Kennedy on a farm in Ontario, Canada, in 1890. As a teenager, she'd gone to hear an Irish Pentecostal preacher, Robert Semple, speak in her local town. Before long she'd married him and joined his life on the road. But a trip they took to Hong Kong as missionaries ended in disaster. Both she and her husband fell ill with malaria. He died but she survived, pregnant with her first child. When McPherson returned to America she felt the call to travel and preach. "She was a spellbinding speaker," says Sutton. "She knew how to use dramatic tricks to draw audiences, and so she turned out to be enormously popular. What made her most popular was her seeming ability to lay hands on the sick and to heal them." Soon McPherson, known as Sister Aimee to her followers, had become a preaching sensation touring across the US during the early 1920s. It was an unusual choice of career for a single mother - and before long she was also a divorcee. Her second marriage to Harold McPherson, with whom she had another child, ended partly because he found it so difficult to walk in her shadow as her fame grew. In 1923, she built a permanent base for her religious movement - a white-domed church called Angelus Temple in the Echo Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles. She put on elaborate services for the public and bought a radio station to broadcast to listeners at home. These were no ordinary sermons - they were more like music hall performances. "She had the best actors, the best set designers, the best costumes, the best make-up artists and professional lighting," says Sutton. "She would create these stories, these dramas in which biblical stories would come to life." The crowds were so large, people had to queue around the block to get a seat. At Angelus Temple today you can still see the theatre-like layout - complete with a stage at the centre. "It was quite simply the best show in town" says the temple's archivist Steve Zeleny. "She would call the construction crew and say 'I need you to build me a 20ft Trojan horse that's hollow on the inside' or 'I need you to build me a huge ship, the bow needs to stick out 20ft. It needs to have guns on it with smoke coming out.'" Often her crew would only have a week to finish these lavish sets. Charlie Chaplin used to advise McPherson on which of her productions worked best. In fact, over the years the Hollywood actor struck up an unlikely friendship with this conservative Pentecostal preacher.