Religion: The Story of My Life

In an Oakland, Calif, hotel room one morning last week Aimee Semple McPherson, the most spectacular U.S. evangelist since Billy Sunday, died gasping in the arms of her son Rolf—a bottle of sleeping pills on the bed table beside her. Though tired and ill, she had come up from Los Angeles to conduct a series of four revival meetings and dedicate a new church of her Foursquare Gospel (which now has 400 branches and 195 missions). On the evening of the day she died, she was to have preached on “The Story of My Life.”

Dedication in Ontario. That story began in the village of Salford, Ontario in 1890 when Minnie Pearce Kennedy, a Salvation Army girl turned farmer’s wife, prayed for a child to carry on her missionary work. On October 9 her prayer was granted. Six weeks later she took the baby girl to prayer meeting and formally dedicated her to the work of the Lord.

At four little Aimee could name all the Books of the Bible. When other children were playing with dolls and hoops, she was teaching her dog Jip to pray, and preaching to the animals in her father’s barnyard. Her faith began to waver as she grew older, and she was almost lost in agnosticism when in 1908 she attended a prayer meeting conducted by a handsome young Pentecostalist preacher named Robert Semple. She married him a few months later. Together they traveled to India and to China, Robert preaching and Aimee playing the piano. In Hong Kong, Robert Semple died of fever. One month later his daughter Roberta was born.

Groceries v. Evangelism. Aimee and her child returned to the U.S., where she soon married again. But Harold McPherson, her new husband, had small taste for evangelism. Soon after the birth of their son Rolf he decided to go back to his grocery business, and the marriage ended in divorce.

With her two children Aimee then began a long pilgrimage through the U.S. to preach her own brand of fundamental ist salvation, which she called the Four-square Gospel. On street corners and under canvas she preached, from Maine to Florida and from coast to coast. Tired of wandering at last, in 1918 she loaded her mother and her children into a broken-down jalopy and headed for Los Angeles.

California was fertile land for the Four square Gospel. Aimee was soon renting the largest auditorium in Los Angeles and finding it too small. What she needed was a church of her own. “Somehow,” she once said, “money has always come to me when I have needed it,” and somehow it came to her now. In 1922, with $1,250,000 donated by her followers, she built the huge (5,300 seats) Angelus Temple, provided it with crystal doors, a silver band, a $25,000 radio station. In the Temple her talents found full scope. Clad in white flowing robes, her hair burnished gold in the glare of the arc lights, a Bible under one arm and a bunch of red roses in the other, she exhorted the Angelenos to come and be saved.

Satan at the Seminary. They came in droves. And when Sister Aimee asked them to give in the name of the Lord, they gave generously in silver, gold, jewelry and bridgework. Once a month, Aimee later admitted, she took up a collection for herself. In the Temple’s heyday it averaged $7,000. From the Lord’s share she was soon able to build the $3,000,000 Lighthouse of International Foursquare Evangelism. From this seminary each year 200 or more evangelists-to-be were graduated—girt in shining armor and brandishing swords against a capering Satan.

Like most missionaries’, Sister Aimee’s path was strewn with thorns. But in Aimee’s case the thorns made excellent newspaper copy.

In 1926, after returning from a trip to Palestine, she went for a swim in the surf at Ocean Park near Los Angeles. No one saw her come out. For over a month the nation’s front pages were frenzied. The Angelus Temple’s faithful paraded the beaches mourning loud & long. A girl committed suicide and a diver was drowned. Then, 36 days later, Aimee reappeared in Agua Prieta, Mexico, just across the border from Douglas, Ariz. She had, she said, been kidnapped, but how or by whom nobody could find out. There were suggestions that Sister Aimee was the veiled woman who had been seen at Carmel, Calif, with one Kenneth Ormiston, the radio operator at Angelus Temple. The case was brought to court but dismissed for lack of evidence.

Sunless Days. From that time on Aimee spent much time in the courts and in the papers. There was a series of well-publicized battles between her and her mother over the management of the Temple, during one of which the ex-Salvation Army lass claimed that her reverend daughter had punched her in the nose. There were as many well-publicized reconciliations, and in 1930 the two went abroad together, where Aimee preached beside the Sea of Galilee, visited the nightclubs of Paris, and together they had their faces lifted. There was Aimee’s third marriage in 1931 to portly David Hutton, one of her choristers, and their divorce three years later. There was a suit for slander brought by daughter Roberta which cost Aimee $2,000, and another for $1,080,000 brought by Rheba Crawford Splivalo, Aimee’s colleague at the Temple, which was settled out of court. But through all her trials Aimee kept her head high. Said she, “I only remember the hours when the sun shines, sister.”

Make It Not True. Even in death Sister Aimee was unable to stay clear of the courts. Last week, after performing an autopsy, three surgeons were unable to agree on the cause of death. Her heart was strong and there was no evidence that she had taken an overdose of the sleeping pills. The coroner scheduled an inquest.

Meanwhile, heedless of the mystery, her devoted followers at the Temple mourned: “Bring her back, Lord. Make it not true.”