Where Was Aimee?

THE VANISHING EVANGELIST (334 pp.) --Lately Thomas--Viking ($4.95).

Canadian-born Aimee Semple McPherson, 28, landed in Los Angeles in 1918 with $10 and a tambourine. Six years later she had built these assets into the $1,500,000 Angelus Temple and a $25,000 radio station, all paid for by cash donations from the fanatic flock that supported her Foursquare Gospel.

Auburn-haired, athletic, with brilliant, hypnotic eyes and a prominent nose and chin, Aimee sometimes looked more like a female impersonator than a woman. She had been married twice--to Holy Roller Missionary Robert Semple, who died in China, and to U.S. Grocery Clerk Harold McPherson, whom she divorced--and had a child by each marriage. At her flamboyant services, surrounded by choirs, bell ringers and 80-piece xylophone bands, Aimee most often preached in filmy white celestial robes but occasionally acted out liturgical tableaux dressed as a policeman, fireman or fisherman. Her carelessness about money was sternly held in check by her mother-business manager, "Ma" Kennedy, an ex-Salvation Army lassie. One May afternoon in 1926, at the very peak of her career, Aimee went swimming in the Pacific off Santa Monica--and disappeared.

In this detailed and heavily documented book, Author Lately Thomas is concerned with Aimee's vanishing and the chaotic aftermath that reached a level of foolishness seldom matched even in that era of wonderful nonsense.

Disastrous Comedy. At first, Aimee was thought to have drowned, and two people died in the search for her body. Then Ma Kennedy began to receive ransom notes from alleged kidnapers, and their language read suspiciously like Aimee's own phrasemaking. Finally, 36 days after she disappeared, Aimee reappeared early one morning in the Mexican border town of Agua Prieta, babbling that she had escaped from her kidnapers and wandered all day and night in the desert heat. But her shoes were unscuffed, and she was neither sweaty nor thirsty after her ordeal. Nor was she ever able to point out the shack in which she claimed to have been imprisoned.

Police turned up evidence that, during the evangelist's absence, a cottage at Carmel, Calif, had been occupied for ten days by Kenneth Ormiston, the former Temple radioman (who was separated from his wife), and a lady with thick ankles and coils of auburn hair who strongly resembled Aimee. Back home at the Temple, Aimee met the attack of the lawmen by crying that it was simply another battle in "the age-old fight between the children of light and the people of darkness." But the outraged evangelist was formally charged with "conspiracy to com mit acts injurious to public morals." Her flock stayed ferociously loyal as the case was tried on the front pages and wound its way in and out of court.

Behind the comedy lay disasters. A man who befriended Aimee killed himself; one of her lawyers died when his car turned over in a water-filled ditch; a state Superior Court judge who backed Aimee was impeached (but acquitted). Mused Ma Kennedy: "It seems that nearly everyone who has been trying to help us has something happen to them." Perjurers, crackpots and self-seekers erupted from the woodwork; religious animosities blossomed. Through it all, Aimee followed her code: "I only remember the hours when the sun shines, sister!" She got surprising backing from Baltimore's vitriolic H. L. Mencken. With Maryland gallantry he summed up the case: Aimee was accused of immorality and, when she denied it, prosecuted. No Maryland court or jury would ever behave so caddishly to a lady, Mencken said, and with heavy irony: "Unless I err grievously, our Heavenly Father is with her!"

Accidental Overdose. Aimee went free after a year's uproar that brought political ruin to nearly all her opponents. Her alleged lover remained a gentleman to the last, stoutly insisting that the lady who trysted with him at Carmel was not Aimee. Author Thomas ends his book with a chapter telling what happened to all concerned in the case--all, that is, except Aimee and her immediate family. The record: after wrangling with her mother, her daughter Roberta and her fellow evangelists, Aimee died in her son Rolf's arms in 1944 as a result, said a coroner's jury, of taking "an accidental overdose" of sleeping pills. Three years later her iron-jawed mother died in her sleep.

Angelus Temple and the Foursquare Gospel did not pass away with Aimee. Today the movement flourishes, with 113,-ooo members, 720 U.S. churches and 800 missionary stations round the world. In charge of the sect: Aimee's quiet, unassuming son, Rolf McPherson, 46, who shuns publicity.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.