IMPRISONED BY HIS OWN PASSIONS

By Howard Chua-Eoan

Through the 1960s, Marshall Herff Applewhite, the man who would end his life with the musical name Do, had been relegated to secondary roles at the Houston Grand Opera. The son of a peripatetic Texas preacher, he had given up earlier plans for the ministry to pursue a career in music, supporting himself, his wife and two children with jobs that ranged from rehearsal conductor to part-time English teacher to occupational therapist at a tuberculosis sanatorium. But he was pushing 40, and his struggle against his homosexuality was unraveling both his marriage and his academic post in a religious school. An attempt to reverse his musical fortunes on Broadway had come to naught. Then, in 1970, Applewhite got a break: lead baritone in the American opera The Ballad of Baby Doe. Detractors whispered that his voice was "not of national caliber," that he was "not musically a ball of fire." This was an opportunity for him to prove them wrong.

He didn't. Instead, recalls Charles Rosekrans, then the choirmaster at the opera, Applewhite "felt the part was too much for him. It was a difficult role and required more voice than he actually had, and he had personal problems." Rosekrans vaguely remembers Applewhite's handing him a letter from a psychiatrist before withdrawing from the production. Thus, through crumbling ambition and the denial of desire, the easy affability of a young Texan from Spur, who loved to perform in lavish productions like Oklahoma! and South Pacific, was transmogrified into the troubled charisma of a cult master in Rancho Santa Fe, California, one who last week led his 38 followers on a fatal comet chase.

What kind of transfiguration was it? Applewhite's sister Louise Winant maintains that her brother entered a Houston hospital with a heart blockage and had a near-death experience that changed his life. The Washington Post reported that in 1971 he checked into a psychiatric hospital to be cured of his homosexuality after an affair with a student at Houston's University of St. Thomas led to his being fired as a music professor. (He had been fired from another job for similar reasons in 1964.) He reportedly confided to a lover that he longed for sexless devotion, passion without physical entanglements. Whatever the facts, Applewhite spun his own myth: the personal turmoil was the result of his body's coming under the influence of a being from the "Next" level, part of the discovery that he was one of the Two.

The other half of the Two was the nurse who attended him, Bonnie Lu Nettles, then 44. According to Applewhite's sister, it was Nettles who told him "that he had a purpose, that God kept him alive." "Their relationship wasn't like a romantic thing, more like a friendship, a platonic thing," says Nettles' daughter Terrie, interviewed by CNN Impact's Henry Schuster and TIME's Patrick E. Cole. But Bonnie Lu Nettles, who dabbled in astrology, believed it was fated in the stars. Says her daughter: "A couple of spiritualists said that there was going to be this guy coming into her life. And then Herff showed up. They linked up on a spiritual plane." Applewhite too saw the union as destiny. In junior high, Nettles had written a novel about a man who died and went to heaven. Somehow, this literary vision became proof of prophecy for Applewhite, who said he was the manuscript's ascendant hero.

Nettles attended drama classes that Applewhite taught in Houston; she drew up his astrological charts and channeled her spirit adviser "Brother Francis" for guidance. In 1972 she helped him start the Christian Arts Center, a protocult that taught astrology and metaphysics. Applewhite had always been intense and charming. Now he became charismatic. Says Terrie Nettles: "I felt like I was in the presence of an incredible human being. It was like I was being uplifted." She adds, "I felt privileged to be with my mother and Herff. I was the only one who could talk with them together. Their followers had to talk to them in groups, not individually." By 1973 Applewhite and Nettles were convinced they were the Two Witnesses prophesied by Revelation to prepare the way for the kingdom of heaven. They traveled around the country, and Nettles wrote her daughter, "I'm not saying we are Jesus. It is nothing as beautiful but it is almost as big...We have found out, baby, we have this mission before coming into this life...All I will say is it's in the Bible in Revelation."

Then, in 1975, Bonnie Nettles told Terrie that she and Applewhite were leaving Houston permanently. "They felt like they had a mission and God was leading them and she would keep in touch with me. I never suspected that she would be gone that long." Mother and daughter never saw each other again. Applewhite severed all ties to his family. Says his sister Louise: "He hurt his family and children very deeply."

Nettles and Applewhite set up shop in Los Angeles with their cosmology of Jesus and UFOs. In the beginning, Applewhite and Nettles called their group Guinea Pig, with Nettles being "Guinea" and Applewhite being "Pig." Very soon, however, the group was called Human Individual Metamorphosis, and Applewhite was "Bo" and Nettles "Peep"--a reference to their roles as shepherds. They were then called "Him" and "Her" and finally the musical "Do" and "Ti."

The early days of the cult were a far cry from the well-organized, high-tech Rancho Santa Fe operation. Applewhite and Nettles, who did odd jobs to support themselves, were arrested in Harlingen, Texas, for stealing gasoline credit cards, a charge that was later dropped. Applewhite then spent months shuttling from state to state in a confusing legal tangle over a car. During this period, he wrote his first spiritual manifesto. Applewhite and Nettles also had a brush with a comet. Stranded with a broken-down car in St. Louis, Missouri, they comforted themselves with the thought that "God would provide the means," and on the same night comet Kohoutek appeared.

But they continued to preach with a passion, persuading followers to renounce their families, sex and drugs and to pool their money with promises of a voyage to salvation on a spaceship. A poster for an appearance at Canada College, in Redwood City, California, read, "If you have ever entertained the idea that there may be a real, physical level beyond the Earth's confines, you will want to attend this meeting." The auditorium was packed.

The cult came to national attention after two dozen people from the small town of Waldport, Oregon, dropped everything to follow Bo and Peep. A 1975 TIME article described Applewhite as having a "rare ability to impress audiences with the urgency and truth of his message." (Such was Bo and Peep's appeal that NBC aired a series pilot called The Mysterious Two--originally titled Follow Me If You Dare--about an extraterrestrial couple.) But Bo and Peep's disciples were not all sheep. One group of discontented followers rejected the cult when a promised space visit never materialized. To stem the drop in membership, Bo and Peep instituted the boot-camp phase of their movement to prepare followers for the rigors of space. Family contacts were frowned upon--except for one time, Mother's Day, 1983.

Perhaps there was a reason for the sentiment. In 1982 Nettles had written to her daughter, informing her that she had had her eye removed because of a melanoma. The cancer, however, did not go into remission. Terrie Nettles said her mother contacted her again in 1984, saying she was so deep into the movement she didn't know how to get out, that "there wasn't a graceful way to leave." In 1985 her mother said she was sending Terrie a "couple of hundred bucks" because "the time was coming close and coming to a point where they were leaving...that she would be transported by a UFO. Maybe she knew she was dying." Nettles died that year. It would be months before her daughter found out.

Applewhite always left an empty chair for his deceased partner, referring to Ti as if she were hovering nearby. Androgyny became even more apparent among the believers--from baggy uniforms and jumpsuits to close-cropped haircuts. At some point, Applewhite had himself castrated, as did at least five of his followers.

In the early 1990s the group renewed its recruitment campaign. (Some members even tried turning the cult's manifesto into a prime-time series.) A 1993 ad in USA Today carried this message: "Caution: If the above information is assimilated, you may experience such side effects as loss of marriage, family, friends, career, respectability, and credibility. Continued use could even result in the loss of your membership in the human kingdom." No one can say they weren't warned.

Reported by Patrick E. Cole/Rancho Santa Margarita, Deborah Fowler/Houston, Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and Richard Woodbury/Denver

With reporting by PATRICK E. COLE/RANCHO SANTA MARGARITA, DEBORAH FOWLER/HOUSTON, JEANNE MCDOWELL/LOS ANGELES AND RICHARD WOODBURY/DENVER