HAVING FAITH Chapter One - Drowning

 

I believe the watch made the lady a liar. She vanished into the Venice, Californian surf attired in a modest one piece green bathing suit and cap.  She miraculously reappeared five weeks later and five hundred miles away, dry as a bone. She said she had been kidnapped. But in the intervening five weeks the lady had acquired new shoes, a new dress and a corset...and her old wrist watch. 

Now, why would a kidnapper risk attracting notice by entering a busy hotel, break into a locked hotel room, just to steal an inexpensive watch with a plain leather band, all for a victim they professed to despise? To me that watch on her right arm is proof the popular evangelical radio minister Aimee Semple McPherson (above) had not been kidnapped. But that remains just my personal opinion, because in 1926 the Los Angeles County Prosecutor was a major league sleaze ball.

“Through green-white breakers swift I leap,

Sun-sparkled seas by body keep;
Bearer of Gospel-Glory I
With singing angels in my sky...”

At just about 3:30 in the afternoon of Tuesday, 18 May, 1926,  a rather plainly dressed middle aged woman, wearing no makeup, walked up to the front desk of the Ocean View Hotel, in Santa Monica, California. She gave her name as Miss Emma Shaffer (above), and explained to the deskman that she was the  private secretary to Sister Aimee Semple Mcpherson.  Sister Aimee had earlier rented a room, where she changed into her modest bathing suit. Aimee also left her wrist watch on the dresser before they exited the hotel. 

After crossing the Venice Boardwalk, the two women settled on a large towel under a rented umbrella. Sister Aimee had immediately gone into the ocean for a swim, while Miss Shaffer remained onshore.  When Aimee returned, she dried herself, sat on the sand and begun to dictate to Emma notes for her Sunday sermon  Then, just before three,  she sent Miss Shaffer into the Ocean View to phone Sister Aimee's Church of the Four Square Gospel to see if there were any urgent matters which required her attention.

There were none, but when the Emma returned to their umbrella on the crowded beach, Sister Aimee was gone. Assuming her employer was taking another swim, Emma waited perhaps twenty minutes, before running into hotel and asking for help.

“The cripples to my temple crowd,

I heal them, and they shout aloud.
A thousand miles my raptures go
Upon my magic radio.”

Hotel staff searched the beach and the surf,  but there was no sign of Sister Aimee. The police were called. A tracking dog had no trouble finding the missing evangelist’s towel, but only Aimee's scent remained on the sand.  One of the most famous women in Los Angeles was missing.

It was too late to make the evening editions of the battling daily newspapers. But overnight The Los Angeles Times, and William Randolph Hearst's  Herald American assigned dozens of reporters to the "beat".  Within 24 hours 500 reporters from across the nation would be chasing this story.  The morning headlines back east shouted, “Evangelist Feared Drown.”

“What's this? A terror-spasm grips

My heart-strings, and my reason slips.
Oh, God, it cannot be that I,
The bearer of Thy Word, should die!...”

It is hard to overstate Aimee Semple McPherson's influence in 1926. One in ten of Los Angeles' one million citizens claimed to be a member of her evangelical Pentecostal Church of the Four Square Gospel (above), with perhaps three quarters of a million adherents nationwide, thanks to her nation wide radio broadcasts.

That Tuesday evening Aimee's mother, Mrs Mildred Kennedy (known as Sister Minnie), preached in Aimee's stead at the Temple on Glendale Avenue (above), delivering the same muscular vibrant faith healing fundamentalist theology, but without the theatrical flair the faithful had come to expect from Aimee. And the first public acknowledgment of Sister Aimee's absence came at the end of the service, when Sister Minnie told the congregation that “'Sister went swimming this afternoon at 20 minutes to three, and she has not come back. Sister is gone. We know she is with Jesus.”

“My daughter's voice, my mother's kiss!

My pulpit-notes on Genesis!
Oh, count the souls I saved for Thee,
My Savior-wilt Thou not save me?”

The next morning, two air planes crisscrossed the stretch of sand (above), a half dozen life boats scoured the waters. A Coast Guard Cutter even sent down divers. By noon the worried crowd was reported at fifty thousand.  The Los Angeles Times reported in its Wednesday evening edition that overnight, “To the hundreds of men and women who wait in a huddled and silent mass beneath the open sky...Through the fog-bound, chilling night and then through the weary scorching hours of the day, the followers of the evangelist have kept their places on the sand..."She can't be dead. She can't be dead....God wouldn't let her die. She was too noble. Her work was too great. Her mission was not ended. She can't be dead."...

“Ten thousand to my aid would run,

Bring me my magic microphone!
Send me an angel, or a boat…

The senseless waters fill her throat.”

“In some manner word was spread about,” reported the Times, “that promptly at 2:30 p.m. Mrs. McPherson (above) would arise from the sea and speak to her followers. The appointed time came and many arose to look further out to sea. But it passed without the miracle... At noon, search of the sea was halted as hopeless. The long seine nets stretched from boat to boat which had dragged the ocean floor since Tuesday night were taken in.

"A boat containing life guards continued the search alone for a little while longer and then also gave up. The tide was left to do its own work....Only an occasional swimmer ventured into the water near the spot where Mrs. McPherson is supposed to have been drowned during the day. The place seemed to be shunned by bathers...”

“Ten million tons of waters hide

A woman's form, her Faith deride;
While thousands weep upon the shore,
And searchlights seek…and breakers roar…”

That Wednesday, a teenage girl saw Sister Aimee struggling in the waves, and raced into the surf to her rescue. But there was no Aimee, and the girl drown. After that the desperate amateurs were replaced by professional hard hat divers, who walked the sea bed from the Santa Monica Pier to the north, to Ballona Creek, three miles to the south. One of the frantic hard hats, a diver named Ed Harrison, succumbed to exhaustion and died. That meant two had died searching for Sister Aimee, but still the search continued and no body was found.

By the first of June, the desperate Minnie (above, left) had calculated the exact location of her daughter's remains, and in defiance of California Fish and Game regulations, four dynamite charges were set off in the waters, hoping to free Sister Aimee's body from the bottom sands. Nothing floated to the surface except a few sacrificial fish. The faithful lined the bay for weeks, spaced a hundred yards apart, walking back and forth, waiting for the sea to give up her dead. 

And then, 33 days later, Aimee's body reappeared five hundred miles away, in the middle of the Mexican Sonora desert. And as was to be expected, miraculously, she was alive.

“Oh, gallant souls that grope for light

Through matter's blind and lonely night!
Oh, pity our minds that seek to know
That which is so—
And piteously have forgot
That which is not! “

Upton Sinclair, “An Evangelist Drowns”

The New Republic, June 30, 1926

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BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

 

I have given up looking for “justice”. As proof of its nonexistence I offer you the “ostentatiously wealthy” British Labor politician John Lewis (above). Called an evil man and “vindictive” by one of his victims, his allies described the self made rubber millionaire as a "nasty piece of work", “one of the lowest forms of human existence I've ever met...” and “loathsome in every sense”. His “lack of personal...honesty or integrity” made him an “embarrassment to his political party”. In a “just” world John Lewis would have retreated after karma thoroughly kicked his ass in 1951. He did not.

That year,  after four years of her husband's promiscuity and "odd" sexual proclivities,  Lewis' fashion model wife, Joy Fletcher (above, left), left him for a female Swedish beauty queen (above, right).  She later moved on to another male millionaire.  

Shortly thereafter Lewis' (above)  bruised ego was further offended when a traffic cop ordered him to stop at an intersection. Lewis ran his car into the officer's car, three times. His justification was that he was late for a vote. The public chastisement resulted in him losing his seat in October of 1951 . As I said, it was not a good year for John. 

But Lewis avoided the productive introspection such justice suggested, by inventing a villain to blame for his just deserts. Lewis decided that Joy (above) had been seduced by an unlucky, undeserving and unrepentant Stephen Ward, because it had been Ward who had introduced Joy to that Swedish Beauty Queen. Lewis swore, “I will get Ward whatever happens”. In public.

The irony was that Stephen Ward (above) did not sleep with Joy Fletcher Lewis. In fact Doctor Ward ( he was an American trained osteopath) was not that interested in sex. We know this because that is the one thing Christine Keeler, one the most inventive, inveterate and inexhaustible liars in 20^th century England, never changed her story about.  Stephen was honest.

The 18 year old show girl always said that although she and Stephen Ward slept in the same bed, it was always “like brother and sister.” She never claimed to have had sex with Stephen Ward. And this is notable because charting the admitted sexual contacts of this beautiful hedonistic exhibitionist narcissist  would have exhausted a team of Public Health epidemiologists.

Christine Keeler (above) , in the words of her most famous victim, “seemed to like sexual intercourse”. She was uneducated, and uninterested in much beyond her own vagina. But in her chosen field she was an expert, the epiphany of common carnal knowledge  It seems at times that this high school drop out had sex with every male in mid-century London, including Soviet secret agents, American military officers, London policemen, bankers, drug dealers, musicians, doctors, lawyers, even members of the British Cabinet. 

And like a single woman Ponzi scheme, Christine's constantly crescive coitus circle eventually brought her into contact with the only male in London who wanted to hear this gorgeous uneducated woman speak. And he was the despised and despicable John Lewis.

Lewis and Christine had a meeting at a 1961 Christmas Eve party. Christine (above)  was, as usual, concerned only with her own problems, which were not insubstantial. 

Two weeks earlier, a former boyfriend, "Lucky" Gordon (above), had fired “several shots” into the front door of the tiny apartment which Christine had once platonically shared with Stephen Ward. 

The publicity generated by that gunfire had killed her affair with British Secretary of State for War, John Profumo (above)...

...as well as scaring off  the other man she was concurrently sleeping with",  Yevgeny Ivanov (above), a Soviet naval attache.   Christine recalled later that John Lewis “could not have been more helpful....” that Christmas Eve.   But the only five words John Lewis heard in Christine's hour long self absorbed diatribe was “Stephen Ward”, “John Profumo”, and “Soviet”.  It was enough for Ward to promise the young fool £30,000 for names and dates of her sexual contacts with the two men , which Christine was happy to provide. 

Meanwhile, the dreadful Lewis was still trying to get the London press interested in attacking Stephen Ward (above, left). But they were no more interested in Ward than the judge at  Lewis' 1954 divorce case, who had dismissed Lewis' fantasies about Ward being a pimp for his wife, Joy Fletcher. 

 But by adding the name of Profumo to his vendetta, Lewis acquired an ally, in the Conservative Party political hatchet man, George Wigg (above). 

Wigg scurried off to repeat Christian’s details to Conservative Party leader, Harold Wilson (above).

And with Wilson's okay, Wigg then fed the “News Of The World” the story of a Liberal Party cabinet member who was having an affair with a woman who was also having an affair with a Soviet Spy.

Christine Keeler met John Profumo while skinny dipping at a 1961 summer night pool party at  Lord Astor's country estate (above).

Christine had been invited as a guest of Stephen Ward, who was Lord Astor's osteopath and who rented a summer house on Astor's property.

At that party, John Profumo (above) got Christian Keeler's phone number

But the lady who was a tramp went home with another party guest, Yevgeny Ivanov, who was in fact a Soviet secret agent.

Monday morning, Stephen Ward felt nervous enough to call his MI 5 contact to report the triangle that had formed in Lord Astor's swimming pool.

The three dominant sections of British Military Intelligence have always been MI 1, code making and breaking, MI 5, counterintelligence, and MI 6, intelligence gathering. In 1960 MI 5 thought they saw a chance to “flip” Yevgeny Ivanov, and they asked Stephen Ward, who knew Ivanov casually,  to befriend him. 

At their urging, Ward had invited Ivanov to the pool party at the Astor estate (above). But it was also Ward who warned the government that the Secretary of War might be dipping his wick into Christian Keeler, at the same time she was partying with the Soviet Agent they were interested in.

Christine (above)  may or may not have slept with Ivanov.  She did sleep with Profumo, but in her own words she saw him merely as “a screw of convenience.”  

Ward tried to penetrate Christina's myopia to warn her how deep the water in the pool was by joking that she should ask Profumo when NATO was going to share nuclear weapons with the West German government.  

Ward (above) knew Christine well enough to doubt the stunning brunette knew what NATO was, or West Germany, or even nuclear bombs. However Ward's little joke would come back to bite his own ass, with teeth that belonged to his sworn enemy, John Lewis.

During the summer of 1963 the London Press exploded with lurid details of Christine Keeler's sex life, her affair with John Profumo and a Soviet spy,  both of which had been arraigned, said the press, by Stephen Ward. 

Christine was having a ball, feeding the press dark and sexy stories depicting Stephen Ward as her pimp and a tool for the Soviets. For an ego maniac, especially one as dim as Christine, it was a joy ride.

 Not everyone was having as much fun. Yevgeny Ivanov was called back to the Soviet Union before the story exploded.  John Profumo first denied his affair with Christine, and then resigned after admitting to it.

Stephan Ward (above, left center)  insisted he had been working for British Intelligence, who, of course, denied everything.  The CIA treats their operatives the same way.   Eventually Stephen Ward was charged with “living off the earnings of an under aged female” - i.e. pimping children.

As Stephen's trial was starting, Christine was in another court room, testifying at Lucky Gordon's trial, charged with shooting Stephen Ward's front door.  Eventually an appeals court would decided her testimony there had been unreliable, and probably perjury. But because the Foreign Office had yet to determine if national security had been breached (it had not), the damage to her reputation - such as it was - were considered proved, and the press lost interest in her. 

But since left Stephen Ward's jury did not know that, they took her story that Ward had asked her to "to find out, through pillow talk, from Jack Profumo when nuclear warheads were being moved to Germany." as true.  It wasn't. 

Samuel Herbert (above), the Chief Inspector running the investigation broke quite a few rules, including threatening to destroy anyone who testified in support of Stephen Ward.  And then, in his closing, the prosecutor reminded the jury that no one had come forward to defend Stephen.  As if lack of evidence was evidence.

The entire trial was a travesty,  and one judge later said the case should never have gone to the jury. But the damage had been done. Stephen Ward (above), took an overdose of sleeping pills. Rushed to the hospital he died two days later. But the jury was still allowed to convict the dead man. 

That conviction helped to bring down the Liberal government, and made Harold Wilson (above) Prime Minister. Three years later 48 year old Inspector Herbert died of a heart attack. His will left only 300 pounds to his family. But his bank account contained 30,000 pounds, well over half a million dollars today.  Where he got that much cash was never explained.

The night that Stephen Ward died, John Lewis celebrated with champagne in a London restaurant. There's political justice for you. Ironically, the vindictive man who created the entire mess, John Lewis, died of a heart-attack on 14 June, 1969. Until that moment, a lot of people would have said he didn't have a heart, just a liver filled with bile.

Most of the money Christine Keeler had been paid by the newspapers went to her lawyers.  Convicted of perjury in December of 1973,  Christine Keeler served 4 1/2 months in prison. By 1972 she had been married and divorced twice, and given birth to two children, who were largely raised by her mother.

She died at 76 years of age, on 5 December, 2017, of  chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, just another victim of John Lewis' hunger for revenge.

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