Strange Angel (29 page)

Explosion: 1. A violent release of confined energy, usually
accompanied by a loud sound and shock waves. 2. The act of
emerging violently from limits or restraints. 3. A sudden
violent expression, as of emotion.

 

—Roget's Thesaurus

 

Parsons' confidence was at an all-time high. He had just invented a whole new type of rocket fuel; rocketry itself had been thoroughly validated by the armed forces' continued investment; work at Aerojet was beginning to pick up; and his fortunes were reviving. With the lawyer Andy Haley, he became a roving ambassador for Aerojet, dining with members of the Bureau of Aeronautics and impressing them with the potential of JATOs. He was, in turn, witnessing the rapidly changing perception of rockets within the army and the government. A new rocket project, funded by the navy, had been started in Annapolis, Maryland, and while a visit to it assured him that the GALCIT group had the edge over the newer competitors, he was not averse to picking up pointers from them. “We seem to be ahead in both fields [solid and liquid fuel] in California ... but I have learned much, I have several new angles on storage.”

He found time to combine his rocket work with personal errands. Traveling to New York for the first time, he met Karl Germer, Crowley's deputy and debt collector. While in Washington, D.C., he met with Dr. Joseph Auslander, the Library of Congress' poet laureate, and donated some of Crowley's poetical works to the library's book stacks. He was twenty-seven years old and living the high life, eating “turtle soup, sauteed shrimp + crab + ham, half the liquor and all the bluepoints [oysters] in Washington,” and, he was pleased to note that because of the war there were four women to every man in the nation's capital. “This is more like life,” he wrote to Helen from the East Coast; “activity, excitement, concentration, loneliness, friendship, frustration, fulfillment, drunkenness, hangovers, ups and downs, all blended together in the splendid mosaic of experience.” Most excitingly of all, he was taking his first trips by airplane. “I could fly about forever, it's great fun, an exalting experience.” He had never seen so much of his country and wrote ecstatically, “Parsons discovers America!”

Parsons' enthusiasm ignored the domestic troubles that had been brewing back home in Pasadena. In June 1941 Helen had gone on a vacation with her mother and one of her other sisters. While she was away, Parsons began an affair with her half sister Betty. She was seventeen years old, ten years his junior. As demure and reserved as Helen had been, Betty was her opposite. Feisty and untamed, proud and self-willed, she stood five foot nine, had a lithe body and blond hair, and was extremely candid—she often claimed to have lost her virginity at the age of ten. An exasperated Jane Wolfe described Betty as having “a quick, deft mind, the spirit to take what she wants, regardless; and I think her chief interest in life is amusement. And she thinks she's so right.” Indeed, there was something about Betty that was a little too outspoken, too insensitive to the emotions of normal life. When Helen had confided in her about her stepfather's abuse, Betty had been cold and indifferent; she suggested that this was hardly a subject for Helen to get worked up over. The two sisters had always had a tense relationship. Upon moving into their house, Betty had infuriated Helen by wearing her handmade dresses “as if she owned them.” Now it seemed as if Betty was trying to steal Helen's husband from her, too. When Helen returned from her holiday, she found Betty wearing her clothes, claiming to be Parsons' new wife. She was appalled. “Think of it,” she recalled years later; “my own sister in my own house with my own husband.”

Violent fights erupted between Parsons and Helen. Visitors noticed “cracked doors as well as wooden partitions ... mute witnesses of [Helen's] combats with Jack.” But Helen could not bring herself to leave her husband. Perhaps she remembered all those letters Parsons had written over the years, signed “Semper Fidelis,” or maybe she did not want to end a relationship that had survived so many difficulties. Parsons knew he was in the wrong. “Everything is my fault—my own mess,” he admitted, but he was unapologetic. “I did it deliberately and would do it again.” Indeed, when confronted by Helen directly on the matter, Parsons could be devastatingly blunt. “I prefer Betty sexually,” he told her. “This is a fact that I can do nothing about. I am better suited to her temperamentally—we get on well. Your character is superior. You are a greater person. I doubt that she would face what you have with me—or support me as well.”

Such merciless candor was encouraged at the OTO, which sanctioned his behavior. For Crowley, marriage was “a detestable institution” and monogamy was “one of the most idiotic and bestial pieces of vanity in human psychology.” “People should marry for convenience” he went on, “and agree to go their separate ways without jealousy.” From his first visit to the Lodge, Parsons saw that wives and husbands were swapped with impunity. The typical attitude towards such exchanges was nonchalance, such as that expressed by Max Schneider, Crowley's “inside man” at Agape Lodge. In his diary, Schneider dispassionately describes his wife Georgia's post-mass dalliance with another member, Roy Leffingwell: “Georgia calls to Roy to come to bed with her; R. is at first a little surprised, but then follows the invitation without further ado. Good!”

But as much as Parsons was acting in accordance with Crowley's laws, the affair with Betty also fed his own vision of himself. Not only was the affair physically pleasurable and religiously acceptable, to Parsons it was also poetically justifiable. In a letter addressed to Helen from this time, he wrote, “A man, a poet should be alive, be drunken, in love betrayed, hurt, lifted from pinnacle to pinnacle.” Looking back on this time a few years later, addressing himself as a mythologized “You,” Parsons portrayed his affair with Betty as a crucial step in the inexorable course that would lead to his becoming a great practitioner of magick: “Betty served to affect a transference from Helen at a critical period ... Your passion for Betty also gave you the magical force needed at the time, and the act of adultery tinged with incest, served as your magical confirmation in the law of Thelema.” Nevertheless, despite Parsons' best efforts to live an open relationship with Betty, the plethora of shifting bedfellows could not prevent him from falling in love with her.

However unwilling Helen was to leave Parsons and no matter how stridently Parsons justified his affair through the teachings of the OTO, Helen could not help but feel that he had breached an unwritten contract by sleeping with her half sister. Soon afterwards Helen wrote in her diary of “the sore spot I carried where my heart should be.” Naturally more reserved than her husband, she had not embraced the OTO doctrine of adultery as readily. Nevertheless, she now found her own solace in the arms of Wilfred Smith, Parsons' mentor and head of the Agape Lodge.

Parsons seems not to have been bothered by this affair—he had recently written to Helen, telling her to “get Willie a girlfriend”—and if anything the friendship between the two men became stronger. Their personal dramas, though, were causing turmoil amidst the OTO lodge. The older members were frustrated at the “increased laxity” of both Parsons and the new members that he was attracting. They still worried that this young generation was sidelining Thelema and simply indulging their sexual whims. In April 1942, an official meeting was called at Winona Boulevard “because of a dissent from some views of the Order, particularly pertaining to Sex before going up to Mass.” Perhaps more than anyone else, Regina Kahl, the blustering opera singer who had been Smith's lover up until this point, was furious at the new state of affairs. Her tantrums reverberated through the house, especially when Smith revealed that Helen was to take over Kahl's role as priestess in the weekly mass. Kahl had helped Smith establish the Agape Lodge in California. Indeed, her drive and domineering forcefulness were all that had kept the lodge from disappearing amidst the expulsions and quarrels of the thirties. But a new wind was blowing; not only had Helen replaced Kahl in Smith's bed, but Parsons was also taking over her role as the dynamic organizer of the lodge. No matter how much members grumbled over sex, when Parsons spoke at group events, many of them were visibly moved by his words. Some of them, with tears in their eyes, likened his appeal to that of President Roosevelt himself.

In New York, Karl Germer, Crowley's second-in-command, was hearing good things about Parsons. Germer had known Crowley in Berlin and had been an early member of the OTO. He had proven a loyal disciple of Crowley, sending him money on a regular basis and suffering greatly for his devotion when in 1935 the Nazis arrested him as a member of an illegal cult and placed him in a concentration camp. He somehow managed to engineer his release in 1940, and he now found himself serving as Crowley's personal representative in America. He was in charge of registering the copyright for Crowley's publications and collecting contributions from members for the Aleister Crowley Publication Fund. Known as Frater Saturnus within the order, his belief in Crowley's work and his devotion to Crowley were absolute. It was widely known that he had married both of his wives not for love but for the monies they could provide to his mentor. In a letter to Jane Wolfe, Germer offered some advice to the new wonder child of the organization. He advised that Parsons “needs a Guru, especially as he lives in Los Angeles' spiritual atmosphere which does not have a good reputation; if he is scientifically inclined, all the better. Let him use most of all common sense and go by his own inner light.” He hinted that an introduction to Crowley himself was not far away.

Meanwhile, Parsons believed he had a way to quell the rumblings of discontent in the OTO. He suggested that the group should move from their present lodgings on Winona Boulevard to Pasadena. Not only would the move enable him to devote more time to the OTO, but it would allow them to find larger and more salubrious lodgings if the order was to expand. Smith and Helen backed him up, and the other members assented, especially as Parsons offered a large part of his wages to help finance the move. Through his mother Ruth's contacts, he found a suitable building on the street of his childhood—Orange Grove Avenue.

Prices on Millionaire's Row had fallen dramatically. The old money of Pasadena had been lost in the crash, relocated by the war, or passed on to an altogether different Paradise. The magnificent properties that at one time were valued at $300,000 or more could now be bought for one-tenth of that price. Admittedly the lawns weren't quite as trim as they had once been, nor was the paint on the houses as bright as in the gold-tinted twilight of the 1920s, but the street still exuded the quiet and dignity that signified one was entering an area of rarefied exclusivity.

Nowhere was that character more evident than at 1003 Orange Grove Avenue, the former home of lumber millionaire and Caltech benefactor Arthur Fleming. A man of magnificent philanthropic gestures, he had left his mark on international affairs by buying, refurbishing, and donating to the French government the railway dining car in which the First World War armistice had been signed. In 1940, however, his generosity had been cruelly repaid when Adolf Hitler, in an act of political exorcism, forced the imperiled French government to sign their surrender in the very same railway carriage. After the humiliation was complete, the carriage was destroyed. It was a mortal blow to Fleming. Less than two months after this perversion of his magnanimity, he died, a broken man.

If Fleming had been able to see the new occupants of his house, it might have added insult to mortal injury. On June 9 1942, as Parsons was putting the final touches on GALCIT 53 in the Arroyo Seco, a strange procession wended its way into the old Fleming house. White-haired Jane Wolfe led the way, carrying a picture of Aleister Crowley, followed by Wilfred Smith with
The Book of the Law,
Regina Kahl with the Egyptian tablet, and Helen Parsons with a small model ark. Upon entering the house, Smith, in his most sonorous voice, declared, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”

Jane Wolfe, who had initially been unwilling to move from Winona Boulevard, was suitably impressed by the new building, although she felt somewhat awed by her surroundings. “What heavily restricted Orange Grove will do about us remains to be seen,” she reflected. “Perhaps our affrontery in moving in right under their noses will silence them.” Parsons seems to have felt no such worries; indeed, the irony of renting 1003 must have amused him intensely. It was in this very house that Fleming had entertained the greatest minds of Caltech, including Albert Einstein himself. Now Parsons, so long kept on the margins of Caltech's social and scientific life, was claiming the home of the institute's greatest benefactor as his own. Perhaps for him the move was also a return to the personal playground of his youth, to the environs which had spawned his world of fantasy. He, Helen, and Betty moved in immediately; indeed, such was Parsons' rush that he left many of his chemicals and explosives behind at his old house on Terrace Drive, much to the landlord's alarm.

The house on Orange Grove had stood empty since Fleming's death two years earlier, but many of its splendors remained intact. Built in 1899 for Fleming and his wife by the architect Frederick Roehrig, it was one of the first Craftsman-style houses to appear in Pasadena. Upon entering the house, the visitor came first into a large hall, boarded with ornate cedar panels and dominated by a sweeping, hand-carved, mahogany staircase, over which Wolfe had hung the portrait of Crowley. The original silk curtains still hung in the windows on either side of the front door. The hall opened into a large oval dining room, with woven tapestry walls above birch paneling; the adjacent music room housed Regina Kahl's piano and Parsons' phonograph and records. A giant, carved fireplace held court in the long living room, from behind which led a secret passage, one of many in the house. Glass doors led outside onto a large terrace. Here, it was decided, lodge meetings would be held and the mass performed. But the grandest room of all was the library, its four walls lined with bookshelves. Above them the walls were covered with tooled leather depicting scenes from German village life. Admiring these scenes, the visitor might almost fail to notice the gold leaf flaking off the ceiling. The house's large kitchen was to become the center of daily life in the new Agape Lodge. It opened onto a covered porch off the building's back, where day meals were taken. Stairs led down to the cellar, a space large enough “to hold 50 people easily” but which was to be devoted to holding the OTO's sizeable collection of wine.