Strange Angel (30 page)

On the second floor were six bedrooms, each with a tiled bathroom. Rooms were allotted according to the OTO's hierarchy. Parsons and Betty shared a two-room suite, an arrangement that afforded them a modicum of privacy if they chose to have separate nocturnal affairs. Parsons covered the walls with knives and swords which he had collected over the years. “He was not happy unless there was a knife in the room,” remembered one of the other lodgers. While these signaled his machismo, other ornaments bespoke of his mystical nature, such as the statue of the Greek god Pan standing in the corner of the room. The master bedroom was reserved for Wilfred Smith and Helen. On the top floor a further five rooms were found, former servant's quarters, reserved for the less exulted and lower-rent-paying members of the Lodge.

Slightly apart from the main house stood the garage and laundry, a two-floor structure, in which Parsons chose to build himself a new home laboratory. Twenty-five acres of garden interlaced with tiled walls stretched down towards the Arroyo. Walking along one of the paths, one came upon a pergola with mosaic tile floors, and a glass tile fountain ten feet in diameter, which was used by the lodge's children as a paddling pool. A large structure known as the Tea House kept watch over the bay trees at the bottom of the garden; it would be a favored location for the assignations, both secret and known, of the household. Parsons would often take the children of the house to search for rings in the grass, which he said were left by dancing fairies (in fact, caused by the unchecked growth of the fairy ring mushroom which grows in circles), convincing the children that the garden was enchanted. And if this bounty proved insufficient, just over the walls lay the charmed rambles of the Busch Gardens.

It was a house fit for a king, but it cost only $100 a month. Parsons, who had grown up surrounded by conspicuous wealth, now attempted to replicate that life. At 1003 Orange Grove he promoted both epicurean and intellectual enjoyments. He would fence with his friends on the grounds before retiring to partake of his treasured collection of fruit brandies in the kitchen. In this mansion he could both womanize and practice his magick with ease. He would create a lifestyle that echoed the Byronic heroes of the past, resounding to the ever present texture of myth, while chiming with the teachings of Crowley's new aeon.

Along with Kahl and Wolfe, the other OTO members who moved into 1003 were a diverse group. Fred and Grace Miller were both old hands in the burlesque trade, but while Grace was still a dancer in various traveling companies, Fred had taken to working in a shipyard to pay for the upkeep of their two young sons, who lived in the house and more often than not were left to be looked after by Betty. Frederic Mellinger was a former avant-garde actor and writer from Berlin. Other German expatriates had helped him find occasional bit parts in Hollywood movies, but most of the time he was unemployed. Believing housework was below him, he confined himself to drawing up astrological charts for the members of the house. A tall Lapp called Jonas Erickson, an old friend of Wilfred Smith, also lived at the house. An epileptic, he was prone to having fits, terrifying the children of the household. Deeply loyal to Smith he acted as the house's strongman, chopping lumber and carrying it to the house. Phyllis Seckler, wife of the jailed Paul Seckler, also stayed here, on the top floor with her two children.

The house and gardens badly needed care. A bees' nest was found on the porch and an infestation of bats discovered in the house's attic. The water pipes had a habit of bursting. Jane Wolfe named some of the necessary tasks in her diary: “screws, electric connections, sawing, adjusting, watering, clipping hedges, planting the rose bushes we brought with us, scouring, scraping.” The members fenced off a large vegetable garden and planted beets, carrots, beans, and tomatoes. They bought rabbits, chickens, and goats to keep for food or to sell at market, or, if need arose, to provide animal blood for rituals and for the Gnostic Mass's cakes of light. Parsons' mother, Ruth, occasionally came to visit and to help him with the household chores. Unfortunately, what she thought of her son's strange friends and surroundings is not known.

The group imagined that they would share all responsibility; they envisioned 1003 as a “Profess House,” a Utopian mission sheltering a community of true Thelemites. Inevitably, the reality of commune living came as a shock to all. The elderly Jane Wolfe was left to do the shopping for the entire house, while Phyllis Seckler was expected to do all the cooking as well as look after her own children. Mellinger's duty was to water the garden, but he often slunk off from work and it began to die. Smith—who had given up his job as a gas clerk—was asked to look after the animals and the vegetables, jobs that he complained were more in keeping with those of a handyman than of a priest of the OTO. Meanwhile, many felt that Betty was shirking her share of the labor. The incessant cries of the members' children added to the tension; the noise sent the usually benign Parsons into the foulest of moods. Throughout his years of marriage with Helen, Parsons had insisted that he never wanted a child and had practiced coitus interruptus to prevent this.

Despite all of these difficulties, Parsons was dedicated to making the move work. He made an agreement with Smith and Helen (who was acting as the organization's treasurer) that he would hand over his entire salary to the Church of Thelema to help with the running of the house, keeping just $10 a month for himself. Even though Parsons was the only member of the house to make such a financial commitment to the Lodge, he never complained that his generosity was being abused. He would provide money for the OTO, and the OTO would provide a family for him.

By the end of 1942 that family was growing. Over forty new members had been initiated into Agape Lodge, largely thanks to Parsons, who was proving remarkably successful in attracting people to join the order. His unrestrained enthusiasm for Crowley's philosophy was evident, as a letter to a holidaying Ed Forman showed:

 

I'm a great one to talk, but it's about time you got out from under the domination of your emotions ... you should be able to say to your temper, your hang-over prejudices, your old conflicts and impulses, “I am master here—you do what I say”—and make it stick. It would be fine for all of us to learn more tolerance towards others, and more intolerance towards ourselves ... above all things have a good time. You only live once.

 

It was not long before Parsons had enticed Forman and his second wife Phyllis into becoming members, along with his old friend Tom Rose from the Hercules Powder Company, and Barbara and Richard Canright, mathematics experts from Caltech who had worked on some of the JATO tests. “Jack does more than any one trying to interest outsiders in the field,” wrote Jane Wolfe to Germer. With much of California swamped with soldiers and sailors on recreational leave, the region was infected by their spirit of carpe diem. Parsons thus found a receptive audience for his recruiting drives. The Agape Lodge promised an escape from the world's worries. “The only reason people would have joined was out of fun—because it was kind of ‘far out',” remembered Forman's third wife, Jeanne. “It was a time in a society when everything was new & different—and out there and strange and marvelous!” Taking their cue from the strange inter-familial relations of Parsons, Betty, Smith, and Helen, many of the new members and residents of 1003 started affairs of their own. Fred Miller began sleeping with Phyllis Seckler, as did Smith on occasion. Miller, thirty-eight years old, also began an affair with Jane Wolfe, by now sixty-seven, and the two began performing sex magick rituals together. Despite the war work Parsons was involved in, despite the reports of the Pacific fleet repelling the Japanese at Midway and of Allied convoys fighting their passage across the precarious Atlantic, the war seemed a very long way away from 1003.

The Thelemites planned an equinox party for the autumn of 1942. They invited friends and colleagues from Caltech and Aerojet to mingle with OTO members in the lavish setting of their new home. It was to be a secular party, with no preaching, but in the days prior to it Parsons became somewhat anxious about bringing these two parts of his life together. Bypassing Wilfred Smith, Crowley had written to him that he should take over some of Smith's duties, notably the distribution of Crowley's new manifesto for the OTO called
Liber Oz.
Crowley believed that this work would finally boost Agape Lodge's membership in California, something he no longer thought Smith could achieve by himself. It was a great honor to receive a personal letter from Crowley, but Parsons was disturbed by the manifesto's contents.

Little more than a pamphlet,
Liber Oz
professed the familiar Crowley doctrine: “Man has the right to live by his own law, to live in the way that he wills to do: to work as he will: to play as he will: to rest as he will: to die when and how he will.” But unusually, it went further: “Man has the right to kill those who would thwart these rights.” If one of Aerojet's military associates should see a copy of this at the party, Parsons would likely have been judged unfit for his job. He asked the other members to remove all evidence of
Liber Oz.
His request was something of a disappointment to those who had considered him the order's great new proselytizer, but Parsons recast his caution as evidence of his grand vision. He told them that he was not being censorious, nor did he disapprove of Crowley's work; rather when he did become a martyr or get sent to jail, he wanted “to make headlines, and at present such an action would not cause a ripple in the public consciousness.” The gesture was typically romantic and self-aggrandizing, but Parsons succeeded in winning the long-standing loyalty of many members of the house, including Jane Wolfe. “He knows his power, he knows what he wants, and he knows his royalty,” she wrote. The party was a success, ending in a drunken dance at the pergola. One by one, OTO member or not, the guests stripped off their clothes and cavorted around the fountain naked.

Parsons' caution over
Liber Oz
was not groundless. Soon after the party, the Pasadena police received a letter from San Antonio, Texas. Signed “A Real Soldier,” it stated that a “black magic” cult flourished at 1003 Orange Grove Avenue, practicing “Crowleyism” and “Sex Perversion.” The letter also named one of the house's inhabitants, Frederick Mellinger, as an “enemy alien.” When FBI officers came to investigate, Parsons gave them a tour and smoothly explained that 1003 housed a fraternal study group who discussed “philosophy, religion, personal freedom and the mysteries of life and eternity.” In the ensuing years the police and the FBI would investigate 1003 time and again, but they would never find anything incriminating. Nevertheless the FBI did open a file on Parsons, detailing his link to a “love cult.” By the end of his life, the file would stretch to nearly two hundred pages.

Within the house angry members pointed fingers of suspicion as they debated the identity of this “Real Soldier.” Many assumed that the still-jealous Regina Kahl or one of her scandalized relatives had sent the letter: Kahl had gone to Texas to recuperate from a persistent illness, which had been exacerbated by the lodge politics and the hard work of communal living. However, any number of disgruntled souls might have informed on the Lodge. Parsons' science fiction friend Grady McMurtry, for one, had become upset by events at 1003. Soon after McMurtry and his wife Claire had been initiated into the OTO, their marriage had disintegrated as Claire gave herself over to the licentiousness of the Lodge, sleeping with both Parsons and Smith. Parsons eventually helped to pay for an abortion when Claire discovered that she was pregnant (something he would also do later for Betty.) McMurtry was shocked by his former idol's callousness.

Crowley tried to patch up the two men's relationship, exhorting McMurtry to fight against the jealousy he felt. Even so, with his marriage destroyed and now himself drafted into the army, McMurtry could make only infrequent trips back to 1003. When he did, his visits filled him with unease. He had been rather surprised, when talking to Smith, to find that the mass had not been performed since the OTO had moved into 1003. From his army base he wrote Parsons a letter describing the group which now hung out at 1003 as “a bunch of empty-headed Athenians” (a phrase he pointedly chose from Crowley's
Konx Om Pax
) and he described Parsons as “being coked up like a snowbird by Wilfred.”

Although McMurtry seems to have meant that Smith's influence on Parsons was narcotic, his former friend was indeed indulging in various drugs by this time. A regular drinker of home-brewed absinthe and an occasional user of marijuana, he now appeared to have turned to cocaine and amphetamines to cope with the pressure of work at Aerojet and GALCIT. His colleagues noticed he was soaked in a perpetual sweat during the day, a common side effect of amphetamine abuse. “Jack was an expert on drugs,” recalled Robert Cornog, a friend from the time; “he knew them backwards and forwards.” It is possible that he had begun to experiment with making his own drugs in his home laboratory. Such substances were not intended purely for recreation. Crowley preached that drugs could aid in the enactment of magical rituals and facilitate “astral travels” when the magician supposedly leaves his body and communes with the universe and the beings who inhabit this higher plane.

When news of the party, the FBI investigation, the drugs, and the constant partner swapping got back to Karl Germer, he saw the turmoil as proof of Smith's bad influence. Breathless with rage he wrote to Crowley:

 

I'd better slow down. I'm getting hot under the collar. Can't even type straight. However, in American slang, “it burns me up” to see the Order, and all it stands for, represented as a Seventh Ave Social Club, with “who slept with whom” vieing with drunk exhibitionism as the topic of the moment ... I am no prude, but neither do I care for obscenity and vulgarity in my sexual life. Nor do I think it a good foundation on which to build a stable, worthwhile Lodge of the Order. Do you?