Strange Angel (39 page)

Parsons slowly began to interest Candy in the tarot and astrology. In turn, she painted him pictures—a portrait of Dr. John Dee and a gruesome picture of the errant Betty, her legs cut off above the knees and bleeding. Despite her increasing enthusiasm for the occult, Candy sometimes found Parsons' deep reliance on magic bemusing. One day, she recalled, a windstorm blew off the sea. “It blew the French doors open, and everything was blowing and I'm yelling ... And can you imagine? I'm running around trying to close the windows, and Jack goes upstairs with his dagger to stop the wind!”

Candy was different from his other loves. She offered neither Helen's patient support nor Betty's joie de vivre. Strong-willed and erratic, she had no wish to settle for one man's affections, and she was not about to adopt the passive role of Parsons' student-lover. When he suggested that their relationship be an open one, it seems that Candy wholeheartedly agreed. Her indifference seemed designed to help Parsons toughen up emotionally. As he wrote in his memoir, “Candy appeared in answer to your call, in order to wean you from wet nursing.”

Parsons still socialized with the few of his old friends who remained in the area. He visited Andrew Haley; home videos of the time show Parsons, Ed Forman, and Haley playing leapfrog together, while Candy plays with the Haley children and strikes fencing poses with a stick. But Parsons' manner had somehow altered, even towards his old friend Forman. “Candy's arrival had changed a lot of things,” remembered Forman's wife, Jeanne. “Jack wasn't acting the way he used to.” He was withdrawn, and his relationship with Candy seemed distant and lacking the intensity he had shared with Betty. “Jack was an affectionate guy,” remembered George Frey, “but they were not too responsive [together], a bit British.” Bob Cornog, who after living in 1003 had also moved to Manhattan Beach, remembered, “They did not make differences or affinities public. They were two very independent people living together.” Some thought that Parsons had never escaped Betty's hold. “Cameron [Candy], she was a nice person,” remembered Alice Cornog, “but she couldn't compare with the other person that Parsons was madly in love with.” When the couple paid a visit to Robert Heinlein, however, Parsons gave him one of the poems he had written about Candy. Entitled “Desire,” the poem displays a sensuousness that belies the couple's outward coolness:

 

Now I am a whip coiling across your naked buttocks
Your flesh writhes under my caress, and your voice
Is shrill with pain and passion
I am a flame that crawls slowly about you
I have found the soles of your feet, and seek
each nerve center.

 

Although they had known each other for less than a year, on October 19, 1946, four days after he was officially divorced from Helen, Parsons and Candy were married. The ever faithful Ed Forman stood witness.

 

With his move to Manhattan Beach and his marriage to Candy, it seemed as if Parsons had put all thought of his time at 1003 behind him. He began selling his vast library of Crowley's books and occult texts, and he had little contact with the other members of the OTO, except in informing them of the few assets Agape Lodge had accrued during his time as its leader. Having lost its home and its charismatic head, the lodge was nearly defunct. “At the moment,” wrote Jane Wolfe to Grady McMurtry, “we are penniless, will-less it seems to me, and generally inactive.” Wolfe visited Parsons in Manhattan Beach to try to tempt him back to the order, but Parsons turned her down. November passed without event; Parsons failed even to acknowledge the supposed date of the birth of Babalon, the goddess he had summoned earlier that year.

Parsons now seemed diligently absorbed in his job at North American Aviation. There were a few diversions. In March 1947, the Los Angeles Police Department asked Parsons to provide expert information on a giant explosion that had occurred at a downtown electroplating plant. The blast had killed 15 people and injured 151. An “atomic-like explosion of smoke and flame” had destroyed the factory and leveled nearby houses. Along with eight other experts in chemistry, explosives, and metallurgy, including some from Caltech, Parsons investigated the causes of the explosion. Almost ten years had passed since his first flirtation with fame at the Kynette trial, but at thirty-two years of age, he was still the youngest expert on the coroner's jury. It did not take long for them to trace the eruption to “an exploding cauldron of dangerous chemicals mixed by a young chemist in presumptive disregard of the warnings of science.” The young chemist had “masqueraded as a man possessing several scientific degrees, while, in truth, he never finished high school.” Parsons surely sympathized with the culprit.

Two months later Parsons gave “a general talk on rocketry” to the Pacific Rocket Society, one of the new breed of amateur rocket clubs started in the wake of the Second World War. These new societies were generally formed not with the purpose of making scientific breakthroughs, but more as a hobby, for the fun of building rockets. In his speech, Parsons predicted that nuclear-powered rockets might enable man to reach the moon; his dreams of interplanetary travel were still keen.

Candy was making plans to travel to Paris in the autumn, ostensibly to study art. Parsons made a talisman for her to wear to protect her from physical and spiritual harm. It consisted of a six-inch piece of rope with nine knots tied in it, a small piece of dark blue felt cut in a circle, two pieces of metal, one seed, a small piece of quartz, a deep-blue stone, and a phonograph needle. He also suggested that she take time to visit Crowley in England. Crowley's wisdom would feed her increasing interest in the occult, and Parsons hoped she might even convince Crowley to forgive his former protégé for his past weakness.

In anticipation of this visit, Parsons wrote a letter to Crowley for the first time since his resignation from the OTO. “It has been almost a year since I last wrote—at that time I was near mental and financial collapse. Since that time I have gained some sort of mental equilibrium and gradually regained something of a position working in my old field in a large aircraft company ... My aim is to rebuild myself.”

It is impossible to know whether Crowley would have cared for Parsons' tentative attempts to appease him. He never received the letter, nor did he meet Candy. Throughout 1947 his health had been declining rapidly. He was by now injecting himself with as many as eleven grains of heroin a day (the usual dose for most addicts being one-eighth of a grain.) With heroin added to his various other medicines, he was permanently dazed, his once remarkable mind dimmed. Before he had become too weak to act, he had placed Grady McMurtry in charge of the OTO in the United States, under Karl Germer's review. On December 1, 1947, the Great Beast died, aged seventy-two. Some said that he died with tears on his cheeks, his last words being the uncharacteristically hesitant, “I am perplexed.” Others thought that his final utterance was the melancholic admission, “Sometimes I hate myself.” His obituary in
Time
magazine stated, “The world of 1947 buried him almost without noticing it, and without a shudder.”

I remember
When I was a star
In the night
A moving, burning ember
Amid the bright
Clouds of star fire
Going deathward
To the womb.

 

—J
OHN
W
HITESIDE
P
ARSONS
, untitled

 

The United States had emerged from the war years in better shape than any other combatant country. Since Pearl Harbor the average weekly earnings of the nation's workers had almost doubled—from $24.20 to $44.39; rationing was a distant memory and birth rates were soaring. Nevertheless, the postwar euphoria quickly dissipated as the country found itself embroiled in yet another international crisis. By 1948 Americans had come to view the Soviet Union not as the brave ally of wartime propaganda but as a serious global threat. As the United States mulled over the Marshall Plan, its vast postwar aid package to Europe, the Soviet Union's foreign policy, under the paranoid direction of Joseph Stalin, became increasingly aggressive. In February the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia, and in June the Soviets imposed a blockade upon Berlin, prompting the West's year-long airlift of supplies for the starving inhabitants.

The United States responded to increasing Soviet hostility with extreme measures of its own. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), a politically rapacious body charged with seeking out “Red” influence in the country, had been formed back in 1938, but its activities had been curtailed during the war years. Now it was reactivated, beginning with a much publicized investigation into Communism in Hollywood, which had long been charged with placing subversive messages in its films. With the intense pressuring it put on witnesses to name former associates, the vague and sweeping accusations it made against individuals, and its readiness to assume guilt through association, the committee was a formidable terror. Witnesses who refused to answer were cited for contempt of Congress and jailed. Its highest-profile victims by 1948 had been a group of screenwriters and directors known as “The Hollywood Ten,” who had refused to give evidence. When the committee accused former State Department official Alger Hiss of being an active member of the Communist Party and of handing government secrets over to the Soviet Union, fear and suspicion spread wider. If Reds had infiltrated the government, where else had they gotten to? Everyone was a suspect. Forrest Ackerman later discovered that the FBI had even planted an informant in the ranks of the LASFS to seek out science fiction fans with Communist sympathies.

Within Parsons' immediate circle of friends, the increasing scrutiny into a person's political history had been causing some concern. In 1946 he had been invited to Frank Malina's for a farewell dinner. Malina had decided to leave America and take a post in Paris with UNESCO. He would be going alone. His consuming dedication to rocketry work during the war had placed his young marriage under an intolerable strain. Now he and his wife Liljan were living apart. Malina had other problems as well. His house had recently been ransacked, although nothing had been stolen; he suspected that the FBI was harassing him. In New York, Liljan's address book had disappeared from her car, only to mysteriously reappear a few days later.

The following year Parsons' friend Robert Cornog lost his security clearance while he was working as a research engineer at Northrup Aircraft. Without a security clearance it was nearly impossible to work in an industry dealing largely with classified government contracts. The rocketeers had all received clearance for their JATO work, but in the increasingly unpredictable political climate, these lifelines to the world of cutting edge research might any day be revoked. A scientific blacklist had been created and it took very little to get one's name on it. A disgruntled former colleague might claim one held “liberal social views” or, as in Cornog's case, might mention one's ties to alleged Communists, and a full-blown FBI investigation would follow. No explanation was necessary for the withdrawal of a security clearance. In this Kafkaesque climate, one was accused, tried, and found guilty without knowing the nature of the crime or even that one was under investigation. Cornog was released from his job without knowing why, and, reeling with shock, he left Los Angeles for Berkeley. It would be almost two years before he found work again, as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California. The job was theoretical enough not to require a security clearance.

Parsons was naturally worried. He had attended meetings of a Communist group before the war, and some of his best friends had been Communist Party members. Fearing harassment or worse from an increasingly Red-scared government, Parsons began to correspond again with the Suicide Squad's old mentor, Theodore von Kármán, about the possibility of working abroad.

Kármán was rarely in Pasadena now. As the founder of the Advisory Group for Aeronautical Research and Development, he traveled incessantly between the United States and Europe, attempting to promote international scientific cooperation on rocketry, among other topics. He told Parsons he would keep an eye out for any rocketry jobs that suited him, but he also advised Parsons that if he wished to work in what was now an established profession, he needed some academic qualifications, especially in advanced mathematics. Parsons grudgingly enrolled in a night course at the University of Southern California. Going back to school must have seemed strange to him when he had achieved so much without any degrees. At any rate his efforts were rendered futile when, a couple of weeks later, his security clearance was stripped from him with no warning.

Without Parsons' knowledge, the FBI had been investigating his past for months, presumably ever since he had started work on the army-sponsored Navaho Missile Program at North American Aviation. Parsons' clearance had not been reviewed since his work at GALCIT during the war. Now the old Pasadena police reports about the goings-on at 1003 had been unearthed, and someone had charged that Parsons had ties with “an alleged Communist Party member.” He was immediately listed as an “Undesirable Employee for National Defense Work.”

North American Aviation suspended Parsons from his job immediately. He wrote a panicked letter to Kármán pleading his case: “As you know, I am not a communist, and have no connection with communists or communist front organizations. I have no idea of the reason for this action. Possibly it is simply because I am not enough of a rubber stamp personality ... Under these conditions, I feel that [it] is desirable to leave this country, and to begin a career elsewhere: in a more liberal atmosphere, as soon as possible. I will greatly appreciate any advice or suggestions that you can offer in the matter. I am really anxious to make the change as soon as possible.”