Tatiana Maslany as Sister Alice on HBO’s Perry Mason and Sister Aimee Semple McPherson.
Photographic illustration of Slate. HBO and Bettmann photos via Getty Images.
This week’s HBO episode Perry Mason it was the Radiant Assembly of God, the fictional Los Angeles church led by the enigmatic faith healer Sister Alice McKeegan, played by Tatiana Maslany. Although the church appeared in the first episode (Mason is investigating a kidnapping that went wrong with members of the congregation), in this second episode, we can see much more, including a normal service and a funeral service. It is a very Californian church even for California, involving costumes, pageantry, and radio, and is clearly inspired by the real life and career of Aimee Semple McPherson, a radio evangelist who played a huge role in the civic life of Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s. To understand Sister Alice, it is helpful to understand the strange story of the preacher on which she is based, involving a still mysterious kidnapping and even a more savage theatricality.
And to understand Sister Aimee, it’s helpful to understand her backstory. She got her two last names from her first two marriages, neither of which ended well. Originally from Ontario, she moved to Chicago in 1908 with her first husband, Robert Semple, who converted her to Pentecostalism, took her with him on a mission trip to China, and died of dysentery. After returning to the United States, she married again, this time with Harold McPherson, an accountant. In 1915, she abandoned McPherson and set out on the road with her children to preach the gospel, fulfilling a promise she had made to God while suffering from appendicitis. Her husband joined her and tried for a time, but eventually went home to her in Rhode Island, divorcing her in 1922. In 1918, at the age of 28, McPherson came to Los Angeles under his trademark. ” Gospel Car “. a 1918 Oldsmobile with “JESUS IS COMING SOON – GET READY” painted on the side.
By the time she reached the west coast, McPherson already had a reputation as a faith healer, and she continued her work in Los Angeles, preaching in a rented location while raising money (over $ 250,000, ultimately) to build a permanent church in Echo Parque. . The Angelus Temple, with its huge central dome flanked by columns, was opened to the public on New Year’s Day, 1923. The Perry Mason, the Radiant Assembly of the church of God uses the facade of the Second Church of Christ, Scientist in West Adams, which has its own columns, although not as many as Angelus.
The main shrine of the Angelus Temple, often credited as the first American megachurch, could house 5,300 people, with speakers installed outside to accommodate the overflow, a detail shown in Perry Mason. The construction of the church sparked a wave of commercial and residential development around her, making McPherson perhaps the first person to gentrify Echo Park. In 1924, he launched his own radio station, KFSG (the call sign stands for “Foursquare Gospel”) and erected two gigantic radio towers over the temple.
McPherson’s radio ministry made her famous nationally, but it was her mysterious disappearance and reappearance in 1926 that made her infamous nationally. McPherson went missing after swimming in Ocean Park, and many assumed he had drowned. At one point, the police received a ransom note asking for $ 500,000, signed “The Avengers.” Five weeks later, she appeared in Mexico, claiming to have escaped from the kidnappers named “Rosie” and “Steve”. The public was skeptical, especially since a former KFSG radio operator went missing around the same time and was seen in Carmel with an unidentified woman. When South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford disappeared on “The Appalachian Trail” and then returned only to admit that he had been having an extramarital affair in Argentina, Timothy Noah de Slate compared the episode to the alleged kidnapping of Sister Aimee:
The problem was that his story was deeply suspicious from the start. Her shoes were without handcuffs, the Mexican shack where she said she had been held could not be located, and although she had disappeared from view wearing a bathing suit, she reappeared fully dressed. Prosecutors became so frustrated with McPherson that they chased her for perjury. The investigation that followed uncovered considerable evidence that Sister Aimee had fled with her lover, an employee and radio engineer named Kenneth Ormiston.
But McPherson stuck to his story, and to this day it is unclear what really happened. By Perry MasonIn the era, McPherson had more or less withstood the storm, and Angelus Temple was a well-known tourist destination.
That had a lot to do with Sister Aimee’s illustrated sermons, which invite a more direct comparison with that of Sister Alice. Like Alice’s spectacular services, Aimee combines the religion of yesteryear with the Hollywood special effects of the new times. In Perry In Mason’s second episode, Sister Alice offers a sermon apparently based on 1 Corinthians 10:21 and “illustrates” it by having seven women on stage in their clothes labeled with the names of the seven deadly sins. At a key point in the sermon, seven other women dressed as angels, representing the seven heavenly virtues, take the stage and give their halos to the seven deadly sins. (There is also someone on stage wearing biblical robes and a long fake beard, swinging around a gigantic pocket watch, the presence of which is not explained, but is probably related to the New Year.) It’s a pretty wild service, but Sister Alice has nothing on Sister Aimee. On Marcus Bach’s 1946 New Religions tour, They have found a faith, described one of McPherson’s illustrated sermons:
That night the sister gave us “The green light is on.” Initial comments were the deafening roar of a motorcycle coming down the ramp with the cutout open. The best evangelist in the world sat in the chair dressed as a speed cop. She expertly rode. … He recklessly drove to the front of the auditorium, slammed on the brakes, blew out a police whistle, raised a gloved hand to the congregation and shouted, “Halt! You’re going full speed to hell!
For a sermon titled “Eighteen Days of Diet or the Skeleton Army,” McPherson covered the stage with bones, which he then “dressed in tendons and meat” through special effects. Another service featured McPherson dressed as an admiral, the choir dressed as sailors, and the appearances of Christopher Columbus (there to recite the poem by Joaquin Miller) and someone dressed as the Fisherman of Gorton (there to perform “Listen to the mocking bird” and ” Old Oaken Bucket “in a tin whistle.) And then there’s the incredible Fox Movietone newscast in which Sister Alice tells the story of Daniel with the help of a living lion. Images from McPherson’s illustrated sermons at Angelus Temple they are difficult to obtain, but the silent images of the services there show that they were at least as scandalous as those shown in Perry Mason:
Perry MasonSister Alice does not correspond perfectly with Sister Aimee. On the one hand, by 1931, McPherson’s reputation was larger and more complicated than Sister Alice appears to be, primarily due to her disappearance. You can get an idea of that from the 1929 newsreel shots, in which McPherson observes: “Aimee Semple McPherson and the name Angelus Temple sometimes … seemed synonymous with problems and evidence” before recounting an earlier version of what would eventually become Christopher Walken’s “Two Little Mice” speech from Catch Me If You Can:
Although McPherson died in 1944 of an apparently accidental overdose of sedatives (his body remained in state for three days while 45,000 people lamented his respects), he has long lived in the nation’s cultural imagination. In Sinclair Lewis’s 1927 novel Elmer GantryShe is an evangelist radio named Sharon Falconer. In 1932 Barse Miller painting Appearance over Los Angeles, is floating in the sky above the Angelus Temple, accompanied by clouds shaped like bags of money. In Nathanael West’s 1939 novel, Lobster day, is a faith healer known as “Big Sister”. In 1976, Faye Dunaway played McPherson in a television movie (Bette Davis played her mother!), And today Kathie Lee Gifford wrote a musical about her. This year, she’s having a little TV revival: both. Perry Mason and the current season of Penny dreadful they feature McPherson figures. The Foursquare Church still has congregations across the country, and Angelus Temple still has weekly services in Echo Park, but Sister Aimee lives where she always belonged: Hollywood.
