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Today, not surprisingly, Hollywood contains the two astrologers best known for their "personal work." Carroll Righter, 62, has numbered among his clients such notables as Clark Gable, Lana Turner, Tyrone Power, Peter Lawford, Marlene Dietrich, Dick Powell, Van Johnson, Arlene Dahl, and Maria Montez (a prize exhibit because she was warned in 1951 that the first week of September, an adverse time in her chart, would bring her danger from water, and drowned in her bathtub on Sept. 7). Righter's rival is veteran Stargazer Blanca Holmes, who boasts her own long list of big names, including the late Marilyn Monroe, Paula and Susan Strasberg and Clifford Odets.
The Highbrows. Southern California also has a small group of highbrow astrologers who are trying to relate their ancient "science" to the modern sciences of space physics and psychology. Such is intense young Sidney Omarr, 36, a senior news editor for CBS Radio in Los Angeles, who also writes a seven-day-a-week syndicated column on astrology. "The present trend in astrology is research," he says. "Instead of adhering to the old textbooks, ethical astrologers are studying more psychology.
We know what the planets show about a person, but we don't know what to tell him to do about it." But just about the most prosperous astrologer of all is not much interested in personal psychology. Zolar—a onetime clothing salesman named Bruce King who got into the horoscope game when a highly popular astrologer quit a radio program King was managing—receives and answers queries by mail, telephone, and telegraph, and never sees a client. Instead, he saturates the mass market with a riptide of astrological merchandising distributed through newsstands, drug and dime stores: Zolar's Book of Forbidden Knowledge, Zolar's Official Astrology Magazine, Zolar's Official Dream Book. Last week the great Zolar was upset, he said, by New York's investigation "because it casts as.
persions on the legitimate science of astrology. There is a world of difference between scientific astrology and what the quacks practice. I despise crystal-gazers, gypsies and tea-readers, who fleece the public. Something should be done about them."