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Aimee's congregation was now immense, and to keep it growing she promoted what turned out to be a 20-year slanging match with Ma, a simpering old party with a tongue like a blowtorch. It was a real power struggle: Ma had a loud voice in making church policy and a death grip on the temple's purse strings. To shake her loose, Aimee once went so far as to bust her nose. Ma struck back by dishing out some dirt about Sister Aimee's finances.
Aimee, the story went, skimmed the collection plate; when the congregation contributed $3,500, she acknowledged $1,200. She kept three sets of books and a secret bank account in which $100,000 was deposited (and withdrawn) in one nine-month period. What's more, she kept a double who took imaginary trips and ran up imaginary expenses.
In 1931, long since divorced from Mc-Pherson, Aimee eloped to Yuma, Ariz., with a plump baritone named David Hutton, who sang in the temple choir. On the morning after their wedding, Aimee and David cooed over the radio from the bridal boudoir in the evangelist's home and signed off with a loud wet smack. Next day David was sued for breach of promise by a "masseuse" named Myrtle Joan Hazel St. Pierre, who announced that "Big Boy" had sullied her virtue on the floor of her living room and then had failed to make an honest woman of her. A jury awarded Myrtle $5,000, which Big Boy couldn't pay and Aimee wouldn't. A few months later, in fact, Aimee wouldn't have anything more to do with Hutton, who sued for divorce and signed up for a vaudeville tour.
Showman or Shaman. In her last years, Aimee shrewdly retouched her public image by sending about 2,000,000 Bibles to servicemen and calling down biblical plagues on the Axis powers ("How many of you would like to see Hitler covered with boils from head to foot?") But her heart really wasn't in it any more, and on Sept. 27, 1944, she died of an overdose of barbiturates.
Suicide? Even in death Aimee kept the public guessing. That was her style—and perhaps her privilege. It should hardly be a biographer's privilege, but Thomas claims it. He chooses to see her as a showman; but she was also a shaman, one of the charged and chosen few in whom the divine and the demonic hold alarming dialogue. There was a chance here to deep-psych a deplorable genius and put calipers to the phenomenon of religious fervor. Because Thomas passed it up, Aimee emerges as a personality who overflows the scope of the book. At her death she left (to her loyal son Rolf) an entire church—which now claims more than 193,000 members and property valued at $59,000,000. To Ma, she left $10.
Brad Darrach