Through the 1960s, Marshall Herff Applewhite, the man who would end his life with the musical name Do, had been relegated to secondary roles at the Houston Grand Opera. The son of a peripatetic Texas preacher, he had given up earlier plans for the ministry to pursue a career in music, supporting himself, his wife and two children with jobs that ranged from rehearsal conductor to part-time English teacher to occupational therapist at a tuberculosis sanatorium. But he was pushing 40, and his struggle against his homosexuality was unraveling both his marriage and his academic post in a religious school. An attempt to reverse his musical fortunes on Broadway had come to naught. Then, in 1970, Applewhite got a break: lead baritone in the American opera The Ballad of Baby Doe. Detractors whispered that his voice was "not of national caliber," that he was "not musically a ball of fire." This was an opportunity for him to prove them wrong.
He didn't. Instead, recalls Charles Rosekrans, then the choirmaster at the opera, Applewhite "felt the part was too much for him. It was a difficult role and required more voice than he actually had, and he had personal problems." Rosekrans vaguely remembers Applewhite's handing him a letter from a psychiatrist before withdrawing from the production. Thus, through crumbling ambition and the denial of desire, the easy affability of a young Texan from Spur, who loved to perform in lavish productions like Oklahoma! and South Pacific, was transmogrified into the troubled charisma of a cult master in Rancho Santa Fe, California, one who last week led his 38 followers on a fatal comet chase.
What kind of transfiguration was it? Applewhite's sister Louise Winant maintains that her brother entered a Houston hospital with a heart blockage and had a near-death experience that changed his life. The Washington Post reported that in 1971 he checked into a psychiatric hospital to be cured of his homosexuality after an affair with a student at Houston's University of St. Thomas led to his being fired as a music professor. (He had been fired from another job for similar reasons in 1964.) He reportedly confided to a lover that he longed for sexless devotion, passion without physical entanglements. Whatever the facts, Applewhite spun his own myth: the personal turmoil was the result of his body's coming under the influence of a being from the "Next" level, part of the discovery that he was one of the Two.
The other half of the Two was the nurse who attended him, Bonnie Lu Nettles, then 44. According to Applewhite's sister, it was Nettles who told him "that he had a purpose, that God kept him alive." "Their relationship wasn't like a romantic thing, more like a friendship, a platonic thing," says Nettles' daughter Terrie, interviewed by CNN Impact's Henry Schuster and TIME's Patrick E. Cole. But Bonnie Lu Nettles, who dabbled in astrology, believed it was fated in the stars. Says her daughter: "A couple of spiritualists said that there was going to be this guy coming into her life. And then Herff showed up. They linked up on a spiritual plane." Applewhite too saw the union as destiny. In junior high, Nettles had written a novel about a man who died and went to heaven. Somehow, this literary vision became proof of prophecy for Applewhite, who said he was the manuscript's ascendant hero.