GONE GIRL

She became famous as a “lady preacher.” Then she disappeared.

- BY CASEY CEP

Aimee Semple McPherson was barefoot when she left Room 202 at the Ocean View Hotel. Wearing only a bathing suit, a dressing gown, and a swim cap, McPherson—the founder of one of America's first megachurches and just about the most famous woman in the country—had a street waffle for lunch, then settled in the shade of an umbrella just north of Venice Beach to work on a sermon.

It was May 18, 1926, and the thirty-five-year-old McPherson was known to critics and champions alike as “God's Best Publicity Agent.” McPherson rose to prominence during the golden age of P.R., when Ivy Lee was talking up the Rockefellers and the Democratic Party and Edward Bernays was selling everything from Dixie cups to the First World War. In keeping with the times, McPherson used mass media to make herself into a master of soul craft and self-promotion, laying hands on thousands of sick parishioners and preaching practically seven days a week to thousands more until her death, in 1944. Her sermons featured elaborate sets and musical numbers, borrowed from the nearby and nascent film industry, including boxing rings in which she knocked out the Devil and a motorcycle that she wheeled across a stage with sirens wailing while calling herself one of the Lord's patrolmen. “Half your success is due to your magnetic appeal,” Charlie Chaplin once told her, “half due to the props and lights.”