14. “There sat Aimee Semple McPherson, coifed in her signature bob.” If the event were true, it would have constituted one of the most bizarre in Jonathan’s life. I haven’t found evidence that a single contemporary of Jonathan’s assistant Davison believed his story, and Jonathan’s diary, tellingly, is silent on the alleged meeting. Davison was apparently acquainted with a female acolyte of the evangelist who committed suicide when McPherson disappeared and was originally feared drowned, a fact that could very well go to plausible motive for Davison’s concocting the story that clearly paints the popular revivalist as liar and schemer and fully disputes her claim that she had been kidnapped and tortured. (She was allegedly burned with a cigar on her knuckles.) I found the following account among the notes Davison had made for an unfinished memoir he was writing at the time of his death in 1971. HD.
I spied her in a dark corner of the hotel dining room. There she sat, coifed in her signature bob. I nudged Jonny and whispered, “The woman in the corner, do you see?”
Jonny peered and nodded. “It’s Aimee Semple McPherson. Perhaps her kidnappers allow her to come down to the dining room to take her meals.”
“What should we do?”
“Why don’t we go over and ask her what’s what?”
Jonny, like me, had little patience for women who pretend to be kidnapped and get everybody on the West Coast in a lather over it.
McPherson saw us coming and looked a little unnerved. We had her cornered.
“Excuse me,” Jonny says. “Are you the famous, allegedly kidnapped evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson?”
“No, I am not.”
She took out a compact and began to powder her nose, hoping, I would suppose, that we would simply go away.
“I must say that you bear a very strong resemblance to the woman,” Jonny pursued.
“People tell me that. Now if you don’t mind—”
To my surprise, Jonny sat down. Taking his lead, I pulled up a chair and did the same.
“Excuse me, but you are not welcome at this table. I wish to be alone.”
“Why did you do it?” Jonny asked, relentless.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, nervously. The woman appeared quite undone by our visit. She had powdered her nose to such point that she now resembled a Geisha.
“What if I were to put it thusly?” Jonny replied. “Let’s suppose you were Aimee Semple McPherson, what would you guess would be the reason you would be sitting in this dining room eating — what is that?”
“It’s pâté of braunschweiger with capers. Would you like a nibble?”
It appeared that she was now attempting to win her release through forced hospitality.
Jonny declined. I took a bite. It tasted like liver cheese.
“Let’s say that I am who you say I am — the world-famous founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel.”
“Throw out the lifeline,” Jonny sang.
Aimee smiled. “Yes, that Aimee Semple McPherson. Let us say that I were she. Well, wouldn’t you think I would be entitled to a vacation? It’s exhausting work healing cripples all day. Sometimes you think they’re totally healed and they start to walk toward you and then they fall flat onto their poor, generally homely faces, and you must return them to their wheelchairs or whatever jerry-rigged contraptions they have assembled to move them about because they’re too poor to afford a decent conveyance. Well, wouldn’t I be entitled to a few weeks rest and relaxation here in Carmel? If only for all those tens of thousands of passports I’ve stamped for entry into the kingdom of gold and myrrh?
Jonny was about to respond but I was too quick: “A young girl killed herself when she thought you had drowned.”
“I suppose the poor young thing wanted to join me at the Gates of Heaven.”
“But you aren’t there.”
“Well, I admit, she’d be in for a little bit of a wait.”
“Are you aware that two men also died — trying to ‘rescue’ you?”
“Yes, I do read the papers, but it must have been clear to most with some degree of common sense that I was not out there. Were there cries for help? Was I seen thrashing about in those waves? No, I was not. Because I was kidnapped. I was tied up and kept against my will in an undisclosed location, and at some point, I will have to escape and return to my flock with a fantastic story to tell. Yes, gentlemen, that is what I would say if I were Aimee Semple McPherson, but I am not. I merely favor her. Now, may I be left to finish my appetizer before my boyfriend comes down? I’d rather he not see you here. He is very jealous and what’s more, has himself been reported missing by his wife several weeks ago. The poor dear has enough to worry about right now.”
Jonny had been holding his tongue through all of this, but now spoke in angry sputters. “What makes you think that I won’t go to the police at this very moment and report your presence here?”
Aimee smiled, a caper lodged stubbornly between her upper two incisors. “This is why.” At that moment I felt a sharp blow to the back of my head and then I was out. Apparently, Jonny, too, was similarly rendered unconscious. When we both came to, Aimee was gone. All that was left was the faint whiff of her floral perfume and a smudge of pâté upon her plate.
Jonny decided that it would be best not to go to the authorities with our story. “She’ll resurface soon. Nobody will buy the story. She’ll convict herself the moment she opens her mouth.”
Two days later Aimee showed up at the Angelus Temple with one whopper to tell — swallowed hook, line, and sinker by her fawning followers. A story that had absolutely nothing to do with pâté.
15. Leopold and Loeb liked the scent. Nathan Leopold to Jonathan Blashette, 4 October1924. Attempting to expand the market for his men’s deodorant line, Jonathan and Davison sent free samples to as many celebrated Americans as he could think of — and a few whose celebrity was colored with all the dark hues of notoriety.
16. Calvin Coolidge wasn’t available that day. The reason that President Coolidge wasn’t able to see Davison, or anyone else on that day was because he had cleared his calendar to meet with “Ol’ Rip,” a horned toad that emerged alive during the razing of the old courthouse in Eastland, Texas, after thirty-one years of incarceration in the building’s cornerstone. Few details of the visit have survived with the exception of one transcribed account from The Amphibian Lovers’ Oral History Project: 100 Years of Frogs & their Friends (Chicago: S. Elliot and Company, 1982). Coolidge allegedly invited the toad and its human entourage to stay for lunch, during which he hand-fed the toad flies skewered on toothpicks. The legendarily laconic president is said to have remarked, “My, my. Hmm. Yum, huh?”
It was foolish of Davison to think that he could have gotten a product endorsement from the president in the first place.
17. “Didn’t James Joyce’s eye patch used to be over the other eye?” Jonathan Blashette to Harlan Davison, 1 November, 1924HD. Jonathan’s pub encounter with author James Joyce was the second in a long series of late-night celebrity convives. Many of the individuals whom Jonathan met during his many years of urban night-owling were, like Joyce, well established in their high-profile professions; others, such as Rodolfo Valentina d’Antonguolla, were soon to be famous. Most of the encounters, though friendly and even affectionate, never rose to anything sustaining, and generally didn’t extend beyond a single, isolated evening of convivial fraternity, soul-baring confession, and/or bathetic beer-basted blubbering.