“Sister Aimee Hides Out at Las Tunas Beach”
by Pablo Capra
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| LEFT: The beach house where McPherson was in seclusion. CENTER: McPherson and her mother. RIGHT: Followers of McPherson pray for her recovery. Los Angeles Times, 1930-08-20. |
Often remembered for her 1926 kidnapping scandal, Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944) was involved in another scandal at Las Tunas Beach in 1930.
The famous evangelist counted 10% of Los Angeles as members of her Foursquare Gospel megachurch in the Angelus Temple building by Echo Park Lake. She modernized belief in miracles through faith healings and glossolalia. She pioneered religious services on radio and newsreels. She dramatized her sermons with Hollywood stagecraft, and performed them on sets built by her own art department. Mary Pickford, Jean Harlow, Clara Bow, and Charlie Chaplin admired her acting.
Her disappearance while swimming at Ocean Park Beach in 1926 led to the drownings of a rescue diver and a follower determined to join her. When she reappeared with a story about having been kidnapped, reporters didn’t buy it, and dug up clues that she’d been hiding an affair.
McPherson captivated audiences with her blending of fundamentalist and secular worlds but also upset some, including her mother, who particularly opposed the influence of secretary Mae Waldron. McPherson had promoted Waldron to vice president and developed a unique friendship with her.
Mae Waldron… became her usher into the secular world of Los Angeles in the roaring twenties. She encouraged her to buy dresses, lingerie, and millinery at the best shops. She introduced her to… actors, artists, and writers, a society that trafficked in ideas and sensations forbidden to followers of the Foursquare Gospel.
— "Sister Aimee by Daniel Mark Epstein", p. 341, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993
Mother and daughter fell out permanently in late July 1930, after an argument ended in a scuffle that broke her mother’s nose, although her mother confessed that her nose was still delicate from a recent face lift and rhinoplasty.
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| Mae Waldron (left) was charged with being the cause of trouble between the evangelist and her mother (right). Los Angeles Times, 1930-08-21. |
On August 9, someone threw a five-foot boa constrictor snake into McPherson’s room and gave her a scare.
Waldron took McPherson away from the Temple on August 15, to a house she’d rented at 41 Las Tunas Beach, where McPherson supposedly needed to recover from a nervous breakdown and the stress of writing her book The Holy Spirit (1931). Her mother alleged that McPherson was really hiding out because she’d had a face lift too, to improve her appearance for a starring role in a movie about her life.
Reporters learned about the Las Tunas Beach hideout on August 18, when a doctor was called to tend to McPherson. Peeping through a window, they claimed to see bandages being wrapped around her head. The Church countered that the bandages were wet rags to reduce fever.
Throughout yesterday crowds of members of Mrs. McPherson’s congregation milled around the temple much after the manner… years ago when some believed the evangelist drowned.… The supplicants blamed themselves for Mrs. McPherson’s condition asserting they had not sufficiently supported her….
— “Mother Denies Blindness of Sister M’Pherson,” Los Angeles Times, 1930-08-20
The devotion of McPherson’s followers almost resulted in another death when a man had to be rescued after trying to walk on the Echo Park Lake to prove his faith.
Temple guards were sent to the Las Tunas Beach house to prevent trespassers. A deputy sheriff moved traffic along because cars kept slowing down to ask, “How’s Aimee?”
McPherson complained that the highway was too noisy. Even the sound of the ocean disturbed her. This was also the last month when gunshots could still be heard in the Santa Monica Mountains. At a September trial, “home owners… asserted with more than a little bitterness they were tired of having their lives endangered by bullets which perforate roofs and walls of their dwellings.” Malibu had become too populated for hunting, and a ban was placed on high-powered rifles. Deputy sheriffs patrolled every entrance from Topanga Canyon westward, turning away 16 hunters at Las Flores Canyon alone on the first day of the ban.
However, McPherson found peace in listening to music. On August 21, the Angelus Temple Choir came to the beach to sing below her window. The next night, the Silver Cornet Jubilee Band performed on the sand.
On August 23, McPherson issued a statement, ceding power over to a Church committee until she could return to the Temple.
On August 30, at midnight, an ambulance secretly drove her to a new hideout at 401 Sycamore Rd. in Santa Monica Canyon. Two weeks later, she left Los Angeles for a cruise to Panama.
When she finally reappeared in public at the Temple, on November 30, she refused to answer questions about face lifts or to allow close-up photos, but the Los Angeles Times reported that, at 40, “She had the face and figure of a co-ed.”
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McPherson presented herself like a movie star, early 1930s. |
Instead of moving back into the Temple, she returned to the beach house with Mae Waldron for the rest of the year. She made screen tests for her life story, but they failed to capture her stage presence, so the studio canceled her movie. In January 1931, she left on a mission trip to China and India.
The next month, on February 4, a high tide and stormy seas damaged many beach houses in the Tuna Canyon area, destroying three.
One, at Topanga Beach, belonged to Mrs. J. P. Raymond.
The other two, on Ratner Beach, belonged to the abstract-artist couple Harvey Leepa (1887-1977) and Esther Gentle (1899-1991), and Lee Duncan (1892-1960), the owner of acting dog Rin Tin Tin, who was not with his master.
Leepa and Duncan both escaped from their houses at the last moment. The Leepa house, named Castel La Mar, was an architectural gem designed in 1923 by Rudolph Schindler. Leepa dove through a window after saving as many paintings as he could.
In 1958, a Foursquare Gospel Church opened in Topanga, where the Inn of the Seventh Ray restaurant is today. Local historian Eric Dugdale remembers attending the church as a boy in 1961. When the congregation began speaking in tongues, an old woman next to him fell to the ground and began to shake. He called for help, but was told she was in religious ecstasy.
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Pablo Capra is the Archivist for the Topanga Historical Society and author of Topanga Beach: A History, 1820s-1920s (2020).
