Strange Angel (17 page)

The effects of both political movements could also be felt closer to home. The rise of Fascism in Germany and Italy had prompted European Jews to emigrate in a steady flow to Los Angeles and Pasadena. Some who had been banned from teaching in Nazi Germany took posts at Caltech. The Suicide Squad's mentor, Theodore von Kármán, had himself suffered similar maltreatment years before while teaching at Aachen. He now grasped every opportunity to question those refugees who made it to Pasadena, and with increasing incredulity he repeated to his students, “The stories are all the same! The Nazis are really devils!”

Communism, thanks in part to the very virulence of its opposition to Fascism, seemed a more attractive and intellectual option, especially to students. The successes of Franklin D. Roosevelt's socialistic New Deal program, with its support of the Communist-led unions, had undoubtedly leant much authority to leftist thought. While some, like Huey Long, the famed Louisiana senator, decried the New Deal as containing “every fault of socialism ... worse than anything proposed under the Soviets,” among the intellectual community Roosevelt's program was roundly praised. The German writer Thomas Mann, now living in Los Angeles, declared Roosevelt “an American Hermes, a brilliant messenger of shrewdness.” For some of the students at Caltech, an alternative to the capitalism that had caused the depression and affected so many of them directly must have been of real interest.

The turbulent politics of the time was reflected in Parsons' latest plan to gain funding for his rocket research. Every Monday he and Malina would meet and work on a novel which they hoped to sell to one of the nearby film companies. Its subject was the fantastical world of rocketry. All that survives of the book is a chapter-by-chapter summary, no doubt intended as a proposal for publishers or Hollywood agents. It initially appears as a histrionic roman a clef offering a skewed take on the members of the Suicide Squad. The story is also remarkably prescient, blithely foretelling the postwar repercussions of the rocketeers' political beliefs. Yet nowhere does the story come closer to prophecy than in relation to Parsons himself, prefiguring not only his eventual absorption in the occult world, but even the explosive manner of his death.

The untitled novel is set in “the Institute,” a dead ringer for Caltech. The hero is Franklin Hamilton, a genius physicist and rocket scientist. With his “black, closely cut slightly curly hair” and “good looking, sharply chiseled face,” he seems to be a replica of Parsons himself. Furthermore, Hamilton is “not the type usually thought to be scholastic” and his colleagues refer to him as a “lady's man.” Like Parsons he constantly smokes cigarettes, placing the butts in his waistcoat pocket.

Other members of his rocket group include Lin Lao, who is faced with the dilemma of going back to China or staying and working on the rocket project; Thomas Elwood, a Nazi-hating union organizer; and a recently defrocked Franciscan monk named Theophile Belvedere, who has an overpowering interest in the Cabbala. All these characters share traits with the members of the Suicide Squad. Lin Lao is clearly a study of Tsien, who had been thinking of returning to China as the Sino-Japanese war of 1937 escalated; Elwood with his social conscience is pure Malina; and Belvedere's interest in mysticism is a product of Parsons' own embryonic interests in the esoteric world.

This hodgepodge of union organizers, genius scientists, and persecuted minorities engage in “preliminary experiments to learn the type of problems they must solve to construct a successful sounding rocket,” exactly as the Suicide Squad had planned. Their greatest trouble, as in real life, is a lack of financial backing. A test is made, with a setup much like the one used in the Arroyo Seco, but as the second rocket motor prepares to fire, Belvedere inexplicably attacks the apparatus with a wrench, striking the fuel tank and “causing a terrific explosion.” Once the smoke has cleared, the group finds him badly injured but conscious enough to reveal the tragic love affair that forced him to leave his monastery. He dies from his wounds in a manner eerily similar to Parsons' own death by explosion. Part thriller, part Brecht, the story dashes headlong into espionage, murder, and organized labor. Franklin Hamilton is roundly attacked for allowing Elwood, a pro-union organizer with “un-American beliefs,” to be connected with the institute. He is saved from being forced to resign by a sudden donation of $100,000 by Franz Adams, a wealthy aircraft manufacturer, union hater, and Fascist-sympathizer, who has decided to sell the rocketeers' plans to the Nazis. In the denouement the “Institute” is pilloried for housing un-American scientists—another event that would actually come to pass—and the rocket plans are about to leave on a plane for Nazi Germany. Fighting to save the day, one of the rocket team wrestles with the Nazi messenger, knocks him out, and grabs back the blueprints. When he receives them, Hamilton must face the grim realization that for mankind to be truly safe he must destroy all his research about rockets. “Only harm to humanity can at present result from its knowledge,” he intones. The plans are burned, and the rocket prototype they constructed is fired into the air, to be lost forever.

Parsons and Malina sent the summary to MGM studios, but perhaps unsurprisingly, nothing appears to have come of it. Still, the outline of the novel proved to be a strangely unsettling and prophetic piece of work. Not only did it predict so many features of the rocketeers' future lives, but it also foresaw the Nazi's secret obsession with rockets, barely hinted at until now.

 

The informal discussion groups that Parsons, Malina, and the other members of the Suicide Squad held at each other's houses had taken a new direction ever since Malina had invited a research assistant in the chemistry department at Caltech, Sidney Weinbaum. Born in 1898 to a middle-class Jewish family in the Ukraine, he fled his homeland after the Russian Revolution and arrived at Caltech in 1922. With an aquiline nose, pointed ears, and humped shoulders, he was unattractive, but those who knew him recognized that he was something of a Renaissance man. He had studied medicine at Warsaw University and physics at Caltech; had won the Los Angeles chess championship twice; and was an accomplished concert pianist. Older and worldlier than the young rocketeers, he could, it seemed, turn his mind to anything.

Weinbaum brought with him a motivating political presence. Until now the rocketeers' talk had focused on poetry, politics, music, and movies. Weinbaum bent their conversations increasingly towards politics. They needed little encouragement. The group had already talked much of its socialist sympathies and its hatred of Fascism, and Weinbaum, a member of the increasingly influential American Communist Party, was not ashamed to display his credentials. He had already circulated a petition through Caltech calling for the international recognition of the Soviet Union, and he was known for his pro-Soviet harangues. In a small and relatively conservative society like Caltech, such a stand could make others uncomfortable. Aeronautics professor Hans Liepmann thought Weinbaum was “a nut ... He never made any beans that he was a communist.” Kármán dealt with him in his usual mischievous manner, introducing Weinbaum at one of his parties by saying, “Here comes my friend Weinbaum, he deals in chemistry and communism.” Weinbaum soon convinced Parsons, Malina, and Tsien (Forman and Smith seemed not to have accepted Weinbaum's offer) to stop their own meetings and come together at his bungalow in Pasadena with others from Caltech. His motive was simple: Both Weinbaum and Frank Oppenheimer, brother of the famed physicist Robert Oppenheimer and a graduate student at Caltech, had been asked by the American Communist Party to try to organize a Communist group at Caltech.

To begin with, the meetings were not especially militant, but they were intoxicating. “It seemed a mental exercise for these men,” remembered Liljan Darcourt, Frank Malina's fiancée at the time. “They discussed Russia [and] Trotsky ... If you had half a brain you were interested in it. There was a great deal of misery at the time, the Depression and a president who couldn't do a damn thing ... They were all enormously patriotic, they felt for the people.” Soon Parsons subscribed to the
People's Daily World,
the first openly Communist newspaper in the country, and became a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, which at the time was labeled a “Red” organization.

The meetings were usually scheduled for Wednesday nights. Between twenty and thirty students, staff, and a few non-Caltech townspeople congregated at Weinbaum's house. The meetings followed a loose format, as they had always done, but the discussions of the Spanish Civil War were marked by their increasing passion. Once voices had dropped and tempers cooled, the usual mixture of music and parlor games took over. Tsien would sit in the corner playing his recorder, while the others gamely tried to beat Weinbaum at kriegspiel, a variant of chess. Meeting after meeting, Weinbaum continued to push the group further into politics. He was soon providing the students with books and pamphlets, offering to loan or sell them copies of Lenin's
State and Revolution,
Marx's
Capital
and
The Communist Manifesto,
and Stalin's
Messages.
It was not long before the rocketeers' informal discussion group had been transformed into Professional Unit 122 of the Pasadena Communist Party and Weinbaum started pressing attendees to become card-carrying members of the party themselves.

It was not illegal to be a member of the Communist Party at the time, but it was risqué and likely to be frowned upon by the college authorities. “It was essentially a secret group,” remembered Frank Oppenheimer. “[Most people] were scared of losing their jobs.” Even Helen Parsons was kept away from the meetings. “I would deliver Jack ... a block or two from where the meetings were held, so that I wouldn't know, and nobody else would know [where the meeting took place].” As the meetings grew more political, Weinbaum suggested that it would be to Parsons' advantage to become an official member of the Communist Party.

Obliged to make a choice, Parsons chose not to join. He had always been what Malina described as a “political romantic,” more anti-authoritarian than anticapitalist. When questioned by the FBI later in his life, Parsons said he had disapproved of Weinbaum's Communist proselytizing. His denial seems slightly disingenuous, however. His interests in left-wing causes had always been strong, and he must have always known that Weinbaum was a Communist. More likely Parsons was disappointed that the group had been driven from its freewheeling discussions of politics, art, music, and literature towards the biting realism of Marxism in action.

His refusal to sign up cooled relations between him and Weinbaum. Soon he stopped attending the meetings altogether. Malina joined the party under a pseudonym, as did Tsien, a choice they would both regret when the postwar Communist witch-hunts began. That Parsons did not enroll caused no antagonism among the rocketeers. “We were a peculiar, closely knit group with very many cross-interests which threw us together,” recalled Malina, “but the unifying thing with our group was rockets, you see.”

 

Walking into Clifton's Cafeteria on South Broadway in downtown Los Angeles was—and still is—a bizarre experience. Founded in 1931, the multilevel canteen was decorated like a redwood glade, with a twenty-foot-high waterfall cascading into a stream that meandered silently through the dining room. Painted plaster redwood trees disguised steel columns; a forest mural covered the whole of one wall; and artificial shrubs and bushes were everywhere. An organist played softly, and high among the artificial rocks stood a tiny chapel complete with neon cross. However odd the décor, under the guidance of crusading political reformist Clifford Clinton, this kitsch cafeteria provided millions of low-priced meals to the out-of-work and destitute during the darkest days of the depression. Clifton's provided a surreal sanctuary from the broken world. Now, in 1938, the only meals it provided free were those that teenagers “chiseled” while no one was looking. Many of these boys would then sneak their spoils upstairs to a small room where around twenty to thirty people met on the first and third Thursdays of each month. Their ages varied from fifteen to forty years, although the average age was around twenty. Like the meetings at Sidney Weinbaum's house, these gatherings were not illegal, but membership was frowned upon. And, similarly, the topics for discussion involved the future—for these were gatherings of Los Angeles Chapter Number 4 of the Science Fiction League (LASFL).

Hugo Gernsback, the great proponent of science fiction and founding editor of the pulps
Amazing Stories
and
Science Wonder Stories,
had launched the Science Fiction League in 1934. It was intended as a nationwide club; local groups of science fiction fans would apply for a charter to found their own chapters. The League flourished and clubs were set up across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

Completely apolitical and hermetically sealed from everything in the outside world but discussion of the future, LASFL consisted of fans of the genre and those interested in cutting edge science. Some of the younger members appeared at meetings smoking pipes like their scientist heroes and clutching large scrapbooks filled with clippings on the march of technology. For most fans science was the doorway to the futures promised in the pulps. “It was still possible to regard science and science fiction as in some way parallel,” remembered the science fiction author and occasional LASFL guest, Jack Williamson, “both engaged in the exploration of the frontiers of the possible, science fiction with the imagination instead of the telescope.”

The members' scientific interests were legion, but foremost among them was rocketry. Like Parsons and Malina, the members of LASFL had an absolute faith that rockets would soon be built to allow man to explore the infinite reaches of space. Many were members of the American Rocket Society or similar local rocket groups, and some had even corresponded, like Parsons, with Wernher von Braun in Germany, about both rockets and science fiction. (Braun was such a science fiction fan that during the coming war he would maintain his much prized subscription to the science fiction pulp
Astounding Science Fiction
through a mail drop in neutral Sweden). Because of these space dreams and the precocious zeal of its fans, science fiction often received the same ridicule that rocketry had suffered. Jack Williamson recalled that when he had undergone psychoanalysis in the 1930s, he had been warned that writing science fiction was symptomatic of profound neurosis.