Strange Angel (2 page)

Back at 1071 South Orange Grove, the reporters and police are leaving. Deadlines are approaching and reports need to be written. Word comes over the radio of Ruth's death, and the photographers scurry up the road to get pictures of this new macabre development. Once there is no one left, Ganci and Foshaug force their way into the room that had been closed off by the buckled wall. The room they step into is painted bright pink. Black lace is draped over the bookshelves, and on one wall is a ten-foot-high painting of a black devil's head with huge eyes and horns. “We better paint over that face,” says Ganci to Foshaug, “or else this is going to haunt us for years to come.” Rather ruefully, they begin to whitewash the devil from existence.

The paint was still drying on the demon in the garage when the next day's newspapers appeared. In spite of the fact that the chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff had warned Congress that the Soviet Union “could overrun Europe today,” that the army had placed its homeland antiaircraft batteries on high alert against the possibility of a Soviet air attack, and that Ingrid Bergman had given birth to twins, the front page of the
Los Angeles Times
was emblazoned with the headline:
ROCKET SCIENTIST KILLED IN PASADENA EXPLOSION
.

At first glance the story seemed a straightforward, if shocking, family tragedy, as well as a terrible loss for the world of science. The newspapers sadly outlined Parsons' accomplishments and his terrible end. He had been a scientist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena and while there had worked with the famed Dr. Theodore von Kármán, the presiding genius of aeronautics. He had been one of the founders of the prestigious Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) situated just a few miles northwest of the city, where he had engaged in top secret governmental work during the Second World War. He was recognized “as one of the foremost authorities on rocket propulsion” and had been a member of the American Chemical Society, the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences, the Army Ordnance Association, and the exclusive Sigma Xi fraternity. In addition to all of this, he had even dallied in the world of commerce as one of the founders of the hugely successful Aerojet Engineering Corporation, an aerospace company rich with governmental research projects.

Similarly, the reason for Parsons' death appeared relatively clear-cut. Don Harding, a criminologist involved in his first major investigation since his assignment to the Pasadena police department, found residue of fulminate of mercury, a highly combustible explosive, in a trash can at the scene of the explosion. He also found bits of a coffee tin shredded into shrapnel and theorized that Parsons had been using the tin to mix the chemical in when he had accidentally dropped it. Knowing the fulminate was so volatile, Parsons had quickly stooped down in an attempt to catch it. He had been too late. The can had hit the floor, the explosive had ignited, and Parsons' searching right arm and right side of his face had borne the full brunt of the blast. The explosion had then ignited other chemicals in the room, causing the holocaust. A man of promise and genius had been lost to a terrible accident.

 

Over the next few days, however, Parsons' life began to appear more complicated and the story of his death less straightforward. Most scientists of any standing leave a clear trail through their work and research—Ph.D.'s, published papers, articles, conferences attended—all carefully documented and easily traceable. But Parsons left little in the way of illumination. Despite statements given by former friends and acquaintances that Parsons studied at Caltech, when pressed, neither the police nor the newspapers could find any official record of an education past high school. Some said that Parsons' most recent work before his death had been making special effects for the motion picture industry—strange work for a man named as one of the “foremost authorities” on rocketry.

Two days after the explosion the Pasadena police added to these contradictions by announcing that Parsons had been investigated by them ten years earlier, following the receipt of an anonymous letter accusing him of “perversion” and “black magic.” Although “charges of strange cultism were not substantiated,” they had been noted. Parsons' house had been investigated in 1944 following a minor fire, at which time the investigating officers found “numerous books and pamphlets about a mysterious ‘Church of Thelema',” along with paraphernalia suggesting that “spiritual séances” were held in the house. These revelations prompted the newspapers to search out the dead scientist's former colleagues to corroborate these facts, and soon journalists were being told of Parsons' “flair for mysticism” and of his interest in the occult, which seemed to rival his fascination with rocketry. From shock and mourning, the tone had shifted to scandalized excitement:

 

John W. Parsons, handsome 37-year-old rocket scientist killed Tuesday in a chemical explosion, was one of the founders of a weird semi-religious cult that flourished here about 10 years ago ... Old police reports yesterday pictured the former Caltech professor as a man who led a double existence—a down-to-earth explosives expert who dabbled in intellectual necromancy. Possibly he was trying to reconcile fundamental human urges with the inhuman, Buck Rogers type of inventions that sprang from his test tubes.

 

The lavish rhetoric continued across the tabloids:

 

Often an enigma to his friends [he] actually led two lives ... In one he probed deep into the scientific fields of speed and sound and stratosphere—and in another he sought the cosmos which man has strived throughout the ages to attain; to weld science and philosophy and religion into a Utopian existence.

 

Certainly the photographs of Parsons displayed in every West Coast newspaper suggested that he was an unusual-looking rocket scientist. With his rakish moustache and chiselled good looks, he seemed to emanate an aspect not of scientific stolidity but of Mephistophelean allure.

By June 20, three days after his death, a former member of Parsons' “cult” had been tracked down by the newspapers, whose headlines now ran:
SLAIN SCIENTIST PRIEST IN BLACK MAGIC CULT
and
VENTURES INTO BLACK MAGIC BY BLAST VICTIM REVEALED
. The articles told how Parsons had been a high priest of one of the “weirdest cults of mystic potions, free love and exotic ritual ever uncovered in the Southland,” and boasted of finding a trail, “locked behind the iron turret of death,” that “reached back into the darkest night of the Middle Ages.” The unnamed former member explained that Parsons had been a follower of the teachings of one Aleister Crowley, a “British witch doctor,” and went on to describe the revels that had taken place at Parsons' home in Pasadena. Lines of robed figures had walked through the grounds, carrying torches and chanting pagan poems. “The score or more of followers were about equally divided as to sexes, and included persons of all ages and professions, some of them brilliant scientists.” It was even said that a pregnant woman had disrobed and leapt “several times through ‘sacred fire' to insure safe delivery of her child.” The fragment of a poem which Parsons had written and circulated among his alleged followers ten years earlier was dutifully printed under the headline
POETRY OF MADNESS:

 

I height Don Quixote, I live on peyote,
Marihuana, morphine and cocaine,
I never knew sadness, but only a madness
That burns at the heart and the brain.

 

Other members of Parsons' group also began to speak to the newspapers. One man, who described himself as a “tongue-in-cheek visitor,” reiterated that members of the group ranged “from plain screwballs and psychos to some really brilliant scientists,” and told how “Friday night seemed to be the big night, and they would run ‘round in black robes with daggers at their belts.” Parsons, he said, had declared that his “real work” was black magic and had transformed the main sitting room of his Millionaire's Row house into “a temple of hedonistic worship.”

In the light of these revelations, even the police criminologist's report on Parsons' death was being reevaluated. While the theory that his death was accidental seemed proven by his injuries, it clashed strongly with the reminiscences of his former work colleagues. In the year before his death, Parsons had been involved in what was called a “confidential research program” for the Bermite Powder Company, a local explosives firm. “Parsons was extremely safety-conscious,” claimed one of his colleagues at Bermite. “He worked carefully, had a thorough knowledge of his job and was scrupulously neat.” If this was the case, how could Parsons have allowed himself to be in a position in which he might drop his chemicals, let alone be accused of mixing them in a tin coffee can? And why had he been manufacturing a chemical that the army had long ago stopped using precisely because of its volatility?

It was now revealed that Parsons had acted as an “expert witness” during the famed Kynette car-bombing trial of 1938, one of the most shocking in Los Angeles history. Was it more than just a cruel irony that he had been killed in an equally deadly explosion? Fulminate of mercury in a trash can would be anathema to a respected scientist like Parsons. Even the police had to admit it was “incongruous.” George Santmyers, an engineer who had associated with Parsons at the Bermite company, compared Parsons' supposed method of manufacturing the chemical to a highly trained surgeon operating with dirty hands: “I intimately knew Parsons as an exceptionally cautious and brilliant scientific researcher.” Santmyers suggested that “someone else” had handled the chemicals in Parsons' laboratory prior to his death,
MYSTERY ANGLE ENTERS SCIENTIST'S BLAST DEATH
, read the
Los Angeles Times.

The specter of foul play was all too easy to conjure up. This was, after all, Los Angeles, the city that Raymond Chandler was in the midst of depicting as a landscape of murders and femme fatales in such hard-boiled crime classics as
Farewell, My Lovely
and
The Long Goodbye.
It was a city in which things had a habit of going bang in the night. Encouraged by this local instinct for the sensational, the story of Jack Parsons was swiftly transforming itself from family tragedy and scientific calamity into a gothic horror story with a dash of film noir.

Four days after the explosion, in an attempt to quiet the churning of the rumor mill, Detective Lieutenant Cecil Burlingame announced that Parsons' curious disposal of the chemicals wasn't sufficient “to warrant us reopening the case,” nor was his membership of a religious cult. “His death is listed as an accident,” announced Burlingame. “The case is closed as far as we're concerned.”

However, this official judgment did little to disperse the increasing hubbub of gossip and conjecture that continued to swirl through Los Angeles and Pasadena among Parsons' friends and former acquaintances. Soon Parsons' bizarre story was spreading into the national magazines. The following month's issue of
People Today
published a profile of Parsons under the title,
L.A.'S LUST CULT:

 

Rich rock-ribbed Pasadena, famed for its roses, the California Institute of Technology and as a retirement haven for Eastern millionaires, looks like the last place a black magic cult dedicated to sex would thrive. Nevertheless the Church of Thelema (the name means “will”), a cult practising sexual perversion, has been making converts of all ages, sexes, there since 1940. Among the believers: many prominent residents of the Pasadena-Los Angeles area; at least one member of Hollywood's movie colony. The existence of the cult ... was only proven this June by the “accidental” death of high priest John W. Parsons.

 

Speculation continued to mount. Some of Parsons' former lodgers suggested that he had been depressed for some time and that his death had been a spectacular suicide. Others who had gotten to know him through his love of science fiction magazines imagined, only half-jokingly, that he had been trying to conjure up a homunculus, a magical creature created by the alchemists of yore, but that the magical working had gone wrong and by mistake he had summoned a fire demon that had consumed him. The scientific establishment, however, remained resolutely silent on the matter. Despite Parsons' obvious prominence in their ranks, any comments they made were curiously oblique. When Aerojet's secretary-treasurer was asked about him, he described Parsons simply as “a loner” who “liked to wander.” Parsons' character seemed to be changing by the day, becoming less real, more exaggerated. Indeed, in the eyes of the public and the press, John Whiteside Parsons had gone from being a young genius dead before his time to the most overworked, hackneyed, science fiction cliché of them all—the mad scientist.

 

The fantastical, tragic, and largely unknown story of John Whiteside Parsons is one of the most intriguing tales to be found in the annals of modern science. His life brings together the seemingly disparate worlds of rocketry, science fiction, and the occult. But for Parsons there was never any contradiction in these subjects.

For us, the rocket scientist exemplifies intellectual complexity. The phrase “it's not rocket science” instantly places rocketry as the ceiling on cerebral understanding. When Jack Parsons began shooting off homemade rockets in his backyard in the 1920s, the very opposite was the case. Rocketry, or the study of rockets, was not only not a science; it had not even been coined as a word yet.

During the first decades of the twentieth century the world was in awe of aviation. Since the Wright brothers' historic twelve-second flight in 1903, pilots had swiftly become modern-day heroes. By the time Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic in 1927, airplane manufacture had become the boom industry of the era. The same could not be said of rockets. Despite having been used in fireworks and primitive weapons for over a thousand years, these often complex machines had never been comprehensively studied. No universities taught rocketry courses, and there were no government grants allotted to rocketry research. In established scientific circles, rockets were synonymous with the ridiculous, the far-fetched, the lunatic, as much a euphemism for “foolish” as
rocket scientist
is now a by-word for “genius.”