Strange Angel (42 page)

With typical casualness, Parsons stacked the boxes in the coach house's laundry room. Since the Mexico trip was almost upon him, he decided to keep many of the bottles in the cardboard boxes he had moved them in. Strictly speaking, it was against the law to keep all these volatile explosives in a residential abode, but he had no place else to put them and who would know about it in the long run?

By the beginning of June, he and Candy had given the lease on the house over to Ganci and Foshaug, although Parsons kept the ground floor for his chemical experiments. The two men had moved in, accompanied by their twenty-one-year-old friend, Jo Ann Price. To celebrate their arrival, they began repainting the house. In honor of their landlord's demonic past, Foshaug painted a large devil with its mouth open above Price's bed. Parsons and Cameron moved in with Parsons' mother, who was house-sitting just a mile or so from Orange Grove at 424 Arroyo Terrace. The new corridor was filled with their bags and suitcases, but Parsons left his “magical” box, covered in runes and Enochian symbols and containing most of his writings, back in the garage of the coach house.

On June 16, the night before Parsons and Cameron were meant to leave, Parsons went for a walk in Exposition Park with George Frey. He excitedly told Frey of their plans to visit the Casa del Inquisidor in San Miguel de Allende, which had a secret tunnel running to a nearby nunnery and was said to be haunted. He predicted that he and Candy would spend several months in Mexico. To Frey he seemed thrilled.

The next day Parsons got a call. It was from the Special Effects Corporation. They wanted to know if he could prepare a rush order for them before he left. He agreed and went over to the coach house to begin work, leaving Candy to finish the shopping for their trip. Their car, the battered old Packard, now pulled a trailer filled with everything they could possibly need: artist's supplies, paints, canvas, archery equipment, and fencing foils.

By 4:30
P.M.
Parsons was still at work. Leaving the house, Jo Ann Price stopped to ask what he was doing. He told her he was mixing some “very expensive chemicals” and was in a bit of a hurry to finish. Most of his chemicals and equipment still lay packed in the boxes. With no beakers and flasks at hand, he was using a tin coffee can as a mixing bowl.

At around 5:00
P.M.
Ganci wandered downstairs from his bedroom. Parsons was still working. “He had test tubes and he was pouring liquids from one to another and then putting them into the oven and then closing the oven and then waiting around.” After chatting briefly, Ganci turned to go back upstairs. Martin Foshaug and his mother were cooking supper. With a joking look of concern, Ganci turned to Parsons and said, “For God's sake Jack, don't blow us up!” Parsons just chuckled and yelled after Ganci as he walked up the stairs, “Don't worry about it!”

Along a parabola life like a rocket flies
Mainly in darkness, now and then on a rainbow

 

—A
NDREY
V
OZNESENSKY
, Parabolic Ballad

 

There was no funeral for Jack Parsons. The OTO held a service to honor the fact that “Brother John Whiteside Parsons has taken his last journey with the sun.” Betty, now divorced from Hubbard, was in attendance. Parsons' body was cremated and his widow, Candy, took the ashes into the Mojave Desert. At the intersection of the two massive, whirring power lines, she scattered his ashes and watched as a light desert wind swept them into the air like smoke.

In the years after his death, Parsons' reputation would be distorted by gossip and hearsay. Speculation grew wilder after the discovery of his Babalon writings, with their frequent invocations of his own death and transformation into “living flame.” The less people knew Parsons, the more outrageous their claims. Some claimed he had been destroyed for his magical ambitions, and there was even talk that he had been assassinated by an angry Howard Hughes, in retaliation for the former employee's theft of company documents. Some of those who had lived at 1003 with him thought he had never recovered from the pain of Betty's departure, and Jane Wolfe thought his death was a suicide “with the help of the Unconscious.” Ed Forman, devastated by the death of his oldest and closest friend, came up with probably the most plausible answer: “Jack used to sweat a lot and the damn thing just slipped out of his hand and blew him up.” In life, Parsons had solved his share of mysterious explosions. It was somewhat ironic that his fate should now be inextricably linked to one.

The House Un-American Activities Committee continued its inquisition. Frank Malina was indicted in absentia for failure to disclose his former Communist Party membership on a security form, and his United States passport was revoked. Despite his unstinting efforts during the war to further the cause of American rocketry—efforts which had caused the breakdown of his first marriage—he was effectively exiled by the United States. His strong moral sense was offended as he watched the German V-2 scientists, led by Wernher von Braun—war criminals in his eyes—welcomed by his home country. They would spearhead the postwar United States missile and space program.

Malina remained in Paris, working for UNESCO, and he continued to keep a close eye on the international astronautical scene until good fortune eventually came his way. He had been the only founding member of Aerojet not to sell all his stock in the company back in the 1940s. As the company grew, employing some 25,000 people by the midfifties, Malina unexpectedly became a very rich man indeed. Aerojet eventually became a giant aerospace and defense contractor. Among its many creations was the propulsion system for the Apollo space flights. Malina devoted the rest of his life to painting and became one of the foremost proponents of kinetic art. His work's central theme was outer space.

Tsien Hsue-shen also became an exile. Forbidden to leave the United States, he began to work on the problems of space flight and rocket-powered passenger ships, but he was continually harassed by the authorities and forbidden to work on cutting edge classified material. After five years, the authorities decided to deport him; by that time he was more than happy to go. He arrived in China in 1955 and received a hero's welcome. If he had not been a Communist before, he was soon to become one, and his anger over his treatment at the hands of the United States government persisted. Over the next forty years he supervised the development of China's intercontinental ballistic missile program becoming a national icon in the process. Such was his standing that Chairman Mao himself asked Tsien to tutor him in science. He never returned to the United States and is believed to be alive today. He refuses to speak to western journalists.

In the course of the HUAC purges, Martin Summerfield lost his security clearance because of his familiarity with known Communists, but his brilliance guaranteed him a successful academic career, and he became professor and director of the Combustion Research Laboratory at Princeton University. Apollo Smith, who had never participated in Sidney Weinbaum's Communist meetings, stayed at the Douglas Aircraft Company for most of his life, in the role of chief aerodynamics engineer.

Ed Forman was not so fortunate. The grief he felt following his closest friend's death, combined with a growing bitterness at his exclusion from the increasingly successful Aerojet, changed him. “Ed became a totally different person,” remembered his wife Jeanne, as her previously outgoing husband became increasingly withdrawn and aggressive. As boys Parsons and Forman had come to an agreement that should one of them die, that person would try and contact the other from the spirit plane. Two years after Parsons' death Forman went for a night drive in the desert. He would later confide in his family that as he drove he felt a presence in the back seat of the car that he was sure was Parsons. “He knew it was Jack although no words passed between them,” recalled his daughter, Lynne. “It really scared him. After that he really didn't want to communicate with Jack again.”

Forman's occult books remained on the family bookshelves in amongst copies of his favorite Edgar Rice Burroughs science fiction, but when one of his daughters asked him about magic he replied very seriously, “It's all real, it all works. Don't touch it. You'll get yourself in real trouble.” Having lost most of the money he had gained from the Aerojet sale, Forman and his family moved to northern California where he found work as a test engineer on missile systems for Hughes Aircraft and Lockheed. But no matter how far he got from Pasadena the events at 1003 had left an indelible mark on him. His wife recalled how every now and then he would look anxiously around him and ask whether she could hear a long, persistent wailing sound. She never could. The screaming of the banshees he had conjured that night with Parsons stayed with him until his death in 1971 at the age of sixty.

The most mysterious and transient member of the rocket group later made a brief reappearance. Weld Arnold, the enigmatic benefactor who in 1937 gave the fledgling Rocket Research Group $1,000 in one- and five-dollar bills, resurfaced in Nevada in the 1960s. He had left rocketry behind and now presided over the Reno Magic Circle, an organization “open to youths of good moral character interested in the magical arts.” Like any good magician, he never revealed the secret of where the money had come from.

After her husband's death, Marjorie “Candy” Cameron grew ever more involved in the occult. She became convinced that she was the incarnation of Babalon that her husband had prophesied, and insisted on burning the majority of his former possessions. She achieved a degree of fame within the underground arts movement in California over the next forty-five years, thanks to her unsettling, powerful paintings, and her pictures appeared in exhibitions across the country. She also performed in a number of avant-garde films, most notoriously acting alongside Anaïs Nin in Kenneth Anger's Crowley-inspired
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.

The hedonistic lifestyle fostered in Parsons' Agape Lodge of the 1940s was revived on a much larger scale by the hippie movement of the 1960s. As for Crowley, his reputation grew and grew. His gospel of “Do what thou wilt”—modified and transformed—appealed strongly to the socially liberated sixties generation. He resurfaced as a countercultural icon; his photograph appeared on the cover of the Beatles' album
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,
and his ideas influenced everyone from Dr. Timothy Leary to the rock group Led Zeppelin. He was hailed as a prophet before his time for bringing together eastern and western esoteric traditions, and although he could never quite escape the “Satanist” tag that he had gained in the Edwardian newspapers, this ensured his present-day popularity.

Wilfred Smith, Parsons' original guide into the occult world, moved to Malibu with Helen and their son, Kwen. From here Smith tried vainly to hold the disparate threads of the old Agape Lodge together, but the frailty of Jane Wolfe and the increasing obstreperousness of Karl Germer meant Smith was doomed to fail. He died of cancer in 1957. Helen would continue to disseminate Crowley's writings through her own publishing company, Thelema Publications. She would remain a self-confessed Thelemite until her death in 2003.

After languishing for years, the OTO was eventually revived through the efforts of Grady McMurtry in the nineteen-seventies. Aided by an upsurge of interest in mysticism and the occult and with the help of Helen Parsons Smith and the few remaining members of Parsons' Agape Lodge, it has since become an international organization with several thousand members worldwide. Since the scientific community had largely overlooked Parsons, the OTO became sole guardians of his story. He became the Che Guevara of occultism, his few surviving writings pored over, his magickal workings the subject of intense debate.

Science fiction, or sci-fi as it became known (the new phrase purportedly coined by Forrest Ackerman himself), swept the world, no longer the diversion of a quixotic (and risible) few. Parsons was not entirely forgotten by those writers who had known him. Some suggest that much of Robert Heinlein's later work, including his cult classic
Stranger in a Strange Land,
was influenced by Parsons' and Crowley's philosophies. Parsons made only one more appearance in fiction, this time in L. Sprague de Camp's 1956 novelette
A Gun for Dinosaur.
The story recounts the adventures of time-traveling big game hunters who journey 85 million years into the past in order to shoot dinosaurs. The resemblance between Parsons and “Courtney James” is not terribly close—Courtney James professes no scientific ideas or occult beliefs—but the character holds some flourishes of Parsons' manners. Courtney James is a “a big bloke ... handsome in a florid way, but beginning to run to fat.” When asked about his wife, he replies exactly as Parsons had eight years before: “My wife is in Mexico, I think, getting a divorce.” And perhaps Courtney James' violent death was modeled after Parsons own. “On the boulevard, just off the curb, lay a human body,” de Camp writes. “At least it had been that, but it looked as if every bone in it had been pulverized and every blood vessel burst. The clothes it had been wearing were shredded.”

 

The years following Parsons' death saw a rush into space. In 1957, the Russian satellite
Sputnik
became the first object made by man to orbit the earth. Only then did the general public begin to admire and eventually fear the rocket. Few were cognizant of the genesis of this stunning achievement. Man once more endeavored, as Parsons put it, “to claim his ancient heritage, the stars.” The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, fruit of the Suicide Squad's early experiments, played an essential role in the United States space program. The JPL conceived and produced robotic spacecraft to explore other worlds. They manufactured lunar landers and Mars landers, as well as the
Voyager 1
and 2 spacecraft, which have traveled farther from earth than any other human-made objects. Twenty-seven years after their launch,
Voyager 1
and
Voyager 2
continue to follow their paths out of the solar system. In 2003, the JPL employed some 5,500 scientists and had an annual budget of approximately $1.4 billion.