Strange Angel (33 page)

Though it had seen its number of workers and its funding increase rapidly, the GALCIT project was still following the directives of 1939, limiting its efforts to the development and improvement of aircraft rockets. Now the group was given carte blanche to develop undisguised war machines, guided missiles that could fly 150 miles and deliver a payload of some 1,000 pounds of explosives. The United States Army Ordnance Department gave them $3 million and one year to do it.

In the face of such huge demands, the Air Corps Jet Propulsion Research Project was reorganized and renamed the Jet Propulsion Laboratory better known as the JPL. A new board was established to administer the new project, which was now divided into eleven sections analogous to university departments. The number of workers in the Arroyo leaped from eighty-five in 1943 to nearly four hundred by the war's end. One-third of these workers were trained at Caltech.

As the facility expanded, the original rocketeers become less and less involved. Although Malina was named the first director of the JPL, administrative responsibilities meant he was growing distant from the hands-on work he loved. “I was aware of more and more research activities but in less and less detail,” he recalled. Moreover, the weapons he had been so loathe to create were now to be the main product of the project which he, Parsons, and the Suicide Squad had founded. Parsons still harbored dreams of travel to the moon—he was telling members of 1003 how he wanted “to do space work with planes” after the war—but it was becoming clear to the rocketeers that the dollars the military were sinking into rocketry were meant solely for current and future wars. The modesty of the JPL's old-fashioned title—it still refrained from using the word
rocket
because of its science fiction connotations—was all that was left of the innocence and simplicity of the original rocketeers' hopes and dreams. In the words of the technical historian, Dr. Benjamin Zibit, “JPL may have been born in the light of intense scientific research, but [it] was the child of war.”

 

The good news coming from Europe helped mollify any moral concerns the rocketeers might still have felt. By the last months of 1944, the end of the war was in sight, and Parsons was no longer the only scientist in Pasadena who was playing as hard as he worked. When not at Aerojet or visiting the Arroyo Seco, he and others from the original group of rocketeers could often be found at one of the many alcohol-soaked gatherings at Andrew Haley's new house—a mansion located, naturally, on Orange Grove Avenue.

Haley embraced the enchanted atmosphere of Orange Grove just as Parsons had as a child. He held frequent parties at which the scientists, along with whatever actors and actresses, politicians and movie moguls Haley had been doing business with, would drink late into the evening. Despite the fact that war rationing made alcohol harder to get hold of than petrol, Haley and his wife Delphine made sure that their liquor cabinet was stocked, ready to lubricate the minds, wits, and tempers of the rocketeers and profiteers alike. There was nothing Haley liked more than to instigate an argument. “He wouldn't settle down for a dull conversation for a minute,” remembered his son, Andy Haley Jr., who was six years old at the time. Sparkling discussions would often ferment into arguments before frothing once more into jokes.

Despite the glitz and glamour his connections afforded him, nothing seduced Haley like talk of outer space. He sincerely admired the rocketeers, and they formed the core of the many parties that took place at his house throughout the year. These strange academic guests heightened the magic of the Haley children's world. Kármán was “a very sweet man,” remembered Andy Haley Jr., although he was “a little bit frightening with the bushy eyebrows, he kind of mumbled and talked in vague sentences.” Fritz Zwicky would argue in his thick Swiss accent on his pet topic, “How many dimensions does an angel have?” Frank Malina was more serious, concerned with the war in Europe and prone to speculation about possible future conflagrations that were coming their way. Ed Forman usually arrived like a “young dude” on his motorbike, which would be buckled or bent from his latest accident. But in the young Andy's eyes, Parsons' arrival made the deepest impression. “On occasion he would love to terrify us kids, and me especially. He would be wearing this snake, a big cobra around his neck, and he would give it to me to hang up for him, as if it was a coat.”

Dede Haley, Andrew Haley's ten-year-old daughter, was not so much terrified as smitten. “Jack Parsons to me was just the living end,” she recalled. “Oh, he was just a very handsome man.” Nevertheless, she found there was something unmistakably disturbing, even wicked about him. “He had a slight Satanic look, he really did, it was something about his eyebrows, in the middle of the eyebrow it would go up in a kind of inverted V.” The childrens' overjoyed father would greet Parsons with his usual exhortations, “O god, get in here immediately, oh dear soul.” The two shared a love for jokes. On Halloween, Parsons got Kármán, Haley, and a few of the others to dress up as ghosts. “When kids came up to the house they opened the door and scared the kids away. They thought that was great,” remembered a friend of Parsons from the time. “They had a kind of a childish sense of humor, just big boys at the time.”

Haley was particularly fond of Parsons' ability to declaim reams of poetry from memory. He would often call 1003 in the middle of the night, shouting, “Get over here right now and recite the Ode to Pan!” remembered Jeanne Forman. “Sometimes he would call up at one o clock or two o clock in the morning... or three sometimes. Everybody would get dressed and run like hell to Andrew Haley's to hear Jack recite ‘Io Pan! Io Pan!'”

The “Hymn to Pan” had long been one of Parsons' favorite Crowley poems, and he was not shy about sharing it. As the other members of Aerojet milled around on the patio outside Haley's house, arguing and drinking, Haley would usher Parsons up to the balcony that overlooked it. Then, after the Aerojet crew had quietened somewhat, Parsons would begin his recitation, slowly stamping his feet in time with the meter:

 

Thrill with lissome lust of the light,
O man! My man!
Come careering out of the night
Of Pan! Io Pan!
Io Pan! Io Pan! Come over the sea
From Sicily and from Arcady!
Roaming as Bacchus, with fauns and pards
And nymphs and satyrs for thy guards,
On a milk-white ass, come over the sea
To me, to me...

 

Often by this point the sight of Parsons, ecstatic, sweating, head tilted back to the sky, was too much for the partygoers, and he would have to halt his recitation to beat off projectiles launched at him from the ground. Andrew Haley, tears of laughter streaming down his face, would encourage him to continue. Indeed, Parsons' attempts to finish the poem might be drowned out by the drunken voices of the Aerojet crew as they launched into an equally fantastic song that Andrew Haley's sister had written for them, sung to the tune of the old Irish folk song, “Garry Owen”:

 

Oh come ye sons of Aerojet,
The way is clear, the course is set;
The beacon is the vast unknown,
So let us sing the chorus.
To the sun, the moon, the stars away,
Our Aerojet will reach some day;
And all the world will wondering say,
It's like a fairy story.

 

The party would continue on until dawn, while the children, thrilled to be part of this strange adult world of fantasy, would sneak over to the Valley Hunt Club and splash until dawn in the swimming pool.

Such performances as these nurtured the long-standing rumors among Aerojet and Caltech staff that Parsons was involved in some form of “mythic love cult” and linked to women of “loose morals.” Some knew of 1003 as a “gathering place of perverts.” At best Parsons was known as “a character,” at worst “a crack-pot.”

Rocketry was swiftly becoming more specialized, more like an orthodox science. In 1936 Malina had estimated that there were fewer than fifty engineers in the world seriously interested in astronautics; now there were several hundred. There was no room for a hands-on innovator like Parsons within the new system. Traditionally trained scientists from other fields were now becoming involved, and they expected others to follow their rules. The old familial atmosphere was rapidly disappearing.

Dorothy Lewis, Frank Malina's secretary at the JPL, remembered a distinct change taking place in 1944. “I don't remember that it was the same little group anymore ... It was not as close as when we were in the primitive building and everything was new, and they all had to work together to get anything done ... It became much more formal. And these outside people—you can't blame them, they hadn't been part of the inner circle.” The days when Parsons could get by without ever writing up his calculations were over. “For testing we'd plan the work and about ten to fifteen mechanics would do our work for us,” recalled Charles Bartley, a research engineer now working on solid fuels at JPL.

But Parsons was still addicted to experimenting; and he still treated both Aerojet company and the JPL's laboratories as his own private domain, often appropriating particularly interesting chemicals for his own recreational explorations. At Aerojet's new test site in Azusa, fifteen miles west of Pasadena, Parsons' habits provoked the ire of Fritz Zwicky, professor of astrophysics at Caltech and a man not used to being disobeyed. Zwicky did not care much for the untrained Parsons, and he later remembered him as “a dangerous man.” Calling him “a collector of explosives ... Like people collect postage stamps, Parsons was enamoured with explosives.” Andrew Haley had asked Zwicky to become scientific director of Aerojet, and as such he was Parsons' nominal supervisor in Aerojet's Research Department. Zwicky had become “very excited” about using nitromethane as an oxidizer for liquid rocket fuels, instead of the acid-analine mixture which the Suicide Squad had come up with some years before. Parsons, who had studied nitromethane when Aerojet and JPL were little more than a pipe dream of the Suicide Squad, knew that this was a bad idea. Nitromethane was far too unstable and dangerous to be used in rockets. Zwicky may have been a scientist of greatness, a student of Einstein's no less, but in terms of explosives knowledge, the thirty-year-old Parsons was still his superior.

Not knowing of Parsons' objections, or more likely indifferent to them, Zwicky ordered a batch of the chemical to be delivered to the Aerojet site. When Parsons found out, he must have been upset by Zwicky's refusal to heed his advice. He and Forman sneaked into the site and gleefully exploded the whole batch, “blowing up half the business,” according to a furious Zwicky. Zwicky could hardly fire a founder of the company, however; and when the affair came in front of the company board, Malina backed Parsons' stand against the use of nitromethane. “It would have been a disaster for Aerojet if that proposal had been followed,” he recalled.

Though Parsons was proved right in the end, he hadn't endeared himself to anyone. His colleagues were also starting to grow weary of his increasing openness about his private interests and his continued dalliances with the company's secretaries. “We told him all the time, I mean, all these fantasies about Zoroaster and about voodoo and so on, this is okay; we do that too in our dreams. But keep it for yourself; don't start impressing this on poor secretaries,” remembered Zwicky. “I mean he had a whole club there you know.”

The new members of Aerojet and JPL had little time for such eccentricity, and all the while Parsons' behavior was growing more outrageous. Other Aerojet workers could clearly hear him chanting and stamping his feet at rocket test firings “like Billy Graham,” although what he was actually chanting was Crowley's pagan “Hymn to Pan.”

Parsons' life was growing increasingly hectic as he tried to balance both his personal and professional lives. Writing to Forman, he described the chaos with glee:

 

Just a note from the midst of the vast sea of confusion wherein I dwell. Navy training programs, late tax returns, overdue reports to A.C. [Aleister Crowley], and of course Aerojet and its marvelous personalities ... Production is six months behind on everything, which is O.K. because the engineering releases are two months behind that. (You'd better burn this).

 

However as the late nights at 1003 caught up with his early morning starts in the Arroyo, Parsons increasingly disheveled appearance led to much sniggering behind his back at the JPL. The research engineer Charles Bartley remembered, “Jack would always use a perfume and wouldn't take a bath so he had a very strange odor about him most of the time.” Complaints against him may have been sharpened, too, by professional jealousy. Although officially the Aerojet Solid Fuel Coordinator, Parsons was working on the problem of smokeless JATOs for two or three days a week at JPL and getting paid double. Even Apollo Smith, one of the original Suicide Squad, griped about it. “They [Parsons, Summerfield and Forman] were able to authorize their own consulting time [at JPL]. And this just didn't seem right to me. It just seemed to me that, well, if they needed a little money, they could come in and consult, whether it was wanted or not.”

While the JPL had become a fully funded military concern, Aerojet was transforming itself into a regular business which demanded regular personalities willing to carry out regular jobs. It was a particularly inauspicious time to be a loose cannon: The Navy was now demanding 20,000 JATOs a month. The company had managed 2,000 the previous year, and even then by the skin of their teeth. A continuing lack of capital investment threatened to make the monthly order impossible to fill. The company began seeking outside investors.