Strange Angel (34 page)

Alarmed by the thought of a takeover, Parsons threw himself into the role of the reliable company man. Official letters by him suddenly appeared in the company files, as if he was making a special effort to fit in, to be a regular worker. He sought the advice of the chemist Linus Pauling about further fuel experiments, showing that he could work in harmony with Caltech. He conferred with Malina at JPL about similar problems with fuel they both faced, and he attended meetings more regularly. But he could not shake his old working practices. He still preferred to follow his own hunches rather than work from the results of other scientists. “I am aware that it may be said that this is impracticable, has been investigated, better processes are known etc etc., ad tedium,” he wrote about a new process for making liquid fuel. “Nonetheless, I should like to undertake this investigation ... I have already prepared samples which look encouraging in my home laboratory, and I should like to take about a week to bring it to the test stage.” He still conducted himself as a pioneer of the science, rather than as one of many in the field.

Thanks to the salesmanship of Andy Haley, the General Tire and Rubber Company agreed to buy a majority shareholding in Aerojet. (General Tire's president had originally been interested only in acquiring a radio station that Haley was the attorney for, until Haley sold him on the idea of Aerojet's potential.) However, it was made clear, from the Caltech contingent within Aerojet, that if the sale was to take place, Parsons and Forman should not be included. As Zwicky put it, “You couldn't have a guy like that associated with a reputable institution.” With the rueful agreement of Frank Malina and Martin Summerfield, it was left to Andrew Haley, friend as he was to the young men, to persuade them that they should sell their stocks to the other shareholders. If they had known about the conditions for the sale, the two might have hung onto their shares out of stubbornness. But Haley withheld this knowledge from them, and given the likelihood of Aerojet's profits dropping at the end of the war and the fact that Parsons still carried the entire financial burden for Agape Lodge, the benefits of selling out for cash up-front would not have been too hard for Haley to conjure.

In December 1944, General Tire bought 51 percent of Aerojet's shares for $75,000. Forman sold his stock to Malina for $11,000. Although no records survive of Parsons' sale, he probably earned a similar sum. Certainly it was not a bad return for an initial investment of $250 some three years before, but others would go on to make much more. Today Aerojet is a multimillion dollar company employing over 2,500. The company's propulsion systems have been used on every manned space vehicle the United States has launched, and the company continues to create solid- and liquid-fuel rocket engines for space agencies across the globe. By the 1960s Parsons' shares would have been worth over $12 million. “They were cheated in a way,” remembered Zwicky.

Parsons still worked occasionally as a consultant at Aerojet—nobody knew explosives quite like him—but that arrangement would not last long, and his remaining links to the JPL would disappear with it. Caltech professors like Zwicky acknowledged his work in an offhand, patronizing manner—”He had done a useful thing by starting these playthings down here in the Arroyo”—but Parsons the innovator and explorer was no longer needed. Despite the proceeds from the sale, Parsons was not entirely blind to his predicament. He confided to his old Pasadena friend Robert Rypinski that he wanted to go on experimenting and developing at Aerojet, but “they just didn't have the room for financing his experiments or listening to his ideas.” With the army now beginning to invest heavily in the production of rocket weapons, many of the aviation companies such as Northrop, Lockheed, and McDonnell started up rocket research and development divisions. New rocket companies began to spring up across the country, and even the burgeoning American Rocket Society was trying to cash in on the craze they had helped begin, creating their own company, Reaction Motors, Inc. The age of the gentleman rocketeer, who dreamed of space travel and worked independently or in small, autonomous groups, was over. The death of Robert Goddard, four days before the end of the war, seemed merely to emphasize this. One member of the American Rocket Society sadly noted that the days when a scientific breakthrough could take place in the backyard were gone. “The jig was pretty much up for rocket amateurs.”

At the age of thirty, Parsons was cut adrift from the world of rocketry for the first time in his adult life. It was plain to see that, like Goddard before him, he was being left behind as the very science he had helped to create soared up and away from him.

 

If Parsons harbored any grudges about his removal from Aerojet, he did not make them public. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying himself tremendously. With the proceeds from the sale of his Aerojet shares, he bought the lease to 1003 and spent almost all his time there, in the manner of a man without a care in the world. His favorite game of the moment was what he called “the Kayam Kontest.” The rules were simple, as he explained to his friend Grady McMurtry. “Take a small glass of Pernod, and a large glass of sauterne. Drink the Pernod, recite a verse of
The Rubaiyat
(beginning with No. 1), then chase both with the sauterne. Try it. The last one to articulate wins. I usually bog down in Jamahyd and Kaikobad.” Since these two names appear in verse nine of
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,
Parsons clearly possessed considerable talent at both drinking and recitation.

He liked to spend hours playing with toy boats in the bath or lounging about the house with Betty. Indolence set in: “He is all enthusiasm, and drops it, he makes plans that are never carried out, he loses interest,” sighed Jane Wolfe. The remaining residents at 1003 were beginning to wonder if Parsons would be able to continue to look after them if he did not find himself a new job. But Parsons was making plans of a sort. With Ed Forman he formed the Ad Astra Engineering Company, its name taken from their childhood motto. They envisioned Ad Astra as an umbrella company for their personal pursuits. Parsons would work on explosives consulting and manufacture, creating an explosives company named the Vulcan Powder Corporation. Forman, who had spent most of the proceeds from the Aerojet sale on an open-cockpit plane, in which he proceeded to learn all manner of daredevil stunts, would try his hand at the latest boom industry, Laundromats.

May 8, 1945, saw victory in Europe. Though the war still raged in the Pacific, somnolence reigned over Parsons' California life. Even the Japanese balloon bombs, incendiary devices drifting slowly across the Pacific and exploding up and down the West Coast, seemed little more than a valediction to war. On the Fourth of July, Parsons treated a group of guests to a spectacle—a six-foot-tall firework which he had built in the house's basement. With a crowd gathered around him in the garden, he launched the rocket with a roar and all watched it soar out across the Arroyo Seco. Unfortunately, the sparks from the rocket leaped into the straw-dry grass, and a fire broke out. Residents and guests alike grabbed buckets of water and splashed and stomped out the fire. When the sound of sirens was heard, the party scattered.

Two days later some deadlier rockets arrived in town: Two V-2 missiles rolled into the Pasadena train station on an open flatbed rail car. Allied forces had recently captured an underground factory in Germany's Harz Mountains, where the weapons had been manufactured by slave labor. They were now at Caltech to be studied. Painted in black and white squares, the forty-six-foot-long missiles had a vicious, sleek grace. These rockets held within them the promises of space and the future. The people of Pasadena thronged to see them; surely Parsons, feeling envy as much as awe, joined the crowd.

 

In early 1945 Regina Kahl died. The stresses and machinations of the OTO had been cruel to her blood pressure. Parsons assembled the Lodge members at 1003 and raising a wine-filled glass, declared, “There is no part of her that is not of the gods.” He drank the wine and shattered the glass in the fireplace. In many ways it was the final nail in the coffin of the old OTO. Many of the old members—including Jane Wolfe, most senior of all—had left the house but not the OTO after the Smith debacle, and Parsons had been turning the Lodge into something closer to a secular bohemian boarding house. Some of the new tenants were acquaintances from the LASFS. The science fiction artist Louis Goldstone, fan Alva Rogers, and the up-and-coming journalist Nieson Himmel had all heard stories of Parsons' rocketry background and occult excesses. He was just the sort of landlord they were looking for.

Himmel was a “Buddha-like figure,” five feet seven inches tall and on his way to weighing nearly three hundred pounds. Only twenty-three years old, within two years he would become one of Los Angeles' most prominent crime reporters, covering the infamous Black Dahlia murder and the assassination of Bugsy Siegel. Goldstone, who had been introduced to Parsons by McMurtry, wrote to McMurtry describing the move. “Since being around here a month has got me out of the apologizing habit, I'll not present you with any ... I needn't tell you how happy I am here with Jack and Betty and this wonderful place. I'm attending classes at the Art Centre in Los Angeles and, I think, doing pretty well. In addition I'm leading a private life amid the best company and surroundings I've yet known—a life more vital and interesting than I could have anticipated before I came here. Indeed, this wilderness is paradise now.” For Alva Rogers, nicknamed ‘Red' for the color of his hair and his politics, meeting Parsons was quite a shock. “Jack was the antithesis of the common image of the Black Magician one encounters in history or fiction ... He was a good looking man in his early or mid-thirties, urbane and sophisticated, and possessed a fine sense of humour. He never as far as I ever saw, indulged in any of the public scatological crudities which characterized Crowley,” although “he did have the Crowley approved attitude toward sex.”

A rather different tenant was Robert Cornog, six feet five inches tall and athletically built. Before the war he had held an assistant professorship at Berkeley, where he had discovered the radioactive isotope, tritium. Now he worked as chief engineer of the Manhattan Project's ordnance division and was intimately involved in the development of the trigger mechanism for the atomic bomb. His coworkers saw him as a “rugged individualist, frank and outspoken,” as well as slightly eccentric. He was renowned at the project for his intense interest in physical fitness and could often be seen picking up large rocks and tossing them around for exercise. He met Parsons through their mutual friend, Robert Heinlein, whom Cornog originally knew from a nudist colony in Denver in the 1930s. Now that Cornog's work on the Manhattan Project required him to travel between Los Alamos and Caltech, Heinlein put him in touch with Parsons, who still had spare rooms available. The two got on well. Cornog had been an early member of the American Interplanetary Society, and he shared a love of rocketry with both Parsons and Heinlein. There were unmistakable parallels between Cornog and Parsons: Both were eccentric scientists, interested in left-wing causes, working on groundbreaking projects. Cornog came to stay more and more frequently at 1003 over the coming months.

Parsons, who needed to rent out every room in the house to make ends meet, now placed advertisements in the local newspaper. Alva Rogers remembered them well: “Jack specified that only bohemians, artists, musicians, atheists, anarchists, or other exotic types need apply for rooms—any mundane soul would be ceremoniously ejected. This ad, needless to say, created quite a flap in Pasadena when it appeared.”

Because of an extreme housing shortage in the country, many people applied, and Parsons and Betty handpicked those they thought would best fit in the house. “The replies to the ad for boarders was fantastic,” remembered Himmel; “I was already in the house at the time. People were all insisting how they were atheists.”

“Those accepted were a typically peculiar bunch,” remembered Alva Rogers. “The professional fortune teller and seer who always wore appropriate dresses and decorated her apartment with symbols and artifacts of arcane lore; a lady, well past middle age but still strikingly beautiful, who claimed to have been at various times the mistress of half the famous men of France; a man who had been a renowned organist for most of the great movie palaces of the silent era.” Occultists rubbed shoulders with nuclear scientists. Rocket scientists ate breakfast with science fiction aficionados. Children ran freely through the house.

When the recently released convict Paul Seckler returned, 1003 housed possibly the strangest collection of people ever to live under one roof. Those who were not OTO members would often see Parsons leading the group in black and white robes towards the pergola, where they performed the Gnostic Mass. He had managed to get one of the older members, Roy Leffingwell, to compose some new music for it. Betty, of course, played the role of the priestess. Ed Forman's stepdaughter Jeanne Ottinger, remembered sleeping over at the house. “I can remember one time waking up in the middle of the night to this chanting sound and mother wasn't in the room with me and so I got up and I opened the door and peeked out and I saw they all had these long black robes on and they were chanting.” When her mother returned and saw her daughter's querying eyes, she was quick to dispel any worries. “They're having a party,” she told her.

By the end of the summer, there were some twenty people living in the house and coach house. Rents were negotiable. “I probably paid $30 [a month],” remembered Himmel. “Alva never seemed to have money for rent, and the girls almost certainly never paid.” Parsons' friend Robert Rypinski, home on leave from wartime duty in the navy, remembered visiting Parsons at about this time. “In the living room up on the second floor we sat and talked while couples kept strolling in and out, [and] were sitting across the room necking while we were talking (he didn't notice it so I thought I wasn't supposed to).” Relationships might have been loose and free at the house, but it was clear that everyone was in love with one woman: Betty. “She was young, blonde, very attractive, full of
joie de vivre,
thoughtful, humorous, generous, and all that,” remembered Rogers. Himmel was similarly infatuated. “The most gorgeous, intelligent, sweet, wonderful person. I was so much in love with her, but I knew she was a woman I could never have.” She “wasn't sophisticated but a natural beauty ... Sometimes it was hard to look at her directly in the eyes.”