Strange Angel (40 page)

To make matters worse, Candy left him a month after he had lost his clearance. Since she had returned from Europe, their relationship had grown increasingly tempestuous. She had gotten bored playing the role of scientist's wife in Manhattan Beach, and she now planned to go to Mexico to join the artists' colony in the town of San Miguel de Allende. Living there was cheap and the location was beautiful, its sixteenth century houses encircled by mountains. Many Americans, supported by the GI Bill, were now traveling there. San Miguel was renowned for its fiesta atmosphere, its heavy drinking, its bullfights, and its peyote. Parsons was now left alone—without job, friends, or wife.

He began pumping gas at a filling station on the weekends and working as a mechanic fixing cars. He also worked as an assistant in a medical hospital, and he even briefly held a staff position in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Southern California. He may have won the job because of the expertise he had acquired manufacturing narcotics at home. His closest friend Ed Forman had also fallen into similar difficulties. “After Aerojet he had a really hard time doing anything for a while,” remembered his stepdaughter Jeanne Ottinger. “I can remember him sitting up on the roof just flying kites.” Unlike Cornog, both men lacked the academic qualifications to fall back on serious theoretical work. Parsons became even less likely to attain them when he failed out of his mathematics course at the University of Southern California. Once again he turned to his magic. If he could not control the real world, then at least he could assert himself in his imaginative magical one.

He embarked on a series of magick rituals, hiring prostitutes or entering into passing affairs in order to carry out his sex magick workings. His new magical endeavor was called “The Crossing of the Abyss,” and its aim was to transform him into a “Master of the Temple.” At that point his consciousness would supposedly become one with the universal consciousness. The last of Crowley's disciples to attempt the operation was a Canadian accountant named Charles Stansfield Jones in 1916. He had declared himself “Master of the Temple” shortly before being arrested for walking naked through the Vancouver streets.

Parsons carried out his rituals over some forty days of what he described later as “madness and horror.” Thoughts of death and suicide possessed him. When he finished, he began frantically writing. Twelve years earlier he had collaborated with Frank Malina and Edward Forman on a scientific paper called “Analysis of the Rocket Motor.” Now he was writing
Analysis by a Master of the Temple,
a histrionic autobiography that recreated the story of his entire life so that this one moment of magical achievement was its climax. Becoming a Master of the Temple allowed Parsons to recast all his disappointments and failures as successes. His parent's divorce, his isolation as a child, his interest in chemistry, the loss of the family fortune, and his betrayal by Betty all appeared as predestined steps on his path to magical fulfillment.

He also began writing a political tract on “liberalism and liberal principles” which he titled “Freedom Is a Two-Edged Sword.” In it, he responds to his treatment at the hands of the government by denouncing the increasingly intolerant nature of postwar American society. However, Parsons' remedy to the problem is not social or political reform but the arrival of Babalon, “girt with the sword of freedom.” He sought out Wilfred Smith, his former mentor, and declared that he, Parsons, was the Antichrist, his mission “[that] the way for the coming of BABALON be made open.”

It seems symptomatic of some form of psychosis that as Parsons' emotional life had been thrown into chaos and his professional achievements retreated further into the past, he should cling to his magic as if it were a raft on a raging sea. His writings of this period contain oblique expressions of deep self-loathing as well as repeated references to all-consuming flames and his own death. Parsons seemed to be casting himself in the role of doomed hero in a cosmic drama that was coherent only to his own mind. Alienated from the OTO, separated from his wife and friends, he seemed to be preaching to himself, declaiming to an empty room, playing to the void.

 

This period of mania seemed to have eventually worn off and, as 1949 arrived, Parsons seemed to settle himself. He set out, newly determined to regain his security clearance, and consulted with his old friend Andy Haley, who agreed to appeal his suspension. Had Parsons' freshly written “Manifesto of the Antichrist” been discovered, Haley's efforts would likely have come to naught, but the document remained secret. After a closed court session in which Parsons denied any Communist affiliation and defended his involvement with the OTO as a nonpolitical religious organization, the Industrial Employment Review Board reversed the restriction on Parsons' security ranking, claiming the previous judgment had been made “without sufficient cause.” He was granted back pay and fully restored to work on classified and top secret projects. Parsons was now back in the real world and functioning with remarkable lucidity.

Kármán had also made efforts on Parsons' behalf. The Hungarian professor had close ties with the American Technion Society, an increasingly powerful organization providing American technological knowledge to the fledgling state of Israel. Kármán had been involved with the society since its foundation in 1945. With his aeronautics connections, not to mention his links to the commanding general of the United States Air Force, he had played an instrumental role in Israel's creation of an air force. Now he put Parsons in touch with Herbert T. Rosenfeld, president of the Southern California chapter of the society.

Rosenfeld was a powerful figure who routinely brokered multimillion dollar contributions from eager donors in the United States to the Israeli government. He met with Parsons and explained Israel's desire for its own rocket program. He asked Parsons to write a proposal for an explosives plant in Israel, and he requested data concerning rockets and other armaments. If Parsons proved he was competent by providing these reports, Rosenfeld would help him leave the United States, as he wanted, and he could open up a whole new chapter in his life, building rockets in Israel.

Since regaining his security clearance, Parsons had left North American Aviation and moved to the Hughes Aircraft Company in Culver City, the company owned by the increasingly reclusive millionaire Howard Hughes, where he worked on chemical plant design and construction. The job put him in an ideal position to gain data for his Technion proposal. By midsummer Parsons had handed over “several reports” to Rosenfeld, all of which were forwarded to Israel for approval. It seems unlikely that Parsons provided any classified material to Rosenfeld. Why, after all, would a man who had just fought so hard to regain his security clearance risk losing it again? Regardless, it was an inauspicious time for an American scientist to collaborate with a foreign power

 

The writer L. Sprague de Camp had followed the Hubbard/Parsons drama from afar. Now visiting California, he wanted to meet the scientist-magician he had heard so much about. He wrote to Robert Heinlein for help in arranging an introduction. At the time, Heinlein was working as technical advisor on the film of his story “Rocketship Galileo,” now retitled
Destination Moon,
Hollywood's first attempt to give the public a realistic glimpse of the science of rocketry and space travel. “I think he is browned off on the OTO,” Heinlein wrote to de Camp about Parsons, “but he may still have some belief in it, i.e. you may find yourself dealing with a convinced cultist.” Anyway, he conceded, “Jack is one hell of a nice guy and a number-one rocket engineer.”

Parsons fulfilled de Camp's expectations. De Camp was taken by this “big, florid, good-looking, youngish man with the indefinable aura of inherited wealth, who drove an old open Packard with a loose door wired shut.” De Camp was researching a book on magic and the occult, and the two spent much time talking together about magic and science fiction. When de Camp asked Parsons about his dealings with Hubbard, Parsons was in good humor enough to admit that he had received a letter from an irate Hubbard, “offering” him Betty back. He then told de Camp that he had summoned his wife, Candy, through magic. When de Camp asked where she was now, Parsons replied ruefully, “I think she's in Mexico, getting a divorce.” “An authentic mad genius if I ever met one,” declared de Camp afterward.

The admiration of an occasional visitor, however, was not enough to ease the isolation that plagued Parsons. “He was kind of lonely at that time,” remembered his friend George Frey; “he got tired of living alone.” Down in San Miguel de Allende, Candy had cultivated a coterie of lovers, both men and women, including a local nobleman and a bullfighter. Parsons saw nothing of her apart from the occasional fleeting visit. To alleviate his loneliness Parsons acquired a semipermanent girlfriend, an Irish girl named Gladis Gohan. He decided to move into a new home with her, a home that might remind him of his childhood.

The home of 1200 Esplanade stood on the seashore on Re-dondo Beach. Complete with crenelations, Moorish arches, and windows framed with stained glass, the house resembled a Gothic castle. It was, however, made completely out of concrete. It was as if Parsons' love of epic grandeur and magniloquent gesture had been distorted in a fun house mirror. Those who visited called it the “Concrete Castle.”

When Candy made one of her rare visits to her husband and found his girlfriend installed in the new house, she paid no heed to her. George Frey, slightly concerned, asked her what she thought of the arrangement. “I think she gives the place a nice feminine touch,” deadpanned Candy. Parsons' joy at seeing Candy again swiftly dissipated as the two began arguing ferociously. Candy finally left for Mexico once more, and an embittered Parsons initiated divorce proceedings against her on the grounds of “extreme cruelty.”

 

A rocketeer reunion took place in Pasadena on June 6, 1949. Frank Malina had returned to the United States from France to visit his old friends and family. He brought with him his new wife, Marjorie, whom he had met while working at UNESCO. Andy Haley threw a lavish party on Orange Grove, where the drink and arguments were as copious as ever. In the midst of the celebrations, Haley coaxed Parsons up onto the little balcony in front of his bedroom window, as he had done so many times before. He demanded to hear the “Hymn to Pan” once more. Parsons took his position and began to declaim. This time there were no thrown bottles, no jeering. Everybody stood silent as Parsons recited the verses he had recited so many times.

 

The great beasts come, Io Pan! I am borne
To death on the horn
Of the Unicorn.
I am Pan! Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan!
I am thy mate, I am thy man,
Goat of thy flock, I am gold, I am god,
Flesh to thy bone, flower to thy rod.
With hoofs of steel I race on the rocks
Through solstice stubborn to equinox.
And I rave, and I rape and I rip and I rend
Everlasting, world without end,
Mannikin, maiden, Maenad, man,
In the might of Pan.
Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan! Io Pan!

 

Parsons finished the final line and a silence fell over the group. They no longer laughed at “Jack being peculiar.” Instead they recalled more glorious, more innocent times, a world where the moon was the limit. “I shall never forget Jack doing this,” Malina recalled many years later. It would be the last time he saw his old friend.

Malina left America early on June 15. He did so just in time. That same day the
Los Angeles Times'
front page led with the headline,
FRANK OPPENHEIMER ADMITS HE WAS RED
. With Sidney Weinbaum, Oppeheimer had presided over the Communist salons that the rocketeers attended before the war. Now the newspapers told how Oppenheimer had “joined the Communist Party while he was working on his PhD degree at the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena.” A few days later came the announcement that, along with an accusation against Weinbaum, “the Committee had information indicating that Frank Malina, identified as a former secretary of the Aerojet Engineering Corp. at Pasadena, was a Communist Party member and that Communist ‘cell' meetings were held at the Oppenheimers' and at Malina's home.”

In early 1950 Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist who had worked on the development of the atomic bomb in Britain and the United States pleaded guilty to charges of passing scientific secrets to the Soviet Union. He was imprisoned for fourteen years. Soon Julius and Ethel Rosenberg would be arrested for passing secrets from the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union. Scientists, the heroes of the last war, now appeared as enemies of the state. Parsons looked on in despair. “Science, that was going to save the world back in H.G. Wells' time, is regimented, strait-jacketed, scared shitless, its universal language diminished to one word, security,” he lamented.

He must himself have been scared. Rosenfeld had fallen ill and Parsons' negotiations with him about a move to Israel had “broken down.” Since regaining his security clearance, Parsons had been interviewed by the FBI on several occasions about his links to Weinbaum's Communist group. Parsons had initially prevaricated, saying that the meetings he had been to in 1938 and 1939 “were in fact study groups and dealt with many ‘isms' other than Communism.” Now, however, he told the FBI that Weinbaum held “extreme communist views” and “knew of the existence of a communist group on the Caltech campus.” In a climate of rumor, such words were proof and clinched the FBI's case against Weinbaum. On June 16 Sidney Weinbaum was arrested for perjury. He had signed a Caltech security form stating that he had never been a member of the Communist Party.

The reasons for Parsons' betrayal of Weinbaum are not entirely clear. The threat of losing his security clearance again must have weighed heavily upon him, considering the depression his lost job had provoked before. Perhaps he thought Frank Oppenheimer's confession had already doomed Weinbaum. Or perhaps Parsons still harbored a grudge against Weinbaum for breaking up the discussion group he and Malina had founded all those years ago.