Strange Angel (41 page)

In any case, Parsons was not the only member of the Suicide Squad to be troubled by the FBI. Martin Summerfield lost his security clearance for his affiliations with known Communists, and even the respected Kármán came under investigation for his links to Béla Kun's Communist regime in Hungary in 1919. Tsien, however, became the most spectacular casualty. He had recently returned to Pasadena to become the first Robert Goddard Professor of Jet Propulsion at Caltech. Following a grilling by the FBI about his alleged Communist sympathies, his security clearance was revoked almost immediately. At a time when 90 percent of all research at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was classified, he could no longer hold his prestigious position. Tsien made plans to travel back to his Chinese homeland, but when the government discovered his decision, it moved swiftly to stop him. Customs officials searched his packed luggage and discovered papers marked “Secret” and “Confidential.” Many of these documents were written by Tsien himself, and it must have seemed natural to him to take them. But the day that Sidney Weinbaum was sentenced to four years without parole for perjury and fraud, “Caltech's famed Dr. Tsien” was arrested and held without bail. He was forbidden from leaving the country for five years so that his scientific knowledge would become obsolete and therefore useless to China's new Communist regime.

As his old friends and acquaintances rapidly fell around him, Parsons contacted a recovering Herbert Rosenfeld and renewed his efforts to move to Israel. Rosenfeld greeted him warmly and asked for one last piece of information. If he provided it, Parsons could leave for Israel immediately.

This final proposal was very simple indeed: Rosenfeld wanted a detailed breakdown of equipment costs for the jet propulsion development program and explosives plant proposal that Parsons had formulated the previous year. Such costs were easily calculated by consulting similar proposals Parsons had been working on for Hughes. He took a bundle of handwritten documents concerning explosives and rocket propellant manufacture from his office and gave them to Blanche Boyer, a female colleague from Hughes, asking if she could type up copies of the material for him. Confident in his plans for the future, he had even included within the bundle “tentative points” for a two-year employment contract he was planning to give to Rosenfeld.

Unfortunately for Parsons, in light of the increasingly hysterical press coverage of “Red” scientists, it seems that the sight of these documents sent Boyer into a panic. No sooner had Parsons gone than she alerted the security authorities at Hughes to a case of possible espionage. On September 26, Parsons was fired from his job at Hughes for removing confidential papers without permission, and the FBI descended upon him yet again. He told them everything. He told them about the Technion Society, he told them about Rosenfeld, he told them about the papers he had already submitted to Israel. He claimed that he was only preparing a cost breakdown from the papers he had taken from Hughes. He swore that he was going to submit the proposal to the State Department and insisted that he wanted only to transfer the costs of equipment to Israel, not the classified material. He pleaded that his action was an oversight, a slipup.

His carelessness caused his past life to be exhumed once again. As the FBI prepared to prosecute Parsons for espionage, they interviewed old friends and enemies, seeking evidence that he was a spy. More stories about his antics at 1003 crept out of the woodwork. An unnamed source claimed that at a weekend party he was drugged and initiated into the order against his will. Others described Parsons as a “crack-pot” and “a religious fanatic.” One source focused on his relationship with Candy, describing them as “an odd and unusual pair in that they do not live by the commonly accepted code of married life and are both very fascinated by anything unusual or morbid such as voodooism, cults, homosexuality, and religious practices that are ‘different'.” Some of Parsons' scientist friends rallied around him, explaining that during his time at Caltech security regulations had been very lax and “it was common practice to remove reports for [one's] own purposes.” But the evidence against him was overwhelming. Making matters even worse, Herbert Rosenfeld himself was under investigation by the FBI for his links to known Soviet agents. When Parsons was pointedly asked about his own political affiliations, he furiously asserted that he was not a Communist but “an individualist.” With the wealth of information collected against him, his declaration was futile.

Parsons could do little but wait for the investigation to be over. He became increasingly disturbed. He talked to George Frey about the FBI, referring to them as the “Black Brotherhood.” He became convinced that the man living in the next door apartment was spying on him. “Just be careful what you're saying,” Frey remembered him whispering; “the apartment is bugged.” The one thing he was certain of was that his chance for escape to Israel was gone.

 

Down in Mexico, Candy heard the news of his FBI troubles. Perhaps she was sympathetic to them, as she now returned to Los Angeles for good. The pair abandoned their divorce proceedings and moved from the Concrete Castle to a real place of solace, Orange Grove Avenue. The coach house of the old Cruikshank estate at 1071 South Orange Grove was for rent. Though the estate itself had been demolished years earlier to make way for condominiums, down the serpentine driveway the coach house was in a world of its own. Across the street the couple could see the brick-and-stone French manor house owned by John S. Cravens, his third on the avenue, and directly opposite the coach house was the grand Macris estate. Jack and Candy's new home even stood on the same block 1003 had once graced.

The ground floor of the coach house, formerly the stables, had been converted into a huge laundry room. Parsons made it his home laboratory, storing his chemicals and powder up against the wall, brewing absinthe next to his explosives. As the FBI investigation rumbled on and Parsons awaited the possibility of an espionage charge against him, he went back to the employment of his youth, working at the powder companies. By May 1951, he had even set up his own—the Parsons Chemical Manufacturing Company in North Hollywood. It was not long before the couple began to throw parties at the house. Guests included a wealth of bizarre transients—a former British secret service agent, a circus performer from Europe—as well as old friends like Robert Cornog and Ed Forman. It was said that the jazz legend Charlie Parker came to one of the gatherings with his girlfriend. Candy's painting of Parsons as the “Angel of Death,” some six feet tall and four feet wide, watched ominously over proceedings. Parsons began to regain something of his old reputation on Orange Grove. Sometimes the group would migrate to the pergola outside, and play bongos “until 6 the next morning,” remembered some of the guests, “and the police cars kept coming.”

One guest was Greg Ganci, an actor and artist in his midtwenties, who had met Parsons and Cameron through mutual friends. He had spent some time in San Miguel de Allende, but after fourteen months of fiesta he had returned to Los Angeles and was now acting at the Pasadena Playhouse along with his partner Martin Foshaug. “We had a friendly relationship with Jack, we talked a lot,” he remembered, “and Jack was always talking about Gilgamesh and the Babylonian gods and goddesses and things like that and I would just listen to it with a tin ear.” They did share an interest in Aleister Crowley, whose reputation had been somewhat revived by the recent release of John Symond's scandalous biography,
The Great Beast.
The tales of Crowley's debauchery and bohemian lifestyle appealed to the new postwar Beat generation, who went out of their way to reject the social conformity of the previous generation, and Parsons entertained his guests with tales of his own about his former mentor.

Despite the sociable atmosphere at these parties, Parsons remained somewhat aloof. He was by now part of an older generation that had thrived on classical music rather than jazz, on piano duets instead of bongo playing. He had become a prewar relic of sorts. Ganci remembered, “[There was] nothing artistic about Jack, he could have passed as an executive of a company. And for us in our twenties—Jack was 35, 36—we considered him much older. He was never really bohemian, everybody else was bohemian.” Little did Ganci know the full extent of Parsons' past debaucheries.

If Parsons was still indulging in drugs, he was doing so discreetly. He never showed any sign of undue intoxication to his friends, but down in his laboratory he kept a number of hypodermic needles. It is unclear whether they were for his chemical experiments or, like Crowley before him, for his own private use. He was certainly emulating Crowley in his bulk. He was growing increasingly heavyset, as if the wired energy of his youth had deserted him. But he was keeping busy. He had been formulating a new religion, one that would replace the “claptrap” and “indirection” that he felt had compromised the OTO. His religion was to be created for the “modern spirit” and consist of “an austere simplicity of approach.” He named it the “Witchcraft”; it seemed to combine elements of Crowley's teaching with Parsons' own Babalon prophecy, while also drawing heavily on Parsons' favorite Jack Williamson story, “Darker Than You Think.” He priced a basic course of instruction at ten dollars; a modest sum when compared to the six hundred dollar cost of a ten-day Dianetics program.

Parsons wrote to de Camp happily, “The witch [Candy] is back with me, quiescent but unexstinct [sic], and I am in the comparative safety and more than comparative respectability of the explosives business.” This new found stability promised to endure. On October 25 the assistant United States attorney at Los Angeles declined to prosecute Parsons “due to lack of sufficient evidence of intent or reason to believe that information obtained was to be used to injure the US or to the advantage of a foreign nation.” They had obviously concluded that he was more of a crackpot than a Communist. The Industrial Employment Review Board was not so kind. In January 1952 they revoked Parsons' security clearance forever and withdrew his access to “Department of Defense classified information and/or material.” The reason stated was simple: “That you do not possess the integrity, discretion and responsibility essential to the security of classified military information ... that you might voluntarily or involuntarily act against the security interest of the United States and constitute a danger to the national security.” Though he had escaped prosecution, any hopes Parsons may have harbored of returning to the field of rocketry were ruined.

The news precipitated another bout of magic. His mood alternated between “manic hysteria and depressing melancholy.” He seemed to recover swiftly, however, and started considering a new adventure—a long trip to Mexico. He mused to friends that he could grow grapes down there to make brandy with, or perhaps even build a pyramid to “re-establish the ancient glories.” He visited an elderly Jane Wolfe in February 1952 and they talked for three or four hours. He admitted he was afraid of the future but felt he had little choice. “I am finished here; there is nothing more for me to do, so I am going away,” he told her, before smiling and saying, “But I shall come back.”

He began to prepare himself financially for the trip and contacted Kármán once more, asking him for a reference. Kármán, who had heard of Parsons' misfortunes, was only too willing to help. “I have known Mr. Parsons for more than 15 years,” he wrote. “He worked under my direction on rocket problems. His technological knowledge and experience, especially in explosives, is excellent.” Nevertheless, the old memories of Parsons at Aerojet could not be completely forgotten. “Mr. Parsons is very inventive; he is better for independent work than for office work with many employees about.”

Parsons' temporary job was at the Bermite Powder Company in Saugus, the same town he had worked in as a young man while employed at the Halifax Powder Company. Here he put his remarkable explosives skill to work developing and manufacturing pyrotechnics and explosives for the motion picture industry. There was a boom in war films at the time, and realistic explosives were needed more than ever. He specialized in squibs, small explosive devices placed beneath clothes to simulate the action of a bullet striking the body. But Parsons soon lost interest in the work. The pull of Mexico became stronger. It would be a new start, a chance to clear the mind after the last troubled year. “This was kind of a second honeymoon or something,” remembered Ganci, “kind of a reconciliation with Candy. They could go down to Mexico where life was one big fiesta.” They planned to leave in mid-June and stay in Mexico for three months, maybe six, just as soon as Parsons had fulfilled his short-term obligations to Bermite.

After all his years working with explosives and rockets, Parsons had accumulated a vast collection of rare and volatile chemicals. Far too unstable to keep in his home laboratory, he had been storing them in a warehouse owned by the Special Effects Corporation, a pyrotechnics company that Parsons often leant his services to, based in Pacoima in the San Fernando Valley. While visiting his stockpile, Parsons ran into an old JPL acquaintance, Charles Bartley. Bartley had founded The Grand Central Rocket Company, a direct competitor with Aerojet, and he had hired some space at the Special Effects plant for his own explosives work—the very space Parsons had been using as a storeroom for his substances. He was instructed he would have to move his supplies. Even Bartley was amazed by the amount and variety of chemicals Parsons had collected over the years, commenting, “Well, he had a lot of explosive stuff that I didn't even know the names of.” Parsons' stores included cartons of nitroglycerin, trinitrobenzene, and penthaerythritol tetranitrate, better known as petn, one of the most powerful explosives known to man.

The last time Bartley had seen Parsons was in 1944 in a tin shack on the dried-up riverbed of the Arroyo Seco, when Parsons and Forman had barged into his office bragging about the new Laundromat business they were going to found. “How's that Laundromat business?” Bartley now asked. Parsons turned to him with a gleam in his eye and said that he was now going to start a “fireworks company” in Mexico. With that he began to transport his bottles and beakers, his test tubes and ovens, back to his house on Orange Grove.