Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Los ^Angeles — T^eligions having been an Oklahoma boomer in his unregenerate days, had also been converted, or, as he put it : " I was from Missouri, an' you got to show it to me. So I says : * Oh, Lord, if there is a God, you got to show me first,' an' the answer come right back like a streak over my brain." I rallied him about peddling the papers which were full of scandals, divorces, and sexual murders. But he was impervious to argument : the newspapers were sacrosanct, an American institution ; there was certainly no law against the papers, while there was a law against every wicked thing. At least, there wasn't a law against smoking cigarettes yet, but there soon would be. Mrs Aimee Semple McPherson, sole proprietor of the Foursquare Gospel method of reaching heaven, is one of the phenomena of Los Angeles. She can best be summed up by saying that for everyday affairs of life she wears bobbed hair, but in the presence of the Lord she wears a wig. Her church, which was the centre of our gardener's interests, was a large concrete building, shaped like a theatre, from the top of which projected an erection like a lighthouse and the standards of a wireless transmitter. In the lighthouse were professional interceders, praying night and day to order ; the fee for special prayers from the lighthouse being, we understood, about one pound for a quarter of an hour. The wireless transmitter was notorious, and of such power that it sometimes drowned all the radio emissions, suddenly interrupting concert, speech, or dance music with such blatant religious exclamations or mere incoherent static that it had finally to be abated as a public nuisance. ...... Going into Aimee's temple on Sunday night made us remember going into the bull-ring. Similar unadorned concrete [251]