Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Star-dust in Hollywood Angeles, and we only discovered where it was practised after our departure. But the "House of God " described in On Wandering Wheels was a variety of the cult. Holy Rollering is an undistinguished and unhonourable cult, developed directly from the Shouting Methodists of Wesley and the early Shakers. It indulges in orgies of floor-grovellings and wallowings, crying out in unintelligible ' tongues,' rejoicing in miraculous cures, and immediate contact with the Holy Spirit. But they wielded no such power in Los Angeles town as did Mrs McPherson, with her publicity, her worshippers, and her scandals. For under that high and much-curled wig in which the revivalist faced her Maker lay the bobbed hair of the merely worldly, and the scandals gathered thickly about Mrs McPherson's name. She had been accused of running off with her own wireless operator for a little holiday, of having faked a dramatic disappearance by drowning, and of having staged an equally dramatic escape from kidnapping bootleggers who had immured her in a hut lost in the deserts of New Mexico. She had been accused of bribing justice, of having been concerned in a fraudulent real estate promotion. She had quarrelled with her mother, "Ma Kennedy," over the finances of the Temple, and had only been reconciled when the latter was sued by a clergyman for ' heart balm/ or breach of promise to marry. But nothing could undermine her influence, neither the scandals nor, what seemed to us even more important, her blatantly businesslike method of conducting the services of her Church. She plays with a deliberate and practised touch on the sensibilities of her Middle Western audiences, stimulates their easy emotionalism to so-called religious fervour, and gives them the colour necessary in their drab existences. Thus the possibility of so extraordinary a power wielded by one so blatant and crude cannot be ignored when one tries to [262]