Raven

by Reiterman, Tim

  COME AND SEE THE MOST MIRACULOUS SPIRITUAL HEALING MINISTRY IN THE LAND TODAY! ALL NINE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT MANIFESTED IN REV. JIM JONES’ PEOPLES TEMPLE MINISTRY (OF THE NEARLY 2 MILLION MEMBER DISCIPLES OF CHRIST DENOMINATION) REV. JONES OFTEN CALLS SCORES OF PEOPLE FROM THE AUDIENCE WHO ARE HEALED OF ALL MANNER OF DISEASES ! THE BLIND SEE! THE DEAF HEAR! CRIPPLES WALK! SEE A MODERN DAY APOSTLE ... HEAR HIS URGENT MESSAGE FOR THESE TROUBLED TIMES.

  Jones’s bus caravans were billed as a traveling Lourdes. Lest the skeptical stay away, the leaflets quoted without permission from letters and comments by prominent people—a physician who said he believed the healings were genuine, Disciples of Christ officials who praised the humanitarian works of the Temple.

  Jones’s healing techniques had been polished over time, but they received a great assist from the climate created by his travelers. The several hundred California members often were presented as local people, so attendees in places such as Detroit, Cleveland and Houston did not always realize that the newcomers were a distinct minority at a staged event. Jones’s huge entourage imported enthusiasm, and some members functioned as shills during offerings. Witnessing miracles and revelations —and donations of hundreds of dollars—made the uninitiated even more inclined to donate generously. The needy and not-so-needy-wage earners, unemployed, runaways, winos and others—were collected along the way.

  While the numbers who headed west stayed limited, the names of those who did not were nearly as valuable. Church mailing lists ranked among the most precious Temple possessions. By the early 1970s, the Temple had set up Truth Enterprises, a direct mail branch sending out 30,000 to 50,000 mailers each month to people who had attended Temple services, written in response to Temple radio shows or otherwise come in contact with the church. Money poured into the Temple from all over the continental United States, Hawaii, South America and Europe. In peak periods, mailers grossed $300 to $400 a day.

  The tone of the mailers was an amalgam of Rev. Ike, Father Divine and brassy old Christian hokum, appealing to people’s desire for financial deliverance, spiritual guidance and physical health. Thanks to the law of averages and the innate gullibility of people, the church received many reports of the bounty of blessings from Jim Jones—and used those in future mailers. People attested to the power of pieces of his robes, healing oil or pictures of him in frames, rings, key chains or lockets. People sent offerings in thanks and anticipation of benefits. Even Jim Jones was surprised by their number.

  An early mailer bore a photo of Jones in his robes, yet without sunglasses. His arm was outstretched toward an empty retangular space where the believer was to glue either a photograph or a piece of a garment as a gesture of faith. Space was provided for the recipient to write an “urgent need” and to designate a “love offering” of $5 to $50, or “other.” The message was clear: “As you send your letter, if you are able to send a Gift of Love to help the work financially, God will honor your faith.” However, on the same page in very fine print was a more temporal disclaimer: “Peoples Temple assumes no legal responsibility for the truth of any testimonies....”

  Jones’s old friend Jack Beam was the star of one mailer with a photograph of a horribly twisted and overturned Temple truck and caption: “Saved from Certain Death.” Wearing a tractor cap and his broadest country smile, Jack stood before the wreckage flashing the peace sign. “When the truck overturned, my head was thrown through the windshield,” said a testimony befitting one of Jones’s loyalist functionaries. He said that he had been decapitated, but that a dashboard photo of Rev. Jones had made him whole again.

  By the Temple’s own count, it received more than one thousand similar testimonies to the power of Jones’s anointed and blessed photographs sold through the mails and at services. It was $5 for the deluxe model with plastic frame. Stationery depicting various scenes of Temple life, including Pastor and Mrs. Jones, sold for $1.50 a packet. Lots of money was made, but Jones used to fret, “They’re gonna get me for mail fraud someday.”

  The pictures were the brainchild of an enterprising couple, Deanna and Elmer Mertle, who after defecting would call themselves Jeannie and Al Mills. Earlier, Jones had asked everyone to destroy photos of him because he did not wish people to worship him like Catholics kneeling before plaster statues. With this new idea, however, he allowed his pictures to be promoted as protection from various evils—one picture was designed to safeguard the owner from fire, another assault, a third from cancer, and so on. Some pictures were to be worn over the heart, others framed for the home.

  On the mainstay weekend bus trips to San Francisco and Los Angeles, it was not uncommon to sell a few thousand dollars’ worth of photos of Jones, holy oil that was nothing but vials of olive oil, and anointed prayer cloths that originally were pieces of Jones’s discarded robes but later merely remnants from fabric shops. The oil went for $5, the cloths for $2.

  Offerings at healing services in the two large California cities dwarfed those sales. The weekly take in Los Angeles often ranged from $15,000 to $25,000 or more, and in San Francisco from $8,000 to $12,000. There also were smaller Redwood Valley collections. The counters, gathered in a back room, started piling and tabulating bills before the services ended. Jones at times would demand a total before they were finished. When an aide relayed the incomplete count, the preacher sometimes would deflate even that figure. Then he would deride the paltry total, and the bucket would be passed some more. To stimulate generosity, Jones would promote future projects, some of which never materialized. In addition to asking for support of the church’s social service programs and college dorms, Jones took up collections to purchase airplanes and boats and bulletproof cars. He began talking about setting up a mission in South America. And, he said, several members would be sent to flight school.

  During one of the Temple vacation trips in 1976, Jones directed the caravan toward his hometown; the side trip would provide a triumphal return, allowing his followers to see his birthplace firsthand.

  Jones evidently was bringing up the rear when the first buses rolled into Lynn at about seven one weekday morning. One of the drivers motioned a passing motorist to the side of the road to ask for assistance. It turned out that the driver was Jones’s boyhood friend, Don Foreman, who had stopped in Lynn for breakfast on the way to his engineering job in Dayton.

  “Can you help me?” said a black man who approached.

  “I’m not sure. Can you tell me what you need?”

  “I’m from California with a church group, and we’re looking for the birthplace of God.”

  “The birthplace of God?” Foreman was bemused.

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t help you until you tell me who God is.”

  “Jim Jones.”

  “In that case, I can help you,” said Foreman. “Jim Jones lived over there in a house that was behind that grocery store.”

  While Foreman went on to work chuckling to himself, eleven buses lined up on Grant Street by the site of the Jones home. Jones himself arrived on Bus No. 7 with his entourage. He introduced his family and followers to his former baby-sitter, Myrtle Kennedy, the sweet Nazarene lady. He spent two hours talking to the aged woman whom he called his spiritual mother. And after he hugged and kissed her good-bye, he did not forget her. He remembered her birthday and made sure she received a shower of birthday cards from his followers as well. He called her occasionally on the telephone and had his secretary write her letters when he could not.

  NINETEEN

  Sex in the Temple

  One night, after a long meeting in Redwood Valley, Jones toppled over in one of his apparent coronaries. The congregation was sent home quickly while Dale Parks, a young inhalation therapist, administered oxygen. A few aides—Jack Beam, Archie Ijames and Larry Layton—anxiously hovered over their stricken leader. Supine on the blue-carpeted pulpit platform, the pallid-looking preacher took a draft of oxygen, looked up at Larry Layton and declared: “Larry, I’m in love with your wife.” It was probably
the first public declaration of the Jones-Layton liaison, and it left no room for misunderstanding: Jones went on to relate that he and Layton’s wife had each come to climax no fewer than sixteen or seventeen times in their first illicit encounter. With his aides looking on, Jones talked Layton into divorcing his wife.

  Other twists soon followed. When Layton went to Nevada to finalize the divorce, Jones dispatched Karen Tow, one of the Temple’s most beautiful women, to keep him happy.

  Like Layton, Tow came from relative affluence and was politically reborn in the 1960s. Temple opinion about her was divided: some thought she was a sweet, sensitive young woman; others saw her as a vain flirt who needed humbling. In any case, she and Larry Layton made a handsome couple—and eventually married. Karen characterized her tie to Larry as a friendship, perhaps warm and sexual, but her devotion belonged to the Temple, and her real sex life revolved around Jim Jones.

  In fact, Jones usurped both of Larry Layton’s wives. However, this sexual double duty taxed even the master juggler. Carolyn, he swore publicly and privately, was his first true love; Karen became expendable. Claiming he was irritated by her demands, he asked Archie Ijames and Jack Beam to extricate him from the relationship. Karen, rebuked by these Temple old-timers, became indignant and refused. They in turn threatened to expose her to the general membership as a selfish woman sapping Father’s energy. “If you don’t back off, he’ll tell it all in public.”

  “He wouldn’t do that,” she snapped.

  “The hell he wouldn’t.”

  The bluff worked, and Karen Tow Layton acquiesced. Jones, however, was not through with her newfound husband. Having stolen sexual favors from both his wives, Jones now proceeded to humiliate Larry Layton by portraying him as a homosexual in front of the planning commission. The effect of Jones’s triple blow to Layton was to turn a deeply feeling, onetime activist with a drug problem into a puppyish functionary. Demeaned, Layton was dismissed by other Temple members as “spacey,” while the church newspaper proclaimed him as a drug reform success story.

  Though Jones stopped short of exposing lurid details of his trysts from the pulpit, he was not so discreet in other forums. Word of his affairs traveled through the church. Jones bragged about his conquests to his longtime buddies like Beam and Ijames, belying his strident public calls for women’s liberation. Like one of the boys in a beer bar, he boasted of his triumphs in raw language. Nothing was too crude or intimate to relate. He loved to talk about venereal warts, the smell of genitals or hygiene in the anal canal, and always in the most graphic and clever terms. He would talk about rooting around in the grass with some young girl and how, once she stood up, her behind was plastered with stickers. Finally, Ijames, using diplomatic double talk, took a gentle jab at his pastor: “Brother Jones. I think you trust people too much. They don’t deserve the trust you give them.”

  The Temple’s sexual politics meshed with the changing sexual mores of society, but most of all with Jones’s own changing attitudes and habits—and his organizational needs. Jones had become a student of sex. He recognized it as a primal force closely tied to the will to survive. Sex, like hunger or the need to sleep, could be channeled and controlled. A charismatic leader like Jones could literally conjure up the sexual energy of his congregants and turn it toward the needs of the organization. Since ultimately Temple goals were synonymous with his goals, he inevitably abused the energy, fulfilling his personal sexual and psychological fantasies.

  Jones also used sex to tie people to the group. Like a matinee idol or some politicians, he promoted himself as the ultimate sex object, dispensing favors to an adoring following, drinking up their adulation. He used his body to discipline, elevate and reward, as well as to assert his own superiority and to humiliate. In his own insecurity, he became an addict who needed the sexual fix. And he also had discovered the reputation-destroying power of sexual rumors and innuendo.

  Jones tailored his sexual theories and rulemaking to a functional opportunism. For instance, in a time of free love and women’s liberation, he preached the sharing of love, encouraging his members to share sexual favors freely. Conventional sexual mores and jealousies he denounced as egotistical and hypocritical. He criticized narcissistic sexual game playing that made the less-favored and shy feel inferior.

  Such policies, in practice, served to bind people to Jones and the church. By violating old taboos, people morally compromised themselves. Jones had disoriented them, like the devout Christians whom he taught to cuss. And he had seized control of a powerful force in their lives.

  Still, Jones’s sexual standards changed like the wind, and were rife with special privileges. The dogma seesawed between sexual awareness and total celibacy. Did not sex squander energy that could be better applied to building socialism? Was it not elitist to continue marital relations when so many Temple members had no partner at all, selfish to make babies when so many were starving? Good socialists ignored the sex drive.

  To convince people to abstain—and perhaps for his own psychological needs—Jones bullied them by attacking their sexuality on many fronts at once. One device was his absurd thesis that he alone, among Temple men and women, was the only true heterosexual. All the rest were hiding their homosexuality, he declared; having heterosexual relations was simply a masquerade. Perhaps out of shame for homosexual tendencies within himself, Jones made his members publicly admit homosexual feelings or acts, past and present, latent or overt. Planning commission members were forced to list all the sexual partners in their lives, male and female, as well as type of sex. He had wives stand up and complain about their husbands’ lovemaking. He had male children fill out questionnaires that asked, among more doctrinaire matters, about their sexual feelings for Father. And he personally had sex with some men in his church, ostensibly to prove to them their own homosexuality.

  Using all this ammunition, Jones created a sexually eclectic climate of intolerance disguised as tolerance, of guilt, repression and division. Some, particularly the elderly and very young, stayed celibate with no great sacrifice. Some members found it a great strain; some had sex on the sly and felt guilt; some had sanctioned sex in arranged relationships. Some had sex with Jones, others resented it. The labels “homosexual,” “queer,” “lesbian,” “male chauvinistic pig,” “sexist” and “narcissist” were flung about. Members censured one another in meetings at home: any behavior perceived as selfish or elitist or snooty warranted attack. Any behavior seen as homosexual, even a friendly kiss or an embrace between two members of the same sex, was criticized, and sometimes punished. Conversely, those who showed an interest in the opposite sex —and were therefore “compensating” for their homosexuality—were humiliated, or sometimes sodomized by Jones to prove their homosexuality.

  Partly as a bonding ritual, partly as an escape valve, the church did sanction some marriages and arranged others. Usually people without real romantic feelings for each other were asked to form a marriage of commitment to the cause. Some lovers, especially interracial couples, were asked to marry for the sake of appearance.

  Jones promoted interracial marriage, despite his general condemnation of all one-on-one relationships as counterrevolutionary. Such marriages advanced the interracial lifestyle and also served to tie the couples more closely to the Temple, which remained a rare, racially hospitable environment.

  Marriage was one thing, but childbirth another, especially in the Ukiah days. There are too many unwanted and neglected little ones in the world, Jones would cry, perhaps lamenting his own childhood. Bearing children instead of adopting was construed as greedy. Some women in their childbearing years were clearly frustrated by this policy; others who went ahead anyway, like Grace Stoen, were showered with abuse.

  “Elitist bitch,” some called Grace Stoen behind her back. Childbirth seemed to be just one more special privilege for the church attorney and his wife. Yet soon after the birth of John Victor Stoen, Jones took extraordinary steps to bind the couple to the church. First, he h
ad Stoen sign the paternity statement. Then, almost immediately, he elevated Grace to the planning commission. By Jones’s own admission, Grace was mistrusted, a waverer; the appointment was an incentive and reward but also an obligation, as was the house down payment Jones gave the couple.

  For a while, he allowed them to live as a nuclear family with their beautiful, bright little boy. But Jones then turned the screws. Grace was pushed into quitting junior college and getting a job: she worked the night shift at a convalescent hospital so that she could spend days with her son. And when John was only two years old, Tim announced it was time to move the boy out of their home and into the larger Temple community, to be raised communally. Grace was upset and angry, but she yielded, and John was moved out.

  The church gradually took the energies she once had devoted to her child. Grace found satisfaction working with the elderly. But in August 1974, that too was pried away from her when she was asked to work full time in the church’s newly opened Redwood Valley commercial complex. Grace objected, and even broke down in tears. “I love the patients,” she pleaded with Jones. “It’s the first job I’ve ever enjoyed in my life.”

  “Grace,” Jones told her. “These people were racists when they were younger....”

  Out of guilt and a need to please her fellow Temple members, Grace gave up the job. She poured her energy into her Temple duties, answering church phones for Jones, paying bills, immersing herself in the organization. She even put in extra hours beyond the sixteen expected of all members, hoping the criticisms of her in planning commission would stop. Slowly, things got better. People came to her with problems. Counselors took note of her dedication. Jones promoted her to the church council and eventually to head counselor. For the first time, she had attained a coveted position of responsibility—and she was deeply gratified. A disinterested appendage had been converted into a key member.