by Tim Cahill
Psychologists are familiar with this tendency on the part of the ill to confuse their bodies with the cosmos and their own death with the end of the world. Susan Alamo, I was to learn later, had little use for this kind of worldly and irreligious blather.
Later Frank and I sat in a booth and read another tract by Tony Alamo. I was surprised to see my teacher close his eyes and ask God to "burn the words upon our hearts"—the same blessing he had lavished on the Bible. But as Richard had told me in an answer to a question, there has never been a time when Tony or Susan were wrong, "because, their judgment is the Word of God and God is not wrong."
Frank read aloud. Some highlights from the tract: "I had no respect for women at all. Every one I encountered was worse than the one before. I actually hated them and decided for some reason that I had been put here to punish them because they were so evil. All my former friends break up now when they see little five-foot-two Susan bossing me around, and believe me, I love it."
Tony's routine, in the old days, was to take "complete unknowns" and "promote them into big stars." He liked
limousines and enjoyed having an entourage of "yes men," people, apparently, who treated his orders as if they were the word of God. It was during one of his most outrageous "promotional extravaganzas" that he met Jesus of Nazareth. In the midst of an important business meeting, in which Tony was going to have to borrow money, his ears went completely deaf. People were speaking but Tony only saw their mouths moving. "Suddenly I heard a voice: a voice that came from every direction." It told Tony, "I am the Lord thy God. Stand up on your feet and tell the people in this room Jesus Christ is coming back to earth, or thou shalt surely die."
Tony struggled against the voice. He tried to excuse himself, claiming sudden illness. But God would not allow this and began playing with Tony's soul "like a yo-yo." He yanked it half out of the body, then put it back. "No, God, no," Tony screamed. "Please don't kill me.... I'll tell them, I'll tell them.
"I know you won't believe me," he said, "but Jesus Christ is coming back to earth again." No one said anything. It was a weak effort, and once again God yanked Tony's soul.
"Repent," he screamed. "Jesus is coming." He lurched about the room, knocking spindles from desks and backing people against the walls. The attorney Tony had come to see yelled, "Get him out of here, he's nuts."
Tony could no longer work because he was "afraid that God would come down on me in front of people." He was broke, at the nadir of his career. His former friends thought he had cracked up, and the God of Wrath gave him visions of a burning hell. One day, alone in the rain, he walked into a restaurant where Susan was sitting. Though they had met one another casually, Susan had generally refused to speak to him. "I always knew there was something different about her." He sat at her table, and her first words were, "Tony, do you know that the Lord Jesus Christ is coming back to earth again?" Tony jumped up and knocked all the silverware off the table.
"How do you know?" he demanded. "Did God come and tell you too?"
Tony subsequently joined one of Susan's small Bible classes, and presently "God spoke to Susie's heart in a very supernatural way," and they were married. God let Tony do one more big promotion so nobody would think that he was crazy, but Susan prayed for him to go broke and God obliged. "She wanted to go out into the street and bring the Bible to the hippies." Against Tony's better judgment.
The Jesus Movement, Tony averred, began one Saturday night in Hollywood when he and Susan started handing out tracts. It was not the product of "some youth with psychedelic lights flashing in his head." In the penultimate and most powerful paragraph, Tony says, "the price has been high. Oh my God, so high. Higher than human flesh wants to pay. ... I am glad that the Lion of the Tribe of Juda, the eternal keeper of the Lamb's book of Life, knows when and how the Jesus Movement began and that he saw my sweetheart as she went into the street with cancer eating through her body and took the Gospel to the hippies."
Frank looked up from his reading. "A lot of people got saved on account of this tract," he said. I told him that I didn't doubt it and kept to myself some further information about the business conference in which Tony met Jesus.
His unknown at the time was a singer-composer named Bobby Jameson. Tony had taken out ads in the music trade papers touting Bobby as the star of the century. At the conference, a very important one, Jameson says that Alamo leapt to his feet and shrieked to the man behind the desk, "You must give him [Jameson] all your money because he is Jesus Christ and if you don't he'll point his finger at you and you will die."
Billboard magazine claims that the bill for the Alamo-Jameson ads is still an unpaid account—$14,000 worth.
A week after I left the Foundation, I was back in one of the booths, talking to Tony and Susan Alamo. It wasn't the way I had planned it. "The press only tells one half of the story," Tony was saying. "If you want a story, you want the A side and the B side."
My original scheme had been to visit the Alamos in their controversial house. Biff Alexander, the deprogrammed
Alamo-ite who claimed to have been inside many times, told me what to expect: "three bathrooms. Three brand-new bathrooms with bath and shower facilities. On the lower level there's an office, about twenty feet by forty feet and it's got a fireplace in it. They've got a huge living room and a small section off to the end where they have a big grand piano. There's a dining room with a chandelier. And a kitchen and then two large bedrooms, say fifteen feet by twenty feet or bigger, and closets that are immense, running three-quarters of the length of the room." Alexander said that the older overseers sometimes stay at the house upward to a week at a time, "answering the phones for them, catering to them, and so forth."
According to Alexander, "Tony was instrumental in making the plans for the house, but one of the guys there who had some experience really drew up the plans, and I think it took two guys along with one of the county engineers, who was a tremendous amount of help." Alexander swears, "with God as my witness," that while helping to build the house, "we . . . got up at five in the morning every morning and we slept on the floor there with what blankets we could muster up and it was filthy. We wouldn't get to go home and wash every night . . . people who were really needed were forbidden to go to services . . . because that house had to be built." Alexander says he spent over a month, working twenty hours a day, on the house.
"A lot of times I would think, How could Tony and Susan have so much and we have so little? We were told that when such thoughts come to our minds to say, 'The blood of Jesus is upon you Satan' and 'Get thee behind me, Satan' . . . that that was an accusation brought by the devil."
Two of the Foundation men, however, couldn't quite get Satan out of their minds and brought this accusation to Tony. According to Alexander, Tony told them that a woman of the Lord should be dressed in fine clothes, linen, and silk. "As far as I'm concerned," Alexander remembers him saying, "the Bible says that Elders who do well are worthy . . . you should have built twice the size of the house you built for us. . . ." The two men were asked to leave the Foundation.
It is Tony who seems to be the disciplinarian, probably because he deals with the men, who are more numerous and more troublesome. "One time Tony got so mad," Alexander says, "that people were using too much toilet paper, so toilet paper wasn't put on the finance list that week ... then another time he had the water shut off [on property number two where the women and children live] and neglected really getting it repaired quickly enough and the littlest babies and the women had to defecate in buckets and we actually had to bury it. . . ."
When I talked to Tony Alamo, he was wearing expensive cowboy-styled boots and slacks. Even in the church he wore dark glasses, and this, combined with a paunch he has developed since his crooning days, gave him the unfortunate appearance of the stereotypical nasty southern sheriff.
I had set the interview up the day before and driven up to Saugus that afternoon, calling the Alamos from a nearby phone booth, telling them I would be
right up.
"Meet us at the Foundation," Susan Alamo said.
'Til save you the drive. I'm about two minutes away."
"We're on our way over to the church now," she said breezily. "Just meet us there."
I had very little desire to meet her there since I had left under unpleasant circumstances—consigned to hell, actually—not a week before. Still, I drove up there and arrived the same time as the Alamos' Cadillac. There is probably some significance in the fact that not one of the people I spoke to (or saw) in my second visit recognized me. I was wearing different clothes, but probably more to the point, I was talking with Tony and Sue.
Susan Alamo was wearing slacks and a frilly blouse. Her hair was dyed stark white, Southern California style. She spoke with conviction, in a voice that might be called lilting were it a bit less pointed. She gave the impression of "just talking sense." When we agreed, she had the disconcerting habit of cutting in on the end of the sentence to say, "uuhv course," as if to suggest I might be the slightest bit dim, stating such an obvious point. She did most of the speaking, with Tony lounging at the far end of the booth, looking both wary and bored.
Susan was talking about Ted Patrick. "Tim, the man is criminally insane. He is taking people and abducting them because he doesn't agree with them. He uses force on them. My God, it won't be long before someone is murdered. Because he can't compete in the marketplace of ideas. . . ."
"You deny his charges of kidnapping and brainwashing?"
"Tim, that is such nonsense I wouldn't know where to begin to answer that. Why, Patty Thorpe here is in fear for her life because of that man."
Later, on the subject of the marketplace of ideas, I asked, "Is it true Tony screens the reading material?"
"Well, of course he screens it," Susan said quickly. "For heaven's sake, we wouldn't have a bunch of pornography passing around in here. Or we wouldn't have books advocating Devil worship . . ."
In contrast to Ted Patrick's muscular brand of argument, Susan Alamo seemed quicker, more nimble. She bobbed and weaved, ducking in and out of corners, taking a hard question on the chin only to come back with an apt Biblical quote. In the few times her answers were without substance, she had the knack of insisting on them passionately. She was clearly the spiritual leader. Tony sat silently; I suspected he had heard much of this before.
Susan had been born in Southern California, and, at the age of five, she had had a vision. "I was a little child." Here her voice lost its glibness. I gathered this was something she didn't often speak about, because for once, there was no practiced quality to her words, and she hesitated, waiting, I thought, for the most precise and honest descriptions to occur to her. "I saw Christ as he was coming back to earth again." She became, for a stunning moment, a wistful child: "I saw him in a beautiful bright red robe, long hair flowing in the wind and . . . his eyes were . . . very big and . . . very black. That's the one thing I remember most distinctly. That his eyes were big." Suddenly she became the Susan Alamo that deals with accusations. "It disturbed my family and they took me to doctors and the doctors said that they felt that it was because I had lost my father when I was two and a half years old and evidently someone had shown me
photographs or talked to me about Christ and that he," she hesitated, "he had become a father image." A pause. "Which, of course, wasn't true." Her common sense voice: "Wasn't true at all."
She had met Tony just as the tract said. He joined her Bible class: one of about twenty-five. There was a romance. They were married. Susan wanted to preach to the hippies. One night a dealer named Ed, who lived in "an insidious crash pad right in the heart of Hollywood," called from jail wondering if the Alamos could bail him out. God told Susan to do it.
Ed became a Christian. He and some friends asked the Alamos to "come over to the dope den and talk to the kids down there." Susan said, "We told them that they had souls that were created by God and that they were destroying their minds, their souls, and their bodies. Everything they were doing was a sin, it was destruction. We said, 'You know the kinds of lives you are leading. Where can the next stop be: a marble slab, the prison yard, a mental institution? How far can you go like this?'
"We asked to see the hands of those that believed what we said, and all of them raised their hands and ... so I looked at Tony and said, 'My God, where do we go from here? We just inherited a dope den full of hippies.' "
The first church was in the Dope Den. The "kids" flushed all the dope down the toilet and vacuumed the rugs. Soon it was too crowded. Tony and Susan begged the churches to take the born-again hippies, but it was no dice. Prejudice, Susan feels, was behind the refusal: too many were long-haired or black. They moved to a bigger building on Crescent Heights Boulevard. "Tony and I were going to the back doors of the bakeries and markets begging for food."
As Biff Alexander remembers it, the Alamos called the markets, and the brothers drove down to pick up spoiled food. "Is that feeding the hungry or is it feeding garbage?" he asked angrily. But as Susan Alamo was to say in a different context, she never met anyone who left a church without having a destructive attitude toward it. As a general
rule, that seems to be true, and perhaps Biff Alexander's testimony should be tempered with that knowledge.
When Crescent Heights got too crowded in late 1969, the Alamos scraped $2,000 together and put a down payment on the old Wilson Cafe in Saugus, situated on seven-and-a-half acres of land. They acquired property number two, for the women's and children's dorms, soon thereafter. They now own both. The house, on five prime acres, was built during most of 1972. Men from the Foundation had built a needed set of bleachers for the high school, and the local jaycees had paid them back by pouring the cement for the foundation of a house in which none of them would live. Much of the lumber was donated, Susan says.
Biff Alexander says that Tony Alamo personally told him that the president of a Santa Clarita bank estimated the worth of the house at $100,000. Susan says they borrowed on it to make a down payment on some other property, and that, because they didn't fully own it, they could only get $20,000.
There is, in addition, a 160-acre ranch under lease with option to buy. It houses a small cattle ranch and, until recently, about two thousand laying chickens.
In a previous call to the local chamber of commerce, I learned that prices for nearby plots of land ranged from about $3,000 an acre to almost $9,000.1 wondered where the finances came from.
Susan mentioned donations: an anonymous Newhall man had given $40,000. Some fundamentalist churches gave them money, as their missionary work. Virtually no money came from the people in the church, she implied, though Biff Alexander, a former finance overseer, says everyone was "pressured" to give to the Foundation. Tony, he said, suggested Biff turn a small trust fund—about $500—over to the Lord, in the keeping of Tony Alamo.
"Tim," Susan said, "you sit here until that bus comes in, and every hippie that comes in here holding money that gets off, I will eat every ounce of money he donates, if you will eat his shoes."
It sounded like a bad deal to me, and I told her so. "Any-
way, what I'm trying to get at is the total worth of the Foundation, which I understand is a nonprofit California corporation."
"What is the net worth of the Catholic Church?" Tony shot back. "Why don't you come out and pick grapes with us. I want you dragging cotton bags!"
I directed my questions to Susan.
"Do most of your finances come from the Fundamentalist churches?"
"A lot of them, yes."
"The rest from donations?"
"From citizens . . . citizens' groups." She mentioned a Christian businessman's group in Orange County. In addition, there were proceeds from speaking engagements, and money from the sale of the Tony and Susan Alamo Big Band Gospel Sound Records.
"What are the names of some of the churches that pay—"
"I'm not going to tell you that, Tim, 'cause that's putting my business on the street. . . ."
; "Well, that leaves a substantial mystery as to where—"
"If it's a mystery, then it's a mystery."
The conversation was getting heated and was leading nowhere. I changed the subject, asking Tony if he distrusted the press because he manipulated it so well at one time.
"Oh, those days," he said, describing a weary parabola with his right hand. "No, I was just shocked to find out that anybody would ever . . ."
Susan finished the sentence for him. "That they can't tell the truth!"
"That they can't tell the truth and not only that but. . ."
"They're looking for sensationalism, and if it isn't there, they're going to create it."
"The biggest story," Tony said, "is the truth. If they'd go out and tell the truth, that'd be the most sensational story that ever happened."
Later I made a call to the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Office in which I learned that the population of the Saugus-Newhall fringelands is sixty thousand and was
projected to triple by 1990. Land prices could be expected to do the same. Biff Alexander had told me that the Alamos said that if they were to die, everyone would share in the church, but that they had never signed any papers to that effect. I reflected that if Susan Alamo were to pass on first . . . that would leave Tony Alamo—the man who used to take "complete unknowns" to stardom, who likes Cadillacs and "yes men," who met Jesus the Nazarene while borrowing money, who joined Susan's small Bible class when things were simpler, who allegedly skipped out on a $14,000 bill after being Saved—the pastor of a very wealthy church.
Holy Saturday evening at the Alamo Foundation: a tomato stuffed with beans for dinner, a brief chant in the ratbox, followed by some Bible study and a course in political science. The communists, I learned, were harbingers of the Apocalypse: the very chaos the Bible prophesied for the last days. Frank had looked into politics "pretty deep below the surface." While the rest of us have been treading water, trying to assimilate a mass of conflicting facts and opinions, Frank told me that he had seen clear to the slimy bottom. A nice lady from the John Birch Society—very interested in the Bible—occasionally stops in on Monday afternoons to give a slide show and a talk.
