The Road to Jonestown

by Jeff Guinn

  Though Jones actively built a faithful San Francisco Temple congregation from new followers lured from other churches, he refrained from similar aggression in city politics. Providing adequate housing for low-income residents wasn’t a controversy limited to the Fillmore District. Though the effort was most extensive in the Western Addition, all over San Francisco houses, apartments, and hotels considered eyesores were being bulldozed in the name of urban renewal and in the service of tourism. In its early days in Mendocino County, Peoples Temple staged a controversial antiwar march down the main streets of Ukiah. Jones said then, “We’re here, so they’ve got to know who we are.” He wasn’t ready for his new city to know yet. In these first months in San Francisco, not a single Temple member joined WACO sit-ins in front of Redevelopment Agency bulldozers. San Francisco mayor Joseph Alioto faced constant, if essentially futile, criticism from blacks, gays, and other city disenfranchised, but Peoples Temple members sent him gifts of homemade candy and bought a bloc of seats at an Alioto fund-raiser.

  Jones maintained a public attitude of pious modesty. He and his people were pleased to be in San Francisco doing good works inspired by the example of Jesus Christ. They aspired to nothing beyond loving service. Privately, Jones reveled in his initial San Francisco foothold and took frequent advantage of new proximity to big-city movie theaters and fine restaurants. Carolyn Layton was his constant companion on these outings. Sometimes they brought Lew, Stephan, Jimmy, and Tim along, but just as often they left the teens in the care of Mike and Suzanne Cartmell, who had an apartment conveniently nearby. The young married couple didn’t enjoy being babysitters on demand—the Jones brothers tended to be rowdy and were always ravenous, emptying the Cartmells’ refrigerator. But Jones and Carolyn never asked if they’d mind watching the boys or offered to restock their groceries.

  Whether enjoying a night out as a couple or else bringing along the children, Jones and Carolyn made no pretense of feeling guilty about enjoying leisure time away from Temple pressures. Once, Planning Commission members were left waiting at a meeting called by Jones while he and Carolyn and the boys lingered over dinner. Jim Jones Jr. remembers that when one of the brothers reminded the adults that the P.C. was supposed to already be in session “Carolyn just laughed, and I guess my dad did, too.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  NARROW ESCAPES

  In San Francisco and Los Angeles, Jones continued the Temple tradition of open and closed meetings. Only in closed meetings did he rant for hours about outside enemies, and how everyone in the Temple was in constant danger, himself most of all. The threats Jones most commonly cited were nuclear war, the U.S. government in general, and the CIA and the FBI in particular. Sometimes he warned of other dangers, first asking the organist to play soft music while he shared alerts with Temple members through his gift of prophecy. These were much more basic than government plots and usually involved relatively mundane, daily activities. No one was to ride a motorcycle for a month—Jones had a vision of spinning wheels, bent handlebars, broken bodies. Jones once urged followers not to use Crest toothpaste: “The only toothpaste that will make your gums resistant to atomic radiation is Phillips toothpaste.”

  But warnings went only so far in assuring that followers remained devoted, that they believed unreservedly that only Jim Jones and his powers stood between them and annihilation by Temple enemies. Healings and resurrections during services weren’t quite enough. There were only so many variations; though they continued to astound newcomers, to a certain extent those who’d followed Jones for a few years or all the way back to Indiana had already seen these apparent miracles countless times before. Something new for the longtime loyalists, something unforgettably dramatic, was necessary.

  During the summer of 1972, when so much of his time and attention were devoted to opening temples in Los Angeles and San Francisco, Jones still conducted some weekend services and weekday catharsis sessions back in Redwood Valley. That was where many veteran followers still lived, dutifully attending the temple there if Jones didn’t require them to fill seats in the newly established pair of churches. The Redwood Valley meetings were often led by Archie Ijames and Jack Beam and occasionally Marceline, though more and more she was required to lead weekend services in either Los Angeles or San Francisco while Jones presided in the other city.

  On a pleasant day when Jones was present, Redwood Valley members enjoyed a late-afternoon potluck meal in the temple parking lot during the break between morning and evening services. It was a smaller congregation than those in the big cities, perhaps a few hundred followers. Jones, clad in a mustard-colored shirt, mingled with his followers, seemingly in a fine mood. Almost everyone had the opportunity to shake Father’s hand or share a warm hug with him. As evening approached and the sky began to darken slightly, the chatter and laughter were drowned out by loud booms, one or two or three of them—witnesses could never agree. Someone shouted that these were rifle shots; people screamed and scattered.

  Jim Jones slumped on the parking lot pavement, his yellow shirt suddenly splotched with red. He appeared to be limp, almost certainly dead based on the amount of gore, but when Stephan Jones’s pet dog went charging into the vineyard on one side of the lot, Jones somehow raised himself to sitting position, pointed to the opposite end, and wheezed, “It’s over there, it’s over this way,” before collapsing again. Temple members racing after the dog reversed direction. Jones had pointed in the general vicinity of a hill, beyond which was a house owned by a Redwood Valley local known to be hostile toward the Temple. But no movement could be discerned at the hill’s crest, so everyone returned to the side of their stricken leader. Marceline Jones crouched over her husband; Jack Beam helped lift him to his feet. As the rest of the Temple members stared, many of them sobbing, Marceline and Beam, along with a few others, helped Jones back into his house adjacent to the church and parking lot. The door closed behind them. Outside, followers stood in anguished vigil, awaiting the inevitable news that Father had died.

  Half an hour later, someone announced that the evening service was beginning as scheduled. People filed sorrowfully into the church—perhaps this was when Father’s death would be formally announced. Instead, Jones himself came striding to the front, followed by Beam and Marceline and the others who’d carried him off after the shooting. “Tell them,” he demanded, and they took turns rhapsodizing about the miracle that had just taken place—Father healed himself! Jack Beam brandished the gory yellow shirt. Jones invited everyone to examine his chest. There was no wound, just a spot, something like a small indentation, where Jones said the bullet had torn through. He declared that this assassination attempt, which would have been successful but for his amazing healing power, proved that enemies with murder on their minds lurked everywhere. Constant vigilance was mandatory. Security at the Redwood Valley temple, and in San Francisco and Los Angeles, would be stepped up—surely everyone now understood the danger that they all were in.

  Jones also explained the gesture he’d made immediately after being shot, when he redirected those racing toward the vineyard. Stephan’s dog had been right. The shooter really was in the vineyard, Jones said, but in his infinite mercy he hadn’t wanted his followers to tear the would-be assassin to pieces with their bare hands, which, in their rage and sorrow, they certainly would have done. So he sent them off in the opposite direction, allowing the shooter to escape with his life. Everyone was so relieved that Father was alive, and so thrilled by this demonstration of his power, that no one suggested calling the police to report the incident. The Redwood Valley temple was sufficiently set apart from the rest of town so that no one else apparently heard the gunfire and contacted the authorities to investigate. This would never have been the case at the San Francisco or Los Angeles temples. Someone would have summoned the police or called for an ambulance. Jones’s supposed fatal wound would have been examined on the spot by outsiders. But in Redwood Valley the incident was kept in-house by the Temple—a private, unforgetta
ble manifestation of Jones’s healing gift that amazed those who’d been following him longest. Afterward, more of the Temple security guards were armed; some carried rifles in addition to handguns.

  * * *

  Another assault on Jones came in September 1972, this one in print and very real rather than staged. Jones could orchestrate his own apparent shooting and resurrection, but prominent San Francisco Examiner columnist Lester Kinsolving was beyond his control.

  In the early 1970s, San Francisco’s two major daily newspapers were engaged in a philosophical slugfest. The Chronicle embraced the colorful, sometimes whimsical, nature of the city, with the intention of appealing to the widest possible readership. The paper covered all the so-called hard news, but almost every day there was something fun to read in the Chronicle. Some of the city’s most famous rock bands like Jefferson Airplane credited Chronicle music critic Ralph Gleason’s coverage with helping them build an audience. Columnist Herb Caen entertained subscribers with daily doses of show business rumor, political gossip, and other tidbits that allowed his readers to feel that they were insiders, too. The Chronicle didn’t shy away from investigative journalism, but one of its most exhaustive series probed why the quality of coffee in San Francisco restaurants and cafés was so uniformly poor. The overall approach was a gamble that worked. Chronicle circulation had lagged behind that of the rival Examiner, but by the late 1960s and early 1970s, thanks to a deliberately lighthearted approach, it had pulled well ahead.

  The Examiner took a sterner approach. Coverage of a major city was serious business; frivolity was for lesser publications. San Francisco business and political leaders much preferred the Examiner to the Chronicle, with good reason: its editorial tone reflected their own conservative beliefs. The Chronicle had Caen, blabbing on about who was seen drinking after hours and where in the city he’d nicknamed “Baghdad by the Bay.” By contrast, the Examiner offered religion reporter and columnist Kinsolving, by background a fourth-generation Episcopal priest who turned to journalism after years spent working in the church hierarchy.

  Jones had already made friendly connections at the Chronicle, and felt confident that he could essentially control coverage in both major San Francisco dailies just as he did with the much smaller newspaper in Ukiah. Jones had no sense that when two daily newspapers competed for primacy in a major city, each was constantly on the lookout for sensational stories that would one-up the other. In the late summer of 1972, Kinsolving apparently found one.

  Cindy Pickering, a reporter for the Indianapolis Star, wanted to keep tabs on Jones and the Temple after the Star’s sensational stories about Jones’s claim in Indiana a year earlier of successfully raising the dead. Learning that the Temple was establishing a new San Francisco church, she wrote to the Examiner news department asking for details. Kinsolving’s editors forwarded the letter to him. He’d already heard rumors about Peoples Temple, and the Star’s stories intrigued him enough to contact the Ukiah Daily Journal and ask what they knew about this church and self-proclaimed healer. Kinsolving’s suspicions were aroused when dozens of letters praising Jones and the Temple began arriving at the Examiner, and when he learned that management at the Daily Journal had contacted a Temple official to warn him that a San Francisco reporter was snooping around. That official was Tim Stoen, whom Kinsolving discovered worked in the Mendocino County district attorney’s office.

  His investigative instincts now thoroughly aroused, Kinsolving got to work. He went with a photographer to a Redwood Valley service. The photographer wasn’t allowed inside, but he and Kinsolving saw several armed bodyguards in the parking lot. At a second service Kinsolving attended in San Francisco, Jones, who obviously knew the reporter was present, put on a show, which included two resuscitations of followers who apparently died, as well as other healings. But he also took great pains in responding after a “healed” follower cried out that Jones was Jesus: “What do you mean by that? If you believe that I am the Son of God in that I am filled with love, I can accept that. I won’t knock what works for you—but I don’t want to be interpreted as the creator of the universe. If you say, ‘He is God,’ some people will think you are nuts. They can’t relate. I’m glad that you were healed, but I’m really only a messenger of God. I have a paranormal ability in healing.”

  Kinsolving began looking for sources who didn’t idolize Jones, and besides the same ministers of black San Francisco churches who’d previously complained to Carlton Goodlett, he also found a few former Temple members who were willing to talk. Tim Stoen didn’t help the situation when, acting on Jones’s behalf, he sent Kinsolving a letter explaining why the reporter shouldn’t write an article about Jones: “Whenever there is publicity, the extremists seem to show themselves.” In the same letter, Stoen swore that “Jim has been the means by which forty persons have literally been brought back from the dead this year,” and offered a graphic account of resurrections by Jones that he had personally witnessed.

  Negative press coverage, especially in the conservative Examiner, was exactly what Jones didn’t want as he attempted the tricky task of building a base congregation of San Francisco’s disenfranchised without alienating its white power structure. But beginning on Sunday, September 17, 1972, he got that and more, the first in what was advertised to be a series of eight articles, each exposing apparent fraud and even violence on the part of Jones and the Temple. Sunday morning’s headline was “The Prophet Who Raises the Dead.” In short, dramatic paragraphs, Kinsolving presented an image bound to startle, and almost certainly repulse, any reader:

  REDWOOD VALLEY—A man they call The Prophet is attracting extraordinary crowds from extraordinary distances to his People’s [sic] Temple Christian (Disciples) Church in this Mendocino County hamlet.

  His followers say he can raise the dead.

  . . . And one director claims that the Prophet has returned life to “more than 40 persons . . . people stiff as a board, tongues hanging out, eyes set, skin graying, and all vital signs absent.”

  There was more, including descriptions of “impressively armed guards . . . attendants at services [wearing] pistols in their gun belts.” Kinsolving related how the Ukiah newspaper was apparently under Temple control, and emphasized that Mendocino County “assistant prosecuting attorney” Timothy O. Stoen doubled as “assistant to The Prophet.” Kinsolving’s description of other Temple works besides Jones’s “claim[ed] . . . resurrections” was confined to two sentences: “A 40-acre children’s home, 3 convalescent centers, and 3 college dormitories. Other operations: A heroin rehabilitation center and, in the words of one of the Temple’s three attorneys, ‘our own welfare system.’ ”

  Even these were presented in terms of income rather than people served: “ ‘Grand total income’ is said to have been $396,000 for the year ending June 30, 1972.’ ” And, after extensively quoting from Stoen’s letter about Jones’s excessive personal modesty, Kinsolving neatly skewered the Temple leader’s obvious ego: “Stoen’s written affirmation of the self-effacement of The Prophet did not include any explanation for the three tables just outside the main entrance of the People’s [sic] Temple. These tables are loaded with either photographs, or neck pieces and lockets—all bearing the image of the Rev. Mr. Jones, and on sale at prices running from $1.50 to $6.00.”

  Kinsolving closed out his Sunday installment with a description of the Temple’s frantic efforts to persuade the Examiner not to run any story and that Stoen swears his leader “ ‘wears only used clothing and takes in abandoned animals.’ Meanwhile, [Jones’s] sturdy bodyguards lend the temporal assurance that the Temple of The Prophet is the best-armed house of God in the land.”

  * * *

  The Sunday article was a blow to Jones and the Temple, but there were errors in Kinsolving’s reporting, from adding an extraneous apostrophe in “People’s” to stating that Jones’s followers routinely referred to him as “The Prophet.” Though Jones frequently claimed to be a prophet, among other things, he was always
called “Jim” or “Father.” Other information in the story was incorrect—Kinsolving identified eleven Greyhounds when there were a dozen, and claimed “no less than 165 Indianapolis Temple-ites” followed Jones from Indianapolis to Redwood Valley when it was slightly more than half that number. Though reportorial balance was expected from established, big-city daily newspapers, even in the hardest-hitting investigative stories, Kinsolving wrote nothing about those genuinely served by Temple outreach programs. Almost one-third of the article was based on a single letter from Tim Stoen. Jones would have been justified in making a controlled complaint to the Examiner, contacting its newsroom that same day and formally requesting corrections, though not a complete retraction since some of what Kinsolving wrote was based on his first-person observations, and also on a letter Jones could not deny that Tim Stoen had written.

  Instead, Jones panicked, and rather than acting immediately, waited with a mounting sense of horror to see what the Examiner would print the next day. The promise of an eight-day series, and the tone of the first installment, indicated that the reporter must have accumulated a considerable amount of additional, damaging research material. To a far greater extent than even his closest intimate among Temple followers, Jones realized all the questionable things he’d done—what had Kinsolving discovered?

  Monday’s article—“ ‘Healing’ Prophet Hailed as God at S.F. Revival”—reemphasized Jones’s healing displays during Temple services, touched on the claim by a healed follower that Jones was God and his response, and described the armed guards in the Temple parking lot. A Marceline Jones musical solo was described: the “trim blonde” sang “My Black Baby” while Jimmy Jones (“a handsome boy of 14”) stood nearby. Marceline’s performance of that song was a Temple standby. Temple music directors had rewritten a few lyrics to “Brown Baby,” a tune popularized by Nina Simone. Temple songs were often revamped versions of popular hits.