EVERY WOMAN'S NEED

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXV, Issue 3374, 6 October 1931, Page 2

EVERY WOMAN'S NEED

AN EVANGELIST’S CREED. ; WHY “AIMEE” WED. Los Angeles, September 14. “Every woman, I don’t care who she is, wants somebody to love, and be loved by.” So says Mrs. Aimee Macpherson, self-styled “Star Saleswoman of God,” who has just crowded into a life already filled with intrigue, love, dim-lit evangelism, costly silk stockings and bursting collection boxes, another thrill—the “Four Square Gospeller” of Los Angeles has marmarried again.

Just when publicity was beginning to wane, and the newspapers had almost forgotten the time huge crowds knelt all night on the beach and aeroplanes and glass-bottomed rowing boats searched vainly for the body of the supposedly drowned evangelist, Aimee sprang her latest tit-bit.

Into her bedroom was brought a microphone, and Aimee, sitting up in pyjamas that are said to have cost more than Norman Talmadge’s, broadcast the news.

“Everybody else has a husband, so why shouldn’t I?” she said.

And then

“It’s strange to wake up and know that there’s a man in the house,” she giggled. The evangelist will retain the name Macpherson for business or evangelical reasons —the two are almost synonymous in the Angelus Temple, christened by her “The House That Gold Built,” and able to seat 5000 comfortably. Her latest husband, David Sutton, a singer in her choir of 50 whiterobed choristers (supported by a brass band of 45 pieces that is said to have made Jack Hylton envious), is no usual man. He is fair, weighs 16st. 111 b., and his age is 30 to Aimee’s 40.

In announcing their happiness, the evangelist explained that, although ordinarily she opposes the marriage of divorced persons, she considers that her case is unusual, especially as 17 years have lapsed si'nce Harold Macpherson left her.

Born in poverty, she began her evangelism at 17, married unhappily, and, soon after her husband died, sprang into fame as a preacher. Elmer Gantry would have been a tyro to Aimee. Her preaching is said to have smashed her other romance, Harold Macpherson leaving her—she divorced him for desertion later—because she took to the pulpit, or platform, before her child, Roberta, was born.

So the evangelist, kept under a tight rein by her sixty-odd-year-old mother —“Aimee has no idea of money; she’ll spend half the collection on a pair of silk* stockings”'— went on her Bible-spreading way, single again divorced from love — until in 1926 wireless operator Kenneth Ormiston well known on the Australian Matson line run, became mixed up in the greatest sensation the West Coast of America has known.

Aimee was believed to have been drowned. Crowds of her followers flung themselves in spiritual agony on the gold sands, and poured out their prayers for her return. Then suddenly the police stopped searching, and Kenneth Ormiston, who had been installed as head of the huge broadcasting" station in the Angelus, which enables Aimee to preach to 50,000 people at * the same time, came into the limelight. He had disappeared a day or two before Aimee, and when he turned up a few days later, was asked where the two of them had been. He denied everything. A month later the evengelist was discovered in a hospital at Douglas, Arizona ,with a romantic story of having been kidnapped by Mexican bandits.

“An absurd tale to cover a vulgar intrigue,” said the district attorney. “Like another Bunyan, I’ll preach the gospel from behind prison bars,” snapped back Aimee, and such a hold did she have on her converts that money continued to pour into the coffers on her behalf.

A few months ago Mrs. Macpherson took her daughter to Hongkong, where the latter was born, and Robert was married in the East.