The city’s reputation as the center of...

The city’s reputation as the center of spiritual showmanship began on New Year’s Day, 1923, at the dedication of the Angelus Temple overlooking Echo Park Lake.

An immense concrete building, with twin broadcasting towers and a revolving cross rimmed in neon lights perched on a domed roof, opened its doors on that day during the Roaring Twenties. It soon became world famous as the spiritual and theatrical base for the flamboyant Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.

It was designed to be like a Broadway theater. Tiered rows of 5,300 seats dropped to the orchestra pit, where a young Anthony Quinn once played saxophone in the temple’s band, and then to the stage where Sister Aimee sat on a red velvet-cushioned chair.

To the sound of Sister Aimee’s golden voice was added music from the temple’s 30-foot golden organ; behind it all was a mural of Jesus with his hands outstretched toward Sister Aimee’s flock.

The Canadian-born Aimee Kennedy received her calling when she was 18 years old, at a revival meeting in Canada. She wrote that she gave herself to Christ in response to the preaching of Robert Semple, an Irish Pentecostalist whom she married.

Two years later, Semple died of dysentery in Hong Kong, where they had gone as missionaries. Aimee returned to America with a baby daughter and married Harold (Mack) McPherson, a solid, unglamorous accountant with whom she had a son.

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The honeymoon was soon over and Aimee decided her mission was to preach. Mack wanted no part of a preacher’s life and took off. The honey-haired Aimee barely noticed.

So she, her children and her iron-willed mother, Minnie (Ma) Kennedy, hit the road with $100, leaving Philadelphia in an Oldsmobile and showing up in the promised land of Los Angeles in 1918.

She started receiving a lot of attention after she donned a leather cap with goggles and scattered religious leaflets from an airplane, and began holding revival meetings at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Hall and in tents. It was the kind of showmanship that would draw huge crowds in later years.

In a city whose roots were new and fragile, whose residents flocked here by the hundreds, Sister Aimee’s faith promised a new and striking Los Angeles tradition. Her upbeat spiritualism--a blend of entertainment, religious faith and boosterism--would help to lead many Angelenos through the Depression.

From the Jazz Age to World War II, she would be as famous and popular as any movie star, delivering a good show and sermon. She once compared Jesus Christ to the Lone Ranger, and once drove--dressed as a cop--onto the church stage on a motorcycle. “Stop!” she cried to the faithful, “You’re speeding to ruin.”

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And she was as effective at raising money as she was at saving souls.

She would tell her Sabbath crowds: “I have a disease, an incurable disease. It is aggravated by the clinking of metal . . . but the rustle of that green stuff soothes it!” She was also known to instruct her congregation of 30,000 at collection time: “Sister has a headache tonight. Just quiet money please.”

As the collection plates filled up with money, so did the “miracle room” fill up with crutches and wheelchairs from the healed. Her claims to miraculous healing brought in thousands, some of them suffering from incurable diseases, but many more hoping to witness firsthand the miracle cures they had heard of. One 10-year-old victim of polio carried his shoes with him when he was brought up to her, so confident was he that he would walk again--and he did.

She soon extended her reach beyond the lakefront church. A year after the temple was opened, Sister Aimee began broadcasting “The Sunshine Hour” every morning over radio station KFSG, which stood for Kalling Foursquare Gospel, the name of her church.

It was the radio station that proved her downfall--or rather, the radio station’s onetime engineer, a married man named Kenneth Ormiston.

On May 18, 1926, Sister Aimee, then 36, disappeared while swimming at Venice Beach. Hundreds knelt on the beach for days, praying and scanning the horizon for her. One young man shouted that he was going after her, and plunged into the sea, and drowned.

Sister Aimee finally resurfaced 36 days later in Douglas, Ariz., telling a harrowing tale of kidnap by “Jake,” “Rose” and “Steve.” Sister Aimee returned triumphantly to Los Angeles, where 100,000 lined the streets to greet her rose-draped car.

Her followers believed her but authorities did not, and took her to court for “criminal (conspiracy) to commit acts injurious to public morals and to prevent and obstruct justice.”

For months, the burning question in a Los Angeles courtroom was whether Aimee Semple McPherson had been kidnaped as she claimed, or had she run off to Carmel with Ormiston

Authorities never found Jake, Steve or Rose. They suspected that she actually had a tryst with an engineer on her Christian radio station--and had tried to cover up for her absence by her vanishing act off Venice Beach and her “miraculous” reappearance.

But despite the lurid court hearings, with evidence of some clandestine rendezvous in a Carmel motel and allegations of a cover-up, the charges were dropped by the district attorney.

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Sister Aimee called the scandal a plot hatched by the devil, and she embarked on a “Vindication Tour.”

Although the faithful kept coming, her reputation was blemished and her popularity with the public and press began to fade.

In 1944, Sister Aimee died of a barbiturate overdose while touring Oakland. Her body was brought back to Los Angeles, and more than 40,000 mourners prayed at her coffin. She was dressed in the white dress and a gray-lined navy cloak that had become a spiritual uniform. She was succeeded as president by her son, Rolf McPherson. He retired in 1988, but he is still active in the church.

Sister Aimee, a charismatic lightning rod, gained fame and fortune from her ability to denounce sin in entertaining ways. She was a pioneer who blazed a trail for other women ministers and established 411 Foursquare Gospel churches in the United States, half of which were run by women ministers.

Today, the Angelus Temple, headquarters of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, has grown to 1.73 million members at 25,300 churches and meeting sites worldwide.

The church celebrates Oct. 9, Sister Aimee’s birthday, as Founder’s Day.