Saints and Sinners: Walker Railey, Jimmy Swaggart, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Anton LaVey, Will Campbell , Matthew Fox by Lawrence Wright

Author:Lawrence Wright [Wright, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Religion, Biography, History, United States
ISBN: 9780307790712
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1993-04-12T14:00:00+00:00

Blanche Barton had a cold. She stuck a package of tissues in her purse and glanced outside. “It’s nice out,” she said, looking at the fog and the light, chilly rain.

It was sundown, and LaVey was just rising. He sleeps, he says, in four-hour stretches. While we waited for him to emerge, I roamed around the small parlor, to which—with the exception of the kitchen and the bathroom—I had been restricted. It was a great frustration for me, because I knew from old newspaper accounts and from speaking to former associates of LaVey’s that there really were secret passages and amazing artifacts buried in this thirteen-room house. A trapdoor to the basement, for instance, leads to his famous “Den of Iniquity,” where he keeps his Hammond organ, a Rock-ola jukebox, and his mannequins—Steve the sailor, Bonita the whore, Fritz the cabbie, and Gwen the drunk, who is passed out on a bar stool with a puddle of urine on the floor beneath her. It is LaVey’s latest attempt at a “total environment,” one in which time stands still. Downstairs, it is 1944.

“Anton literally has created an underground world in his basement,” says his old friend Kenneth Anger, the filmmaker and author of the scandalous exposé Hollywood Babylon. “We share a fondness for mannequins,” Anger says sweetly. When he and LaVey met, “it was just like a friend I should have known forever. We’ve never had a quarrel.”

They met in the sixties, when Anger was working on Invocation of My Demon Brother, a film version of the black mass. Anger fell in with an informal group of friends who met every Friday evening in LaVey’s house to discuss the occult. They called themselves the Magic Circle. It was this group that eventually became the nucleus of the Church of Satan. They included novelist Stephen Schweck; a Danish baroness named Carin de Plessen; Donald Werby, one of the wealthiest property owners in the city, and Werby’s wife, Willie. Along with this group was a selection of science-fiction writers, a tattoo artist, a dildo manufacturer, and a handful of San Francisco policemen. These meetings became famous in the city, and eventually LaVey opened them to the public, charging $2.50 a head to hear him lecture on “Fortune Telling and Character Analysis” or “Love Potions and Monkey Glands.” Vampires, werewolves, freaks, homunculi, bondage and torture, moon madness—it was a survey course in the weird and forbidden. One memorable evening LaVey spoke on the subject of cannibalism, and his wife—his second wife, a slender blonde named Diane—served a small portion of a human thigh, which a doctor friend had salvaged from an autopsy.

Eventually Anger would cast LaVey in his film, in the role of His Satanic Majesty. The film also featured Anger’s roommate and protégé, Bobby Beausoleil, as Lucifer. By the time the film was released, Beausoleil had run off to join Charles Manson. LaVey says Manson himself was an occasional visitor to his lectures on magic.

I had run into Anger in Los Angeles, in the company of LaVey’s younger daughter, Zeena, an exotic blonde in her early twenties.

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