Aimee Semple McPherson was barefoot when she left Room 202 at the Ocean View Hotel. Wearing only a bathing suit, a dressing gown, and a swim cap, McPherson—the founder of one of America’s first megachurches and just about the most famous woman in the country—had a street waffle for lunch, then settled in the shade of an umbrella just north of Venice Beach to work on a sermon.

It was May 18, 1926, and the thirty-five-year-old McPherson was known to critics and champions alike as “God’s Best Publicity Agent.” McPherson rose to prominence during the golden age of P.R., when Ivy Lee was talking up the Rockefellers and the Democratic Party and Edward Bernays was selling everything from Dixie cups to the First World War. In keeping with the times, McPherson used mass media to make herself into a master of soul craft and self-promotion, laying hands on thousands of sick parishioners and preaching practically seven days a week to thousands more until her death, in 1944. Her sermons featured elaborate sets and musical numbers, borrowed from the nearby and nascent film industry, including boxing rings in which she knocked out the Devil and a motorcycle that she wheeled across a stage with sirens wailing while calling herself one of the Lord’s patrolmen. “Half your success is due to your magnetic appeal,” Charlie Chaplin once told her, “half due to the props and lights.”

More recognizable than the Pope, McPherson was often besieged by followers, but the ocean offered an escape from their attention, and she liked going to the beach to read Scripture and to write, and then to take a break from both to swim. That May afternoon, she chose a title for her sermon, “Light & Darkness,” and wrote for almost an hour before wading into the water. Jonah was swallowed by a whale on his way to Tarshish, and St. Paul was shipwrecked off the coast of Malta, but no one knows what happened to McPherson after she wrote the following in her notebook: “It had been that way since the beginning. The glint of the sun, gleaming light, on the tops, and shadow, darkness in the troughs. Ah, light and darkness all over the earth, everywhere.”

More than a month later, and two days after her own memorial service, the lady preacher reappeared, still barefoot but now wandering around a Mexican desert, hundreds of miles away. McPherson never wavered in her version of what had occurred, but for the rest of her life her friends and family, her followers and detractors, the newspapers and even the courts debated where she went and what she did during the five weeks she was missing. She became—as the journalist Claire Hoffman argues in a new biography—a schismatic figure in religious history: blessed sister to some, conniving sinner to others.

McPherson’s Angelus Temple, in Echo Park, still stands, although her celebrity has largely faded compared with the days when she was played by Faye Dunaway in a Hallmark movie and inspired one fictional character after another: Reno Sweeney, in Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes”; Sister Sharon Falconer, in Sinclair Lewis’s “Elmer Gantry”; and Mrs. Melrose Ape, in Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies.” Not even Pete Seeger’s goofy refrains of “hi dee hi dee hi dee hi” and “ho dee ho dee ho dee ho” would reliably get the answer now that they did when the folksinger first crooned: “Did you ever hear the story of Aimee McPherson?”

McPherson was born in 1890 in Ontario to Mildred Kennedy, an orphan who became a teen-age bride. When she was just twelve, Kennedy, who went by Minnie and then Ma, joined the Salvation Army, an organization not yet known for its thrift stores but storied for its promise of “soup, soap, and salvation,” which Minnie needed as much as anyone until she found work as a maid for a farmer whose wife was sick. After that wife died, the fifty-year-old farmer, James Kennedy, married the fifteen-year-old Minnie, who soon had a daughter to take with her to Salvationist meetings.

Like the future congressman John Lewis preaching to his family’s chickens as a child, the young Aimee Semple McPherson loved to play church, arranging her toys as if they were a congregation, sermonizing and singing them hymns. She claimed to have memorized most of the Bible by age five, and when she started school she made a drum kit and led the other children around the schoolyard like she was a sergeant major and they her Salvation Army band. Raised by parents who eschewed alcohol, dancing, tobacco, and anything else Lucifer might like, McPherson once persuaded her father to take her to a “Holy Ghost” revival, where she hoped to see some of the charismatic Christians known as Holy Rollers—the spiritual equivalent of catching a glimpse of Elvis on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” At first, she disapproved of the alarming teakettle-like shouts of “amen” and “hallelujah,” but soon she found herself taken by the preaching, drawn into the shaking and the swaying, rapt when much of the room fell to the floor in the ecstasy of the Holy Spirit.

By the time that spirit found McPherson, Pentecostalism had travelled a long way from Topeka, where the preacher Charles Fox Parham founded it just after the turn of the century. One of the many strengths of “Sister, Sinner” is Hoffman’s nuanced treatment of the breakaway Protestant movements of this period, when the factions of old-time and newfangled religion fought their way across the American landscape. Parham, a former Methodist married to a woman from a Quaker family, had come to Kansas from Iowa, after touring holiness camps and talking with global missionaries, some of whom told him about seeing recent converts slip into trances and speak in tongues. Convinced that these were signs of the Second Coming, Parham sought to hasten Christ’s return by training his followers in gifts of the spirit like those found in the Acts of the Apostles—everything from faith healing and prophecy to glossolalia.

Parham preached that his was a new apostolic age, and he inspired a flock of notable disciples. These included William J. Seymour, the son of former slaves, who escaped poverty in Louisiana and went on to lead the Azusa Street Revival, in Los Angeles, and Robert James Semple, an Irish department-store clerk who left the sales floor for the sawdust trail, where, in the winter of 1907, he preached Pentecostalism so passionately that McPherson fell newly in love not only with Jesus but also with him. Instead of starting her senior year of high school, she married Semple and committed herself to a life of evangelism.

In 1909, she and her husband were both ordained in Chicago. They had travelled there together from Canada, and then headed to Europe, where they met his family in Ireland, before making their way to Hong Kong to spread the Gospel. While there, they got malaria, and Semple died a month before McPherson gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Roberta. It was Minnie who took up a collection to bring her stranded daughter and granddaughter home, getting them seats on a ship called the Empress of China, which carried the pair from Shanghai to California. McPherson preached aboard the ship, and its passengers, spellbound by her blossoming charisma and moved by her plight, gathered just enough funds to buy the young widow and her baby train tickets to New York City, where Minnie would meet them in the fall of 1910. All along the route, McPherson said, the train’s wheels clicked and clacked a question: “What’ll you do? What’ll you do? What’ll you do?”

At first, the answer was: not much. Mother and daughter and granddaughter fell back into the arms of the Salvation Army, with McPherson keeping some of the coins she collected while ringing a bell in theatres up and down Broadway. She still wanted to serve God, but she had left most of her nerve and verve in the Happy Valley Cemetery, where Semple was buried. Then she met Harold McPherson—neither a charismatic preacher nor a courageous missionary but an accountant who had dropped out of a Baptist college in Missouri. She was down at the heels; he was head over heels. When Harold proposed, McPherson accepted on the condition that God would be her real husband, and should He “call me to go to Africa or India, or to the Island of the Sea, no matter where or when, I must obey God first of all.”

Harold agreed, but didn’t exactly acquiesce, hoping that his bride would simply settle into life as a happy homemaker. The newlyweds soon left New York and ended up, fittingly, in Providence, where McPherson had another baby, a boy named Rolf. Although Harold encouraged his wife to dust the furniture and feed her two children, those children watched as their mother seemed to lose her mind, shuttering all the windows, refusing to leave her bed, and crying out for Christ from behind her locked bedroom door. Within a year, her condition had become so severe that she went into the hospital, the first in a series of admissions, for vomiting and heart tremors, one nervous breakdown and then another, followed by a hysterectomy. “The poor, unconscious ‘what-there-was-left-of me’ was put back in bed,” she recalled after the surgery. “I opened my eyes on the white walls of the hospital—quivering with pain from head to foot, which, instead of growing better grew worse and worse.” Minnie was summoned more than once to her daughter’s bedside to say goodbye, but, in 1915, a different voice rescued McPherson from death and despair. “GO! Do the work of an evangelist,” she heard one winter day. “Preach the Word ‘The time is short; I am coming soon.’ ”

On this occasion, McPherson’s answer to God’s call was a definitive yes. Her pain and depression disappeared as soon as she’d said it, and she felt giddy with certainty that God not only had healed her but was calling her to new ventures; when she left the hospital, it was for the streets. She took her children, abandoned her husband, and set off to preach again, starting with “hallelujah runs” near where she’d grown up, in Canada. She would stand silently on a chair on the sidewalk, then raise her hands toward Heaven until strangers stopped to ask what she was doing. Once a crowd formed, she’d jump down and shout, “Quick! Come with me,” and run into a nearby theatre. An usher would lock the door behind anyone who’d followed her into the venue, and she’d work to captivate the audience she had captured.

Around this time, McPherson began wearing white nursing uniforms and answering to Sister. She bought a revival tent, and then, after a few successful weeks, she invited Harold to join her. “I have tried to walk your way and have failed,” she wrote to him in a telegram. “Won’t you come now and walk my way?” Together, they graduated from travelling by foot to road-tripping, driving around New England, then expanding their circuit to the entire Eastern Seaboard. Following a prophecy that McPherson believed was calling her to Florida, of all places, they ended up buying an Oldsmobile they dubbed the Gospel Car, painting “JESUS IS COMING SOON—GET READY” on one side and on the other, more ominously, “WHERE WILL YOU SPEND ETERNITY?”

But McPherson mostly preached love, not fear. A novelty of sorts as a “lady preacher,” she always attracted intrigue and occasionally censure, but she was ready with a sharp defense whenever someone quoted Corinthians or Timothy to condemn female ministers. After Pentecostalism divided along racial lines, she still sometimes held integrated religious meetings, periodically pitching her tent in Black camps and even requesting that a Black preacher baptize her son. If her gender and racial politics gave certain people pause, her ministry gave many others hope, and she quickly outgrew her tents and the small municipalities where she’d first staked them. Some revival-goers said she worked the pews so hard that she ended any service soggy with sweat, water pouring out of her shoes. Her crowds multiplied exponentially once she began performing miracles—leaving arenas, opera houses, and convention centers littered with discarded canes, casts, crutches, and wheelchairs as parishioner after parishioner claimed to have been healed by her laying on of hands.

Word of mouth might have been enough for Jesus, but Minnie was relentless in promoting her daughter’s ministry, and McPherson herself embraced one medium after another for spreading her message. Mother and daughter saw to the distribution of flyers, postcards, and advertising ahead of every appearance. They wielded megaphones, started a magazine to disseminate transcripts of McPherson’s sermons, and opened a Bible college to train disciples. Calling herself Your Sister in the King’s Glad Service, McPherson published an autobiography, and told her life story on any radio station that would air it. Realizing the potential of that technology, she then started her own radio station, Kall Four Square Gospel (KFSG), becoming one of the first women in the United States to hold a broadcast license. She once told reporters to meet her at a local airfield, where she preached a short sermon, climbed into an airplane, took off, and dropped fifteen thousand leaflets advertising her next revival series, which went on to attract more than ten thousand people.

In 1918, after Roberta almost died of pneumonia, Sister Aimee heard another voice, this one telling her to pack up the family and move to California. Once again, Harold stayed behind, while she loaded her mother and two children into the Gospel Car, taking two months to travel across the country. They arrived in Los Angeles as the city’s population was booming, transforming from a farming-and-ranching town to a modern metropolis, wild with drugs, prostitution, and gambling, just waiting for a savior.

McPherson seemed like an angel in the city that was named for them, not least because she was so physically beautiful and kept up her habit of wearing white. She collected souls as her mother counted cash, millions of dollars pouring into the offering plates while the airwaves of KFSG made their way around the world. At the same time, criticism of McPherson grew. A rival minister even published a takedown tract called “McPhersonism: A Study of Healing Cults and Modern Day ‘Tongues’ Movements.” Hoping to quiet the controversy and attract more mainstream Protestant audiences, McPherson tried distancing herself from the practices of the Holy Rollers, not only refusing to speak in tongues but also admonishing overly exuberant attendees at her services. Although she had been ordained by the Assemblies of God, she started her own denomination, which she called the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel.

In 1921, McPherson broke ground on her megachurch, while the fed-up and upstaged Harold filed for divorce. She kept his name but nothing else, barely mentioning him in her autobiography, devoting many more pages to Angelus Temple. Where King Solomon had used cedar and cypress trees, Sister Aimee opted for concrete, marble, and steel. The sanctuary, situated on Glendale Boulevard, opened on January 1, 1923. Minnie, who had long been her daughter’s personal assistant, officially became her business partner in the newly incorporated Echo Park Evangelistic Association, overseeing a hundred employees, who helped welcome more than seven thousand people a day for multiple services seven days a week—plus a thousand children for Sunday school.

The main auditorium of Angelus Temple seated five thousand people in two balconies and rivalled Grauman’s nearby Chinese and Egyptian theatres in size and production values. McPherson’s “illustrated sermons” were performed alongside a brass band, a fourteen-piece orchestra, and a hundred-person choir. When those performances lost their novelty, she began staging “sacred operas” with even larger choirs and sets. Her charisma kept the church’s so-called Watch Tower humming with volunteers, who prayed twenty-four hours a day in two-hour shifts, and filled the Miracle Room with almost every medical device imaginable, all of them cast aside after Sister Aimee’s healings.

McPherson was at the peak of her fame when she vanished. Several weeks later, when she walked out of the desert and into the back-yard garden of a casita in Agua Prieta, just south of the Arizona border, she claimed that she had been kidnapped from Venice Beach. According to her, a couple tricked her into their car by saying that they had a baby who needed healing, then hit her over the head and drugged her before fleeing south. Her kidnappers were enraged, she said, because her preaching had made it harder for them to run their human-trafficking ring, and they threatened to sell her into slavery. It was a Joseph-type tale without an amazing Technicolor dreamcoat—or, for that matter, any clothes at all, beyond the swimsuit she’d been wearing at the beach. Despite her pristine appearance at the time of her return, McPherson insisted that she’d been tied up and tortured by her captors. She described a harrowing escape from a remote shack which involved sawing through ropes with the discarded lid of a syrup can, slipping out a window, and making her way across twenty-two miles of an arid and unforgiving landscape. Authorities observed that McPherson’s lips were not chapped, that her skin was pale and unblemished, and that her feet were practically pedicured, except for two small blisters on her toes. Needless to say, they had questions.

So did the whole world. Throughout McPherson’s absence, her fans and followers, as well as the merely curious, had scoured the Venice Beach area and beyond for clues about her fate. Divers, airplanes, and police boats had mobilized in the effort to find her; one rescue diver drowned, and an acolyte of McPherson’s was said to have died by suicide at the scene of her vanishing. Reporters covered the story with the same avidity that they would later bring to the disappearances of the Lindbergh baby and of Amelia Earhart. Now, with McPherson abruptly un-disappeared, an even larger group of people—the relieved, the vengeful, the doubtful, and the desperate-for-a-byline—set about trying to vet her story.

A major manhunt turned up not even a footprint of the supposed kidnappers and not a splinter of their desert shack, and it didn’t take long for an alternative theory of McPherson’s disappearance to materialize. Many people claimed to have seen her, or someone who looked like her, during the time she went missing, and a great many of those sightings had been in Carmel-by-the-Sea—where, it seemed, a married man with whom she was rumored to be having an affair happened to have rented an oceanside cottage. The man, Kenneth Ormiston, ran McPherson’s radio station. Before the disappearance, his wife had shown up at Angelus Temple to accuse McPherson of adultery, and Minnie had tried to keep the two suspected lovers apart after congregants heard them flirting over the church’s intercom.

Perhaps that is partly why even Minnie turned against her daughter. The day McPherson went missing, Minnie declared her dead, anointing Roberta, then a teen-ager, as her successor. But McPherson never wavered from her story. She insisted that her enemies were the enemies of God, seeking to undermine her integrity in order to thwart her ministry and protect many of the city’s evildoers, from street gangs to corrupt Catholics. As McPherson defended herself, she wove an ever-expanding conspiracy theory that stretched all the way from Venice Beach to the Vatican.

The district attorney of Los Angeles had a less complex explanation: McPherson wanted sex, her mother wanted money; one was a Jezebel, the other a Judas. But the effort to prosecute either of them, or Ormiston, for any kind of fraud quickly devolved into chaos, with witnesses, experts, and lawyers on both sides stretching the bounds of morality, to say nothing of legality. When McPherson’s case finally went to court, the resulting trial was the longest and most expensive in California history, a record broken only after the arrest of Charles Manson and his followers.

The charges were ultimately dropped, and McPherson resumed her preaching and her leadership of Angelus Temple. She got married again, too, this time to the three-hundred-pound baritone who’d played the part of Pharaoh in her staging of Exodus. During the Great Depression, she rallied her membership to the task of Christian charity, feeding and clothing more than a million and a half people at her church’s twenty-four-thousand-square-foot commissary. The church also ran a community laundry, an employment office, a nursery school, and a clinic of sorts, with free medical and dental care. Even McPherson’s critics had to concede that she had at least some amount of saintliness, whatever they made of her miracles, holy hustle, and notorious disappearance.

Years of investigation and interrogation failed to definitively solve the mystery of McPherson’s vanishing. Her church is now even deeper in the heart of the city, which continues to sprawl around it, and plenty of people worldwide still identify as Foursquare Christians. But she made no confession before she died—in the fall of 1944, of an apparently accidental overdose of sleeping pills—and she doesn’t seem to have availed herself of the afterlife to clarify what happened in Carmel-by-the-Sea, or anywhere else. If she had, Claire Hoffman would surely have found out. Her book is wonderfully thorough, the type of biography in which you learn just the right amount about everything, from the idiosyncrasies of American religious history to the idiocy of modern celebrity culture.

Before turning to books, Hoffman profiled the likes of Prince, Amy Winehouse, Jane Fonda, and Michael Jackson for this magazine, Rolling Stone, and the Los Angeles Times, so it’s unsurprising that she brings the lens of celebrity to her account of McPherson’s life. In this version, the controversial evangelist is somewhere between tragic feminist icon and pioneering proto-influencer—a kind of Kabbalah Kardashian or St. Taylor Swift. “Aimee’s life story prefigures so much about the world we live in today in terms of belief, power, truth, and the corrosive nature of fame,” Hoffman writes, arguing that “this is not a story about the sins or the spectacle. Instead, I see nested inside Aimee’s story a cautionary tale about fame.” Of course, plenty of famous people manage their fame—and their infidelities, sexual or otherwise—without going so far as to stage a kidnapping hoax. “Her relationship to reality was different from that of those around her,” Hoffman writes of McPherson, as if fame was not merely explanatory but exculpatory.

But deflecting questions about McPherson’s disappearance by blaming her celebrity status and the toxic scrutiny that accompanied it is just another way that fame obscures the person it elevates. If there is a flaw in Hoffman’s book, it is that she suspends disbelief beyond belief about the central episode of the evangelist’s career, sidestepping some of the most tantalizing aspects of McPherson’s life. If you never resolve the matter of whether she lied, you never get to ask why she might have done so, and then kept doing so for decades.

Was walking away from the Ocean View Hotel a sudden impulse or a premeditated plan by McPherson to get away from her mother and get some time with her lover? Or was it actually another mother-daughter scheme, a con to refill the ministry’s coffers hatched by Minnie and then derailed by McPherson’s lust? Or was it an attempted renunciation of authority and responsibility which the fame-stricken, but also fame-addicted, preacher came to regret?

It could have been any of the above, of course—or maybe a brain worm, literal or otherwise, entered McPherson’s body between the beach and the breakwater, causing her to forsake her life’s work. Who knows? But it seems representative of the moral confusion in our own society that whether or not one of the nation’s leading religious authorities perpetrated a grand fraud on the public is not seen as a question in need of answering. Instead, Hoffman finds it more interesting to consider how the media covered the case and what happened after the charges were dropped. As a result, by the end of this otherwise magnificent biography, McPherson has once again managed to disappear. ♦