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Hello and happy weekend!
In the 1920s, Sister Aimee Semple McPherson was a huge deal — just as famous as any movie star and probably the first evangelist to turn herself into a media star. She had a huge following in Los Angeles where she was based, as well as all over the country, thanks to her radio addresses.
But on May 18, 1926, she went for a swim in the ocean and did not come out.
At first, everyone naturally believed she had probably drowned. They searched the ocean for her body, with no success (though some tragedy, as two men died as a result of looking for her). Still, her mother, Minnie Kennedy, put out a reward for her safe return or for information about what happened to her, and there were sightings of her pretty much everywhere. Someone claiming to be holding her for ransom sent a lock of her hair to her mother, along with the answers to questions only she would know that Kennedy had submitted as a for someone to prove that they had her.
A month later, she returned, with a story about having been kidnapped — one that matched up with the kidnapper’s claims. But her whole story was pretty sketchy, and she ended up being the one getting charged. Prosecutors and journalists of the time believed that she had faked her disappearance to run off with her former radio engineer, and just got bored and wanted to go back to her old life in the spotlight. She and her mother (who was thought to have been in cahoots with her crazy scheme) were both charged with “a criminal conspiracy to commit acts injurious to public morals, to prevent and obstruct justice, and to prevent the due administration of the laws, and of engaging in a criminal conspiracy to commit the crime of subordination of perjury.”
The grand jury inquiry ended up being pretty sketchy itself, with jurors reportedly even stealing evidence in order to help her. Not a thing that tends to happen a whole lot! So much of it went missing, really, that the prosecution no longer had enough evidence to properly charge anyone with anything. Whoops!
So this week, your present is The Disappearance of Aimee, an obscure Hallmark movie starring Bette Davis, Faye Dunaway and Faye Dunaway’s cheekbones.
I know, right?
In This’n’That, Davis’ second autobiography, she wrote about the movie and how much she disliked working with Faye Dunaway, whom she said was never on time for anything. Still, they’re both incredible actresses and it’s pretty freaking cool to get to see them in a movie together.
Faye Dunaway would, of course, go on to do another, much more famous biopic, Mommy Dearest, which really ended up torching her career, both because it was so camp and because Joan Crawford still had a lot of friends in Hollywood, because she had always been so kind to everyone on set. (Not going to get into it, but Crawford’s other adopted children, Cathy and Cindy, also had nothing but good things to say about their mother.)
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