DISCIPLE OF THE DEVIL
Article by Fred Harden
HUSTLER [December 1979 C.E.]
[From The Collection of Butch & Sara Rung]

Some five months after blacks rioted in the Watts section of Los Angeles and precisely nine days after surgeons in Houston implanted an artificial heart into a human chest for the first time, a tall, barb-bearded, self-proclaimed sinner named Anton Szandor LaVey shaved his head, donned a black cape and publicly declared himself to be High Priest of the Church of Satan and the year 1966 to be 1 A.S. - 1 Anno Satanas.

In the 13 years since that dramatic debut in San Francisco, LaVey has epitomized--from a Judeo-Christian perspective at least--all that is evil. He shocked many by conducting melodramatic Black Masses in which he would lead the congregation in the recitation of the Lord's Prayer--backwards. For Communion he would dip a triangular holy wafer into the vagina of a naked female--who served as the altar--for sanctification. When it was sufficiently moistened, LaVey and the naked young women he chose as acolytes would break the wafer into pieces and place them on the tongues of the parishioners.

It was showmanship, Satanic and simple, but not entirely unexpected, coming from a onetime carny, cop and calliope player whose prepubescent years had been spent poking around in books dealing with the supernatural and the occult. For the next four years or so, using stage props and costumes, LaVey entertained a world fascinated by the black arts and magic, while titillating a press enthralled by the bizarre.

The Satanic shenanigans practiced by LaVey and his followers at the infamous Black House in San Francisco's posh Sea Cliff district drew thousands of the curious, including clerics. LaVey and his Church of Satan became the subject of a cover story in Look magazine, plus scores of other articles and scholarly investigations. His peculiar brand of Satanism inspired books and music, including such compositions as the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil," as well as "pro-Devil" music by Led Zeppelin, Santana and King Crimson.

LaVey's romantic involvements included such famous stars as Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, and reports of his "great Hollywood connections" were and still are beyond dispute. He made a number of appearances in movies dealing with the occult, the most celebrated of those being Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, in which the High Priest portrayed the Devil.

Then, a year or so after being a guest on Johnny Carson's Tonight show, and shortly after being featured in Time magazine in June 1972, LaVey did a "disappearing act" that was as cold-bloodedly planned as the formation of the Church of Satan had been in the first place. He did so because he was tired of pandering to the press and had grown weary of playing games; but more important, the first man in America to organize a bona fide religion based on Devil-worship had begun to take himself and his philosophy of self-love, self-indulgence, seriously.

"I found our efforts being relegated to cultic proportions," LaVey explains to me late one night at his home, a warlock's hop, skip and jump from the Cliff House. "I realized that I was being processed by the media into something very sectarian, and instead of attracting those who were truly serious about the black arts, we were drawing more and more of the 'crazies,' the nuts who really believe the Devil has horns and cloven hooves."

LaVey--handsome in a Mephistophelian way with his Manchurian mustache and pointed goatee--tells me: "Invoking Satan is simply invoking the powers in oneself. We do not accept the Christian image of Satan as an anthropomorphic being with cloven hooves, a barbed tail and horns. This concept was devised by Christianity and used by its white magicians to terrorize people so they would not stray from the fold. Satanism is a religion of the flesh, rather than of the spirit; therefore, an altar of flesh in the form of a woman is often used in Satanic ceremonies."

Our talk takes place in the darkened study of LaVey's home, replete with human skulls and demon heads, secret panels, trapdoors, a basement bar and two organs.

The San Francisco house is one of three. Another is located in Hollywood, where LaVey spends considerable time these days serving as consultant and technical director for films dealing with the occult. The third is located on a hilltop overlooking the Valley of the Moon, in the Sonoma Valley north of San Francisco, where a "Satanic soulmate," writer Jack London, once lived.

The Black House is no longer painted black, and Anton LaVey no longer wears the collar of a priest. Contrary to published reports, says LaVey, members of the Church of Satan never did take part in public orgies, although sex has always played an integral part in the rituals conducted publicly and privately. The holding of services within the Church of Satan has diminished in recent years; they are generally reserved for special occasions.

For six years following the founding of the Church of Satan on that Walpurgis Night of April 30-May 1, 1966, Anton Szandor LaVey practiced his black magic, espousing a new religion of indulgence in the Seven Deadly Sins--anger, pride, envy, gluttony, lust, sloth and avarice.

Borrowing liberally from men he called "earlier Satanists"--such as Nietzsche, the Knights Templar, Faust and the celebrated English Satanist, Aleister Crowley--LaVey designed a new religion based upon man's natural instincts, "a religion devoted to earthly matters, a place where people can come and pray for their material, carnal desires."

LaVey calls those early days of the church his "prankish" years, admitting that he was vying for public attention to publicize the Church of Satan as a true vehicle of the black arts, "a place where people could come to practice a philosophy more in tune with reality."

Early Satanic rituals conducted within the confines of the San Francisco grotto generated a lot of ink in newspapers and magazines, whose editors were excited by the specter of naked women dancing to the crashing music of an organ. These rituals were held in a chamber painted blood-red and coal-black, under the sign of the ancient deity Baphomet.

Changes took place gradually. LaVey and the men and women who made up the church's ruling hierarchy became troubled by the "public aspect" of it all. The church had attracted many well-educated people from all strata of American society who were earnest about the practice of ritual magic. But it was also drawing thousands of hippies, avant-garde bohemians and people who were trying to make a guru of LaVey.

"We set a twofold program for the church," explains LaVey. "Get rid of the crazies and soft-pedal the publicity. The press, in its perennial quest to sensationalize, failed to see the changes taking place in me and the church. Unless there was sex or something they could play cutesy with, then they weren't interested."

In 1972 LaVey and his fellow church officials--the Order of the Trapezoid--decided to cease all public activities to prevent the church from becoming provincialized.

Dr. Marcello Truzzi, an authority on the occult and occult movements and head of the Department of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University, has known LaVey some 12 years. "A great change has taken place since Satanism has gone underground and LaVey no longer has public grottos going," notes Dr. Truzzi. "LaVey has been able to deal more introspectively with his Satanic philosophy since he has gotten away from the crazies. It's a very elite group now, more selective in general about those they admit to the inner circles of church membership."

While membership in the church is now restricted, millions of others around the world are practicing Satanists. Enough of them exist, in fact, to make LaVey a modestly wealthy man. His publisher, Avon Books, a subsidiary of Hearst Publications, reports that sales of his Satanic Bible and The Satanic Rituals have been very good. The former has some 400,000 copies in print; the latter about 150,000.

In a 1972 article Dr. Truzzi wrote that the Church of Satan had acquired the sociological criteria to rate being identified as a "church" instead of a "cult." He included among these criteria its size, bureaucratic organization and hierarchiacal structure. People who became members had to submit themselves to complex testing and initiations; but most important, "the success of the church no longer [centered] on its founder's charisma."

LaVey has left the operation of the church to its ministers. Sex is still tightly woven into the fabric of its rituals, which are now held at home or at the grottos on special occasions, like one's birthday.

"The highest of all holidays in Satanism," explains LaVey, "is the date of one's own birth, for we worship the individual and celebrate self-love. Masturbation is the height of self-indulgence, and we revere all fleshly things and pursue the pleasures of the human body. We're all dirty little people, so let's take advantage of it and have fun. Let's do whatever we want, if it makes sense and we don't harm anyone else by it."

LaVey's new-found freedom has given him the time to pursue other loves, like his love for art, music, cars, good food and wines, and reading. "There are many who would take my time; I shun them," says LaVey. "There are some who will share my time; I tolerate them, sometimes enjoy them. But there are precious few who contribute to my time, and I cherish them."

Today LaVey leads a comfortable life in San Francisco with his sensual wife, Diane, and his youngest daughter, Zeena Galatea, 16. They travel a lot, to Hollywood and to Europe, where LaVey has established a "world headquarters" in Amsterdam.

In all of Christian "mythology" Anton LaVey admires most the Whore of Babylon, Mother of Prostitutes (from Revelations in the Bible), who reportedly rode the Red Beast, with its seven heads and ten horns, with the wicked names written all over it; who wore purple and scarlet clothing and beautiful jewelry made of precious gems and pearls and who drank from a golden goblet "full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication."

He reveres her because of the symbolism of attaining great worldly power through the use of sex. LaVey himself has done a good deal of manipulating. This is a man who mentally genuflects before a good meal with great wine; who collects art and antique cars and thinks the Antichrist is here among us, masquerading as "mass-media evangelists." LaVey himself considers the Antichrist to be a myth, but draws on the biblical image to point out the contradiction in those who pretend to save souls on the one hand while making money by predicting doom on the other.

"By creating the Devil and scaring the shit out of people with the threat of a living hell on the boob tube, these people are amassing great fortunes, creating electronic empires and buildings bases of power, and are able to sway elections, mold legislation, without ever having to look their constituencies in the eyes. If there's and example of Satanism operating at its best, it's these pious frauds, these sleight-of-hand charlatans who parade under the banner of mass soul-saving. Give me that old-time religion any time, with all of its red-necked prejudices, if only for the honesty of its practitioners.

"I chuckle--no, I chortle," says LaVey with a devilish grin, "when I read that 50 million Americans have been 'born again' or that Billy Graham drew a crowd of 337,000 persons to his crusade in Singapore or that Pat Robertson [The 700 Club] has launched another fucking satellite. This born-again movement has been the best thing that could have happened to us. I don't question that some people may sincerely believe that they were 'born again'; but I do not believe people become Christians from listening to the radio or watching television or by standing in a multitude listening to an ivory-toothed soothsayer on the stage."

LaVey believes that the Billy Grahams, the Oral Robertses, the Robert Schullers and the Jim Bakkers (of PTL Club fame) are "electronic-death salesmen and that the Antichrist they are looking for is right before them, in the mirror, every time they shave."

True religious heroes in LaVey's eyes are men like Joseph Smith (the founder of Mormonism), Rasputin and the Reverend Paul D. Lindstrom, the latter the conservative pastor of the Church of Christian Liberty in Chicago. LaVey admires Smith because he liked his sex and made no bones about it, taking on several bed partners every week in the name of God; Rasputin, the renegade cleric in Czarist Russia, because he found heavenly pleasures with the opposite sex in the palace cellars; and the Reverend Lindstrom because last year he proposed dispatching an armed fighting unit to eastern Rhodesia to reopen missions closed by the hostilities in that region.

"I don't know why, but it pleases me to see a gospel-spewing minister mixing bullets with the Bible, contradicting all that Jesus crap where everything must be done in the name of goodness, sweetness and piety," explains LaVey.

"If it were not for the hypocrisy of the evangelists, I would send them membership applications today to join the Church of Satan, for we need more people who are seeking personal power and glory and who have mastered the art of manipulation. They would have to learn one thing: Satanism demands study, not worship!"

Born in Chicago under the sign of Aries the Ram, Anton LaVey attributes much of what he is, who he has become, to his maternal grandmother, Luba Lupescu-Primakov, a Transylvanian born of a Gypsy father and Jewish mother. She introduced young Tony to the legends and superstitions of the land that inspired the most celebrated bit of literature on vampirism, Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Shortly after turning 17, Tony dropped out of high school and ran away to join the Clyde Beatty Circus, starting as a roustabout and cage boy, watering and feeding the big cats. His mastery over the animals was uncanny, and he meticulously learned Beatty's act: rollovers, the hoop jumps and the use of the whip and chair.

When the season ended in October 1947, LaVey hooked up with a carnival outfit--Craft's 20 Big Shows--playing the steam calliope. A skilled organist as well, he handled the Wurlitzer for the bally platform, the stage above the midway featuring those fantasies on canvas, exotic and exaggerated paintings o fwhat was supposed to be inside.

His flamboyant accompaniment for the hootchy-kootch and hula girls eased him into alternating gigs at Pike Amusement Park in Long Beach and at two of Los Angeles's most popular strip joints--the Mayan and Burbank--when the carnival season ended in the autumn of 1948.

One of the strippers Tony accompanied at the Mayan was a 22-year-old brunette voluptuary billed as Marion Marlow, "a Hollywood starlet." The future Marilyn Monroe was down on her luck then, having just been dumped by Columbia Pictures after finishing her first "title role," that of a stripper in Ladies of the Chorus.

The 19-year-old LaVey looked older than his years, a persona he had assumed while assisting Clyde Beatty. He sported a pencil-thin mustache and wide-brimmed hats, in keeping with the male mystique of the times.

Monroe had taken the job at the Mayan because she needed the money to keep her place at the Hollywood Studio Club, an institution for aspiring young actresses. "It had prestige and was a place where one could be easily reached by Central Casting," reflects LaVey, reluctant to make a big deal of his "fleeting affair" with the sex goddess.

"Marilyn was no one in particular at the time, and there was no frigging reason to take notes for posterity. We were just two young people attracted to one another, who enjoyed getting our jollies together, and that was about it," continues LaVey, who finds this resurrection of the dead repugnant.

The actress took a liking to Tony LaVey because he sensed right away that she was not a professional stripper. She had a hard time handling traditional brash numbers like "Pistol Packin' Mama." She was feeling blue and pushed around when LaVey started helping with her act by playing romantic standards she liked dancing to, such as "Deep Night" and "Dream Lover." Management disapproved, as did the middle-aged audiences, but he would go ahead and play.

"She was what we in the trade called a 'chain-dragger' . . .someone who danced a lot more than they stripped, and she found it awkward to feign copulation. Her act was the routine bump and grind--nothing flashy. She never exposed her nipples or public hair, simply because the law did not permit it."

In September 1948 Monroe was nearly three months behind in her rent at the Hollywood Studio Club; but to maintain her anonymity while working the Mayan, she had taken a room at the Oban Hotel. Before moving to Columbia Pictures, she had had bit parts in two movies from 20th-Century Fox: Dangerous Years and Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! But now her money was almost gone.

LaVey moved in with her at the Oban Hotel, for selfish reasons. She was "a good fuck," she owned her own car, and she was making $12 a day--$2 more than LaVey.

"Essentially, for the month that I lived with her she lived out of an old Pontiac convertible--out of cardboard boxes in the trunk," he recalls. "The damned thing was battered and dented, and its paint was peeling." He soon learned where all the dents had come from. She was a lousy driver.

When LaVey first met Monroe, she was disillusioned with religion, but she was intrigued by LaVey's preoccupation with the occult. He was studying mentalism, astrology, palmistry and hypnotism with great zest, and she was fascinated by this arcane aspect of life. For a decade after they parted, after she became a star, she continued to write to him--brief letters that never touched on her success or personal problems. In them she would invite his attention to a newspaper story about a haunted house or something dealing with the occult.

"She seemed to enjoy taking walks through cemeteries," recalls LaVey, "like the one at Forest Lawn and that little celebrity cemetery down on Sunset, and exploring haunted houses."

Marilyn Monroe was physically and chemically LaVey's type--blond, and voluptuous. She was a bit untidy in her personal habits, but so was LaVey.

"She kept all of her shit in those little cardboard boxes, lugging them back and forth from the hotel to the car. When something got dirty, she just balled it up and stuffed it into a box. Neatness in appearance was important to her, but impeccable cleanliness came in a poor second. She liked to dress to tease, to get men to whistle at her, to ogle her. The secret of her later success, I think, was her ability to be very carnal, but in a naive and vulnerable way."

The husky voice she adopted in later films never did jibe with the talkative, almost childlike chatter LaVey had been familiar with. "She spoke with a shipyard worker's twang. She wanted to turn heads, to be a princess, a lady and all that, but no matter how she tried, she came across sleazy in spite of herself. She looked like she was falling out of her clothes in her endless quest to be sexy."

"There was something of the exhibitionist about her," LaVey continues. "Something almost juvenile, like a child trying to see how far she could go without getting caught. She was never really sexually aggressive, but seemed to feel sex was more fun in the backseat of a car, in a graveyard or under a pier, someplace where someone might come along and see her. She liked to screw at the nuttiest times, like the time she got amorous on the Red Car coming back to L.A. from Venice.

Tony and Marilyn had driven out to Venice, and her car had broken down. It was about 3 a.m., and their only way of getting back to L.A. was on the Pacific Electric train--called Red Cars--that at the time ran from L.A. to San Bernardino and to points west. The three-car train was empty when they boarded, except for the motorman and a couple of drunks. The drunks were sitting in the first car with the motorman, whose view of the cars behind him was obstructed by a curtain that hung behind the driver's compartment. Tony and Marilyn took seats in the rear of the car.

"In a way it was typical of her desire to be sexually daring. It was the ultimate expression of her lust. After some passionate smooching she hiked her skirt, let it flare out to cover our intimate parts and began pumping up and down, matching the rolling and pitching of the car. She faced the front of the car so both of us could keep an eye on the drunks, in case they decided to amble back our way."

Monroe did not have any major sexual hang-ups, but like many women, says LaVey, "she could be somewhat theatrical when screwing." She enjoyed "a good fuck, whether it was in a dark corner in the back of the burlesque theater, or bent-over leaning against a tree, or doing it missionary-style on the hotel bed. She approached sex like a little girl, adjusting shyly to the demands of her mate.

"She was responsive and pliable, assuming any position I suggested, verbally or with a touch of the hands. She moaned and groaned and sweated like so many of us do, but when she came she would begin gnashing her teeth," LaVey says. "And she sometimes farted when she lost all control."

LaVey tried to get her to break that teeth-gnashing habit, feeling she was holding back just at the time she should have been letting out all the stops. "In so many ways she was like a lot of girls just off the farm . . .full of little guilts."

After a month of Marilyn, LaVey--ever the opportunist--moved out and took up with a girl whose father owned a bank, a girl who had a new car and lots of money to spend.

From Los Angeles, LaVey moved to San Francisco, where he began playing the organ and piano in neighborhood bars. He worked for the San Francisco Police Department from 1951 to 1955 as a police photographer and later as an occult investigator. Shortly after leaving the department he informally organized the "Magic Circle," out of which would emerge, in the words of Herb Caen, popular Bay Area newspaper columnist, "those strange magic shenanigans at that bizarre black house near the Cliff House . . . ."

Marilyn Monroe was not a Satanist, but another blond and voluptuous sex goddess was--Jayne Namsfield. During a visit to San Francisco in the fall of 1966 she read a newspaper item about the Church of Satan and went to some lengths to seek out LaVey and arrange an interview.

Right away Mansfield told LaVey about her intense sexual desires and her quest for knowledge. At the time she was having custody problems with her ex, Matt Cimber, who was claiming she was unfit to be the mother of four children. Mansfield asked LaVey to put a curse on Cimber so that she would retain custody of her children. Not long afterward the court declared her fit and granted the entertainer custody of her children from her two marriages.

"Jayne was not a flirt; she was an all-out exhibitionist," says LaVey. "She had her hang-ups about big, brawny studs being good lays, and she had a propensity for flashing her twat or bareing her breasts."

Mansfield joined the Church of Satan and, much to the consternation of her studio and publicists, posed for pictures dressed in Satanic regalia, complete with classic chalices and skulls.

"She was a true witch," declares LaVey. "She was happiest when she was rolling on the floor, fucking up a storm. She deliberately manipulated men into sexual confrontations, going so far as to moisten the crotch or rear of her pants or dress to make it look that she had gotten so excited she had wet herself."

Then Mansfield began having problems with her attorney, Sam Brody, who she had taken as a lover. Brody was insanely jealous of her other suitors and her relationship with LaVey and the Church of Satan. The situation got so bad that she asked LaVey to perform the ultimate curse--the death rune. Professor Edward J. Moody, a lecturer at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, who spent two-and-a-half years as a member of the church's ruling circle, says that only once during his membership had he heard the magic incantation invoked.

After much deliberation and considerable provocation from Brody, LaVey says he agreed to conduct a private but formal destruction ritual. According to his story, he placed the attorney's name on a piece of parchment and burned it, invoking the power of the infernal names and calling for Brody's annihilation within a year.

LaVey then telephoned Mansfield and told her what he had done, warning her to stay away from Brody. She failed to heed his advice. At 2:25 a.m. on June 29, 1967, six months after LaVey had administered the ultimate hex, she and Brody were on U.S. 90 near New Orleans in a car driven by Ronnie Harrison, son of a Mississippi supper-club owner. Harrison was driving fast. There was fog on the road, and they crashed into the back of a tank truck. All three were killled.

Since restructuring the Church of Satan in the early 1970s and turning the leadership over to the nine men of the Order of the Trapezoid, Anton Szandor LaVey has had more time to indulge his own pleasures, to savor the fame and wealth his work has brought him.

The church that he founded is now officially recognized by the Pentagon, and when military members of the church die, chaplains in the various armed services are instructed to contact the nearest Church of Satan grotto. The church has expanded its operations to Europe and maintains a world headquarters in Amsterdam. In Moscow's Museum of Atheism there is a prominent display, including blowups of LaVey with his Satanic Bible.

These days LaVey spends a lot of his time traveling, reading, writing, and working in Hollywood. Since his appearance in Rosemary's Baby, a film on which he also served as technical adviser, LaVey has been at the beck and call of movie moguls, profiting handsomely from his work on such celluloid tributes to diabolism as Poor Devil, The Devil's Daughter, The Omen and lesser-known flicks like Simon, King of the Witches and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

As High Priest of the Church of Satan, LaVey still presides over an occasional Satanic rite, but now only on special occasions or in response to a special request by a member of the church in desperate straits. But employing a hex or a curse--Greater Magic--must not be undertaken lightly, LaVey warns, mindful perhaps of the Mansfield episode.

For all his strangeness, LaVey remains a strict law-and-order man, working with police in the investigation of crimes, especially murder, where there emerge signs of witchcraft or demonomania. He does not smoke. He drinks, but not to excess. And he continues to appreciate women, especially well-developed blondes.

Far from the scandalous and prankish antics of the '60s, LaVey now stirs his cauldron of Satanic witchdoctory with a truly evil objective in mind--to make the world a more fit place for devils. "We Satanists pride ourselves on being ladies and gentlemen--sinful ones, perhaps--but nonetheless, ladies and gentlemen."

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