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the pews not only on Sunday but also for prayer and instruction one afternoon and one evening during each week, as Marilyn recalled. “Every night I was told to pray that I would not wake up in hell. I had to say: ‘I promise, God helping me, not to buy, drink, sell or give alcohol while I live. From all tobacco I’ll abstain and never take God’s name in vain.’ . . . I always felt insecure.”
    That the Bolenders were not prodigal with entertainments or compliments is entirely consistent with the austere and highly charged religious character of their lives. Perhaps the primary advantage of faith, they believed, was the certainty of their moral posture, and it wasmorality which assured salvation. They were members of a branch of the United Pentecostal Church much influenced by the famous Los Angeles Apostolic Faith Gospel Mission, a revival community founded on Azusa Street in 1906. Like many people with good intentions but a restrictive and potentially dangerous literal-mindedness, adherents to this kind of religion often equate true religion with unquestioning obedience to a certain code of right conduct; a sense of mystery (much less a mystical sense) is not even mentioned. For children especially, everything was to be made clear and immutable, and people of any age who questioned or complained were pitied, ignored or held in quiet contempt. This is not to imply, however, that there is any evidence that the Bolenders were other than attentive, caring foster parents. “They were terribly strict,” Norma Jeane said years later. “They didn’t mean any harm—it was their religion. They brought me up harshly.”
    For over a century, Roman Catholic, mainstream Protestant and then Jewish communities had flourished in Los Angeles. But in the 1920s and 1930s, flamboyant evangelical sects proliferated along with the aromatic eucalyptus and acrid auto fumes. Unconventional, sometimes hysterical attempts at faith healing; bizarre costumes; midnight-to-dawn meetings where sinners were asked to “testify”; services that resembled movie-set extravaganzas—all these were typical of local religious life. This is not remarkable in a place where the entertainment industry depended on the mechanisms of fanfare and promotion; the fringe churches, too, engaged advertising and public-relations counselors.
    The best example of this colorful spirit during Norma Jeane’s childhood was the notorious Aimee Semple McPherson, greatly admired by the Bolenders, who took Norma Jeane and their other young charges to hear the famous evangelist. A Pentecostal minister born in 1890, Sister Aimee began her preaching career with itinerant evangelism, radio sermons and healing services at seventeen; eventually she found her greatest welcome in Los Angeles. There, after terminating two marriages but attracting many followers, she established her International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, whose Angelus Temple was built by her devotees in 1927 at the staggering cost of one and a half million dollars. Her congregations nationwide, augmented and unitedby radio broadcasting, numbered in the tens of thousands.
    McPherson was quite a character. Usually present was her mother, sunnily addressed as “Ma Kennedy,” who led the applause for her daughter’s highly theatrical revival services—rites ideally suited to Hollywood. To preach a sermon on God’s law, she wore a police uniform; to address the topic of decency, her outfit was a Victorian coverall. Lights, music and mirrors were routinely used for the right effects. The saxophone, for example, was played by a young man named Anthony Quinn, later a movie star. Dynamic and attractive, McPherson was much loved by her faithful, even after the collapse of her third marriage, the filing of at least fifty lawsuits against her and widespread scandals involving (separately) sex and money. (She had an affair with Charles Chaplin.) For all that, the impression made by the exuberant blond Sister