God Help Her
She calls herself the “most hated woman in America.” She has led a lifelong crusade against everything holy. But if Madalyn Murray O’Hair did not exist, God would have had to invent her.
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“I feel that Madalyn Murray O’Hair doesn’t belong to the public, only her public activities do,” Madalyn told me when I asked her to reflect on the 25 years since the school-prayer decision. “My life is my own. It doesn’t do anybody any good, anytime, anywhere for anyone to look back and say I’m going to reevaluate. What good does that do? The answer is not a gawddam bit of good!
“I do think we’re in a steady retreat. There’s an absolute steady retreat into what I call a neofascism—but it’s really old-time fascism—into a robber-baron society and a religiously dominated society, and that’s not cyclical, because they have new weapons at hand now, mainly communications technology with which they can rapidly disperse ideas…”
She was off. Like most people who have been interviewed too many times, Madalyn had learned the art of avoiding questions; in her case, she bulldozed right through them with her massive opinion-machine. (“I am convinced that the pope should be arrested tomorrow for crimes against humanity. Just for the fact that he goes out and he tells women to breed indiscriminately, get one in the oven tonight, to be fruitful and multiply. He should be put in a cage.”) As she argued her points, I absently studied the awards and plaques that have been given to her by various free-thought societies. Next to the door was a framed law degree from the South Texas College of Law. The extent of Madalyn’s education, like practically everything else in her background, is a matter of dispute. She likes to be called Dr. O’Hair and has claimed on occasion to have attended as many as 23 schools and 11 colleges. “Compared to most cud-chewing, small-talking, stupid American women, I’m a brain,” she once told Life. “We might as well admit it, I’m a genius.” “My degrees are primarily in history and law,” she vaguely informed a student audience. Later she boasted of an “alphabet of degrees—B.A., M.A., LL.B., M.P.S.W., Ph.D., J.D.” Her erudition is frequently remarked upon in the press. She has spent “more hours in college than many professors,” said Esquire, which noted that she had a degree from the Warren G. Harding College of Law (no such institution is listed with the American Bar Association). Except for the 1952 law degree from South Texas, an LL.B. that was later automatically converted to a Juris Doctor when the terminology changed, most of the other degrees appear to be imaginary—although that is a subject Madalyn foreclosed with her vigorous refusal to discuss anything personal. It is known that she took the bar exam, but she has never been admitted to the practice of law.
“People talk constantly about the problems of the world, but they don’t get down to basics,” Madalyn was saying. “What are you going to do with the shit? Five billion people have a bowel movement every day! Just what are you going to do with it? Let’s go ahead and ask the pope, ‘Do you want it all accumulated and put in front of the Vatican?’ ”
I finally had the opportunity to ask about a curious bronze statuette on her desk depicting two animals copulating. That set Madalyn off on a discussion of the Judeo-Christian suppression of natural sexual impulses. “I know where religion came from, and don’t ask me to talk about it, I’ll put it out in a paperback soon, but part of it has to do with human sexuality. So, one of the things that I have been collecting over the years is those things that would show humans an understanding of the need for a recognition of sex and its normal and natural place, and here is one of them,” she said, handling the statuette. “Here is an absolutely beautiful—they’re bears, I guess—example of sex in its place.” She sighed fondly. “I love them, don’t you? They’re forbidden.”
The circumstances of Madalyn’s background and early life are cloudy and bitterly disputed. A 1964 Saturday Evening Post article on the woman who then called herself Madalyn Mays Murray states that her father’s ancestors settled in the Massachusetts colony in 1650. Since then, Madalyn has given the date as 1611, although the Pilgrims didn’t arrive in Plymouth until 1620. Her younger son, Jon Garth Murray, now says that the Mays family first appeared on American shores in the person of the Reverend Mays, a chaplain on the second ship to arrive at the Jamestown colony. In any case, eighteen generations later, on Palm Sunday in 1919 in Beechview, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Madalyn was born, the second child of John and Lena Mays. According to Madalyn’s elder son, William Murray, Madalyn’s mother tried unsuccessfully to abort the child by jumping out of a second-story window. “Even Madalyn’s birth had a bizarre element,” William wrote in his score-settling autobiography, My Life Without God. “Grandmother swore years later that Mother had been born with an unusual dark membrane covering her whole body. It resembled a black shroud, and Grandmother claimed that the doctor at hand had said it was very unusual, though he offered no explanation. He gave a portion of the membrane to her, and Grandmother kept this odd keepsake for many years.”
Madalyn says that her father, whom she called Pup, was a wealthy contractor. William Murray says his grandfather was a “good carpenter, but the man never filed a tax return in his life.” Madalyn has written, “We have always been affluent. I grew up in Cadillac cars, commodious homes, with linen damask tablecloths and heavy silver and oriental rugs and a concert-grand Steinway piano. I had fur coats and diamond rings and designer dresses.” Elsewhere she states, “The chauffer of our Rolls-Royce was black and shiny, and he rode me on his shoulders.” William contends that the chauffeur was a friend who brought food to the Mays family when Madalyn’s father was broke. After going bankrupt in the construction business, William writes, Pup opened a roadhouse that served as a brothel and turned to rum-running during Prohibition.
Madalyn’s mixed feelings about her father may be seen in her various statements about him over the years. She has been quoted, in her broad accent, as calling her father a “Nazi and a rayshist too.” On the other hand, she also has described Pup as a benevolent capitalist. “He was the only construction man in Pittsburgh then who went to the union for his ‘journeymen’; paid union wages.” Later, when her parents came to live with Madalyn, she and Pup waged an ongoing war. The last words she said to him before she slammed out of the house to run an errand were “Oh, I wish you would drop dead.” When she returned home, she found her wish had come true.
Her feelings about her mother were never mixed. Her mother was a “cowed, whipped dog.” “I do think I have resolved any kind of oedipal conflict I may have had in relation to my father,” Madalyn once told a student audience. “We had a very normal relationship. Now, I hated my mother’s guts.” According to William, Madalyn didn’t speak to her mother for the final five years of her life and did not attend her mother’s funeral.
In 1923 Madalyn Mays was baptized in the Presbyterian church. The story she has told many times is that she read the Bible cover to cover one weekend while she was still in grade school, “And I was totally, completely appalled, totally turned off, filled with repugnance.” She was twelve or thirteen at the time. “I came away stunned with the hatred, the brutality, the sado-masochism, the cruelty, the killing, the ugliness. Oh, I suppose that words like ‘sado-masochism’ were not in my vocabulary at the time, but I could see the obvious lies, the disgusting stories.”
The precocious young scholar who read those passages turned to her parents for advice. “I went in and said to my dad and mother, ‘Do you know what’s in the Bible?’ and for the next couple of weeks I would read little things to them. My mother just drew herself up and said, ‘That’s not in my Bible.’ That ended the discussion. I never accepted the Bible after that date at all. I refused to go to Sunday school. I refused to go to church. What were they going to do, hang me by my thumbs? That ended it right there.”
Despite that childhood apostasy, Madalyn, according to William, listed in her high school yearbook her life’s ambition as serving God for the betterment of man. Later, she would attend Ashland College, an Ohio school affiliated with the Church of the Brethren. Whatever the truth of her early relationship with religion, she obviously was drawn to spiritually charged environments.
In October 1941, at the age of 22, still a virgin, she eloped with a man named John Roths. Their marriage was interrupted by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor two months later, which inspired Roths to join the Marines and his wife to sign up with the Women’s Army Corps. Madalyn says that she served as a cryptographer on General Eisenhower’s staff in North Africa and Italy. (Archivists at the Eisenhower Library, who have personal records and directories of the general’s staff, could find no trace of a Madalyn Mays or Roths.) “In letters home she expressed confidence in an Allied victory because ‘God is on our side,’ ” William Murray writes in his autobiography.
“Mother always relished telling one story in particular about her time in the army,” William continues. “Though I doubt it ever happened, it illustrates the sort of grandiose ideas about herself that her army experiences somehow fostered.
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