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.
(Page 5 of 5)
Now the camera shut off again while a trailer ran, promoting the upcoming atheist convention in San Diego. Madalyn’s face went slack. It was then I saw the frightened look in her eyes once more. It’s an expression her friends know well. “Yes, I know what you mean,” Frank Zindler told me. “I think it’s because she’s been betrayed so many times. Madalyn does indeed have to worry about physical assaults and betrayal. Fear is not an irrational response given what’s happened to her over the years. Also, Madalyn is very sensitive to the reality of mortality.” Charles Dews, a political activist in Austin who once worked at the American Atheist Center, remembers the first time he saw “that scared look” on Madalyn’s face. “We were both in the employee kitchen, and she began talking about feeling ill,” says Dews. “She was worried that she was not going to live much longer. There was a vulnerability about her that I wasn’t expecting. It seemed to me that she must have lived a hard life, a hard life and an empty life—not because her life is not full of God but because she has no real friends. I intuited something that made me feel really sad. It wasn’t that she imagined that she was going to hell or anything like that. It was that she had created a nothingness out of her life.”
Madalyn turned to watch the convention promo on the monitor. At that moment it was advertising the marvels of San Diego, which include the famous zoo. A female orangutan appeared on the screen, and Madalyn suddenly guffawed. “Well, look at that,” she said. “The Virgin has just made another appearance.”
I was sitting in the nicely appointed office of Jon Garth Murray, who has succeeded Madalyn as the president of the American Atheists. “Most cause-people think that part of being a dissenter is that you need to be poor or to look poor,” Murray said. “Madalyn and I and Robin just don’t fit into that role.” Murray, who is 34, has dark brown eyes, a moustache, and the mulish jaw and sprinkle of freckles that are his mother’s mark. His radio was set on an easy-listening station. On a credenza behind him was a photograph of beaming Madalyn cuddling her late beloved dachshund, Keegan. “We’re accustomed to good food, to eating in dining rooms with tablecloths, good dishes, a good bottle of wine. Even when we go out for lunch, we go someplace nice. You’d never see us at McDonald’s or Burger King, that’s just not our lifestyle. All of us have nice clothes. My suits cost a minimum of five, six hundred dollars. My shirts are custom made; my ties are all silk. We have a nice house in Northwest Hills, nice automobiles—we get a tremendous amount of flak over the fact that I drive a Mercedes, Madalyn drives a Mercedes, and Robin drives a Porsche. We’ve been around the world three times.”
One of the complaints that atheists have about the Murray-O’Hairs, as the triumvirate is called, is that they run the center as a family business. Jon Garth is not apologetic about that. “When it comes to ‘cause’ organizations,” he once wrote, “democracy kills.” The Murray-O’Hairs live together and tend to spend all of their time—seven days a week—at the center. “At lunchtime the three go out together, generally in three different cars,” says Charles Dews, “and of course they come back in three different cars. I used to wonder about that. Then I realized it’s probably the only time they ever have to be alone.” Madalyn has said, “I work full time on a volunteer basis for the American Atheist Center—that is, without salary.” Yet the Murray-O’Hairs obviously live a luxurious life. Jon Garth says that his lifestyle is no different from that of Jerry Falwell or Jimmy Swaggart. “I kind of understand somebody like Swaggart,” he says. “I understand why he has the mansion, the limos, the Rolexes, and so on. He’s in with a particular set of folks, and he’s got to compete. The people in his church are happy for him to do that. It’s just the outsiders who don’t understand.”
“People say that one of your mother’s goals is to see you elected president before she dies,” I said.
“Yeah, it is,” Jon Garth acknowledged. “She would like to see me run for office. I haven’t ruled it out.”
I asked him what his politics were.
“I don’t think you could actually call me a communist at this time, but I’m very close to that.”
I was surprised, because all of her life Madalyn has fought her image as a subversive. Indeed, she has said, “My most exciting victory never got near the courtroom. I am the single person who disassociated atheism from communism. I taught the American people that there is such a thing as an American atheist, just as there is an American Democrat, an American Republican, an American fascist, and an American socialist.” She purged her own organization of Marxists. “The moment we mix politics with us, we’re dead. We do not pretend to be one thing when we’re another.” Her attempted defection to the Soviet Union was a deeply buried secret.
In 1970, after the student movement had made leftist politics more acceptable, Madalyn began calling herself an anarchist. In 1976 she contemplated a race for governor of Texas, but turned her attention to running for the Austin City Council instead. She received six percent of the vote. Undaunted, Madalyn briefly considered running for president. Instead, she became the chief speech writer in the 1984 presidential bid of pornographer Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine. It was, in many respects, an odd alliance. Only a few months earlier Flynt had declared himself “saved” and had returned to his native Kentucky to be baptized in Stenson Creek. “If elected,” he said after announcing his candidacy, “my primary goal will be to eliminate ignorance and venereal disease.”
Flynt’s campaign was cut short by his imprisonment for contempt of court when he refused to disclose the source of secret tapes he had released in connection with the drug arrest of carmaker John DeLorean. While Flynt was in prison, Madalyn apparently got him to sign over a power of attorney, giving her and Jon Garth “every cotton-picking thing that the owned, all real, personal, and mixed property,” including Hustler magazine. Madalyn privately estimated the fortune at $300 million. This coup was blocked by Flynt’s brother Jimmy, who filed suit in Los Angeles for a conservatorship of Flynt’s estate. By the time Flynt got out of prison, he had apparently changed his mind and decided to keep his fortune for himself.
“My gawd, you’re persistent!” Madalyn yelled at me as she came into the office to deliver a message to her son. She walked out of the room, then abruptly returned. “You’ve got no business writing this story!” she shouted. “You don’t have a radical mind. There’s no way you could ever even attempt to understand what we’re trying to do here. You’re a classic liberal!”
Two weeks later, when I called her on the phone, she continued the verbal lashing.
“You’re a gawddam liar!” she told me. “It is absolutely incredible that you’re calling up people and telling them that I am a thief, and that you are telling them that we are in serious trouble with a number of government agencies, and that we’re under criminal investigation . . . ”
She was angry because I had been digging into various charges, most of which had been leveled at her by Brian Lynch. Lynch maintains that the IRS is following up his assertions with an investigation into the finances of Madalyn’s tax-exempt corporations. She is also facing a civil racketeering suit in connection with a weird episode surrounding the estate of James Hervey Johnson, a deceased atheist and white supremacist who published a magazine called Truth Seeker. Even before Johnson’s death, Madalyn made a claim on his $15 million estate and went so far as to have stock certificates made up in her own printshop in the name of the Truth Seeker Corporation; she then held a board meeting of her friends and allies and voted Johnson out of power. “It’s like you and me deciding that we’re going to take over Chrysler and kick out Iacocca,” says San Diego attorney Roy Withers, who is representing the Johnson interests in this case.
As a matter of fact, I had never been much interested in doing an exposé of Madalyn’s finances, as she feared. It was the woman herself I wanted to understand. And hasn’t she cried out for understanding? The closer I came to her, however, the more she withdrew and the angrier she became. Now, as she ranted on the phone, I realized that this would be my last opportunity to talk to her.
“I think you are going to try to use my name as a vehicle to gain some attention for yourself,” Madalyn continued, bushing aside my attempts to mollify her, “because you don’t have it in you to get any attention for yourself otherwise.” Click.
I replaced the receiver. Despite her feelings toward me, I came away from Madalyn O’Hair with a sense of respect but also of sadness. I had wanted to study a life lived in defiance of convention, a life that was recklessly authentic and accepting of the consequences. But when I looked into Madalyn, that was not exactly the life I found. Madalyn stood aside from the world of belief and longing-for-belief and said it was only imaginary. She had been willing to state the awful truth as she understood it, no matter how frightening the consequences. I admired her courage. But now I saw that much of her own life was imaginary as well.
As I peeled away each layer of O’Hair, Murray, Roths, Mays, looking for the Madalyn inside, I began to have a sense of the sadness of that life. It seemed a commonplace observation about her, one that her detractors and even her friends had made, but I saw at last that Madalyn was a religious phenomenon, in the same way that antimatter is an expression of matter. She was a black hole of belief.
Long ago Madalyn understood the source of her power. She is a mirror of doubt. Holding up that mirror to America, she had changed our country and shaken our ideas about who we are. Now I had glimpsed how fragile was her own identity. She had made us examine our beliefs perhaps at the cost of her own.
But, “what the hell,” as she once observed. “We have to live now. No one gets a second chance. There is no heaven and no hell. There is no ‘after’ life. You either make the best or the worst of what you have now or there is nothing. Laugh at it. Hug it to you. Drain it. Build it. Have it.”
My Library
