Has Madalyn Murray O’Hair Met Her Maker?
God only knows. In the meantime, FBI agents dig up a ranch in South Texas, an ex-con with a violent past sits in jail, and atheists everywhere happily adjust to life without the “most hated woman in America.”
(Page 2 of 5)
In Texas, at the whip end of the Bible Belt, she found the courage of her lack of convictions. In 1964 she had admitted to the Saturday Evening Post, “I don’t really care that much about atheism, but I’ve gotten into this thing, and I’ve been driven out of the community. Atheism is all I have to fight my way back in with.” Separation of church and state was her cause, but survival by any means necessary was her true belief. She formed the Society of Separationists—and later American Atheists—and began publishing a newsletter. The money started coming in.
It was the sixties, a time to be angry, outrageous, and outside the mainstream. Madalyn hit the TV talk shows and became a celebrity. She was on Phil Donahue’s first program in 1967 and was later a hit on the Merv Griffin and Johnny Carson shows. She was funny, smart, opinionated. She was also bitter and mean. When Pope John Paul died in 1978, she wrote in her diary: “I only wish I could spit on his corpse.” She helped prevent astronaut Buzz Aldrin from taking televised communion on the moon. She sued to stop Texas from requiring that public officials believe in a Supreme Being; it worked. She couldn’t get “In God We Trust” off coins, couldn’t stop the pope from saying mass on the Mall in Washington, D.C., and couldn’t get rid of tax exemptions for churches. But she could get into Larry Flynt’s Hollywood parties. In 1984 she even became his “chief speech-writer” when he ran for president.
It was a good period for Madalyn, personally and professionally. American Atheists (AA) was the most successful national atheist group, with thirty chapters, a cable TV show, and a radio show on 150 stations. In 1987 Madalyn bought a new headquarters for more than $1 million—in cash, she bragged. The 16,100-square-foot monolith of red brick and mirrored glass in North Austin had no steeple. It was squat, hard, and earthbound, like its owner.
FROM HER HEADQUARTERS—WITH ITS PRINTING PLANT, tape duplication center, 25,000-volume library, and luxury offices—Madalyn reigned over a vast empire. She had at least seven corporations, each with a handpicked board of directors. She got exemptions from state sales and property taxes. She and her lawyers filed more and more separation of church and state lawsuits. She lost one to get “so help me God” taken out of the Texas jury oath and another to get the cross taken out of the City of Austin seal. But she won city-seal cases in two Illinois cities, Zion and Rolling Meadows. “People would say, ‘So what? It’s just a little cross,’” remembers John Vinson, Madalyn’s onetime lawyer. “Madalyn would reply, ‘What if it were a little swastika?’” There were also suits filed to generate publicity and suits filed for the hell of it. Madalyn sued Texas Monthly for $9 million in 1989 after contributing editor Lawrence Wright wrote a story about her (the suit was ultimately thrown out). She loved a fight, loved to be hated. “We got boxes and boxes of hate mail,” says David Travis, who worked at American Atheists.
Many of Madalyn’s employees were, like her, outsiders. A man who had done time in federal prison for threatening President Reagan. A brusque gay activist with a phone-sex business. A Vietnam vet who had lost his religion under fire. An Illinois ex-con with a violent past. There were also college students, Catholics, and working-stiff atheists—some just looking for a job, others eager to work for an American hero. She did not return the admiration. “We can afford lumpen proletariat employees and that’s what we get,” she wrote in her diary in 1979, “flotsam and jetsam, pimps, whores, hopheads, queers, pinkos, drunks, glue-sniffers and freaks.…I’m absolutely fed up with all of them.”
Madalyn, Jon, and Robin rode herd on the office, sometimes viciously. “They belittled everybody,” says a former staffer. “They were always telling employees they were stupid, that they didn’t know what they were doing. And you could always hear the three of them yelling at each other and doors slamming.” In 1986 Jon—then 31—became president of American Atheists, but his mother still ran the show. “He was a big doofus,” says the ex-staffer. “He had no social skills whatsoever,” says Travis. “He was always running around the office shouting obscenities.” Jon also had no management skills, and it didn’t take long for him to alienate some of the AA chapters. “No one in the organization wanted him taking over,” says Vinson. “They all despised him.”
Robin, meanwhile, edited the group’s publications and managed its library. She had a sensitive side and wrote poetry (American Atheist Press published Tweetings of a Loose Robin in 1981), but “she could be caustic and impatient with people,” remembers Rodney Florence. She learned how to treat people from her grandmother, who had adopted her when her father abandoned her. Bill, who announced on Mother’s Day in 1980 that he had found God (he was then banished from Madalyn’s life), says that years later he wrote to his daughter and tried to apologize for giving her up. He still doesn’t know if she got the letter.
It wasn’t just apostates whom O’Hair excommunicated. She severed ties with members who offended her, asked too many questions, or tried to democratize her organization—and once you were out, you were out for good. When Vinson got fed up and quit, she contested his unemployment claim. “She told them I had possibly murdered some people and that I had sex with animals,” he says. She ran American Atheists as she ran her life, bulling through everyone in her way, with Jon and Robin close behind her. The three misfits did everything together. They sat on and controlled the boards of most of AA’s corporations, rotating the positions of president, vice president, and treasurer among themselves. They worked, ate, and took vacations together and lived in the same huge house on Greystone Drive in northwest Austin. They trusted no one else, except maybe their dogs.
And they were lonely. Madalyn had no close friends; Jon and Robin fared no better. AA member Arnold Via told the Baltimore Sun that around 1987, “Jon got a little horny and got a girlfriend and let her move into the house, and that was a big mistake. Madalyn locked horns with her fast, and that was the end of that love affair. Robin thought she had a boyfriend once until Madalyn cut the bonds.” The threesome made up for their loneliness with extravagance. Jon and Madalyn each drove a Mercedes, Robin a Porsche. “We’re accustomed to good food,” Jon told Lawrence Wright, “to eating in dining rooms with tablecloths, good dishes, a good bottle of wine.…All of us have nice clothes. My suits cost a minimum of five, six hundred dollars.”
The party line, however, was that American Atheists was cash poor. Though the organization officially claimed 70,000 families on its mailing list, it only had between 2,000 and 2,500 actual members, each of whom paid dues of $40 a year. Like the televangelists she mocked, Madalyn got good at begging for money by claiming poverty or fabricating catastrophes, including a famously leaky roof. Money poured in, sometimes from the estates of dead atheists. In 1987, not long after failing to wrest Larry Flynt’s empire from him while he was in jail, Madalyn tried to take over the $14 million fortune of James Hervey Johnson, the publisher of The Truth Seeker, an atheist magazine in San Diego; she even printed stock certificates showing herself as president of the company. The Truth Seeker countered with a racketeering claim, demanding $7 million in damages.
Soon American Atheists was in crisis. The IRS sued Jon and Robin for $1.5 million in back taxes. Pleas for money weren’t going as well as they used to, and in 1993 the radio show was dropped; that was also the last year for AA’s annual convention. Madalyn secretly began to pack up the $3 million library, her main asset. “Madalyn said they were not going to get their hands on the library,” says a former worker. That August, Jon went to New Zealand. “Madalyn told me he was there to check into legal information on extradition,” says the ex-staffer, who saw a fax from a New Zealand bank that showed a $250,000 transfer to an account only insiders knew about. Madalyn eventually asked this employee to leave her husband and relocate with the family; she declined. At the end of that summer half the staff was let go. In November the Truth Seeker suit ended in a mistrial.
On top of everything else, Madalyn was suffering from diabetes, high blood pressure, and dizziness. Roy Withers, the attorney for The Truth Seeker, remembers her being wheeled into the courtroom. “She was in bad shape,” he says. She would get worse.
My Library
