the supremacy of scientific breakthroughs and updated interpretations of philosophy, religion and history, he all but stopped buying new volumes for his fabled library. He chastised rock ‘n’ roll, jazz and modern art as potentially dangerous cacophony and watched arguably less talented peers such as Ernest Holmes, founder of the First Church of Religious Science, develop far larger metaphysical denominations.
Hall’s warnings around this time of an impending “great decision” that would involve Western powers and Islamic nations could come straight from an early 21st-century news report. The great problem that faces the world, he forecasted in a lecture, centered in the area of the Eastern Mediterranean. “This center of tension,” he said, “is probably more important than at first appears and will justify our thoughtfulness concerning the Mediterranean area, which is part of the world policy.”
Amid the Utopian wonderment and experimentation of the 1960s and ’70s, Hall’s Hollywood compound attracted a new generation of people from surprisingly diverse fields and disciplines, from Burl Ives to astronaut Edgar Mitchell to Elvis. However, in a time of sexual liberation, mind-expanding drugs and hippie counterculture, Hall seemed strange, stuffy, and demanding to others, and, judging from his physical appearance, embarrassingly out of step with his own advice about the importance of self-discipline with diet and exercise.
By the 1980s, Hall knew all too well that his inconsistencies and personal failings were catching up with him and disappointing some acolytes. He had predicted that would happen in essays written decades earlier on the dangers of putting spiritual leaders on a pedestal.
“One cause of disillusionment in metaphysics is for the metaphysical teacher to prove to be more human than originally suspected,” he wrote in an essay published in 1942. “The tendency is to so elevate personalities that we endow them with sacred powers. All our faith is put upon them as we hang tinsel on a Christmas tree. The leader is assumed to be infallible, whereas he is no more than one who is well-meaning, quite capable of contributing to the improvement of humanity, but still personally subject to innumerable ills. Doing the best he can, he is a good human being but a poor divinity. All followers who offer to adorn and deify their teachers set up a false condition. Human beings, experience has proved, make better humans than they do gods. We should be willing to accept a person who possesses wisdom as a friend, not deify him; it just won’t hold up.”
A year later he wrote, “Why did the disciples of Pythagoras always refer to the master as ‘The Man,’ as in the Bible we are enjoined to ‘Behold the Man.’ Why? Because in the old mysteries only the initiated were human—the rest were trying to get that way, and any greatness was measured by their accomplishment. Only the great initiated adepts were recognized as human; the rest were creatures crawling toward the light who, having eyes, see not, and are therefore blind; who, having ears, do not hear. It is in this manner that the Platonist tells us what they were trying to do at our stage of human development; not to make gods out of men, but to make men out of beasts, and so lift humanity up to its true estate of enlightened harmlessness, where men no longer prey upon each other.”
He could have been talking about himself. Although he saw the validity of sacred truths, he was also swept away by questionable enthusiasms that were profitable and popular, like mental telepathy and the healing powers of gemstones. He could distill the salient principles of Neo-Platonism, but he enjoyed being the center of attention, and didn’t trust anyone but himself.
For much of his life, Hall binged on cheap sweets such as donuts and malted milk balls, avoided physical activity, and sometimes cultivated relationships with followers by telling them, for example, that they had been close friends in a past life, or that secret societies had big plans for them. Putting himself in the role of a godlike man who could not be questioned opened the doors for idolatry and abuse.
On August 23, 1990, Hall’s caretaker, executive officer and confidant, Daniel Fritz, who billed himself as a shaman and expert in alternative medical techniques, rushed to the ailing philosopher’s office in order to resolve an urgent legal matter. He needed Hall’s signature on a new will and living trust arrangement. It would help Hall’s survivors avoid probate. After Hall died, control over the Philosophical Research Society, the compound and its contents, then valued at about $5 million, would go to the successor trustee, Fritz.
And why not? The old man had neglected the place for years. Buildings were in desperate need of repairs. The copyright on some of his writings had been allowed to lapse. His personal library of 30,000 volumes lacked even fire alarms to protect them. Valuables, including gold coins, were inexplicably missing from his walk-in vault. And Hall, who was beginning to show signs of senility, had yet to groom anyone to succeed him.
Clearly, he told him, something must be done quickly. Hall agreed, and with a few strokes of his pen, he signed documents that essentially turned over his assets to Fritz, wedging out his second wife, Marie, and stepchildren who were to inherit everything, according to the last will and testament he had signed nearly two decades earlier.
Six days later, on the morning of August 29, Fritz telephoned a local mortuary to report that his boss had died in bed of natural causes. The corpse collectors and the Halls’ family physician were alarmed by what they saw in the bedroom.
Hall’s immense pale body lay on a bed without a single wrinkle; thousands of ants streamed from his ears, nose and mouth. A cleaning crew was attacking reddish-brown stains on the carpet near the bed. Fritz and his helpers were busily carting Hall’s clothes and valuables from the home to his car. The physician, growing increasingly suspicious, rescinded the death certificate he had signed a few hours earlier.
Fritz insisted that his boss died peacefully in his sleep. Los Angeles Police Department investigators have a different theory: that Fritz murdered Hall.
The case remains an open-ended Hollywood murder mystery.
IN THE EARLY 1900S, IT WAS EASY TO IMAGINE THE SUNNY CANVAS OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA AS A SORT OF PARADISE: A PLACE OF SPARKLING BEACHES AND IRISH-GREEN HILLS, VINEYARDS AND FRAGRANT ORANGE BLOSSOMS; A WESTERN OUTPOST EXPLODING WITH POSSIBILITIES AS A HOME TO THE FLEDGLING MOVIE INDUSTRY AND MYRIAD FRONTIER RELIGIONS. FABULOUS OIL WELLS WERE BEING STRUCK AND FERTILE VALLEY FARMLANDS ROLLED OUT LIKE CARPETS.
A place of adventure and change was not what Manly Palmer Hall was looking for when he stepped off a train in downtown Los Angeles in the fall of 1919. For Hall, the lure of Southern California was the chance to reunite with his mother, who had abandoned him in infancy. The 18-year-old Canadian immigrant, who never knew his father, had spent a confused and insecure childhood bouncing from town to town with his maternal grandmother, Florence Palmer. They had been living in New York City when she died suddenly, leaving Hall with little choice but to quit his clerk’s job at a Wall Street firm, leave the city, and move into his mother’s home in the beachside community of Santa Monica. [1]
Louise Hall, who had worked for 15 years as a chiropractic healer in the Alaskan gold fields, shared the modest house with her second husband, Charles Hall, a jack-of-all-trades who took her last name. [2]
If there were hard feelings between Hall and his mother, he never spoke of them; that is, beyond gentle chiding for burdening him with an odd name. As for the father he never knew, Hall would only say that husbands who walk away from their families are irresponsible and inconsiderate
