Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult (14 page)

Mo’s own mistress, Maria, who was the age of his daughter, was his constant companion, whereas his legal wife, and the mother of his royal children, whom we affectionately called Mother Eve, now traveled the colonies with a young consort. Instead of considering these relationships ungodly, I thought they were enlightening, although I considered the titles to be foolish. I knew that there must be a cache of money somewhere, since the royalty and the leaders traveled so much and always had what they needed, but I could not imagine that it was very much. We didn’t make that much litnessing, so where could all this money be coming from? I knew that quite a few very wealthy people had joined the Family, and maybe they had given all their money to the group. I knew that Jeremy Spencer, who had been relatively wealthy at one time, had given everything he owned to the Lord’s work, a fact that reassured me. Jeremy now lived in the same home that I did, and he went out on the streets just as I did. If he could live like this, with all the money he had forsaken, why should I worry about who controlled the money? All that I had given the group was an old guitar and a few vintage clothes.

However, any doubts about money and who had it were canceled after meeting Hopie. I perceived her to be a spiritual princess, and I was honored to be in her presence. Hopie was the one responsible for bringing me to Paris.

By the mid-1970s, the COG were beginning to set up discos in the larger cities in Europe, wherever we had colonies and musicians. Initially called the Poor Boy Clubs, these weekend discos attracted youth and young adults by providing music and a place to dance. Since the Family had musicians, the entertainment cost us nothing, and there wasn’t much financing involved. We rented a hall in a less expensive area of town, sent our litnessers out with flyers advertising the club, and charged a small admission at the door. It soon became the main event of the week, and with all the free manpower and womanpower at our disposal, our discos became regular happenings for the Parisian teenyboppers.

Cal was now the drummer for the disco band in Paris. Since some of the leaders in London told us that including go-go girls drew a bigger crowd, Hopie suggested I be a go-go girl, which meant wearing a skimpy outfit and dancing on stage. Not only did this new role come easy to me, it also meant I would be free of the normal quotas for litnessing, since I now had to practice with the band. It was a wonderful outlet for me, and it became a training ground that led to my professional dancing career. I usually brought Thor with me to practice and let another sister watch him during the disco nights.

As important as dancing became, my primary concern was the nursery.

With more women having children in the Paris home, babies were becoming a problem. Fortunately, we never had a major illness or accident among the children in Paris while I lived there, and I attributed this to God’s protection. France, like most of Europe, had a free health system, and if any of our members did not have the faith to heal themselves, they could always go to the doctor. I did not then understand why we qualified for this service, or France’s laws concerning it, but I know that many of our mothers made use of France’s medical hospitality. In addition, France had very strict vaccination laws, and to avoid legal trouble, we all had our babies, Thor included, vaccinated at the local clinics. However, the first step toward making the Paris stables into a home that could accommodate children came with the arrival of Rahab.

A tall, pretty woman who had been in the Family more years than many, Rahab had been married to Benjamin, the son and heir apparent of Moses David. Ben had recently fallen off a mountain in Switzerland while on a walk and died. Mo explained in a letter to us that his son had been too good for the world and had gone to join forces with the spiritual realm.

Nasty rumor had it that he had committed suicide. Rahab was in Paris with another mate and a small baby, and since Rahab was semiroyalty, having been the wife of Mo’s son, she had to be given a leadership position. Hopie put her in charge of setting up a nursery and child-care department in Paris. The problem was, Rahab had little child-care training, she seemed to have no sense of organization or scheduling, both of which were important parts of any effective child-care program. Joab recognized this lack of practicality, and he suggested I work closely with her. After a few days of meetings, I decided that Paris must be the place they sent those leaders who were too spiritual to do any earthly good.

Rahab and I set up a nursery in the small room next to the girls’ dorm.

It doubled as a bedroom for Cal and me, which did not make him too happy, but since he was away all day practicing, it only interfered with his sleep. The nursery consisted of single mattresses on the floor along one wall, a soft rug in the middle, and two changing tables with covered trash containers for disposable diapers. It had a softwood floor, so it was safe for babies taking their first steps.

Thor was the oldest at a little over a year, and the other two babies, Rahab’s and another woman’s, usually slept with their mother. The children usually followed the adult schedule, with a little earlier bedtime, and single sisters took turns volunteering to read the babies scriptures as they fell asleep.

Officially, the nursery could be used twenty-four hours a day, but only visiting leaders and disciples made use of it at night. Since it was right across from the only bathroom, we brought water into the nursery to bathe the children, and used a large tub to clean baby materials and wash clothes. We could not afford the expensive Montessori equipment, which was used for the children in the bigger, well-stocked Family nurseries, so we brought various pots and pans, plastic dishes, and spoons from the kitchen, and odd-shaped cardboard boxes for the babies to play with.

Rahab spent many hours in my nursery/bedroom, revealing to me the “new” spiritual growth of the family. She spiritualized everything, and I wondered if she had always been like this or if she had learned it from her deceased husband, whom I had met in Canada and remembered as an ethereal person. Everything from the stain on the babies’ bib to the recent death of the French politician Georges Pompidou had a deep spiritual significance to Rahab. Little child care was discussed.

Since Rahab came from the London home, where the organizational heads and Mo were, she knew a few royal secrets.

“Do you know who Esther is sleeping with now?” she quipped while I patted the last baby to sleep as he lay on the extra blankets we had arranged on the floor. Recently, a few mothers had come from colonies outside Paris for meetings, and our nursery was a little crowded during the day. I was worried if they planned on letting the babies stay here all night, but Rahab evidently was too spiritual to worry.

“Well, I suppose her husband, Jacob,” I replied, knowing she would soon fill me in on royal gossip.

“Oh, no. Jacob is living with Enoch’s first wife, Pearl. That was really a terrible thing to do to Enoch, you know. I mean, he always suspected that Pearl was more than Jacob’s secretary, but until Mo came out and explained about the royal family having consorts and concubines, he really did not know, did he? So Pearl is now Jacob’s second wife, and she’s having a baby. And Jacob’s wife, Esther, is traveling with Hosanna. From what I hear, she is pregnant again, but of course, no one is sure who the father could be.” Even for the Paris home, this was radical information that I was hearing. I tried to change the subject, knowing that, since I was not a member of the royal family, or even a mistress, I should probably not be privy to what went on in their personal relationships. I had heard that the London home was even more on the libertine cuttingedge than the home in Paris, but I was dedicated to our pioneer effort here and didn’t care about London’s elite or what they did. I usually had the attitude that others could do as they liked as long as it didn’t interfere with me or my son. But what I did not understand was that no woman is an island—especially not one living in a commune.

“Do you think we could request funds for a crib in here?” I asked, trying to change the topic. “The babies should really be up off the floor, and it would certainly be safer to have them in a crib, rather than on the bed.”

“Okay, I’ll talk to Joab about that. Well, you know, of course, that Joab made Beth pregnant. I wonder what Hopie is going to do about that. Oh well, I guess I won’t be involved in their stories anymore, now that Benjamin is gone. Mother Eve is coming through here soon. She and I get along marvelously. I think I’ll ask her to take me with her. “

“What about the child-care program here?” I asked.

“oh, you’ll do fine. I really don’t enjoy child care. They just put me here to give me something to do, you know. Well, I hope you never get stuck with Esther. She is a tyrant to work with.” I had already worked with a tyrant in Germany, and I had no desire to be near another one. Esther, however, was our Queen, and somehow I knew that with Paris gaining the Family’s attention, we would be graced with a royal visit soon.

Mo’s original wife came first. Although she was Mo’s first wife— and I don’t think they ever divorced—she was never called a queen, just Mother Eve. She was a kind-looking lady in her fifties who traveled with a young man about twenty-five years old. Like her daughter Hopie, she always wore a smile, and always had some words of encouragement.

Now that I had learned to read people a little better, she did not seem old, but forgotten. She did not keep herself as attractively attired as the sexy French women of her age. I knew from the letters that she had been raised in the church and had married Mo when he was a budding preacher.

I saw pictures of her in the Family history letters in which she was playing a piano in church, and I wondered how this fundamentalist Christian lady could ever be traveling and having sex with a man so young while her husband lived with another woman. I had been socially prepared for this by hippie ideals, but she was more radical than I.

How did this poor lady do it? She must really have believed that this was God’s true work. She had followed Mo across America while he searched for a “ministry,” and had borne him four children. When he’d finally found his calling with the youth of California, the beginnings of the Children of God, her children were all teenagers and witnessed with their father to the lost hippies. I don’t think Mother Eve ever shared the limelight during those days, but she certainly made up for it now.

Wherever she went, she held meetings and talked for hours. We never knew what to think of her. I had been told that Mo referred to her as the “the old church” and to Maria as “the new church” in his first circulated letter of 1969, titled “A Prophecy of God on the Old Church and the New Church.” But he told us to respect her as a Mother and he even published her talks, called Mother Eve letters. At other times we were warned that Mother and her consort were not obeying the rules laid out in the letters and should be banned from fellowship. At this point in Paris she was still respected.

“Come here, honey. You look pretty today. Are you married, dear?” she said to me when we first met.

“Yes, I am married to Cal.”

“oh, he’s the drummer, isn’t he? Well, honey, you better keep your eyes on him. He’s a handsome young man, you know. Are you happy, honey?” I really did not think much about happiness. I felt I was doing God’s Will, so I guess I should be happy. She noticed that I hesitated.

“Well, don’t worry, dearie. God never takes anything away without giving you something better,” she informed me in an apocalyptic tone.

The realization came to me that she had borne all Mo’s children and then been cast aside, and maybe she was not happy. I hid this fact from my rational thought processes, a mental action that had become ingrained.

Whenever a leader came through Paris, Hopie and Joab would throw a big party and everyone enjoyed the royal festivities. There would be music and dancing until late into the night, and being in France, wine flowed freely. Every leader in the Family wanted to come through Paris, since we were beginning to have good contacts with music and television producers. A well-known French singer and his producer had seen some of us performing on the streets and were seriously interested in promoting us as a music group. In the small French entertainment world, their influence meant success. We had already made a recording of our theme song “You Gotta Be a Baby,” and we had appeared on a few TV and radio shows. Hopie had always been wonderful at making contacts and establishing a good public relations image, but paperwork and legal matters were not something she could be trusted with. Her husband Joab) a Vietnam veteran, was more of an inspirationalist than a manager, so we knew our so-called organizational geniuses, Esther and her husband Jacob, would be sent our way soon.

Esther came like the Queen of Hearts, yelling “off with their heads. ” I heard rumors that Mo had sent Esther to Paris to put our home in order. Whatever the reason, a pall settled over Paris after Esther arrived. She was a small lady whose physically fragile appearance gave little clue of the tremendous power she held as Queen of the Family.

Having known the loving, free, and easygoing Hopie, I was not prepared for the Queen’s wrath. She had been given complete authority over all practical matters in the Family, which was now centered in Europe.

Esther came to our home with her last baby and a child-care helper in tow. Her older children were all taken care of in the large Italian child-care center that she had personally set up a year earlier. Her positions on how children should be taken care of were full of contradictions. Even so, Esther was in charge of setting up huge nurseries and schools where many of the children were sent. I knew from the Family testimonies that these nurseries were clean and well organized, that children were taught in Montessori-style classes from the age of two, and that our nurseries and schools were on a par with the best the system had to offer. In comparison, here in Paris we did not have a great practical setup, but at least the babies slept with their mothers at night—they had to since we had no cribs. I remembered watching babies all night in the nursery in Ellenville, and trying to understand how a mother could be sleeping over in the married couple’s rooms or in the leaders’ house, and not be worried that her baby was crying somewhere far away. I didn’t want Thor crying in the middle of the night only to have him be held by some passing nursery worker. As far as I could see, big, organized nurseries meant separation of mother and baby, and, consciously or subconsciously, I did not want this to happen to me. Up until now, I had kept Thor with me night and day, but Esther’s appearance in Paris marked the beginning of the end for my close relationship with Thor.