Completely overlooked by much of the media and by people like me was the recent death of one-time noted evangelist Marjoe Gortner, who died on October 2 at the age of 82. He had been the youngest person ever ordained as a minister at the age of four. He was clearly a prodigy of some kind, but he was pretty much exploited by his family and others because of his extraordinary (for his age) speaking ability.
In early adulthood, Marjoe (his name a combination of Mary and Joseph) abandoned evangelism, exposing all the fraud and deceit involved in it and turned to acting, which was a natural outgrowth of his background. In the early 1970s, he became the subject of a documentary called Marjoe, which won the Academy Award of 1972 for Best Documentary. What is interesting is in the decades following its release, it was believed to have been a lost film, but the original negatives and related elements were found in 2002 and restored in 2002. It is available on DVD. I have a copy of it. Cynicism runs amok in this film.
Gortner was married five times, the first time when he was a mere 16 in 1960. Early marriages were rampant in the United States then, but Marjoe's was still an outlier.
He spent his later years in New Mexico. He died of congestive heart failure.
It appears the death wasn't announced until a couple of weeks ago, so I don't feel so bad about being late to write about it here.
He was born into the business, the fourth generation of a family of ministering men. But it was his mother, Margaret, known as Sister Marge, who taught him the trade, writing the scripts for his sermons and drilling him in daylong sessions.
He rarely stumbled. When he did, Marge’s teaching method involved pressing a pillow over his face or holding his head under a running faucet. These tactics were successful not only because they were terrifying, but also because they didn’t leave any telltale marks.
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These days, that sort of thing would have landed Marge in jail.
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