Marjorie Cameron

Marjorie Elizabeth Cameron, who exhibited under the single name Cameron, was born on April 23, 1922 in Belle Plaine, Iowa, and died on July 24, 1995. The Whitney Museum of American Art records that she served in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War before settling in Pasadena.¹ A gallery biography describes a Navy period as a cartographer.² The FBI's Washington Field Office was asked in March 1951 to check her Veterans Administration file under the G.I. Bill and her WAVES service record at Garden City, Long Island, in the espionage inquiry into her husband.³

Babalon Working and marriage to Jack Parsons

In a letter of March 6, 1946, Jack Parsons wrote to Aleister Crowley that between February 2 and March 4 he had had "the most important, devastating experience of my life," which he believed "was the result of the 9th working with the girl who answered my elemental summons," and that "First instructions were received through Ron the seer," that is L. Ron Hubbard. He wrote that he did "not yet know the vehicle but it will come to me bringing a secret sign."⁴ Crowley replied on March 15, 1946 that he was "particularly interested in what you have written to me about the elemental" and warned that "the love of the Magus for such things is insensate and destroys him"; on May 19, 1946 he wrote that he was "completely puzzled by your remarks about the elemental" and could not form an idea of whom Parsons meant.⁵

The Orange County marriage record found by the FBI shows that Parsons, a thirty-two-year-old chemist at 1003 South Orange Grove Avenue, Pasadena, married Marjorie Elizabeth Cameron, a twenty-four-year-old painter born in Iowa and living at 1002 South Orange Grove Avenue, at San Juan Capistrano on October 19, 1946, before a justice of the peace; it was her first marriage and his second.³ The file shows the FBI also sought to learn whether she had been issued a passport.³

June 17, 1952

According to the Los Angeles Daily News of June 18, 1952, when the explosion occurred in the garage laboratory at 1071 South Orange Grove Avenue, "Mrs. Marjorie Cameron Parsons, 30, the scientist's wife, ran into the lab and dug frantically for her husband, buried under the debris." She had just made arrangements with the Turner and Stevens mortuary when she walked into the house on Arroyo Terrace to learn that his mother had also died. Robert Cameron, identified as Parsons's brother-in-law, told the paper that he believed Parsons had decided to complete an experiment although he was in a hurry to pack the trailer for San Miguel, an art colony near Mexico City, where the couple planned to leave that night.⁶ The Whitney's biography states that she came to suspect her husband had been assassinated and began rituals to communicate with his spirit.¹

Later work

The Whitney records that she moved to Beaumont, where she established a group called The Children, which dissolved; that on returning to Los Angeles she befriended the socialite Samson De Brier and the filmmakers Curtis Harrington and Kenneth Anger; that she acted in Harrington's The Wormwood Star and Night Tide and in Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (as the Scarlet Woman); that she lived in Joshua Tree, San Francisco and Santa Fe; and that she had a daughter, Crystal Eve Kimmel, in 1955 and lived in West Hollywood from the late 1970s.¹ A gallery biography states that Wallace Berman published a photograph of her on the cover of his journal Semina in 1955 with her drawing Peyote Vision, that the drawing was shown at Berman's 1957 exhibition at the Ferus Gallery, where the Los Angeles Police Department deemed it "lewd," closed the gallery and arrested Berman, and that she afterwards declined to exhibit commercially.² In 1989 she co-edited Parsons's occult writings with the O.T.O. leader Hymenaeus Beta, and her work was surveyed at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery that year.²