Linda Goodman
Toward the end of her life, Linda Goodman’s favorite movies were Gone with the Wind and Brother Sun, Sister Moon, both of which she regularly screened for her friends in the rambling Cripple Creek, Colorado, home she lost to bankruptcy just before her death. A giant stained-glass window depicting St. Francis de Assisi cast blues and oranges across the carpeted parlor where, once a week, this famous American astrologer would mouth “as God is my witness” along with Scarlett O’Hara. Following the films, she’d cart everyone off to the Palace Hotel on Main Street for a three-course dinner that she’d cover with a combination of estate jewelry and the small fortune she’d amassed from her astrology books’ sales.
Goodman was a beautiful woman. In her earliest public portrait, a black-and-white author photograph for Sun Signs, she is leaning forward, her eyelids heavy with makeup, her high cheekbones defined by shadow. She’s wearing a turtleneck and her hair does a Nancy Sinatra flip at the shoulders. In a press photo ten years later, she’s redheaded with a raised eyebrow and peach skin so smooth it looks painted on. Then there’s a point-and-shoot photo from her late Cripple Creek days, in which she stares directly at the camera wearing a Navajo-print T-shirt, her palm planted on a golden bust of Osiris sitting before her on a coffee table.
I remember sitting at my own coffee table one night in Brooklyn, flipping through Love Signs and finding an appendix I’d never noticed before that brought the weirdness of Goodman’s worldview into sharp relief. My copy of Love Signs shared shelf space with the English Standard Version Bible and The Collected Stories of Flannery O’Connor, and though it was weathered from reference, here was this thing I’d never noticed before, like a hidden track on an old album: a reproductive treatise in the appendix called “A Time to Embrace.” In it, Goodman argues for all forms of modern birth control to be replaced with a family-planning method called “astrobiology.” She allows that “whether abortion is right or wrong is not the Aquarian issue,” then, in the next paragraph, writes, “The Catholic Church has taken the view that abortion is an act against Nature and against spiritual Wholeness. The Catholic view is correct.” It was funny, that lack of self-awareness, an idiosyncratic style so complete she could thread Christianity and references to the planet Vulcan into the same world, the same cosmology. It was funny, yes, and emboldening, considering my own awkward position transversing secularism, the occult, and American Calvinism.
During those years, because of my apparent interest in the subject, I was frequently asked to interpret astrological charts for my friends and friends of friends, and I eventually learned to read tarot as well. Both the Western zodiac and the tarot are constructed from similar forms, archetypes, and patterns, and can be used to interpret one another. If I found any use of them for myself or others, it was not because of their predictive powers, but rather the way the zodiac organizes things that are already happening, that have already happened. I often felt compelled to say, “I am not telling your fortune. I’m showing you what’s going on and what you might be inclined to do next. If you don’t like your current inclination, it’s up to you to change it.”
Soon I was being hired to read cards at art openings and book launches, and I even had a few clients. My roommates and I were hosting regular literary salons at our apartment, and a young man who sometimes arrived on uppers dressed as Arthur Rimbaud and read excerpts from his sinister, mystical poems invited me to a service at his Presbyterian church in Williamsburg, which I ended up attending every Sunday until I left New York.
I sometimes picture Linda Goodman in her final years, standing in the glow of her stained-glass windows, and I wonder how she knit it all together—the magi, the magic, the church, the channeling of ancient wisdom, the writing on the wall—or didn’t.
If you’ve never heard of Goodman, you’d likely recognize her book jackets anyway, if only because of the sheer number that remain in print. Her second New York Times bestseller, the 900-page Love Signs written in 1978, bears the iconic Alphonse Mucha portrait of a priestess orbited by the Western zodiac. Flip over the book and you’ll find the sorts of teasers you see on monthly horoscope booklets in grocery store checkout lines:
“Can a Gemini man find happiness with a Virgo woman?”
“Will it be smooth sailing or perpetual fireworks between the Scorpio female and the Libra male?”
“If you’re a Taurus, you will love or hate Scorpios, nothing in between.”
But inside, Love Signs is perhaps the weirdest, most verbose, conversational mishmash of astrological writings to ever have graced commercial bookstore shelves. In a chapter detailing the various incarnations of a Virgoan-Aquarian relationship, Goodman writes:
The Aquarian male’s eccentricity often stops just short of the altar. In his choice of a lifetime mate, he tends to be slightly old fashioned. Maybe that’s because there’s room for only one cuckoo in a clock . . .
Since a Virgo female won’t compete in the cuckoo-clock Olympics, you can see that a mating between these two can work out nicely . . . For one thing, she’s too discriminating to flip over all the odd, assorted friends he may bring home at various hours. (I know one Virgo wife whose Aquarian husband expected her to play hostess to a snake wrestler from Pakistan for two weeks while he practiced with his reptile in the basement in preparation for the worldwide Python Tournament Match—and that’s a true story.) For another thing, she’s not a torrid sex symbol. But let’s face it, he might not know what to do with Raquel Welch if he had her.
This casual style is consistent throughout all of Goodman’s books, each of which is penned in the first person. Every chapter in Love Signs—most of which are lengthy insights on astrological pairings (e.g. Scorpio woman and Taurus man)—is introduced by an excerpt from J.M. Barrie’s original Peter Pan script, with secondary sources spanning the Gospels, Plains Indian cosmology, Henry James, and “Dear Abby.”
In that slim addendum I stumbled upon, “A Time to Embrace,” she opens with a verse from Ecclesiastes: “To everything there is a season . . . a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing . . .” She charges readers to heed the scripture’s message and find ways to make their actions “harmonize with the flow of cosmic currents, rather than timing them to oppose these powerful forces.” She goes on to dismiss the use of birth control, artificial insemination, and other reproductive innovations on account of being against “Universal Law”:
As the ancients who planned the conception of Kings knew well, a woman can conceive only during a certain, approximately two-hour period of each Lunar month, when the Sun and the Moon are exactly the same number of degrees apart as they were at the moment of the woman’s first breath at birth . . . Without exception, a woman can conceive at no other time than this approximately two-hour period, easily determined if her birth data are known. Each individual woman’s “cycle” is different, bearing no relation to the generalized, and consequently inaccurate, so-called “rhythm method.” It’s absolutely foolproof. And awesomely profound.
The book is peppered with these polemics. It begins with several title pages of quotations from the Bible and one from a fifteenth-century pope. These introduce a long letter to Goodman’s daughter Sally, who overdosed on speed in 1973—a death Goodman believed was a cover-up by the government—which she addresses openly and in good faith to a Sally she’s convinced is alive and reading it in 1978.
Since its first printing, Love Signs has sold over eight hundred thousand copies. Goodman’s total sales, according to the New York Times, amount to more than 30 million. Accompanied by other mystical uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s, Goodman’s books uniquely suggested that astrology was for everyone. How such unusual texts became an American blockbuster is no surprise: Most people scan astrological books as quick and affirmative reference, reading only the parts they believe have bearing on their own lives. Thus the birth chart’s complexity is reduced to cartoonish archetypes, and Goodman’s rambling meditations and appendices are lost to obscurity, remaining as unexamined as the woman who administered them.
The United States might be the only nation to have made its astrologers both famed and tawdry, with dual statuses of celebrity and hack. While earlier Euro-occultists like A.E. Waite and Aleister Crowley had formed brotherhoods, ministries, and esoteric origin stories, their midcentury American counterparts were advising movie stars and presidents, writing columns, and generally benefiting from the free market according to their calling. And while the U.S. government dignified the practice with a federal union in 1938, any public understanding of the tradition has been diminished by the print news demand for two-sentence horoscopes with our morning coffee, affirming harmony and passionate sex.
After reading hundreds of near-identical obituaries of Goodman as well as a handful of magazine features, the only non-book-jacket-type biographical information I could find came from a now-defunct website called Colorado History Chronicles, where a local historian had been selling articles for fifty cents apiece since the 1990s and happened to have written one at Goodman’s passing in 1995. This is where I read about her community standing in Cripple Creek as a generous eccentric who kept her friends closer, perhaps, than they wanted be, and also of her neighborhood screenings: two films that seem to express the strange place she occupied as an American writer and occultist. One is the story of the lavish fallen antebellum heroine, the other an affectionate biopic of St. Francis. Somewhere in the hang of Scarlett O’Hara’s dreams of “better times,” Goodman’s acute sense of victimhood, the communion of saints, the American Indians, the resurrection of the body, and casual encounters on the astral plane is the sum of this unlikely celebrity’s legacy.
Goodman migrated to Cripple Creek, the site of the last Colorado gold rush, shortly after Sun Signs reached the New York Times bestseller list in 1968. It was her first book. She was forty-three years old then and had already, reportedly, cycled through twin careers as a radio personality and a copywriter, reading aloud soldiers’ love letters during the Korean War and, somewhat inexplicably, speechwriting for Whitney Young, the black American civil rights leader who, during Goodman’s reported tenure, served as president of the National Urban League. Born Mary Alice Kemery in Morgantown, West Virginia, “Linda” created the pseudonym during her years broadcasting Love Letters from Linda for Parkersburg’s WCOM. Goodman was her second married name, which she took on in her early thirties.
This is the gist of what’s available of her pre–Sun Signs life, digested and repeated ad infinitum from cyberspace to microfilm. The rest of her legacy has been hijacked by a Tumblr of excerpts, a Twitter account operating in her name, and what appear to be forums run by compulsive-posting New Agers—and no book-length biography exists to date. When I asked her former agent, Art Klebanoff, how he interpreted her low profile, he said, “Linda was basically opposed to dealing with the media. The one interview she granted to People Magazine during the years I worked with her ended up focusing on the death of her daughter and did not cast Linda in a favorable light . . . Indeed, the fact that Linda was inaccessible was probably a marketing plus.” While reports of her work with Whitney Young are printed in all of her obituaries, Klebanoff said he is not even sure this is true.
In that 1979 People Magazine article, which opens with a portrait of Goodman tending the woodstove in her Cripple Creek home, reciting the St. Francis prayer (“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace . . .”), her late husband Sam O. Goodman attests to her interest in astrology beginning when he brought home John Lynch’s The Coffee Table Book of Astrology in 1962. She pored over its pages while the children were at school and Sam, a disc jockey, was at work. “I think she stayed in a nightgown studying astrology twenty hours a day for a year,” he recalls. Once everyone was out the door, she’d sit at her cane-back chair, slumped in that tiny kitchen with the lights off, her Victorian nightdress still smelling of sleep; she wouldn’t change positions, not once, and by sundown she’d be surrounded by legal pads wrinkled from note-taking.
Perhaps Sam silently agreed to start cooking dinners, taking charge of the kids’ hygiene so his wife could carry out her vocation. He was an even-tempered man, Linda’s wary but dutiful supporter, who, while never quite believing in what she did, gave her the benefit of the doubt.
When news reached them of Sally’s death in 1973, Sam was the first to fly out to New York, where Sally had been studying at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Linda and Sam were already separated then, though still friendly, and she was holed up in Cripple Creek, caught in a fraught publishing debacle that had frozen her advance for Love Signs, rendering her temporarily penniless. When she was finally able to join him (on a friend’s dime), she spent seven months couch-surfing and sleeping on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral while she tried to debunk what she believed was a corrupt investigation. The suicide note, she swore, was not in Sally’s handwriting. There was no empty pill bottle in the apartment. And above all, she didn’t “see” death in Sally’s birth chart, but instead, as she mused in People Magazine, “shock, amnesia, seclusion, and a convent. I’ve heard the government hides lots of witnesses.”
What were those nights like on the steps at St. Patrick’s? Did she slip into a green nylon Coleman sleeping bag, surrounded by candles and a small St. Francis figurine? I picture Sam, as I imagine he always behaved in these situations, with a dark furrowed brow, saying, “Now come on, Linda, let’s get a hotel room,” or “As upsetting as this is . . . ,” pacing around the church’s landing, meeting the eyes of concerned passersby so as to assure them that everything was fine, everything was going to be OK.
My father’s second wedding was officiated by an astrologer named Joanna Mitchell. This was in the mid-1990s. The ceremony was held in a deconsecrated church in Northwest Portland, and the guests—a mix of Catholics, rogue Episcopalians, and Old Order Mennonite descendants—fell into a confused hush as Mitchell began calling in the four directions, her big, shimmering body swathed in purple cloth. My new stepmother habitually referred to the zodiac in conversation with me, occasionally giving me doe-eyed pats on the shoulder when she’d remember I was a Virgo. I was seven then, and I’m not sure how I knew what she was talking about, but I did, and it stuck.
This was in elementary school, when Scholastic book order forms were passed out every month, with four-page newsprint pamphlets featuring kids’ books available at competitive rates. These were highly honored in my mother’s house. I was allowed to circle whatever I wanted, and she would clip out the order form and mail a check. In the third grade, among my selections was a blue paperback astrology book with “early reader” profiles of the twelve sun signs and accompanying cartoonish portraits: a Capricorn girl wearing furry boots and a headlamp; an Aquarius boy with a SAVE THE WHALES T-shirt.
I hauled that thing around with me for years, and I began memorizing the sun sign of every single person I met. Immediately I’d arrange their detectable characteristics in my head, cross-reference them in the book, and file it away for later use. This grammar-school astrology became a lens through which I acquainted myself with the world. It was, for the most part, a silent practice, barring the ingenious ways I’d weasel out birth dates from unsuspecting subjects. And somehow, through this, I created a Rolodex in my head of all the signs’ nuances. Gemini: angular face, “nymph-like,” quick, funny, rapid-fire decision-making mistaken for fickleness, holds a spoon like so. Taurus: shapely arms or legs, rooted, warm, well-behaved though contrary, unperturbed by all manner of taboo conversation. Leo: a striking or plentiful head of hair, friendly, hyper, “devil-may-care” demeanor, down for just about anything.
Around the time I first acquired the astrology book, much to the confusion of my parents, I’d begun attending a local Baptist church with my neighbor Kelsey and her family, a group to whom astrology was sacrilege. I don’t recall why I’d gone—maybe I’d slept over and the family had invited me as a matter of course. Either way, I remember only a glimpse of the thick orange glow of the sanctuary, a young Southern minister and his chubby wife sitting in the wings with a new baby in her lap. Then Kelsey and I were sent upstairs to Sunday school, where an old woman with a curly brown perm taught us a psalm and then we played games and filled out word puzzles. There’s a Polaroid she took of me, standing beneath my nametag on the door, clutching my Pocahontas-themed sweater. The room was small and carpeted, and the gray Portland light clashed with the buzzy yellow fluorescents, and for some reason, for many years, I kept going. My mother, who’d attended at most a few Unitarian services as a child, tolerantly came to my Christmas pageants, while my stepfather, a traumatized ex-Catholic, once-born-again Baptist, and brief Scientologist, would offer an unsolicited “Yep, there’s no God, no aliens, no God” when he drove me to school in the mornings.
I kept both of my spiritual interests private for many years, examining charts and saying prayers I didn’t understand until I started hanging out with punks in the seventh grade. Then, at thirteen, I denounced Christianity as a capitalistic hoax—a rebellion unnoticeable to anyone but me.
For my sixteenth birthday, my father and stepmother took me to Joanna Mitchell to have my birth chart read. Her practice operated out of a brightly painted Victorian cottage on the outskirts of Eugene, and she met her clients in its A-frame attic. We arranged ourselves around a card table, and she pushed her long brown hair behind her shoulders, clicked record on a small tape deck, and said, “What do you want to know?” What did I really care to know at sixteen, or rather, what was I capable of even articulating? I asked some vague questions: Where would I be in a year? How were my prospects for international travel that summer looking? Should I let go of my ex-boyfriend?
She focused, instead, on the fact that something to do with my parents’ early divorce would cause me to spend a great deal of the next few years “building a toolbox,” that I was obsessed with fairness, that I could expect to feel the obstinate and frightening pressure of Saturn until 2009, that I was particularly prone to health problems from narcotics, that I’d spend a great deal of my life in pursuit of familial belonging, that I was a writer—or a dancer. “Are you a dancer or a writer?” she asked.
In college, I was given Love Signs by a girl whose friendship I sought mostly for her beauty, and who handed the book to me saying that the writing was great but it was heteronormative and made a lot of references to the Equal Rights Amendment and had outdated ideas about “career women.” “Otherwise it’s great,” she assured me. One of the last nights we spent together was over a dinner in Midtown, and on my walk back to the train on 5th Avenue, I passed the entrance of a giant office building engraved with the twelve signs of the zodiac and, above them, what appeared to me in that moment to be the twelve apostles encircling Christ. Shortly after, I read that Goodman identified the beginning of her astral pursuit at the moment she was baptized, in third grade, in the Parkersburg, West Virginia, Episcopal Church.
It’s hard to find people willing to talk about Goodman. I reached out to her two youngest children and got silence. The publisher at Taplinger, who first put out Sun Signs, said he could not share any biographical information that was not already available. Many of her friends were celebrities, or are now very old, or dead. I finally was able to track down a man named Mark Aulabaugh, who grew up in Goodman’s neighborhood and used to work at the station where she broadcast Love Letters from Linda. In her early twenties, his mother had been among Goodman’s closest friends in Parkersburg. Aulabaugh now runs a local station in central Texas, and he took my call between programs.
“She was one of the first people my mother met when she moved to West Virginia as a newlywed,” he said.
It’s funny, my mother always referred to her as “Mary Alice,” not Mary . . . At that point, I believe Mary Alice was working for the newspaper, something small, like the obits.
They hung out all the time. On Fridays and Saturdays, my folks would invite people over to drink, and she was always a part of those get-togethers . . . I remember Mary Alice always looking really, really gloomy . . . In old photographs, everyone is smiling and having a good time, but she was always frowning, like she had a chip on her shoulder. But then somewhere along the course of the evening they could cheer her up and she’d be real fun.
I was good friends with her old boss at WCOM, Jack See, until he died a couple years ago . . . He always had so much respect for her. He used to talk to me about how they’d go out and get coffee somewhere after work and talk philosophical stuff. Jack said she was one of the best writers of commercials he’d ever met, and also that she intimidated people . . . I don’t know, maybe because she was kinda weird?
I asked if he recalled whether or not she was writing then.
“There used to be a little bar called the Car Barn she’d go to in the daytime, and she’d take her portable typewriter and sit in a booth in the back and write. No one really knew about what.”
She wasn’t writing about astrology in 1953, so what was it? Metered poems or short stories? Perfecting her top-notch copy? Coming of age in postwar America, during the years women were being filtered out of the workforce and into the suburbs, into a domestic ideal most closely resembling the Victorian era, I wonder if she knew in advance that she’d have to write something larger than life, that in order to do anything professionally creative, she’d have to make a spectacle of herself, or be spectacular.
I can see her smoothing her rumpled work clothes as she settles onto a vinyl bench in her favorite smoky corner of the Car Barn, clacking away on that portable typewriter, hiding out from a marriage that would soon dissolve, from boredom, from babies, from weekly parties where no one talked about anything she found interesting. She’d continue to seek hiding places, even after publishing her wildly successful Sun Signs. All of her subsequent contracts subsidized the completion of her future books to take place in a particular second-floor room at Hollywood’s Roosevelt Hotel, an inn whose renovations were long overdue, where Art Klebanoff visited her once and remembers “the towels covering [his] body in color.”
But it’s not as though Goodman disowned all of that culture she came from. For instance, she remained a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution until she died, purportedly winning West Virginia “Daughter of the Year” in 1971. She also took seriously church history and her own early experiences among the Episcopalians, a church that formed right after the American Revolution, when once-Anglicans refused, or were forbidden, to keep pledging allegiance to the British monarch. She was never fully willing to admit the mutual exclusion of occultism and patriotism, motherhood and fame, Christianity and astrology. These are powerful paradoxes, and paradox is the substance of almost all religion, all those sacred contradictions: barren women who conceive, prophets born as peasants, kings as slaves, the meek as brave, the poor as rich, the enslaved as free, granted a will but only by the grace of God.
From the inconsistent information available publicly and from her own books, I know this: Linda Goodman was a woman of paradox. She was a proud mother of seven, though only five survived beyond infancy, and she was possibly estranged from most of them. She was intensely patriotic, though she believed the U.S. government was behind a cover-up of Sally’s death. She was a Franciscan lay scholar and a Vatican enthusiast despite having been raised in an American tradition that developed, more or less, in revolt from the Catholic Church—not to mention that she was otherwise considered a heretic. She was a critic of astrologers and advisers who charged for their services, though she was among the highest-earning authors of her era. She sold the paperback rights to Sun Signs for a record-breaking $225 million but died bankrupt. Among friends, she was considered both needy and reclusive, often asking her confidants to spend the night so she didn’t have to be alone. She was a celebrity and a hermit. She was born in the East and died in the West, ten thousand feet above sea level. She was part of the first generation of diabetics to have access to insulin but opted instead to become a “fruititarian,” which may have led to the mid-leg amputations toward the end of her life and her death at age seventy.
On July 14, 2002, seven years after Goodman’s death, her remaining belongings were auctioned from the Colorado home she’d lost to foreclosure. In the descriptions from the Colorado Springs Gazette, it sounds like the slim pickings of a garage sale. Among the detritus was a “bronze ram’s head, four pairs of white Minnetonka moccasins, [an] avocado-green blender and [a] dented blue tea pot.” Fans flocked to the auction from all over the region but were disappointed to find not much more than cheap furniture and kitchen goods, a cache of Sweet’N Low hard candy, a few coins in an Almond Roca container labeled “petty cash,” an old photo album bookmarked with a cigarette stub, and a roll of toilet paper. The Gazette quotes a scavenger saying, “I guess I expected to see more stars and moon sculptures, cool stuff like that . . . It’s typical stuff my grandmother would have in her house.”
As with any person survived by children and grandchildren, Goodman’s loved ones probably sweated out her last days together, then collected her precious belongings according to a will. But even that’s unclear: Klebanoff doesn’t even know who inherited her copyrights. He said she had “what was described at the time as one of the larger personal bankruptcies in Colorado history. The earning power of her books ultimately meant that nearly all creditors were paid off one hundred cents on the dollar—nearly unheard of,” and that ultimately her intellectual property was invested in a literary trust overseen by a Colorado bank. “I have no information about the underlying beneficiaries,” Klebanoff concluded.
Neither her most ardent fans nor her closest professional peers could conceive of the human realities of Goodman’s life, but because the narrator of her books was so intimate and personable, the auction-pickers felt entitled to her relics. As Klebanoff told me, “She got a never-ending stream of mail, all of which was addressed, ‘Dear Linda.’”