Journalist and author Doug Brod joins AP in this episode to discuss his recent biography Born With a Tail: The Devilish Life and Wicked Times of Anton Szandor LaVey. Doug is currently an editor at the Toronto Star, and was formerly editor in chief for SPIN and TV Guide. He has also written for The New York Times, Billboard, Hollywood Reporter, and Fangoria.
Doug's entertaining narrative of LaVey's life and works fills in a lot of gaps left by previous writings on the man, and gets to questions about the nature of truth with larger-than-life figures such as the founder of the Church of Satan. He and AP talk in this episode about the Church, personalities around it, and LaVey's complicated and sometimes problematic philosophy. Also discussed are his aspirations toward celebrity, such as his insistent claims of involvement in the making of Rosemary's Baby, his friendship with Jayne Mansfield, and his appearance in the truly odd horror film The Devil's Rain... not to mention Sammy Davis Jr., who almost had a TV show in which he played a minion of Hell!
In addition Brod was able to interview and gain new insights from people who knew LaVey, such as Jaques Vallee, Don Frew, Nikolas Schreck, and others- resulting in an array of opinions about the controversial and impactful figure.
There's also a brief discussion of Doug's first book, They Just Seem a Little Weird: How KISS, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith, and Starz Remade Rock and Roll. Be sure to check out his books, available on Amazon (although it's preferred if you can order it through your local bookseller!). You can order the book directly from the publisher here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/doug-brod/born-with-a-tail/9780306833311/?lens=grand-central-publishing
Chapters
Journalist and author Doug Brod joins AP in this episode to discuss his recent biography Born With a Tail: The Devilish Life and Wicked Times of Anton Szandor LaVey. Doug is currently an editor at the Toronto Star, and was formerly editor in chief for SPIN and TV Guide. He has also written for The New York Times, Billboard, Hollywood Reporter, and Fangoria.
Doug's entertaining narrative of LaVey's life and works fills in a lot of gaps left by previous writings on the man, and gets to questions about the nature of truth with larger-than-life figures such as the founder of the Church of Satan. He and AP talk in this episode about the Church, personalities around it, and LaVey's complicated and sometimes problematic philosophy. Also discussed are his aspirations toward celebrity, such as his insistent claims of involvement in the making of Rosemary's Baby, his friendship with Jayne Mansfield, and his appearance in the truly odd horror film The Devil's Rain... not to mention Sammy Davis Jr., who almost had a TV show in which he played a minion of Hell!
In addition Brod was able to interview and gain new insights from people who knew LaVey, such as Jaques Vallee, Don Frew, Nikolas Schreck, and others- resulting in an array of opinions about the controversial and impactful figure.
There's also a brief discussion of Doug's first book, They Just Seem a Little Weird: How KISS, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith, and Starz Remade Rock and Roll. Be sure to check out his books, available on Amazon (although it's preferred if you can order it through your local bookseller!). You can order the book directly from the publisher here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/doug-brod/born-with-a-tail/9780306833311/?lens=grand-central-publishing
What is The AP Strange Show?
A show about Weird Stuff, hosted by AP Strange. AP interviews cool weirdos about their work, and invites friends on to discuss second sequels in franchises in a series called "Third Time's the Charm". Other fun surprises await...
AP Strange:
Pardon me while I have a strange interlude. But there is nothing else. Life is an obscure oboe bumming a ride on the omnibus of art. Among the misty corridors of pine, and in those corridors I see figures, strange figures. Welcome back my friends to the AP Strange Show.
AP Strange:
Today's show is brought to you by Levy's Satanic Organs. If you want a good organ sound with a nice groove to it, one that's perhaps a little bit more blasphemous than most of the organs that you find on the market, go check out Levy's Satanic Organs. They'll be able to help you out and help you pick the machine. For your musical and heretical needs- and on today's show- we're getting a little bit devilish here and I am happy to talk to. The man who is the author of the book Born with a Tale, The Devilish Life and Wicked Times of Anton Zander Leve.
AP Strange:
We're gonna be talking about the life of Leve in this book And that author is currently the editor of the Toronto Star.
Doug Brod:
And editor.
AP Strange:
He has, I'm sorry.
Doug Brod:
He and editor.
AP Strange:
And editor for the Toronto Star. And he has also edited for Spin and TV Guide and Entertainment Weekly. He's written for Billboard, New York Times, Bangoria. He's got a very impressive resume, and I was a little bit intimidated reading all that, but please welcome to the show, Doug Broad.
Doug Brod:
Hi there.
AP Strange:
How are you, Doug?
Doug Brod:
I'm great. I'm so glad to be here.
AP Strange:
Well, I'm yeah. I'm I'm glad to have you here because I I came across your book online and I thought that would be kind of an intriguing read and I picked it up and I wasn't wrong. I basically read the book in about a day and a half because every time I put it down and went to go do something, I'm like, I can go read another chapter. But it is very entertainingly written, so I'm very glad to have crossed paths with you online and discovered this book.
Doug Brod:
Glad you did too, thank you.
AP Strange:
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I guess like my first question for you with the book is what drew you to Levee? What was the impetus for writing this biography?
Doug Brod:
Well, I've always been into weirdness and bizarreness, weird horror movies, science fiction, comic books, monsters. And I mean, that's just something that's kind of been swirling all around me since I was a kid. And I had always kind of known who LeVey was. I had maybe seen photos of him, but I never really kind of paid attention to him until the late 80s when he kind of had this resurgence in like underground zines. And I started, you know, seeing interviews with him and photos, and I thought he seemed like a really fascinating guy.
Doug Brod:
And it always kind of played in my head that maybe I could do something with him. I mean, were already a few biographies written about him. One was very early on in 1974. Another one was written in the late '80s, early '90s by his longtime companion. It was obviously done with his participation.
Doug Brod:
And it obviously is only one side of the story, but no one ever really did a sort of a deep dive, a deeply reported biography of this guy who I thought was, as I learned about him was a real celebrity for one thing in the 60s and 70s. And he was a real interesting social figure and had a lot of interesting things to say. He had a very bizarre background, a very bizarre family life. And I thought it would make a nice colorful book.
AP Strange:
Yeah, and I mean, I don't think you were wrong about that because as you say, like he's kind of like a cultural force and he's a presence that's kind of on the periphery for a lot of people. Like they know the name or they know the Church of Satan and they can picture him if you mentioned him. But I feel like I've always just kind of had, as with a lot of larger than life figures, there's a balance of myth and legend around them, as well as what can be verified. So you'll read in one book, oh, well, he was an organist for the Clyde Beatty Circus. And then Another account will say well that's not you know nobody can really prove that he was with the Clyde Beatty circus.
AP Strange:
You know he's not on their payroll at any point so- it just seems like every little part of his life story is- is something that you have to take with a grain of salt, especially if the only source is him.
Doug Brod:
Yeah, and that was something that interested me when I was writing the book. I mean, like you said, there's a lot of mythology behind him and he self mythologized. He made up stories about his background. I'm not sure that all of them are made up. And one of the things I tried to do with the book was to give him a little credit for either doing this stuff or just having the gumption to create this sort of idea that he did do this stuff.
Doug Brod:
For example, he claimed to have been, when he worked in the Clyde Beatty Circus, he claimed to have been a lion tamer. He kind of rose up the ranks. And later on in life, he actually owned a full size lion that he kept in his backyard in a cage. And that's verifiable fact. So even if this guy wasn't a lion tamer, I mean, he had a lion and named him.
Doug Brod:
So, I mean, you know, there's and that's one of the things I wanted to do with the book as well, was to not try to separate all the fact from the fiction, because I thought that would be a really boring endeavor. I don't think anybody would really want to read that. But, you know, I wanted to get at the nature of truth and the truth for some people obviously is a lie to another as we're seeing today in our politics. But as you read the front of the book and the back of the book, the beginning and the end, there's anecdotes that kind of really touch upon the nature of truth and what it means to have been born with a tale. I'm doing fake.
AP Strange:
Right.
Doug Brod:
Living this life of this fantastical person who in some cases had a rather mundane life, but he made it interesting.
AP Strange:
Yeah, I mean, he kind of created the life and the kind of cult of personality around himself that he wished. I think you refer to it at some point as as like kind of like this Carney huckster kind of ability that he had like a PT Barnum ism about him.
Doug Brod:
Exactly, but he also had this trait that I really admire that I couldn't do myself, but I try. He was really into pulp magazines and the shadow and H. P. Lovecraft and horror and science fiction and film noir. And he was actually able to sort of craft this aesthetic and run with it.
Doug Brod:
That's how he lived. He dressed the part, he looked the part, his house was painted black. He had real skeletons adorning his living room and, you know, just crazy knickknacks in the house and stuffed ravens and other creatures all over the house. So and trap doors in his house. And he lived the part and that's something that I admire with.
Doug Brod:
I have to admire that with people that they commit to the bit.
AP Strange:
Yeah, yeah, and he made it work, whatever else you can say about him, because I mean, one thing that came across as a through line for him is that the thing that really kind of brought him joy was music in a lot of ways like he loved playing that organ and entertaining people when they were in the house. And it seems like you just kind of has this whole whole thing set up around him as as like a- like you said he's living life he wants to live inside of this- this kind of world that he built for himself because, I mean, his house, I guess, is kind of described sort of like the Adams family mansion or something like that.
Doug Brod:
Yeah, and I don't think it's combined with the Munsters. It's funny because both of those TV shows had come out like a year or two before the Church of Satan was started. So, I mean, it was like the culture was primed for a real life analog to those TV And he basically supplied that. That's kind of how he was able to sort of gather a lot of publicity and he ended up on Johnny Carson. He performed the first satanic wedding in his home, which was also the So yeah, he was able to sort of parlay his sort of interesting look and lifestyle into, I don't wanna say thriving organization, but a real organization that had, you know, you know, real membership.
Doug Brod:
And, you know, he was able to parlay that into, you know, a best selling book. He wrote The Satanic Bible, which came out in late sixty nine, I believe. And that's gone on to sell over a million copies, which is phenomenal. It hasn't been out of print since it was published.
AP Strange:
Yeah yeah I mean I remember seeing new additions of that in the bookstore like when I was younger and even now if you go into like a Barnes and Noble and go into their kind of new AG section they're gonna have a copy there so. Yeah so I mean he definitely had a quite quite an effect and it kind of seemed to me that he was he was after that kind of publicity a lot where he was. Sort of early on always trying to befriend movie stars like that seemed like a big big deal to him. Of course Jane Mansfield is a really notable one.
Doug Brod:
Yeah, you know, when he started the church in 'sixty six, in April '6, his whole idea at the beginning was he wanted the publicity and he admitted this. He wanted to do sort of outrageous things that will get people's attention. And he did. He did the first satanic wedding. He did a satanic baptism of his youngest daughter, Zena.
Doug Brod:
He did a satanic funeral. And, you know, he got written up all the time. I mean, when I was doing research, was insane how many newspapers from all over the world and all over the country were writing about him at that time. So, yeah, he was able to sort of parlay all that publicity into this organization. But then he kind of pulled back and wanted it to be taken a lot more seriously than just like this kind of, goofy sort of horrific organization.
Doug Brod:
But as you said early on, he wanted to cultivate relationships with celebrities. And also he was kind of a fanboy by his own. Right. He admitted he was kind of a fanboy. But he also, even before Jane Mansfield, who he became friendly with in 'sixty seven, he claimed to have had an affair with a young Marilyn Monroe before she was really Marilyn Monroe.
Doug Brod:
He claimed she was a stripper in a burlesque house in Los Angeles and he accompanied her on the organ. But that has not been proven. But Jane Mansfield relationship was real. They really knew each other. As you can read in the book, I think a lot of what went on was embellished and he claimed to have had an affair with Jane Mansfield.
Doug Brod:
I have my doubts that that had happened. But they definitely were photographed together. There was a huge photo shoot done at her house, the Pink Palace. And there are some photos from that shoot in the book where LeVey was hanging out with Jane and her boyfriend and her kids, some of her kids, including Mariska Hargitay from the Law and Order series. Yeah.
Doug Brod:
And also, Samby Davis Jr. A member of the church. He was given an honorary warlock degree. And I interviewed his publicist from back in the day, kind of, he just pooh poohed the relationship totally. He was like, Oh, Sammy would meet with anybody.
Doug Brod:
These people were kooks or freaks. You know, they were silly people. Know, it's going back and talking to some of these people to sort of get their views on Levee they knew Yeah,
AP Strange:
well, had a note about that because this is something I knew about Sammy Davis Jr. And the Church of Satan and kind of like him checking it out and being interested in it. I think there was something about like he had one painted fingernail or something like that.
Doug Brod:
Yeah, yeah. No. So Sammy was actually he was into Satanism.
AP Strange:
Right.
Doug Brod:
This church is satan, but he was into so called satanism in LA, even before the Church of Satan was a big thing. And he claimed that he had gone to an orgy and one of the orgy leaders that like a satanic orgy, one of the leaders was Jay Sebring, who was the hairdresser who was killed along with Sharon Tate by the Manson family. So it was weird connections. And Sammy was really into this stuff and he made a movie, a TV movie that he had hoped to go to series called Poor Devil. Was one of Satan's minions.
Doug Brod:
In the movie, there's a line in the script where Jack Klugman, plays the soul he wants to grab to bring him down to hell. Jack Klugman's on the phone and he's like, Get me the Church of Satan in downtown, because it was San Francisco based. So, we're overjoyed that the Church of Satan, we're overjoyed getting that kind of attention in a prime time TV movie.
AP Strange:
Right. And for listeners, if you go on YouTube, you can find this. I haven't watched it yet, but I'm definitely going to. It's I
Doug Brod:
have watched it. It is it's not good. It's fascinating. And it's and it's the production design reminds me reminds me of the old Batman series. It's very colorful.
Doug Brod:
It's very well.
AP Strange:
And it has Adam West in it, right?
Doug Brod:
Has Adam West in it. Yes. And
AP Strange:
the part that I thought was great was Christopher Lee is Satan in it, right?
Doug Brod:
And he's actually quite funny.
AP Strange:
Yeah.
Doug Brod:
He's funny in the show because you don't expect him to be funny.
AP Strange:
Yeah. I mean, I wasn't surprised to read that he didn't seem to think very much of Levet.
Doug Brod:
No, no. He yeah, yeah. He was not a fan. And because Christopher Lee, having made all these horror movies, was actually very learned. And he knew a lot about the occult just by studying it, but he was like really kind of, he was very turned off by it.
Doug Brod:
Did not like it to and he thought it was evil.
AP Strange:
Yeah yeah and I think he kind of saw right through Levee and he was like I don't have time for this. But I mean you got Lord Summerisle himself in the role so. But yeah I mean the the this just seems fascinating to me because like what a cast Adam West and Jack Klugman and Christopher Lee with Sammy Davis junior. I'm just trying to imagine what that would be like as a TV show if they actually got that greenlit, like how many different ways they could have gone with it, but.
Doug Brod:
You know what, I probably would have watched it.
AP Strange:
Because I feel like there was the opposite version of that was supposed to happen happen several times before where there was supposed to be a spin off from the Twilight Zone with like an angel that was being sent out. He was supposed to help somebody.
Doug Brod:
That sounds like Highway to Heaven with Michael Landon.
AP Strange:
Yeah, I guess so.
Doug Brod:
It wouldn't have done anything.
AP Strange:
But that was less of a comedy. That wasn't the same kind of screwball thing.
Doug Brod:
Right, right, of course, of course.
AP Strange:
And the Marx Brothers had a show set up where they were supposed to do something like that too. For Groucho is essentially like god and he has to send his angels- yeah har harbo and chico. Down to earth. On little missions. So there's little clips of that, but I don't think they ever even did a full show because I think Chico got sick pretty shortly after that.
AP Strange:
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, far as movies and TV goes, that was another one of those myths or one of those things that LeVey wanted people to believe was that he was in Rosemary's Baby.
Doug Brod:
He was not. He claimed early on, I mean, he saw Rosemary's baby, and that came out only a couple of years after he started the church. And he was thrilled. I I've read letters that he's written to people saying how much he thought the film painted Satanism in a good light and showed that there are people like the people in my church, in the Church of Satan, who are out there. All these older people in the Dakota apartment where Rosemary and John Cassavetes or Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes lived.
Doug Brod:
He was like, these are my people. So he was really happy about the movie and he pushed it on everyone saying, You've got to see this. And, you know, he also claimed to have sort of helped Ira Levin or inspire Ira Levin to write the book. Yeah. But yeah, I actually found and interviewed the dialogue coach for Rosemary's Baby, this guy named Howard Koch Jr.
Doug Brod:
And he's gone on to produce tons of great classic movies. But this is one of his early, early jobs. And I asked him point blank, I mean, Levee have anything to do with this movie? He's like, absolutely not. It's all BS.
Doug Brod:
I mean, it had that kind of response had kind of trickled through the Leveegan lore throughout the years. But I was just I needed to get someone who was on the staff of the movie to definitively say no, he was not involved. So I trust this guy. So I think it's safe to say he was not involved.
AP Strange:
Yeah, and I mean, think that's been suspected by a lot of people that he was just kind of inflating that.
Doug Brod:
But they But I'm sorry to interrupt you, but still it's like you In his obits, when he died in '97, major newspapers were putting in that he played the devil in Rosemary's Baby. It's like, no one bothered to check these things. They just threw it in there because he said so.
AP Strange:
Yeah, I mean, got two sources that say that happened and you don't bother to check further than that or ask around. So I mean, I guess that's a cautionary note people doing research via newspapers is sometimes journalists just use whatever is available and they don't have time to fact check everything, you know.
Doug Brod:
Well, it's funny you say that because I, as I say in the book, there was an article written about Levee in '92 for Rolling Stone by Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize winning And it's a piece that LeVey was not happy with because Lawrence Wright kind of poked a lot of holes in the mythology and even interviewed his father, found his father and interviewed LeVey's father. But as he poked holes into a lot of these claims that LeVey had, he still perpetuated some myths as well. He said that LeVey was married to his common law wife, Diane, but they were never really married. But yeah, so even a lot of people who are trying to poke the myths end up reiterating some of the myths.
AP Strange:
Yeah, I mean, it becomes such a tangled web anyway with somebody like Levey that sometimes the more mundane things like whether or not he was actually married to Diane, it's like you don't bother with that so much because you're focused on other things.
Doug Brod:
Exactly. And it's funny because I interviewed his son-in-law, Nicholas Schreck, who has, there's no love lost there. He does not like his former father-in-law. But he told me, and he said, you know, the guy was interesting on his own. Why did he have to make all this stuff up?
Doug Brod:
And that's kind of something that I think comes up in the book, maybe between the lines as you're reading it. It's like this guy is really fascinating and he's an interesting guy and he's really smart and funny. Why did he feel the need to make so much of this stuff up? But it makes his life interesting and I think it makes the book interesting.
AP Strange:
Well, yeah, and to continue perpetuating it even when he was getting older and he had no real, nothing was really happening at the Black House anymore. Like people weren't going there.
Doug Brod:
As he told Lawrence Wright, he said, know, this is my legacy. This is what I'm living for. It's like, why are you taking away my memories? Or why are you taking away my history?
AP Strange:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I don't I think I I kinda feel like that might have been some kind of insecurity on his part where he wanted to always be hidden. I mean, you use a couple of quotes right at the front of the book, little epigrams there related to masks as Yeah, so I mean, like the black pope of the church, which is Satan, is just kind of this mask that he needed to wear, you know, to insulate himself, I Yeah,
Doug Brod:
I mean, that was something that it struck me when one of his friends, this guy Marcello Truzzi, who is a sociologist and an expert in carny and a lot of the stuff that we're into. A lot of your show is about. Is what this guy Marcello Truzzi was into. And you know, even he said that Levee kind of wore a mask. And I think he kind misquoted George Orwell.
Doug Brod:
And George Orwell is one of the epigrams in the front of the book. He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it. So the idea is that he wore this mask, he became this character, but he eventually kind of really got into it and believed some of it and made himself believe it.
AP Strange:
Right, yeah, I mean, I think that's a danger for anybody like adopting a persona is that you start to kind of believe your own bullshit after a point. You can't discern one from the other anymore, you know. But that's
Doug Brod:
exactly what a number of journalists who I spoke to for the book, interviewed for the book, who had one on ones with Levet said that. He said, this guy started believing his own bullshit. And yeah, I don't know how much of it he believed. I mean, there are those who will argue that he was a total believer and he believed in the devil and he did not believe in a devil. He believed in the devil as a metaphor.
Doug Brod:
It's to, it's a figure or a figurehead in this case. It's just something not to worship, but to sort of take his advice and live out your carnality and unleash the beast in man. That was kind of his whole philosophy of the church was just do what you want to do as long as it's not hurting anybody else. It was very kind of libertarian and live your life to the fullest. And that was kind of his credo.
AP Strange:
Yeah, and I mean, think a lot of people, especially some of the journalists early on that talked to him, there was that one guy that was actually part of the satanic wedding publicity stunt there. Yeah a lot of a lot of the people that kind of met him early on would take a look at what his actual philosophies were and they'd say well I don't really see anything wrong with it. It's just like, I don't find anything to disagree with here. It's not evil. He's not actually worshiping a devil.
AP Strange:
He's
Doug Brod:
not telling you to sacrifice babies. And it's funny because if you read the satanic Bible, I mean, there is a lot of kind of nasty speechifying and there's a lot of authoritarian leanings in it, but there's some really kind of funny common sense pieces in there. There's a lot of essays in the book, and throughout his life, dozens of essays, and, you know, they're very logical, they're very smart. Some of them are very mean spirited, but, you know, he did have a philosophy and it wasn't, you know, we must obey the great Lord Satan and you know kill people on his behalf so he got a bug. Right,
AP Strange:
yeah well I mean unfortunately I think because of the time and place he gets conflated with Charlie Manson and the Manson family and it wasn't exactly the same place but it was happening around the same time and I think one of the Manson family girls was attended the Church of Satan at least once and she kind of got booted out because she was on drugs or something like that, right?
Doug Brod:
Yeah. He during during his kind of publicity phase early on for the, you know, when he wanted to get the word out about the church, he produced a topless review
AP Strange:
at a
Doug Brod:
club in the North Beach in San Francisco. It's kind of this sleazy topless bar area, the red light district of San Francisco. And he produced this show with, you know, topless vampire women and an executioner with an executioner mask. And the woman who played the vampire was Susan Atkins, who was a go go dancer and member of, she later became a member of Charlie Nansen's family. She got wigged out.
Doug Brod:
She dropped acid, I think the first night of the show and she didn't want to come out of her coffin. And she said that her, she later claimed that her relationship with the Church of Satan was something that sort of poisoned her mind and, you know, led her down this bad path of, you know, being a murderess. So it's, yeah, as you can see in the book, there's a lot of interesting sort of cross pollination between these kind of out there organizations.
AP Strange:
Yeah, I mean, it's funny too, because for being kind of right in the middle of a lot of counterculture stuff and being an iconoclastic figure himself, It's funny that he seemed to be pretty anti drugs. The satanists were pretty much like teetotalers in that respect.
Doug Brod:
Yeah, he was not a hippie. I mean, was a Bohemian, but he wasn't, he wasn't a hippie and he had real disdain for hippies and drugs and people like losing control, losing their minds. He did allow alcohol and he drank himself, but only in my, he preferred that people drank in moderation during his rituals and during his parties. He had a lot of parties. But yeah, he was kind of a, he was very conservative, like law and order, anti drug, that was kind of his, that was his bag.
AP Strange:
Yeah, and I mean, think it goes along with how you were describing his philosophy was, you can't really go out and do what you wanna do if you're not in control of your own mind. You know? So to to him, it was like people let letting themselves go with inebriation was just kind of doing themselves a disservice because they're not they're they're not actually doing what they want to do they're doing what the drugs are making them do you know. But but yeah I mean I guess the shadow of the Manson family murders kind of affected him and and sort of like plagued him throughout his whole life, even though he had really no direct connection with it or even a similar philosophy.
Doug Brod:
Yeah, I mean, he brought out this kind of almost acceptable Satanism and it was almost like a playful Satanism. You know, he was There was an excerpt from his second book, The Complete Witch that ran in Cosmopolitan magazine. Right. You know, he had a cover line on Cosmo. So he was like and he was on Johnny Carson, like I said, and he was on the cover of Look Magazine and Time Magazine wrote about him and Newsweek wrote about him.
Doug Brod:
So, you know, it was seen as kind of a benign sort of a cultic endeavor. But then, you know, the Manson family came along and spoiled everything because then they, you know, the murders, their murders were considered satanic and ritual. And as soon as you conflate, as soon as you get those words out in the and they just get conflated and he's kind of being painted with that same brush. And that bothered him, obviously. But it wasn't until really the satanic panic in the eighties where it really did a number on him and the church when all these daycare centers and schools for kids, nursery schools were being accused of, you know, sexual, child sexual abuse and mutilation and all this other nonsense.
Doug Brod:
But, you know, it was called satanic. So, of course it had to be connected to the Church of Satan, which it wasn't.
AP Strange:
Right, and during that time you also had the rise of talk shows both on TV and radio where It seemed like Leve was a less active participant at that point and he was letting his daughter Xena and Michael Aquino make a lot of those appearances. But but yeah I mean that's that's definitely something I remember from when I was young is, like, kind of seeing Michael Aquino sitting there. I think I it was Phil Donahue or Oprah, probably both.
Doug Brod:
And also Geraldo.
AP Strange:
Yeah. Yeah. Geraldo is what the big one I think because he had a he had a tendency to be extra sensational. But but, yeah, I mean, at that point, it's almost like Akino and and Zena and also Nicholas Schreck were kind of being more the the spokesman for what was happening, you know?
Doug Brod:
Yeah, definitely Zena and Nick Lashrek. In the case of Michael Aquino, he had already split from the Church of Satan in like nineteen seventy four, seventy five. He was still active as a satanist, but under his own umbrella, rubric, he was the temple of Set, he called it. Right. His own kind of offshoot of the Church of Satan.
Doug Brod:
Because early on, he was a member of the Church of Satan. He was in fact Levee's kind of right hand man and did a lot of administrative work, edited the Klobinhoof, which was the church's kind of newsletter organ, house organ. And when he split from the church, because he was angry that Leve had said that he would start selling degrees like, Warlock and Witch certificates. Oh, right. And basically, people had worked very hard to sort of move up in the organization to hit that level.
Doug Brod:
And Levey said, you know, this is a money making opportunity and, you know, we should take this money if people want to be a witch or a warlock. So that was the last straw for Aquino. He split off and he was a real believer as well. He was a true believer. He believed in the devil.
Doug Brod:
He claimed that the devil came down and told him to write this document, became the basis for the temple of Set. So he would go on these talk shows as a Satanist, but not really connected to the Church of Satan.
AP Strange:
Right, right. Yeah, because, well, as you say, I think he was kind of more of a traditional occultist where he really believed in the magical elements of it and the hierarchy and the secret society aspect of initiation and working your way up through degrees where for Levee it was just kind of like well as with the example of Sammy Davis junior like hey we like you You want to be an official priest of the church of St. Here you go. Like, he was pretty fast and loose with ranks and degrees within the organization.
Doug Brod:
Well, it's funny because one person I was very happy to be able to talk to was this guy named Richard Lamparsky, who was a friend of Levez early on in the sixties. And Lamparsky was famous for writing a series of books called Whatever Became Of. And there were these basically like 200 page books, a whole series, basically updating all these like faded stars, Hollywood Stars, Movie Stars, TV Stars, what they're doing now. And a lot of them were, you know, a lot of the stories are very, very sad, but that was his thing. And he'd heard about Leve in San Francisco and wanted to meet him because he thought like, oh, this guy looks like he's interesting and he's new.
Doug Brod:
He's not an old timer. They struck up a friendship. And I think from what Lamparsky told me, he thinks that LeVey LeVey was very into, like you said, cultivating celebrities. And he tried to see if Lamparsky with all of his connections could bring some of those, bring some of that stardom his way. But he and Lamparsky had a falling out and Lamparsky said to me, essentially he tried to get me hooked into the Church of Satan and I didn't want to do it.
Doug Brod:
He said it was essentially a boy's clubhouse. That's what he called it. And some other people said similar things to me. Nicholas Shrek said old man in his house. That was the organization.
Doug Brod:
Mean, a lot of it's, you know, obviously, it's coming from a negative place. But, the idea that it was kind of a clubhouse is not too far off the mark because the church started or even before the church started, where they would have these lectures in his house where he would put ads in the newspaper and he would talk about cannibalism, werewolves, all these esoteric occult ish topics. And he would charge people 2 and a half dollars, they'd come in, sit on folding chairs, and he would regale them with stories. And he had people there all the time, like throughout the week. And can you imagine inviting strangers into your house something a lot more.
Doug Brod:
But yeah, just the evolution of a church is just kind of a fascinating continuum.
AP Strange:
Yeah. And then, of course, if you have like a secret passageway that leads to a little bar area, like man cave with some mannequins in it.
Doug Brod:
Exactly. You had a, the, oh god, why is it the name escaping me right now? Den Of The Den Of Iniquity. Yeah. Yes.
Doug Brod:
Where he had these he set up these mannequins, you know, that were in that were posed in provocative positions. Like he had one kind of drunk floozy who was, you know, sitting in a puddle of her own pee with her panties down. And he had like a Boy Scout with an erection. I mean, he had all this kind of crazy, these crazy, like human companions, like not inhuman, humanoid companions that were down there and just made him happy. It was like, you know, that was his, I guess some people like model railroads, you know, slot car racing or whatever it is.
Doug Brod:
And he liked to collect, you know, mannequins and make them look odd.
AP Strange:
Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, yeah, that and playing the organ or just watching movies, it seemed like when he got older, when people did come to the house, would just kind of hang out and they'd either like listen to him like hold court and tell stories or play the organ or sometimes you just watch old movies with people because he loved like old horror movies and stuff.
Doug Brod:
Yeah, and after the satanic panic kind of really put a target on the church, he kind of checked out and you know, he lived in the house and he didn't really like to leave the house, but he had a lot of people come over and he liked entertaining people. He would just sit at his or he had a bank of like nine organs or nine, sorry, nine keyboards in his kitchen And he would just perform for people who came over and he'd do like three hour sets with no sheet music in front of him, just playing from memory. And I interviewed a bunch of people who were there for these private concerts and they were like, this guy was a maniac. He was amazing. It was like, you wouldn't believe, you know, what this guy could do.
Doug Brod:
And he was like you said, he was he was into showing movies and watching movies. He had a lot of favorites. He collected old Hollywood scandal magazines. One guy interviewed told me that he kept them in like pristine condition in like plastic. And, you know, he was a collector.
Doug Brod:
He was a nerd. He was like, he was kind of like a power nerd like all of us are. And I don't want to speak for your but I would imagine many of them are. And just not to say because I am proudly one as well. But yeah, that's kind of what he enjoyed doing in his later years.
Doug Brod:
He just cultivated a lot of younger friends, people who discovered him like I did the eighties and nineties. And he also was very attractive to a lot of rock and rollers like Marilyn Manson. He was one of Manson's idols and Manson wrote a lot about him in his autobiography. And there were a lot of like young writers and fanzine people and musicians who just became friendly with LeVey because he was a really entertaining old guy who was into the same kind of stuff that they were into.
AP Strange:
Right. Yeah, I mean, it seemed like he was kind of ahead of the curve in a way where he was appreciated more by that generation. And to the point where he had a bit of a revival where they were recording him and cutting records for him, like in the '90s, or making these little zines based on him and stuff like that, yeah.
Doug Brod:
Yeah, that all kind of came about because he was being shot for a fashion shoot for a San Francisco magazine called The Nose. It was a kind of a satirical news magazine. And they did a fashion shoot with Leve and ran an excerpt from one of his later essay collections. And the woman who set up that fashion shoot, her name was Becky Wilson, who I interviewed. She was roommates with this guy named Greg Turkington, who is probably better known now as he's he's a, like, alternative comedian.
Doug Brod:
His name is Neil Hamburger. He tours and does a Anyway, so Turkington knew who LeVeigh was and was really kind of into LeVeigh. And when he found out that Becky had just set up this photo shoot or styled this photo shoot, he was like, I got to meet him. And they met and they became very friendly. And Turpinter was really, you know, he was putting out records, his own like little indie records in San Francisco.
Doug Brod:
And he said, you know, maybe we can put out some of your music. And LeVey, you know, initially a little hesitant, but then he was like, yeah, let's see what we can do. And they did a recording and it sold and LeVeigh made some money off of it. And then they went on and they did a record. It's
AP Strange:
kind
Doug Brod:
of a really sweet story in the book because you see how this relationship is being built on mutual interests, you know, with a guy in his 60s or almost 60s and a guy who was much, much younger. And yeah, it's just kind of, it's an interesting story. And, you know, those records are still around. You can still buy them on eBay. And I advise look them up.
Doug Brod:
They're really entertaining. I mean, it's it's it's organ music, but it's knowing who's making the music is it's kind of part of the the appreciation, just knowing who the artist is.
AP Strange:
Yeah, mean, that's exactly the kind of thing I would I would collect just to have it in my collection just because it's such an oddball thing. But I mean, as as you alluded to, was pretty he was really talented. I mean, was the one section where somebody had mentioned a song from the thirties or something and he kinda remembered it and then within a minute or two, he was playing it from memory. Right? He just figured it out.
AP Strange:
It's like, I've known musicians like that, and that's a real you know, it's a real special skill if you can just if they say any requests and they mean it, like, really any song you can come up with, if they've heard it before, they can do it, you know?
Doug Brod:
That was something that so many people who listened to his playing told me that, and you could just shout out any obscure, like pop or jazz or country song and he would know it and he would play it for you. Yeah. Yeah,
AP Strange:
it's pretty amazing stuff. All right, so I would be remiss, kind of talked about some of the movies and things, but I would be remiss if I didn't talk about the Devil's Reign.
Doug Brod:
I can imagine that was one of the most fun parts of the book to write because I took a really deep dive into that movie.
AP Strange:
Yeah. I mean, it's a wild movie. I mean, for people that haven't seen it, it's like you got evil Ernest Borgnein, you've got William Shatner, a young Don Travolta before anybody knew who he was really.
Doug Brod:
It's an amazing cast. It's actually kind of a boring movie. I mean, it's just kind of slowly paced. And I actually, I watched it again, obviously for, you know, when I was writing the book, I was amazed at how beautiful it looks for a crappy seventies like B movie, it's really nicely shot. It's really well done.
Doug Brod:
But yeah, he, you know, he actually, despite having nothing to do with Rosemary's Baby, he did have something to do with other movies along the way. And this one in particular, you know, he got a big credit on. It was made with the participation of Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan. And he was on the movie posters and he's actually in the movie as is Diane, his companion. You know, he has a speaking role.
Doug Brod:
He utters like two words. And you can't see half his face because it's covered in a golden mask. He has a golden kind of helmet mask on.
AP Strange:
Right.
Doug Brod:
But the movie was, you know, it was a it got a real release. It made a little bit of money. It was famous because it claimed to have the most horrifying ending of any movie ever made. And it's essentially 10 of people being exposed to the devil's reign melting and their faces start melting into like these rainbow puddles. Kind of gross, really phony.
Doug Brod:
But yeah, so I take a deep dive into that movie and, you know, write all about the production, about his, you know, what he brought to the movie in terms of some of the set decoration, you know, was his ideas and some of the dialogue, the rituals. He, you know, he had a huge hand in putting those together. In fact, some of the rituals were taken word for word from the satanic Bible and the satanic rituals. So, it was a big movie for him.
AP Strange:
Yeah. What I find mystifying about that movie is that none of the scares are played for scares in the movie. Like, moments that are supposed to be scary, they don't shoot it or have the music in a way that's gonna make you jump or just like you said, it moves slowly because there's no there's almost no dynamics to it. You know, there's no shifts. You're just kind of watching it all play out.
Doug Brod:
Exactly. And then and it has kind of a TV movie ish quality, like a seventies TV movie ish quality. Although with seventies TV movies, they kind of had to have those like shock moments because that's when they had a cut to a commercial. So you leave those little moments. This was, you know, ninety minutes of just almost like a nonsensical procedural drama without any real legitimate scares or, It's a very awkwardly made movie.
Doug Brod:
And it's surprisingly so because it was made by this guy, Robert Fust, who directed these two brilliant Vincent Price movies, The Abominable Doctor. Fives and Doctor. Fives Rises Again.
AP Strange:
I love those movies.
Doug Brod:
Yeah. So it's, you know, this was not one of his better movies. Although, you know, you, like I said, when I looked at it again, after not seeing it for many years, there's a lot to like about it. It's just not very good.
AP Strange:
Right. I think the madness of it in general, just people would have to watch it once if you like any of this, if any of this sounds appealing to you at all, definitely.
Doug Brod:
Just the cast. I mean, William Shatner is William Shatner and at his Shatner esque best, his Shatner esque best And Tom Starritt of all people is in it. And it's got an Eddie Albert from Green Acres. It's like it's bizarre.
AP Strange:
Did you interview Shatner for this or did you
Doug Brod:
I did. He I was able
AP Strange:
to
Doug Brod:
more people than I expected participated in the book. And in fact, reached out to Marilyn Manson. I had his email, I reached out to him and told him about the book and I was writing it because I know that he was a huge fan of Lavie's. And he said he would have loved to have been involved, but at the time he was going through some legal problems as we all know what those were. And his lawyer's advice, thought that it was not a good time for him to talk.
Doug Brod:
Unfortunately, you know, and I appreciated that, I understood that. But you know, some people came through and some people didn't, but I was happy with who I spoke with.
AP Strange:
Yeah, I mean, speaking of that, you spoke with Jacques Fallet,
Doug Brod:
Yes. Well, didn't speak with him. Okay, I'll tell you this story. So Jacques Fallet came up in a lot of pieces about Levee. And even in Blanche Barton's book, The Secret Life of a Satanist, the biography of Levet.
Doug Brod:
And I never really knew who Jacques Vallee was. I read up on him and this was a guy who Steven Spielberg based the Francois Truffaut character in Close Encounters on Jacques Filet. He was a big UFOlogist, a UFOlogist. I don't know how to pronounce that. But he was really big into UFO.
AP Strange:
Yeah, they always just say UFOlogist.
Doug Brod:
UFOlogist. Thank you, thank you, UFOlogist. And so I read up on him, and I saw that he had a few books where he actually writes about his relationship with LeVey. So I read that stuff and he had a lot of interaction with LeVey. And I emailed him.
Doug Brod:
I found his email. I emailed him cold, told him what I was doing and he agreed to answer questions via email. So he gave me some good stuff and yeah, I was very happy with that.
AP Strange:
Yeah, I mean, think listeners to my show, lot of a lot of whom are ballet fans will be happy to see some of that in the book because it's kind of, you know, commentary that he hasn't necessarily written elsewhere because it's in direct response to your questions. He almost gives like kind of a really interesting psychological profile of Lavet.
Doug Brod:
He does. And that was that's the beauty of reaching of finding some of these people who knew him very early on, who could look back and say, well, this is what I really thought about him. I was led to another guy. I emailed a San Francisco Musician who who had a contact with Levee because they sort of played lounge organ in the same circles and he didn't really have much to give me. He admitted that he didn't really remember a lot, but he said, you should talk to this guy.
Doug Brod:
And this guy turned out to be this older gentleman who is probably the world's foremost Worlitzer organ maintenance repair person. This guy is world renowned for maintaining these tremendous organs, pipe organs. And he gave me the guy's number. I called him. He's probably in his late, I would probably say mid to late 80s at this point.
Doug Brod:
But his mind was like he was clear as a bell and he just remembered everything. And he was very frank with me about, you know, what he thought about the Church of Satan back in the day. And, but he really liked Levet and they got along well. They were pranksters together because he said Levet was the real deal in terms of, you know, being a musician. And he knew these organs, he knew keyboards and that's how they kind of connected.
Doug Brod:
So it was fun discovering these people who have never spoken about Levet, who were totally kind of, you know, in the background, but they were there when all this was happening.
AP Strange:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the the people you you were able to track down and talk to, I mean, of course, a lot of them are no longer with us. Like, Michael Aquino had passed away a couple years ago. Yeah.
AP Strange:
But
Doug Brod:
Well, I'll tell you what an interesting story about people passing away. It was really kind of devastating to me. I reached out to his grandson, Levy's grandson, Stanton, who I guess he's in his early forties. He was in his early forties. And a number of years ago when I worked at Spin Magazine, we did a profile of him because he was kind of like, he was a real kind of mover and shaker in the Hollywood industrial goth scene.
Doug Brod:
So we did a story about him, a profile, which was really like weird and funny and crazy. And I reached out to him to tell him I was writing this book and, you know, I'd love to talk to him. And he was like, sure, certainly, let's make a date. So we made a date, I guess it was two Decembers ago to talk via Zoom. And I'd sent him a Zoom link and he never showed up at the appointed time.
Doug Brod:
I emailed him and I said, you know, sorry, you couldn't make it, but let's try to figure out another time to do this and never heard back from him. And then like three days later, I get an email from a mutual acquaintance who's also in the book telling me to hear about Standing. I'm like, no, what? Like he died. I'm like, what?
Doug Brod:
He's like, yeah, he died three days ago, which was the date of our interview. So he died the same day we were supposed to talk. And it was just like, well, was, that's weird. That really bothered I mean, and I feel terrible. I interviewed his widow who was very, very kind and she spoke to me for the book.
Doug Brod:
But yeah, that was really kind of that was kind of devastating when that happened. But yeah, like like you said, a lot of a lot of people just aren't around anymore. So, you know, it was I also would have liked to have spoken to, you know, Diane, Diane, who was his. It was it was his second longtime companion. He was he was married very, very early on.
Doug Brod:
Then he was with Diane for like twenty two years. And then he was with Blanche, who was his third companion until he died. But Blanche actually responded to questions via interview, you know, via email as well for an interview. And she was amazing and I was so grateful for her. She was very candid with me.
Doug Brod:
She's still a satanist and she's into it. But she's incredibly, she's a brilliant woman, really smart and just really fascinating. Had a lot of interesting things to say.
AP Strange:
Yeah, she kind of took over the Clovenhoof administrative kind of stuff too toward the end there, was running all that. And, you know, of death, I was gonna say that I mean when he died it just seemed like there was a lot of conflicts between- her and Diane and- seen a like everybody involved where just kind of stuff went out of the house. And I guess a lot of it, nobody really knows what happened to it or ended up in a dump somewhere, you know?
Doug Brod:
Yeah. You know, when Levet died, you know, there was just it was just a mess because he was estranged from Zena, his youngest daughter. And Zena's half sister Carla was still sort of involved and she actually lived in lived in the black house toward the end for a bit. But when he died, there was like a mad scramble for, you know, who gets what and who takes over the church and who gets this, who gets that. It was just a sad situation.
Doug Brod:
Know, Blanche was very candid to me about, her side of what was going on. I reached out to Zena and Carla and neither of them participated. Did speak with Nicholas Schreck, who was also involved in that as well. And he gave me his side of the story. So it was interesting, you know, talking to these people and trying to piece together what exactly went on during that time.
Doug Brod:
Because at one point, after he died, Blanche and her son, they had a young son named Satan Satan Xerxes, they called him Xerxes. They lived in the house and after Leve died, they were able to live in the house for a while at the largesse of this guy named Donald Warby who owned the house at the time. He was a friend of Leves. And eventually, they were evicted. So when they had to leave the house, all the stuff from the house had to leave with them.
Doug Brod:
So there was this real chaotic scene of, you know, all of this stuff being removed from the house and was supposed to go into storage. Stuff was breaking. Some of his like rare 78 records collected were like, you know, thrown on the ground and stomped on and and even Nicholas Schreck told me that, you know, he went into the house and he kind of destroyed the ritual chamber. I mean, he took, you know, he there was no love lost there. So he just, you know, did his curse and did some destruction.
Doug Brod:
And, you know, it's a shame because there were I'm sure there were some relics in that place that were just phenomenal and irreplaceable. Thing that was very kind of that came out of that, that was very beneficial to the book was that LeVey kept everything or Diane or whoever it was administering to this stuff kept everything. So everything was packed in like these legal boxes and stacked. And so many of those boxes were actually just basically taken out and put on the street. And they ended up going to various places.
Doug Brod:
A number of those boxes were taken, I think they were purchased by a guy who worked in a Berkeley bookstore. Those boxes contained letters, correspondence between LeVey and his friends and people like Kenneth Anger, the filmmaker who was a good friend of his. They contained membership files and membership, you know, and order forms for merchandise, news clippings, just like amazing stuff. And those boxes ended up at a research center called the Research Center in Albany, California, right outside of Berkeley. And it's this great library, a research library, all with all occult and UFO and esoterica and bigfoot and all that, you know, all of that's all the stuff that your show covers is in this incredible library that this couple, Don Frew and Anna Korn run.
Doug Brod:
And when I interviewed Don for the book, Don Frew, who runs this research center, he knew LeVeigh in the 80s, which is how I got in contact with him. And he told me he had some of these boxes. I'm like, you're kidding me. He said, come to San Francisco or come to Albany and you can look through them. So I booked a trip to San Francisco.
Doug Brod:
I went up there and I spent three days just going through the boxes and essentially just copying everything on my phone, just sharing everything on my phone and bringing it home and going through it. It just blew me away, the stuff that was there. But at the same time, I know that the Church of Satan headquarters, which is now in New York, in Poughkeepsie, I imagine that they also have some of this material or similar material because this woman, Peggy Nadramia, who is one of the heads of the organization, she writes these incredible articles about Leve and his books and just historical Church of Satan stuff. But she has documentation, you know, woven into these stories, which are just amazing and they're mind blowing in their details. So she was very beneficial in helping me out and she sent me a link to like almost every story that had ever been written about Levee in a magazine.
Doug Brod:
It was just a phenomenal part of, you know, part of my research.
AP Strange:
Yeah, that's a jackpot when you're writing about something. You get that one link where it has all articles.
Doug Brod:
Came a little late though. So I was like, I was finishing up when I got it. But I have to say just, you know, when I went to San Francisco and I saw what this library had, was just like, I was just that this is going to make the book and it did make the book. The book would not have been nearly as good as I think it is, had it not been for this, you know, this very rare material that no one had really seen.
AP Strange:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, and that library sounds like a place that I absolutely would need to visit.
Doug Brod:
It is amazing. And they told me that I was the first person to do substantial research at the library. Because it's pretty brand, it's pretty new, but I was very, very happy to have that honor.
AP Strange:
Well, yeah, I mean, that makes sense because I would have thought that I would have heard of it before. I mean, had heard of Don Frew before, but I didn't know about this research center.
Doug Brod:
And here's how I got in contact with Don Frew. So when I was starting research on the book, I just wanted to find anybody I could who knew LeVeigh. That's why I got in contact with a lot of journalists who interviewed him, journalists from both professional world and the zine world, and made a lot of contacts that way. One person led to another and, you know, kind of fanned out that way. But with FRU, used to one of my first jobs in journalism was working at a magazine called Video Review in New York.
Doug Brod:
At Video Review, one of our copy editors was a pagan, a neo pagan, and he published his own pagan magazine. And I hadn't really been in contact with him for decades. And we were Facebook friends and I just reached out and I said, John, do you happen to know anybody in your travels who might have had any contact with Levee? And he's like, Talk to my friend Don. I read up on Don and he's a very important person in the pagan world.
Doug Brod:
And yeah, I contacted him and he was more than happy to talk to me and he knew Levet intimately. He was very close with him for a number of years. And yeah, so he was great and he was instrumental in making this book what it is.
AP Strange:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he seems like another one where it's perhaps a little bit more sacred to him than it was to to Anton. Yeah, because I mean, I think people need to understand that the Satanism is a bit tongue in cheek, but also he's serious about the philosophy of it. But, you know, when you mix that with like what people would consider like Wicca or witchcraft or neo pagan ideas, that's more of a sacred kind of nature based and it's a religion to them, know, and like Satanism is basically an anti religion in a lot of ways.
Doug Brod:
It's part of philosophy and, you know, Levee didn't have any use for religion and, you know, it's fascinating to me. One of the things that I can admit that really attracted me to writing the book was the fact that Levy was born Jewish. And always been hinted, and I'm a Jew, I'm an atheistic Jew, I should say. But Leve had always hinted that, Oh yeah, I had a little Jewish blood in my background. I also was a gypsy from Transylvania.
Doug Brod:
He had all of this going on in the background. But no, was able to access some census documents on ancestry.com that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that both sides of his family, his mother and father's side, were both Russian or Ukrainian Jews. So that was something that fascinated me, that a guy who was born Jewish would create this religion or this organization, this philosophy, at the end, toward the, actually in the middle and toward the end, he was very much into authoritarianism and hung around with unsavory, you know, fascist adjacent types. So that was another kind of, you know, weird dichotomy that I wanted to try to explore in the book as well.
AP Strange:
Yeah, I mean, like there's, I don't know if he's directly quoting like Hitler, but there is definitely some overlap with with kind of you know especially when you get into the 80s and stuff you're right about like that period with with with Shrek's band like Radio Werewolf and Adam Parfrey being involved and throwing around like a Like Vice? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's a hard thing to kind of square, you know?
Doug Brod:
Yeah, yeah. And it didn't just start there because, you know, even early on, he'd have parties where he'd have, you know, people dressed up as Nazis, you know, at his costume parties, which is a turnoff for a number of people for obvious reasons. And, you know, he even his first biographer, this guy Burton Wolf, who was a church member who wrote the biography, it's called The Devil's Avengers. And even in that book, he claimed that he had left the church because he saw that it was becoming this kind of crypto fascist organization. So it always was kind of an undercurrent in the church, this authoritarian, very rigid, pro military, pro law and order kind of sensibility.
Doug Brod:
Also, there's a lot of social Darwinism, like, you know, you know, kind of this stupid people shouldn't breed kind of mentality. Yeah. You know, you know, there's it's an elitist organization where only, you know, the cream rises and everyone else is, you know, pond scum. So, yeah, there was a lot of heavy duty kind of, you know, nastiness going on there.
AP Strange:
Well, yeah, I think several people described him as basically being misanthropic.
Doug Brod:
Oh yeah, there's no doubt. You can be misanthropic without being sort of denigrating toward those less fortunate than you.
AP Strange:
Right. Yeah, mean, he's basically, You could be a misanthrope without being a eugenicist.
Doug Brod:
Exactly. Exactly. There you go.
AP Strange:
But, yeah, I mean, like, when when I was referring to, Valet's kind of like little psychological profile of him, that's kind of where he came is like that was kind of the moral failing of it is he's so misanthropic that he really just kind of thinks that some people just don't deserve the freedoms.
Doug Brod:
Exactly, exactly. And he also was not shy about putting out his likes out there. I mean, in the Satanic Bible and the Satanic Ritual, in Rituals, in both of those books, the Dedications page, originally, they've since been altered and revised. But originally, he listed all of these Nazi commanders and these Third Reich guys and Nazi bankers he's dedicating the books to them. So whether that was done tongue in cheek or just to get a rise out of, you know, to be provocative, who knows?
Doug Brod:
But at the same time, Satanic Bible, his first book, he lifted content from this like notorious sort of fascist Bible by Ragnar Redbeard called Might Is Right, Vehemently anti Semitic and racist, just crazy diatribes. And he actually lifted some material for his own book. So, you know, he was a complicated man.
AP Strange:
Yeah and I mean that's really what makes this book such a fascinating read apart from you know your writing style and the way you put it all together. Thought like I said I had a hard time putting it down because he is a complicated figure and he does touch on so many parts of culture that you know, I think especially people that listen to the show would be interested in. It seems like a lot of a lot of people try to compartmentalize their various interests and he seemed to kind of unify it behind this mask that he wore.
Doug Brod:
Great summation of this guy. I mean, and that's it. It's like he created a total environment around himself where he can sort of indulge in all of the stuff that he was obsessed with. And I credit him because he was able to impart that even into his family life. I mean, daughters were kind of involved.
Doug Brod:
Partners were involved. He was a very charismatic guy. So I guess, you know, that helped. But yeah, it's like to be able to sort of live your obsessions is kind of a I don't know if it's an admirable thing, but it's an, I think in some respect, it's an enviable position to be in.
AP Strange:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, he wasn't always living high on the hog, but he had the things that he liked around him.
Doug Brod:
That's exactly it. Yeah. Yeah.
AP Strange:
And I think, you know, by the time Xerxes came along, was he was older, kind of as a, you know, to be to be the father of a young child. But it seemed like that was kind of his happiest times too.
Doug Brod:
I believe he was 63 when Xerxes was born because Xerxes was I think four when his dad died. So yeah, And Blanche was very candid with me about the relationship between, you know, Anton and his son. And it seemed very it seemed lovely. At the same time, at this there's always an at the same time with this guy. At the same time, I was reading this interview that Levee did Levee and Blanche did in a zine called Ben is Dead.
Doug Brod:
It's a real fun kind of feminist punk zine. And they spent a lot the two women who interviewed them spent a lot of time with Levee at the house. And Lavey was saying things to them like, you know, Xerxes was an experiment and, you know, we want to see if we can raise him, you know, our own way, you know, no television. They claim that like somebody claimed that he had no contact with other children for like his first year. So it's like Leve had to put this kind of weird spin on it.
Doug Brod:
It's like, yeah, have a baby. I'm an older guy with a baby, but, you know, we're trying to experiment to do something different with this child. Know, so it's like there's always the little kind of tweak that he has to add to it that makes you think, oh, there's something creepy here.
AP Strange:
Yeah, he's always got like a little touch of Doctor. Fives to him.
Doug Brod:
Exactly.
AP Strange:
Yeah. I mean and Xerxes, I guess, would probably be in his thirties by now. Right? Is he still around?
Doug Brod:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. No. He changed his name.
Doug Brod:
And I actually got a little shit online because I have his name in the book. But the thing is, it was easy to get this information. It's on his mother's Wikipedia page. He goes by now. And it's been on that Wikipedia page for years and was also on his sister Carla's Wikipedia page.
Doug Brod:
I think it's since been removed. But there's some Church of Satan members who sort of came down on me for mentioning his current name. And I said, this information is on his mom's Wikipedia page and it will be read by way more people than will ever read this book. So I assume.
AP Strange:
Yeah, right. Well
Doug Brod:
I was just kind of taken aback by that. I mean, was though malice intended, but yeah, I thought it was, that was a weird kind of response to the book.
AP Strange:
Yeah, so I'm guessing he prefers the anonymity these days and doesn't really want to.
Doug Brod:
Yeah, I imagine so, yeah. I realize that now that, you know, yeah.
AP Strange:
Right. Yeah. Well, you know, it would have been nice if they were participating before. They could have told you that, but
Doug Brod:
No, but listen, you know, I just I don't know, maybe it's my instinct as a journalist. If the information is out there and readily available and it could have been removed after all of these years, it's like, why is it still there? It's still there because it's not a big deal. That's how I justify including his name in the book.
AP Strange:
Right. Yeah, I mean, that seems like a safe assumption, but people are going to be upset no matter what you do, think.
Doug Brod:
Yeah, no. And listen, understand. I understand. But, you know, I still, I think that people who are going to avoid the book for that reason, I think are missing out. But then also, I think a lot of people who are maybe members of the Church of Satan, they don't want to read anything that could potentially be perceived as negative or critical of Levet.
Doug Brod:
That's something that I have to accept as an author that not everyone is going to be into this book.
AP Strange:
Yeah. I and I don't think you're really critical in the sense that you're, like you said, you didn't set out to debunk all the myths or anything like that. And you do kind of leave it pretty open ended. You kind of lay out all the different accounts and stories and weave it together in this really well composed narrative that takes you through his whole life. Along the way, you are kind of dispelling some of the myths, but a lot of them are kind of open to interpretation.
AP Strange:
And I think it's really well done the way you did it. Know, I don't see how anybody could really take too much issue with it.
Doug Brod:
Thanks. I I tried to make it as truthful as possible. And that was my only goal. It's like to do a full portrait of this guy with all his positives and all the things that he brought to this world and brought to the culture. But with that, there's also gonna be some negative stuff as well.
Doug Brod:
And it's all researched and reported. I didn't make this stuff up. It's all out there. You know, and getting other voices and hearing from people who had dealings with him. Some people just don't wanna see their heroes, know, see them as flawed human beings.
Doug Brod:
And that's kind of what he is. He's a flawed human being.
AP Strange:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I think I've heaved a lot of praise on the book, but I do recommend my listeners definitely go out and find a copy because it is great. But as we're winding down here, I did wanna at least get a mention in about your other book that I only found out about when buying this one. I'm like, oh man, I'm gonna have to read that at some point too.
AP Strange:
It's They Just Seem a Little Weird is the book.
Doug Brod:
Yes, is a book. Well, it's called They Just Seem a Little Weird. I have it right here. And it's How Kiss, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith and Stars Remade Rock and Roll. And it's a book that essentially tries to tell the story of 70s hard rock, but only through the eyes of these four bands that were very intricately interrelated.
Doug Brod:
Was a lot of cross pollination between all four of these bands, Kiss, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith and the smaller band called STARZ, which not many people have heard of, but they were part of the KISS Orbit, they opened for Aerosmith and all of these bands like shared management, they sometimes shared producers, they shared agents and bookers and toured together and were friendly and were frenemies. And there was so much going on with these four particular bands. The way I kind of got on this idea was that I'm a huge Kiss fan and Kiss was my first band that I loved growing up. And when I got the Gene Simmons nineteen seventy eight solo album, when Kiss did their four solo albums that were released in the same day, Gene Simmons had on his record as all these guest guitarists and guest musicians. And some of the guest guitarists were Rick Nielsen from Chief Trick, Joe Perry from Aerosmith and Richie Ranno from Starz.
Doug Brod:
So I took this album as kind of the launching pad for this story and telling the story of these four bands and how they remade rock and roll.
AP Strange:
Well, that's awesome. Yeah, I feel like I do need to read that one because it's I'd like to know how they're all connected because that just seemed like four bands that didn't seem on the face of it to be too connected, but
Doug Brod:
Very. And the thing about the book that it was a much tougher book to write than the Levee one because the Levee book is pretty straightforward. I mean, it covers the entirety of this man's life. I interviewed 50 something people for it. But for the first book, it's just like the story is very complex.
Doug Brod:
I mean, I try to tell it in a way that was very coherent and I think I've succeeded and people have told me I succeeded. But a lot of people have sort of said that they're experiencing their experience reading the book was like one of those detective series where they, you know, they put like photos on a board and they connect them to other people with string.
AP Strange:
Yeah, the old cork board thing.
Doug Brod:
Yeah. And that's how they read the book. I'm like, okay, if that worked for you. But it was a fun book to write, it was very difficult. And I interviewed like 140 people for it.
Doug Brod:
So it was a very time consuming book as well.
AP Strange:
Yeah, and I imagine, I guess I don't have to imagine too much because I do, you know, research on larger than life figures and I feel like for somebody like Leve and somebody like even just Gene Simmons, who'll isolate one person, you know, a rock star has the same kind of mythology built up around them and a lot of stories that get told and conflicting narratives and conflicting people that may have liked them, people that didn't like them telling different stories, you know.
Doug Brod:
There's some of that in the book, absolutely. Yeah, it's just that's that's something that kind of comes up almost accidentally when you write books like this. It's like you have this perceived fact And then you talk to two other people and they're like, no, no, no, no. Don't know who said that. It's like, he said it.
Doug Brod:
It's like, no, he's full of shit. So that's one of the reasons why I love reading oral histories when you're basically reading quote after quote after quote and people are contradicting the person who just spoke. So yeah, I love reading that as a reader and I find it fascinating as a reporter and writer to encounter that because it's like not everything, everyone has their own version of the truth.
AP Strange:
Yeah, oh yeah, that's for sure. And I think we see that more and more clearly every day.
Doug Brod:
Exactly, exactly. The book is timely too, so brush out and buy it.
AP Strange:
Yeah. Okay. Well, if people do wanna do that, where where can they buy it? I mean, I I
Doug Brod:
It's it's available in stores, not as many stores as I had hoped. I think the easiest way to buy it is on Amazon, although I'm not a big Jeff Bezos fan right now. But, you could order it from your books from your local bookstore. It's out from Hachette Publishing. So yeah, enjoy.
AP Strange:
Wherever fine books are sold. Yeah. And if people want to follow you online, where can they do that?
Doug Brod:
I'm on Facebook. I'm also on Twitter. I don't use Twitter or Twitter or X, whatever the hell it's called, X.
AP Strange:
It's X now.
Doug Brod:
I try to avoid that too for obvious reasons. But yeah, you can find me on X. I'm at I don't even know what my handle is.
AP Strange:
I don't think it's right.
Doug Brod:
There you go. It's easy enough. Dougbrough.
AP Strange:
And you're on Instagram too, think.
Doug Brod:
Yeah, I barely look at Instagram. So I'm so bad at this stuff. You'll find me. If you're really looking for me, you're gonna find me.
AP Strange:
Yeah, well, if you liked Twitter before, I would recommend Blue Sky. You might enjoy that because it's very similar but worth checking out. But people listening right now, definitely check out Doug's books and find them online because like I said, I mean really this was a day and a half of reading for me. Got it in the afternoon on my doorstep and started reading it. And then the next day it's like every spare moment I got, I kept picking it back up.
AP Strange:
And then by the end of the day, was done with the book.
Doug Brod:
I love hearing that from people who read my book, but I also love reading like that. If I get a book that's totally absorbing, I could sit and read 150 pages in a sitting, so I Yeah.
AP Strange:
It's nice when that happens because I mean sometimes, oftentimes I'm reading something really dry. I'm reading like occult books from the eighteen hundreds or something that I have to stop and read footnotes and maybe get another book to help me decode it or something. So, but yeah, no, no, this was just a joy to read. It was joyful all the way through. So, Well, it was great talking to you, Doug, and I'm sure I'll see you somewhere on the internet.