Marjoe Gortner
Marjoe Gortner (born January 14, 1944 in Long Beach, California) was an evangelical minister who first gained notoriety in the late 1940s and early to mid 1950s when he became the youngest ordained preacher at the age of four, and again in the 1970s when he made a documentary film about himself, in which he both exposed himself as a con artist and revealed that several other evangelical ministers were likewise defrauding their congregants out of large sums of money.
When Marjoe was three, his father, a second generation evangelical minister, noticed his son's talent for mimicry and overall fearlessness of strangers and public settings. Seeing a moneymaking opportunity, his parents concocted a series of stories about Marjoe receiving a vision from God during a bath and began training Marjoe to deliver sermons by using broad gestures, lunges, and hand movements which acted as mnemonics. By the time Marjoe was four, his parents arranged for him to perform a marriage ceremony for a film crew from Paramount studios; although his parents referred to him as "the youngest ordained minister in history," it never became clear who exactly ordained him, if his father ordained him, or if he was even ordained at all.
Until the time he was a teenager, Marjoe and his parents travelled the rural United States, holding revival meetings which doubled as "fund raisers;" as well as teaching him scripture passages, Marjoe's parents had also taught him several grifting tactics, involving Marjoe selling supposedly "holy" articles at revivals which promised to heal the sick and dying. By the time Marjoe was sixteen, he had amassed a fortune of three million dollars; shortly after his sixteenth birthday, Marjoe's father absconded with the money, and a disillusioned Marjoe left his mother and went to live as a hippie in San Francisco, where he was taken in by and became the lover of an older woman. Marjoe spent the remainder of his teenage years as an intinerant hippie, living in communes and smoking marijuana. In his early twenties, a further disillusioned Marjoe decided to put his old skills to work and re-emerged on the evangelical circuit, this time consciously scamming people out of their money with a charismatic stage-show modeled after those of contemporary rock and roll singers, most notably Mick Jagger. Marjoe quickly grew rich again, and began to take six months off every year, during which he returned to California to live as a hippie, surviving on the previous six months' earnings.
In the late 1960s, Marjoe suffered a crisis of conscience, and resolved to not only expose himself but other evangelical ministers he had learned were participating in schemes identical to his own. Under the pretense of making a documentary on the evangelical and non-denominational faiths, Marjoe reunited with his father and assembled a documentary film crew to follow him around the Southern United States during 1971; unbeknownst to everyone else involved, Marjoe gave "backstage" interviews to the filmmakers in between sermons and revivals, talking about his hedonistic lifestyle (which included routinely seducing airline stewardesses), informing them of scams he was about to pull, and giving intimate details of how he and other ministers operated. After sermons, the filmmakers were invited back to Marjoe's hotel room to tape him counting the massive amounts of money he collected during the day. The resulting film, Marjoe, won the 1972 Academy Award for best documentary, although the distributor refused to allow it to be screened in theatres south of Des Moines, Iowa, for fear that it would spark a backlash from The Bible Belt.
With the film forever preventing Gortner from returning to his previous lifestyle, he attempted to break into both Hollywood and the recording industry. He cut an LP with Columbia records, entitled "Bad, but not Evil" (Gortner's description of himself in the documentary), which met with poor sales and reviews. Gortner appeared in several films shortly thereafter, most notably in the 1974 disaster film "Earthquake" as a psychotic National Guardsman. In 1974 he also appeared in the television movie Pray for the Wildcats.
During the late 1970s, Marjoe attempted to self-finance another film, this time a pseudo-fictional drama about an evangelist con-man and based in part on his real-life experiences. The film started shooting in New Orleans, Louisiana, but went bankrupt less than 6-weeks into production. Marjoe disappeared late one night with several thousand dollars worth of unused film stock and left the crew stranded in Dallas, Texas where they had been moved for shooting. The film was never completed.
Gortner's most memorable film performance was as the psychopathic hostage-taking drug dealer in Milton Katselas's 1979 screen adaptation of Mark Medoff's play When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?, also starring Peter Firth, Lee Grant and Hal Linden.
Gortner reappeared a few years later, starring in several B-movies such as Starcrash and hosting an early-1980s reality TV series called Speak Up America before ending his movie career in 1995. Today he sponsors charity golf tournaments and other events. The name "Marjoe" is a combination of the names "Mary" and "Joseph".