Roberta Semple Salter; Times (UK) obit
Hyfler/Rosner
From The Times
February 15, 2007
Roberta Semple Salter
Daughter and one-time heir to the ministry of the colourful
Los Angeles evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson
September 17, 1910 - January 25, 2007
The evangelical revivalist Aimee Semple McPherson was as
much a part of America's cultural landscape in the 1920s as
was, say, Agatha Christie indissolubly part of Britain's.
Then, in 1926, when both women were at the peak of their
fame, they temporarily disappeared in circumstances never
satisfactorily explained, and which in the case of Semple
McPherson led to the leadership of her flock being
transferred to her 15-year-old daughter, Roberta.
Tall, virginal and soft-voiced, Roberta Semple impressed
observers with the calm way in which she asked each day the
15,000strong congregation to pray for her mother's return.
Men wept openly in the church in Echo Park, Los Angeles,
while others maintained a vigil on the sands of Venice Beach
where Semple McPherson had last been seen, dressed for
bathing.
Women preachers were then a novelty, and ones who
acknowledged their own attrac-tiveness something of a gift
for the press, which made much of the daring lines of her
swimming costume.
The tenor of these reports seemed to be justified when, a
month later, Semple McPherson stumbled out of the Mexican
desert claiming to have escaped from kidnappers. There was
little evidence to substantiate her claims (the bathing suit
had metamorphosed into a clean frock), and rather more to
support sightings of the divorcée in hotels with a male
employee of the church who had also gone missing.
Nonetheless, her parishioners eagerly welcomed her back.
In the years that followed, Roberta Semple continued to be
groomed by her mother to succeed her in ministering to her
church, that of the Foursquare Gospel. She helped to stage
the elaborate bible plays that her mother put on to
illustrate her sermons and which were calculated to appeal
to those otherwise drawn to the cinema.
She was also involved with the youth wing of the church and
with its mission to alleviate social deprivation. In the
depths of the Depression, it was this, as much as its
better-known reputation for faith healing and miracle cures,
that secured the church such an enthusiastic following.
Roberta Semple accompanied her mother on frequent overseas
trips, and on their 1930 world tour fell in love with
William Smyth, the purser of a steamship on which they were
travelling. The pair became engaged in Shanghai, and were
married in Singapore. The formidable matriarch of the
family, the bride's grandmother Minnie Kennedy, gave them
her blessing. "I was married at 15, and Aimee at 17," she
noted, "so at 19 Roberta has waited really much longer than
either of us." The marriage, however, was dissolved after
three years.
Yet it was her mother's own propensity for matrimony that
was to prove the catalyst for greater change in Roberta
Semple's life. When Aimee Semple McPherson married in 1931
for the third time, thus contravening her church's own tenet
that one might not remarry if a previous spouse (in this
case Roberta's stepfather) was still alive, it brought
tensions within the congregation and family to a head.
In 1937 Roberta Semple sued her mother's lawyer, one Willedd
Andrews, for slander after he claimed that she had tried to
intimidate and blackmail "Sister" McPherson. The latter was
led weeping from the courtroom shortly before the judge
ruled in her daughter's favour after a lengthy trial that
had transfixed America.
Despite her victory, Roberta Semple was subsequently forced
out of the church and had to resign its vice-presi-dency.
Yet, contrary to popular belief, she remained both proud of,
and on good terms with, her mother, never allowing past
events to overshadow a life that she lived notably on her
own terms.
Aimee Semple McPherson died in 1944 of an overdose of
barbiturates that was ruled accidental, though she had
suffered for much of her life from mental ailments. Sixty
thousand of those who had heeded her call filed past the
coffin. The leadership of her church was taken on by Roberta
Semple's half-brother, Rolf McPherson. Nobody was more
pleased than she by the success of his work, such that the
International Church of the Foursquare Gospel now claims
several million adherents around the world.
Roberta Star Semple was born in 1910 in Hong Kong, where her
parents had settled as missionaries. Both, however, soon
caught malaria, and her father, Robert Semple, died before
she was born. Her mother chose her daughter's names in
memory of him, and because she brightened her future.
Aimee Semple's faith was strengthened yet further when she
made a miraculous recovery from illness some years later
after promising to dedicate herself to preaching if she
survived. So began her career as an itinerant evangelist,
which, though it was to bring her renown, also drove her
apart from her second husband, William McPherson.
After the breach with her mother, Roberta Semple made a
career for herself in a related branch of showmanship, the
world of radio and television. In 1941 she appeared as a
guest on an American radio programme that featured
celebrities and their pastimes, and subsequently she became
its researcher.
She went on to marry its musical director, Harry Salter, and
afterwards to help him in his career as a producer of
programmes, most notably of Name That Tune, which he created
in 1953 and which became a long-running success. It was she
who dealt with the 20,000 letters from potential contestants
that arrived at their home each week, and she who identified
which ones showed promise.
A voracious reader, blessed with a sparky intelligence and a
keen sense of her own abilities, Roberta Semple Salter was
ahead of her time in refusing to be subjugated to her gender
or to her background. She remained a woman of faith, albeit
hers was a personal one.
Harry Salter died in 1984, and she is survived by their
daughter.
Roberta Semple Salter, church leader, was born on September
17, 1910. She died on January 25, 2007, aged 96