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The Black Pope
Although this new biography exposes flaws in Anton's character, especially his propensity for inventing claptrap about himselfand his origins, what remains is the story of an extraordinary innovator, prankster, satirist, and musician: a unique individual who had the effrontery and courage to play the bugaboo of Christianity and to confront purportedly religious, proper, conformist human beings with their hypocrisy. Upon his works and howthey strike you, and upon his influence on thousands of men and women who continue to admire and even revere him, rests the final judgment of the man whoplayed the role of the Devil's avenger and the "Black Pope" Anton Szandor LaVey.
144 pages, Paperback
First published October 8, 2010
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December 16, 2020
The Black Pope
*
Like a flea still upset that his dog died, Burton H. Wolfe revisits the only thing that apparently ever gave him any significance and tries to look like a big shot while he’s doing it. Wolfe writes in a sort of hectoring stream of consciousness style with constant bizarre asides, especially in the photo captions. One of the most unusual aspects of his writing is that he will constantly, and I really mean constantly, put everything in parentheses and refer to it as ‘so called’ or ‘self-proclaimed’. All Christians are ‘self-proclaimed Christians’ (isn’t that the point?), and anyone that knows anything more than he does is a ‘so called expert’. The gay bars of San Francisco are ‘the so called “gay bars” of San Francisco’ (he says this repeatedly and I have no idea what he means by it). He has many axes to grind and no sources besides well known apocrypha and hearsay to back anything up. While defending LaVey, who even he accepts was a pathological liar and con man, Wolfe repeatedly refers to Aleister Crowley as a ‘pretentious fop’. Whatever other things you could accuse Crowley of, pretension and foppery weren’t amongst them. This becomes relevant when LaVey apparently became disillusioned early on with Uncle Al after reading the sort of tawdry biography Wolfe might have been proud to write, but when asked his definition of magic just gave a tortured and verbose version of Crowley’s ‘the art and science of causing change in accordance with will’. But Wolfe always knows best.
The most absurd example of this is in his referring to LaVey’s dog Typhon who can clearly be seen in a photo in the book to be a pure blooded English Bull Terrier. Not happy with this and forced to include that Diane LaVey (now Heggartey) only let him use this photo if he identified the dog as a Bull Terrier, Wolfe insists it was something called an ‘Abraxas Pitbull’ and thereafter repeatedly refers to it as such, his justification being that it is the same breed as Patton’s dog which was ‘identified as a Pitbull’ (by whom exactly we never learn). Patton’s dog Willy was well known by everyone except Wolfe to be an English Bull Terrier, there is of course no such thing as an Abraxas Pitbull nor are Bull Terriers a type of Pitbull, being bred as they were from Dalmations and the extinct English White Terrier which was a breed of prick-eared working terrier. There is however the Abraxas bloodline of Bull Terriers descended from the only such dog to win Crufts which is perhaps what Wolfe is thinking of. The reason all of this is relevant is because Wolfe is utterly sure of himself and despite decades of evidence that he could have easily accessed from primary sources; he ploughs on in the hope no one else will ever look at those sources either. He has no more time for “so called dog experts” (his parentheses) than he does for the accounts of multiple witnesses or even letters written by LaVey’s own hand.
Wolfe (who knows if that’s his real name, as despite being the ironically self-proclaimed ‘father of alternative journalism’ and ‘the best investigative journalist on the West coast’ according to the man’s blog, citations absent, there is no further mention of him beyond having tried to sue the Brotherhood of Teamsters while he was working as a cab driver in the 80s) may be known to the reader as the ‘author’ of The Devil’s Avenger. A notorious biography of LaVey from 1974 whose only print run was largely burned by the publisher. The book was notorious for being very clearly written by LaVey, containing the most astounding lies and then being given Wolfe’s byline as if he had written it himself. Wolfe acknowledges that early on here and that he was taken in but then goes on to spend the entire rambling and unedited text grasping for any justification to back up all the most well known lies (and those most well known to be lies) and as all the hard evidence and actual research is against him he has to constantly resort to a very weak sort of trickery to shore his arguments up. If you’ve seen the episode of The Simpsons where Lionel Hutz asks a witness what colour of tie he is wearing and then hastily and obviously removes it to proclaim he’s not wearing one at all then you’ll recognise what Wolfe tries to do here.
Some examples:
-LaVey could not have beaten his wife throughout their marriage as she and her daughters alleged because they were never actually legally married (?) (Wolfe does admit that LaVey was often verbally and physically abusive towards her in company, but that doesn’t mean he would beat her in private of course)
-LaVey could not have beaten Zeena’s Alsatian puppy with a board until it was streaming blood because it was actually seven months old and so effectively fully grown (??). He then states that LaVey was an animal lover but had no ability to command or train a dog whatsoever, exactly as Zeena stated as his reason for becoming so violent.
-As to the assertion that LaVey used a cattle prod on his lion Togare and his Doberman Loki, Wolfe states LaVey couldn’t have ‘used Togare’s cattle prod’ on the animals as Zeena stated because lions can’t own cattle prods (???) and then states there’s nothing wrong with using a cattle prod on a dog (or lion) anyway so what’s the fuss?
-LaVey can’t have seen a “black” girl (Wolfe’s parentheses) get killed by a car outside her house on her first day of school because, and I quote ‘most “black” people are actually dark brown’. It was at this point I made to delete the ebook out of pure stupefaction at what I was reading but instead I laboured on.
Wolfe triples down on the most transparent of lies, those about LaVey’s affair with Monroe when he was a beady eyed, bat-faced 18 year old dressed up as a gangster with a fake scar and she 22 and also Marilyn Monroe. And of course Mansfield who LaVey did at least meet once As my own aside, in later years LaVey started claiming he had also encountered Elizabeth Short and even somehow Ed Gein, though he failed to ever mention these two icons of cultural infamy until 40 years later. He was obviously very busy as a teenager, Short having been killed at the other end of the state when he was car-less and 17. Of course he solved the Black Dahlia murder as soon as it happened but he must not have felt like telling anyone (maybe he told Monroe that he’d known the Black Dahlia and who killed her and she thought he was mysterious, who knows). Wolfe uses as evidence that LaVey trained big cats (at a circus that never had big cats) and played calliope there, a handbill of LaVey’s possession with no date, location or any other information that would be needed on a handbill, not even the name of the circus.
The question over Wolfe’s own name is relevant because despite always deferring to some people’s chosen names he refuses to use those of others. He will always refer to Blanche Barton as Sharon or “Blanche” but he doesn’t refer to LaVey as Howard or Marilyn Manson as Brian. This is part of an obvious vein of real old-school misogyny that runs through all of Wolfe’s text, the most excoriating of which is directed at LaVey’s daughter Zeena Shreck, who as the reader likely knows was the first person to receive a Satanic baptism. Wolfe seems to be practically spitting feathers every time he is forced to mention Zeena and claims that she is the source of all the hate thrown at LaVey because she was upset about being allegedly thrown out of the Church. It is a matter of record that Zeena was once very loyal to her father and thanklessly did what she could while serving as a spokeswoman for the church, but that sometime in the late 80s she became estranged from him. She has since then displayed a ferocious and undying loathing for LaVey. Wolfe accuses her of spreading lies about her old man and yet it is Wolfe who repeats several times his own belief that LaVey fathered a child with Zeena when she was fourteen (Stanton Lavey does bear a strong resemblance to his maternal grandfather), Zeena has never even hinted at this and yet she’s the muckraker.
Even amidst this strange and rambling text this hatred stood out as especially bizarre and then I remembered something. Wolfe had written about LaVey decades ago and he included a plainly lustful and lascivious description of the then 15 year old Zeena. In this book he includes photos of her and remarks on what a beauty she was and then a more recent one where he unfairly crows about her as ‘ageing’ and ‘not looking so good any more’. This is especially egregious considering that she must have been two or three decades younger than Wolfe but it highlights what his big problem with her was. My feeling is that Wolfe pursued the younger Zeena, maybe thinking he had a chance with a wayward teen but was obviously rebuffed. This lit a fire of hatred and envy in him which burned for the rest of his life (I assume Wolfe has died by this point). This is especially clear in all the invective that he has to throw at Zeena’s husband Nicholas, or as Wolfe says over and over and over again “so called husband”.
All in all this book is an absurd attempt by a very petty little man to save face for his own glaring failures. It’s the sort of rubbish that might have flown twenty years ago but judging by what happened to The Devil’s Avenger, even that’s doubtful. Read if you’re a LaVey completist I suppose, but save for a description of Black Mass there is almost no information that you won’t have seen elsewhere. That’s especially sad for someone who claims to have once been a close friend of LaVey and spent a lot of time in the Black House (or “black house” as it’s referred to here). The Black House (it really was a house that was black so I don’t understand Wolfe’s problem) was the real body and soul of the Church of Satan, much more than even LaVey IMO. If you want to read the most detailed description of it then read Michael Aquino’s exhaustive thousand page tome The Church of Satan. Aquino provides sources and reproduces evidence for every single statement he makes and in the 5th edition at least never badmouths LaVey or the church but instead provides probably a much more moving and even loving account of the Church of Satan’s nine good years than LaVey deserved. It will also show you the reality behind Wolfe’s paper-thin pretensions and excuses. Wolfe has scarcely a word for Aquino who was once along with Diane the actual administrator of the church but if there is at least one thing that is known about the special-forces trained intelligence officer Aquino (little else is, including whether or not he finally died for real) it was that he was hyper-focused on detail and never left his backside uncovered, Wolfe’s inept handwaving seems comical in comparison.
It’s chastening to remember that this book was, once at least, available in mainstream bookstores worldwide, I remember reading the intro’ in Waterstones a few years ago. While this was once available in the bookshops, it’s now not even listed on Amazon so I doubt many people will read either this or The Church of Satan. I’m very interested in self-published books, free as they are of stifling editorial oversight, but Wolfe could have at least paid attention to the little squiggly red and green lines appearing under his words as he typed. Bizarrely the German edition is listed on Amazon and I wonder if that translation caught the typos.
There is, I must say one interesting personal anecdote in the entire book. Despite Wolfe’s assertions that LaVey was indeed an animal lover it is again a matter of record that after Togare was removed from the Black House he went first to the San Francisco zoo then ended up in a big cat sanctuary run by Tippy Headron who said he was the most emotionally damaged animal she had ever encountered. One day Wolfe and LaVey went to the zoo where a large crowd of onlookers were gawping at Togare as he paced in his pen. When LaVey arrived at the back of the crowd, without being able to see him Togare let out a mournful whine that Wolfe took to be longing. Minutes later the lion was let into his enclosure where Wolfe and LaVey had now moved to watch him up close and turning, Togare blasted a gallon of urine right into LaVey’s face through the bars. So through Wolfe we know Togare had a small measure of revenge at least.
*
Like a flea still upset that his dog died, Burton H. Wolfe revisits the only thing that apparently ever gave him any significance and tries to look like a big shot while he’s doing it. Wolfe writes in a sort of hectoring stream of consciousness style with constant bizarre asides, especially in the photo captions. One of the most unusual aspects of his writing is that he will constantly, and I really mean constantly, put everything in parentheses and refer to it as ‘so called’ or ‘self-proclaimed’. All Christians are ‘self-proclaimed Christians’ (isn’t that the point?), and anyone that knows anything more than he does is a ‘so called expert’. The gay bars of San Francisco are ‘the so called “gay bars” of San Francisco’ (he says this repeatedly and I have no idea what he means by it). He has many axes to grind and no sources besides well known apocrypha and hearsay to back anything up. While defending LaVey, who even he accepts was a pathological liar and con man, Wolfe repeatedly refers to Aleister Crowley as a ‘pretentious fop’. Whatever other things you could accuse Crowley of, pretension and foppery weren’t amongst them. This becomes relevant when LaVey apparently became disillusioned early on with Uncle Al after reading the sort of tawdry biography Wolfe might have been proud to write, but when asked his definition of magic just gave a tortured and verbose version of Crowley’s ‘the art and science of causing change in accordance with will’. But Wolfe always knows best.
The most absurd example of this is in his referring to LaVey’s dog Typhon who can clearly be seen in a photo in the book to be a pure blooded English Bull Terrier. Not happy with this and forced to include that Diane LaVey (now Heggartey) only let him use this photo if he identified the dog as a Bull Terrier, Wolfe insists it was something called an ‘Abraxas Pitbull’ and thereafter repeatedly refers to it as such, his justification being that it is the same breed as Patton’s dog which was ‘identified as a Pitbull’ (by whom exactly we never learn). Patton’s dog Willy was well known by everyone except Wolfe to be an English Bull Terrier, there is of course no such thing as an Abraxas Pitbull nor are Bull Terriers a type of Pitbull, being bred as they were from Dalmations and the extinct English White Terrier which was a breed of prick-eared working terrier. There is however the Abraxas bloodline of Bull Terriers descended from the only such dog to win Crufts which is perhaps what Wolfe is thinking of. The reason all of this is relevant is because Wolfe is utterly sure of himself and despite decades of evidence that he could have easily accessed from primary sources; he ploughs on in the hope no one else will ever look at those sources either. He has no more time for “so called dog experts” (his parentheses) than he does for the accounts of multiple witnesses or even letters written by LaVey’s own hand.
Wolfe (who knows if that’s his real name, as despite being the ironically self-proclaimed ‘father of alternative journalism’ and ‘the best investigative journalist on the West coast’ according to the man’s blog, citations absent, there is no further mention of him beyond having tried to sue the Brotherhood of Teamsters while he was working as a cab driver in the 80s) may be known to the reader as the ‘author’ of The Devil’s Avenger. A notorious biography of LaVey from 1974 whose only print run was largely burned by the publisher. The book was notorious for being very clearly written by LaVey, containing the most astounding lies and then being given Wolfe’s byline as if he had written it himself. Wolfe acknowledges that early on here and that he was taken in but then goes on to spend the entire rambling and unedited text grasping for any justification to back up all the most well known lies (and those most well known to be lies) and as all the hard evidence and actual research is against him he has to constantly resort to a very weak sort of trickery to shore his arguments up. If you’ve seen the episode of The Simpsons where Lionel Hutz asks a witness what colour of tie he is wearing and then hastily and obviously removes it to proclaim he’s not wearing one at all then you’ll recognise what Wolfe tries to do here.
Some examples:
-LaVey could not have beaten his wife throughout their marriage as she and her daughters alleged because they were never actually legally married (?) (Wolfe does admit that LaVey was often verbally and physically abusive towards her in company, but that doesn’t mean he would beat her in private of course)
-LaVey could not have beaten Zeena’s Alsatian puppy with a board until it was streaming blood because it was actually seven months old and so effectively fully grown (??). He then states that LaVey was an animal lover but had no ability to command or train a dog whatsoever, exactly as Zeena stated as his reason for becoming so violent.
-As to the assertion that LaVey used a cattle prod on his lion Togare and his Doberman Loki, Wolfe states LaVey couldn’t have ‘used Togare’s cattle prod’ on the animals as Zeena stated because lions can’t own cattle prods (???) and then states there’s nothing wrong with using a cattle prod on a dog (or lion) anyway so what’s the fuss?
-LaVey can’t have seen a “black” girl (Wolfe’s parentheses) get killed by a car outside her house on her first day of school because, and I quote ‘most “black” people are actually dark brown’. It was at this point I made to delete the ebook out of pure stupefaction at what I was reading but instead I laboured on.
Wolfe triples down on the most transparent of lies, those about LaVey’s affair with Monroe when he was a beady eyed, bat-faced 18 year old dressed up as a gangster with a fake scar and she 22 and also Marilyn Monroe. And of course Mansfield who LaVey did at least meet once As my own aside, in later years LaVey started claiming he had also encountered Elizabeth Short and even somehow Ed Gein, though he failed to ever mention these two icons of cultural infamy until 40 years later. He was obviously very busy as a teenager, Short having been killed at the other end of the state when he was car-less and 17. Of course he solved the Black Dahlia murder as soon as it happened but he must not have felt like telling anyone (maybe he told Monroe that he’d known the Black Dahlia and who killed her and she thought he was mysterious, who knows). Wolfe uses as evidence that LaVey trained big cats (at a circus that never had big cats) and played calliope there, a handbill of LaVey’s possession with no date, location or any other information that would be needed on a handbill, not even the name of the circus.
The question over Wolfe’s own name is relevant because despite always deferring to some people’s chosen names he refuses to use those of others. He will always refer to Blanche Barton as Sharon or “Blanche” but he doesn’t refer to LaVey as Howard or Marilyn Manson as Brian. This is part of an obvious vein of real old-school misogyny that runs through all of Wolfe’s text, the most excoriating of which is directed at LaVey’s daughter Zeena Shreck, who as the reader likely knows was the first person to receive a Satanic baptism. Wolfe seems to be practically spitting feathers every time he is forced to mention Zeena and claims that she is the source of all the hate thrown at LaVey because she was upset about being allegedly thrown out of the Church. It is a matter of record that Zeena was once very loyal to her father and thanklessly did what she could while serving as a spokeswoman for the church, but that sometime in the late 80s she became estranged from him. She has since then displayed a ferocious and undying loathing for LaVey. Wolfe accuses her of spreading lies about her old man and yet it is Wolfe who repeats several times his own belief that LaVey fathered a child with Zeena when she was fourteen (Stanton Lavey does bear a strong resemblance to his maternal grandfather), Zeena has never even hinted at this and yet she’s the muckraker.
Even amidst this strange and rambling text this hatred stood out as especially bizarre and then I remembered something. Wolfe had written about LaVey decades ago and he included a plainly lustful and lascivious description of the then 15 year old Zeena. In this book he includes photos of her and remarks on what a beauty she was and then a more recent one where he unfairly crows about her as ‘ageing’ and ‘not looking so good any more’. This is especially egregious considering that she must have been two or three decades younger than Wolfe but it highlights what his big problem with her was. My feeling is that Wolfe pursued the younger Zeena, maybe thinking he had a chance with a wayward teen but was obviously rebuffed. This lit a fire of hatred and envy in him which burned for the rest of his life (I assume Wolfe has died by this point). This is especially clear in all the invective that he has to throw at Zeena’s husband Nicholas, or as Wolfe says over and over and over again “so called husband”.
All in all this book is an absurd attempt by a very petty little man to save face for his own glaring failures. It’s the sort of rubbish that might have flown twenty years ago but judging by what happened to The Devil’s Avenger, even that’s doubtful. Read if you’re a LaVey completist I suppose, but save for a description of Black Mass there is almost no information that you won’t have seen elsewhere. That’s especially sad for someone who claims to have once been a close friend of LaVey and spent a lot of time in the Black House (or “black house” as it’s referred to here). The Black House (it really was a house that was black so I don’t understand Wolfe’s problem) was the real body and soul of the Church of Satan, much more than even LaVey IMO. If you want to read the most detailed description of it then read Michael Aquino’s exhaustive thousand page tome The Church of Satan. Aquino provides sources and reproduces evidence for every single statement he makes and in the 5th edition at least never badmouths LaVey or the church but instead provides probably a much more moving and even loving account of the Church of Satan’s nine good years than LaVey deserved. It will also show you the reality behind Wolfe’s paper-thin pretensions and excuses. Wolfe has scarcely a word for Aquino who was once along with Diane the actual administrator of the church but if there is at least one thing that is known about the special-forces trained intelligence officer Aquino (little else is, including whether or not he finally died for real) it was that he was hyper-focused on detail and never left his backside uncovered, Wolfe’s inept handwaving seems comical in comparison.
It’s chastening to remember that this book was, once at least, available in mainstream bookstores worldwide, I remember reading the intro’ in Waterstones a few years ago. While this was once available in the bookshops, it’s now not even listed on Amazon so I doubt many people will read either this or The Church of Satan. I’m very interested in self-published books, free as they are of stifling editorial oversight, but Wolfe could have at least paid attention to the little squiggly red and green lines appearing under his words as he typed. Bizarrely the German edition is listed on Amazon and I wonder if that translation caught the typos.
There is, I must say one interesting personal anecdote in the entire book. Despite Wolfe’s assertions that LaVey was indeed an animal lover it is again a matter of record that after Togare was removed from the Black House he went first to the San Francisco zoo then ended up in a big cat sanctuary run by Tippy Headron who said he was the most emotionally damaged animal she had ever encountered. One day Wolfe and LaVey went to the zoo where a large crowd of onlookers were gawping at Togare as he paced in his pen. When LaVey arrived at the back of the crowd, without being able to see him Togare let out a mournful whine that Wolfe took to be longing. Minutes later the lion was let into his enclosure where Wolfe and LaVey had now moved to watch him up close and turning, Togare blasted a gallon of urine right into LaVey’s face through the bars. So through Wolfe we know Togare had a small measure of revenge at least.
July 1, 2017
Interview with Burton H. Wolfe Outsight Radio Hours #563 12-Dec-10 from a forthcoming anthology of my interviews:
Hey, Burton. Welcome to Outsight Radio Hours.
Burton H. Wolfe: Hello, Tom. Glad to be here.
Hey, wonderful to have you. Wonderful to have you. I have read two—both of the books. I want to talk to you about today and really enjoyed them. Kind of a lot of insights there. The first one I read, so I’ll ask you about that one first, is The Black Pope, your updated biography of Anton LaVey, founder of Church of Satan and a man of many other talents. One of the things I like most about the book, actually, was the sort of telling of the sort of history of the ’60s and a lot of its points and intersections Anton LaVey had, like particularly with Monroe and Mansfield. Did you think about it when you were writing it as sort of a history of an era as well?
BHW: No. I thought of it as biography of Anton. The history is just incidental to his life since he was such an important part of the 1960s and 1970s and remains so today, actually.
And, why would you say he is important today?
BHW: Well, he was part of a kind of explosion of subcultures that occurred in the 1960s, you know, the hippies. There were protests against what was going in Vietnam. There was even a certain amount of opposition to standard—the standard establishment—whether it’s in politics or religion or whatever. And, he was at the forefront of all that. One, one of the most audacious of all the anti-establishment critics, this is the guy who had the audacity to identify himself as The Devil’s representative on Earth.
You know, at the same time I was reading your book, Burton, I happen to be reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success at the same time which, if you haven’t read it, sort of makes the case that the—the amazing, the incredible individual is often a product of, say, time and opportunity. And, I guess, in the context of that, do you think there would have been an Anton LaVey, a self-described devil’s representative eventually anyway, or was there really something unique and peerless about Anton LaVey?
BHW: Oh, certainly, there was something unique and peerless about Anton. You can’t replace him. He was, he was one of the most unique characters in the history of the feel of humanity. But, yeah, the times produced him for sure to a certain extent. And, I don’t know that he could gain the kind of popularity today that he did then especially with all the sensitivities that are occurring these days. The… Yeah, we’re going backwards, so there’s a lot more freedom of expression in the 1960s and 1970s than there is today. And, it’s remarkable when you find that, but it’s true.
Well, interestingly, a lot of what he chose to express to you in the original edition of the biography, you found out it was false and this biography corrects it. How important was that to sort of clear the air or settle the case on these, on these issues regarding Anton for you?
BHW: Well, how important anything turns out to be, who knows? I made mistakes in the original biography called The Devil’s Avenger published in 1974 by Pyramid Books. And, you can’t get it because of—after there was opposition and even boycotting the bookstores. The publisher took all the books back and burned them and did not even give Anton and me a chance to buy some up. And I did not want those mistakes to be left there for history. I’m trying to get The Black Pope in to print as so that it’s more than just an e-book. And, it could get in to the libraries and the important part of history that he was can be in print form. So, I, and I, you know, I just felt an obligation to correct mistakes that I made, that these are the worse mistakes I ever made in the whole history of my writing career. And, if there are any writers listening to this or would-be writers, don’t make the mistake that I did. That was… That… Don’t get so close to your subject that you just accept the story’s details without going in to, doing a lot of research and checking a lot to make sure he is telling the truth.
Yeah. That’s really interesting. And, because, I think that’s some good advice, but that’s part of the most sort of compelling part of the book to me is, is you were right there to witness the life that you were, you were documenting at that time particularly; a colleague of Anton’s.
BHW: Yeah. Well, we were friends. We did a whole lot of things together. That was the problem. The other problem was the first stories that I told about them were, were checked out. Those were in to magazine articles. But then, and once, once they checked out, I just sort of let him go and run with the stories. That book fortunately, I’m glad now that the copies were burned and there are so few more around. So, there’s not too much damage done. That book, by the way, is a collector’s item. Yeah. People still want it for whatever reason, maybe. You have to pay Amazon.com $400 or something like that last time I looked to get a copy of the thing. And, what I keep telling people when they ask about it is don’t bother. It isn’t worth 10 cents because there are too many errors. Get my e-book. Type Mind Opening Books into your web address bar and that will take you to the website and show you how to order the book. And then, you’ll get the true story of Anton.
...
Hey, Burton. Welcome to Outsight Radio Hours.
Burton H. Wolfe: Hello, Tom. Glad to be here.
Hey, wonderful to have you. Wonderful to have you. I have read two—both of the books. I want to talk to you about today and really enjoyed them. Kind of a lot of insights there. The first one I read, so I’ll ask you about that one first, is The Black Pope, your updated biography of Anton LaVey, founder of Church of Satan and a man of many other talents. One of the things I like most about the book, actually, was the sort of telling of the sort of history of the ’60s and a lot of its points and intersections Anton LaVey had, like particularly with Monroe and Mansfield. Did you think about it when you were writing it as sort of a history of an era as well?
BHW: No. I thought of it as biography of Anton. The history is just incidental to his life since he was such an important part of the 1960s and 1970s and remains so today, actually.
And, why would you say he is important today?
BHW: Well, he was part of a kind of explosion of subcultures that occurred in the 1960s, you know, the hippies. There were protests against what was going in Vietnam. There was even a certain amount of opposition to standard—the standard establishment—whether it’s in politics or religion or whatever. And, he was at the forefront of all that. One, one of the most audacious of all the anti-establishment critics, this is the guy who had the audacity to identify himself as The Devil’s representative on Earth.
You know, at the same time I was reading your book, Burton, I happen to be reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success at the same time which, if you haven’t read it, sort of makes the case that the—the amazing, the incredible individual is often a product of, say, time and opportunity. And, I guess, in the context of that, do you think there would have been an Anton LaVey, a self-described devil’s representative eventually anyway, or was there really something unique and peerless about Anton LaVey?
BHW: Oh, certainly, there was something unique and peerless about Anton. You can’t replace him. He was, he was one of the most unique characters in the history of the feel of humanity. But, yeah, the times produced him for sure to a certain extent. And, I don’t know that he could gain the kind of popularity today that he did then especially with all the sensitivities that are occurring these days. The… Yeah, we’re going backwards, so there’s a lot more freedom of expression in the 1960s and 1970s than there is today. And, it’s remarkable when you find that, but it’s true.
Well, interestingly, a lot of what he chose to express to you in the original edition of the biography, you found out it was false and this biography corrects it. How important was that to sort of clear the air or settle the case on these, on these issues regarding Anton for you?
BHW: Well, how important anything turns out to be, who knows? I made mistakes in the original biography called The Devil’s Avenger published in 1974 by Pyramid Books. And, you can’t get it because of—after there was opposition and even boycotting the bookstores. The publisher took all the books back and burned them and did not even give Anton and me a chance to buy some up. And I did not want those mistakes to be left there for history. I’m trying to get The Black Pope in to print as so that it’s more than just an e-book. And, it could get in to the libraries and the important part of history that he was can be in print form. So, I, and I, you know, I just felt an obligation to correct mistakes that I made, that these are the worse mistakes I ever made in the whole history of my writing career. And, if there are any writers listening to this or would-be writers, don’t make the mistake that I did. That was… That… Don’t get so close to your subject that you just accept the story’s details without going in to, doing a lot of research and checking a lot to make sure he is telling the truth.
Yeah. That’s really interesting. And, because, I think that’s some good advice, but that’s part of the most sort of compelling part of the book to me is, is you were right there to witness the life that you were, you were documenting at that time particularly; a colleague of Anton’s.
BHW: Yeah. Well, we were friends. We did a whole lot of things together. That was the problem. The other problem was the first stories that I told about them were, were checked out. Those were in to magazine articles. But then, and once, once they checked out, I just sort of let him go and run with the stories. That book fortunately, I’m glad now that the copies were burned and there are so few more around. So, there’s not too much damage done. That book, by the way, is a collector’s item. Yeah. People still want it for whatever reason, maybe. You have to pay Amazon.com $400 or something like that last time I looked to get a copy of the thing. And, what I keep telling people when they ask about it is don’t bother. It isn’t worth 10 cents because there are too many errors. Get my e-book. Type Mind Opening Books into your web address bar and that will take you to the website and show you how to order the book. And then, you’ll get the true story of Anton.
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