Word: pikes
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With the zest he showed plunging into everything from alcohol to psychic phenomena, from sex to theology, James A. Pike became America's most controversial 20th century clergyman. As an infant in Oklahoma, he won the Better Babies contest at the state fair two years running. In 1969, still hyperactive at 56, he got lost and died in Israel's Judean desert−and was the first Episcopal bishop ever to have three surviving wives attend the memorial service at his old cathedral in San Francisco...
...Pike, who was frankness personified, picked the title Nothing to Hide for the autobiography he never actually wrote. Now this biography (The Death and Life of Bishop Pike; Doubleday; $10), by William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne, is even more candid than Pike was in life. The book has full backing from the bishop's last wife, Diane Kennedy Pike, whose introduction calls it "sensitively written" and adds "It has been my joy to cooperate with the authors." The authors tell in some detail how Diane became Pike's mistress long before they were married and nearly a year...
...Pike slept with various women during his second marriage, even installing a private line through which they could phone him. The most sensational episode came when Maren Bergrud committed suicide after a three-year relationship during which he had paid many of her bills with his bishop's discretionary funds. As she was dying, she told him she had taken 55 sleeping pills. He rushed her to her own nearby apartment, called a doctor, who could not save her, and removed the part of her suicide note addressed to himself, later giving it to his third wife. This read...
...Much Help. The bishop's elder son, James A. Pike Jr., committed suicide at 20, apparently in unhappiness at being a homosexual. Stringfellow and Towne state: "Jim Jr. did talk with his father on at least one occasion ... about his fears that he might be homosexual. Bishop Pike would later feel that he hadn't been much help." They report that Pike himself had had one "homosexual experience while he was a lonely law student at Yale ... He hadn't found the experience unpleasant or distasteful. 'It was just that nothing seemed to fit together...
...authors examine Pike's many efforts to talk with the dead (notably Jim Jr.) in seances, and suggest that the mediums he used probably learned in advance almost all of the obscure information that so impressed the bishop. They also note that since he and Diane agreed on the survival of the soul, they cut the words "till death do us part" from their marriage ceremony...