Major Hollywood Stars Who Were Connected To Dangerous Cults

Before the 2000s, when everyone suddenly knew everything thanks to computers in your pocket, it was believed there were people in the world who could solve all your problems, gurus who had an innate understanding of the intangible machinations of the universe and could explain them to you. You know, cult leaders. The '60s and '70s were the heyday of Hollywood cults, when a handsome guy with a three-foot-long beard and a set of white robes could invite you into his bungalow to change the world. While people mostly think of cult members as townies with nothing going on in their lives, there were a few cults in Hollywood that landed a big fish or two.

Los Angeles offers the promise of endless summer, and the possibility of making all your dreams come true, but it’s also filled with the harsh realities of what happens when your dreams wither and die. That atmosphere breeds desperation. People look for some way to give life meaning. Enter cults. Celebrities in cults doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it's incredibly strange. While there are a few starlets in cults you’re going to read about, most of the celebrities who were sucked into the cult world were men, which makes you think about how much more impressionable male celebs are than their female counterparts.

Practitioners of psychic surgery are some of the worst hucksters on the planet. Psychic surgery is a holistic medical practice by which a "doctor" lays hands on a patient and, through a mix of theatrical movement, fake blood, animal organs, and other props, the patient is convinced they've been healed with the power of the mind. This kind of mumbo jumbo only provides a placebo effect. In 1975, the Federal Trade Commission warned patients traveling to the Philippines for "operations" that psychic surgery is a hoax. 

None of that stopped Andy Kaufman from pursuing psychic surgery as his last bet for wellness after he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of lung cancer in 1983. When an all natural diet and palliative radiotherapy couldn't stop the cancer from reaching his brain, Kauffman traveled to the Philippines for psychic surgery with Jun Labo. Labo appeared to remove something from the comedian's chest, but to no avail. Kaufman died from renal failure as consequence of a metastatic lung cancer on May 16, 1984.

Labo isn't technically a cult leader, but he has a very strong cult of personality, and a cult-like following of people who truly believing in his healing powers. Man call his practices into question - he's been called a fake healer and, in 1998, faced criminal charges in Russia. 

Everyone can agree Charles Manson is crazy. But he understood he needed celebrities by his side to gain clout in Los Angeles. Throughout his relatively short run of cult leading and songwriting in the late '60s, Manson used the women in his Family as sexual bargaining chips to get what wanted, whether it be a place to stay or a record contract.

This is where Dennis Wilson enters the picture. The Beach Boys drummer met Manson when he picked up Patricia Krenwinkel and Ella Jo Bailey, who were hitchhiking through Malibu, and dropped them off at his place before going to a recording session. When he returned home, Manson was hanging out in front of Wilson's house, which was populated with a bunch of groovy Manson Family babes. This was fine with Dennis Wilson. 

In a 1968 article titled "Dennis Wilson: I Live With 17 Girls” the drummer talked about hanging out with Manson and his harem of swinging hippy women. His words are  equal parts cliché and horrifying: 

"I told [the girls] about our involvement with the Maharishi and they told me they too had a guru, a guy named Charlie who’d recently come out of jail after 12 years. He drifted into crime, but when I met him I found he had great musical ideas. We’re writing together now. He’s dumb, in some ways, but I accept his approach and have learnt from him."

After hearing Manson's songs Wilson introduced him to Terry Melcher, record producer and son of Doris Day, who Manson hated with a passion. Shortly after a failed recording session, Melcher's home was the scene of the tragic Tate murders - Manson instructed his followers to go to Melcher's house and kill everyone there, not realizing Melcher had recently leased the house to Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski. 

The Self-Realization Fellowship is one of those vaguely named churches that could be literally anything. Essentially, the SRF wants to "foster a spirit of greater understanding and goodwill among the diverse people and nations of the global family," which is cult speak for "make good vibes." The organization was founded by swami Paramahansa Yogananda, who arrived in Los Angeles from India in 1925 intent on introducing yoga to America. He believed a balanced spirit and total calm could come through meditation. 

While on a quest for higher spirituality, Elvis Presely was a devotee of Yogananda and became friends with the longtime “mother” of the movement, Sri Daya Mata. One of the SRF's favorite stories involves Elvis showing up at the door of one of its compounds, shaking his hips, and telling one of their monks, "Man, you made the right choice. People don't know my life or that I sometimes cry myself to sleep because I don't know God."

Which doesn't seem like a very Elvis thing to say, but maybe he was feeling particularly eloquent that day. Supposedly, when Elvis asked, "Why did God make me Elvis Presley?" Sri Daya Mata handed him some ancient manuscripts and said he might find the answer to his question within them. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like he did.

Hare Krishna (International Society for Krishna Consciousness, if you're nasty) isn't the worst cult to grace the earth. Outside the odd gaggle of Krishnas with tambourines harassing people at train stations, they're mostly fine. All they want to do is "educate all people in the techniques of spiritual life in order to check the imbalance of values in life and to achieve real unity and peace in the world," which seems pretty easy. Of course, they've been criticized for preying on minors, specifically runaways, brainwashing them into staying with the group, rather than helping them. So there's that.  

After The Beatles broke up, each went his separate way - John to America, Paul writing terrible Christmas songs, Ringo doing whatever it is Ringo does, and George to the Krishnas in search of inner peace. In a 1982 interview, Harrison was all about people the world over getting into Krishna consciousness. He went so far as to call those who weren't into the whole robe-and-tambourine thing spiritually bankrupt.

"The intellectuals will always have problems, because they always need to 'know.' They’re often the most spiritually bankrupt people, because they never let go; they don’t understand the meaning of 'to transcend' the intellect. But an ordinary person’s more willing to say, 'Okay. Let me try it and see if it works.' Chanting Hare Krishna can make a person a better Christian, too."

When Harrison passed away in the early 2000s, it was revealed hadn't left the Krishnas  any money in his will. Many members of the church assumed he would, since he donated a large property in north London to the organization. Hell, some thought he would give them as much as $30m. It's unclear why Harrison left the Hare Krishna trust out of his will. 

Moral Re-Armament (MRA) is a little-known, non-denominational cult with Protestant roots open to anyone who accepts its four tenets: absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love. That sounds nice, but when you're twisting someone's arm until they love someone absolutely and unconditionally, they aren't actually loving absolutely. MRA (which changed its name to Initiatives of Change in 2001) is even rumored to have links to the Nazi party.

Glenn Close spent 15 years in MRA and managed to escape while in college. At the age of seven, she and her family were taken to MRA headquarters in Switzerland, where she was indoctrinated. She told The Hollywood Reporter:

"You basically weren't allowed to do anything, or you were made to feel guilty about any unnatural desire. If you talk to anybody who was in a group that basically dictates how you're supposed to live and what you're supposed to say and how you're supposed to feel, from the time you're seven till the time you're 22, it has a profound impact on you. It's something you have to [consciously overcome] because all of your trigger points are [wrong]."

When Close was asked how she escaped the cult, she simply said it wasn't something she could explain in an interview. 

The Church of Satan isn't your standard cult - it doesn't send people out to sea or make them sign billion year contracts. But there's a dark aura surrounding it, and in the '60s, the organization was lumped in with crazy-people cults of the day. Anton LaVey started the church to cast off the shackles of mainstream society (sounds cult-like), which provided him with a way to meet groovy goth chicks while playing his calliope in a cape. People who joined the Church of Satan didn't want to perform spells like a bunch of nerds, they wanted to party. This attracted celebrities, which attracted the media, which served to make Church of Satan a very popular and wealthy religious organization. 

That LaVey was a media darling made him a magnet for people who were desperate to get into the entertainment business, which is where Jayne Mansfield enters the frame. When the Church of Satan was in the eye of a media hurricane, Mansfield's career was in decline; she was looking for a way to get back in the public eye. Hanging out with LaVey seemed like a perfect solution. If it meant kneeling at a weird alter drinking fake blood, so be it.

Supposedly, in 1967, Mansfield hung her certificate of church membership in her bedroom. In the same year, she died in a car accident while in Biloxi, MI.

Of the cults covered here, The Children of God (or Family International, Family of Love, etc) is perhaps the most terrifying. It began in 1968 as a modernization of the Christian faith, but quickly morphed into an international cult in which followers were encouraged to have sex not only with strangers, to bring them into the church, but with their own children, as a way to show God's love. As of 2017, the cult exists under the name The Family International, and operates under the leadership of Karen Zerby, an original Children of God member. 

A lot of celebrities grew up in the cult: Christopher Owens from the band Girls, actress and director Rose McGowan (whose father headed the Italian branch), and Joaquin and River Phoenix. Born in 1974, Joaquin Phoenix is a year older than Karen Zerby's son, Ricky Rodriguez, who murdered his long-time handler over childhood sexual abuse, then committed suicide.

Phoenix finds it annoying everyone wants to talk about CoG. In a 2014 interview with Playboy, he said

"When people bring up Children of God, there's always something vaguely accusatory about it. It's guilt by association. I think it was really innocent on my parents' part. They really believed, but I don’t think most people see it that way. I've always thought that was strange and unfair."

Phoenix's parents left the cult when their sons were adolescents. Whether they were tired of living in a dirty hippy commune or were aware of the child abuse happening within the church, is unknown. 

From 1969 to 1974, Father Yod and his Source Family owned and operated The Source restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, an all-natural vegetarian joint rooted in the "dietary wisdom found in the teachings of Jesus Christ as revealed through the Essene Gospels of Peace." When they weren't serving alfalfa sprouts and mashed yeast, the Source Family taught classes on their chill vibes and utopian community, which was run by a man who wore crisp white suits and drove around town in a Rolls Royce. 

Father Yod had 14 wives, was allegedly a former Marine, stuntman, and jiu-jitsu master, and fronted the cult's improvisational psychedelic band Ya Ho Wa13. He also killed at least two people, one in a justifiable homicide, the other in a manslaughter. After the cult left LA and moved to Hawaii in 1974, Father Yod died crashing a glider into the beach. 

In the heyday of The Source, John Lennon was hanging out in LA with guys like Warren Zevon and Alice Cooper and dining regularly at the restaurant alongside Marlon Brando and Warren Beatty. The degree to which Lennon was or wasn't involved with The Source Family and Father Yod remains unclear, but it's known for certain he frequented the restaurant, and most likely saw Ya Ho Wa 13 live, as they played there regularly. 

If you look at the life of Charles Manson starting around when he left prison in 1967 and hitched his way across California, it's obvious he was making things up as he went along. He spent most his life up to that point trying to survive by criminal means, while hopping in and out of prison. By the time he assembled his family of strung-out hippies in Los Angeles, Manson decided what he really needed was a record contract.

Rather that pursue a career as a musician via the traditional route of writing songs and playing shows, he strong-armed famous friends into listening to his tunes and hooking him up with infamously disastrous recording sessions ("When the session day arrived, Charlie failed to impress the talent agent as a musician, but did manage to catch his eye... for new film about a modern Jesus Christ that Universal was considering."). 

Neil Young didn't care about all that. When he met Manson, Young was going solo from Buffalo Springfield and likely saw a compatriot in him. Both were weird, scruffy guys with an affinity for rambling acoustic jams. Young even tried to get Manson a deal: 

"I asked him if he had a recording contract. He told me he didn’t yet, but he wanted to make records. I told Mo Ostin at Reprise about him, and recommended that Reprise check him out... Shortly afterward, the Sharon Tate-La Bianca murders happened, and Charlie Manson’s name was known around the world."

Young reiterates the notion that Manson had no real master plan in his assessment of the cult leader's music: "His songs were off-the-cuff things he made up as he went along, and they were never the same twice in a row."

Parts of Christian Science are interesting. For instance, practitioners believe the material world is an illusion, and reality lies in spirituality. However, they also believe sickness and injury are not physical afflictions, and prayer is the only solution; medical treatment is an affront to God. That's where Christian Science loses all of its cool cred. Sometimes you just have to take some medicine, you know? 

Val Kilmer is noted to be a strange duck, but he's an actor, so he's allowed a degree of eccentricity. However, the whole praying-the-pain-away thing is a bit much to swallow, especially when the person doing the praying starred in Real Genius. His involvement in Christian Science has been met with skepticism by fans and those who know Kilmer personally, especially in 2015, when TMZ alleged he denied treatment for a tumor until it was almost too late.

In 2016, Michael Douglas said Val Kilmer was suffering from throat cancer (a disease Douglas himself had). Kilmer denied this, saying "I love Michael Douglas but he is misinformed." According to Kilmer, he was in fact suffering from a swollen tongue. He went on to explain: 

"Some fans have mistakenly thought my silence about my personal issues meant that somehow I wasn't being responsible to my health, because of my reliance on prayer and Love. Nothing could be further from the truth... Being healthy and having the respect of my peers and love from my family, friends, peers and fans is a DAILY source of inspiration, for which I am so grateful."