Captain Billy's Whiz Bang, October 1921 · page 13 of 68
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang #25 — page 13: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This column mocks a real Hollywood religious movement, likely referencing Madam Edith Maida Lessing's actual "Temple" community in the 1920s that promoted free love and rejected conventional institutions. The satire ridicules the movement's radical teachings: rejecting civil marriage, property ownership, and organized religion in favor of "divine marriage" (commitment before God alone, dissolvable at will). The author uses period slang ("the berries," "biscuits," "hot dog") and absurdist imagery—scantily-clad elves, spirit dances, red flags of love—to mock the movement as frivolous and dangerous nonsense. The piece suggests that this philosophy so seduced Hollywood women ("bungalow sweeties") that respectable families feared losing their daughters to the cult. The humor targets both the movement's idealism and Hollywood's susceptibility to fashionable fads, portraying the entire episode as ridiculous theatrical performance rather than genuine spirituality.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Captain Billy's Whiz Bang 11 Our Movie Gossip TRUST Hollywood to have the latest in fads, but as in lots of cases, they are short lived. A few months ago Madam Edith Maida Lessing built her temple in Glass-well Park, high above Hollywood, and said, “Here will I commune with the eternal, here will I show the bungalow sweeties that I am no piker.” So she gathered her subjects about her and taught them that civil marriage is the bunk, ownership of land is terrible, churches, penitentiaries are awful, divine marriage is the berries, barter and exchange are the biscuits, free trade and religious transformation is the hot dog. So divine marriage prevailed, it consisted of taking a person as your mate in the sight of God and when tired of them give them the gate, and daily and nightly they gamboled lightly on the lee, little elfins scantily clad could be seen flitting hither and thither in the moonlight and they held earthly communi-cation in the doorways; in the early mornings could be seen the spirit dance around the red flag of love, and many a bungalow sweetie could be seen looking longingly toward Glass-well Park. It got so bad that the dearies thought they were going to lose their sweet