WHERE'S MADALYN?

(3 of 9)
That is exactly what she did, even as she slipped from public view. Madalyn Murray O'Hair's organizational and financial heyday occurred in the mid-'80s. Having worn out her welcome with authorities in Maryland, where she filed her original suit, and then Hawaii, she arrived in Austin in 1965 and established the Society of Separationists, later adding Atheist Centre in America and several satellite groups. By the late '80s, there were eight. Each had a five- or six-person board, and each board was dominated by Madalyn, Jon and Robin (she was Bill's daughter, but he had given her up to his mother years before his Christian conversion).

Despite Madalyn's claims that American Atheists had 50,000 members, it was tiny (it currently numbers 2,400). Lawyers for other church-and-state separatists say its lawsuits fell primarily into the nuisance category and few prevailed. Yet her acerbic, sometimes erudite weekly radio show ran on 150 stations. The group was still the only national atheist organization in America, with more than 30 state chapters. It threw national conventions, which, although "outrageously expensive," according to Kerns, were "Madalyn's moment to shine."

Madalyn, who had known poverty in her younger years, began to enjoy the pleasures that money can buy. American Atheists did a healthy business selling Godless books, posters, bumper stickers (HONK IF YOU LOVE MADALYN; APES EVOLVED FROM CREATIONISTS) and "solstice cards" for the areligious at holiday times. Perhaps more important, Madalyn, like many of her clerical foes, became adept at persuading elderly members to leave American Atheists their last bequests. In 1986, when she moved the organization into its current red brick headquarters, she claimed to have paid in cash the full cost of $1 million-plus. Jon Murray, her second son and by then her titular successor, told Wright, who later profiled her in his book Saints and Sinners, "We're accustomed to good food...All of us have nice clothes. My suits cost a minimum of five, six hundred dollars...We have a nice house in Northwest Hills, nice automobiles...We've been around the world three times."

As Jon was boasting, however, Madalyn's darker traits--and his own--were taking an increasing toll. They did not restrict their belligerence to the political sphere. "The Murray-O'Hairs," says a movement observer, "were factories of rancor." Almost from its inception, American Atheists spawned splinter groups, usually led by people Madalyn had wooed, employed and finally alienated, often viciously and profanely. "She went through people like popcorn," says Anne Gaylor, who in 1978 became head of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, based in Madison, Wisconsin. "People realized, 'We can do this on our own,'" says Kerns. Madalyn, without irony, told offenders they had been "excommunicated."