Marjoe Gortner

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Hugh Marjoe Ross Gortner, generally known as Marjoe Gortner (born January 14, 1944 (1944-01-14) (age 66) in Long Beach, California), is a former revivalist who first gained a certain fame in the late 1940s and early to mid 1950s when he became the youngest ordained preacher at the age of four, and then outright notoriety in the 1970s when he starred in an Oscar-winning, behind-the-scenes documentary about the lucrative business of Pentecostal preaching. The name "Marjoe" is a portmanteau of the names "Mary" and "Joseph".

When Gortner was three, his father Vernon Gortner, a third generation minister, noticed his son's talent for mimicry and overall fearlessness of strangers and public settings. His parents claimed he had received a vision from God during a bath but was later confirmed by Marjoe that this was a lie his parents forced him to repeat. They enforced this by moc-drowning him since they would not beat him due to his public appearances and scars being left over. They began training him to deliver sermons, complete with dramatic gestures and emphatic lunges. By the time he was four, his parents arranged for him to perform a marriage ceremony for a film crew from Paramount studios, referring to him as "the youngest ordained minister in history." Like much in Gortner's early life it is hard to say for sure who exactly ordained him, if his father ordained him, or if he was even ordained at all.

Until the time he was a teenager, Gortner and his parents traveled the United States, holding revival meetings. As well as teaching him scriptural passages, his parents also taught him several money-making tactics, involving the sale of supposedly "holy" articles at revivals which promised to heal the sick and dying. By the time he was sixteen, he later estimated, his family had amassed maybe three million dollars. Shortly after Gortner's sixteenth birthday, his father absconded with the money, and a disillusioned Marjoe Gortner left his mother for San Francisco, where he was taken in by and became the lover of an older woman. He spent the remainder of his teenage years as an itinerant hippie until his early twenties, when, hard pressed for money, he decided to put his old skills to work and re-emerged on the circuit with a charismatic stage-show modeled after those of contemporary rockers, most notably Mick Jagger. He made enough to take six months off every year, during which he returned to California, surviving on the previous six months' earnings.

In the late 1960s, Gortner suffered a crisis of conscience — in particular about the threats of damnation he felt compelled to weave into his sermons — and resolved to make one final tour, this time on film. Under the pretense of making a documentary detailing a viable ministry, he assembled a documentary film crew to follow him around revival meetings in California, Texas, and Michigan during 1971. Unbeknownst to everyone else involved — including, at one point, his father — he gave "backstage" interviews to the filmmakers in between sermons and revivals, explaining intimate details of how he and other ministers operated. After sermons, the filmmakers were invited back to his hotel room to tape him counting the money he collected during the day. The resulting film, Marjoe, won the 1972 Academy Award for best documentary.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjoe_Gortner