Excavating the Truth of Anton LaVey’s Devilish Life

You’d never know it these days, but for decades, 6114 California Street was one of the most infamous addresses in all of San Francisco. As the longtime headquarters of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, the house — painted completely black — hosted a rotating menagerie of colorful guests (including, at one point, a lion) visiting the sanctuary devoted to Satan.

In his revelatory new biography of LaVey, author Doug Brod attempts to parse fact from fiction, detailing how a Jewish boy from Chicago left an indelible dark mark on popular culture — and found himself labeled as a face of evil to many Americans.

Relying on more than 50 interviews as well as church documents and personal correspondence, Born With a Tail: The Devilish Life and Wicked Times of Anton Szandor LaVey (Hachette; $31) shows that while many of LaVey’s most outlandish claims were clearly lies, his brilliance at combining philosophy and outrage put him on equal standing with history’s great charlatans.

One part pope, nine parts P. T. Barnum, LaVey nonetheless cultivated a devoted following whose exploits regularly made headlines and late-night television appearances. But the occult trappings of LaVey’s organization belied its true intent; no one was literally worshiping Satan.

“The church’s idea was more like a self-empowerment group,” Brod says. “LaVey wanted people to indulge in their carnal desires. It was basically a hedonistic philosophy — some might say it was a greedy and selfish philosophy — but it was about always putting the individual first.”

In his 368-page biography, Brod recounts the Church of Satan’s colorful history from its inception at the Black House in 1966, and the Satanic marriage ceremonies and baptisms the group publicly performed to earn early press, to the devastating backlash LaVey endured as a result of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and his eventual retreat from public life.

Ahead of an appearance on Tuesday, Oct. 8 at 540 Rogues in San Francisco, Brod spoke with KQED by phone to discuss LaVey’s lasting impact, what his research uncovered, and where the Church of Satan stands today.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Getting to the bottom of Anton LaVey’s life seems like a challenging task. Where did you start? Were the fact-checks previously published by journalist Lawrence Wright and LaVey’s daughters Zeena helpful?

One thing that was really essential for me was going into the archives of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Examiner, because he was in the papers constantly: on the front page, in columns, and as a news topic. He was also on local TV news programs. Contemporaneous stories are a little more trustworthy, and perhaps more reliable, then people hearing stuff secondhand 30 years later. Yes, that Lawrence Wright piece in Rolling Stone, where he was able to debunk some of LaVey’s more outlandish claims, was essential too. I interviewed Lawrence for the book. The “Legend vs. Reality” piece was co-written by Zeena LaVey [now Zeena Schreck], who became estranged from her father. There was a lot of negativity surrounding that estrangement, and this piece was one of the main sources of it. There was also a very interesting book written by one of his right-hand men, Michael Aquino, who was there pretty much from the start of the Church. He wrote a 500-page account of the Church of Satan that he self-published. There’s a lot of bizarre stuff in there, because Michael Aquino was a true occult believer, while the case can be made that Anton LaVey was not.

One thing that struck me about LaVey and the Church of Satan is how large they managed to appear, despite never having more than 300 members around the world at their peak. For how ingrained the Church of Satan is in today’s culture, were you surprised by how few people were involved with the organization?

LaVey just glommed on to a really interesting philosophy and he articulated it very, very well. People basically took from it what they wanted to take from it. Eventually, it got mixed in with the devil-worship brand of Satanism that was prevalent in the media in the ’80s, which led to the Satanic Panic, but he never really wanted that. LaVey’s thing was more of a philosophical approach to life that stressed the power of the individual and the power of people. It was very effective, and he was a very effective communicator. Even down to the way he looked, he is so associated with what we see as Satanism today, with his bald head and the Van Dyke beard and his pirate earring and arched eyebrows. There are questions about how big the organization actually was, and who knows if we’ll ever get the real numbers? I certainly couldn’t get the real numbers.

Anton LaVey died in 1997. It’s now 2024. Do you think people are aware that a lot of what he was doing was for show, or is there still a contingent of folks who believe he was truly evil?

During the writing of the book, everyone I mentioned it to, at least in my circle, found it really interesting but I never heard anything especially negative. My feeling is that people do know who he actually was, and what he was actually about. Even if they don’t see him as a benign figure, they at least see him as someone who wasn’t diabolical. As I write in the book, there are cases to be made that he was indeed a bad guy in many respects, but overall, I think it was only during the time of the Satanic Panic where he was really considered to be this evil, diabolical figure. Over time, I think that’s changed.

But he did also have some garden-variety evil in him, in the form of domestic violence and animal abuse. Now that people have had a chance to reevaluate his spectacles — like choosing to keep a pet lion in his home — do you think we have the distance necessary to properly evaluate LaVey’s life and legacy?

That’s pretty much what I set out to do, but I have to say, I was helped along by an amazing discovery. While I was working on the book, I interviewed a man named Don Frew, who knew LaVey during the Satanic Panic era. He and his wife run a research center in Albany, California. They have thousands of books on the occult, and on esoteric topics like UFOs and Satanism and paganism — all this stuff. Not only did Don know LaVey, he was friends with him and was able to get his hands on boxes upon boxes of original Church of Satan administrative materials, as well as correspondence between LaVey and his friends.

What’s the status of the Church of Satan today?

As I write in the book, it’s no longer a clubhouse that’s centrally located in San Francisco. Now it’s more of an internet-based organization. There’s still a Church of Satan with its headquarters in Poughkeepsie, New York. It’s headed up by a married couple, Peter H. Gilmore and Peggy Nadramia, and there are still many followers. If you go on Facebook, you’ll see there are still people who really follow the LaVeyan form of Satanism, but it’s more dispersed now. It’s not so much an organized system. It’s more people doing their own thing.

I will say this for the Church of Satan itself: their website is really fascinating. It was also a very good resource for some of the research in this book. Their X — formerly Twitter — account is very funny and very droll. They’re constantly on the defense, which is amusing, but yes, it’s still around. There are also other organizations that base themselves on the Church of Satan. There’s the Satanic Temple, which is more like a social justice organization. They do a lot of stuff with the First Amendment. They put up, like, Baphomet statues alongside the Ten Commandments at various state halls. They’re a very active protest organization that’s less about following satanic tenets or satanic rules and more about using the idea of Satan worship to counter the overt Christian nationalism in this country.

In terms of what this book can tell us about the times we live in now, do you see a lot of symmetry between the world LaVey lived in and the present moment?

Absolutely. People are always looking for organizations where like-minded people share their ideas and philosophies. The thing that depresses me about what’s going on today is that it feels like an amped-up version of the Satanic Panic, which happened in the ’80s and really made LaVey go into retreat, because the Church of Satan was being blamed for a lot of things it had nothing to do with. But now you have QAnon and various other belief systems where everything is conspiracy theories and lies. People are being bombarded with lies, and groups are being scapegoated as a result, which feels a lot like a repeat of the Satanic Panic. That’s something that’s still going on today. It has nothing to do with LaVey, per se, but it has a lot to do with how he was seen in the ’80s.

Tell me about the person you’ll be chatting with on Tuesday here in San Francisco. Do they have ties to the Church of Satan as well?

Jack Boulware will be in conversation with me, and yes! He was someone I interviewed for the book because he knew LaVey. He actually published a fashion shoot with LaVey in a magazine called The Nose many years ago. He was friendly with LaVey for a period, so I’m hoping he’ll share some of his stories at the event too.

Doug Brod appears in conversation with Jack Boulware on Tuesday, Oct. 8, at 540 Rogues (540 Clement St., San Francisco), presented by Green Apple Books. Details here.