Jayne Mansfield, Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan: Hollywood's Devil Stars (Part 1)
In 1966, a former carnival organist with a shaved head and a black cape announced in San Francisco that he had founded a church dedicated to Satan. Within months, Anton LaVey had something no religious upstart could buy: a Hollywood sex symbol posing beside him at his altar. That star was Jayne Mansfield, and her name still opens every conversation about Hollywood and the devil.
This is the first of three parts on stars who were linked, by fact or by rumor, to satanic and occult groups. Part 1 stays in America. Parts 2 and 3 cross to Britain and France. To keep things honest, every name below falls into one of three categories: documented involvement, LaVey's self-promotion, or pure rumor.
Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan: Why Hollywood Came Calling
LaVey founded the Church of Satan on Walpurgis Night, April 30, 1966, at his black-painted Victorian house on California Street in San Francisco. Born Howard Stanton Levey in Chicago in 1930, he had already reinvented himself several times before that night. He told interviewers he had worked as a lion tamer, a carnival hand, a police photographer and a nightclub organist. Some of these jobs are documented, others exist only in his own telling, and that blur between biography and performance would define everything that followed.
Before the church, LaVey ran Friday-night lectures on the occult, vampires, cannibalism and the black arts for a small circle of San Francisco bohemians. The group became known as his "Magic Circle," and it included writers, artists and filmmakers who were curious about the darker side of the counterculture. When he shaved his head and declared 1966 "Year One," he was turning a salon into an institution.
His Satan was less a horned god than a symbol. LaVey preached pride, appetite, vengeance and individualism, and he dismissed both Christianity and the hippie ideal of universal love as hypocritical. He set this out in The Satanic Bible (1969), which became one of the best-selling occult books of the century and is still in print. Its "Nine Satanic Statements" read less like scripture than like a manifesto for indulgence.
A Church Built for Cameras
From the beginning, LaVey's rituals were part theology and part theater. He staged the first publicized satanic wedding in early 1967, with a naked woman serving as the altar, and press photographers were invited. Months later, he held a satanic baptism for his young daughter Zeena, and the pictures traveled around the world. Newspapers called him "the Black Pope," and he happily accepted the title.
That theatrical streak was exactly what made him useful to the press, and what made the press useful to him. A celebrity at the Black House guaranteed a headline, and LaVey understood publicity as well as any studio flack. He courted actors, singers and nightclub performers, and he understood that a single photograph of a famous face at his altar was worth more than a thousand pamphlets.
LaVey and the Movies
LaVey also wanted to be part of the film world himself. He later claimed to have advised on Rosemary's Baby (1968) and even to have played the devil in its rape scene, though there is no credible evidence for either claim. He did receive credit as a technical adviser on The Devil's Rain (1975), a satanic-cult horror film starring Ernest Borgnine, William Shatner and Ida Lupino, with a young John Travolta in a small role, and he appears briefly on screen. He also features in Kenneth Anger's Invocation of My Demon Brother, discussed below.
He also had a gift for telling stories about the famous women he claimed to have known. Some of those stories were true. Many were not. Separating the two is the whole point of this article, and it starts with the most famous of them all.
Jayne Mansfield and Anton LaVey: Devotion or Publicity?
Category: documented involvement
Jayne Mansfield's link to LaVey is not a rumor. To understand why she was drawn to him, it helps to remember how far and how fast her career had fallen. Born Vera Jayne Palmer in 1933, she became a star in the mid-1950s, first on Broadway in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and then in Hollywood, where Fox promoted her as its answer to Marilyn Monroe. The Girl Can't Help It (1956) and the film version of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) made her one of the most photographed women in the world.
By the early 1960s, however, the studio had lost interest. She took roles in low-budget European productions and became one of the first major American actresses to appear nude in a mainstream release with Promises! Promises! (1963). By 1966 she was living largely on nightclub tours, personal appearances and tabloid coverage, all while running her famous heart-shaped-pool mansion on Sunset Boulevard, the Pink Palace. She needed attention, and few men in America generated attention like Anton LaVey.
Meeting the Black Pope
Mansfield met LaVey in 1966, reportedly while she was in San Francisco for a public appearance. She visited the Black House and was soon photographed with him in ritual settings, surrounded by candles, skulls and the trappings of his ceremonies. LaVey presented her with a medallion and an honorary title within the church, and she reportedly kept a shrine to him at the Pink Palace. She spoke about him in interviews in a way that was half flirtation and half provocation, which suited both of them perfectly.
How deep her belief went is another matter. Biographers disagree. Some see a genuine fascination from a woman who collected experiences as eagerly as publicity and who was raised in a world where image and identity were interchangeable. Others see two showmen using each other, with Mansfield gaining shock value at a time when shock was the only currency she had left, and LaVey gaining the most famous convert he would ever have. The truth is probably somewhere in between, and Mansfield herself may not have drawn a clear line between the two.
The "Curse" on Sam Brody
The story turned dark because of Sam Brody, Mansfield's lawyer and lover, who openly mocked LaVey and resented his influence over her. According to the legend LaVey himself encouraged, Brody was warned, or cursed, that he would die within a year. Brody did suffer a car accident in the months that followed, and the story began to circulate in Mansfield's circle.
Then, in the early hours of June 29, 1967, the car carrying Mansfield, Brody and their driver slammed into the back of a truck on a highway outside New Orleans. All three adults in the front were killed instantly. Mansfield's three children asleep in the back seat survived with minor injuries; one of them was the future actress Mariska Hargitay. The crash led to stronger rules for underride guards on American trucks, which are still sometimes called "Mansfield bars."
LaVey later claimed he had accidentally cut a photograph of Mansfield across the neck shortly before the crash, and he let the press connect the dots. A persistent myth also says she was decapitated, which is false. There is no evidence of anything beyond tragedy, a dark highway and a speeding car, but the "Jayne Mansfield curse" has outlived both of them. It remains the best-known story linking Hollywood to the Church of Satan, and it is the reason searches for "Jayne Mansfield Anton LaVey" still run in the thousands every month.
Sammy Davis Jr. and the Church of Satan
Category: documented involvement
The second famous American case is the least expected. Sammy Davis Jr. was one of the most versatile entertainers of the twentieth century: singer, dancer, impressionist, Broadway star and member of Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack. He had survived a car crash in 1954 that cost him his left eye, and he converted to Judaism a few years later, a decision that made headlines of its own. His life was already a long search for belonging, in an industry that celebrated him on stage and excluded him off it.
From Hollywood Party to Satanic Ritual
Davis became involved with the Church of Satan in the late 1960s. By his own later account, he was introduced to satanists at a Hollywood party, was intrigued by what he saw as their freedom and lack of hypocrisy, and began attending rituals. He was given an honorary status in the church, and photographs from the period show him wearing a medallion bearing satanic imagery. He was, in other words, not a rumor but a genuine, if temporary, participant.
His autobiographical writing describes the experience with a mixture of curiosity and embarrassment. He presented it as one of many spiritual experiments in a life that also included Judaism, show business excess and a lifelong friendship with some of the most powerful people in America. He walked away from the church after a relatively short time and later spoke of it as a phase rather than a faith.
Poor Devil: Sammy on Screen
Fittingly, Davis also played with the devil on screen. In the 1973 television film Poor Devil, he starred as a bumbling apprentice of hell trying to win a soul, with Christopher Lee as Lucifer. The film was meant to launch a series that never happened, but it remains a curious footnote: one of the few genuine celebrity members of the Church of Satan, playing a comic demon opposite the actor who had just made The Wicker Man.
Even so, his membership is what people remember. Searches for "Sammy Davis Jr. satanism" and "Sammy Davis Jr. Church of Satan" spike every year, often after the story goes viral on social media, and they peaked at several thousand a month last December. For many readers it is the single most surprising fact in this entire story.
Kenneth Anger, Marjorie Cameron and Hollywood's Occult Underground
Category: documented involvement (Thelema rather than Satanism)
For a film critic, this is the most rewarding corner of the story, because here the occult did not just touch the movies. It shaped them. While LaVey was courting the press, a smaller and stranger network of artists in Los Angeles had been practicing ceremonial magic for years. Their religion was Thelema, the system created by the British occultist Aleister Crowley, whose motto was "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." Thelema is not Satanism, and its followers resent the confusion, but newspapers rarely bothered with the distinction.
Kenneth Anger: The Magus of Underground Cinema
Kenneth Anger, born in 1927 in Santa Monica, claimed to have appeared as a child in the 1935 A Midsummer Night's Dream. He made his first major film, Fireworks, in 1947, when he was still a teenager, a homoerotic dream that got him tried for obscenity and admired by Jean Cocteau. Later came Scorpio Rising (1963), his biker film set to pop songs, which influenced everyone from Martin Scorsese to the music video, and the scandal book Hollywood Babylon, first published in France in 1959.
Anger was a lifelong follower of Crowley. He visited the ruins of Crowley's Abbey of Thelema in Sicily and filmed there, and he described his films as magical workings rather than entertainment. He was also a friend of LaVey. In Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), LaVey appears in a ritual sequence, and the droning soundtrack was composed by Mick Jagger on a Moog synthesizer. The film is eleven minutes of fire, flags, smoke and rock-star faces, and it captures the moment when the counterculture flirted openly with the occult.
Lucifer Rising: The Cursed Production
Anger's Lucifer Rising took more than a decade to complete and became a legend in itself. Bobby Beausoleil, an early collaborator, was later convicted for a murder connected to the Manson Family and recorded the final score from prison. Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, a Crowley devotee himself, had earlier been hired to write music before falling out with Anger. Marianne Faithfull appears as Lilith. The finished film, released around 1980, is a Crowleyan ceremony on celluloid, full of Egyptian gods and volcanic landscapes.
Anger never belonged to the Church of Satan, and he would have rejected the label. He died in 2023, still insisting that cinema was a form of magic. His films are where many viewers first saw occult ritual presented as art rather than horror, and that alone earns him a central place in this story.
Marjorie Cameron: The Real Witch on Screen
Marjorie Cameron, known simply as Cameron, was a painter, poet and occasional actress. Born in Iowa in 1922, she served in the Navy during the Second World War before moving to California. There she met Jack Parsons, a brilliant rocket scientist and co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who also led a Thelemic lodge in Pasadena. Parsons had just performed a series of rituals, with the future founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, intended to summon an elemental woman. When Cameron appeared at his door, he believed his invocation had worked.
They married, and after Parsons died in an explosion at his home laboratory in 1952, Cameron remained a committed Thelemite for the rest of her life. Her paintings and drawings, full of goddesses, demons and visionary creatures, were long dismissed as occult curiosities. A major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2014 finally brought her the recognition she had never sought.
On screen, she is unforgettable. In Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), she plays the Scarlet Woman, a figure from Crowley's mythology, staring out from the screen with an intensity no professional actress could fake. In Curtis Harrington's Night Tide (1961), she plays the silent woman in black who shadows a young Dennis Hopper and his mysterious girlfriend. Few actresses have played a sorceress while actually practicing ceremonial magic. Cameron did both, which makes her the most authentic name on this list, and the one most overdue for rediscovery.
LaVey's Celebrity Claims: Marilyn Monroe and Kim Novak
Category: LaVey's self-promotion
If Mansfield and Davis show that LaVey really did attract celebrities, Marilyn Monroe and Kim Novak show the other side of his talent: inventing them. Both stories come almost entirely from LaVey himself, and both collapsed under scrutiny.
The Marilyn Monroe Story
LaVey liked to say that, as a young organist, he had an affair with Marilyn Monroe in 1948, when she was supposedly working as a dancer at a Los Angeles burlesque theater where he played. In his version, she was an unknown stripper and he was the musician who recognized her potential. The story appeared in his authorized biography and was repeated in countless articles.
Researchers have largely dismissed it. By 1948 Monroe was under contract to a major studio and appearing in films such as Ladies of the Chorus, and her documented movements that year do not fit his account. The theater's history does not support it either, and no one else ever corroborated the affair. Later investigations into LaVey's life found that much of his early biography, including his circus career, was embellished or invented.
The Kim Novak Story
LaVey told a similar story about Kim Novak, the star of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), who was famously linked to San Francisco through that film. He claimed a romance with her in the 1950s. Novak has never confirmed it, and no evidence has ever surfaced. Like the Monroe tale, it rests entirely on his word.
Why These Stories Mattered
These tales matter not because they are true but because they show how LaVey built his legend. Attaching his name to the most desirable women in Hollywood made the Church of Satan sound glamorous and dangerous at the same time. It suggested that Satanism was not a fringe belief for outcasts but something that stars secretly embraced. The press was happy to repeat the claims, because "Marilyn Monroe" and "Satan" in the same headline sold newspapers.
For the modern reader, the lesson is to treat every celebrity connection that comes from LaVey alone with caution. The real cases, like Mansfield and Davis, are backed by photographs, witnesses and the celebrities' own words. The invented ones are backed only by the man who profited from them.
Marilyn Manson and the Church of Satan
Category: documented involvement
A generation later, LaVey extended the same honor to a rock star. In the 1990s, he ordained Brian Warner, better known as Marilyn Manson, as a "reverend" in the Church of Satan. Both men acknowledged it publicly, and Manson spoke admiringly of LaVey in interviews and in his memoir The Long Hard Road Out of Hell.
For Manson, whose stage name fused Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson, the title was part provocation and part tribute to a writer whose ideas about individualism and hypocrisy he admired. It arrived just as his album Antichrist Superstar (1996) turned him into the most protested musician in America, blamed by religious groups for corrupting teenagers and later, wrongly, for the Columbine massacre.
The connection also closed a strange circle. Manson's stage name honored Marilyn Monroe, the star LaVey falsely claimed to have known, and Charles Manson, whose crimes generated the satanic rumors that still surround Sharon Tate. LaVey died in October 1997, and Manson's ordination became one of the last great publicity coups of his life. Search interest in the connection today is small but steady, a reminder that the Church of Satan's link to celebrity did not end in the 1960s.
The Process Church, Manson and the Sharon Tate Myths
Category: pure rumor
No Hollywood tragedy attracted more satanic gossip than the murder of Sharon Tate and four others by followers of Charles Manson in August 1969. Tate was 26, eight and a half months pregnant, and on the verge of stardom after Valley of the Dolls (1967) earned her a Golden Globe nomination. The brutality of the crime and the strangeness of the Manson Family left the public searching for explanations, and the occult offered an easy one.
Eye of the Devil and Rosemary's Baby
The rumors drew on coincidence. Tate had played a member of a pagan cult in Eye of the Devil (1966), a British thriller with David Niven and Deborah Kerr in which she uses witchcraft and appears in ritual scenes. Her husband, Roman Polanski, had just made Rosemary's Baby (1968), a film about a Manhattan coven that delivers the Antichrist. The connection between the two films and the murder seemed, to some, too neat to be accidental.
The so-called Rosemary's Baby curse grew from there. Its composer, Krzysztof Komeda, died in 1969 after a head injury. Producer William Castle suffered serious health problems after the film's release. John Lennon was later murdered outside the Dakota, the building where the film was shot. None of this has any connection, but together the stories created the legend of a cursed film and a cursed family.
The Process Church of the Final Judgment
Writers in the early 1970s tried to tie Manson to the Process Church of the Final Judgment. The group had been founded in London in the early 1960s by Robert de Grimston and Mary Ann MacLean, and it taught that Christ, Lucifer and Satan would be reconciled at the end of the world. Its members wore black capes and silver crosses, ran coffee houses and recruited in American cities, and their dramatic look made them easy targets.
Ed Sanders' book The Family (1971) suggested links between the Process and Manson. The Process denied any connection and took legal action, and passages were reportedly removed from some later editions. No credible evidence has ever shown that the Process influenced Manson. In one of history's stranger twists, former members of the group later founded Best Friends Animal Society, today one of America's largest animal-rescue organizations.
Dennis Wilson and the Verdict on Sharon Tate
Beach Boy Dennis Wilson did host Manson and his followers at his home in 1968, and Manson even had a song reworked and recorded by the band. That was hospitality gone wrong, not cult membership, and Wilson later distanced himself in fear.
The verdict is simple: there is no evidence that Sharon Tate had any involvement with satanic or occult groups. She was a victim, and the myths say more about the fears of the era than about her. Searches for "Sharon Tate satanism" are almost nonexistent today, which suggests that, slowly, the record is being set straight.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was Jayne Mansfield a Satanist?
She was genuinely associated with Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan in 1966 and 1967, received an honorary title and was photographed in ritual settings. Whether she truly believed or was drawn by publicity remains debated by her biographers.
Which celebrities were in the Church of Satan?
The best-documented American cases are Jayne Mansfield, Sammy Davis Jr. and Marilyn Manson. Kenneth Anger was close to LaVey but followed Thelema rather than the Church of Satan.
Did Anton LaVey curse Jayne Mansfield?
LaVey encouraged the legend that he cursed her lover Sam Brody before their fatal 1967 crash. There is no evidence that the accident was anything other than a road tragedy.
Was Sammy Davis Jr. really in the Church of Satan?
Yes. He attended rituals in the late 1960s and held an honorary status in the church, before leaving after a relatively short time and describing it as a passing phase.
Did Anton LaVey have an affair with Marilyn Monroe?
Almost certainly not. The claim comes only from LaVey, and Monroe's documented career in 1948 contradicts his account.
Was Sharon Tate involved in a satanic cult?
No. The rumors grew from her role in Eye of the Devil, her husband's film Rosemary's Baby and the Manson murders, but there is no evidence she had any occult involvement.
Who are the most famous satanists in Hollywood history?
Anton LaVey himself is the central figure, followed by the celebrities he attracted, especially Jayne Mansfield and Sammy Davis Jr. Many other famous names were linked only by rumor or by LaVey's own unverified claims.
Coming next: Part 2 crosses the Atlantic to Britain, from Aleister Crowley's long shadow to Jimmy Page, Genesis P-Orridge and Christopher Lee.
