Searching for Linda Goodman
One writer’s obsessive hunt for the real life story of reclusive American astrologer Linda Goodman.
Toward the end of her life, Linda Goodman’s favorite movies were Gone with the Wind and Brother Sun, Sister Moon, both of which she regularly screened for her friends in the rambling Cripple Creek, Colorado home she lost to bankruptcy just before her death. A giant stained glass window depicting St. Francis de Assisi cast blues and oranges across the carpeted parlor, where, once a week, this famous American astrologer would mouth “as God is my witness” along with Scarlett O’Hara. Following the films, she’d cart off everyone to the Palace Hotel on Main Street for a three-course dinner that she’d cover with a combination of estate jewelry and the small fortune she amassed from her astrology books’ sales.
Goodman was a beautiful woman. In her earliest public portrait, a black-and-white author’s photograph for Sun Signs (1968), she leans forward, eyelids heavy with makeup, her high-cheekbones defined by shadow. She’s wearing a turtleneck, and her hair does a Nancy Sinatra flip at the shoulders. In a press photo 10 years later, she’s red-headed with depthless peach skin and a raised eyebrow. Then, there’s a point-and-shoot photo from her late Cripple Creek days: She stares directly at the camera wearing a Navajo print T-shirt, her palm planted on a golden bust of Osiris sitting before her on a coffee table.
I remember sitting at my own coffee table one night during the years I lived in Brooklyn, flipping through Love Signs and coming across a reproductive treatise in the appendix called “A Time to Embrace.” The book was weathered from reference and shared shelf space with the English Standard Version Bible andThe Collected Stories of Flannery O’Connor. Finding this little chapter was like finding a hidden track on an old album. In it, Goodman allows that “whether abortion is right or wrong is not the Aquarian issue,” then undermines this in the next paragraph, saying, “The Catholic Church has taken the view that abortion is an act against Nature and against spiritual Wholeness. The Catholic view is correct.” I found her lack of self-awareness funny, but was also confronted with all the hybrid Christian allusions in her books and my own awkward position between the occult and Calvinism.
During those years, because of my apparent interest in the subject, I was frequently asked to interpret astrological charts for my friends and friends of friends, and I eventually learned to read tarot as well. Both the Western zodiac and the tarot are constructed from similar forms, archetypes and patterns, and can be used to interpret one another. If I found any use of it for myself or others, it was not because of astrology’s predictive powers, but rather the way the zodiac organized things that are already happening, that have already happened. I often felt compelled to say, “I am not telling your fortune. I’m showing you what’s going on and what you might be inclined to do next. If you don’t like your current inclination, then that’s up to you to change.”
Soon I was hired to read cards at art openings and book launches, and even had a few clients of my own. My roommates and I were hosting regular literary salons at our apartment, and a young man who sometimes arrived on uppers dressed as Arthur Rimbaud and read excerpts from his sinister, mystical poems invited me to a service at his Presbyterian church in Williamsburg, which I ended up attending every Sunday until I left New York. I sometimes pictured Linda Goodman in her final years, standing in the glow of her stained glass windows, and I wondered how she so freely knit it all together.
If you’ve never heard of Goodman, it’s likely you’d recognize her book jackets anyway, if only from the sheer number that remain in print. Her second New York Times Bestseller, the 900-page Love Signs (1978), bears the iconic Alphonse Mucha portrait of a priestess orbited by the Western zodiac. Flip over the book, and you’ll find the sorts of teasers that shoppers are tempted to read with some shame in grocery store checkout lines:
“Can a Gemini man find happiness with a Virgo woman?”
“Will it be smooth sailing or perpetual fireworks between the Scorpio female and the Libra male?”
“If you’re a Taurus, you will love or hate Scorpios, nothing in between.”
But inside Love Signs is the weirdest, most verbose, conversational mish-mash of astrological writings to ever have graced the greater public. In a chapter detailing the various incarnations of a Virgoan-Aquarian relationship, Goodman writes:
The Aquarian male’s eccentricity often stops just short of the altar. In his choice of a lifetime mate, he tends to be slightly old fashioned. Maybe that’s because there’s room for only one cuckoo in a clock. …
Since a Virgo female won’t compete in the cuckoo-clock Olympics, you can see that a mating between these two can work out nicely. … For one thing, she’s too discriminating to flip over all the odd, assorted friends he may bring home at various hours. (I know one Virgo wife whose Aquarian husband expected her to play hostess to a snake wrestler from Pakistan for two weeks while he practiced with his reptile in the basement in preparation for the worldwide Python Tournament Match — and that’s a true story.) For another thing, she’s not a torrid sex symbol. But let’s face it, he might not know what to do with Raquel Welch if he had her.
This casual style is consistent in all Goodman’s books, each penned in the first person. Every chapter in Love Signs, most of which are lengthy insights on astrological pairings (e.g. Scorpio woman and Taurus man), is introduced by an excerpt from J.M. Barrie’s original Peter Pan script, with secondary sources spanning the Gospels, Plains Indian theology, Henry James and “Dear Abby.”
In that slim addendum, “A Time to Embrace,” she opens with a verse from Ecclesiastes: “To everything there is a season … a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing….” She charges the reader to heed the scripture’s message and find ways to make their actions “harmonize with the flow of cosmic currents, rather than timing them to oppose these powerful forces.” She goes on to admonish the use of birth control, artificial insemination and other reproductive innovations on account of being against “Universal Law,” and she vies for all of this to be replaced with a family planning method called “astrobiology”:
As the ancients who planned the conception of Kings knew well, a woman can conceive only during a certain, approximately two-hour period of each Lunar month, when the Sun and the Moon are exactly the same number of degrees apart as they were at the moment of the woman’s first breath at birth. … Without exception, a woman can conceive at no other time than this approximately two-hour period, easily determined if her birth data are known. Each individual woman’s “cycle” is different, bearing no relation to the generalized, and consequently inaccurate, so-called “rhythm method.” It’s absolutely foolproof. And awesomely profound.
The book is peppered with these polemics. It begins with several title pages of quotations from the Bible and a 15th century Pope, which introduce a long letter to her daughter Sally, who overdosed on speed in 1973 — a death Goodman believed was a cover-up and which she addresses openly in good faith to a daughter she’s convinced is alive and reading it in 1978.
Since its first printing, Love Signs has sold over 800,000 copies. (Goodman’s total sales, according to The New York Times, amount to more than 30 million books.) Accompanied by other mystical uprisings of the ‘60s and ‘70s, Goodman’s books uniquely suggested that astrology was for everyone. How such unusual texts became an American blockbuster is no surprise: Most people scan astrological books as quick and affirmative reference, reading only the parts they believe bear on their own lives. Thus the birth chart’s complexity is reduced to cartoonish archetypes, and Goodman’s rambling meditations and appendices are lost to obscurity, remaining as unexamined as the woman who administered them.
