posted July 08, 2008 05:23 PM              

Why Did Her Lover Flee? Is Her Daughter Dead? Linda Goodman Seeks Answers in the Stars

As dawn breaks over her remote aerie high in the Colorado Rockies, Linda Goodman shakes off sleepiness, feeds wood into the stove against the chill and sets about a bizarre daily ritual. To the low recorded music of a Gregorian chant, she lights candles on a handmade altar and recites a mystical litany she created six years ago as a message to her departed loved ones. It begins with the prayer of St. Francis: "Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace..."

Goodman's life defies imagination. On the one hand, she is a very rich woman, made so by her wildly popular books on astrology. Her 1968 explanation of the zodiac titled Sun Signs sold four million copies, and paperback rights to her current best-seller, Love Signs, went last year for $2.25 million, equaling the record held by Mario Puzo's Fools Die. By any standard, Goodman at 54 is the most influential astrologer in the world. But she has also become a recluse, hidden away in Cripple Creek, Colo., haunted by the disappearance of the two most important people in her life within the space of 20 months. One was her lover, Robert Brewer, a marine biologist of 22 who fled to Mexico without explanation in the spring of 1972 and has not been seen since. The other was her daughter, Sally, officially listed by the New York medical examiner as a suicide just before Christmas 1973, a casualty of liquor and barbituates at 21.

Goodman believes Brewer will return soon of his own accord; she keeps a place set for him at the dining table. Her grief over Sally, a budding actress and drama school graduate, has taken a more obsessive turn. "I know Sally is not dead," says Goodman. "I've done her chart over and over again. An astrologist can't predict death, but I can foresee non-death. I don't know exactly why she was taken, but I feel the time is right for her to reappear. The only reason I'm talking now is hope that I'll find some lead to her."

Cause for hope seems slim. Sally had a period of depression and was hospitalized after a suicide attempt at the age of 18. Her body was identified in the New York morgue by Linda's second husband, Sam Goodman. (Still legally married, they have lived separately for 12 years, but still relate "as brother and sister," she says.) After an autopsy, police declared the case closed and Sam had the body cremated. Linda was penniless then, living in Cripple Creek on welfare and the generosity of such celebrity acquaintances as Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw. According to Linda, her royalties from Sun Signs had been withheld when she failed to deliver a second book to her publisher as promised. Friends helped her buy an airline ticket to New York, where she lived out of a suitcase and occasionally slept on the grounds of St. Patrick's Cathedral while tracking down leads on her own. Within a few days Sam recanted his identification of the body ("I was all hyped up at the time," he says), but he was still skeptical of her investigation. "He would say, 'Linda, you've got to stop this and face the fact that she's dead,' " she recalls. "But I couldn't."

Linda faulted the police work from the beginning. The suicide note, she swears, was not in Sally's handwriting. There was no empty pill bottle in the apartment. Police reported no signs of violence, but Goodman says she found bloodstains and bleached hair, although her daughter was a natural blonde. "For seven months I stayed in New York, going from homicide to the DA's office," she says. "I became a pariah. I never got any answers. They promised me blood and lab reports. In the end, I got nothing. They just said, 'Well, there was some mistake.' "

Last year, when her $500,000 advance for Love Signs came through, she hired Ray Neff, 55, a professor of health and safety at Indiana State University with a background in forensic medicine. From his study of police, lab and autopsy reports, Neff has concluded that the body could not have been Sally's. He says, among other things, that she was two inches taller and 25 pounds lighter than the corpse, that the high level of drugs in the bloodstream could indicate homicide possibly by injection, and that he has found a witness who drove Sally to Boston the day she was supposed to have died. "I am certain Sally survived the whole thing," Neff says. "Perhaps she's married and living somewhere quietly." A Goodman family friend believes the young woman may have just wanted to drop out: "I think she had trouble accepting her mother's life-style."

Linda Goodman's case is not helped, it is true, by her profession and lifestyle. She first ventured into astrology when Sam, a onetime disc jockey and carnival comic, brought home The Coffee Table Book of Astrology in the mid-'60s. Her first marriage, to a writer named Bill Snyder, had ended in divorce a decade later. (Three of their five children died in infancy; only Sally and a younger brother survived.) Linda's two children by Sam were then school age. "I think she stayed in a nightgown studying astrology 20 hours a day for a year," Sam recalls. By 1970 Sun Signs was on the best-seller lists, she and Sam had split, and she was deep into a new circle of friends and concerns on the outer limits of theology.

The 10-room Victorian house where she has lived in utmost simplicity since moving to Cripple Creek remains an open classroom on vegetarianism, reincarnation and metaphysics. It is also HQ for the religion she started with her lover Brewer called "Mannitou," an odd blend of Franciscan and American Indian teachings. Mannitou gets 49 percent of her earnings tax-free; the list of other causes to which she has given money is long, including an environmental group, a plastic surgeon whose work she admires, a plant-life experimenter, husband Sam ("He's been a rock of Gibraltar") and the family of a deceased former literary agent, to whom she gives five percent of her net. "I've seen her empty her pockets to anyone who asks," says her accountant, Joel Cohen. Adds a friend: "She's incredibly naive."

Goodman's current literary projects tend to cast further doubt on her credibility—an autobiographical account of reincarnation and a book-in-progress about Howard Hughes, who she claims is alive and living in Alaska. Her dark theories on the case seem equally strange. They involve organized crime and/or the CIA. "I don't see death in Sally's chart," Linda says, "but shock, amnesia, seclusion and a convent. I've heard the government hides lots of witnesses." Grasping at straws, she also suggests that her troubles may be rooted in the fight with her first publisher. Improbably, she claims that a now-dead Chicago mobster threatened her into signing a contract that gave the publisher half of her future royalties. "I'm not sure what motivates Linda," says her lawyer, Arthur Klebanoff, who arranged to buy her out of that agreement for $250,000. "The intensity of her concern makes it clear that she felt she was being forced to act under duress."

Finally, Professor Neff concedes that some of his conclusions are still questionable. Certain discrepancies, he admits, "could be just sloppy police reporting," and the witness to Sally's presence in Boston has yet to be examined. Neff, who is trying to sell a manuscript contending that John Wilkes Booth actually escaped the barn fire after assassinating Lincoln, sums up: "We have lots of leads, but not enough solid evidence."

The retired New York detective, Al Desmond, who investigated Sally's death insists there isn't any evidence to find. "There was a rambling suicide note," Desmond recalls. "The father identified her. Then 10 days later the mother comes to town saying—hold your hat—she dreamed her daughter was still alive. She was very domineering, so Sam changed his mind. But we exhausted everything."

Still, even Desmond wishes there had been more positive identification of the body, if only to account for differences between the police and autopsy reports and the facts about Sally that have come to light since. Even Linda Goodman admits, "It's all very confusing—like the Mad Hatter's tea party."

Her curious profession may hold some key to her faith that she is right. A well-known astrologer on the East Coast, provided (by PEOPLE) with the date and place of Linda's birth (West Parkersburg, Va., April 9, 1925) but not with her identity, describes "an Aries who has a tendency to spin dreams. She is not a liar—she just dramatizes things. She tries to make her fantasies come true." Indirectly, Goodman's explanation seems to agree. "I admit that to be an astrologer you live a great deal in the imagination," she says. "But about Sally I'm like any distraught mother. I just want my daughter back."
http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20073623,00.html

posted July 11, 2008 11:12 PM            

Thanks for sharing these articles!

posted July 12, 2008 12:30 PM              

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an autobiographical account of reincarnation and a book-in-progress about Howard Hughes, who she claims is alive and living in Alaska.

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posted July 23, 2008 10:54 PM              

[edit] Early life
Although Goodman never revealed her year of birth, swearing even her father to silence, it emerged posthumously that she was born in 1925.

She was born Mary Alice Kemery, by some accounts in her parent's hometown of Parkersburg, West Virginia and by her own account in her maternal grandparents' house on Kingwood Street in Morgantown, West Virginia.

She graduated from Parkersburg High School in 1943.[1]

[edit] Career
She assumed the name Linda during World War II for a popular WCOM radio show in Parkersburg that she hosted called Love Letters from Linda. Each show consisted of Linda reading letters written between soldiers and their loved ones. Each letter was punctuated with a popular song of the day. While working in radio, she met her second husband, Sam O. Goodman, and took his last name.

Linda Goodman began her career writing for newspapers in the eastern and southeastern United States. She also wrote speeches for black American civil rights leader Whitney Young, who served for several years as president of the National Urban League.

Some have suggested that Linda Goodman was responsible for accelerating the growth of the New Age movement through the unprecedented success of her first astrology book Linda Goodman's Sun Signs (1968). This was the first astrology book ever to earn a spot on the New York Times Bestseller List. It was followed by yet another success with Linda Goodman's Love Signs (1978), which also made the New York Times Bestseller List.

Other books by Linda Goodman include:

Venus Trines at Midnight (1970)
Linda Goodman’s Love Poems (1980)
Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs: The Secret Codes of the Universe (1987)
Gooberz (1989)
Linda Goodman’s love Signs (1998)
Gooberz, begun in 1967, is a long epic poem riddled with a myriad of occult references and symbolism. It is also a thinly veiled autobiography, which explores two of her significant romantic relationships: her marriage to William Snyder and her love affair with marine biologist Robert Brewer. It also touches on the birth of her four children Sally Snyder, Bill Snyder, Jill Goodman and Michael Goodman. The book surveys her ideas on reincarnation, karma, love, and miracles.

Goodman's books also reference what she referred to as the "disappearance" of her eldest daughter, Sally Snyder, and the mystery around her reported death. Linda Goodman spent much money and many years trying to find Sally, long after police closed the case as a suicide or accidental suicide.

Linda made Cripple Creek, Colorado her home during the latter part of her adult life.

[edit] Later life and death
A businesswoman from Ireland named Crystal Bush befriended Linda at the end of her life and obtained the publicity rights to Linda Goodman's name at her death. Crystal Bush published the book "Linda Goodman's Relationship Signs" after Linda's death.

It is said that Linda Goodman died on October 21, 1995, in Colorado from complications of diabetes. She was 70. Despite reports of her death, some of her followers maintain that she is still alive, living anonymously in rural New Zealand.[citation needed]

http://www.answers.com/topic/linda-goodman-1
American astrologer, born Mary Alice Kemery on April 9, 1925, in Parkersburg, West Virginia. She emerged into public notice in 1958 as the writer-broadcaster for a Pittsburgh radio show, "Letter from Linda." She moved to New York City in 1964 and later became a speechwriter for the National Urban League. In 1968 Goodman published her first book, Sun Signs, a massive work on astrology and human relationships offering advice for changing one's responses to the actions of others in accordance with one's own astrological characteristics as well as those of whomever one is dealing with. It became one of the best-selling astrology texts of the period. It went into 17 hard-back printings prior to paperback publication in the fall of 1971. By the end of the decade it had sold more than four million copies. From having no prior connection to the astrological community, Goodman became one of the most influential astrologers in America, and her clients included a number of celebrity personalities.

Additional astrological texts by Goodman include Venus Trines at Midnight (1970) and her equally popular Linda Good-man's Love Signs: A New Approach to the Human Heart (1978).

Less known, Goodman founded a new religion she termed Mannitou, a synthesis of teachings from St. Francis of Asissi and some Native American tribes. She put a large percentage of the income from her books into establishing her new faith.

Sources:

Goodman, Linda. Linda Goodman's Love Signs: A New Approach to the Human Heart. New York: Harper, 1978.

——. Sun Signs. New York: Taplinger, 1968. Reprinted as Linda Goodman's Sun Signs. New York: Bantam Books, 1971.

——. Venus Trines at Midnight. New York: Taplinger, 1970.

posted July 23, 2008 10:58 PM              

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Birth Control Of The Ancients

Yep...astrology.

According to Linda Goodman in her book Love Signs:

“A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing” ( Ecclesiastes3:1-5), concerns a specific knowledge possessed and suppressed by the Temple High Priests during the time of Jesus.

“There is a way of controlling birth that is not harmful to health, is both religiously and aesthetically acceptable, costs nothing and is 100% dependable”

“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”

The woman doesn’t even need to know the hour of birth, just the correct month, day and year. Each month calculate the day where the Sun and Moon are the same degrees apart as they are at birth, and add a day or two as a safety margin on either side of the day the fertile two hours falls. (sperm can stay alive and fertilize an egg for a day or two) One only needs to refrain from “embracing” about 5 days out of the month.

However if you are trying to conceive it is best to know the exact time of birth to calculate the two hour fertile period.

Linda Goodman calls this ‘astrobiology’ and states that it “has been meticulously researched in scientifically controlled tests with thousands of women”

Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was no abortion or unwanted babies???

I had a child four years ago. I had read about this before getting pregnant but never used it as a form of birth control. Right after I found out I was pregnant I knew I wanted to put this to the test. I knew for sure within a three day period of when I conceived, so I calculated my natal chart and looked at the position of the sun and moon over those three days in which I conceived. Lo and behold the distance of degrees matched my natal distance between sun and moon during those three days.

I am a believer….does anyone else want to put it to the test???

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