Some that you’ve hardly even heard of
By 
A friend who read my latest rumination on the fickle transitoriness of fame pointed out that by his estimate 2% or less of Americans today would be able to identify Aimee Semple McPherson, who was without question one of the most famous people in the whole country in the 1920s and 1930s. My off the cuff reaction to this is that 2% is almost certainly way too high, although that reaction is influenced by the fact that I hadn’t ever heard of her until about ten years ago or so, this despite the fact that there’s a Foursquare Church in Boulder that I’ve driven past literally thousands of times.
If you’re not familiar with her, the story of Sister Aimee as she was known is an absolute trip, and it does surprise me that she hasn’t survived as a cultural reference, at least in the way that a much larger percentage of people would recognize contemporary names like Rudolph Valentino and Harry Houdini. In particular, the story of her incredibly obvious faux “kidnapping” is just amazing, and how it didn’t become a big budget movie or something similar, at least after her death (she died young in 1944, still extremely famous although now suffering from much worse press than she did in her golden era prior to the “kidnapping” in 1926) also surprises me.
Speaking of the arbitrariness of fame, Erik’s obit this morning about Joseph Berliner notes that he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, while McPherson’s Wiki page is 10,000 words [!] long, which makes it much longer than that of most U.S. presidents. This cyber-tome is fascinating in and of itself, in that it is obviously composed primarily by some extremely credulous author or authors, whose credulity is made all too obvious by the many outrageous elements of Sister Aimee’s life story. This makes me wonder, given the arguable importance of Wikipedia to the formation of contemporary cultural discourse, if a decade or two or three from now a whole lot more people will know about Sister Aimee than are aware of her ministry of truth at present, and indeed whether she’s much better known now than she was twenty years ago for example, which wouldn’t surprise me. (Again my discovery of her existence just a few years ago may be influencing this judgment, but I think it’s definitely possible).
FWIW I suspect Sister Aimee wasn’t a conscious grifter — for one thing her estate at her death was only $10,000 (about $200K in 2026 money), despite having raised immense sums for her ministry over the course of her career — although it’s almost surely the case that the faux kidnapping was a desperate after the fact attempt to cover up an affair with a church employee, as opposed to a publicity stunt or the like.
A footnote that would be of interest to our many Trekkies here is that she served as the inspiration for Edith Keeler for the TOS episode The City on the Edge of Forever, which is probably the best Star Trek episode ever (it’s certainly the best episode title). This was written by Harlan Ellison at a time when he was in the middle of reading a biography of her, so the influence is very clear.
The whole story is fascinating on many levels, including the sociological aspects of the most famous preacher in the country being a woman, and a divorced thrice-married one at that. It’s also a story of the emergence of Los Angeles as the nation’s entertainment capital, the early melding of evangelical revivalism with Hollywoodesque features (Charlie Chaplin, despite his own agnosticism, was a fan on purely aesthetic grounds apparently), the development of radio as a mass medium, and the clash between the evangelical culture in America with modernity in all its forms, along with a bunch of other things.
FSG just published a new biography of McPherson, by Claire Hoffman, which has gotten a lot of prominent reviews, so that goes on the stack of things I’m supposed to read. Hopefully at least one of you has already done so and can comment accordingly.