Nothing Hidden

With the zest he showed plunging into everything from alcohol to psychic phenomena, from sex to theology, James A. Pike became America's most controversial 20th century clergyman. As an infant in Oklahoma, he won the Better Babies contest at the state fair two years running. In 1969, still hyperactive at 56, he got lost and died in Israel's Judean desert -and was the first Episcopal bishop ever to have three surviving wives attend the memorial service at his old cathedral in San Francisco.

Pike, who was frankness personified, picked the title Nothing to Hide for the autobiography he never actually wrote. Now this biography (The Death and Life of Bishop Pike; Doubleday; $10), by William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne, is even more candid than Pike was in life. The book has full backing from the bishop's last wife, Diane Kennedy Pike, whose introduction calls it "sensitively written" and adds "It has been my joy to cooperate with the authors." The authors tell in some detail how Diane became Pike's mistress long before they were married and nearly a year before he divorced his second wife.

Equally explicit are the accounts of many other aspects of the bishop's career. An alcoholic, he was three times picked up drunk and confused by police. He told one airline stewardess she could not mix a good martini, standing up in the aisle to show her how to do it. He joined Alcoholics Anonymous in 1964 and with one brief lapse stayed dry thereafter.

Pike slept with various women during his second marriage, even installing a private line through which they could phone him. The most sensational episode came when Maren Bergrud committed suicide after a three-year relationship during which he had paid many of her bills with his bishop's discretionary funds. As she was dying, she told him she had taken 55 sleeping pills. He rushed her to her own nearby apartment, called a doctor, who could not save her, and removed the part of her suicide note addressed to himself, later giving it to his third wife. This read in part: "(a) I am unlovable and (b) you are unloving... Maren."

Not Much Help. The bishop's elder son, James A. Pike Jr., committed suicide at 20, apparently in unhappiness at being a homosexual. Stringfellow and Towne state: "Jim Jr. did talk with his father on at least one occasion ... about his fears that he might be homosexual. Bishop Pike would later feel that he hadn't been much help." They report that Pike himself had had one "homosexual experience while he was a lonely law student at Yale ... He hadn't found the experience unpleasant or distasteful. 'It was just that nothing seemed to fit together the way it should,' he said."

The authors examine Pike's many efforts to talk with the dead (notably Jim Jr.) in seances, and suggest that the mediums he used probably learned in advance almost all of the obscure information that so impressed the bishop. They also note that since he and Diane agreed on the survival of the soul, they cut the words "till death do us part" from their marriage ceremony.

Despite the examples of Maren Bergrud and his son, one of Pike's great gifts was in aiding the people who flocked to consult him.

He could make superb use of any idea or thing. At Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, he put "secular saints" in the stained-glass windows: Albert Einstein, John Glenn, Thurgood Marshall, Paul Tillich, Martin Buber and others. Early in his episcopate he read that Duke Ellington had composed a sacred concert for jazz, and promptly arranged for the Duke to give its world premiere at the cathedral. Nobody asked Ellington to join any memorial service to the bishop. But when the Duke heard there would be such a gathering at St. Clement's Church in Manhattan, he came, led the congregation in a hymn, then made one of his rare solo appearances at the piano. He explained: "I loved that man."

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