(from wikipedia.com)
". . . Hugh Marjoe Ross Gortner (generally known as Marjoe Gortner; born 14 January 1944 in Long Beach, California) is a former revivalist and actor who first gained attention during the late 1940s when, aged four, he became the youngest-known ordained preacher. He then gained notoriety in the 1970s when he starred in Marjoe, an Oscar-winning behind-the-scenes documentary about the lucrative business of Pentecostal preaching. The name "Marjoe" is a portmanteau of the biblical names "Mary" and "Joseph".
When Gortner was five, his father, Vernon, a third-generation[clarification needed] minister, noticed his son's talent for mimicry and his fearlessness of strangers and public settings. His parents claimed he had received a vision from God during a bath, but this was later conceded by Marjoe to be a lie his parents forced him to repeat. He claimed they enforced this by mock-drowning him because they could not beat him which would leave bruises which might be noticed during his many public appearances. They began training him to deliver sermons, complete with dramatic gestures and emphatic lunges. By the time he was four, his parents arranged for him to perform a marriage ceremony for a film crew from Paramount studios and referred to him as "the youngest ordained minister in history". It is not clear, however, who ordained him or if he was even ordained at all.
Until his teenage years, Gortner and his parents traveled the United States holding revival meetings. As well as teaching him scriptural passages, his parents also taught him several money-making tactics involving the sale of supposedly "holy" articles at revivals which promised to heal the sick and dying. By the time he was sixteen, his family had amassed what he later estimated to be three million dollars. Shortly after Gortner's sixteenth birthday, his father absconded with the money and a disillusioned Marjoe left his mother for San Francisco.[citation needed] He spent the remainder of his teenage years as an itinerant hippie until his early twenties, when, hard-pressed for money, he decided to put his old skills to work and re-emerged on the preaching circuit with a charismatic stage-show modeled after those of contemporary rockers, most notably Mick Jagger. He made enough to take six months off every year, during which he returned to California and lived off the previous six months' earnings.
In the late 1960s, Gortner suffered a crisis of conscience about his double life and felt his performing talents might be put to better use as an actor or singer. . . "
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