The Star-Crossed Recluse Who Brought Astrology to the Masses

Goodman was born Mary Alice Kemery in Morgantown, West Virginia, on April 9, 1925. (The date was finally confirmed by a data collector who claims to have found her birth certificate.) There is little information about her childhood, and what there is comes from an unreliable source: Goodman’s penultimate book, a thousand-plus-page quasi-autobiography that she published, in 1989, with the preposterously goofy title of “Gooberz.” In “Gooberz,” which is written in haphazard poetic verse, she describes her parents frequently being out of town, and her staying with a neighboring Black couple named Bob and Grace Carpenter, from whom she first gleaned a mystical education. Grace, she writes, told “perfectly marvelous faerie stories / while she bustled around, getting breakfast / . . . she and Bob believed in druids too, like me.” Goodman was raised Catholic, but her faith wavered after an early cascade of losses: first, her beloved grandmother died, then a close friend, and then her prized cat. One day, after watching a local boy squish a colony of ants, she had a feeling of despair that she describes as “the dreadful dilemma / of my struggle to make Life and Death rhyme.”

In her twenties, Goodman married a man named William Snyder, a union that was soon marked by calamity. Goodman miscarried multiple times, and lost at least one child in infancy. She and Snyder ultimately had two healthy children, but the relationship fractured and they separated. Not long afterward, Snyder died—the cause, according to “Gooberz,” was alcoholism and pneumonia—and Goodman, suddenly a young single mother, struggled to make sense of her situation. “Why do I still hope—why?” she writes. “When people die, they die / why, oh, why can’t I realize that? / I believe it—I know it / but why can’t I . . . realize it?”

In LaFaive’s telling, it was Goodman’s inability to reconcile life and death which helped her excel in her breakthrough job, as the host of a radio program called “Love Letters from Linda.” (This appears to be when she changed her first name.) On the show, LaFaive writes, Goodman read letters from soldiers stationed abroad during wartime, many of whom expressed anxiety about ever seeing their loved ones again. Goodman likely had a knack for soothing her listeners—she had a mesmerizing voice, low-pitched and lilting—and assuring them that their desired reunions were imminent. “This talent of hers,” LaFaive writes, “injecting hope into the most fraught possibilities, of convincing those who have been separated by dissonance or distance that they can be brought back together again—would make her celebrated.”

During her time as a radio host, Goodman met her second husband, Sam Goodman, “a onetime disc jockey and carnival comic,” according to an article in People, and together they moved to New York City, where Goodman had two more children. Sometime in the mid-sixties, Sam brought home a coffee-table book about astrology, and Linda became consumed by it, launching into a self-education that approached mania. “I think she stayed in a nightgown studying astrology twenty hours a day for a year,” her husband later told People.

Goodman taught herself how to make detailed astrological charts, which, in the decades before the internet, involved labor-intensive hand calculations to determine planetary movements. She began offering her services to acquaintances in Manhattan, and word spread. In 1969, a Miami News report cited her exorbitantly expensive rates—up to a thousand dollars for a single birth-chart analysis. Hoping to share her knowledge more widely (and, presumably, to find a more efficient way of earning income), Goodman turned to writing. She put out “Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs” with a small publisher, asserting that you could learn “up to ninety percent” about a person simply by knowing her sun sign. Goodman described each in a bold, conspiratorial tone: “Taureans would rather entertain hospitably at home than go to the trouble of visiting. The effort required for scintillating popularity doesn’t appeal to the bull’s nature”; “Leo, the person, rules you and everybody else. (Yes, yes, I know he really doesn’t. But please don’t tell him. It would break his big, warm, egotistical heart.)”

The enormous success of “Sun Signs” was, in part, a matter of good timing. By the late sixties, the average person was increasingly exposed to the outer realms of both consciousness and the known universe. (In 1968, a few months after Goodman’s book hit shelves, NASA sent the first manned crew to orbit the moon.) Astrology, an ancient divination practice that has its roots in Mesopotamia and was considered an academic vocation until the eighteenth century, has experienced swells of popularity over the ages, but none so pronounced as the explosion during the sixties and seventies, when horoscopes crossed fully into the mainstream. Betty Crocker published a recipe for an “Age of Aquarius” cake. Yves Saint Laurent designed a cocktail dress printed with astrological symbols. Even a serial killer adopted the Zodiac as his moniker. By 1975, the trend was so widespread that a group of more than a hundred leading scientists, including eighteen Nobel Prize winners, signed an open letter titled “Objections to Astrology,” in which they expressed exasperated concern. “We must all face the world,” the letter read, “and we must realize that our futures lie in ourselves, and not in the stars.” Notably, one scientist who refused to sign the letter was the astronomer Carl Sagan—“not because I thought astrology has any validity,” he wrote, “but because I felt (and still feel) that the tone of the statement was authoritarian.”