Celebrities Who Are Freemasons

Hollywood’s connection to the Craft runs deep, and for decades a motion-picture lodge in California drew much of its membership straight from the studios. John Wayne was raised in Marion McDaniel Lodge No. 56 in Tucson, Arizona, and Clark Gable was a member through his years as the king of Hollywood. Cecil B. DeMille, the founding father of the American epic, belonged to Prince of Orange Lodge No. 16 in New York, and the swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks Sr. was a Mason as well. The Western carried the fraternity into the saddle through Roy Rogers and the singing cowboy Gene Autry, while Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of the Second World War before he turned to acting, joined North Hollywood Lodge No. 542. Ernest Borgnine, who won the Academy Award for Marty, was a member of Abingdon Lodge No. 48 in Virginia.

Three of the screen’s great comic and character names round out the list. Oliver Hardy, the heavier half of Laurel and Hardy, was initiated into Solomon Lodge No. 20 in Jacksonville, Florida. Harold Lloyd, the bespectacled daredevil of silent comedy, rose so high in the fraternity that he served as Imperial Potentate of the Shriners. And Mel Blanc, the Man of a Thousand Voices who gave Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck their sound, came up through DeMolay, the Shrine, and the Scottish Rite.

Some of the most familiar faces of the stage were Freemasons. Harry Houdini, the escape artist born Ehrich Weiss, belonged to St. Cecile Lodge No. 568 in New York, a lodge long associated with performers. Red Skelton, the clown prince of early television, was a member of Vincennes Lodge No. 1 in Indiana and reached the thirty-third degree, later receiving the Gourgas Medal, the highest honor of the Scottish Rite’s Northern Jurisdiction. Will Rogers, the cowboy humorist and newspaper columnist, was raised in Claremore Lodge No. 53 in Oklahoma. Richard Pryor, among the most influential comedians of the twentieth century, joined Henry Brown Lodge No. 22, a Prince Hall lodge in Peoria, Illinois, in 1981.

American music has a long Masonic lineage that crosses every genre. The march king John Philip Sousa and the songwriter Irving Berlin, who gave the country God Bless America, were both Masons, as was the Broadway showman George M. Cohan. The tradition is especially rich in Prince Hall Freemasonry, which counted many of the giants of jazz and blues. Duke Ellington belonged to Social Lodge No. 1 in Washington, the senior Prince Hall lodge in the District of Columbia. Count Basie was a member of Wisdom Lodge No. 102 in Chicago, and W.C. Handy, the father of the blues, was a Prince Hall Mason as well. Louis Armstrong is recorded in Montgomery Lodge No. 18 in New Orleans. The lineage carried into the postwar era through the ballad singer Nat King Cole and the soul singer and pastor Al Green, both Prince Hall members.

On the court, in the ring, and on the field, Freemasonry has claimed some of the most celebrated American athletes, a great many of them through Prince Hall lodges. Shaquille O’Neal was made a Mason at sight in 2011 and belongs to Widow’s Son Lodge No. 28 in Boston, and his fellow basketball star Scottie Pippen came up through Unity Lodge No. 454 in Arkansas. John Salley, the four-time NBA champion, is a Prince Hall Mason as well. The fraternity’s reach into sport goes back generations. Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, belonged to King David Lodge No. 100 in Chicago, and the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, often called the greatest pound for pound fighter who ever lived, was a member of Joppa Lodge No. 55 in New York. The heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey was raised in Kenwood Lodge No. 800 in Illinois. Two icons carry the Craft into the modern era of their sports: the Hall of Fame quarterback John Elway, of South Denver Lodge No. 93 in Colorado, and the golfer Arnold Palmer, raised in Loyalhanna Lodge No. 275 in Pennsylvania, who reached the thirty-third degree.

A handful of famous names come up again and again in connection with Freemasonry, and they are worth addressing directly rather than leaving to rumor. We sort them into two groups: those reported as members on credible but secondhand authority, and those who are frequently listed with little or nothing behind the claim. Where the record is silent, we say so rather than guess.

Freemasonry is not the Illuminati, and the two were never the same thing. Modern Freemasonry began as an organized institution with the founding of the first Grand Lodge in London in 1717. The Bavarian Illuminati was a separate society founded in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a professor at Ingolstadt, as a secret circle devoted to Enlightenment ideas and political influence. The Illuminati did recruit some of its early members from Masonic lodges and borrowed a few of their forms, which is the kernel of truth behind the confusion, but the Bavarian government suppressed the group in the 1780s, and it was effectively gone within about a decade. Freemasonry, by contrast, has continued without interruption and today numbers in the millions worldwide.

The celebrity version of the myth, in which pop stars and rappers are said to belong to a Masonic or Illuminati cabal that controls the entertainment industry, is a modern invention with no basis in fact. It draws on a long tradition of cultural conspiracy theories rather than on any lodge record. Some musicians genuinely were Freemasons, the Prince Hall jazz greats above among them, but membership in a fraternity that meets at the local lodge, raises money for charity, and publishes its own address is a very different thing from the shadowy fiction sold in books and music videos.