The Goddess Pose

by Michelle Goldberg

  She suffered through the winter, but when spring came she was able to reunite with Járosy in Austria, and she hoped they’d be able to spend the summer together. They had a few lovely days, taking long walks through the mountains and eating picnics of cheese and fruit. Yet he was distant; she thought he was depressed. Then, he ended their relationship.

  He told her, kindly, that he didn’t want to be a burden to her and that she needed to discover her own path. She should go to India, he said, just as she’d always longed to. His words pierced her. Once again, her dreams of her future were being ripped away, but she realized she had no choice but to let him go.

  It would be almost thirty years before they saw each other again.

  By the time they parted, Járosy had moved permanently to Warsaw, where he’d been so warmly received when he was with Der Blaue Vogel. He became the emcee at Quid Pro Quo, the city’s premier cabaret. “All of Warsaw’s best comics, dancers, singers, and actors eventually appeared on the club’s tiny stage,” writes cabaret historian Ron Nowicki. Járosy couldn’t speak Polish properly, but that just endeared him to the crowds all the more. He intoned “Proszę Państwa!” (“Ladies and gentleman!”) with such grandeur that it became a popular catchphrase in sophisticated circles. Soon the new king of Warsaw cabaret accepted Polish citizenship.

  On August 23, 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a nonaggression treaty. One week later, the two countries, along with the German client state of Slovakia, invaded Poland and divided it between themselves. Warsaw came under Nazi occupation. Járosy was outspoken in his hatred of the regime. He composed satirical anti-Nazi poems and scattered them all around the city. Sometimes he’d translate them into German and put them on German cars.

  One began with this quote from a German newspaper: “The world’s leading scholars have confirmed that the German is the epitome of the Nordic race.” Járosy then wrote:

  Take Hitler’s dark hair,

  and Goering’s fat belly,

  and Goebbels’ short height.

  Mix all this up a trace.

  What will come out of all that brown mess?

  The epitome of the Nordic race!

  On October 25, 1939, Járosy was arrested by the Gestapo. At first the Nazis seemed more interested in co-opting the famous performer than in persecuting him. They offered him the chance to claim his Reichsdeutsche citizenship—he’d been Austrian, after all—and to run a German propaganda theater. Járosy refused. He was tried and convicted in March 1940, and sentenced to execution. Then, somehow, as he was being transported back to prison, he escaped. He spent the next four years in hiding in and around Warsaw.

  Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, pushing the latter to join the Allies. By the summer of 1944, the Polish resistance expected the imminent arrival of Soviet forces in Warsaw, and the former launched a rebellion to dislodge the Nazis. It was only intended to last for a few days, but the Soviets halted their advance, and the Poles had to fight alone. Járosy was among them, and the Nazis captured him.

  On August 14 the Germans brought Járosy to Buchenwald. There, some higher-ranking Polish prisoners recognized him as a celebrated actor and brought him into their quarters, protecting him from the worst of the concentration camp’s brutality.

  The artist and poet Mieczysław Lurczyński met Járosy in one of Buchenwald’s subcamps, and he became the inspiration for the character of Fryderyk in Lurczyński’s searing play, The Old Guard. Lurczyński remembered Járosy as an icon of humanism and civilization amid the camp’s savagery. “A conversation with him was an escape,” he writes in his memoirs. “[I]t allowed me to get a breather from the primitiveness and bestiality surrounding me on all sides.”

  In the play, Fryderyk is tormented by the moral compromises that survival in the camp requires. The Polish prisoners who manage internal camp affairs are callous and vicious to the inmates over whom they rule, and Fryderyk hates his dependence on them. “Do you know that in here they consider me a non-kosher clown, who has to kow-tow and re-tell farces and risqué anecdotes under the threat of losing the favor of his lordship who knows that this stinking room is a palace compared to the hell of life in the barracks?” he says. Eventually he stands up to one of his protectors, threatening to denounce him when the war ends, to make sure he’s held responsible for his cruelty. Fryderyk’s desperate assertion of his obliterated society’s values leads to his death.

  In real life, however, Járosy didn’t die. The camp was evacuated in March 1945, and the inmates were loaded onto an open-wagon train. When Allied strafing stalled it, Járosy and Lurczyński escaped. Járosy eventually made his way to London and spent the rest of his life performing for the Polish diaspora.

  In the early 1950s he visited Los Angeles on tour. It’s not clear how he and Indra Devi learned that they were once again in the same city, but each of them was thrilled and amazed to find the other still alive. After their reunion, Járosy, ever suave, wrote her a letter full of endearments. He recalled their beautiful times together and told her that he felt suddenly twenty years younger. They met again in 1960, when Devi stopped in London on the way home from a trip to Russia. Járosy told her she was the only woman he’d ever loved. That’s almost certainly not true, but he probably said it as if he meant it.

  —

  Back in Riga in 1926, her liaison with Járosy over, Eugenia had nothing but work for consolation, so she threw herself back into acting, signing a contract with a Riga theater that styled itself after Der Blaue Vogel. There, she had the chance to do some directing, which she found enormously stimulating.

  New suitors quickly came calling, though none of them was nearly as dashing or fascinating as Járosy. A former naval officer proposed to her, but convinced they had nothing in common, she turned him down. A German banker, Hermann Bolm, also began to frequent her house. Twenty years Eugenia’s senior, he was married, though his wife had abandoned him and asked for a divorce. Eugenia found him charming, kind, and attractive. With his wavy black hair and olive skin, he seemed to her more Italian than German. In a photo from that time, she’s sitting next to a girlfriend, smiling in a sequined flapper dress and Mary Jane heels. A shiny headband holds back her bobbed hair. He’s behind her in a tuxedo and white tie, solid and protective.

  She was twenty-seven, and it was unlikely that acting was ever going to earn her much of a living. She liked Bolm and believed she could be happy with him. It wasn’t a great love, but given her precarious circumstances, it would do. So when his divorce was finalized and he asked her to marry him, she said yes.

  From the start of their engagement, though, she was anxious. Her fiancé was kind but also controlling. He insisted that once they were married, she should leave the theater altogether, warning her, “When we’re married, you will be totally under my control.” His words chilled her. She had always valued her liberty above all else.

  That summer, she traveled to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, where her mother was performing. One day, she wandered into a bookstore advertising Theosophical literature. As she paged through the volumes, an employee handed her a flyer for an upcoming gathering of something called the Order of the Star in the East in Ommen, Holland. The order was devoted to heralding the teachings of a young Indian man named Jiddu Krishnamurti, believed by a group of leading Theosophists to be a new messiah. Thousands of people would be camping out on the grounds of a Dutch castle to hear Krishnamurti and his “protectress,” Annie Besant, who had succeeded Madame Blavatsky as Theosophy’s figurehead.

  The group’s name—full, she thought, of beauty and mystery—made an immediate impact on Eugenia. She wondered if perhaps her own star might be guiding her to discover the strange city of Ommen.

  If she saw the flyer as a sign, it might have been because she was desperately seeking one. She was close to packing away her youthful dreams of India and settling down to a comfortable but compromised life as a bourgeois housewife. The Order of the Star in the East woul
d have appeared as a last shot at transcendence. It wasn’t India, but at the moment it was as close as Eugenia could get. When she returned to Riga, she went to the local Theosophical Society headquarters and registered for the Star meeting. And at the end of July, she boarded a train for Holland.

  · CHAPTER 4 ·

  ARRIVING IN Ommen, Holland, at the end of July 1926, Eugenia joined pilgrims from every corner of Europe and from the United States. There were at least two thousand of them, mostly aristocrats, bohemians, and intellectuals, but also proper middle-class housewives, and poor mystics who came on foot. Extra ferries from the British Isles to the Hook of Holland had to be scheduled to accommodate them all.

  The writer Rom Landau’s description of the crowd at the 1927 Star Camp would have been equally apt in 1926. “Such readers as have ever attended a theosophical or practically any sort of religious convention will know the type, and I shall refrain from describing it at length,” he writes. “They generally abhor the idea of meat as violently as that of wine or tobacco; they look deep into your eyes when they talk to you; they have a weakness for sandals, for clothes without any particular distinction of shape, for the rougher kind of textiles and such colours as mauve, bottle-green and purple. The men affect long hair, while the women keep theirs short.”

  The Order of the Star gathering took place on the forested grounds of Eerde Castle, which was donated to the order by a Dutch aristocrat named Baron Philip van Pallandt. Important people in the Star organization stayed in the castle itself, an eighteenth-century Dutch classical building ringed by a moat, with pavilions on each side. A formal circular garden fronted the building, which was surrounded by parkland where most of the attendees slept in small canvas tents.

  An Associated Press dispatch about the event carried the lurid headline “Secrecy Veils Cult Camp,” but the piece painted a pleasant, bucolic picture. “The camp is beautifully situated on the slopes of Best-Hnerberg [sic], its multicolored and multishaped tents dominated by two giant ones set apart for meetings and meals. These can be seen for miles, surmounted by Dutch and American flags,” it read. “The tents are arranged in pleasing disorder, some labeled ‘married,’ others ‘ladies’ and others ‘gentlemen,’ all trim and comfortable.” In some ways, it reminded the reporter of “an old-fashioned camp meeting.”

  Attendees carried their own plates and mugs to meals, which were served from pails. Some amenities had been added since the first Star Camp at Eerde in 1924: pipes had been laid underground to pump hot water into the showers, and huts had been erected to house a post office, a bookstore, a first-aid station, and an information booth. Everything was laid out on a grid, with brick pathways protecting pedestrians from the mud.

  Eugenia had never camped before, and she found the camp’s vegetarian food “insipid.” Washing her own dishes was a novelty. Still, the scene generally enchanted her. More than seventy years later, she still remembered the piney forest air and the birdsong that awoke her in the morning.

  The Star Camp featured lectures, dances, and plays, but life there revolved around the evening talks given by Jiddu Krishnamurti, the beautiful young messiah-in-training. The days began with meditation and a brief Krishnamurti discourse. Afternoons were given up to various talks and to games of volleyball. It was at dusk, though, when the camp really came alive.

  On one or two nights, rain kept everyone inside. Every other evening, attendees would gather in a big open-air amphitheater, sitting on felled logs surrounding a fifteen-foot pyre. They’d sing folk songs for an hour or more, until, sometime after sunset, Krishnamurti would appear alongside white-haired Annie Besant, the indomitable woman who was both his patron and his disciple. A violinist from Vienna played a piece to set the mood. Krishnamurti, a thirty-one-year-old with a thin, noble face, doleful long-lashed eyes, and an aquiline nose, usually wore Western clothes when in Europe, but for the camps, he donned traditional Indian dress. He would light the pyre while chanting a hymn to Agni, the god of fire. The air would then fill with the delicious scent of burning pine, and the attendees would listen, enraptured, as Krishnamurti began to talk.

  His words had a pleasant vagueness that allowed his listeners to project all manner of profundity onto him. In one of his most quoted talks, given the night of July 27, he said, “You give me phrases and cover my Truth with your words. I do not want you to break with all you believe. I do not want you to deny your temperament. I do not want you to do things that you do not feel to be right. But, are any of you happy? Have you, any of you, tasted eternity?…I belong to all people, to all who really love, to all who are suffering. And if you would walk, you must walk with me.”

  On paper, this might seem empty, but Krishnamurti had a quiet charisma that, coupled with the collective will to believe and the exotic atmospherics, drove many attendees into ecstasy. “Whenever He speaks, it is not as if a separate individual was speaking, but as if someone was giving voice to your own greatest thoughts, your own ennobled feelings,” wrote one attendee. “And you know that everyone in that mighty audience feels the same—that He is thinking the thoughts of the world, and expressing the hope of the multitude, and after He has spoken you feel you know everyone intimately, however strange before, that you have met in His heart, have lived in His dreams.”

  —

  It’s easy to see why, as she listened to Krishnamurti, Eugenia believed that his was a voice straight from the India of her imagination. Yet Krishnamurti was less a product of India than of Europe. More specifically, he was a product of Europe’s obsession with India, a custom-made messiah raised in Theosophy’s most elite circles. To understand how Eugenia became Indra Devi, it’s necessary to understand the bridge Theosophy created between Eastern and Western spirituality.

  By the time Krishnamurti was born in 1895, Theosophy had become deeply established in India. Madame Blavatsky and Henry Steele Olcott’s beginnings on the subcontinent had been inauspicious: the first person they stayed with, Arya Samaj president Hurrychund Chintamon, entertained them lavishly but then billed them for everything, even his welcome telegram. Eventually, though, Blavatsky and Olcott were able to find a foothold in both British colonialist and educated Indian society. The English in India, like those in England, loved séances and other supernatural happenings, and Blavatsky obliged them.

  Even those who were convinced she was a charlatan found themselves taken with Blavatsky. Her supporters tended to see her as capable of both silly tricks and real magic. That was part of her brilliance: convincing otherwise sensible people that her frauds were but playful embroidery on her deeper engagement with real mysteries. Once one believes this, supernatural claims become unfalsifiable. Indeed, initiates can congratulate themselves on discerning between petty fakery meant for outsiders and authentic wonders. Many gurus (including, decades later, India’s most powerful, Sai Baba) would create a similar dynamic among their followers.

  It wasn’t, of course, just parlor tricks that attracted the British. “The fundamental appeal of theosophy lay…in the response it offered to the various dilemmas that constituted the Victorian crisis of faith,” writes philosophy professor Mark Bevir. Theosophy came along at a time of widespread European disenchantment. Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, fundamentally challenging the biblical account of creation and showing that human existence could be explained without reference to God. Annie Besant, the crusading journalist, feminist, political agitator, and speaker, traveled tirelessly throughout the 1870s, promoting atheism and becoming, in the process, one of the most notorious women in England. In 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche would write, famously, “The greatest recent event—that ‘God is dead’; that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable—is already starting to cast its first shadows over Europe.”

  By now, the phrase “God is dead” has been repeated so often that it has lost its meaning, much less its ability to shock, but in the Victorian era, the end of religious certainty was a jarring, even cataclysmic thing. “In the m
inds of many Victorians, geological discoveries and evolutionary theory had combined to pitch science against Christianity. Theosophy offered them a religious faith that appeared to embrace these discoveries whilst also sustaining a spiritual interpretation of life,” writes Bevir.

  Some of the leading British figures in India, including A. P. Sinnett, editor of the Allahabad Pioneer, and A. O. Hume, who had retired after an illustrious career in the civil service, became active Theosophists. Theosophy’s appeal in India, though, was hardly limited to Europeans. Blavatsky and Olcott were extremely popular with many Indians because of their respect for Hinduism and Buddhism, faiths that the colonialists tended to treat with contempt. For generations, British-educated Indians had been taught to regard their traditional religions as no more than barbaric superstition. This left many confused and deracinated. They could never really become British, but schooled in European Enlightenment rationalism, they were estranged from the beliefs of their families.

  Theosophy offered a way out of this crisis. It made Indians proud to hear Westerners proclaim that their religion was not only equal to Christianity but superior to it. At the same time, Theosophy refracted Hinduism through a liberal Western lens; it emphasized human equality rather than caste divisions and was consonant with scientific rationalism. It offered an intellectual home for Indians trying to reconcile competing cultures. Among the powerful figures who became Theosophists, at least for a time, were Motilal Nehru and, later, his son, Jawaharlal Nehru, the future Indian prime minister.

  From its new headquarters in India, Theosophy spread rapidly in Britain and Europe. Its growth was barely hindered by the scandal that forced Blavatsky to leave the subcontinent. In 1882 she and Olcott had settled on an estate in Adyar, just south of Chennai, which continues as the world headquarters of Theosophy today. Blavatsky had hired a down-on-her-luck old friend, Emma Coulomb, as a housekeeper and taken her into her confidence; Coulomb thus knew Blavatsky’s tricks. Increasingly resentful of her menial job, she used that knowledge to try to blackmail the Theosophical Society. Eventually, Coulomb revealed all she knew about the sliding panels and hidden entrances Blavatsky used to “materialize” objects, such as letters from her Himalayan Masters.