Devi made little effort to contact those who did. Upon arriving, she doesn’t seem to have looked up her old master Krishnamurti, which is in some sense surprising—after all, she’d once traveled halfway around the world just to be close to him. A person reinventing herself, though, doesn’t always welcome reminders of the past. Krishnamurti knew her as Eugenia, the Theosophist and lovesick diplomatic wife, not as an experienced yogini, as women practitioners of yoga are sometimes called. Besides, while Devi was a warm person, she also had a starkly unsentimental side. When a chapter of her life closed, she rarely tried to revisit it, so that people who knew her in one incarnation heard little about those who populated her earlier lives. Leaving the past behind was both a spiritual philosophy and a survival strategy, allowing her to thrive in the midst of calamitous instability. She was generally happy to see people she’d known before, but she didn’t seek them out.
In the 1990s, Devi traveled to Moscow to give a talk, accompanied by David and Iana Lifar, the Argentine couple who were her constant companions during the last years of her life. A woman came to her hotel claiming to be the daughter of a cousin of hers, which, if true, would have made her Devi’s only known living relative. The two talked for a while, and Devi gave her some money, because she seemed to be quite poor. After forty-five minutes, though, Devi called David and Iana and said that she wanted the woman to go, but she wasn’t taking the hint. Iana, who speaks Russian, came and urged her out. The woman was quite upset, telling David and Iana that she hadn’t wanted money; she’d wanted to spend time with her “aunt Zhenia.”
At breakfast the next morning, David asked Devi why she’d been so eager to get away from the woman. “David,” she told him, “I try to live in the eternal now. This lady belongs to my past.” She was, for the most part, kind toward those around her, but one of her main teachings, said David, “was not to be attached to anyone,” and she practiced it with only a few powerful exceptions.
So, in Los Angeles, rather than seek comfort in her history, Devi steamed forward, looking up Bernardine Fritz, a friend of Emily Hahn’s. Fritz had been a doyenne of society in Shanghai, where she’d hosted one of the few salons that brought expatriates together with Chinese artists and intellectuals, though she’d left China before Devi arrived. In Los Angeles, Fritz once again became known as a glittering entertainer, hosting Sunday lunches and cocktail hours in a hilltop home full of Chinese art. She threw a party to introduce Devi to her friends, including many who worked in Hollywood. They gravitated to the exotic newcomer with the saffron sari, eastern European accent, and Indian name.
Fritz was particularly close to Aldous Huxley, who, with his wife, Maria, was at the center of Hollywood’s literary and spiritual scenes. As a young British writer, Huxley, a tall and skinny sophisticate who, with his stooped posture and thick glasses, looked rather like a handsome praying mantis, had been famous for his arch skepticism. (One newspaper story about him was headlined “Aldous Huxley: The Man Who Hates God.”) Ultimately, though, he found a life of cultivated cynicism insupportable, and under the influence of his friend Gerald Heard, an Anglo-Irish writer who would become one of California’s New Age pioneers, he began experimenting with spirituality. (The critic William Tindall lamented Heard’s influence on Huxley and mocked their life in California, where, “when they are not walking with Greta Garbo or writing for the cinema, they eat nuts and lettuce perhaps and inoffensively meditate.”) Yogic meditation helped Huxley break through a debilitating writer’s block. By the time he arrived in the United States for a pacifist lecture tour on the eve of World War II, he was convinced that only spiritual renewal could head off global annihilation.
Though their American sojourn was meant to be temporary, Aldous and Maria ended up settling in Hollywood, where he tried to capitalize on his literary prestige by writing for the movies. They became part of a circle that included Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Anita Loos, and Christopher Isherwood.
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Devi knew Huxley’s work, particularly his 1937 book Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals. She’d quoted it at length in Yoga: The Technique of Health and Happiness: “The ideal man is the nonattached man; non-attached to his bodily sensations and lusts; nonattached to his craving for power…non-attached to his exclusive loves…not even to science, art, speculation, philanthropy.”
It’s a sign of how quickly Devi moved to the center of things that, soon after arriving in America, she was invited to spend a weekend with the writer and his wife. All that she recorded of this visit is that they discussed health food—Maria warned her that American produce is sprayed with poisonous pesticides.
Like many in Hollywood, the Huxleys experimented with their diets as well as their consciousnesses. “How can you expect to think in anything but a negative way, when you’ve got chronic intestinal poisoning?” asks the Buddhist Dr. Miller in Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza, the 1936 novel that marked the author’s turn to the spiritual themes that came to dominate his work. In that book, the narrator, a standin for Huxley, moves from jaded libertinism to a desultory stab at guerilla revolution before his encounter with the enlightened doctor saves him. The doctor lectures him on “the correlation between religion and diet…The fact is, of course, that we think as we eat.”
Everywhere in the emerging New Age culture was an assumed connection between health and salvation. That link, of course, is at the heart of modern hatha yoga’s power. (It exists in evangelical Christianity, too, but the cause and effect are reversed: salvation can lead to health, rather than vice versa.) Yoga as it eventually came to be practiced in the United States elevates exercise into a sacrament, merging the contradictory quests for beauty and selflessness. It’s a kind of secular magic, promising that by assuming certain physical positions, you can bring about specific changes in the body and soul—clearer skin and clearer thoughts. It’s alchemy for a disenchanted age, rendered plausible to Westerners by translating esoteric tantric terms into the language of glands and hormones. Yet, until Devi arrived, no one in Los Angeles was teaching it.
There had been hatha yoga teachers in the United States before, most famously Pierre Bernard, né Perry Baker, who, as an occult-minded teenager in 1889, had the fantastic good luck to meet a tantric yogi in Lincoln, Nebraska. Sylvais Hamati, who had come from Calcutta, may have worked on the western railroads or, as Robert Love, Bernard’s biographer writes, he may have been a traveling entertainer, “a mind reader or a hypnotist, like ‘Professor Craig of Hebron, the boy prodigy’ who promised Nebraskans he could place a subject in a ‘cataleptic state’ for five days.” Hamati taught Bernard “advanced physical culture” (i.e., asanas), pranayama, and meditation.
Bernard first used his skills as a sideshow performer in San Francisco, putting himself into a trance and lying tranquil while his assistant inserted a needle through his lip and cheek and a hatpin through his tongue. He started a secret society known as the Tantrik Order, “a band of dashing gypsy occultists who traveled in a pack, lived together in communes, and conducted their mystical business late in the evenings,” as Love writes, business that included various sexual rites.
In 1910, Bernard was the subject of major national scandal in New York, charged with abducting two of his young female pupils, both of whom he was sleeping with. “ ‘Hindoo Priest’ Lures Girls…Weird Dance His Cure,” blared the Chicago Daily Tribune. “Wild Orgies in the Temple of ‘Om,’ ” screamed the San Francisco Chronicle. He was held for three months in New York’s infamous Tombs before the case fell apart; though the charges were ultimately dismissed, he was disgraced.
Bernard’s arrest was just one of several American yoga scandals that took place in the early twentieth century. “Coroner Holds ‘Hindu Yogi,’ ” read a 1910 New York Tribune headline about the arrest of Samri Ellis—his real name was Charles F. Balwanz—in the shooting death of his assistant. The same year, the Los Angeles Times reported on the arrest of Sakharam G. Pandit, “the Hindu with the ‘hypnotic eye,’ whose Ori
ental religious practices have been denounced by many of his women students.” In 1911 the paper ran a story about women who had “abandoned home and husband and children to join the sun worshippers in the study of yoga.” Its headline: “A Hindu Apple for Modern Eve: The Cult of the Yogis Lures Women to Destruction.”
Unlike most other tabloid yogis, Bernard was able to rebuild his reputation, attracting socialites and celebrities such as cosmetics queen Helena Rubinstein, actress Ethel Barrymore, and Frances Payne Bolton, later the first woman elected to Congress from Ohio. Eventually, he founded the Clarkstown Country Club in Nyack, New York, a Jazz Age destination where a fashionable crowd enjoyed asana classes, concerts, baseball games, and elaborate amateur circuses. “Lawyers and teachers and heiresses would be transformed into clowns, tumblers, high-wire artists, magicians, trapezists, animal trainers, barkers and prop masters,” writes Love.
The Clarkstown Country Club wasn’t the only place teaching hatha yoga in upstate New York in the early 1920s. After founding the Yoga Institute in a suburb of Bombay in 1918, Sri Yogendra came to the United States, hoping to popularize his hatha system. In 1920 he set up a yoga institute on Bear Mountain in Harriman, New York, working with medical doctors and meeting American health gurus such as Bernarr Macfadden and John Harvey Kellogg.
But Yogendra stayed in the country less than five years, and thanks to the Immigration Act of 1924, which banned East Asians and Indians from coming to live in the United States, he was unable to return. The Clarkstown Country Club fell into disrepair during the Depression, and yoga retained its reputation as something racy, disreputable, and perhaps a bit ridiculous. Edith Wharton’s satirical 1927 novel Twilight Sleep features a society matron in thrall to a “Mahatma” whose “eurythmic exercises…had reduced her hips after everything else had failed.” She later works furiously to quash an incipient scandal involving several young socialites, her daughter-in-law among them, implicated in lascivious activities at the mahatma’s retreat center, “Dawnside.”
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When Devi arrived in Los Angeles, there were one or two people in California who’d been trained by Bernard and offered private lessons, but the field was largely empty. Indeed, when Devi gave a lecture to celebrity nutritionist Gayelord Hauser’s “Eaters Anonymous” group in Los Angeles, one attendee listened to the whole thing thinking that it was about yogurt.
Yet if most Los Angelinos didn’t know what hatha yoga was, many were eager to learn, given the growing fashion for Eastern spirituality and the perennial obsession with improving the body. Encouraged by Fritz and her friends, Devi leased a studio at 8806 Sunset Boulevard, on the notorious Sunset Strip. (The legendary nightclubs Mocambo and Ciro’s were both a few blocks away.) Her classes were only moderately challenging and resolutely free of religion; she went to great pains to explain the practice in scientific rather than spiritual terms. Yoga, as she presented it, was first and foremost a commonsense exercise and relaxation system, utterly practical and wholesome, promising transformative results without the grunting agony of other physical culture regimens.
Slowly, her fame started building, initially under the name Indira Devi, which she still sometimes used during her first couple of years in Hollywood. In February 1949, Paul Bragg, former wrestler, bodybuilder, and nationally famous health food guru, hosted a three-night lecture series for her at LA’s fifteen-hundred-seat Embassy Auditorium. “Her amazing exhibition of Yoga Health exercises will leave you breathless!” promised an ad in the Los Angeles Times. “Indira Devi shows how to recharge the batteries of your mind and body with Vital Cosmic Energy.”
Devi’s mother soon followed her to the United States, which surely pleased her. Soon Sasha was creating a life of her own in California—shortly after she arrived, she married George Ghermanoff, a Turkish-born actor who was a couple of years younger than she. (He’d had tiny, uncredited roles in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Buccaneer and Rouben Mamoulian’s The Mark of Zorro.) It’s not clear if she was still living with Devi in the summer of 1948, when Avshalomov arrived, uninvited, and moved into Devi’s apartment in the Yamashiro building.
Unlike Devi, Avshalomov had a hard time gaining a foothold in Los Angeles. He hoped to stage The Great Wall there and to make money by writing scores for movies. While Devi tried to use her growing connections on his behalf, none of his plans came to anything. Broke, he considered taking a job in a record shop, but was ultimately too proud. He was not, however, too proud to let Devi support him; even after he found his own apartment, she paid his rent. This could not have been easy for her, since money was tight. To raise funds, she managed, through an intermediary, to sell what remained of her and Strakaty’s interest in the Shanghai noodle company, for which she received $4,500.
Struggling, Avshalomov talked about going back to Shanghai. “[P]robably when I am finally convinced that all my efforts here are in vain, I will take that step—much as I would hate to lose face,” he writes. His inability to take care of himself maddened his son, who had a budding music career of his own. “I felt that underlying his inability to get professional work as a musician was his 19th century assumption that society owed it to artists to support them,” writes Jacob. It must have frustrated Devi as well, though she never wrote a word about it—a depressed, deadbeat, married Russian boyfriend wouldn’t have been helpful to the image she was cultivating.
Avshalomov hoped to bring his wife, Tanya, to the United States and imagined that he could remain married to her while continuing his affair with Devi. “No matter what I do I will hurt some one badly,” he writes. “I cant [sic] be cruel to Tanya and leave her, my only hope is that she will agree to tolerate a triangular situation. Asking too much, I know. Yet my feelings toward both women are deep and sincere.”
Meanwhile, though Devi didn’t know it, this love triangle was threatening her future in the United States. Around the time that Avshalomov left China for California, someone sent an anonymous letter to the American consulate in Shanghai accusing Devi of being an “important Soviet agent.” The author had an imperfect command of English, writing, “Before this war she spent few years in India, where she learned Ioga’s [sic] science and exercises and married old and rich Czech commercial ahache [sic].” Though Devi is “not yong” [sic] and “not pretty,” the writer said, she is “very intelligent” and has “very attractive manners.” Under the “veil” of yoga, the letter said, she had “penetrated everywhere.”
The charge was absurd, as everyone whom the FBI interviewed about Devi pointed out. Edwin Stanton, the former American consul in Shanghai and husband of one of her first students, Josie, vouched for her, writing that although the “philosophical concepts of yoga…are very broad and liberal in nature, neither I nor my wife recollect ever hearing her make any statements or remarks which would indicate that she is a Communist or ‘a fellow traveler.’ ” Colonel M. B. DePass, who had been an American military attaché in Shanghai, told the FBI that he believed Devi would make a good American citizen. Less kindly, the American judge Milton Helmick told investigators that Devi couldn’t possibly be a Soviet agent because she wasn’t “sufficiently intelligent or discreet to be entrusted by the Soviets with undercover assignments.” DePass’s former secretary, another of Devi’s students, told investigators that the anonymous letter must have come from Tanya Avshalomov. When Devi was finally interviewed, she had the same suspicion.
Yet proving her innocence wasn’t easy. This was the height of the McCarthy era. Congressional hearings into Communist subversion in Hollywood had been going on since 1947. Devi was a Russian with multiple aliases and a suspiciously bohemian lifestyle. When FBI agents first reported that they had found nothing incriminating about Indra Devi, Hoover told them to look harder. “In view of the original allegations in this case it is not believed that sufficient investigation has been conducted to definitely disprove those allegations,” he writes in a March 16, 1950, memo about her.
This was a problem for Devi. Her status in the country was tenu
ous. With the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, Jan’s diplomatic career had come to an end, and the new regime refused to let him leave the country. Devi had entered the United States as the wife of a diplomat; when the Immigration and Naturalization Service realized that her husband had no official status, she was told she couldn’t stay. Being under investigation as a Communist agent didn’t help her case. One June 13, 1950, with her status still unresolved, a warrant was issued for her arrest.
· CHAPTER 12 ·
EVEN AS her immigration struggles threatened to derail her American life, Devi was thriving as never before, as socialites and actresses began to discover what yoga could do for them. In 1950 she was invited to teach at an outpost of Elizabeth Arden’s Maine Chance spa near Phoenix, Arizona, where for around four hundred dollars a week—more than thirty-eight hundred in today’s dollars—wealthy women went to live in “sumptuous starvation,” in the words of Life magazine. Days passed in a tightly regimented schedule of exercise classes and beauty treatments. It was as square an environment as could be imagined, a place where spiritual aspiration, if it existed, was sublimated into a Sisyphean battle against weight gain and aging. Devi was extremely well received, and by teaching there, she both popularized and further domesticated yoga, turning it into a hobby for respectable bourgeois ladies. This is one of the ironies of hatha yoga in America: rich housewives discovered it well before it became the avant-garde enthusiasm of beats and hippies.
Arden, the perpetually pink-clad creator of a cosmetics empire, was a Canadian parvenu with a weakness for aristocrats. She had a special fondness for White Russians and a long-standing fascination with yoga. She must have been happy to find Devi, an expert asana teacher with excellent social credentials and no hint of the sort of impropriety associated with earlier generations of American yogis. After a stint in Arizona, Devi, ignoring the warrant for her arrest, spent the summer season at Arden’s original Maine Chance spa, in Mount Vernon, Maine. In the fall, Arden brought Devi to New York City to instruct her personally.
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