The Goddess Pose

by Michelle Goldberg

  There, Devi ran into an old friend whom she hadn’t seen in more than thirty years: Valentina Sanina. The last time they’d been together, in Kharkov after the Russian Revolution, Valentina had been an icy, remote ingénue pursued by Alexander Vertinsky. She’d come to New York in 1923 with her husband, George Schlee, and had become one of the country’s most celebrated fashion designers, known for her rigorously spare, architectural, wildly expensive couture. Valentina—she was by then known by only one name—dressed the most ravishing figures in Hollywood, many of whom would later become Devi’s students. No one was closer to her, though, than Greta Garbo.

  During the 1940s, Valentina, Schlee, and Garbo formed an inseparable triad. The exact romantic dynamic between them all is hard to discern. At the time, the rumor was that Valentina was sharing her husband with the actress, though it’s also possible that Valentina and Garbo, who had at least one female ex-lover in common, were romantically involved as well. Whatever her relationship with the Schlees, when she was with them, the usually retiring Garbo courted gossip: “The two women would dress in identical Valentina ensembles for high-profile nights out on the town—with George in the middle, Garbo on one arm, and Valentina on the other,” writes Valentina’s biographer. Here was an acquaintanceship Devi was happy to renew.

  When Devi showed up in New York, the threesome was fraying, with Garbo and Schlee settling into coupledom, to Valentina’s dismay.* Still, Valentina was at least outwardly friendly with Garbo, and she introduced Devi to the legendary actress. Garbo already knew something of yoga—in the 1930s she’d had an affair with the conductor Leopold Stokowski, a health fanatic who’d frequented Pierre Bernard’s Clarkstown Country Club. Thanks to Avshalomov, Devi knew Stokowski as well. The two women also had other friends, including the Huxleys, in common. Garbo was happy to hear that Devi had opened a studio in Los Angeles, and promised to come when she was on the West Coast.

  She did, and other stars did, too. Jennifer Jones took classes; a cameraman on her movie Gone to Earth complained about her habit of “standing on her head for several minutes just before a take while the assembled company waited in expectation.” Marion Mill Preminger, then the bored, frustrated wife of the director Otto Preminger, went, but struggled with the meditation at the end of class. “During one yoga lesson I was feeling very discouraged, thinking I should have gone to the jiujitsu [sic] lesson instead,” she recalled. “Just then I heard Indra saying, ‘Everybody look at Marion in the Lotus Position. She sits like a flower. She looks like a flower. She even thinks like a flower.’ ”

  Robert Balzer, the country’s preeminent wine writer and a prominent man-about-town, noticed that several friends “had taken on a new radiant vitality” after practicing with Devi. He began working with her as well, both at her Sunset Boulevard studio and on the lawn of his hilltop home in Beverly Hills, and soon he introduced her to his lover, Gloria Swanson. At the time, Swanson was enjoying a sort of Hollywood comeback, having just played the monstrous Norma Desmond, decayed relic of the silent film era, in Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder’s Grand Guignol masterpiece about the horror of aging in Hollywood.

  As a silent film star, Swanson had been the highest-paid actress of her day, and many people thought that Norma Desmond was an exaggerated version of her. The film made use of old Swanson footage; a clip meant to show Norma in her glory days came from Queen Kelly, a failed 1929 movie produced by Swanson’s ex-lover Joe Kennedy. After Sunset Boulevard came out, Swanson wrote of being bombarded with scripts “that were awful imitations of Sunset Boulevard, all featuring a deranged superstar crashing toward tragedy.”

  Yet Swanson, who was born the same year as Devi, was no Norma Desmond, and handled aging much better than many in her cohort, finding other pursuits when her career went into decline. In the late 1930s she’d formed a company, Multiprises, which brought to the United States scientists escaping Hitler’s Germany and financed their inventions in return for a share of the profits. Before Sunset Boulevard, she’d hosted one of the first live television talk shows, The Gloria Swanson Hour. Afterward, she acted on Broadway and started a fashion design business, helming a line called “Forever Young.” Long a vegetarian and, in her own words, a “fanatic about healthy food,” she campaigned against agricultural pesticides. (In 1976 she wed her sixth husband, William Dufty, the author of the health food tome Sugar Blues, which is still influential today.) An enthusiastic yoga student, Swanson became Devi’s closet friend in Hollywood, propelling Devi’s career and, with it, yoga’s popularity.

  The FBI kept following Devi, though no attempts were made to deport her. Meanwhile, as her renown grew, the publisher Prentice Hall contracted her to write a book. Sidney Field, a screenwriter who was the son of leading Theosophists, helped with the manuscript. Swanson suggested the title, based on the name of her fashion line, and Forever Young, Forever Healthy was published in the fall of 1953. The actress provided a cover endorsement, and other blurbs came from Linda Christian, soon to become the first Bond girl, and from the modern dance pioneer Ruth St. Denis, Martha Graham’s teacher.

  Forever Young, Forever Healthy is largely antimystical, as much an all-purpose self-help tome as a yoga treatise. Devi promises to teach readers how to sleep better, feel calmer and more cheerful, lose or gain weight, even rid themselves of wrinkles. The book combines lessons she learned from Krishnamacharya and Kuvalayananda with elements of New Thought and nature cure and even a light sprinkling of feminism. Its tone alternates between sternness and affectionate exasperation. “I shall not even make an attempt to persuade heavy smokers to give up their cigarettes or cigars, as they are not going to do it anyway,” she writes, proposing that smokers instead practice deep breathing to mitigate the effects of their habit.

  A chapter on diet includes commonsense instructions to avoid fried foods and refined sugar, and recommends vegetable juice and soy. It instructs readers to ignore stories they’ve heard “about someone’s ‘uncle’ who ate everything, drank everything, did everything wrong and yet lived to be a hundred.” You, she writes, “are not this superman uncle, or you wouldn’t be reading this book.”

  Toward the end of the book is a chapter titled “The Woman Beautiful,” which encapsulates Devi’s combination of pitilessness and encouragement. It begins with Devi urging women to stand naked before a full-length mirror and conduct frank self-appraisals, her words reading like the dictates of a cruel sorority sister. Ask yourself, she urges, what you don’t like about your body. “Your hips perhaps? Or your stomach?” Then, she continues, figure out what you did to make it that way. Is it because you take too many drinks, or eat too much or smoke too much…Or perhaps you are too lazy and do not exercise enough.” Not for Devi the gospel of self-acceptance. Her message was clear: if you’re not beautiful, it’s your fault.

  Yet, in a style later perfected by countless women’s magazines, she follows up her undermining with a message of empowerment, telling women to attend to their looks in order to be confident of their femininity as they move out of traditional roles. Women, she writes, are moving through a period of historical transformation: “Being awakened to a new freedom, they will probably have to suffer even more now than they did a generation ago when they lacked it.” Ultimately, she believed, the growing antagonism between the sexes “will continue until man grants woman equality as a human being,” but she urges women to maintain their femininity even as they compete with men economically. “She must stop imitating him, his attitude and manners, and become intrinsically herself,” she writes.

  By today’s standards, this seems a bit reactionary. But in 1953, with much of the country in thrall to the stifling cult of domesticity that Betty Friedan describes in The Feminine Mystique, parts of Devi’s message would have seemed liberating. Other self-help books of the time acknowledged that women were restless and unhappy, and blamed it on their failure to adapt to a life of housewifery. The enormously influential, viciously antifeminist book Modern Woman: The Lost Sex published in 1947,
claims that women were suffering because they’d attempted to find satisfaction “by the route of male achievement” instead of the female path of nurture. Devi, by contrast, assumed women were suffering because they wanted equality but didn’t yet have it, and she offered a soothing ritual to help them cope in the meantime.

  Pop Freudianism was increasingly influential in the 1950s and was frequently used to castigate women for what one writer called a “masculinity complex.” (One of the coauthors of Modern Woman: The Lost Sex was the psychoanalyst Marynia Farnham.) In her book, Devi borrows from Freud as well, but to different ends. “It is a well known fact that sex repression often results in sadism, masochism, extreme cruelty and other abnormalities,” she writes. She is firm about the duty of men to please their wives sexually and says little about the reverse. Sex, she writes, is a “very important, if not all-important, factor in marriage and an emotionally mature and loving husband is the best person to help his wife to overcome her frigidity, provided he himself hasn’t caused it by being a clumsy, crude, and uninspiring lover.”

  None of this has much to do with yoga, but it certainly spoke to the frustrations that, at the time of the book’s publication, drove at least some people to the practice. And though traditionally yoga had been employed to sublimate the libido, Devi writes that for Westerners, it could help people express their sexual energies “more beautifully and more fully than they ever have before.”

  Only in the last forty pages does Devi get into asanas, giving instructions for familiar poses such as the plow, bow, lotus, shoulder stand, and headstand. Initially, she and Swanson did a photo shoot to accompany this section, practicing together outdoors in front of a flowering hedge. In one picture, they stand side by side with opposite legs in half lotus, their knees touching. They’re the same height, and both all in black; Swanson is wearing a strapless tank top with a jaunty little bow around her neck.

  At the last minute, though, Swanson informed Devi that Prentice Hall had decided to save the pictures for the book she was writing, the never-completed Beauty after Forty. There was little Devi could say; Swanson was by far the more famous and powerful of the pair. Instead, Devi appears in the book’s photos either alone or guiding a group of a half-dozen female students, most with full makeup and pin-curled hair, looking almost like chorus girls. Jack Macfadden, stepson of the exercise guru Bernarr Macfadden, posed for a few shots as well, including one of the difficult peacock pose, an arm balance in which the rest of the body is held off the ground horizontally, parallel to the floor.

  Swanson helped launch the book, presenting Devi and Forever Young, Forever Healthy to a crowd of fashionable women and curious journalists at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Walter Winchell, the gimlet-eyed gossip writer, mentioned the event in his syndicated column, which appeared in more than two thousand newspapers: “Gloria Swanson’s latest ‘kick’—introducing her Yoga to socialites.”

  Forever Young, Forever Healthy quickly became a best seller, spreading Devi’s fame nationwide. “Among the ‘sideline’ stars of Hollywood is Indra Devi, who teaches movie stars to eat moss and potato water, stand on their heads, cut down on romance and tie their legs into knots,” began a wire service story on Devi. The “discomfort…known as yoga,” continued reporter Aline Mosby, “appeals to such luminaries as Robert Ryan, Suzanne Ball, Gloria Swanson, Linda Christian and Jennifer Jones.” Visiting Devi’s studio, “one of the curiosities of the Sunset Strip,” Mosby didn’t see the appeal. The class, she wrote, consisted of “Indra standing on her head and me trying a leg-knotting torture known as the ‘lotus position.’ ”

  Other journalists proved gamer. Jack Zaiman, a columnist for the Hartford Courant, described trying to do a headstand at the YMCA after reading the book. “What are you doing?” asked his friend Wardy Waterman. “I’m a Yoga,” Zaiman replied proudly, before crashing to the floor.

  Soon Prentice Hall signed Devi up for two more books. She crisscrossed the country giving lectures, often trying, at the request of her many hosts, to rope Swanson into appearing with her. PLEASE DO NOT INVOLVE ME IN ANY SPEECHES, LUNCHEONS OR ANYTHING ELSE, Swanson cabled Devi on February 15, 1954. I WILL ONLY HAVE A FEW DAYS WHICH I HOPE TO SPEND WITH MY FAMILY AND FEW FRIENDS BEFORE I START A VERY STRENUOUS TOUR. WOULD YOU PLEASE SEND ME THE NAME OF XXXXX THE DOCTOR WHO WROTE A BOOK ON FEET. LOVE GLORIA.

  If there was a note of rebuke in Swanson’s message, Devi doesn’t seem to have picked up on it. Perhaps she was too happy to register anything negative. At fifty-four, she had finally found major professional success. Perhaps more important, she was in love again, and not with Avshalomov. Further, thanks to her new partner, all her immigration problems were about to disappear. At the end of a four-page letter to Swanson—Devi addressed her as “my beloved”—she gushed over her renewed sense of tranquility and joy by the side of a “saint in disguise.” Her words made it clear that this saint was someone Swanson knew well. Both she and her paramour, wrote Devi, “think about you, talk about you, and love you, my wonderful Gloria.”

  * * *

  * Garbo eventually bought an apartment in the same building as the one Schlee and his wife shared on East Fifty-Second Street, and Valentina came to hate the actress. After George Schlee’s death, the two women remained locked in a sort of cold war, each refusing to move but doing everything possible to avoid each other, though in a 1978 letter to Devi written in rhyming doggerel (and signed, jokingly, Maharajah Indor Schlee), Valentina seems less hostile than gently mocking: “I hope that my friend ‘that wants to be alone’ / Exercises in the open air, on her own lawn / As I think it will do her a lot of good / And keep her always in an excelent [sic] mood.”

  · CHAPTER 13 ·

  SASHA’S MARRIAGE to Ghermanoff didn’t last, and by the 1950s, she was once again living with Devi. Sometime in 1951 or 1952 she grew sick. In her autobiography, Devi says that Sasha developed a heart condition, but in reality, she had breast cancer, a disease that was then wrapped up with stigma and shame. It was natural that Devi would take her to see Sigfrid Knauer, a German doctor living in Los Angeles. He was known for his spiritualism and for alternative cancer treatments such as Iscador, derived from mistletoe, a remedy that today is widely used in some European countries but considered quackery by most mainstream American doctors.

  While in Knauer’s office, Devi said something private to her mother in Russian, assuming the doctor wouldn’t understand. When he spoke to her in Russian in response, she blushed. They started talking, and she learned that they’d traveled similar trajectories in their early lives. She quickly came to feel a deep connection with him.

  Born in Kiev in 1894, Sigfrid Knauer studied medicine at Germany’s University of Jena before becoming a pupil of the Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner, a onetime leader of the Theosophical Society in Germany, Switzerland, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  Unlike most prominent Theosophists, Steiner rooted his spirituality in the esoteric Christian tradition, not Eastern religion. (He did, however, incorporate ideas of karma and rebirth.) As Theosophy became increasingly identified with Hinduism and Buddhism, Steiner moved away from it, finally splitting with the society over Annie Besant’s deification of Krishnamurti. In 1913 he founded his own movement, the Anthroposophical Society.

  Under its banner, Steiner undertook an epic number of projects. He developed all-encompassing theories of political and social organization meant to rival capitalism and communism. He elaborated a metaphysical doctrine in which humankind is menaced by two sinister forces—Lucifer, the spirit of pride, and Ahriman, the spirit of materialism. He had theories about art and architecture that he put into practice in building his grand headquarters in Switzerland, the Goetheanum, after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

  His pedagogical system has had the most far-reaching impact; Waldorf schools, with their emphasis on nurturing the creativity and uniqueness of every student, have been very influential in the world of progressive private education. But for Indra Devi’s story, w
hat’s most important is Steiner’s creation, in concert with Ita Wegman, of Anthroposophical medicine.

  Like many practitioners of homeopathic medicine, Steiner believed that illness stems from imbalances in the body, but in his view, the body can’t be limited to material, physical processes. “Man is what he is through physical body, ether body, soul (astral body) and I (spirit),” Steiner and Wegman write in their book Extending Practical Medicine: Fundamental Principles Based on the Science of the Spirit. Illness, they argue, is an upset in the balance between these elements, and for health, “it is necessary to find medicines that will restore the upset balance.” (The etheric body, in this formulation, might be analogized to the concept of energy, or prana, in yogic thought.)

  Using these principles, Steiner developed an entire pharmacopeia. Anthroposophic medicine is often based on concordances between physical substances and bodily dysfunctions, in which like is thought to cure like. So, for example, rock salt is used to treat diseases including chronic rhinitis (stuffy, runny nose) because salt, like mucus, can be both crusty and, when dissolved, liquid. Anthroposophic medicine is intended to complement, rather than replace, Western medicine. Doctors working in the field are supposed to get conventional medical degrees and then supplement their knowledge with Steiner’s system for gaining spiritual and even supernatural insights—which is precisely what Knauer had done.

  Knauer had an Anthroposophical medical practice in pre–World War II Berlin, where he served as the doctor at the local Waldorf School and, according to an obituary, treated various aristocrats. When the Nazis came to power, he, his wife, Edith, and their four children fled the country, landing in New York in 1939. Unable to get a medical license in that state, he set out for Los Angeles, where he became the doctor to the local Anthroposophical community and to artists, celebrities, and ordinary people who turned to alternative medicine when conventional cures failed them.