Like his mentor, Knauer rejected a materialistic explanation of ill health. “Illness is a part of man’s evolution,” he writes. “It is a challenge, a warning, a stimulation. It is an indication that man has failed somewhere. To overcome this…[h]e has to realize that he stands with his ego between the spiritual and the earthly worlds and that he has to strengthen his spiritual forces to be able to integrate them into his earthly existence.”
Yet Knauer didn’t practice mind cure; he incorporated all sorts of physical techniques and substances into his work. He took what he learned from Steiner and built on it, drawing on acupuncture and Russian folk medicine—and, later, yoga. Often, he used a pendulum to make diagnoses. “He would have a shelf full of little medicines, just crowded with little bottles,” one of his patients, John Brousseau, told me. “He didn’t advertise it much, but he would have a little silver pendulum in one hand, and he would pick up the particular medicine and place it on the spot that was giving trouble. And depending on the pendulum, it would either go back and forth or it would go round and round in a circle.” The motion, says Brousseau, would tell Knauer whether or not his patient had a “harmonic convergence with the substance.”
Eccentric as this may sound, Knauer’s patients considered him an unparalleled healer. Some still talk about his bedside manner—the warmth behind his brusque, dry sense of humor. “He was a very sharp wit, but he was very gentle,” says Jean Brousseau, John’s wife. “His hands were so gentle.”
In her memoir, Devi says that Knauer cured her mother, but in fact she needed a mastectomy. Nevertheless, her faith in his healing powers was strong, and shortly after they met, when she needed medical advice for a chapter in Forever Young, Forever Healthy, she turned to her new friend, and eventually a romance developed.
Knauer had lost his first wife to cancer in 1948, a death that haunted him and spurred his obsession with the disease. When Devi met him, he was married to his second wife, the gorgeous, blonde, and much younger Vera von Hossenfeldt von Langer Wisbar, the daughter of a German insurance salesman. Described by one writer as “one of history’s most infamous and unabashed gold-diggers,” Vera had become a baroness thanks to her first husband. An aspiring actress, she then traded the baron for the director Frank Wisbar, and together they left Germany for Los Angeles after the start of World War II. But Wisbar failed to make inroads at any of the American studios, and Vera was reduced to working as a department store salesgirl and then as Knauer’s receptionist. Evidently, Knauer seemed a better prospect than the husband she had, so she secured a divorce from Wisbar in Las Vegas and married her boss.
The union was short-lived. A few months after Devi met Knauer, Vera left him and decamped to Germany, where, in 1952, she married Alfried Krupp, the German industrialist and Nazi war criminal. A major supplier of weaponry to Hitler’s regime and an enthusiastic employer of slave labor, Krupp had been sentenced by the Allies to twelve years in prison for crimes against humanity. Vera, who had known Krupp in her youth, wrote to him when he was locked up. When, after three years, the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany arranged to have him pardoned, she and Krupp fell into each other’s arms. As a wedding gift, Krupp gave his new bride the most expensive Porsche on the market.
It seems fair to assume that Knauer was eager to move on. In Devi he found a partner, a woman who spoke his languages and shared his background and his passions. He adored her catalyzing energy. Later in life, he would often tell friends that she was an “activator—wherever she goes, she awakens and quickens and activates things.” They were married on March 14, 1953, and bought a house in Hollywood with a secluded open patio facing Nichols Canyon. Devi insisted on separate bedrooms, believing that privacy and autonomy were both spiritually necessary and key to lasting romance. Her indulgent, gallant new husband—whom she always called “Doctor”—ended her immigration problems, since he was an American citizen. There’s no record of her divorcing Strakaty, though if she was a bigamist, no authority noticed.
Avshalomov was blindsided, telling his son that he’d been left for a hypnotist. Tanya felt vindicated, writing to Avshalomov’s son, “I begged him to leave her, predicted what would happen. But he said he would never leave her, would rather leave me. So he did, and I dont [sic] want him back.”
Together, Devi and Knauer formed an alternative-medicine power couple. While Devi instructed movie stars, Knauer became the private physician to the celebrated composer Igor Stravinsky, a close friend of Aldous Huxley. “Knauer, together with his Russian-born and Indian bred wife, Indra Devi, deserves a place in any biography of Stravinsky in the Hollywood years; by age, cultural background…and holistic medical philosophy, he was closer to Stravinsky than any of his other American-period physicians,” writes the composer’s friend and biographer Robert Craft.
Some who loved Stravinsky thought Knauer a dangerous crank. A book that Stravinsky’s second wife, Vera, cowrote with Craft laments the way the composer fell under the influence of his idiosyncratic doctor, with his “homeopathic prescriptions, his system of diagnoses by pendulum, and his belief in rejuvenation by the ingestion of minced fetuses.”
There’s no evidence that this last, ghoulish detail was true, but some of Knauer’s remedies were unusual even by the standards of alternative medicine. Brenda Barnetson, Jean Brousseau’s sister, recalls Knauer giving shots of a preparation he said was made with ground dinosaur fossils, a treatment for radiation poisoning, which he believed was endemic. “When you got an injection of this, your body went whoosh and warmed up; it was amazing,” she says.
However strange his methods, he evoked intense loyalty among many patients. His practice was so full that even the very famous would wait hours for appointments at his Sunset Boulevard office. “His other patients often proved fascinating as they all waited together, such as Marilyn Monroe, Dale Evans, Michael Chekhov…and others,” writes Henry Barnes, a historian of the Steiner movement. “Igor Stravinsky would keep Mala Powers fascinated in the waiting room as he read musical scores the way most people read books.”
Devi’s career was thriving as well. Interest in yoga was growing all over the country, in part because of mounting concern about the toll that stress was taking on Americans’ health. Stress is now such a ubiquitous concept that it’s hard to imagine that it hasn’t always been with us, but according to Anne Harrington, a historian of science at Harvard, preoccupation with stress didn’t become widespread until the 1950s. That’s when Hans Selye, a physician and biochemist at the University of Montreal, formulated the idea that a constant state of tension or alarm creates a cascading hormonal reaction that, if unrelieved, causes chronic, predictable physical damage. He called this state “stress,” a term he took from metallurgy. It quickly came to replace the earlier concept of neurasthenia, which was seen as a nervous disorder brought about by chronic exhaustion and was treated, at least in women, with total bed rest and a heavy diet.
Selye’s scientific colleagues were skeptical at first, but the general public embraced the idea, happy to have a name for the inchoate but widely shared feeling of anxious malaise brought on by modern life. The 1950s, after all, was a worry-choked decade. The threat of nuclear annihilation thrummed relentlessly in the background even as the country reveled in a Technicolor consumerist boom. Fleeing the cities for exploding suburbs, young families found themselves cut off from traditional social networks. The cult of domesticity kept many women isolated in their homes and feeling ashamed of their lack of fulfillment there. Men, toiling in increasingly impersonal bureaucracies, experienced another sort of relentless pressure; as Harrington points out, these were the years that gave us expressions such as the “rat race.”
Popular books of the time worried about this constant low-level unease. David Riesman’s epochal The Lonely Crowd diagnosed a new middle class made up of “other-directed” people, conformists who constantly recalibrated their ideas about how to live based on the lives of their peers. Writes Riesman, “The other-directed person must be
able to receive signals from far and near; the sources are many, the changes rapid…[O]ne prime psychological lever of the other-directed person is a diffuse anxiety” (his italics).
Beneath their surface placidity, Americans were desperate for relief. When the pharmaceutical company Carter-Wallace introduced Miltown, the first prescription minor tranquilizer, in 1955, it quickly because the fastest-selling drug in U.S. history. (By 1957, an astonishing third of all prescriptions were for tranquilizers.) The pills were particularly popular in Hollywood, where the famous Schwab’s drugstore on Sunset Boulevard couldn’t keep them in stock. A 1955 ad in the Los Angeles Times trumpeted: “Attention physicians: just arrived by air, another shipment of MILTOWN. Your prescriptions can now be filled.
For those who wanted a different kind of balm, yoga beckoned. “Before a new student joins my class, he is usually asked, among other things, what is his reason for taking up Yoga,” writes Devi. “The great majority, I find, want to learn how to relax…One constantly hears people saying, ‘I am all on edge,’ ‘My nerves are in bad shape,’ ‘It’s nothing but my poor nerves.’ ”
As it happens, yoga is uniquely suited to addressing stress. Researchers have found that some of the most common Western claims for the benefits of yoga, particularly the type of gentle hatha yoga Devi taught, are overblown. Many people take up yoga to lose weight, but it turns out that the practice can actually lower the metabolism rather than raise it, meaning that, in the words of one physiologist, it can create “a propensity for weight gain and fat deposition.” Even the most vigorous styles of yoga do little for aerobic conditioning. A 2010 review of more than eighty studies of yoga and other types of exercise found that yoga improved people’s lives as much or more than conventional workouts in a whole host of ways—save “those involving physical fitness,” a rather significant exception.
Yet if yoga doesn’t generally burn calories, it does wonders for the nervous system. The 2010 review found that yoga decreases blood pressure, “reverses the negative impact of stress on the immune system,” lowers anxiety, and increases “feelings of emotional, social, and spiritual well-being.” Further, it is more beneficial than other types of exercise in reducing fatigue and sleep disturbance. The review speculated that yoga works by calming the sympathetic nervous system and what’s called the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which produces stress hormones. Yoga, it seems, can actually help undo the body’s natural but maladaptive response to the modern world. No wonder the more overwhelming the postwar world seemed, the more people flocked to it.
Among those who did was Yehudi Menuhin, one of the greatest violinists of the twentieth century. A child prodigy who performed his first violin solo with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra at the age of seven, Menuhin fell into an artistic funk after World War II. He discovered yoga when he picked up a book about it in the waiting room of a New Zealand osteopath and taught himself some asanas. In 1952, while on tour in India, he boasted to local newspapers about his ability to stand on his head, prompting Jawaharlal Nehru to goad him into a demonstration, in full evening dress, during a state banquet. The prime minister informed him that he had a long way to go and proceeded to demonstrate proper form as assorted dignitaries looked on. Later, India’s president arranged for Menuhin to attend a class taught by the country’s oldest practicing yogi. Then, in Bombay, the violinist began searching for a teacher who could travel with him.
He was, according to his biographer, besieged by offers. The person he finally chose was Krishnamacharya’s brother-in-law B. K. S. Iyengar. When Devi was studying with Krishnamacharya, Iyengar was still a cowed, scrawny young man who’d been forced into yoga to earn his livelihood. Yet, in the late 1930s, Krishnamacharya sent Iyengar north to the city of Pune to teach in colleges and gymnasiums, and there, away from his fearsome master, he developed a genuine passion for the practice and grew into one of the most innovative yoga teachers in the world.
At first, Iyengar started reading about yoga in order to improve both his English and his teaching, knowing that if he failed as an instructor, he’d have to go back to Mysore. “Freedom had come to me by chance and I did not want to lose it at any cost,” he writes. “If I returned, I would have to rejoin my guruji.” He quickly realized how little consistency there was in most asana guides. “I felt that these practitioners were presenting asana according to their whims and fancies,” he writes. So he set out to refine and standardize the asanas, developing a slow, exacting, anatomically precise style that employed props to help students perfect their alignment.
Iyengar’s instruction had a profound impact on Menuhin. As he learned to relax, critics detected a new intensity and an elevated level of artistry in his playing. “In recent years there has been evidence of a struggle going on within him,” wrote New York Times critic Howard Taubman. “Whatever private difficulties he has had with his art, he seemed to have conquered them.”
Menuhin gave yoga much of the credit. In 1953, Life magazine did a multipage spread about his devotion to the discipline, headlined “Yehudi’s Yoga,” with photos of him performing various asanas and kriyas, or cleansing practices. In one, he’s shown running a string through his nose and out his mouth, which he said helped his sense of smell and “makes his eyes bright.” Another has him standing on his head. Yoga, he told the magazine, was even more important to him than violin practice. The story, in such a quintessentially mainstream publication, was further evidence that hatha yoga was moving in from the margins.
Thanks largely to Menuhin, B. K. S. Iyengar would become an international celebrity. In 1954 he summered with the violinist and his family in Gstaad. Menuhin introduced his master to the Standard Oil heiress Rebekah Harkness, who in the summer of 1956 brought him to spend six weeks in her Watch Hill, Rhode Island, mansion. Once again, Life ran photographs. In one, Iyengar is teaching Harkness’s family to do the forward bend known as Janu Sirsasana, with one leg extended and the other folded into the groin. Another shows Harkness’s neighbors practicing reverse prayer on her front lawn, their palms pressed together between their shoulder blades. In a third, Iyengar balances on his forearms on top of a low wall overlooking the sea, his back arched so that his feet rest on his head. The headline is “A New Twist for Society.”
Yet for Americans who couldn’t afford to import an Indian guru, there were still few qualified instructors. Iyengar wasn’t impressed with the United States and wouldn’t return until 1973. “I saw Americans were interested in the three Ws,” he said later. “Wealth, women, and wine. I was taken aback to see how the way of life conflicted with my own country.” The 1924 Immigration Act continued to keep other Indians from settling in the United States.
People began writing to Devi, begging for a more detailed guide to home practice, something that went beyond the overview in Forever Young, Forever Healthy. “Many were…afraid of falling into the hands of charlatans and self-appointed teachers when seeking advice, since there seems to be quite a number of unscrupulous and dishonest individuals who style themselves as real yogis, but who are only out to exploit the name of Yoga,” writes Devi. She began to think about opening a center to train teachers herself. In the meantime, she started her second book, Yoga for Americans, designed as a complete six-week home course. It was dedicated to Gloria Swanson, “for her ever-searching, burning, crusading spirit, admirable courage, keen sense of humor and luminous laughter.”
The book has a chipper, secular practicality perfectly calibrated for Eisenhower’s America. (In some ways, it prefigures the contemporary literature on the business applications of mindfulness meditation.) “Yoga is of great value not only to artists engaged in creative work,” Devi writes. “It will help businessmen and sportsmen, public speakers, models and housewives, and also people employed in offices, factories and stores where they must either sit at a desk, stand on their feet for long hours at a time, or work under stresses and tensions.”
Menuhin penned the foreword. “This welcome book by Indra Devi is furt
her evidence of the interest that has been awakened in the United States, Canada, and other countries of the Western world, for the practical aspects, applicable to our own mode of living, of the ancient science of yoga,” he wrote.
Like her first book, Yoga for Americans was an enormous success. People started calling Devi the First Lady of Yoga. As Menuhin suggested, yoga was catching on all over the world, not just in the United States. Forever Young, Forever Healthy had been translated into a number of languages, including French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. One reader of the Japanese edition (thought to be the first book about yoga published in that country) wrote to Devi from Osaka to thank her for alleviating his nervous heart condition, his wife’s weight problem, and his son’s asthma. A letter from a German fan read, “The Yoga exercises are remarkable: The fat ones get slimmer and the thin ones gain weight and get stronger; constipation disappears, the body becomes elastic and the spirits brighten up.”
Devi even managed to bring her message to Russia. A June 1960 United Press International dispatch from Moscow announced her triumph with the headline “Red Heads Turn for Yankee Yogi.” “Yoga has been introduced to Kremlin leaders—head stands and all—by a woman teacher from Hollywood,” read the story. Devi had taken her first trip back to the Soviet Union since fleeing the Russian Revolution as a teenager, and she’d brought her yoga with her. Given that most spiritual practices were outlawed in the USSR, this was something of a coup.
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