Daring (10 page)

What I didn't foresee was a truly dramatic unraveling of the American family: more and more women would rather do two things well than do all three poorly. Paycheck Mom is now the norm. In 2013, the Pew Research Center reported that in 40 percent of American households with children under age eighteen, the mother is either the sole or primary earner. That number has quadrupled since 1960. For great numbers of such women, marriage is now decoupled from motherhood. Forty percent of women with some college but no degree, and 57 percent of women with high school diplomas or less, elect to be single mothers. Why? Often, because they don't want to take the chance of having to support the baby daddy, too. It's only the elite—90 percent of women with bachelor's degrees or higher—who still believe in acquiring a mate before producing a baby. These are the enviable couples who are able to invest in their children from the resources of two successful careers, thus widening the gap between the security of the elite and the struggles of the new middle class and impoverished Americans.

MY FIRST FAILURE WAS SHORT-LIVED.
Soon after the publication of
Lovesounds
in 1970, a call came from Otto Preminger himself. The world-famous Hollywood director spoke with a gurgly Viennese accent. He was interested in optioning the book for a film. How would he get in touch with my agent?

I was embarrassed to admit that I didn't have an agent. I called Clay. He said he'd get in touch with his former wife's agents, Irwin Winkler and Bob Chartoff. They invited me to lunch and offered to represent me. But weren't they Hollywood agents? I asked. Yes, but it could add luster to their résumé to have an East Coast author. I tried not to smile. Only Hollywood agents would think of a failed first-time novelist as added “luster.” It's reverse snobbism; they think we're all
intellectuals
.

The next thing I knew, I was spending afternoons writing my first screenplay under the tutelage of a temperamental tyrant. Preminger was a big bearish man with a hairless ovoid head and a fleshy face. He had directed Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Stewart, and female stars such as Marilyn Monroe, whom he called “a void with nipples.” His actors nicknamed him “Otto the Ogre.”

He invited me to work at his classical Italian manse on East Sixty-Fourth Street, where he sat behind a massive white marble desk. Once, when I couldn't get a sitter, he invited me to bring my little daughter. Maura had inherited my Irish ginger hair and the outspokenness that comes with it. She took one look at this giant of a man and knew immediately how to tame him. She climbed into his lap. “Mr. Preminger, you're a peanut!” He roared with laughter and picked up the child in one of his basketball-size hands and lifted her over his head. She squealed with delight. From her unique point of survey, she exclaimed, “It must be so fun not having any hair to comb.”

Maura at age three.

It took an Otto Preminger to option my little novel and get it green-lighted by a major studio, Paramount. Everything was on the upswing.

Three months later, on a day of drenching rain, Mr. Preminger called to cancel our afternoon meeting. “Vat gives with your agents? My studio tells me they did not get the reassignment of copyright.” My work was in the public domain. The studio had found a way to keep Preminger from making a movie based on an unsuccessful book written by a nobody novelist.

It was one of those days when the roller coaster plunges down a hair-raising precipice and one's stomach surges up into one's throat. It was still pouring outside. Maura was having a meltdown. I was a divorced woman. My first movie sale was dead. My hope of making a living as a freelance writer looked dead in the water. I crawled into bed with Maura and we lost ourselves in the hilariously perverse world of Maurice Sendak, reading
Where the Wild Things Are
over and over.

“
PUSSYCAT, HOW SOON CAN YOU
leave for India?”

I'll never forget that rescue call. It was few months later, the end of January 1971, and I couldn't quite make the rent. The breathy voice was unmistakable. Helen Gurley Brown. She was reinventing the risqué women's magazine
Cosmopolitan
, as a guide to “mouseburgers” like Helen herself—girls with neither looks nor money who, if they learned how to be sexy and worked hard enough to afford nice clothes and plastic surgeons, could get a rich man to marry them. Helen had proved it by snagging David Brown, a movie mogul famous for producing
Jaws
and
The Sting
with Richard Zanuck.

I had only done a couple of stories for Helen's
Cosmo
while working at the
Trib
, but this was a plum assignment. She wanted me to track down the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his most famous new disciples, the Beatles. What could be a better rebound from failure than to strap on a backpack and plunge into the Himalayas in search of bliss consciousness and the Beatles' guru? I sensed a cultural shift in the making. Here was the first swooning embrace of Eastern mysticism by the darlings of Western pop culture. How could I pass up the chance to sneak inside the spiritual training camp of His Holiness, founder of the transcendental meditation movement? Hundreds of other journalists had staked out the compound with little chance of gaining entrance to the inner sanctum.

But what about Maura—she was only six. Albert offered to take her; he knew I needed the money.

The first and fundamental fact about gurus was revealed to me by one of the Maharishi's public relations people: The
shishya
(disciple) does not seek. When the shishya is ready, the guru appears. In point of fact, the guru himself wasn't quite ready for prime time. On the Maharishi's first visit to New York, in 1959, he had greeted reporters at the airport in Hindi-lish: “I come to spread manure on you.”

I was invited to an initiation ceremony on a Saturday night at the Barclay Hotel on East Forty-Eighth Street. The man behind the peephole of the Maharishi's suite was not the ascetic Indian mystic. He was a Norwegian opera singer, Richard Fleur, a big strapping Siegfried who instructed a gathering of decorative young New York neurotics to remove our shoes and kneel to offer thanks and gifts to our teacher, Guru Dev. (Who he?) No answer.

We were coached on how to meditate. Most of the shishyas drifted off to sleep. Then came the big moment. Each of us would receive our “customized mantra.” The mantra, Fleur said, is a sound, a vehicle; we travel with it to the innermost core of our being. “To receive the mantra possessed of the right vibration and mystical power for the individual,” he emphasized, “one needs a guide.” Then the fast finish: “Anything good costs a lot of money.” The price he quoted was roughly equal to an average week's salary.

“You understand this sound must never be told to anyone or written or even spoken aloud to yourself,” Fleur said solemnly. “It must be kept as part of your pure being. Do you agree?” I agreed. However, the picture of a robust Siegfried tossing water over the shoulder of his business suit and moving grains of rice between brass bowls while chanting Sanskrit in a Norwegian accent put a certain strain on reverence. Each of us was asked five questions, presumably to allow Fleur to penetrate our pure being and divine our unique sound.

Forty-five years later, I think I am reasonably safe in revealing my personalized mantra, since it is merely a hitching of half my last name to the oldest of sacred sounds,
OM
. It is—forgive me, Guru Dev—Shee-Om. That's it.

“Now I will have to ask for the contribution,” Fleur said. “It is for the Guru Dev, not for me.”

Fumbling with pen and checkbook in the darkened and densely incensed hotel room, I felt like we were kids playing dressup.

“Where
is
the Guru Dev?” asked one intrepid shishya.

“He is everywhere.”

So I bought my mantra and headed off to India with more than a dollop of skepticism.

I CHOSE TO MAKE THE JOURNEY
from Delhi to Rishikesh by bus. Three dollars. Racing around the bus yard looking for the No. 1871 bus among forty skeletal conveyances, all piled high with bedrolls and numbered in Hindi, was the first test of the staying power of bliss consciousness. I failed. It was miserable.

The road through 140 miles of flat Gangetic plain was a river of bullock carts, rickshaws, and columns of men who looked headless under bundles of wash, wood, or sugar cane. At the foothills of the Himalayas, the driver motioned for me to get off. “You wait. You sit. It coming.” In a while a horse-drawn tonga appeared and carted me to a notch in the hills at the headwaters of the Ganges. I scrambled down to the clear green water. Stranded on the wrong side of Mother Ganga, I didn't have to fret for long about how to cross to Rishikesh.

“Hey, American girl, over here!” A power boat was swerving in my direction. What a welcome sight, a bunch of tangle-haired American hippies! They welcomed me to spend the night in their Hash Ashram. That was a trip in itself. A traditional
ashram
is a spiritual hermitage hidden in a forest or mountains where Hindus seek tranquillity and perform some sacrifice. The Hash Ashram was a joyful happening where the only sacrifice was privacy. A motley collection of young men and women—stoned-out visa violators and guitar-toting trust-fund babies—crowded around an open fire in their stone abode. Joints were shared. We sang folk songs and Beatles favorites,
I get by with a little help from my friends, I get high with a little help from my friends
, until near dawn when everyone spilled out onto the bamboo deck, as if on cue. We slept until the sun rose too high to ignore.

Walking up the burning sand in the noonday sun, with two heavy bags and no idea where to find the pathway to bliss consciousness, I practiced meditating. Amazingly, it sort of worked. My walking meditation was indeed quite pleasant. As if by divine mercy, a boy appeared and piled my bags on his head. He led the way to the side of an unmarked cliff and pointed up. I climbed about a mile up a trail from the beach.
WELCOME
! Pastel flags flew from the outpost of the Maharishi's sixteen-acre compound, which was encircled by barbed wire.

I was detained at the guesthouse outside the compound. Dutifully, I submitted a copy of my written request to interview the Maharishi. Five o'clock. A light Himalayan wind sprang up. Monkeys descended to snatch the banana I foolishly peeled. The Beatles were not yet in residence, I learned. Mia Farrow was en route. Where would I sleep?

“You wait. You sit. It coming. Just now.”

Then I heard it. The unmistakable California sound of a high-pitched male voice mingled with guitar. Emerging from the trail was Mike Love, blessed Beach Boy, draped in a purple satin hooded rajah coat and singing “Good Vibrations.”

Mike was full of smiles. He had renounced drugs. But even he had to sit and wait. He asked for tea and we were served. He talked excitedly about how meditation had changed his life. I told him I had been practicing. Don't worry, he said, he would make sure the Maharishi gave me a proper initiation. Did he always find the time and quiet to practice meditation in the hectic show-business life?

“Oh, well, you blow a meditation now and then.”

We were joined by an English journalist. Like most Brits, Peter Drake avoided sincerity at all costs. “I don't buy the Maharishi's Kool-Aid,” he said, “but I can offer you other forms of libation.” He revealed a fifth of Gilbey's gin and several bottles of tonic in his backpack. We asked our minder if we could have some ice—for our tea. After an hour of happily drinking and chatting, Peter and I were admitted to adjoining rooms in the guesthouse. We smoked some hash I had brought along from the night before. I relaxed into the delicious abandonment of responsibility with this handsome fellow vagabond. Before I knew it, Peter and I were in the same bed. The night turned into a rediscovery of the joys of eros. What had I been missing! Peter was a sexual athlete. Tussling for what seemed an eternity ended with us asleep on the floor when our minder knocked. Morning already?

“You come. You hurry. Maharishi ready. Just now.”

THE MAHARISHI MADE AN APPEARANCE
in a pastel two-hundred-seat hall. He took the lotus position on a goatskin. Sprigs of jasmine nestled in his flowing white hair and long beard. And what he did was—nothing. For ten minutes. He said not a word. He smiled beatifically. He looked upon each face, row by row. Soon everyone was smiling. Laughing. Bringing him flowers and fruit. Spontaneously, a dialogue began. For two hours it never palled.

Then we adjourned to a porch to practice with our guides. Signs were hung from the backs of bamboo chairs overlooking the Ganga.

DO NOT DISTURB—MEDITATING
.

Teenagers with blankets over their heads sat beside middle-aged English ladies with cashmere sweaters under their saris. It looked like an old people's home with young people. I was summoned to sit on the roof with a German-speaking guide. By evening, it was hot as hell. Peter and I blew a meditation and enjoyed another night of gin and sin.