Rebels in White Gloves (19 page)

For Matilda Williams, ’69, graduating from Wellesley “was like being launched on a ship without a rudder.” After several “self-criticism sessions” with her SDS group, she too had gone to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade and for years afterward refused to tell her parents where she was as she careened through numerous jobs and towns and loves. “I
turned my back on Wellesley and all the privilege it pretended,” she wrote to her classmates, “and ‘cast my lot with the poor people of the earth,’ as in José Martí’s song.”

She came to rest finally in Thailand, where she had gone to do public health work in a refugee camp. There she met a Buddhist monk who was trying to save the rain forest by ordaining trees as monks; confronted with a sacred being, the loggers would have to bow and show respect and let the tree stand. “Within half an hour of our meeting, we felt we’d known each other for three thousand years. He was convinced that in some previous incarnation we had known each other. He said to me, ‘You have to live here for seven years.’ So that’s what I decided to do.” When she finished her work with the refugees, Matilda went to his temple, the Wat Nam Phud in the Dong Yai forest, and took the vows of a Buddhist nun. She shaved her head and donned white robes, forgoing all adornments and perfumes so as “not to call attention to myself or be imprisoned in my ego.” Having vowed not to sleep on a high bed and to eat only what she was given, she went out with a begging bowl, and slept on a grass mat in the woods, on a platform raised just enough to be out of reach of the snakes and rats. “I meditated seven hours a day, wishing compassion to all living things, trying to be one with all creatures. As nuns we had few possessions—a couple of robes, underwear, soap, toothpaste, a toothbrush, and a
gloat
, which is like an umbrella with a mosquito net attached, which we slept under when traveling. I snuck a camera into mine, and had my picture taken with a fully opened lotus—an arrogant move, because it implies enlightenment. A few Thais were hostile to me as an interloper, but some were perversely proud.” They could not, in any case, miss her: With her large pink nose and apple cheeks and bright blue eyes in a big, bald, moon-white head, she stood out like a bare lightbulb among the small, nut-colored nuns.

She would spend just two of her seven promised years. Matilda received word at the temple that her father was in a coma and dying, that his insurance had run out and her mother needed help. “I recognized the hypocrisy of praying for the rain forest and the benefit of all living things while ignoring my own mother’s needs, so I came home to Oklahoma. I saw how much I had hurt my mother, and felt I couldn’t do that anymore.” Still, a sense of alienation deep enough to inspire so extraordinary a pilgrimage was not easily overcome. Giving her life over to
Buddhist practice had been an attempt by Matilda to escape from the personal—both the stifling, oblivious love of her mother and the “ego” itself. The two years in Thailand freed her enough to go home but not to be happy there. She describes her maternal caretaking as a thankless task. “Everything is still a cause for a fight, from why do I want to be an idol worshiper to why don’t I like Lawrence Welk.”

The “third great religious awakening,” Tom Wolfe would call the early seventies. Badly soured on politics, young Americans increasingly vested their faith in those years in the promise made by Charles Reich and many others: that the transformation, or transcendence, of self was the true avenue to transforming the world. Watergate had been the single greatest wound to the civic spirit; the humiliating fall of Saigon, a rash of skyjackings and terrorist attacks, the first Arab oil embargo, and the abrupt end of the twenty-five-year postwar economic boom all added to the sense that the American age was at an end.

Many in the class of ’69 now turned away from their efforts to redeem the world and toward a more intimate encounter with the sacred, or to what Wolfe would call “a new alchemy: changing one’s very self.” As the human potential movement launched in the early ’60s by Abraham Maslow and Gregory Bateson and Alan Watts and Carl Rogers came to full flower, Hillary’s classmates could be found lying on the floor of one of the sea cliff rooms at Esalen listening to dolphin sounds; studying astrology or transcendental meditation; enduring est seminars, encounter groups, and Rolfings; or living in Zen monasteries or Hindu ashrams. “Up against the wall” was replaced on the lips of many with Fritz Perls’s Gestalt prayer: “I do my thing and you do your thing … and if by chance we should meet, that’s beautiful.” The ’69ers were far from alone:
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
sold more copies in the early seventies than any work of fiction since
Gone with the Wind
. Hippies became Jesus freaks or Hare Krishnas or Scientologists, read Hermann Hesse or had their auras read.

Though she was invited to go, Alison Campbell had skipped Woodstock. That summer, after graduating from Wellesley, she was working in the brooch department of Tiffany’s, next to Princess Hohenlohe (a member of the German nobility) at the diamond counter, and was “just too
straight an arrow” to call in sick. Alison did make it to the infamous Rolling Stones concert at Altamont that December, dressed like a nymph in a gauzy Empire-waist dress and sandals and flowers in her hair, but she remembers little except the fear. “I was glad to get home. It was not nice. When the Hell’s Angels killed that guy, it was like watching barracudas descend on bait.”

Alison had moved to San Francisco just a few months earlier with her poet boyfriend, Michael, and had found a job at a gallery making kinetic sculpture. For a brief time, she experimented with the freedom she felt, cut loose from her family’s fortune and the expectations and shelter that came with it. She earned only enough to live in a basement apartment for fifty dollars a month. Her father sent her generous checks. She sent them back.

But things were falling apart with Michael. He continued to be unhappy with Alison’s “hang-ups” over fidelity and keeping the house clean. When she received a job offer at home from one of her father’s patients, she abandoned her self-exile and for a time returned to the fold. For the next six years, Alison would be a kind of court artist for the Paul Mellon family, flying about in their Gulfstream jet—its walls hung with Braques and Van Goghs—to do watercolors of the family’s Virginia and Washington and New York and Antigua homes. “I felt strange painting for wealthy people when I had wanted to make a difference in the world. I had marched after King’s assassination and protested against the war and wanted to go into the Peace Corps; I always identified more with people who were hurting than with those who were not. But when Nixon was reelected, I was so disillusioned. I stopped paying attention to politics, stopped believing we could change the world.”

A near-member of the family in those years, Alison did Mrs. Mellon’s Christmas shopping every year: buying gifts for John Jr. and Caroline Kennedy or a toothbrush in gray and yellow—his racing colors—for Mr. Mellon. When she married an aspiring medical student, in a wedding as grand as her debutante ball, with eight bridesmaids, six hundred guests, and her father in tails, she wore a dress given her by Mrs. Mellon—a Givenchy gown.

It was a short-lived marriage. Supporting her husband both financially and emotionally left Alison drained and in search of rejuvenation. She earned a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. Then, one afternoon in Washington
in 1976, she went to a New Age fair and met some visitors from Findhorn, a spiritual community on the Scottish North Sea coast with vaguely Celtic beliefs and remarkable gardens. A few days later, Alison was sitting reading a Findhorn garden book when an odd thing occurred. “A butterfly landed on me, several times. I’d been reading about the secret life of plants and why you should talk to them, about how angels direct all things. Oh dear, I’m worried how this will sound—you can’t describe a spiritual experience. But I felt I’d had proof many times of the benign forces in the world, in the flowers and hummingbirds. As a child I had felt it was magic to be alive, that there must be a soul that made your body move. What other people tried to accomplish with drugs, I already felt I had—a heightened sense of color and shapes. I always felt there was consciousness in everything. I thought if there’s a place they believe in angels and try to grow plants the way the plants want to grow, I’ve got to check it out.”

Alison had found the religion of her upbringing uninspiring. “My parents sent us to an Episcopal church, but they never went. And life didn’t match what I learned in Sunday school. I saw pious ministers who wouldn’t rile their wealthy congregations, weren’t agitating to change corporate behavior. I felt guilty about being confirmed when I didn’t believe.

“Though I hadn’t managed it yet, I still wanted to live closer to my ideals, and after four and half years, I needed a separation in my marriage. So I gave away almost everything, including the French hand-painted china Mrs. Mellon had given me, and went to Findhorn. They had one place open, in the kitchen—it was slogging work, four of you feeding three hundred people—but I decided I’d do it and asked to stay. I met unbelievable people there: Swami Satchidananda, Pier Vilat Khan, who was the head of the Sufis, Dr. Frederick Leboyer [a French obstetrician who advocated gentle birth, in a darkened room and under water, so as not to traumatize the baby]. After some months, I realized I couldn’t go back to my marriage. Fortunately, we had no children yet, though we had tried. I agonized over not going back. But I knew I had to pull myself back together and make my own happiness instead of propping up somebody else.” A year later, Alison returned to America, having met Bruce Swain, a journalist who shared her interest in the spirit world and with whom she would soon establish a middle-class Middle American home.

The turn in the early seventies from the political to the personal has been seen by some as a kind of defeat for women. Since the beginning of time, women have sought consolation for their sorrows in the company of other women or the comforts promised in the afterlife; some radical feminists saw consciousness-raising and New Age pieties as merely sustaining those traditions, providing group-therapy sessions or a new opiate of the masses that dissipated anger rather than mobilized it to political ends. In 1969, Anaïs Nin was booed at Smith for being apolitical and self-involved.

Of course, in Wolfe’s “Me Decade,” everyone was “polishing one’s very self … observing, studying and doting on it.” The human potential movement had barely begun before it was swallowed up by a marketplace increasingly adept at capitalizing on what was hip. Entrepreneurs turned the counterculture into a kind of epicureanism: fern bars, free-range chickens,
The Whole Earth Catalog
selling gorgeous hand-wrought “tools for intimate personal power” and promising a cybernetic utopia. Self-anointed therapists and gurus saw the moneymaking opportunities in spiritual seekers as well and were soon trafficking in an expensive kind of navel-gazing.

The co-optation of the sixties would have particular consequences for women. Sexual liberation had been the first movement to be seized upon by the entrepreneurs. Quickly drained of its millennial politics, it became the capitalists’ favorite tool, exploited to arouse appetites for all sorts of curved and aromatic and glistening things. The sex industry came aboveground and flourished; rape and other forms of sexual violence, rarely spoken of until confronted openly by feminists, became the stuff of made-for-TV movies and MTV. The emergent multimillion-dollar recovery movement would also affect mostly women; its market is 85 percent female. The self-help business perfectly reverses feminism’s central insight: Rather than challenging the structural impediments (workplace inflexibility, inadequate public support for parents and children, economic dislocation) to individual success, it turns every problem into a psychological or spiritual illness, a private failure.

Even feminism, which had assimilated Veblen’s insights and rejected consumerism as a means for confining women, was co-opted by Madison Avenue. Equality became a “lifestyle.” “The ad industry encourages the pseudoemancipation of women,” Christopher Lasch wrote in
The
Culture of Narcissism
, “flattering them with its insinuating reminder ‘you’ve come a long way, baby’ and disguising the freedom to consume as genuine autonomy.”

Feminism was to a degree complicit in the shift away from social action to self-improvement and advancement. From the beginning, the women’s movement had been split between those like Ti-Grace Atkinson and Kate Millett, who sought a fundamental social and economic revolution, and those like the “bourgeois” Betty Friedan, who were more interested in simply securing for women a piece of the status quo. By 1972, Joan Didion would conclude that the Friedan faction had won and that the original, radically egalitarian and collectivist idea that had animated feminism was lost. “The have-nots, it turned out, aspired mainly to having.… It was a long way from Simone de Beauvoir’s grave and awesome recognition of woman’s role as ‘the Other’ to the notion that the first step in changing that role was Alix Kates Shulman’s marriage contract (‘wife strips beds, husband remakes them’), but it was toward just such trivialization that the women’s movement seemed to be heading. Of course this litany of trivia was crucial in the beginning, a key technique in politicizing women who had perhaps been conditioned to obscure their resentments even from themselves … but such discoveries could be of no use at all if one … failed to make the leap from the personal to the political.”