What falls away : a memoir (17 page)

inculcated, we shall then be truly and worthily His disciples: and my opinion is that if nothing had ever been added to what flowed purely from His lips, the whole world would at this day have been Christian."

Tolstoy said much the same: "Nothing needful can be poured into a vessel full of what is useless. We must first empty out what is useless . . . True Christian teaching . . . tells us nothing about the beginning, or about the end, of the world, or about God and His purpose, or in general about things which we cannot, and need not, know; but it speaks only of what man must do to save himself, that is, how best to live the life he has come into, in this world, from birth to death. For this purpose it is only necessary to treat others as we wish them to treat us . . . Belief that the Gospels are the inspired word of God is not only a profound error, but a very harmful deception . . . Jesus himself did not write a book . . . The reader must remember all this in order to disengage himself from the idea, so common among us, that the Gospels in their present form have come to us directly from the Holy Spirit."

In his essay entitled How to Read the Gospels and What Is Essential in Thern^ Tolstoy wrote that "to understand any book one must select the parts that are quite clear, dividing them from what is obscure or confused. And from what is clear we must form our idea of the drift and spirit of the whole work . . ."

These insights illuminate, far more eloquently than I could, the shape and distillations of my befuddled thoughts. And so I lifted the words of Jesus out of the New Testament and wrote them out in mv clean, lined notebook; and in takmg them to heart, the confusion that had previously besieged all my efforts to define my position fell away, and was replaced by plain understanding.

From the chaos of the recent years, and the personal failure and forgetting, emerged a powerful remembrance from the polio wards of my childhood. As a member of the

human family, I rediscovered my sense of responsibility. Now I would begin to search for a mission that could breathe meaning into my existence.

Nearly every afternoon Maharishi sent for me to come to his bungalow for a private talk. From the start he had been especially solicitous and attentive to me, and I had responded with wary resentment. "Not only does he send for me every single day, and not the others," I complained to my sister, "but also, he is giving me mangoes. And to the best of my knowledge, he has not given a single mango to anybody else . . ." Prudence said the problem was me.

The ashram, up to this point, was a strange, cold, colorless place where meditation was the sole focus: we moved as if in a dream and spoke only when necessary, in the respectful, hushed tones of visitors to a graveyard. So it went, quietly and evenly, until one afternoon when, out of the blue, the Beatles arrived.

Right on the heels of their groundbreaking, earthshaking Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, all four Beatles and their wives descended upon the ashram. Maharishi managed to keep the press outside the compound, but even there, at the edge of the earth, there were photographers in the trees. Nonetheless, with their cheerful chatter and guitars and singing, the new arrivals brought an element of "normalcy" to the ashram—a sort of contemporary reality, which at first seemed jarringly out of place. After a short time Maureen and Ringo Starr left: because of the flies; and they missed their kids. Ringo and George were the most accessible of the four, but I liked them all. Now the Beatles too came to Maharishi's bungalow in the afternoons.

"Whenever I meditate," John said, in his irresistible Liverpool accent, "there's a big brass band in me head."

"Write it down, write it down," recommended Maharishi.

I think of John, so off-center and quick, peering out from behind his glasses; he made me laugh, which I hadn't done in a while. And at evening assembly he used to turn his chair completely around, and look at everyone. John seemed to see everything on a mystical plane, and he thought of Maharishi as a kind of wizard.

George was gentle and kmd, with a radiant spiritual quality—he would go to the elderly women meditators to play his guitar and sing for them. It was his serious commitment to meditation that had motivated the other Beatles to come to India. He was interested in playing the sitar, he said, not just to entertain, but so that he could play the ragas—rhythms passed through holy men from the Vedas —because it is believed that they alter the consciousness and can influence people for the good.

I didn't get to know Paul well, but I was friendly with his girlfriend, Jane Asher, a freckle-faced, redheaded actress who, like Patti Harrison and Patti's younger sister, Jennie, was roughly my age. They were not noticeably serious about meditating; and for me, a slight de-escalation of the intensity of the previous weeks came as a welcome relief.

Now, on the rocky Ganges shore, the Beatles played their guitars and sang, and we talked, and for some extended moments the heaviness that had settled around me lifted. They were in the land of light, and of youth, strength, and certainty; they seemed beautiful and fearless. Not since high school had I spent time with people my age. It was 1968, an exciting time to be young, but the feeling persisted that I was on the outside, always either too old or too immature. Chilling were the times when I caught myself pretending to be my own age.

The flat roof of our puri, in the hours when it caught the late-afternoon sun, was a good place to get warm, and read, talk, or meditate, and for George to practice his sitar. I had given up trying to meditate for twelve hours a day and was pleased when I could manage six. But Prudy was meditating

continuously, and no longer appeared at meals (we left a plate outside her door) or at the evening lectures. Finally, she did not leave her room at all. Even in our setting, this was extreme.

The ashram seemed a cheery place now, in the spirit of the flower-child sixties. The Beatles were everywhere and so was their music. They even brought their guitars to meals and improvised songs. I heard no complaints from the meditators: our eclectic group had bonded, Beatles and all. Then a self-important, middle-aged American woman arrived, moving a mountain of luggage into the brand-new private bungalow next to Maharishi's along with her son, a bland young man named Bill, People fled this newcomer, and no one was sorry when she left the ashram after a short time to go tiger hunting, unaware that their presence had inspired a new Beatles' song—"Bungalow Bill."

In response to several frightening, emotional eruptions that occurred during the long hours of meditation, Mahari-shi appointed sets of "team buddies" to look out for one another. Prudence's "buddies" were George and John, and they took their responsibility seriously. Every morning and most afternoons they met in Prudy's room, where they discussed their respective lives, the meaning of existence, and who Maharishi really was.

"I just wanted to meditate as much as possible," Prudence told me. "It was a special time, and such a holy place. One night when I was meditating, George and John came into my room with their guitars, singing, *Ob la di, ob la da, life goes on, naninani.' Another time John, Paul, and George came in singing *Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,' the whole song! They were trying to be cheerful, and it was so sweet of them. I was grateful, but I wished they'd go away. At first I don't think they realized what the tram-ing course in meditation was all about. They were just having fun. They didn't quite understand until later."

No one is ever indifferent to Prudence. When the

frames on her glasses broke—"It's like I'm underwater without them," said Prudy—Paul spent a long time fiddling with a piece of wire and managed to fix them. And when, a day later, they fell apart again, again he wired them together. This went on for some time; Paul's commitment to my sister's glasses was admirable, but it seemed that no matter how he bent that wire, the glasses ended up in pieces.

Before they left the ashram, Paul and John wrote the song "Dear Prudence" for my sister: "Dear Prudence, won't you come out to play. Dear Prudence, greet the brand-new day . . ."

"I guess I thought it was really nice, but I didn't know they were going to put it on an album or anything," said Prudy. "I didn't really think about it; it wasn't anything in my mind. Then much later, after India, I heard people saying there was a song. I was really grateful that it was something so nice."

"Now we will meditate in my 'cave,' " said Maharishi, and I followed him down steep wooden steps into a dark, humid little cellar room that smelled of sandalwood. It was my first time m his cave: there was a small shrine with flowers and a picture of Guru Dev, Maharishi's dead teacher, and a carpet on which we settled ourselves in the lotus position to meditate. After twenty or so minutes we were getting to our feet, still facing each other, but as I'm usually a little disoriented after meditation, I was blinking at his beard when suddenly I became aware of two surprisingly male, hairy arms going around me. I panicked, and shot up the stairs, apologizing all the way. I flew out into the open air, and ran as fast as I could to Prudy's room, where she was meditating of course. I blurted out something about Maharishi's cave, and arms, and beard, and she said, It's an honor to be touched by a holy man after meditation, a tradition. Fur-

thermore, at my level of consciousness, if Jesus Christ Himself had embraced me, I would have misinterpreted it.

Still, I flung the essentials into my faded cloth shoulder-bag, stuffed passport and money into a pouch hung around my neck, and without a plan, and nothing to lose, I dashed out of the guarded gates headlong into the spreadmg Indian twilight.

The next weeks had the quality of a long hallucination —sometimes blurred, sometimes jaggedly sharp. I walked and rode and hitched, I traveled in buses, cars, trains, an elaborately hand-painted truck, a bullock cart, rickshaws, a steamer, and an airplane. I crossed bridges and waded through streams, I wandered along peaceful country roads past rippling mustard yellow fields, and through the slums of Calcutta; I slept in hotels, huts, and dives; I rode an elephant, killed cockroaches the size of mice, and kicked a rat clear across a room. I saw the lacy Taj by moonlight, and by day I explored countless temples, monasteries, and palaces. At ninety-five pounds, with my cropped hair, I dressed and looked like a boy, and that seemed a useful thing throughout my travels. I wasn't afraid, but I was lonely; and when I begged my brother Johnny, who was back in California, to come on a great adventure, he did.

It wasn't even light when I jolted awake, feeling something fumbling at my neck. The woman who had given me bread the night before was now laughing into my face. Quickly, I traced the outlines of my passport and traveler's checkbook still inside the pouch. The woman was making signs that she only wanted to touch my hair, unusual blond hair, but I was already backing out of the hut; it wasn't until I noticed her fingers missing—not in a neat, clean way—that I began to run. The river was shockingly cold. With my bar of Ivory soap, I scrubbed the leprosy off.

In southern Goa, the white sand beach was completely

deserted except for a barefooted, bearded young man who was walking toward us wearing faded, sawed-off jeans and a T-shirt, and carrying an empty bucket. We recognized, in a flabbergasting coincidence, our brother Patrick's closest friend. Along with another neighbor from Beverly Hills, he'd been living on this beach in a lean-to made from palm fronds. At their invitation, and lacking any better plan, we decided to stay awhile, and assumed our share of the household chores, which included walking a couple of miles into town to buy food and sodas in the marketplace, cooking supper on an open fire, washing our clothes in boiling sea-water, drawing fresh water from the town well, and a brand-new skill, rolling fat hashish joints.

We went through our daily routines with little if any conversation, to the tuneless, woody wails of our host's flute. The weather was hot, the water was warm, and the days passed in a haze of hash, until one morning when my brother and I were out swimming just beyond the surf, a large fin sliced the water between us. Like cartoon whirligigs, we churned through the surf until we were safely back on the sand. As we sat, panting, I glanced at Johnny and saw (as I had a thousand times before) our father's ocean blue eyes fixed upon the waves. After a long moment, my brother quietly said, "I want my razor-sharp mind back."

The next day, we left: our friends in Goa. I didn't have the slightest idea where to go, or what to do, or how to go about it. But it was time to make a decision. I considered staying in India, but as much as I liked it, I did not feel at home there.

So thinking. This is only temporary, I telephoned my agent, who'd been trying to contact me about a movie to begin shooting immediately in England. In a Calcutta hotel room I read the script, dawdled awhile, then phoned my assent, knowing that with this job, a busy and protected life would take shape around me, albeit temporarily, and this time it would be in London.

G liapt er S ev e

n

The movie was Secret Ceremony^ directed by Joseph Losey. EUzabeth Taylor and I were set to play a delusional mother and daughter, and my father's old pal, Robert Mitchum, was cast as my father. Peggy Ashcroft and Pamela Brown played the batty aunts. The movie people dyed my hair soot black, hoping to create any slight resemblance between myself and ravishing, raven-haired Elizabeth Taylor. When that failed to do it, I wore a long dark wig.

Frank, who was in Miami, had invited me to stay in the vacant flat in Grosvenor Square. The idea made sense, and was appealing because I imagined I'd feel less cut off from him. But m fact, staying in the apartment where we had lived as newlyweds returned me to Frank's world, and I began to miss him even more acutely.

I had been in London for nearly two weeks but we had not yet begun filming. I couldn't sleep at night despite the prescription sleeping pills and I spent my days in bed. Although I

often felt claustrophobic, I couldn't bring myself to go outside. The plump English doctor gave me stronger pills. The disorder in my mind, and mounting depression, reached a crescendo, and finally that same doctor was standing beside my bed asking what "a rolling stone gathers no moss" meant. When I had no reply, he checked me into a clinic. I spent three days there, heavily medicated, before Barbara arranged my escape: I pulled my coat off the wire hanger, slipped into my shoes, and as a nurse dropped her trayful of tea, we climbed out the window and down the fire escape.