Sally Kempton, once a rising star in the world of New York journalism and a fierce advocate of radical feminism, but who later moved to a life of Eastern asceticism and spiritual practice, died Monday at her home in Carmel, Calif. 80.
His brother David Kempton said the cause was heart failure, adding that he suffered from a chronic lung condition.
The literary pedigree of Ms. Kempton. His father was Murray Kempton, the erudite and acerbic newspaper columnist and a lion of New York journalism, the ranks of which he joined in the late 1960s as a staff writer for The Village Voice and a contributor to The New York Times. He is a sharp and talented reporter — although he sometimes feels that he has not taken his position as a journalist well and owes it to his father’s reputation.
He wrote arch pieces about New Age fads like astrology: “One believes in marijuana and Bob Dylan,” he told The Times in 1969, and “astrology is part of an environment that includes things that this and so on; it is one of the ways we communicate with our friends.” He profiled rock stars such as Frank Zappa and reviewed books for The Times.
She and a friend, the author Susan Brownmiller, joined a group called the New York Radical Feminists, and in the spring of 1970 they participated in a sit-in at the offices of the Ladies’ Home Journal to protest its editorial content, they said. is humiliating to women. In the same month, he and Ms. Brownmiller was invited to “The Dick Cavett Show” to represent what was then called the women’s liberation movement; the two had a set-to with Hugh Hefner, the publisher of Playboy magazine, who was also a guest, as well as rock singer Grace Slick (who didn’t seem entirely on board with the feminist agenda).
But what made Ms. Kempton, for a minute in New York, is a blister essay in the July 1970 issue of Esquire magazine called “Cutting Loose,” in which she focused on her father, her husband and her own complicity in the era’s regressive gender roles.
The main point of the essay is that he is groomed to be a certain type of bright but obedient servant, and he doubts himself because of success. Her father, she wrote, considered women incapable of serious thought and was skilled in the art of female degradation; their own relationship, he said, was like that of an 18th-century count and his early daughter, “where he grew up to be the perfect female companion, watching him so well that it was impossible to tell his thoughts and feels, so coincident with his, are not original.”
She describes her husband, the film producer Harrison Starrwho is 13 years his senior, as “a male supremacist in the style of Norman Mailer” who rejuvenated him and drove him so frustrated that he fantasized about hitting him over the head with a frying pan.
“It’s hard to fight an enemy,” he concluded, “with outposts on your head.”
The piece landed like a cluster bomb. His marriage did not work out. His relationship with his father suffered. The women ate it up, identifying themselves with his furious prose. In a certain generation, it is still a point of feminist exposition. Years later, Susan Cheever, writing in The Times, called it “a scream of marital rage.”
Four years after the Esquire piece was published, Ms. Kempton was actually lost, to follow an Indian mystic named Swami Muktananda, otherwise known as Baba, a proponent of a spiritual practice known as Siddha Yoga. Baba was touring America in the 1970s and gathering devotees from the chattering classes by the hundreds and then the thousands – including, at one point, apparently half of Hollywood.
In 1982, Ms. Kempton took vows of chastity and poverty to live as a monk in Baba’s ashrams, first in India and then in a former borscht belt hotel in the Catskills. He gave him the name Swami Durgananda, and he wore the traditional orange robes of a Hindu monk.
After he was ordained, as he told writer Sara Davidson, who profiled Ms. Kempton in 2001he ran into a classmate of Sarah Lawrence, who then wrote in the alumni newsletter, “Saw Sally Kempton, ’64, now married to an Indian man and Mrs. Durgananda.”
As The Oakland Tribune reported in 1983, “The Sally Kempton who wrote about sexual outrage in Esquire is no more.”
Sally Kempton was born on January 15, 1943, in Manhattan and grew up in Princeton, NJ, the eldest of five children. His mother, Mina (Bluethenthal) Kempton, was a social worker; they are Mr. Kempton divorced when Sally was in college.
She attended Sarah Lawrence instead of Barnard, she wrote in her Esquire essay, because her boyfriend at the time thought it was a more “feminine” institution. There, he co-edited a magazine parody called The Establishment. He was hired by The Village Voice after graduation and began writing pieces, as he put it, about “drugs and hippies” that he said were mostly made up because he had no idea what he was doing. (His writing refutes that claim.)
He had his first ecstatic experience, he later recalled, in his West Village apartment, while taking psychedelics with a girlfriend and listening to the Grateful Dead song “Ripple.”
“All the complexities and suffering and pain and mental things that I was dealing with as a journalist in downtown New York melted away, and all I could see was love,” he said in a video on his website. When she described her new perspective to her boyfriend, she said, he responded by asking, “Haven’t you taken acid before?”
But Ms. had a transformative experience. Kempton, and he continued them as he began to investigate spiritual practices such as yoga and Tibetan Buddhism. He went to Baba out of curiosity – everyone does – and, as he wrote in 1976 in New York magazineif you’re going to make yourself a guru, why not hire a good one?
He was immediately drawn, he writes, fascinated by his persona to the truth as well as something more powerful, if difficult to define. He soon joined his entourage. He felt, he said, like running away with the circus.
His friends were shocked. “But you’ve always been ambitious,” said one. “I’m still ambitious,” he said. “There was just a slight change in direction.”
Ms. Kempton spent nearly 30 years with Baba’s organization, known as the SYDA Foundation, during the two decades during which he was a swami. Baba died in 1982, following accusations that he had sexually abused young women in his ashrams; since his death, the foundation has been managed by his successor, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda. In 1994, when Lis Harris, a writer for The New Yorker, inspecting the foundation and wrote an article addressing the accusations against Baba and questions about his succession, he quoted Ms. Kempton says the accusations are “ridiculous.” Ms. Kempton has never spoken publicly about the issue.
In 2002, he took off his clothes and left the ashram, moving to Carmel to teach meditation and spiritual philosophy. He is the author of several books on spiritual practices, including “Meditation for the Love of It: Enjoying Your Own Deepest Experience” (2011), with an introduction by Elizabeth Gilbert of “Eat, Pray Love” fame .
In addition to her brother David, Ms. Kempton is survived by two other brothers, Arthur and Christopher. Another brother, James Murray Kempton Jr., known as Mike, died in a car accident with his wife, Jean Goldschmidt Kempton, a college friend of Sally’s, in 1971.
The father of Ms. Kempton, after his initial shock, supports his new life. He was a spiritual man himself, a practicing Episcopalian, but humble about it. “I just go for the music,” he likes to tell people.
Murray Kempton, who died in 1997, visited the ashram and met Baba several times, David Kempton said, and respected the order’s ethos and history. He told The Oakland Tribune that if his daughter wanted to be a druid he might be worried.
“I guess he knows something I don’t,” he said. “I respect his choice. In fact, I admire the choice Sally made. After all, he is a swami, isn’t he?”
