Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [99]
Darkness Falls
Seen from one angle, Spalding pulled off a massive metaphysical caper on thousands of unsuspecting believers. But if money were all he was after, he would have operated along different lines. While held in thrall by a legion of readers, Spalding had no organization, offered no products beyond his books, and created no money-raising apparatus. Biographer Bruton, who on several occasions made clear that he put little stock in Spalding’s tall tales, recounted seeing him, impromptu, give $400 to a distant acquaintance who had lost her home. And while Spalding’s various editions of Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East series sold hundreds of thousands of copies during his lifetime (and appeared in several translations), he seems to have reaped limited benefit. According to Bruton, who administered Spalding’s estate after his death, the writer had a dubious system of recompense with his Los Angeles publisher and business manager, Douglas DeVorss. DeVorss, who founded one of the premier metaphysical imprints and book distributors of the dawning New Age, kept Spalding on a monthly stipend that Bruton estimated at $150. By the night Spalding died in Tempe, Arizona, the scribe of the Far East had all of $110.74 in savings. And, in a most unusual arrangement, DeVorss retained total control of Spalding’s copyrights, which he owned flat out by the time of the writer’s death. To all appearances, Spalding had been fleeced.
In a tragic twist of events, the financial advantage of this arrangement would prove of little benefit to DeVorss. The year 1953 hung darkly over the lives of the Spalding circle. After Spalding’s death in Arizona in March of that year, DeVorss suffered the terrible loss of his young wife, Dorothy, in complications following childbirth in June. The couple had just moved into a twelve-room home on a landscaped property in Pasadena; after his wife’s death DeVorss was seen alone in the gardens, sobbing. Their newborn daughter was sent to Lincoln, Nebraska, to be raised by a maternal aunt. And the clouds darkened still. The following September, a gunman burst into DeVorss’s offices in downtown Los Angeles and fired four times, shooting the fifty-two-year-old publisher to death at his desk. After turning himself over to police eight hours later, the shooter, a former Minneapolis mail carrier, was revealed to be an enraged husband who suspected the metaphysical publisher of carrying on an affair with his estranged wife.
And that was not the end of the fog that surrounded Spalding and his friends. Spalding’s executor and biographer Bruton completed his thoughtful, meticulous memoir of the writer in fall 1954—and he then died, a relatively young man, the following March, almost two years from the death of Spalding himself. With these events, the mysteries of Baird T. Spalding were largely sealed.
A Real Phony
In the final years of Spalding’s life, a woman approached him after a lecture and said: “Mr. Spalding, I think you are the biggest liar I ever heard.” But for those who would demand a reckoning of the New Age pioneer, none will be found by branding him a charlatan. He was something else altogether. In the novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote’s heroine Holly Golightly—the hillbilly girl who transformed herself into a party-going sophisticate in New York City—was deemed no ordinary phony, but “a real phony.” Holly wasn’t trying to con anyone but to embody her ideal that life should always be beautiful. In this sense, Spalding, too, was “a real phony.” From within a cloak of absurdities he proffered sincere religious principles and a discernible set of ideals.
His was a sensitive theology, emphasizing a message of universal hope for self-realization. “The path is right within,” Spalding would repeat, in what became a mainstay of New Age metaphysics.