Krishnamurti, the lonely Hollywood Star
Krishnsmurti visiting the US for the first time, with his mentor Annie Besant
Jiddu Krishnamurti is famous as the man who was groomed to be the Messiah of Theosophy, but then heroically gave it up to become an anti-guru.
It’s a brilliant story, which still gets told. Here’s Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian in 2013, for example.
The Theosophical Society decided Jiddu Krishnamurti was the messiah who would save humankind. Awkwardly, Krishnamurti came to believe this was bunkum.
But the legend is not true. The real story is much more interesting.
It is true that Krishnamurti ditched the Theosophical Society, but he never renounced his divine authority, nor the material privileges and benefits bestowed on him by devotees.
He taught that ‘truth is a pathless land’ — that we could all attain a state of enlightenment he had attained, free from all beliefs and conditioning. But one couldn’t get there through any guru or teaching or practice. In which case, why bang on about it for six decades, giving enough talks to fill 200 books?
Why? Because it was his role, his star persona, and he was stuck in it. He couldn’t get off the stage and just be an ordinary human, he had to be The World Teacher.
He spent much of his life living in California, not far from Hollywood, and I think his life-story is a classic Hollywood tragedy, like Sunset Boulevard. A damaged child star gets trapped in the role he had created for himself, and ends up giving up real love for fan worship. It’s a tale of child abuse, trauma, ecstasy, celebrity, and, finally, loneliness.
Are you ready?
The story begins in Chennai, south India, at the headquarters of the Theosophical Society, a strange sort of occult research group / religion / coven, established in 1875 by Madame Blavatsky. She was perhaps the first spiritual tourist of the modern age, leaving her native Russia and travelling around the world in search of wisdom. She claimed to have visited Tibet and been initiated by a secret order of superbeings called The Masters.
They supposedly taught her a perennial philosophy, an ancient wisdom which Blavatsky claimed was the source of all religions. Theosophy helped introduce Hinduism and Buddhism to the West, but Blavatsky also mixed in a lot of esoteric magic and some bizarre pseudo-science. She developed her own evolutionary theory in which spirit evolves through various ‘root races’ (the Lemurians, the Atlanteans, the Teutons). She also suggested a new race of advanced humans was now appearing…the Californians.
Blavatsky died, Theosophy splintered. The Indian branch was taken over by Annie Besant — an extraordinary woman, who became a Socialist reformer and advocate of free love and birth control. She converted to Theosophy after reviewing Blavatsky’s book The Secret Doctrine. She moved to India, took over the Society, and also threw herself into the Indian nationalist movement.
Her right-hand man at the Society was Charles Webster Leadbeater, an occult explorer with a sexual predilection for young boys. Around 1906 (just as he was being investigated for paedophilia), Leadbeater announced a new message from the Masters: the coming of the ‘World Teacher’, a Christ-like figure who’d help advance human evolution.
Leadbeater ran a sort of Messiah factory, comparable to a Hollywood star studio or a pop hit factory. He would identify a young man as a possible ‘vehicle’ for the World Teacher’s spirit, take over his education and groom him for the role. Groom in all senses of the word.
One Theosophist noted:
In six months he would transform even an ignorant street boy into a charming well-mannered gentleman. One could see the change almost daily, making the face of an ordinary boy into that of an angel.
The parents were either happy to go along with this because they were Theosophists. Or, if the child was Indian or Sri Lankan, they didn’t have much choice because they were brown and Leadbeater was white. For all Theosophy’s ‘brotherhood of man’ philosophy, there was some pretty disgusting paedo-imperialism taking place.
One day, while bathing naked in the river in Adyar, Leadbeater saw the young Krishnamurti. The boy was a Brahmin (upper caste) but malnourished and lice-bitten. But Leadbeater nonetheless had a vision, straight out of the pages of Humbert Humbert. Krishna’s biographer Roland Vernon writes:
Oblivious of his companions in the sea, Leadbeater had eyes only for the boy…The child appeared to be surrounded by an etheric substance of gorgeous luminescence.
Krishna was taken in by the Society, along with his brother Nitya, and groomed by Leadbeater as a promising candidate for World Teacher.
Krishnamurti and Leadbeater
The poor boy was holed up for months in an apartment with Leadbeater, ‘exploring the astral realm’ and then writing his discoveries in his first book, At the Feet of the Master, which sounded suspiciously like Leadbeater’s words. Was he abused during this time? Vernon writes that Leadbeater’s ‘murky record with one pupil after another for nearly half a century points to the likelihood that there were multiple sexual encounters’.
Over months and years, Leadbeater groomed the boy into a star. He was a young, fresh, dapper, slightly vacant dream-boat, the perfect vessel for others’ projections.
The Messiah hype generated by Leadbeater and Besant started to do its magic. On 28th December 1911, at the Society’s annual camp, Krishna handed out regalia for a new order, The Order of the Star. Some of the new recruits prostrated themselves at his feet in ecstasy. Besant proclaimed triumphantly: ‘Those of you who were here yesterday can no longer have doubt whose vehicle the Lord will use.’
But then the Indian press again attacked Leadbeater for his paedophilia, and Krishna’s father decided he wanted him and Nitya back. He took the Society to court for enabling child abuse. So Besant whisked them off to the UK and used all her influence in the courts to keep them under her ‘protection’.
In the UK, at least, Krishna and his brother were safe from Leadbeater. In London, Krishna developed a very close relationship with Lady Emily Lutyens, wife of the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, and at 20 years his senior, a substitute for the mother who’d died when he was small. He also grew accustomed to the aristocratic life supported by rich Theosophist patrons. He developed a taste for fine clothes, dressing in suits from Saville Row, ties from Liberty, monogrammed shirts, wielding a gold cane and a Philippe Patek watch. He tried studying but it wasn’t to his liking — he flunked his exams to UCL and scorned knowledge for the rest of his life.
The Theosophical Society eventually won the court case against Krishna’s father, after he and his brother Nitya said they wished to remain with Besant. They barely saw him again. It was not the last time Krishna would brutally cut off someone close to him.
The young man started to become more independent. Privately, he expressed his dissatisfaction with Theosophy, with the ‘Masters’, with the whole baroque occult bureaucracy Leadbeater had constructed. ‘It’s all rot’, he told Lady Emily Lutyens. When his brother Nitya tragically died, he became even more disillusioned. But he was still committed to his own Messiah-ness.
In 1922, he went through an intense spiritual experience which would repeat over the years and become known as the ‘process’. It involved physical pain accompanied by angelic visitations, during which Krishna had to be mothered by a woman he was attracted to — in this case, a young American woman named Rosalind Williams.
Krishna emerged from this experience convinced that ‘All that I have written is absolutely genuine and profound’ — in other words, he really was the World Teacher, not just the vehicle. His brother also insisted Rosalind had a vision, in which she saw a star descend on Krishna, before she fainted. Rosalind herself later said she merely fell asleep and ‘did not feel anything remarkable had happened’. Her daughter, Radha Sloss, would write:
Even before the popularity of psychosomatic medicine, a competent physician might have suggested that Krishna’s symptoms were quite simply the result of a conscious or unconscious intense need to receive mothering and love…In the future these symptoms would be witnessed usually by a woman for whom Krishna felt a special involvement or love.
After the first ‘process’, Krishna took on the mantle of the World Teacher more boldly. On 28 December 1925, at the Theosophical camp at Ommen Castle, Krishna switched, while talking about the World Teacher, from the third person to the first person: ‘I come for those who want sympathy, who want happiness, who are longing to be released…’ The impact on the audience was electric. Annie Besant declared: ‘The coming has begun’. Lady Emily Lutyens was equally ecstatic: ‘Krishna has become the Lord’. Krishna claimed to have no memory of the speech. But a backstage comment to Rosalind suggests he knew the effect he’d make: ‘You watch! I’m going to show them something.’
The Theosophical hierarchy realized they were losing control over their star vehicle, and they worried about the future of the franchise. They attempted to launch a new ‘star’ — the ‘World Mother’ — but she soon flopped. In this, the Society reminds me of a pop hit factory, like Motown, constantly experimenting to discover what sells. The World Teacher story-line worked great as long as the Messiah could be controlled. But Krishna was onto an even better story. He was about to launch his solo career.
On the 3rd of August 1929, at another camp meeting at Ommen, Krishna made his most famous speech:
I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect…Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized, nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path…
You can watch him deliver it, I’m not sure if this is a recreation or not:
He then proceeded to dissolve the Order of the Star, like Brian in Monty Python declaring ‘go home, you are all individuals!’ Krishna said:
I do not want followers…I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free…I desire to free him from all cages…Because I am free, unconditioned, whole…the whole Truth that is eternal.
But the speech, for all its soundbite quality, doesn’t make sense. If truth cannot be approached by any path whatsoever, then it cannot be approached at all…and there is no point talking about it, looking for it, or anything like that.
It was also pretty brutal to those who gave him everything, like Annie Besant, to torch her organisation and use it as rocket fuel for his own launch. She was devastated and rapidly descended into senility. Then again, she had enabled Leadbeater’s paedophilia, so…
At this point, Krishnamurti could have ‘quietly retired from the whole turgid mess’. He could have renounced the Theosophical Society entirely and given up all the trappings of World Teacher. But he didn’t. His renunciation, writes biographer Roland Vernon, ‘did not represent the great sacrifice for which he has been admired so handsomely ever since’.
Radha Sloss, Rosalind’s daughter, writes:
on one hand, Krishna was declaring that there should be no authority; yet on the other he had insistently and dramatically portrayed his own new condition as being united ‘with the flame’ and having the ‘vision of the mountain top’, which seemed to place him in a position of ultimate authority, nor did he specifically deny that he was the world teacher. If he had been willing quite simply to step aside or step down from the height on which Leadbeater and Mrs Besant had placed him and stand as a mere human being on his own philosophy, a great deal of present and future confusion could have been avoided. But then, of course, he risked losing everything the Theosophical Society and individual Theosophists had willingly given him — the Order of the Star, the castle, the land in Ommen, Ojai and India, and most important, a sizeable international following. He claimed he did not want followers which, perhaps, he did not equate with the audiences who would fill his camps and lecture halls for years to come.
Are you ready for Act Two? It’s set here, in Ojai California.
After his bombshell of 1929, Krishnamurti relocated to California, settling in a villa in Ojai, where Annie Besant had bought some land. She called it the Happy Valley, where she anticipated the coming of the new race of super-humans. It turns out she was right — California did produce an endless stream of superbeings…the stars of Hollywood.
Krishna himself was something of a hit in Hollywood. Radha Sloss writes:
There would always be an interest in Krishna among the Hollywood film set. Some years later John Barrymore…went so far as to suggest that Krishna would make a good film actor portraying the life of Buddha. This remark, tossed out as it happened when Barrymore was in his cups, seems to have made a surprising impression on Krishna. He later claimed he had been offered the part at five thousand dollars a week and knew he could always have made a living that way if he had to.
Young Krishna with the director Cecil B. DeMille and actor Victor Varconi, in King of Kings (about the Messiah)
He settled down in Ojai with his manager Rajagopal and Rosalind, now married to Rajagopal. Rajagopal and Rosalind’s marriage cooled after the birth of their daughter, Radha, and Krishna secretly started a 35-year affair with her. She thought Krishna had told Rajagopal about their arrangement, but it turns out he didn’t.
A rare photo of Krishna with Rosalind. Their love affair didn’t fit with his iconic image as a chaste saint.
For several years, they were a very happy family — Krishna, Rosalind and little Radha, for whom Krishna was more of a father than Rajagopal. Krishna didn’t teach during World War Two (his pacifist message didn’t go down very well) but he enjoyed the country life and made new friends, like Aldous and Maria Huxley, Bertrand Russell, and Greta Garbo.
Krishna could have left his troubled Theosophical past, come clean with Rajagopal about his affair, and led a happy and honest life with Rosalind. But he still yearned to play the saint on the world stage. After the war, he started teaching again, always the same basic message:
The world is messed up. But liberation must happen not through systemic change but through the individual. The individual must realize their creative freedom. How? There is no method, no teacher, no path or effort. Our longing for a path or guru or ideology is merely insecurity. All we have to do is abandon all beliefs, all conditioning, all knowledge, and pay attention to what is.
It’s basically impossible. It doesn’t make any sense, as various people have pointed out (like Osho: ‘If nobody can guide you, what is the point of listening to him again and again? It is pointless.’).
He could have usefully pointed out that we tend to cling to belief systems out of fear — whether that’s Stoicism, Jordan Peterson, ayahuasca, Brexit, the ego, whatever. That would be a useful reminder, particularly in the 70s when ex-hippies were looking for anything to hold on to, or now, when our belief systems are crumbling.
But he took it further, into an extreme scepticism — all beliefs are bad, all knowledge is a waste of time — and extreme individualism. The only answer to all the world’s problems is to know your self and free yourself. How? There is no way. He could have said, here are some ways, but don’t get hung up on them — that’s basically what the Buddha said.
Instead, he developed a performative style of teaching, where his audience wrote questions on pieces of paper like ‘Is there a God?’ or ‘Should I leave my wife?’, and Krishna teases out the question, with occasional comments like ‘You see? Are you with me? Are we together?’ , as if it’s a group exercise. But it really isn’t. It’s a monologue. And his talks are littered with conclusions that don’t make sense to me (perhaps they do to you) such as:
‘When you choose a leader you do so out of confusion, so your leaders are also confused’. Eh?
‘Why is society collapsing? One of the fundamental reasons is that the individual, you, has ceased to be creative.’ Eh?
‘If you and I, as individuals, can see the whole working of the self, then we shall know what love is.’ Eh?
‘Knowledge is not going to solve our problems…Thought has not solved our problems and I don’t think it ever will.’ Eh?
But the audience can never stop him and say, sorry, what exactly do you mean, because it’s always a monologue, delivered to a reverent silence.
He still claimed he was enlightened, and so ‘unconditioned’ that he couldn’t remember his past. This is very unlikely. Helen Knothe, his first ‘girlfriend’, says: ‘He was conditioned and affected every second of his life, just as everyone else was and is’. Perhaps he didn’t want to remember his past because it was traumatic. Radha Sloss writes: ‘There was too much emotion, sometimes even a perceptible shudder, when he spoke of Leadbeater, making it hard to believe that his own recollections were no longer available to him.’
Perhaps if he admitted he remembered the past he’d also have to admit he’d said and written an awful lot about the Masters and the Messiah and special experiences — all of which he now criticized others for believing in. And he never recanted, never apologized for leading others on. He never simply fessed up and said ‘I’m not the Messiah’. He preserved a vacancy for others’ projections.
There were two Krishnamurtis, the onstage and offstage. He was playing the role of a celibate penniless enlightened saint. But he wasn’t celibate, he wasn’t penniless, and he wasn’t enlightened, so why pretend that he was?
In the 1960s, he fell out spectacularly with his manager Rajagopal and his wife Rosalind. Rajagopal discovered the affair, both sides were embittered when Krishnamurti became friendly with another woman in India, Rajagopal lost patience with Krishnamurti’s childish behaviour and took to drink, and Krishnamurti wanted control back of his Foundation. This led to 20 years of law suits, made worse by the fact Krishnamurti wouldn’t simply talk to Rajagopal on their own, simply and directly, but only communicated through disciple intermediaries. He became extremely vituperative — he claimed his house was bugged, that Rajagopal was a black magician, that Rosalind had tried to kill him twice.
Like an ageing Hollywood star, Krishna became cut off from those who knew him well and treated him like an equal, and instead surrounded himself with a court of sycophants, who copied his mannerisms, his hair-style, even his toothpaste brand.
The physicist David Bohm, a close associate of Krishnamurti’s last years, thought there was something hypocritical in this. Bohm’s biographer and friend, F. David Peat, says:
people did treat him as a guru and did behave as if he were a guru. And I think that disturbed Dave. He felt there was some sort of incompatibility in this, something paradoxical. He began to wonder about the extent to which Krishnamurti may have been conditioned by his own upbringing…
Roland Vernon writes in Krishna’s defence:
he did not amass personal wealth [yes he did, just not in his name], he did not establish a personality cult [yes he did], he did not take sexual advantage of his followers [we don’t know, but he certainly took emotional and financial advantage], nor did he subject those around him to irrational cruelties [yes he did]…he refused to be regarded as an authority [no he didn’t]
His public persona was as a sharp-thinking yet loving teacher. Kahlil Gibran said that when he entered my room, he said to himself, ‘Surely the Lord of Love has come’. But his behaviour to those close to him was far from loving.
He abandoned his father, he used Annie Besant and then ditched her, he insisted his brother shouldn’t marry Rosalind and then slept with her himself, he insisted his girlfriend Helen shouldn’t be a violinist but should instead dedicate herself to his life; he opposed the marriage of Rosalind to Rajagopal, then secretly took her as his mistress; he demanded his best friend Lady Emily Lutyens bin her adoring biography of him the week before it went to press; he bullied and criticized his followers; he drove David Bohm to a nervous breakdown; he demoralized the headmasters of his various schools through his interference. And he ruined the lives of his two closest associates — Rajagopal and Rosalind — with two decades of law suits.
He never had a problem relying on others’ kindness, but they could expect nothing from him. And if they contradicted him, he’d get furious. One time Radha had the courage to criticize him for his treatment of her parents: ‘His voice changed completely from a formal indifference to heated anger. It became almost shrill. `I have no ego!’ he said. ‘Who do you think you are, to talk to me like this?’
On the first page of his first book, Krishna writes: ‘Understanding comes when we, you and I, meet on the same level.’ He never met with anyone in his life on the same level. The closest he came was with Rosalind. Everyone else in his life was a devotee or flunkey. I admit these failings make him an unattractive figure to me…but against that one must balance the fact his teachings have apparently helped many, many people. That’s the paradox of so many modern spiritual teachers.
Conclusion
Krishnamurti was a huge success. Time magazine rated him ‘one of the five saints of the 20th century’. It’s remarkable that a boy could escape from what was basically an international paedophile gang to become a global star of spirituality.
He was a major influence on other spiritual teachers: on Aldous Huxley, and his idea of a mystical experience beyond all culture and language; on Alan Watts, and his idea of the ‘wisdom of insecurity’; on Chogyam Rinpoche and his idea of ‘spiritual materialism’; on Osho, and his iconoclasm; on Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle; on Esalen, and its creed of individualism, sensitivity training and the ‘religion of no religion’, and on the entire Sixties counter-culture, with its anti-institutionalism and search for authentic individual existence. In his break from Theosophy, he helped create the modern landscape of ‘spiritual but not religious’.
He remained an influence on Hollywood as well, particularly on Bruce Lee, who said he was much influenced by Krishnamurti’s teachings when he formulated what would become mixed martial arts.
But was Krishnamurti a positive influence on our culture? It’s hard to say. He strengthened the idea that organized religion is nonsense, and somehow it’s superior to be a rootless individualist. I’m not sure that’s true. But many of his millions of fans on YouTube say they’ve been helped and inspired by him.
Does it matter that he was dishonest, treated people badly, that his philosophy didn’t make sense? Well…to be honest the more one studies the lives of ‘enlightened beings’, the less one believes in such an idea. Perhaps there are some genuinely enlightened humans out there, but they are probably not big on YouTube.
What we have instead, in mass market spirituality, are performers, like pop singers. The market creates stars, who each find their own style, riffing off what came before — Osho said he was very influenced by Krishnamurti, for example, but tried to be funnier. They craft personae, and give inspiring performances. What happens off-stage is usually very different, and not very pleasant to see.
Spiritual teachers have charisma, and they’re good at talking and casting a spell. But in terms of ethical behaviour, they are generally worse than the average human. More selfish, more megalomaniac, more self-absorbed, more infantile, more immoral in how they treat others. And more hypocritical because, on the whole, they claim to be advanced in some way, or even enlightened.
But never mind that. Onstage, Krishna was great. What a performer. ‘Integrity spilled out of him’ as another good performer, Sadhguru, says. Radha Sloss writes:
One day on a walk with Krinsh on the hillside above Chalet Tanegg, I suddenly asked him why he still talked after nearly forty years of saying very much the same thing. `If everyone took you literally, listened carefully, and took in what you are saying, they needn’t come back unless they want to be followers and you say you don’t want followers. What would happen if your audience, by really listening to you, disappeared?’ `That is a paradox,’ he answered in a moment of open candour. ‘I speak to live, I do not live to speak, if there were no more talks I would die.’
And so, rather like Alan Watts, he had to keep on performing, keep on talking and talking. Trapped in a public role, dissociated from his own loneliness and pain, he chose the worship of fans over the genuine love of friends and family.
Well, nobody’s perfect. We can admit his flaws and give thanks for his teachings. He went through a lot, after all.