Sally Kempton, who was as soon as a rising star within the New York journalism world and a fierce exponent of radical feminism, however who later pivoted to a lifetime of Japanese asceticism and non secular observe, died on Monday at her house in Carmel, Calif. She was 80.
Her brother David Kempton mentioned the trigger was coronary heart failure, including that she had suffered from a continual lung situation.
Ms. Kempton’s literary pedigree was impeccable. Her father was Murray Kempton, the erudite and acerbic newspaper columnist and a lion of New York journalism, the ranks of which she joined within the late Sixties as a workers author for The Village Voice and a contributor to The New York Instances. She was a pointy and gifted reporter — though she generally felt she hadn’t correctly earned her place as a journalist and owed it largely to her father’s repute.
She wrote arch items about New Age fads like astrology: “One believes in marijuana and Bob Dylan,” she famous in The Instances in 1969, and “astrology is a part of an environment which incorporates these items and others; it is likely one of the methods we communicate to our buddies.” She profiled rock stars like Frank Zappa and reviewed books for The Instances.
She and a good friend, the creator Susan Brownmiller, joined a gaggle referred to as the New York Radical Feminists, and within the spring of 1970 they participated in a sit-in on the workplaces of Women’ Residence Journal to protest its editorial content material, which they mentioned was demeaning to girls. That very same month, she and Ms. Brownmiller had been invited on “The Dick Cavett Present” to symbolize what was then referred to as the ladies’s liberation motion; the 2 had a set-to with Hugh Hefner, the writer of Playboy journal, who was additionally a visitor, as was the rock singer Grace Slick (who didn’t appear completely on board with the feminist agenda).
However what made Ms. Kempton well-known, for a New York minute, was a blistering essay within the July 1970 problem of Esquire journal referred to as “Reducing Unfastened,” during which she took goal at her father, her husband and her personal complicity within the regressive gender roles of the period.
The essential level of the essay was that she had been groomed to be a sure sort of shiny however compliant helpmeet, and he or she was spitting mad at herself for succeeding. Her father, she wrote, thought of girls to be incapable of great thought and was expert within the artwork of placing girls down; their very own relationship, she mentioned, was like that of an 18th-century depend and his precocious daughter, “during which she grows as much as be the proper female companion, parroting him with such subtlety that it’s unattainable to inform her ideas and emotions, so coincident along with his, are usually not authentic.”
She described her husband, the film producer Harrison Starr, who was 13 years her senior, as “a male supremacist within the type of Norman Mailer” who infantilized her and provoked in her such frustration that she fantasized about bashing him within the head with a frying pan.
“It’s arduous to battle an enemy,” she concluded, “who has outposts in your head.”
The piece landed like a cluster bomb. Her marriage didn’t survive. Her relationship together with her father suffered. Ladies devoured it, recognizing themselves in her livid prose. To a sure era, it’s nonetheless a touchstone of feminist exposition. Years later, Susan Cheever, writing in The Instances, referred to as it “a scream of marital rage.”
4 years after the Esquire piece was revealed, Ms. Kempton basically vanished, to comply with an Indian mystic named Swami Muktananda, in any other case often called Baba, a proponent of a non secular observe often called Siddha Yoga. Baba was touring America within the Nineteen Seventies and accruing devotees from the chattering lessons by the a whole bunch after which the hundreds — together with, at one level, seemingly half of Hollywood.
By 1982, Ms. Kempton had taken a vow of chastity and poverty to dwell as a monk in Baba’s ashrams, first in India after which in a former borscht belt hotel within the Catskills. He gave her the identify Swami Durgananda, and he or she donned the standard orange robes of a Hindu monk.
After she was ordained, as she instructed the author Sara Davidson, who profiled Ms. Kempton in 2001, she ran right into a Sarah Lawrence classmate, who then wrote within the alumni e-newsletter, “Noticed Sally Kempton, ’64, who’s now married to an Indian man and is Mrs. Durgananda.”
As The Oakland Tribune reported in 1983, “The Sally Kempton who had written about sexual rage in Esquire now not existed.”
Sally Kempton was born on Jan. 15, 1943, in Manhattan and grew up in Princeton, N.J., the eldest of 5 kids. Her mom, Mina (Bluethenthal) Kempton, was a social employee; she and Mr. Kempton divorced when Sally was in faculty.
She attended Sarah Lawrence as an alternative of Barnard, she wrote in her Esquire essay, as a result of her boyfriend on the time thought it was a extra “female” establishment. There, she co-edited {a magazine} parody referred to as The Institution. She was employed by The Village Voice proper after commencement and commenced writing items, as she put it, about “medication and hippies” that she mentioned had been principally made up as a result of she had no concept what she was doing. (Her writing belied that assertion.)
She had her first ecstatic expertise, she later recalled, in her house within the West Village, whereas taking psychedelics with a boyfriend and listening to the Grateful Useless music “Ripple.”
“All of the complexities and the struggling and the ache and the psychological stuff I used to be involved with as a downtown New York journalist simply dissolved, and all I may see was love,” she mentioned in a video on her web site. When she described her new perception to her boyfriend, she mentioned, he responded by asking, “Haven’t you ever taken acid earlier than?”
However Ms. Kempton had had a transformative expertise, and he or she continued to have them as she started investigating non secular practices like yoga and Tibetan Buddhism. She went to see Baba out of curiosity — everybody was doing it — and, as she wrote in 1976 in New York journal, in the event you’re going to get your self a guru, why not get a superb one?
She was immediately pulled in, she wrote, charmed by his matter-of-fact persona in addition to one thing stronger, if arduous to outline. Earlier than lengthy she had joined his entourage. It felt, she mentioned, like working away with the circus.
Her buddies had been appalled. “However you had been at all times so bold,” one mentioned. “I’m nonetheless bold,” she mentioned. “There’s simply been a slight shift in course.”
Ms. Kempton spent practically 30 years with Baba’s group, often called the SYDA Basis, for 20 years of which she was a swami. Baba died in 1982, following accusations that he had sexually abused younger girls in his ashrams; since his dying, the muse has been run by his successor, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda. In 1994, when Lis Harris, a author for The New Yorker, investigated the muse and wrote an article that famous the accusations in opposition to Baba and questions on his succession, she quoted Ms. Kempton as saying that the accusations had been “ridiculous.” Ms. Kempton by no means spoke publicly concerning the problem.
In 2002, she put away her robes and left the ashram, transferring to Carmel to show meditation and non secular philosophy. She was the creator of quite a lot of books on non secular practices, together with “Meditation for the Love of It: Having fun with Your Personal Deepest Expertise” (2011), which has an introduction by Elizabeth Gilbert of “Eat, Pray Love” fame.
Along with her brother David, Ms. Kempton is survived by two different brothers, Arthur and Christopher. One other brother, James Murray Kempton Jr., often called Mike, was killed in a automotive crash along with his spouse, Jean Goldschmidt Kempton, a school good friend of Sally’s, in 1971.
Ms. Kempton’s father, after his preliminary shock, was supportive of her new life. He was a non secular man himself, a training Episcopalian, however humble about it. “I simply go for the music,” he appreciated to inform folks.
Murray Kempton, who died in 1997, visited the ashram and met with Baba quite a lot of instances, David Kempton mentioned, and was respectful of the order’s ethos and historical past. He instructed The Oakland Tribune that if his daughter had wished to be a druid he might need anxious.
“I assume she is aware of one thing that I don’t know,” he mentioned. “I respect her alternative. In actual fact, I love the selection Sally made. In any case, she is a swami, isn’t she?”
