Sally Kempton, who was once a rising star within the Recent York journalism world and a fierce exponent of radical feminism, but who later pivoted to a lifetime of Eastern asceticism and spiritual practice, died on Monday at her home in Carmel, Calif. She was 80.
Her brother David Kempton said the cause was heart failure, adding that she had suffered from a chronic lung condition.
Ms. Kempton’s literary pedigree was impeccable. Her father was Murray Kempton, the erudite and acerbic newspaper columnist and a lion of Recent York journalism, the ranks of which she joined within the late Sixties as a staff author for The Village Voice and a contributor to The Recent York Times. She was a pointy and talented reporter — although she sometimes felt she hadn’t properly earned her place as a journalist and owed it largely to her father’s fame.
She wrote arch pieces about Recent Age fads like astrology: “One believes in marijuana and Bob Dylan,” she noted in The Times in 1969, and “astrology is an element of an environment which incorporates this stuff and others; it’s certainly one of the ways we speak to our friends.” She profiled rock stars like Frank Zappa and reviewed books for The Times.
She and a friend, the creator Susan Brownmiller, joined a gaggle called the Recent York Radical Feminists, and within the spring of 1970 they participated in a sit-in on the offices of Ladies’ Home Journal to protest its editorial content, which they said was demeaning to women. That very same month, she and Ms. Brownmiller were invited on “The Dick Cavett Show” to represent what was then called the ladies’s liberation movement; the 2 had a set-to with Hugh Hefner, the publisher of Playboy magazine, who was also a guest, as was the rock singer Grace Slick (who didn’t seem totally on board with the feminist agenda).
But what made Ms. Kempton famous, for a Recent York minute, was a blistering essay within the July 1970 issue of Esquire magazine called “Cutting Loose,” through which she took aim at her father, her husband and her own complicity within the regressive gender roles of the era.
The essential point of the essay was that she had been groomed to be a certain sort of vibrant but compliant helpmeet, and he or she was spitting mad at herself for succeeding. Her father, she wrote, considered women to be incapable of great thought and was expert within the art of putting women down; their very own relationship, she said, was like that of an 18th-century count and his precocious daughter, “through which she grows as much as be the proper feminine companion, parroting him with such subtlety that it’s inconceivable to inform her thoughts and feelings, so coincident together with his, should not original.”
She described her husband, the movie producer Harrison Starrwho 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 in the top with a frying pan.
“It is tough to fight an enemy,” she concluded, “who has outposts in your head.”
The piece landed like a cluster bomb. Her marriage didn’t survive. Her relationship along with her father suffered. Women devoured it, recognizing themselves in her furious prose. To a certain generation, it continues to be a touchstone of feminist exposition. Years later, Susan Cheever, writing in The Times, called it “a scream of marital rage.”
4 years after the Esquire piece was published, Ms. Kempton essentially vanished, to follow an Indian mystic named Swami Muktananda, otherwise generally known as Baba, a proponent of a spiritual practice generally known as Siddha Yoga. Baba was touring America within the Seventies and accruing devotees from the chattering classes by the tons of after which the hundreds — including, at one point, seemingly half of Hollywood.
By 1982, Ms. Kempton had taken a vow of chastity and poverty to live 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 name Swami Durgananda, and he or she donned the normal orange robes of a Hindu monk.
After she was ordained, as she told the author Sara Davidson, who profiled Ms. Kempton in 2001she bumped into a Sarah Lawrence classmate, who then wrote within the alumni newsletter, “Saw 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 not existed.”
Sally Kempton was born on Jan. 15, 1943, in Manhattan and grew up in Princeton, N.J., the eldest of 5 children. Her mother, Mina (Bluethenthal) Kempton, was a social employee; she and Mr. Kempton divorced when Sally was in college.
She attended Sarah Lawrence as a substitute of Barnard, she wrote in her Esquire essay, because her boyfriend on the time thought it was a more “feminine” institution. There, she co-edited a magazine parody called The Establishment. She was hired by The Village Voice right after graduation and commenced writing pieces, as she put it, about “drugs and hippies” that she said were mostly made up because she had no idea what she was doing. (Her writing belied that assertion.)
She had her first ecstatic experience, she later recalled, in her apartment within the West Village, while taking psychedelics with a boyfriend and listening to the Grateful Dead song “Ripple.”
“All of the complexities and the suffering and the pain and the mental stuff I used to be concerned with as a downtown Recent York journalist just dissolved, and all I could see was love,” she said in a video on her website. When she described her latest insight to her boyfriend, she said, he responded by asking, “Haven’t you ever taken acid before?”
But Ms. Kempton had had a transformative experience, and he or she continued to have them as she began investigating spiritual practices like yoga and Tibetan Buddhism. She went to see Baba out of curiosity — everyone was doing it — and, as she wrote in 1976 in Recent York magazinefor those who’re going to get yourself a guru, why not get a very good one?
She was immediately pulled in, she wrote, charmed by his matter-of-fact persona in addition to something stronger, if hard to define. Before long she had joined his entourage. It felt, she said, like running away with the circus.
Her friends were appalled. “But you were at all times so ambitious,” one said. “I’m still ambitious,” she said. “There’s just been a slight shift in direction.”
Ms. Kempton spent nearly 30 years with Baba’s organization, generally known as the SYDA Foundation, for 20 years of which she was a swami. Baba died in 1982, following accusations that he had sexually abused young women in his ashrams; since his death, the inspiration has been run by his successor, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda. In 1994, when Lis Harris, a author for The Recent Yorker, investigated the inspiration and wrote an article that noted the accusations against Baba and questions on his succession, she quoted Ms. Kempton as saying that the accusations were “ridiculous.” Ms. Kempton never spoke publicly concerning the issue.
In 2002, she put away her robes and left the ashram, moving to Carmel to show meditation and spiritual philosophy. She was the creator of quite a lot of books on spiritual practices, including “Meditation for the Love of It: Having fun with Your Own Deepest Experience” (2011), which has an introduction by Elizabeth Gilbert of “Eat, Pray Love” fame.
Along with her brother David, Ms. Kempton is survived by two other brothers, Arthur and Christopher. One other brother, James Murray Kempton Jr., generally known as Mike, was killed in a automotive crash together with his wife, Jean Goldschmidt Kempton, a university friend of Sally’s, in 1971.
Ms. Kempton’s father, after his initial shock, was supportive of her latest life. He was a spiritual man himself, a practicing Episcopalian, but humble about it. “I just go for the music,” he liked to inform people.
Murray Kempton, who died in 1997, visited the ashram and met with Baba quite a lot of times, David Kempton said, and was respectful of the order’s ethos and history. He told The Oakland Tribune that if his daughter had desired to be a druid he might need nervous.
“I assume she knows something that I don’t know,” he said. “I respect her selection. The truth is, I love the selection Sally made. In spite of everything, she is a swami, isn’t she?”
