Sally Kempton, Rising Star Journalist Turned Swami, Dies at 80

Sally Kempton, who was as soon as was a rising star within the New York journalism world and a fierce exponent of radical feminism, however who later pivoted to a lifetime of Eastern asceticism and religious follow, died on Monday at her dwelling in Carmel, Calif. She was 80.

Her brother David Kempton mentioned the trigger was coronary heart failure, including that she had suffered from a power 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 Nineteen Sixties as a workers author for The Village Voice and a contributor to The New York Times. She was a pointy and proficient reporter — though she generally felt she hadn’t correctly earned her place as a journalist and owed it largely to her father’s popularity.

She wrote arch items about New Age fads like astrology: “One believes in marijuana and Bob Dylan,” she famous in The Times in 1969, and “astrology is part of an atmosphere which includes these things and others; it is 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 buddy, the creator Susan Brownmiller, joined a bunch known as the New York Radical Feminists, and within the spring of 1970 they participated in a sit-in on the workplaces of Ladies’ Home Journal to protest its editorial content material, which they mentioned was demeaning to girls. That identical month, she and Ms. Brownmiller have been invited on “The Dick Cavett Show” to characterize what was then known 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).

But what made Ms. Kempton well-known, for a New York minute, was a blistering essay within the July 1970 concern of Esquire journal known as “Cutting Loose,” through which she took intention at her father, her husband and her personal complicity within the regressive gender roles of the period.

The fundamental level of the essay was that she had been groomed to be a sure type of vivid 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, “in which she grows up to be the perfect feminine companion, parroting him with such subtlety that it is impossible to tell her thoughts and feelings, so coincident with his, are not original.”

She described her husband, the film producer Harrison Starr, who was 13 years her senior, as “a male supremacist in the style 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 is hard 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 livid prose. To a sure era, it’s nonetheless a touchstone of feminist exposition. Years later, Susan Cheever, writing in The Times, known as it “a scream of marital rage.”

Four years after the Esquire piece was revealed, Ms. Kempton primarily vanished, to comply with an Indian mystic named Swami Muktananda, in any other case often known as Baba, a proponent of a religious follow often known as Siddha Yoga. Baba was touring America within the Nineteen Seventies and accruing devotees from the chattering lessons by the a whole lot after which the 1000’s — together with, at one level, seemingly half of Hollywood.

By 1982, Ms. Kempton had taken a vow of chastity and poverty to stay as a monk in Baba’s ashrams, first in India after which in a former borscht belt lodge 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 informed 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, “Saw Sally Kempton, ’64, who is 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 no longer existed.”

Sally Kempton was born on Jan. 15, 1943, in Manhattan and grew up in Princeton, N.J., the eldest of 5 youngsters. Her mom, Mina (Bluethenthal) Kempton, was a social employee; she and Mr. Kempton divorced when Sally was in school.

She attended Sarah Lawrence as a substitute of Barnard, she wrote in her Esquire essay, as a result of her boyfriend on the time thought it was a extra “feminine” establishment. There, she co-edited {a magazine} parody known as The Establishment. She was employed by The Village Voice proper after commencement and commenced writing items, as she put it, about “drugs and hippies” that she mentioned have been principally made up as a result of she had no thought 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 Dead tune “Ripple.”

“All the complexities and the suffering and the pain and the mental stuff I was concerned with as a downtown New York journalist just dissolved, and all I could 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 before?”

But Ms. Kempton had had a transformative expertise, and he or she continued to have them as she started investigating religious 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 case you’re going to get your self a guru, why not get an excellent 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. Before lengthy she had joined his entourage. It felt, she mentioned, like working away with the circus.

Her mates have been appalled. “But you were always so ambitious,” one mentioned. “I’m still ambitious,” she mentioned. “There’s just been a slight shift in direction.”

Ms. Kempton spent almost 30 years with Baba’s group, often known as the SYDA Foundation, for twenty 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 demise, 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 towards Baba and questions on his succession, she quoted Ms. Kempton as saying that the accusations have been “ridiculous.” Ms. Kempton by no means spoke publicly concerning the concern.

In 2002, she put away her robes and left the ashram, shifting to Carmel to show meditation and religious philosophy. She was the creator of numerous books on religious practices, together with “Meditation for the Love of It: Enjoying Your Own Deepest Experience” (2011), which has an introduction by Elizabeth Gilbert of “Eat, Pray Love” fame.

In addition to her brother David, Ms. Kempton is survived by two different brothers, Arthur and Christopher. Another brother, James Murray Kempton Jr., often known as Mike, was killed in a automotive crash together with his spouse, Jean Goldschmidt Kempton, a university buddy of Sally’s, in 1971.

Ms. Kempton’s father, after his preliminary shock, was supportive of her new life. He was a religious man himself, a working towards Episcopalian, however humble about it. “I just go for the music,” he favored to inform individuals.

Murray Kempton, who died in 1997, visited the ashram and met with Baba numerous instances, David Kempton mentioned, and was respectful of the order’s ethos and historical past. He informed The Oakland Tribune that if his daughter had needed to be a druid he may need nervous.

“I assume she knows something that I don’t know,” he mentioned. “I respect her choice. In fact, I admire the choice Sally made. After all, she is a swami, isn’t she?”