The Goddess Pose by Michelle Goldberg

Author:Michelle Goldberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-06-09T04:00:00+00:00

· CHAPTER 12 ·

EVEN AS her immigration struggles threatened to derail her American life, Devi was thriving as never before, as socialites and actresses began to discover what yoga could do for them. In 1950 she was invited to teach at an outpost of Elizabeth Arden’s Maine Chance spa near Phoenix, Arizona, where for around four hundred dollars a week—more than thirty-eight hundred in today’s dollars—wealthy women went to live in “sumptuous starvation,” in the words of Life magazine. Days passed in a tightly regimented schedule of exercise classes and beauty treatments. It was as square an environment as could be imagined, a place where spiritual aspiration, if it existed, was sublimated into a Sisyphean battle against weight gain and aging. Devi was extremely well received, and by teaching there, she both popularized and further domesticated yoga, turning it into a hobby for respectable bourgeois ladies. This is one of the ironies of hatha yoga in America: rich housewives discovered it well before it became the avant-garde enthusiasm of beats and hippies.

Arden, the perpetually pink-clad creator of a cosmetics empire, was a Canadian parvenu with a weakness for aristocrats. She had a special fondness for White Russians and a long-standing fascination with yoga. She must have been happy to find Devi, an expert asana teacher with excellent social credentials and no hint of the sort of impropriety associated with earlier generations of American yogis. After a stint in Arizona, Devi, ignoring the warrant for her arrest, spent the summer season at Arden’s original Maine Chance spa, in Mount Vernon, Maine. In the fall, Arden brought Devi to New York City to instruct her personally.

There, Devi ran into an old friend whom she hadn’t seen in more than thirty years: Valentina Sanina. The last time they’d been together, in Kharkov after the Russian Revolution, Valentina had been an icy, remote ingénue pursued by Alexander Vertinsky. She’d come to New York in 1923 with her husband, George Schlee, and had become one of the country’s most celebrated fashion designers, known for her rigorously spare, architectural, wildly expensive couture. Valentina—she was by then known by only one name—dressed the most ravishing figures in Hollywood, many of whom would later become Devi’s students. No one was closer to her, though, than Greta Garbo.

During the 1940s, Valentina, Schlee, and Garbo formed an inseparable triad. The exact romantic dynamic between them all is hard to discern. At the time, the rumor was that Valentina was sharing her husband with the actress, though it’s also possible that Valentina and Garbo, who had at least one female ex-lover in common, were romantically involved as well. Whatever her relationship with the Schlees, when she was with them, the usually retiring Garbo courted gossip: “The two women would dress in identical Valentina ensembles for high-profile nights out on the town—with George in the middle, Garbo on one arm, and Valentina on the other,” writes Valentina’s biographer. Here was an acquaintanceship Devi was happy to renew.

When Devi showed up in New

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.