The founder of the “college” was Pierre Bernard, who was neither a “Pierre” nor a “Bernard.” Originally Perry Baker from Leon, Iowa, a town with a mere 1,400 residents, he preferred “Pierre Bernard” for its European air. Having escaped Iowa in his late teens, Baker traveled around the country, dispensing Eastern wisdom that he’d picked up from a self-taught yogi. Eventually, he settled in Manhattan, teaching his version of mysticism and the occult to the curious, the rich (wives of Broadway producers, sons of Wall Street financiers), and the famous (Lillian Russell, the illustrious actress). Women were Bernard’s weakness. First he shared an apartment near Central Park West—what newspapers would soon call a “love nest”—with a young woman from the Bronx who suffered from a weak heart. He promised he had the cure for her. She was soon disappointed: he had other things in mind. Then there was Gertrude Leo, whom he brought to New York after one of his yoga hustles in Seattle. When the police learned about this, they claimed he had crossed state lines with an unmarried woman for “immoral purposes.” Stuck in prison for three months—Bernard couldn’t raise the $15,000 bail—he was released when both women dropped their charges against him, deciding they cared more about preserving their reputations than trashing his. Soon, Bernard was running the Sanskrit College with essentially the same moneyed clientele as before.
Bernard liked flaunting his credentials. By his own count, he belonged to more than sixty “learned societies and academies” on three continents. One of these “societies”—the American Medical Association—went to considerable lengths to state that Bernard had never graduated from a medical college, never been licensed to practice medicine anywhere in the United States, and never belonged to the AMA itself. Responding to a query about Bernard, the association stated that its investigators “seemed to get the impression that . . . [Bernard’s] cult or circle was devoted to sex worship.” Despite the scandals that followed him for decades, by the 1930s Bernard was so wealthy that he purchased an estate in Rockland County, about twenty miles north of New York City, and he was so adroit at mingling the aspirations of spiritual seekers with the balderdash of a sideshow that he owned several elephants. Baby, Budh, Juno, and Old Man entertained local kids, swam in the pool Bernard built for them, and rode oversized tricycles in Bernard’s annual fetes.
Inayat arrived in New York a few months after Bernard’s disgrace from the “love nest” where he had kept nubile young women. Inayat never learned about the scandals. He probably never wanted to. He was there to teach, not worry about headlines like the police breaking “in on weird Hindu rites” or about “The Great Oom,” the tabloids’ moniker for Bernard. In any case, Inayat had to be careful. His stay coincided with a resurgence of hysteria about Eastern religions. According to the Washington Post, women, brainwashed by gurus and swamis, were “deserting home and husband and children to ‘follow the light’ ” and flee to India. A journalist who attended Inayat’s classes noted that after he proclaimed, “We are love ourselves, and we must love,” “fair bosoms rise and fall” and “an attraction” and “obsession” sprang up between “American women and a dark-skinned master.”
One of those women was Ora Baker, Pierre Bernard’s twenty-year-old sister and legal ward. Willowy and petite, with long blonde hair secured by a barrette just above the nape of her neck, Ora fell in love with Inayat. Tall and handsome, he was a relief from the scrawny holy men who usually passed through her brother’s “college.” Summoning her courage, Ora told Bernard she wanted to marry the new “professor.” Bernard was furious. Inayat had no job, no future. He couldn’t provide for a family. He could barely provide for himself. Many brothers would have had similar concerns. What really bothered Bernard was Inayat’s color: he didn’t want a dark-skinned man in his family. “Your blood will never mix with his,” he told his sister. (Despite all his talk of love, Bernard forbade his students to ever discuss “in the presence of niggers and chinks and snakes” what he taught. His wisdom was too precious for these lower life forms just as Ora was too lofty for a brown-skinned man from India.)
Soon, Inayat had to leave the United States for concerts and lectures that had already been booked in England. Bernard ordered Ora to stay in the United States, and to never see Inayat or write to him. Bernard also began keeping a gun in a drawer. Had Inayat shown up, he was prepared to kill him. Virtually a prisoner in her brother’s house, Ora called herself “the saddest girl in the world.” While going through Bernard’s desk one day, she came upon the address of Inayat’s family in India. Writing to him there, she asked that her letters be forwarded to Inayat in England. In the next few months, Ora wrote almost sixty letters to Inayat, all of them full of longing and yearning, lamenting in one, “Oh, my soul, my soul, how can I ever live through this separation?” and in another, “Who could be so heartless as to keep us apart. . . . My eyes are blind with tears,” and in still another, “Where is my love, where is he now / Just to see his face again . . . / I would die a thousand deaths.”
In February 1913, Ora secretly bought a ticket for a steamer to Europe. Wearing a plain black dress and tucking her long blonde hair under a hat, she barely left her cabin for the entire trip. Even her meals were brought there. Inayat met her in Antwerp, a safer port than London in case Bernard had detectives looking for Ora there. On March 20, Ora and Inayat were married in a civil ceremony in London; a few weeks later, they had a Muslim ceremony. Ora never returned to the United States.
Though Inayat and his brothers gave concerts and lectures all over Paris and London, they were barely making a living. To make more of a splash, they teamed up in Paris with Mata Hari—the Dutch dancer Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, whom the French would execute as a German spy after World War I. The brothers were happy to soon leave Mata, embarrassed by her partially nude performances and her phony versions of classical Indian dancing. Years later, they were still making fun of her. “First,” the brothers recalled, “she swayed to the right, then to the left, and then she stood still for a bit. And all the bald gentlemen with white beards on little gold chairs would murmur, ‘Ah, c’est charmant.’ ”
Noor’s mother, Ora.
More satisfying was Inayat’s friendship with the composer Claude Debussy. Debussy, who had long been interested in nonwestern music, would incorporate into several of his symphonies the Indian melodies that he had learned from Inayat.
Then an offer came to perform in Moscow. Inayat was accustomed to being asked to perform for royalty in India. He assumed the invitation had come from the czar himself. Inayat was wrong. The offer came from Frederick Bruce Thomas, an African American whose parents had been slaves in Mississippi. After the Civil War, Thomas’s parents, Lewis and Hannah, bought a farm—one of only six owned by blacks in Coahama County. They were threatened by the Ku Klux Klan, shunned by their neighbors, and swindled by a rich white landowner to sign their two hundred acres over to him to ease their debts. After they moved to Memphis, Lewis was murdered, his wife struggled to get by, and Frederick—exhausted from sorrow, misery, and humiliation—headed north. Eighteen years old, he worked as a delivery “boy” in St. Louis and Chicago, a valet in New York, and a waiter, butler, and headwaiter in London, Paris, Monte Carlo, Milan, Rome, Vienna, and Budapest. Looking for a place where he could put down roots, Frederick found it in Russia. In 1912, he bought a club in Moscow, Maxim, with rich fabrics on its walls, glittering chandeliers hanging from its ceilings, and, soon, “first-class variety theater” that he imported from Europe. “Mature” entertainment began around 11 p.m. as men reclined on low settees in Maxim’s Salon Café Harem, sipping champagne at fourteen rubles a bottle (several hundred dollars in today’s money) while the Royal Musicians of Hindustan played their vinas and tablas, and Princess Chukha Mukha, the dancer they’d brought with them from Paris, slithered her way through showbiz hoofing and phony Indian gestures.