Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 11, 1993 TAG: 9310070409
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE CAPUZZO KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
So goes the hype from Los Angeles, where Marianne Williamson, spiritual guru to the stars and mega-selling advice author to common folk, is rising with a dignity compared to Indira Gandhi's, compassion said to rival Mother Teresa's (or at least Ann Landers') and better press than Jesus Christ. Of course, the world was smaller in A.D. 30, and the crowds who cheered and jeered Jesus were far fewer than all the magazines and talk shows that have covered Williamson's ascent to new-age high priestess from drugged-sexed-and-rock-and- rolled-messed-up chick.
If you haven't heard of Williamson, shut the windows, pull the blinds and plug your ears ... the Word, like motes of sunlight, is still bound to filter in. She's ``Hollywood's answer to God,'' a magazine quipped, and has parlayed her 100 huge-selling self-help tapes (such as ``Forgiving Your Parents,'' ``Death Does Not Exist'' and ``Saving the World'') into a book, ``A Return to Love.'' Whereupon the modern equivalent of the water-to-wine miracle occurred: Oprah said, ``I've never been more moved by a book,'' and 780,000 people promptly went out and bought a copy, making ``A Return to Love'' the fifth-best selling nonfiction book of 1992.
Williamson officiated at the wedding of Liz Taylor and Larry Fortensky. (Oh, NOW you've heard of her.) She lectures in New York and LA every month to huge audiences, playing them like a Mary Magdalene-Lenny Bruce hybrid, saying such things as, ``Any man who holds a woman back is not a man a woman can afford to be with.'' And: ``When we are truly aware of our spiritual glory, a varicose vein or two is not that big a deal.''
Nowadays she's on the road pitching her second book, ``A Woman's Worth,'' which rocketed to No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list this month, less than a month after a colossal first printing of 375,000.
Between the covers of ``A Woman's Worth,'' Williamson mixes golden-rule standards and new-age sauciness, God and sex, selflessness and the big sell. ``Many woman complain that they keep attracting the `wrong relationship,''' Williamson writes. ``What they mean ... of course, is that they are attracted `to' the wrong relationship. ... The truth that sets us free is ... remembering we are the daughters of God, and daughters of God don't brake for jerks.''
The big talk comes from a tiny woman, barely 5 feet tall with little-boy legs and Sally Field-saucer eyes. This is how she appeared one morning recently, strolling into a New York hotel lobby, clutching a spring-water bottle and wobbling a bit on platform shoes, her face hard and flinty, her eyes cold. It was two hours after her four-minute appearance on ``Good Morning America,'' during which she had been all smiles. Williamson was 20 minutes late for a newspaper interview, trailed by a publicist professing traffic excuses. Mariann e Williamson did not apologize. Marianne Williamson, leading new-age proponent of the golden rule, was having a bad turn-the-other-cheek day.
In her suite, she posed for a photograph, unable to stand still, legs dancing and twitching a nervous beat. A few minutes later, she exploded, a theatrical rage, hands waving, railing against the government's handling of the Branch Davidian disaster. ``Oh, I wish I were lecturing this week,'' she says. ``It has me so worked up.''
If it were up to Williamson, President Clinton would have summoned a group of new-age leaders, say, even Williamson, to talk to David Koresh in spiritual terms, to encourage a peaceful solution.
Her ideas, she says, are based on ``the principles of love and recovering love as a guiding principle in all of our choices. People can choose to be open, loving, positive in each moment of their lives / or choose to be negative, resentful...''
Williamson this morning seems to be choosing anger, resentment and struggling to reign them in. This is a bittersweet time to be Marianne Williamson. She's riding a huge publicity wave as her book soars, yet at the same time the inevitable backlash has hit, stories portraying her as Aimee Semple McPherson, as a hypocritical fame-and-power grabber. She bites her lip, tempted to trash unto others as others have trashed unto her, but declines as a public-relations counselor across the room nods, no. But it's not in interviews that Williamson shines like a new-age divinity. It's on stage.
At a typical gathering in Los Angeles, Williamson is often described as dazzling, a powerful, hyperkenetic orator who'll invoke the Holy Spirit, Eastern philosophy, Snow White, ``Dances With Wolves,'' Buckminster Fuller, Julia Roberts, Carl Jung and Cinderella in the same speech.
Williamson's intellectual reach, often described as breathtaking and brilliant, leaves her on thin ice occasionally. In a recent interview, she thundered about the need to find a spiritual answer to the world's psychopaths, more and more of whom soon will be acquiring ``plutonium to build nuclear bombs.'' (``Wait. It is plutonium, isn't it?'') (It is.) Speaking of First Amendment guarantees of freedom of press and religion - ``Wait. The First Amendment ``does'' protect religious freedom, doesn't it?'' (It does.)
``The first time I went to see her it was like the Liberty Bell fell on my head,'' LA film producer Howard Rosenman told Vanity Fair. ``Here was this gorgeous Jewish chick who obviously came from a sophisticated, neurotic Texas Jewish background, talking in the argot of my generation. ... The community she's addressing is a group that partied and drugged and sexualized through the '60s and '70s, and here comes this woman who ... you know could have been at Studio 54 or dancing at Fire Island Pines with a tambourine on her hip - and yet she's talking like Jesus Christ. She's talking about the most fundamental precepts. She's talking about the golden rule.''
Some spiritual leaders try to hide a troubled past. Williamson eagerly shares hers. Growing up in Houston, the daughter of a homemaker and a lefty-radical Jewish lawyer, Williamson says she was inspired by her father to ``grow up and change the world ... be the strong one and hold other people who are burdened with serious problems.'' For years, the one with problems was Williamson. In the early '70s, she studied acting at Pomona College near LA, then dropped out and moved to New Mexico with a boyfriend who designed geodesic domes. She dumped him a year later, beginning her ``wasted decade'' - moving from Austin to New York to San Francisco, changing addresses and odd jobs and bad relationships. She tried singing jazz at nightclubs. In her 20s, ``I was a mess,'' she says.
She returned to Houston in 1979, opened a new-age bookstore, got married and divorced almost immediately, a ``15-minute mistake,'' she says. She was in therapy five times a week and nearing a nervous breakdown when she turned to the book that changed her life.
It was ``A Course in Miracles,'' the thousand-page new-age bible. ``A Course in Miracles'' was written in the '60s by the late New York psychologist Helen Schucman, who maintained she was merely taking dictation from an inner voice that urged her to ``write this down ... this is a course in miracles.'' The inner voice, Schucman came to believe, was Jesus.
Schucman felt uncomfortable with the work and rejected it before her death. But ``A Course in Miracles'' went on to sell almost a million copies and spawn study groups around the country. And by 1987 - four years after arriving in LA with no friends and $1,000 to her name - Williamson was speaking three nights a week to hundreds of people, teaching the ``Course'' in her own style. She had become its chief prophet.
During this period, a friend's death from breast cancer inspired Williamson to found the Los Angeles Center for Living, a nonprofit organization that serves the terminally ill. Then, in 1989, came the Manhattan Center for Living in New York, where Williamson began a weekly HIV support group. And with the AIDS work came the famous - Bette Midler and Cher donated money to the LA center. Music mogul David Geffen contributed $100,000 to the centers. Officiating at Taylor's wedding made Williamson's reputation as ``guru to the stars, '' a reputation she is trying to downplay. ``It's just not realistic or fair, doesn't speak to the real work she does with terminally ill people, the depth of her caring,'' says Sandi Mendelson, a public-relations adviser.
Criticism came, too, when Williamson - portrayed as a spiritually pure ascetic living in a modest apartment with her infant daughter, Emma, and driving a battered Peugeot - recently moved up to an Infiniti and Hollywood house with pool.
Williamson takes it in stride, saying ``nobody of good will will begrudge me living comfortably with my daughter.'' She works seven days a week, writing long hours at home, appearing at weddings, funerals - wherever a spiritual booster $shot is needed - speaking regularly to large audiences in LA and travelling monthly to New York. Her next book, she says, will be ``The Healing of America.'' She's addressed the problems of the heart and the problems of being a woman. (At least she has for other people - Williamson won't reveal the father of her daughter and doesn't discuss her reported inability to stay in a relationship.) Now she'll take on ``the social problems of our country.''
Williamson rails on about ``new paradigm'' approaches (spiritual reaching out to psychopaths) replacing ``old paradigm'' approaches (John Wayne style), but concedes ``new paradigm'' and ``new age'' are largely the same old stuff - ancient wisdoms, that is, that seem new and threatening in every age, because people so seldom live by them.
``Spiritual growth and spirituality always seem suspect to some people,'' Williamson says. ``Living your life by the teachings of love, of God. That's radical in every time.''
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by CNB