Before 1900, biographies of American women were customarily grouped under a collective title—famous, eminent, celebrated, or noble. The standards of selection were overtly moral and covertly gendered. In Our Famous Women: Lives and Deeds of Distinguished American Women of Our Times (1883), 20 women were profiled by well-known women writers, to show their “courage, patience, … cheerfulness, and lofty aspiration.”

In 1917, Nicholas Butler, president of Columbia University, which presided over the Pulitzer Prizes, said that Julia Ward Howe was the “best American biography teaching patriotic and unselfish services to the people, illustrated by an eminent example.” These virtues—requisite in famous women—were not expected of eminent men. No one cared about Benjamin Franklin’s unselfishness, Mark Twain’s patience, or President Lincoln’s cheerfulness. “Lofty aspiration,” too, was an acceptably feminine way of describing what in men was simply “ambition.”

The Howe daughters edited the story of their mother’s life to smooth over any selfish moments. They were especially careful to present their parents’ turbulent marriage as the idyllic union of two noble souls. But Julia Ward Howe was not a solemn or didactic book. Indeed, the Howe daughters drew on their mother’s letters and journals, in addition to their own memories, to present her as lively and lovable.

They told the story of her struggle to become a serious poet while raising six children, her sudden fame after writing the lyrics to The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and her second life as a widow, suffragist, pacifist, and social reformer. They also noted her love of fashion and her appetite for fruitcake, her comic verse, and her playful self-mockery. Writing to her sister about caring for her large and obstreperous family, she concluded, “If it were not for beer, I were little better than a dead woman.”

Reviewers paid tribute to Howe’s dedication and achievements, but the critic for the North American Review found that her mixture of “saintliness and friskiness” undermined “that unity and that almost epic quality which distinguish the greatest biographies.” For a high-minded woman writer, philanthropist, and social reformer to enjoy shopping, let alone beer, violated his standards of greatness. Yet the biography of a woman was likely to touch on details of domesticity and everyday experience that would not come up in the biography of a man. Did that disqualify women’s lives from “epic quality”?

During the 20th century, American attitudes towards biographies of eminent women slowly changed. In the 1950s, the great Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger saw the need for a biographical dictionary devoted to American women. The Dictionary of American Biography included only a tiny percentage of female subjects—706 out of 15,000 entries. A group of historians at Radcliffe College, led by Edward T. James, undertook the vast project of compiling a “biographical dictionary” of American women.

The three-volume Notable American Women, 1607-1950 began to come out in 1971. Containing 1,359 biographical entries by 738 contributors, it was a major event. It drew attention to the way women’s public and private lives often conflicted; it suggested how the career paths, motivations, social environments, and marital circumstances of gifted women differed from those of their brothers, and contributed to their chances of becoming—or failing to become—“notable.” Janet Wilson James, the associate editor, cautiously predicted that circumstances might change. The revival of feminism in the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, the invention of the birth control pill, and the expansion of higher education might lead in the near future to women’s “larger, long-term commitment to the world outside the home.”

In the 21st century, women can become notable in a much wider field of actions. They need not be considered admirable or even respectable to attract and deserve biographical attention. Yet there is still a gender imbalance in biography. In 2015, a study found that more than 70 percent of the biographies published in the U.S. were about men, with the list dominated by books about presidents, world leaders, war heroes, and sports figures.

Paradoxically, a century ago, when women could not imagine seeking real political power, “lofty aspiration” was a virtue readers admired in Julia Ward Howe. But today a woman’s desires to aspire and compete, and her self-confidence, can be seen as unlikable traits. Howe was one of the most famous women of her era. At the memorial exercises at Symphony Hall after her death in 1910, she was hailed, with enormous local pride, as a figure who stands “for womanhood itself, for America, and for Boston.” Today that admiration is a bit trickier to secure.

As a researcher writing a biography in the 21st century, I knew many things about Julia Ward Howe’s life and difficult marriage that her daughters did not know or chose to ignore. Some of her social and literary female frenemies, who knew very little about her struggles or her marriage, regarded her as “Bostonish,” stuffy, discontented, competitive, or self-indulgent. I included these details, along with lots of stories of her interest in jewelry, hairstyles, fashion, and iced champagne. No one today objects to her frivolity or friskiness, and my readers also sympathize with her ambitions to lead. But I was surprised to see that a few reviewers thought that Julia was whiny, or had a high opinion of herself. Too high, I assume they meant—in any case, unlikable in a woman.

I admire the fact that for 91 years, Howe refused to conform to social expectations. She would not be “Saint Julia,” she would not conceal her opinions, she would not hide her ambitions or her pleasures. “I do not desire ecstatic, disembodied sainthood,” she wrote, “Because I do not wish to abdicate any one of the attributes of my humanity. I cherish even the infirmities that bind me to my kind. I would be human, and American, and a woman.” Words for a modern biographer to live by, I think. And glory, glory, hallelujah for that.

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According to press releases from the time, Pandit was born in New Delhi, India, the son of a Brahmin government worker and a French opera singer. A prodigy on the piano, he studied music in England and later moved to the United States, where he mastered the organ at the University of Chicago. Not once in 900 performances did he speak on camera, preferring instead to communicate with viewers via that hypnotic gaze.

He became one of the first TV stars, ever, with friends like Errol Flynn, Bob Hope, and Sabu, the Elephant Boy. He eventually ceded his TV performances over a contract dispute to the young pianist Liberace. And the way he came to fame is one of those only-in-America fables where the audience and the performer are both invested in the illusion.

 
I first got to know Korla Pandit in 1990, while I was working at KGO TV in San Francisco. I was producing a series on Bay Area eccentrics and a colleague at the station mentioned that Pandit had a live show on KGO in the ’50s.

I tracked Pandit down to a private residence in the Napa Valley, where I was greeted by a man who appeared much shorter than the pianist I’d seen on faded television clips. He was elegantly dressed in a grey Nehru jacket, a turban, and highly polished shoes. As he spoke to me in a soft but high-pitched voice, Korla regaled me with stories of India, Hollywood, and sold-out concerts, cleverly salted with “Indian pearls of wisdom.” He told me that in India a song never dies but materializes into beautiful forms and that he had played at the funeral of his famous friend Paramahansa Yogananda. I had no reason to doubt his integrity or question his philosophy. He seemed like a gentle soul.

Although his face was sunken and his gaze less alluring, he was able to take me back in time, much like the character Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. After we got the necessary footage of him playing the organ and a great shot of him walking off into the sunset, we left, promising to stay in contact.

When the piece ran a few days later on the evening news, Pandit called me at work to say that he was happy to reconnect with his Channel 7 fans. He continued to call me every four months or so for the next seven years. We usually talked about the clubs he was playing at in Los Angeles. He told me he had a new audience of tiki hipsters who canonized him by calling him the “godfather of exotica music.” And he told me about his cameo appearance in Tim Burton’s film about cult film director Ed Wood.

When he called, I’d pick up the phone and hear a woman’s secretarial voice asking me if this was Mr. Turner. Then she’d say “Korla Pandit would love to talk to you.” After an acknowledgment, the line was usually quiet for 15 to 20 seconds until he came on with his familiar greeting of “Namaste, John.” It was straight out of a ’50s noir film.

In 1996, he invited me to attend a San Francisco concert held at Bimbos 365, an atmospheric club with ’50s-style booth seating. This was the only time I got to see him perform before an audience and boy, was he great. He played songs from his 29 albums. The crowd was on their feet for the whole performance.

In October of 1998, a viewer called the station to say that Pandit, age 77, had died that day at a hospital in Petaluma, California, of heart failure. We showed 20 seconds of him playing at his height in the ’50s, as well as something from the interview. I thought that closed the chapter on Korla Pandit. It didn’t.

In June of 2001, a friend sent me a story in Los Angeles Magazine written by R.J. Smith called “The Many Faces of Korla Pandit.” I started reading the article with excitement, which was soon followed by a clouded curiosity and later capped with a disclosure that shook what I knew about him (which apparently wasn’t that much because the name he was born with was John Roland Redd). I shared the article with a fellow KGO producer, Eric Christensen, who grew up in San Francisco and remembered his mother saying she was mesmerized by Pandit’s eyes, which seemed to see right through her.

We agreed that Pandit’s true story was astonishing, tragic, and yet illuminating—the foundation for a movie and a true American archetype of self-invention. Unbeknownst to the rest of us, he had actually been one of the first African-American television stars. Twelve years later, when we were both retired, Eric and I decided to use our pensions and social security to make that movie.

We started by filming Smith, the author of the magazine piece, who had known Pandit in the early ’90s. Only years later, as he was interviewing musicians for a book on L.A.’s great African-American music clubs in the ’40s, did Smith begin to uncover Pandit’s true history. When Smith complimented a piano player of note, Sir Charles Thompson, Thompson said offhandedly that while he thought he was a decent piano player, there was another musician from Columbia, Missouri, who was much better, a fellow named John Redd. He went on to say that when he was working in L.A., he turned on the television and lo and behold, there was John Roland Redd, running over the keys while wearing a turban and going under the Indian name of Korla Pandit. Well, this was a real shocker to Smith, and of course to us.

Smith confirmed that Pandit was indeed John Roland Redd, one of seven children born to Baptist pastor Ernest Redd and Doshia O’Nina Johnson, in Columbia, Missouri. His love of music took hold in childhood and he played a mean boogie-woogie piano. Smith learned that Frances, one of Redd’s sisters, had preceded him to Hollywood, where she found work as an actress on an all-black film called Midnight Shadow in which a shifty villain wore a turban. When he first came to L.A., Redd changed his name to Juan Rolando, because at that time, Mexican music was in vogue and Mexican musicians had an easier time then African-Americans getting studio and club work.

Frances had a white roommate who was a Disney artist named Beryl DeBeeson, whom she set up on a date with her brother. Their relationship eventually led to a Tijuana marriage, as interracial marriages were illegal in California at that time. Beryl helped John become Korla Pandit, doing his eye makeup and designing his sets and wardrobe.

Korla Pandit with his wife and children.

 
One of Redd’s childhood friends filled us in on what life was like for African-Americans living in Columbia in the ’30s. There wasn’t much mingling between the races, as Jim Crow laws were in effect. Blacks weren’t served at the soda fountain and if you wanted to buy clothes at the department store, you couldn’t even try them on. A nephew told us that John was asked to play the piano before the local chapter of the KKK. He also recounted a humorous story about Redd hypnotizing a fellow grade school student for fun. Redd’s childhood friend felt that John’s move to California, after graduating from high school, only helped him.

We asked our interview subjects if John’s version of passing or reinvention was dishonest. Almost all responded that he did what he had to do to navigate the existing racism in the U.S. This overall sense of approval seemed to ring true because while many of the members of his father’s congregation knew of his transformation from John to Korla—as did numerous musicians—no one outed him. He was able to take his secret with him to his grave.

Hollywood was also kind to shape shifters who’d invented their biographies. And Pandit and his wife understood that Americans knew very little of India outside of the magical rope-climbing swamis or men-of-mystery they saw in the movies. With their sets and music, they created an exotic escape in people’s living rooms. Female fans of Pandit have told us that he was their first teenage crush. He was an image that came through their TV screens that they could safely fantasize about.

Korla Pandit understood—far more than anyone realized—that what we saw on TV wasn’t real, but it could be a whole new kind of reality.

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