When New Age guru Rama was fished out ofthe waters off Long Island,
he was wearing a suit and tie and his pet dog's collar around
neck.
The mansion at 183 Old Field Road sits beside a quiet country that
runs along New York's Long Island shore. The house is hidden from the
road and neighbors by a red wood fence; the mailbox bears no name. A
camera perched at the beginning of the driveway surveys passersby
Police patrolling the shore road early on the morning of April 13
noticed something strange: the outdoor lights were all ablaze. Even more
odd, entering the usually barricaded estate was easy. As they crossed the
vast manicured lawn to the huge house with its copper mansards and
three-windowed cupolas, they saw that the the daffodils were
abloom.
When the officers reached the front door, they discovered it was
open. Inside, they found an immaculate living room punctuated by floor
rugs, and a wall of glass overlooking the sleepy bay. Nothing seemed out
of place; nothing seemed missing. The only thing unusual was that no one
was around.
Upstairs, the master bedroom was empty and all of the motion
detectors that guarded the room had been turned off. Then, m one of the
guest bedrooms, police spied a fully dressed woman lying on a bed,
unconscious. Police tried to rouse her, but she was incoherent. By her
side was a picture of a man and another of a dog. In another room were
two dogs, stiff but breathing.
Searching the grounds, one officer followed a narrow path down to a
pier on the water. Thin metal rails guided walkers on the path; one of
them was bent and broken. Police called in divers who, 10 hours later,
pulled a man's body from the water. He was dressed in a suit and tie.
Around his neck was a dog collar with a dangling rabies vaccination
tag.
The man was Frederick Lenz III, better known to the world as the
New Age guru Zen Master Rama; the woman, Brinn Lacey, one of his devoted
followers. Two nights before, in a suicide pact, the pair had drugged the
dogs with phenobarbital, downed fistfuls of Valium (at least 150 pills by
Lenz alone) and stepped off the pier. By some miracle, Lacey and the dogs
survived; Lenz did not. Lacey wrote in a note the police found by her
side: "We all tried police go too the other woorld last night, anti only
Rama made it..."
Lenz's death at age 48 brought to a close a lilt marked by
spectacular accomplishment and enormous controversy. He won hundreds of
followers to his self-invented brand of inaterial Buddhism. earning a
fortune in the process. A Ph.D. in American literature, he published two
books. Suiting thc HimalaYas and Snowboarding to Nirvana, describing his
experiences with a Himalayan monk named Master Fwap. A visionary, he
anticipated the computer age, branching into programming before it
emerged as the culture's second language. To his followers. Lenz was a
brilliant teacher who brought them to new levels of spiritual awareness
and an entrepreneur who guided them to lucrative careers. Newsweek dubbed
him the "Yuppie Guru."
To his critics, however, Lenz was a charlatan who lied without
compunction, fleeced his students and sexually exploited women. "For
someone who theoretically lived his life to help others, he spent a great
deal of his time looking out for his own interests," wrote Steve Kaplan,
an ex-follower, in a letter printed in New York magazine after the guru's
death. "Lenz was a walking contradiction."
Lenz cultivated followers, not friends; surrounded by disciples, he
apparently felt closest to his dogs. He proclaimed himself "one of the 12
truly enlightened beings on the planet," but seemed beset by private
demons. And in what may be the supreme irony, Lenz, who never evinced a
twinge of guilt, chose to die in a body of water known as Conscience
Bay.
In many ways, Lenz's life was the baby-boomer experience writ
large, covering everything from hippiedom to Reagan-era materialism (in
this life, at least; on some resumes Lenz listed several past
incarnations, including a 17th-century Zen master in Kyoto, Japan). Lenz
was born to Dorothy and Frederick Lenz Jr. on February 9, 1950, in San
Diego. He was to be the only child of the union. The couple's marriage
ended when their son was,just five years old. Frederick Jr.. a publishing
executive, remarried about six years later and did not seem closely
involved in his young son's life.
For Frederick III, the center of his universe was his mother, a
woman who dabbled in astrology and was addicted to alcohol. "No One loved
me like my mother," Lenz was to tell one of his numerous girlfriends.
Dor0thy died when her son was just 14 years old. and Lenz moved in with
his father and his new family, but he did not much care for the
arrangement.
As an adult. Lenz kept his family ties to a minimum. He distanced
himself. rarely phoning or visiting relatives. "He really didn't like his
father and didn't want anything to do with him," says a former family
friend. Nevertheless, after he grew rich, Lenz paid for an apartment for
his father and bought him a Jaguar.
They may not have been close, but in an eerie way, the father's
life presaged the son's. Lenz Jr. had charisma; he drew followers to his
1974 political campaign to become mayor of his hometown of Stamford,
Connecticut, and enough voters to win the election.
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