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Introducing Max Mathews
Far from this ancient life of ordered study and esoteric wisdom, yet just around the corner, lay the very worldly pleasures of Kathmandu. On the last Thursday of November, Zina set off with Clive Giboire for an all-American Thanksgiving Day party at an art gallery right next to the American Embassy. Max’s Gallery was the first commercial art gallery in Nepal. Its owner, Max Mathews, an African-American woman, worked as a teacher in the American diplomatic service’s international schools division. The job at Kathmandu’s Lincoln School paid very well and Max definitely had a taste for the high life. No hippie, she lived in a beautifully furnished apartment above the gallery. She had arrived in Nepal only four months earlier, following a posting in Russia, where she had acquired the impressive collection of icons and fine modern paintings now hanging in her new gallery.
Max was dynamite and Zina was nervous about meeting her again. They had originally known each other on Mykonos, where Max had spent her summer vacations, first while she was teaching in Germany and then when she moved to a new teaching position in Athens. “Zina had been gorgeous beyond belief,” said Max. “Astoundingly, traffic-stoppingly beautiful, with platinum hair. She wore things like a full-length mink coat with nothing underneath. She also wore a lot of black because she’d gotten involved with this witchy coven stuff in Paris.”
Max was pretty gorgeous herself, a small woman with a wonderful figure, twinkling black eyes and a vivaciousness that stood out in any crowd. Max draped herself in luxurious brocades and exotic jewels. She was more conservative than Zina but no less noticeable.
Despite some difficult history between them, they enjoyed meeting again in Kathmandu. “Well hi! Will you look at you!” they said to each other and settled into a pleasant evening of eating, drinking and talking. It was all extremely friendly. Max found Zina still elegant, despite her dramatically changed appearance. “She had gotten huge, massive. I was kind of shocked to see her in nun’s robes. When I launched into a description of my latest disastrous love affair with yet another married man, Zina said to me, ‘Come and meet my lamas, they’ll give you some advice.’ I promised to get in touch,” said Max.
Max did go out to the Double Dorje house. There she found Zina surrounded by her usual entourage of artists and friends on the fringes of the drug scene. Their idea of meditation was erratic, eccentric—something they had worked out for themselves without legitimate instruction.
Zina took Max along to Samten Ling to meet “my lamas,” which is how she always referred to them. “They were sitting on the floor in a very bleak little room. Lama Yeshe folded his hands, bowed and smiled,” said Max. “The next thing I knew I was on the floor, sobbing. I just cried and cried. I cried for hours. Zina and Lama Zopa were both there and I didn’t even acknowledge them. It was just bang! Instantaneous! When I finally stopped crying I felt incredibly relieved, with no problems, no pain or questions. I felt I had come home and that Lama Yeshe was my guru. He just opened me up completely. I felt balanced and whole, like I was walking on air. I also felt committed. There was no going back,” she said.
Not long after this, Max sponsored a three-month Vajrayogini retreat for twenty monks at Samten Ling. Soon, she was covering the lamas’ food and other expenses, which was fortunate, as Zina’s funds had begun to run very low.
Although Max and Zina were both grandes dames, they were, nevertheless, two very different people. Zina was not much older than Max but seemed considerably older in appearance. “She’d done so much, taken so many drugs, read so much esoteric literature, dabbled in her witching and had this Blavatsky trip going on,” said Max. “Zina had left no stone unturned. She had ‘made her soup,’ as Lama Yeshe put it, and her last pregnancy seemed to have taken a lot out of her. But she was still hooked on the celebrity lifestyle with these hippies out at the Double Dorje house.
“On Mykonos, she had tried to get me to take acid (LSD) and was forever saying how drugs could open your mind. But I wasn’t into drugs. I used to throw people out of the gallery just for smoking bidis—I couldn’t tell the difference between those little rolled tobacco leaves and hashish. Sex and a few beers was my high. Zina was a much more experienced woman than I was. I was a baby. My freedom and my great salary were enough for me,” said Max.
Their backgrounds could not have been more different. Max’s current lifestyle was a far cry from the grinding poverty of her early years. Born in 1933 to a desperately poor black undertaker in Virginia, Max and her siblings had often helped embalm bodies after school. “Embalming was all the go with poor blacks,” she said. Her parents’ marriage broke up when she was around ten years old and she was adopted into a wealthy white family, with a house on the West Coast and an apartment in New York. Max was thirteen when that white couple separated. She stayed with her adoptive father, moving right into his bedroom. “The arrangement suited me just fine. I was no victim. By the age of ten I was already a very sexually experienced little girl and he treated me like a princess,” she said.
Max eventually got a Masters degree in education from Columbia University in New York, and after graduating she was ready for adventure. Joining the American diplomatic service as a teacher gave her the freedom to travel, the security of American protection and an American salary. Her teaching career took her to Greece, Germany and Moscow. In August 1968, it landed her in Kathmandu.
Eventually, Max moved out of her apartment above the gallery to a “penthouse” apartment in Asan Tole, the busiest market square in Kathmandu, full of barefoot coolies bent double under enormous loads carried on their backs, anchored with a thick strap across the forehead. Impossibly laden bicycles and handcarts swerved on their way, the air filled with the noise of impatient bicycle bells and the shrill cries of street vendors. Most expatriates lived in rambling bungalows out of town, their every need catered to by hosts of servants. But to Max, Asan Tole was New York. She created her own roof garden, spread out the flokati rugs she brought back from her annual summer holidays in Greece and filled the two floors of her spacious apartment with Russian and Tibetan antiques.
On weekdays Max taught fourth grade at Lincoln School. “She was a dedicated, clever and energetic teacher,” observed Judy Weitzner, who taught third-graders in the adjoining classroom. Judy’s husband, Chip, also taught at Lincoln School. Judy and Max became friends and Judy started hanging out with Max in Asan Tole.
Judy Weitzner: “There was nothing in town quite like that apartment. Max used silver Tibetan offering bowls as wine cups and I wanted some too. She had a whole retinue of people coming to sell her things for the house or the gallery. It was often kind of sad, seeing the Tibetans selling off their treasures, but many of them were real dealers. They pulled all kinds of things out of the big open front of their chubas—household goods, statues, little dogs. Max was continually in financial trouble, despite her excellent salary. She lived incredibly high and never let money come between her and anything she wanted. I was fascinated by all of it.
“Max never bragged about herself but people from all over the world turned up at her apartment. She had taught in several countries and learned many languages. On different occasions I overheard her speaking Greek and Russian. She broke into other languages so easily!”
Excerpted from Big Love: The Life and Teachings of Lama Yeshe.
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