(WO)MAN OF MYSTERY
Who was Dr Charlotte Bach? – Francis Wheen
I wrote a while back about reading a book by a hypnotist called Michael Karoly.
I took the book on face-value, and thus mostly wrote the blog post accordingly.
(If you haven’t read it then you might enjoy pausing here, skipping back to that post, and then returning to relish the surprise. Otherwise: spoiler alert!)
But, long story short, I explain at the end that ‘Karoly’ is not all he purported to be…
Karoly was, in fact, a personae of Baron Carl Hajdu, who was born Karoly Hajdu in 1920 in Budapest to humble beginnings.
He came to the UK as an immigrant after the Second World War and soon ingratiated himself among society in his guise as a Hungarian nobleman.
He was a prolific conman. But he was also highly intelligent – since childhood, he’d lapped up key tomes on psychology, philosophy, science and mathematics.
He became ‘Michael Karoly’, the hypnotist, in his early 40s. He wore a pork-pie hat and dark glasses, had a taste for fast cars, and wrote advice columns for national newspapers.
But, most intriguingly, ‘Karoly’ died as Dr Charlotte Bach, a woman who caused a stir among the intelligentsia and part-published a 3,000-page magnus opus on sexual deviation being the mainspring of evolution.
Author Francis Wheen untangles Bach’s story in this book, Who was Dr Charlotte Bach?
You can read an extract here; I’m not going to attempt my own potted history beyond some nuggets on ‘Karoly’ as a hypnotist below. But I thoroughly recommend the book – it’s a short read and a fascinating glimpse into an unconventional life regardless of the hypno-angle.
Wheen writes that Karoly (as I’ll call him/her to minimise confusion) became interested in hypnosis in 1950 while in Brighton. British Parliament was discussing a Bill to ban stage hypnotism at the time, “provoked by a notorious performance in 1948 at the Brighton Hippodrome, where a woman had been hypnotised to cry like a baby.” Karoly would have seen extensive press coverage at the time, arousing his interest.
Seven years later, Karoly – stricken with financial and marital problems, and struggling with his secret transvestism – sought help from Harley Street hypnotherapist WG Warne-Beresford as a patient.
I confess that I lol’ed on reading that Karoly followed the path common among so many hypnotherapists; he shortly thereafter enrolled as one of Warne-Beresford’s pupils!
To make lemonade from his lemons, Karoly was required to study with Warne-Beresford for one year and then to pass an exam to qualify for membership of the British Society of Hypnotherapists. Alas, Karoly is not listed among the graduates in his year-group – though, as is also so common among hypnotherapists still today, this didn’t deter him from setting up shop and using an impressive bunch of initials after his name.
My blog post on Hypnosis mentions the opening poem penned by the woman who helped Karoly organise the book. Wheen tells us that the poet, Dorothy Shirley, was one of Karoly’s first hypnosis clients. Otherwise there is scant information on his clientele.
I remember being impressed with Karoly’s chapter on group therapy in his book. I didn’t write about this because my inexpert rants against the conceived wisdoms of psychotherapy and psychiatry are by the by.
BUT. An undercover journalist’s account of a Karoly group session is spectacular! After separating from his wife, Karoly deemed himself qualified to start a support group for divorcees. This pitched itself as offering peer-based practical support – how to rearrange finances and find new friends.
However, Karoly seems to have attracted a hareem of besotted female divorcees – many of whom he was shagging.
He was known to the press, and the police, from both his current and past scams and personas, so a journalist infiltrated the group. He reported that the therapising consisted of Karoly lecturing on fidelity and reading personal letters penned by group members aloud on intimate details of their marital sex lives. The session concluded with Karoly inviting everyone down the pub, walking there arm-in-arm with an attractive young divorcee.
This latest Sunday newspaper exposé precipitated his need, once more, to escape to a new persona – but, this time, by accepting his transvestitism… and, soon thereafter, by creating Dr Charlotte Bach.
After her death in 1981, the narrative that a controversial woman had been exposed as a ‘male freak fraudster’ was an easy and convenient one. Karoly’s story is more complicated than that, and you can’t help but admire a person of singular intelligence and ingenuity raising themselves up and pursuing a life less ordinary.
I appreciated the nuance and sensitivity with which Wheen concludes Bach’s life story. “Mightn’t one reasonably conclude that it was her life as a man that had been the masquerade – that Baron Hajdu and Michael Karoly were the great pretenders, whereas Dr Charlotte Bach was not only her finest creation but also her true self?”
The self-made composite photo of Charlotte and Karoly, pictured above left, leaves me with more questions than answers as to whether they were always one – or both.
