I have lived many lives in one, all those lives leading to, and contributing toward, the writing of The Magdalen. I was raised outside of Clinton, New York, on Spring Farm, the dairy farm that had been in my family since about 1840, and which is now the headquarters of Spring Farm CARES Animal Sanctuary.
My father, Harwood Hamlin Jones, was not your typical farmer. He played Puccini and Verdi records in the barn as we milked the cows, then, after supper each evening, he buried himself in his passion, the study of history. He infected me with the same passion – though his especial favorite areas of study were Roman and Conquistador history, while mine were English and Mid-Eastern/Biblical history. We traveled a lot as well, taking off in our dear old Chevie each summer when the cows were dried off, touring most of the states of the union. My graduation gift from high school was a drive to Mexico City.
My father was an atheist, my mother a faithful Methodist. I was ridiculously religious as a kid, giving up my bed, sleeping on the floor for Lent, that extreme kind of thing. An early epiphany was the reading of The Robe. That book turned me into an adolescent ascetic. In my teens, I became drawn to Catholicism. I used to spend every Saturday in the Utica Public Library studying up on saints, so I would know what patron saint to chose when I became a nun.
At the same time that I was planning to become a nun, I was also planning to become a prima ballerina. The latter won out, and, the September after graduating from high school, I went to NYC, attending the School of American Ballet. I was really not good enough at all, and, my first day in NYC, I was accepted by a model agency. Soon I was making good money modeling, and I dropped out of ballet school.
My passion for dancing was satisfied when I began to date, and soon married, John A. Lucchese. Johnny was highly respected among NYC ballroom dancers, and we performed our act at clubs all around the NYC area. At the same time, my modeling career went into high gear. During the years in which we were married, there was also a fabulous three-month trip around the world – to Hawaii, Japan, Thailand, Burma, India, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, and England. This trip
was not made, however, with my husband Johnny. Instead, with Johnny’s full approval, it was made in company with an elderly, male, eccentric millionaire friend of ours. There I was, at 22, enjoying a millionaire’s trip around the world, also enjoying unusual situations such as swimming at a party with Greek diplomats and the Presidential Guard in the pool of Rashtrapati Bhawan, the presidential palace of India, and, in Rome, sitting with the Maharani of Jaipur in her private box, watching her husband, “Jaipie,” play polo.
It was during the marriage to Johnny that I also began to study acting, first with Lee Strasberg, then with Wynn Handman (I had the honor of understudying the lead actress in the first presentation at Wynn’s American Place Theater, first housed in an old church on the West Side.)
Very importantly, it was during the marriage to Johnny (a non-practicing Catholic) that I became an atheist. This was due to the influence and tutelage of our friends, Marcia and Phil Rubin, both Jewish, both totally atheist. They ridiculed my religious beliefs and countered my every argument with their own, in-depth knowledge. They introduced me to a book by Theophile Meek called Hebrew Origins, which calls into serious question most of what the Old Testament claims, which claims I had always unquestioningly accepted. Still wanting to prove them wrong, I plunged ever-deeper into a scholarly study of Judaism and its history, Christianity and its history, books of the Bible, Old and New Testament time periods, and comparative religion. Of course this serious and studious endeavor only further validated what Marcia and Phil said. Basically, everything which I had been taught to believe was a lie. I became a rather bitter atheist.
Johnny and I divorced after four years of marriage. Another marriage soon followed, as I was still a product of the cultural indoctrination of the day, which insisted that a woman without a man was a nothing, and that a woman who did not marry a man she was sleeping with was worse than a nothing.
Husband Number Two was a William Morris agent. And, for this marriage, at his and his family’s gentle but firm insistence, I converted to Judaism. Stupidest thing I ever did (except that it gave me an excuse to become even more of an expert on Judaism and Jewish history, and to study Hebrew.) I gave in to the demands that I convert because, since my own religion no longer meant anything to me, and should we have children, it seemed reasonable for both parents to, at least nominally, be of the same religion. Unfortunately, that marriage lasted only six months and was annulled. The end of the marriage was also the end of my “Jewishness.”
Throughout all this, I had become a successful commercial model. Some interesting credits from thatcareer, other than about a hundred TV commercials, were repeated appearances on Dave Garroway’sToday Show, a year modeling on The Big Payoff, a year modeling on The Price Is Right, and a year as a“Glea Girl”, a showgirl with the June Taylor Dancers, on the Jackie Gleason Show. I also began to get acting roles in playhouse productions around NYC, and to appear in TV dramas then based in that city,such as Naked City and The Doctors. Just before moving out to Hollywood, I had a major role in aBroadway show called Once For The Asking. It opened the night before Kennedy was assassinated and
did not make it through the weekend. (But I did have that “All About Eve” kind of thrill when I walkedinto Sardi’s to applause after that opening performance.)
Once in Hollywood, I began to appear in TV shows such as Perry Mason, Living Doll, Man From Uncle, Farmer’s Daughter, The FBI, Wendy and Me, and Hogan’s Heroes. Otherwise, for a year, Iwas a hermit in my apartment, trying, after two bad marriages, to find answers to life. And it was duringthat year that I was again given a life-changing book, my introduction to the theory of reincarnation,
Many Mansions, by Gina Cerminara. That book sent me off on a study of parapsychology and spiritualitythat continues to this day. In the course of that study over the years, I went from atheist to agnostic, to pantheist, then to what I privately call a Sethite.
My marriage to Gene Reynolds lasted ten years. I didn’t do much more acting after that marriage, justsome appearances in some of Gene’s shows, Room 222 and M*A*S*H. Instead, I was a “hostess with the
mostest” in our Hollywood home, I took courses at Los Angeles City College and UCLA, and I wrote my two novels, The Truth About Unicorns and The Confetti Man.
Ah, those were the good old days, when a publisher sent an author out on a 10-city tour—back-to-backradio, TV, newspaper interviews, bookstore signings, then, quick, hop a plane to the next city and start all over again. It was during the tour for Confetti that I found myself being haunted—followed about,at home and on the road, by something that manifested itself as, both, strange footsteps and clawings upon the doors of, and items in, rooms in which I happened to be, and as electronic interferences—malfunctions and breakdowns—which I referred to, jokingly in the beginning,as my electronic poltergeist. Interviewers were, at first, intrigued, and we used my poltergeist as a hook. But then too many TV cameras broke down, tape recorders failed, power went out, etc.
It wasn’t fun anymore. We stopped mentioning the poltergeist to potential interviewers, while I acted surprised when the lights went off.
After my separation from Gene, I lived for half a year in San Francisco, then went to Australia.For a year, I lived in a hotel in Sydney. Then I bought a cottage two hundred miles down the coastfrom Sydney, on a cliff overlooking the Tasman Sea, outside of a tiny town called Narooma. While
there, I wrote Bikram’s Beginning Yoga Class for my Yoga teacher, Bikram Choudhury.
It was a wonderful two years in my cottage overlooking the sea. That little cottage was Heaven onEarth. It was also haunted, again by strange happenings and electronic displays. For instance, the house used to turn lights on to welcome me home, lights which I had definitely turned off when I left. Had thehaunt that had dogged me during the Confetti tour followed me to Australia? If so, while, during the Confetti tour, there had sometimes been a sinister quality to the manifestations—whatever it was had oftenseemed antagonistic to those whom I loved the best—now that “it” had me all to itself, it seemed happy. It and I got on well together, as it was nice to find lights on when I got home.
Aside from finishing the Yoga book, I spent most of those two years—fittingly, considering the “it”with which I shared the cottage—in deep study of parapsychology, the paranormal, and things spiritual, searching, searching for answers to all the questions that had been piling up over the years, and for whichI had never been able to find the answers.
Sadly, at last, it became apparent that Australia was not where my future lay. I rented the beach house out and returned to Hollywood.
During the winter of 1979-80, I rented another cottage, on the beach in Malibu. While living there Ipicked up a book by Jane Roberts called Seth Speaks.
January 20, 1980. The date of my re-birth. After only a few pages of that book, my spirit went soaring,straight to the stars. Suddenly, finally, the answers were there. Suddenly, finally, everything made sense.The six months I spent in that cottage, again as a virtual hermit, studying all the books of Seth, were themost important months of my life, forming, as they did, the basis for the years which followed. (Oh, and of course that cottage was also haunted, what else is new?) In 1982, my father became a hopeless invalid, and my mother needed help in caring for him. I packed my computer, my cat and three dogs, into the car, and set out to prove that, yes, you can go home again.
Once returned to the little red farmhouse of my childhood, after twenty-seven years of adventuringaround in the world, I moved back into the upstairs bedroom that had been mine as I was growing up. Imade an office for myself in the attic where I had played with my dolls and toys on rainy days, and setup my computer. There, wrapped in the bosom of my real home, with the comfort of my parents just downstairs, I began The Magdalen. It just came pouring out of me, suddenly demanding to be written.
But I had had to adventure for those twenty-seven years, and search spiritually for all of those years, then read Seth Speaks, then come home again, for it to happen.
The birth of Spring Farm CARES came about gradually. All is covered in If Only They Could Talk –The Miracles of Spring Farm. Very briefly, during the years leading up to SFC’s incorporation in 1991,I took up riding, acquired several horses, dabbled in Thoroughbred and Arab breeding, became a professional practitioner of Linda Tellington Jones’s TTouch, a system of healing touch for horses and other creatures, and I studied hypnotism and practiced professionally and successfully for several years(even doing the fire walk during my training.)
Most importantly, through my talented friend and business partner, Dawn Hayman, I learned of, andbegan to practice, Interspecies, or Animal, Communication, which is based, quite simply, on the realization that telepathy is the language of the Universe, and that all things, both living and seemingly inanimate,are in constant communication through telepathy. Every particle of the Universe is in completecommunication with all other particles. Because each particle is part of the true god All That Is.Interspecies Communication is the recognition and utilization of the language of All That Is.
Dawn and I made, of Spring Farm CARES, a test case for the validity of the teachings of Seth. At thetime that SFC was in the process of “becoming,” my fortunes were at extreme low tide. I had investedmost of what I had into a West Hollywood house. But, just as I put the place up for sale, the real estate
market in Hollywood crashed. I was so broke trying to keep paying the first and second mortgages onthe place, and I took such a beating when I did sell it, that I came close to losing Spring Farm. Yet Dawnand I, and a subsequent, third partner, Margot Unkel, decided exactly what it was that we wanted to create. We laid out in detail exactly what SFC would become, exactly what it would accomplish. We trusted inSeth’s assurance that we each create our own realities . . . and we proved that assurance to be exactly the case. We astonished the nay-sayers, and often even ourselves, as, seemingly, angels placed a protective dome over the place, and we thrived. Spring Farm CARES went from penury, desperation, and the devastation of a fire, to being a nationally and internationally known and respected organization whichis of magnificent value both to its immediate community, to the tens of thousands of people which itreaches and touches each year, and to the even larger number of animals that it helps each year.
So there were twenty-seven years wandering in the wilderness, now there have been twenty-seven years since coming home, that time spent in building something wonderful, primarily for the animals.With the publication of The Magdalen, I set sail onto the sea of the next twenty-eight years, intending to create something even more wonderful, not just for animals, but, for those among Humankind with the ears to hear.
- Bonnie Jones Reynolds
Author of The Magdalen, A Novel
and Author of
The Truth About Unicorns