Review
Sunday, June 22, 1997

He organized be-ins and Earth Days and Sun Weeks. He wore dashikis and flowered T-shirts. He was scruffy and smelly and hairy and happy.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ira Einhorn was Philadelphia's best-known hippie. People followed him. They invited him into their Main Line homes and corporate headquarters. They listened to him hungrily.

Then police found a body in a trunk in his closet. They charged him with the murder of his girlfriend, Holly Maddux. He jumped bail and fled. And he left all his friends and admirers behind.

For many, the memories dredged up last week by Einhorn's capture and arrest in France are ones of pain and disillusionment.

They are also memories of a very different time -- when the whole world seemed to be rumbling with change and people everywhere were looking for guides.

``He saw himself as a pied piper, as a guru. He was able to transcend a bunch of communities. He was able to dazzle people with his knowledge,'' said Stuart Samuels, a former University of Pennsylvania history professor and a close friend of Einhorn's in those days.

``He was Philadelphia's Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Timothy Leary, all of them together. He was Philadelphia's connection to the world counterculture. And he was anti-war; he fought for the environment; he spoke out about peace.''

To his friends, ``he was so gentle and peaceful and beatific that he could not be even a suspect.''

Samuels testified on Einhorn's behalf at his bail hearing. So did a priest, a restaurant owner, the director of Penn's Christian Association -- even Edward Mahler, an assistant vice president at Bell of Pennsylvania.

Mahler was one of many from the starched, buttoned-down world who had been drawn to Einhorn. For years, he had been Bell's link to the counterculture, a person who could forge links to the community.

At occasional lunches -- Mahler in his well-pressed suit, Einhorn in his filthy jeans -- Einhorn told Mahler about other contacts, at such places as General Electric and Salomon Bros.

``It was sort of popular to have a hippie around in the '70s, and I think that we were sort of corporately fascinated -- because there were no normal contacts with this part of society,'' said Mahler, now retired. ``No one knew what was going to happen, but there were the Earth Days and the this and the that, and you wanted to be a part of it, to have your finger on the pulse.''

Einhorn helped fashion a compromise when Bell wanted to erect a building at 27th and South Streets, overlooking the Schuylkill. Residents, many of them students, said the river was for people, not companies.

``He was very, very instrumental in soothing the tensions down there, and in the end we built the building and a park for the people by the river,'' Mahler said.

For some, Einhorn's presence was anything but soothing. Each time he showed up at Bell, Mahler recalls, his secretary would ask, ``Can I leave?'' Other executives sneered.

Mahler, grateful for his help, made copies of articles Einhorn wanted to send to friends -- then sent them to Einhorn's many contacts around the world. A lot of Philadelphia's movers and shakers were on that list, said Joel Bloom, president and director emeritus of the Franklin Institute, from which he retired in 1991.

``I remember just a couple of days before the story broke about his arrest [ in 1979 ] , I was talking to a very powerful and distinguished Philadelphia CEO,'' Bloom said. ``He said, `I've just been reading the latest distribution from Ira. Isn't he wonderful? Isn't he insightful?'

``He certainly was well connected with the corporate structure of Philadelphia. I thought there was something a little phony about him, but he was certainly charismatic, and he convinced a lot of people that he had insights into the new world.''

He also titillated and fascinated the elite. Bloom remembered going to a party where Einhorn was holding forth and there were not enough chairs for all the guests who wanted to be near him.

``Some of the most powerful and distinguished people in the city were sitting on the floor in front of him,'' Bloom recalled of the man he now describes as ``a magic con man.''

``All the fancy-shmancy goyim in Paoli or Berwyn or wherever would invite Ira out. He was like the show-and-tell hippie guru,'' said local playboy Harry Jay Katz, who was Einhorn's friend and who supported his decision to flee the country.

``They would say, `Oh, isn't this charming? We don't even have to go into town to see these people.' He would eat all their watercress sandwiches, without crusts, of course, because they were free.''

In 1979, Bloom said, Einhorn offered to get a hold of original papers belonging to the inventor Nikola Tesla for an institute exhibit. But he was mum about who had them.

``He had a very secretive manner, like someone who was being chased,'' Bloom said. ``He cultivated that. He talked about how the CIA was after him. I thought it was some kind of edge lunacy.

``But he was very intelligent, and it was genuinely fun to talk to him. He said some outrageously outrageous things.''

It wasn't that Einhorn was so charming; it was more that he mesmerized -- with his sharp blue eyes and open grin.

He never had money. They paid his way. Often, although they listened raptly, they didn't understand what he was talking about. Often, too, it was his studied lack of charm, his dirty clothes and smell, that drew people in. He liked to be a sort of burr in the saddle, Samuels recalled.

``He liked to make people uncomfortable; that's the way he engaged people,'' he said. ``They ate it up. They saw him as harmless and kooky and eccentric -- but he had his pulse on something on the fringe.''

In retrospect, some call Einhorn a false prophet and a phony. They say they never bought his lines, never trusted him, never understood his dense gibberish about technology and philosophy that so many eagerly lapped up.

``He was a product of his times, don't forget. His timing was impeccable -- in the middle of that whole peace, love and Sgt. Pepper's thing,'' said Kiki Olson, a writer now living in London who used to hang out at La Terrasse, the West Philadelphia restaurant that was Einhorn's haunt. ``I mean, if Ira tried his act today, he won't get anywhere. Forget it.

``But back then, he was a guru like there never have been gurus. I mean, the people used to just sit at his smelly feet. The Beatles had gone to India, and these people couldn't afford to go to India -- so they went to Ira.''

For Samuels, now a documentary filmmaker who plans to make a film about Einhorn, doubts about his friend came early. He said he read some of Einhorn's journals before Einhorn fled and was disturbed by the ``images of blood.'' He and Einhorn also went to a medium together, ``and the medium freaked out, because she said there was way too much negative energy.''

The realization that Einhorn may have been a murderer was devastating.

``You start to question your whole analysis of everything, of so many different events you've been through together,'' Samuels said. ``It depressed me a lot about myself, to be so blinded. Ira blinded people by his light, not by his darkness -- but this was so dark.''

The doubts were painful for Mahler, too, and not just because other Bell executives were telling him he should never have talked to Einhorn.

``I was really crushed,'' he says now.

After Einhorn's bail hearing, Mahler visited him in his Powelton Village apartment, where Einhorn was busy raising money for his defense. Mahler told Einhorn he had heard rumors that he planned to jump bail.

``He just looked me straight in the eye and said, `You know I would never do that to you, Ed,' '' Mahler said. ``I guess that's the one thing I had to hold on to, that I could say, `You SOB, you lied.' ''

That gloomy afternoon, as Einhorn rambled about CIA plots to frame him and a new lady friend drifted around the apartment, Mahler was quickly losing faith in his friend's innocence.

``It just didn't hang together, what he was saying,'' Mahler said. ``It was a sickening feeling -- by God, he did do that.''

To many of those who knew Einhorn, those feelings rose back to the surface last week with his arrest in France. Some said they were surprised that he had stayed free so long. But Olson, speaking from her home in London, said she was more surprised that he got caught.

``Ira had a wonderful quality of getting people on his side,'' she said, simply. ``He was a master.''