When the young dancer Merna Bailyn¹ first heard of Meher Baba from Margaret Craske in the early 1950s, she was immediately “drawn towards Him with a strong feeling of love.”²

She drank in Miss Craske’s stories about her life with Baba. She read the Discourses and would spend evenings with friends talking of Him. She even sang to Baba as she knit socks to give Him when He came to America.³ Merna and my mother, who was then Ella Massie, were close friends. My mother told me she envied Merna’s immediate clarity about Baba and who He was.

Then in May 1952, when Baba came to Myrtle Beach, Merna had the opportunity to finally meet Him, but it did not turn out as she had hoped. “Her first meeting with Baba was a disaster, because she couldn't see Him,” said Ella. “She didn't put on her glasses. She wanted to look lovely. So when Baba called her and told her to sit down, she couldn't see. And three times He did and she didn’t.”⁴

Merna also felt nothing. Miss Craske wrote that “almost immediately a kind of haze seemed to intervene between her and Baba.”⁵ To make things worse, Merna’s new fiancé was with her and he was adamantly opposed to Baba. When he was called to Baba, he was “distinctly rude,” according to Miss Craske.

When Merna left the Barn, Miss Craske wrote that “she was in complete turmoil, although the love was still strong.”⁶ 

That afternoon, Merna and Ella were invited to tea at the Guest House with Mehera, Mani, Dr. Goher and Meheru. Merna was still distraught and burst into tears as she told the women mandali what had happened. Mehera was so moved by Merna’s suffering that later that afternoon she asked Baba to “do something about it.”⁷

Baba agreed and then told Mani to find Merna and tell her to come see Him in New York but “that she was to come alone”⁸ the first time. (He said she could bring her fiancé

Merna Bailyn as a young dancer - courtesy of Miriam Mara Dorfman

 later.) He also said to tell her that “Baba reveals Himself in many ways, and that she was not to be disappointed, she would feel Him.”⁹

“[Merna] was grateful for the message,” Mani wrote in a letter to Miss Craske that evening, “and when I said, ‘Baba says you will feel Him,’ she said rather pathetically, ‘I do hope I will.'” 

In the letter, Mani also confided that Baba said, “Because I care and feel sad for her I will make her feel me; perhaps more so than any others have. And I will put on her socks that she knitted for me, only after she has seen me in New York and felt me.”¹⁰

Shortly after her visit to Myrtle Beach in 1952, Merna married her fiancé Robert Kaplove and they quickly started a family. In 1956, when Baba came to New York, Merna again went to see Baba at the Delmonico Hotel with great hopes. But again, she felt nothing. The meeting was recounted in Lord Meher.

“She began to weep, and Baba gestured about her to Ella, ‘She cannot see me,’ meaning that she was somehow veiled from recognizing who He was and loving Him. Merna also confessed that she did not know why she was crying because she did not feel drawn to Baba.”¹¹

When my mother first heard that Baba said He would make Merna "feel me, perhaps more than any others have," her initial thought was that Merna would have "some sort of bliss, oh, you know, popping up onto another plane. But it was unbelievable suffering.”

As time went on and her family grew, Merna also drifted away from Miss Craske and the dancers. But she and my mother Ella, both of whom left the dance world to marry and start families, remained close friends. 

Merna’s life was challenging. She moved to New Jersey and by 1959 had four children. Her husband, according to Miss Craske and my mother, was difficult, so much so that Miss Craske “had to stop going to visit Merna because Bob would be so overbearing,” Ella said.

But Merna still took her daughters into New York on Saturday mornings to take ballet with Miss Craske at the Metropolitan Opera House. Her daughter Miriam Mara Dorfman recalls how strict Miss Craske was, but also how much she loved that special time with her mother. She also remembers there were pictures of Baba in the house. 

“My mother talked about Baba a lot. Baba was the place of peace in our home, the place of peace for my mom,” Miriam recalls. "My mother did not relate to the religion of Judaism at all, as far as I could tell, and she didn't really care about much, except for she loved her children and … she did love Baba.”

In the late 1960s, Merna was diagnosed with breast cancer. In those days, the treatment involved aggressive surgery and heavy doses of radiation. There was only a sixty percent chance of surviving. After Merna got out of the hospital and recovered enough to have visitors, my mother went to see her. Merna asked Ella what was going on with Miss Craske and the other dancers. 

Miss Craske had recently suggested they learn the Master’s Prayer and the Prayer of Repentance. Ella was in the process of trying to memorize them herself, usually when she was ironing, but she didn’t think she had yet learned them. Then Merna asked her to recite them to her. 

“We were sitting under a tree and by some miracle, because I’ve not got the best memory in the world, I recited the Master's Prayer right through,” Ella said. “And I looked and Merna was weeping.”

Later, Merna told Ella that from that day on, she recited the Master’s Prayer every day. 

In the spring of 1973, five years after Merna’s battle with cancer, she loaded two of her four children, Brett and Elana, into her big black Cadillac. My mother Ella, myself and my sisters Sue and Wyatt (now Viola) went along as well. We all drove to the Center in Myrtle Beach for a week to celebrate Merna being cancer free.

In those days, if a person survived cancer after five years, it was thought they had beaten the disease.

“This was the one place she wanted to be when we thought the five years were over,” said Ella.

We stayed in the Lantern cabin and while Merna cooked feasts for us all, she fasted in gratitude. She and Ella went for long walks on the beach, where my mother recalls “we shared more deeply… the way women share.”

It was Passover week and we held a Seder. Throughout, Merna glowed with Baba’s love.

“Her very grounded, capable and clear nature expressed extra stillness, inner quiet, while we were on Center,” Viola remembers. “Naturally that capacity omitted show, display. She appeared to have no self seeking.”

My sister Sue, who was the youngest among us at age 10, remembers that Merna made her feel loved and special “at a time when I felt lost and alone.”

“Merna hid a sand dollar from the beach during a Passover Seder…and made sure that I was the one to find it,” Sue remembers. “I couldn’t name it at the time, but I felt Baba’s love through her.”

On our last night at the Center, my mother remembers that Merna sat for a very long time alone at the Boat House and “was unbelievably still.”

Shortly after her return from the Center, Merna learned the cancer had returned. She told Ella that she just didn’t have the energy to fight it again. 

One day in September of 1973, the phrase “Baba, Merna, Baba, Merna” kept running constantly through Ella’s mind. That evening she learned that Merna had passed into Meher Baba’s arms that day.

Miss Craske saw Merna shortly before and wrote, “it was obvious that Baba kept His word. She was filled with Baba’s Love.” ¹²

1.In Lord Meher and The Dance of Love Merna’s name is misspelled as Myrna Bailin.

2.The Dance of Love, by Margaret Craske, p. 177

3.Ibid

4.Interview with Ella (Massie) Marks at the Meher Spiritual Center in May of 2002.

5.The Dance of Love, p. 177.

6.Ibid.

7. The Dance of Love, p. 178

8.Letter from Mani to Margaret Craske dated May 17, 1952

9.Ibid.

10.Ibid.

11.Lord Meher, by Bhau Kalchuri, Online Ed., p. 3987

12. The Dance of the Love, p. 178