As I approach my 104th birthday, I’m often asked about the secret to longevity. My answer is there are no “secrets,” but living in alignment with a few timeless truths can help. I learned this as a 7-year-old in Brooklyn when my mother came home with steamship tickets to Tahiti and told us we were moving there.
“Where’s Tahiti?” my dad asked. “I don’t know,” she answered. “But we’re going in 16 days.” And we did.
Tahiti was lush and gorgeous; after bleak Depression-era Brooklyn, I felt as though I’d stepped into Technicolor. We lived on a lagoon and slept under a thatched grass roof.
Our family had to be flexible and practical to make a life in the South Seas. I learned French quickly, then Tahitian. Mother planned for us to live as fruitarians—she had been vice president of the Vegetarian Society of New York—but the sugar in all that fruit gave my brother and me boils. So Dad studied how our neighbors lived: fruit, vegetables, and fish. When we added fish to our diet, it fixed the boils, and I remain a pescatarian.
That balanced approach is the foundation of meals at Rancho La Puerta, the fitness resort in Baja California, Mexico, that I opened with my late husband, Edmond Szekely, in 1940, 86 years ago. It was the first of its kind, and it’s still flourishing today. Indeed, I’ve often been called the “godmother of wellness.” My skin has stayed clear since we began practicing the precepts we taught at Rancho La Puerta, and even now I get questions about what I “use.” Just soap and water. As I hope our guests learn, beauty doesn’t come from what you put on your face, but from what you put in your body.
After six years in Tahiti my family settled in Mill Valley, California, when the only way you could get to San Francisco was by ferry boats; there was no bridge yet. We’d picnic and watch the Golden Gate Bridge being built. It was thrilling.
I graduated from high school a year early, at 16. In 1939, at the age of 17, I married Edmond Szekely, an author and philosopher of natural living with a global following. But we had a problem when his visa to the United States expired. As a Hungarian of Jewish descent with Romanian citizenship, a return to Europe would have been a death sentence under Hitler.
So we went to Mexico, where we found our sanctuary in a beautiful, quiet village of 400 called Tecate. We discovered ranchland on a valley floor protected by rolling hills at the foot of Mount Kuchumaa, sacred to the indigenous Kumeyaay people and a place that became sacred to our family, too.
We arrived as newlyweds. We had fresh water from the Tecate River for drinking. We slept in an adobe hut that used to store hay. Ever flexible, I asked myself, where to begin?
Edmond’s writings and lectures inspired a devoted following. He was known as “the Professor.” While we didn’t have much, we did have a typewriter, so I wrote to the Professor’s correspondents, “Bring your own tent, $17.50 a week.”
And our first guests arrived. We opened June 6, 1940.
They came to hear the Professor’s lectures, swim in the river, and hike. I hand-cranked a Victrola for activity classes that I’m told were the first aerobic dance exercises. I cooked the meals. With no money to pay staff, I put our guests to work: milking goats, planting, and tending our organic garden.
I didn’t have time to be afraid. There was too much work to be done! And there were challenges to be met. How would we ever make the business grow? The Professor could lecture about Aristotle and ancient Essenes. He was decades ahead of the culture on a range of health issues, such as industrialized foods, or what are now called ultra-processed foods. But he left the practical decisions to me.
Beauty doesn’t come from what you put on your face, but from what you put in your body.
On a visit to Camp Lockett, in nearby Campo, California, one of the last cavalry outposts in the U.S., I spotted large army surplus wooden crates. I immediately imagined them as guest cottages. All we needed was to cut in windows and add an army cot and an apple crate for a chair. Now guests needn’t bring their own tents. And we could charge a little more and begin to hire our Mexican neighbors and friends as our first staff.
Our reputation grew, especially in Hollywood. Kim Novak, Burt Lancaster, Charlton Heston, and the Gabor sisters Eva and Zsa Zsa started coming as guests. Aldous Huxley became a friend and, years later, he told me the children in his novel Island were based on the stories I told of my brother and me growing up on the island of Tahiti.
An “Anglo” retreat with a revolving cast of Hollywood stars, artists, and spirituality and nature seekers in a tiny Mexican border town might have created tension. But our neighbors welcomed us and supported us and we tried to do the same in return.
One of our first housekeepers came to me in tears one morning. Her son had unexpectedly died in Tijuana, Mexico, about an hour away, and the funeral home wouldn’t release his body unless she paid a stratospheric sum.
She didn’t have that kind of money. In those early days, neither did we. So I took our station wagon, threw a blanket in it, and drove to Tijuana myself to confront the undertaker. He told me the expense was necessary because all bodies “must” have a casket. He added that all transportation “must” be by hearse. He was so used to extorting grief-stricken families that he had never heard “no.”
I said no.
I also said, “Give me back that body.” I gave him $50, not a small sum at the time.
He asked me, “What about the casket?” I handed over the blanket.
“What about the hearse?” I opened the door to my station wagon.
Then I left Tijuana with that boy’s body, which bumped along the rutted road all the way back to Tecate. I drove straight to the church, where the village was waiting so a mass could be held and he could have a proper burial. After that, they called me the bruja.
Bruja means witch. But if I had cast a spell, it must have been a kind of happy magic because we were thriving. During those years I also founded the Golden Door, a spa that’s still winning awards and acclaim 68 years after it first opened. We started a family and welcomed a daughter, Sarah Livia Szekely Brightwood. She is now president of the ranch.
My grandsons Jacob and Joshua Szekely are a joy. But I also know sorrow. My son Alexandre died young. I lost my only granddaughter, Emily Shenandoah Brightwood, at 17.
Practicality and flexibility helped me to somehow find a way to continue. And life itself has also taught me to believe in the good and try to practice goodness whenever I can. While I don’t know if working to be good makes for a long life, it helps me sleep at night.
As our family prospered, I wanted our employees to prosper, too. Our staff now numbers in the hundreds: managers, accountants, masseuses, concierges, gardeners, chefs, housekeepers, yoga instructors, hiking guides.
When Mexico awarded me that nation’s highest honor for non-citizens, Order of the Aztec Eagle, I was proud. But I’m more proud of seeing our staff thrive. I’ve hired generations of the same family and it has been tremendously rewarding to see our current staff raising children who become doctors, lawyers, and engineers.
By the 1960s, my children started elementary school in San Diego, and that became our home base, about 30 miles from Tecate and 30 miles south of the Golden Door.
In the 1980s I decided to run for Congress. But San Diego wasn’t ready for a pro-choice Republican. I lost and that stung. Once again, flexibility allowed me to pivot.
I still wanted to improve Congress, so I hired 12 former congressional chiefs of staff to write the first management guide for Congress. A blueprint for the newly elected on how to open an office, set a legislative agenda, and hire staff, Setting Course: A Congressional Management Guide is now in its 19th printing. A copy is in every congressional office on Capitol Hill.
Back on the West Coast I still walk daily, though my pace has slowed. But my determination to do some good hasn’t. Saddened by attitudes toward recent immigrants and how they go unrecognized for their contributions to America, I felt we needed a West Coast answer to Ellis Island. So I recruited an advisory board with immigrants including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Deepak Chopra, and we established the New Americans Museum.
I continue working weekly, traveling from San Diego to Tecate where I give a talk to the guests. It’s always a full house.
During the Q & A, I’m always asked how I keep going. I explain that I never worry about things I cannot control. If something is troubling to me, I find a way to fix it. But if I can’t come up with a fix for a problem, then I drop it. Instead, I find a problem that I can solve. And then I do.
When you’re flexible and you’re practical, life teaches you that there is always a way to do some good.
This has been Ancient Wisdom, our series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. In case you missed it, two weeks ago John Skoyles described how he learned of his wife’s affair when he read her memoir.
Beautiful. All of it! What a life!
As my late father always said, "nobody wants to live to 90 - unless they're 89!"