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Not everyone bought into the World According to Ira. A lot of ideas but "nothing to hold onto," recalls Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Claude Lewis. "Total b.s.," concurs Joel Bloom, president emeritus of the Franklin Institute Science Museum. But with knowledge stolen from years of voracious reading, Einhorn charmed many into believing the planet was warping into new frontiers and only the Unicorn could lead them into the Age of Aquarius. Whether it was politics, environment or computer science, "he was three or four steps ahead of you at every turn," says Norris Gelman, one of Einhorn's attorneys. As if hypnotized, the suits responded with free lunches, grants, consulting contracts, four-figure speaking fees. A local communications company hired Einhorn to mediate a neighborhood power-plant dispute, then for years afterward sponsored his space travel by mailing copies of his scribblings and those of other "forward thinkers" to a growing list of international contacts.
Einhorn won a teaching fellowship at Harvard in the '70s. In the '60s he had taught an alternative-education class at Penn, his alma mater, and once reportedly broke out the joints, stripped naked and danced in the classroom. Thirty years ago, not everyone was after an M.B.A.
Warts and all, "Ira charmed the city," says Lewis. And countless women.
Back then, says Harry Jay Katz, an acquaintance, "guys never asked girls what they thought about politics or poetry. Ira did. He feigned that he cared."
He met Helen (Holly) Maddux in 1972 at La Terrasse, the bistro where he held court but never picked up the tab. Maddux was described as a woman of such mesmerizing elegance, everything around her would fall away. "Michelle Pfeiffer has the same kind of fragile beauty," says Holly's sister Mary, 34. (Years later, the comparisons to his wife Annika would seem chilling -- both she and Holly were described as delicate and ethereal. Both dancers, both seamstresses, both Earth Mothers.)
In the middle of the antiwar movement, Maddux had left Tyler, Texas, and a home ruled by a proud and disciplined World War II veteran to attend Bryn Mawr College, a select Main Line liberal arts school for women. By some accounts, she never recovered from the shock and drifted like a windblown leaf through relationships and jobs after graduation. Within days of their meeting, the Unicorn carried this wounded deer back to his lair, a squalid apartment near Penn.
"Around women, Ira was a stunted teenager," says his old friend Keegan. "He was all brain, no heart. Sex was an addiction for Ira. If he was interested in a woman, that was the only thing that existed. For many women, getting all this attention from Ira Einhorn was flattering, and it would be easy to succumb." Keegan remembers a party where Ira "came over and said, 'Would you take Holly home? I'm going home with someone else.' Holly just sat there, silent. She put up with it, and unfortunately, so did we."
Maddux had a younger brother and three younger sisters. When she brought Ira home to Texas to meet the family, they were horrified. Like a caveman, Einhorn began eating ravenously. While the family said grace, he scratched and clawed at his poison-ivy blisters, and he treated Holly as if she were his personal maiden. "We concluded that he basically came down there to try and promote a rift between Holly and my father," says Elisabeth Hall, 37, who gave the name Holly to her daughter, a ballerina. Elisabeth was the last family member to see Holly alive. After Elisabeth's high school graduation, she visited London, where Holly and Ira were traveling on Holly's savings. "She told me she was real tired of Ira, and that... when she got back she was going to leave him and start a business."