Golden State housewives swooned for this mid-century piano prodigy. He may not have been whom he said he was.
In the early 1950s, thousands of Bay Area housewives were mesmerized by a handsome young organ-playing Indian sage who gazed seductively at them out of their console TVs. The dreamy-eyed keyboardist was named Korla Pandit, and his story is one of the strangest in the annals of show business.
Pandit’s life was like a fairy tale, but what no one realized until after he died is that it was a fairy tale. Korla Pandit did not exist. “Later, he went to Hollywood and became a famous organist on television,” Thompson told Smith. “He used another name, some Turkish title, I guess.” At some point in the 1940s, Redd met DeBeeson, a take-charge blonde who worked for Disney. She became his confidante and career advisor; in the late 1940s, they got married.
The first known appearance of Korla Pandit was in 1949 when he was the regular organist on a TV show called Hollywood Holiday. Pandit got his big break later that year when Claus Landsberg, the founder of pioneering Los Angeles TV station KTLA, saw him playing at the opening of a local furrier and gave Pandit his own TV program.
Pandit’s family knew what was going on. When they came to his gigs, they would only speak to him later. When Pandit visited his father, he wouldn’t bring his two sons with Beryl. One of Pandit’s sisters told Smith that Pandit never told his children about his lineage.
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