Star Children

The Star Children: Beatrice Straight and Ingo Swann’s Psychic Rock Album

There is another fascinating story hiding inside Star Children, and it involves an Academy Award-winning actress.

The album is credited to Steven Halpern and Ingo Swann, featuring Beatrice Straight and Johnny Pierce.

Yes, that Beatrice Straight.

Straight was one of the most respected actresses of her generation. She won a Tony Award for playing Elizabeth Proctor in the original Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Then, in 1977, she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her unforgettable performance in Network.

So how did an Oscar-winning actress end up on an experimental album created by Ingo and Halpern about psychic abilities, quantum realities and traveling the universe aboard a “psychic starship”?

It turns out that Straight’s connection to this world went much deeper.

More Than an Actress

Behind Straight’s distinguished Hollywood and Broadway career was a serious interest in subjects that would have been very familiar to Ingo.

The New York Public Library’s description of the Beatrice Straight papers specifically identifies parapsychology among the subjects represented in her personal files. And there was a personal connection between Straight and Ingo. A chronology drawn from the papers of author and psychical researcher Harold Sherman records Sherman meeting Straight in January 1975 at a reception given for him by Ingo in New York.

That small detail places Straight inside Ingo’s world years before most people would ever associate her with the paranormal.

Another entry in the Sherman chronology is even more intriguing. In December 1976, it records a $2,000 grant to ESP Research Associates from the Whitney Foundation “via Beatrice Straight.” This suggests something more than a celebrity with a passing curiosity about psychic phenomena. Straight appears to have been part of a network of people seriously interested in consciousness and psychical research.

From Star Fire to Star Children

The origins of Star Children are found in Ingo's science-fiction novel Star Fire. Each chapter of Star Fire begins with lyrics that reference quantum physics, remote viewing, and other decidedly Ingo-esque subjects. 

Within the novel, those songs are composed and sung by the main character: a rock star who becomes super-psychic and discovers the existence of ominous doomsday weapons.

His mission is an extraordinary one: he wants to persuade both the United States and the Soviet Union to destroy the weapons before the weapons destroy the planet.

But Ingo was not content to leave his fictional rock star's music on the printed page. He decided the songs should actually exist.

He handed the lyrics to composer Halpern and gave him an assignment that must have sounded almost as improbable as the novel itself: compose and arrange the songs, hire the musicians and record an album in time to coordinate with the release of the book.

Halpern accepted the challenge, and the album was born.

Enter the Psychic Starship

The resulting album was probably unlike anything either man’s audience expected. Instead of the meditative music for which Halpern would become famous, Star Children moved through rock, pop, disco, jazz and atmospheric meditative passages. Ingo’s lyrics explored space, consciousness, psychic perception, and realities beyond the ordinary senses.

Halpern recruited musicians he had met from the Bay Area disco group Santa Esmeralda, minus their lead singer, to play on the sessions. And according to Halpern, something unusual happened when Ingo entered the studio. After recording the first song, Halpern remembered the musicians looking at one another and asking:

“Whew! What got into us?”

They turned around. Ingo was standing there with what Halpern described as a huge Cheshire-cat grin. Halpern believed Ingo had somehow been “beaming” energy toward the musicians while they played.

Whatever happened in that studio, Halpern never forgot it. He later wrote that the recording contained something beyond the notes themselves, and that the music could take the listener for a ride aboard what Ingo called “the psychic starship.”

And Then There Was Beatrice

Seen against this background, Straight’s appearance on Star Children no longer seems quite so improbable.

She was not simply a famous actress who wandered into an eccentric recording session. She knew Ingo. She had an interest in parapsychology. She moved among people involved in psychical research. And now she was participating in an artistic project in which Ingo was attempting to bring many of those same ideas into popular culture.

There is also a wonderful twist to the story.

Just a few years later, millions of moviegoers would see Straight confronting the paranormal in Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist (1982). Straight played Dr. Martha Lesh, the paranormal researcher who enters the Freeling family’s haunted home and tries to understand what is happening there.

To movie audiences, it was simply a role. But knowing something about Straight’s real interests makes the casting seem wonderfully appropriate. Before she investigated the paranormal in Poltergeist, Straight had already traveled aboard Ingo Swann's “psychic starship.”

Not a Musical Detour

What we can see already is that Star Children was much more than an odd musical detour in Ingo’s career.

It brought together his science fiction, his ideas about consciousness, his fascination with human psychic potential, his visual art, and his circle of creative friends and collaborators. 

Ingo was not content simply to write about a psychic rock star. He wanted us to hear the music, too. 

And somehow, along the way, an Oscar-winning actress climbed aboard the psychic starship with him.