Gracefully Insane (27 page)

The same psychiatrist who visited McLean in the
1950
s and remarked
upon the hospital’s “feudalistic” and “medievalistic” culture had this to say about the patients: “Most of the patients looked to me
like social rejects of a blunted sort mixed with annoying neurotics. ... because of the high rates and the luxuriousness of the place, aristocratic clientele is found, consisting of patients whose families
don’t want them to get really well
[emphasis added].”

So it was, for example, with Louis Agassiz Shaw. No one really wanted him to get well. The state did not want him to regain his sanity because then he would have to stand trial for murder. The hospital had no particular stake in the matter; Shaw’s lawyers paid his bills on time, and he was generally harmless. As for many of the “thoroughbred mental cases,” life inside McLean offered Louis much more than life outside. So for twenty-three years, with occasional escorted day trips to his Topsfield mansion or group outings to a North Shore beach, Louis called a book-lined suite in Upham Hall home.

Louis dressed oddly. “He’d get all dressed up as a cavalry officer with a cloak over his shoulder when he came out to see me,” recalls his lawyer James Barr Ames. “He always wore crisp, white shirts, and he would wear paper towels on the inside of his collars,” a McLean staffer remembers, “and he would constantly pull at his collar during community meetings. He didn’t like anything tight around his neck.” A curious tic for a man who had strangled his maid.

Louis continued to be a tremendous snob. His preferred psychiatrist was his Harvard contemporary Dr. Vernon Williams, himself something of an odd duck who lived in a bachelor’s boarding house on Beacon Hill. (“The story was that Vernon had been sent to psychiatry so he wouldn’t kill anybody in medicine,” a colleague recalls. “And he always traveled by train because his mother never allowed him to fly.”) Whether or how Williams actually treated Louis, no one knows. Paul Dinsmore, the psychiatrist in charge of Upham for a portion of Louis’s stay, remembers the two men singing Episcopalian hymns together during therapy sessions. Louis’s favorite companion at Upham was a renowned Harvard professor of Asian studies who had tried to commit suicide nineteen times. On the twentieth attempt, he succeeded.
“Louis never spoke to me after that,” says the doctor in charge of the case. “His psychiatrist said, ‘Louis is very angry with you because you let Mr.———die.’ I could understand that.”

In his late seventies, Louis Shaw was a pale shadow of the lunatic who once strangled his maid. Nurses could control him relatively easily. To the younger generation, “He was a wonderful, gentlemanly character,” remembers William Shine, a ward aide at McLean in the late 1960s. “He was quite distinguished looking, with white-ish hair. He wandered the grounds, wearing an overcoat in the winter, a blazer in the summer. He never spoke to anybody.” In the mid-1980s, McLean officials decided it was time to part company with Louis. “It was getting to the point where it was becoming very expensive to have him here,” says Dr. Peter Choras.

This was precisely the kind of deal that had gone sour for McLean in the past. One family supposedly paid the hospital a lump sum of $25,000 after World War I to warehouse a wayward scion. The patient lived another fifty years, contributing to McLean’s deficits over the years.

But Louis did not live another ten years. In accordance with their custodial agreement, McLean decided to place him in a North Shore nursing home, not far from his ancestral manse in Topsfield. Administrators made the decision, which, interestingly, Louis’s psychiatrist (not the long departed Vernon Williams) opposed. Even though Louis had never discussed the events of April 7, 1964, with his latest analyst, the doctor worried about loosing
Louis on the world. Medicated with mood-stabilizing drugs, Louis presented a gentlemanly, raffish demeanor to the outside world. But his therapist had a hunch that he could turn violent, and his hunch proved right. In the nursing home, Louis tried to attack a nurse, feebly, but aggressively nonetheless. Shortly afterwards, he died in Manchester, Massachusetts, which had just voted to rename itself Manchester-by-the-Sea, to remind the public of its bygone renown as the “Newport of the North Shore.” I think Louis would have approved.

The passing of the privileged “Bay State scion” who had made front-page news in 1964 went unremarked by either Boston newspaper. When he died, Louis left almost $4 million in assets. Two million went to charity, and the Topsfield mansion, worth about one million, was donated to the Catholic archdiocese of Boston. Harvard’s Fogg Museum turned down his $300,000 art collection. To put it gently, Louis was no Scofield Thayer. The Raphael, the Michelangelo, and the Leonardo that Louis showed off to visitors were fakes. The Fogg did take a bronze sculpture of Charles VII (Louis thought it was Joan of Arc) and a donation of $150,000. The rest of the money went to nieces, nephews, former servants, and the lawyers. Over the years, McLean had been trying to wheedle some money out of Louis’s estate to pay for the restoration of the Pleasant Street gatehouse, where he lived for a while. They did not get a dime.

About halfway through my work on McLean, I met Mark Robart,
the hospital’s director of social work, at a party. We discussed my interest in McLean’s vestigial culture. He asked me what kinds of sources I was using to research my book. “People,” I answered. Out of the blue, he suggested that I interview “Walter Paton,” a seventy-seven-year-old man who had resided at McLean since 1948. Paton was genial, excessively shy, and well liked by his caretakers.
Flashing his hesitant smile, he often muttered that “things are quite a bit different now at the hospital” or “things really changed when Dr. Stanton got here.” There had been talk of preserving his memories in an oral history. Instead, I was allowed to interview him, on the condition that I promised not to reveal his identity.

Walter now lives in Appleton House, which has been converted into an unlocked residential facility. He is not strictly speaking a patient at McLean, although he is living on the campus in the care of McLean doctors, for the comparatively cheap price of $195 a day (the rate for an inpatient day is about $900). The doctor in charge explained to me that the Appleton residents are men and women who suffered from psychotic events in their past but are now in remission. With the help of drugs, they no longer have to live on a ward. On the other hand, although they are free to roam around the grounds, they do not have the life skills to function in everyday society. Their meals are prepared for them, but the patients participate communally in some chores, such as kitchen clean-up. In Walter’s case, it seemed fair to conclude that he would never leave the hospital. “There were lots of attempts to move him off grounds, but they weren’t successful,” his social worker told me. “This had become his own small town. Walking around the grounds with him is like walking around with the elder of a village.”

Walter proved to be eager for the interview, and he was unfailingly polite when we met. He was dressed casually, in an open shirt, yellow cardigan sweater, slacks, and sensible shoes. With his stooped gait and thin, pencil mustache he resembled the older Leo G. Carroll, star of the long-forgotten (but not by Walter, I suspect) television series
Topper.
As advertised, he was quite shy, and he did have some trouble speaking. He also had motor control problems with his hands and arms.

Like many old people, Walter had some firm memories about the past. He remembered Paul Howard, the doctor who had admitted him to McLean, and he could easily tick off the wards
where he had lived: Proctor, North Belknap, Upham, and Hope Cottage; the latter two had been closed down during the 1990s, and his program had moved to Appleton. He made a point of noting that he had never been on Bowditch, for many years the men’s locked unit.

Walter had been cued to my interest in the old McLean, and he did repeat his pet phrase, “things are quite a bit different now at the hospital.” When he arrived in the late 1940s, “there was a work horse here in the garage, and two riding horses. Then there got to be so many cars around it got too dangerous to ride.” He correctly noted that there had not been a security department when he came to the hospital and that the longtime food service workers had been sacked during a cost-cutting drive.

Walter well remembered that Franklin Wood used to live just down the hill, in a grand residence now slated for demolition to make way for the office park. “Wood was a medical doctor but not a psychiatrist,” Walter said. “Dr. Stanton was a psychiatrist. He really changed things around.” For example? “Well, they never needed a stoplight down on Mill Street before he came. Then they got all these cars. He built Hall-Mercer [the brutalist, concreteblock child and adolescent center]—as for that architecture, the less said the better. They had some adults in there at one point and they said it felt like a jail.” I told him that Hall-Mercer, too, was slated for demolition. “I don’t think people will miss it,” he said with a slight smile.

I wanted to talk about Upham, but it was not clear whether I could ask after specific patients. (A McLean staffer sat in on our conversation.) I asked if he recalled “the man who knew Freud,” and without naming him, Walter recited the career highlights of Carl Liebman: “There was a patient who had gone to Europe to see Dr. Freud. I don’t know what good it did him. He liked to read German philosophy books. Goethe. He had a lobotomy. He came from New York. His family was in the brewing business.”

When I mentioned that Carl had attended Yale, Walter quickly corrected me. “But only for two years—he always said that people
should be paid to go there.” Walter had a reflexive answer for people and events he did not recollect. When I inquired about Ray Charles playing the piano in the Upham sitting room or about other patients, he just smiled and said, “Oh, I missed that.”

When I asked after his family, Walter said he had a sister in the Worcester area who had lived in a large house that she had recently sold. Her children had all grown up, and she had since moved into a smaller condominium. About a year and a half earlier, one of his nephews had come to visit him on Appleton. “He said that he’d be back, but I don’t know when,” Paton recounted. “He said he wanted to get to know me, but maybe he didn’t want to get to know me that well.”

Walter told me more than once that “psychiatry has improved a lot,” but he didn’t sound particularly sincere. How had it improved? There are “more meds than forty years ago. It’s sort of encouraging and it’s sort of disappointing.” How is it disappointing, I asked? “It’s a mixed bag,” he answered, changing the subject.

Two weeks later, I saw the McLean staffer who had sat in on our conversation. We both agreed that the meeting had not yielded much. On the one hand, I felt I had failed to make a positive connection with Paton—psychotherapy is hard! On the other hand, I felt that her presence, which was probably necessary for legal reasons, had exacerbated an already awkward situation. What did she learn, I asked? She told me that while Walter and I had been speaking, she had been calculating the number of days he had spent at McLean and then multiplied that number by $195. Since 1948, give or take a few hundred thousand dollars—long-term discounts were common for good customers—the Paton family had spent $3.5 million to lodge Uncle Walter at McLean.

Toward the end of the
1960
s, the character of Upham gradually began
to change. In 1966, the patients must have been surprised to see a
rare black face at their morning meetings; the great blues singer Ray Charles, then thirty-five years old, came onto the hall for a week-long “observational” visit.