Gracefully Insane (9 page)

When Stanley was clear, which was much of the time, he was the typical McLean patient, puttering around the golf course, pedaling the Zander machine (an early version of the stationary bicycle), or regaling his attendants with stories of his hunting trips in Maine. On May 13, 1907, the anniversary of his father’s death, he addressed a letter to his mother:

But Stanley’s moments of clarity alternated with long periods of catatonic inactivity and with outbreaks of violence. In the spring of 1907, he hid in the bathroom of a neighboring suite
rather than meet with his wife. A few months later, he assaulted Katharine, prompting Dr. Hamilton to curtail all visits from women. Katharine and Anita agreed on a radical intervention: They decided to relocate Stanley to a family-owned estate, Riven Rock, in Montecito, California. The gorgeous stone mansion overlooking the sea had initially been purchased as a home for Mary Virginia, who had since been moved to a private sanitarium in Alabama. Katharine lured Hamilton, who was doing research on primate sexuality, to the West by endowing the nation’s first freestanding primate research institute on the estate grounds. Similarly, she convinced two of McLean’s male nurses to pull up stakes and spend what proved to be the rest of their lives caring for her husband.

Stanley spent the next thirty-nine years at Riven Rock.
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Hamilton drifted away, to be replaced by McLean’s chief research pathologist, August Hoch. The ensuing psychiatric quadrille will become a familiar tale in later chapters of this book. Just after Stanley left McLean, the family paid a small fortune—$2,000 a week in 1908 currency—to bring Emil Kraepelin, the world’s most famous psychiatrist, to Stanley’s bedside. Kraepelin’s lengthy report essentially recapitulated Meyer’s conclusions of the previous year, with one exception. Whether out of politeness or conviction, Kraepelin held out a slim hope for recovery, noting that Stanley was suffering from an “active disease,” catatonic schizophrenia, as opposed to a “terminal condition.” As for treatment, Kraepelin had no suggestions to improve upon the Hamilton-Tuttle regime imposed on Stanley from the first day of his breakdown: “rest treatment ... should be continued ... continuous baths ... warm packs” and so on. Kraepelin was aware that some voices might be calling for Stanley to be psychoanalyzed. Stanley himself said twice that “he would like to have Dr. Freud visit
him.” But Kraepelin ruled that out: “Any definite mental treatment is not practicable at the present time, since the patient is essentially inaccessible.” Freud never came, nor did Carl Gustav Jung, whom Nettie approached by letter in 1912.

The tragedy of Stanley McCormick seemed interminable. Forbidden by the doctors from meeting with her son, the dying Nettie McCormick traveled to Montecito in 1923 to gaze at him through a crack in his bedroom door. In 1929, in a lawsuit publicized in every major American newspaper, Katharine sued Anita and her brothers for sole guardianship of Stanley, claiming that Stanley’s new attending physician, Dr. Edward J. Kempf, was bilking the family for $150,000 a year and doing her husband no good. Katharine had soured on the potential success of talk therapy and had begun her search for a possible biochemical explanation for Stanley’s disease. The previous year she had endowed the Neuroendocrine Research Foundation, tasked with exploring the role of hormone imbalances in schizophrenic patients. The lawsuit provoked a media circus. “Freudism as Used on Harvester Heir Is Fought by Wife,” the
New York World
reported of the trial taking place in Santa Barbara. “She Contends Sex Psychology Treatment Alienates Love of Stanley McCormick; Seeks to Oust Dr. Kempf of N.Y. from $150,000 job.” The coverage continued:

And so on. Katharine eventually paid $500,000 in legal fees, with little to show for it. She did get Kempf fired, but the court forced her to continue sharing Stanley’s guardianship with the McCormick family.

Katharine never remarried. Dividing her time between Montecito, where she monitored Stanley’s care from a neighboring estate, and Boston, she used the considerable Dexter-McCormick fortunes to become one of the nation’s leading philanthropists, endowing the pioneering birth-control research of Margaret Sanger and Dr. John Rock, who conducted some of the first field tests of the birth-control pill. When Stanley died in 1947, his lawyers produced a will scribbled out in longhand in 1906. It proved to be one of the “letters” that Stanley was writing at night during his honeymoon instead of attending to his wife. He left her everything, an estate then valued at about $35 million. After four decades of open warfare with her in-laws, Katharine finally won Stanley back. At the elite Graceland Cemetery in Chicago, she had Stanley’s body laid to rest in the Dexter plot, far removed from the McCormicks.

Katharine died in 1967, leaving huge bequests to the Stanford University Medical School, the Chicago Art Institute, the Chicago and Boston symphonies, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. All of the gifts, including the priceless impressionist paintings she and Stanley had collected on their honeymoon, were made in the name of her late husband. The largest beneficiary in her will was her alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Toward the end of her life, she wanted desperately to build a dormitory for women; there was none on the MIT campus. In fact, she had been paying taxi fares for female students to commute to her beloved “Tech” from housing across the Charles River. By 1960, she managed to get the plans for Stanley R. McCormick Hall under way. “I am particularly happy to be able to provide a dormitory on the Tech campus for women students there,” she wrote to her friend Sanger. “This has been my ambition for many years but it had to await the oral contraceptive for
birth control.” She lived to see the first wing dedicated in 1963. The second wing was completed just after her death. She was buried in Chicago, next to the handsome man she had met during a chance encounter at an ocean resort sixty-four years previously.

The amenities at the new Belmont location were extraordinary. In
addition to the “architected” riding stable, McLean comprised a working farm, with separate beef and dairy barns; two piggeries; extensive vegetable and flower gardens; a working apiary for honey; and apple and pear orchards, which are still visible on the left when one drives into the hospital. (The orchards are slated for removal to make way for luxury housing.) Fish and meat came from Boston’s Quincy Market. Otherwise, patients mainly consumed what came from McLean itself: fresh water from a prodigious spring and donuts and rolls from a bakery that turned out one hundred loaves of bread a day. The food was by all accounts very good. “We catered to patients,” a former steward recalled in the hospital’s official history. “If the patient did not like the lamb we served for dinner and asked for lobster, we gave lobster. They could afford it. Appleton House [the men’s ward] was the Ritz Carlton.”

As time progressed, it became less and less economical for the hospital to bottle its own milk or slaughter 2,000 pounds of pork a week during the spring and fall. The nation’s need for manpower put an end to the dairy business during World War II. In the 1944 annual report, Franklin Wood noted that “it was necessary to dispose of the herd of cows this year because we were unable to find or keep dairy hands.” The herd had roamed the campus for fifty years, and he lamented their departure: “It was a sad affair.”

For those disposed to enjoy them, there were cultural opportunities in the form of “regular weekly entertainments.” In the mid-1930s,
Wood selected a few for special mention: “Mr. Frank, with his ‘Seeing-Eye’ dog Buddy, visited the hospital, showed his pictures, gave an interesting talk, and allowed us to see Buddy in action.” Another visitor, Stephen Corey, a member of Richard Byrd’s second polar expedition, “gave a most instructive talk and showed us a duffel bag full of equipment, explaining the use of the various articles.” Patients could even study art. A group of high-minded ladies converted a portion of the women’s gymnasium into an art room, stocking it with fifty original oil paintings (including a Guido Reni of questionable provenance), watercolors, and reproductions of the great religious works of Venice and Florence, mostly for teaching purposes. The small gallery also housed copies of the Venus de Milo, the Hermes of Praxiteles, and about a dozen other marvels of antiquity. Patients could peruse the annotated catalog and attend art-appreciation classes if they so chose. The donors expressed their hope that when the restorative powers of Olmsted’s delightful landscape might wane, art would fill the breach: “In the beauty of outward surroundings on this hill-top, the ministry of Nature is manifest, even if, in suffering, one can not always realize it. Often—certainly in times of heat or cold or storm, when Nature’s power of helpfulness is suspended—it is hoped that within, after some simple fashion, Art may minister charm and serenity.”

But the most powerful signal to the city’s well-to-do that McLean was offering a level of service not customarily found in mental institutions was the construction of the first of several freestanding “cottages for one patient,” completed in the summer of 1896. It was a cottage in name only, not unlike the sprawling, flagstone “Berkshire cottages” that graced the landscape of Edith Wharton’s New England novels. The five-bedroom, two-story colonial revival home faced west, overlooking a terraced garden and the rolling hills of Belmont. On the ground floor, one found an entry hall, a dining room, a living room, a spacious sun room, a kitchen, a pantry, and a china closet. Each of the two ground-floor bedrooms had a separate bath and a three-foot-by-five-foot
closet. Upstairs, there were three smaller bedrooms, with smaller closets, all sharing one bath—the servants’ quarters. Also on the second floor were two storerooms and a linen closet. All this was for one patient and the requisite support staff.

The cottages proved to be popular with McLean’s aristocratic clientele, who could enjoy the comforts of home as well as full-time access to some of the best medical and psychiatric care in the country. Although each arrangement was slightly different, a wealthy Boston family—the Schraffts and the Shaws were two well-known examples—would typically pay for the construction of the cottage and deed it to McLean in return for lifelong care of a disturbed relative. An elderly man I know recalled visiting his cousin Nellie in one of the cottages, where her furnishings and maids had all moved in. As a young boy, “I had to go have tea with her once, and she introduced me to all the portraits on the walls.” One cottage was built to replicate a woman’s Brookline home. Legend has it that she was transported in her sleep from Brookline to McLean, woke up in the hospital, and lived the rest of her life in the comfortable and appealing surroundings. Architects Peabody and Stearns designed the Arlington Cottage with four-foot-thick fire walls to assuage the pyrophobic fears of the patient whose family paid to build it.