The Professor and the Prostitute
and Other True Tales of Murder and Madness
For
M.P. and J.P.W.
Contents
Introduction
The Professor and the Prostitute
Boston, Massachusetts · 1983
From a Nice Family
Dallas, Texas · 1981
The Strange Death of the Twin Gynecologists
New York, New York · 1975
The Downward Drift of a High School Star
Torrington, Connecticut, and New York, New York · 1981
A Tragedy on Eighty-ninth Street
New York, New York · 1980
The Transsexual, the Bartender, and the Suburban Princess
Rockland County, New York · 1981
The Lady Vanishes
Nantucket Island, Massachusetts · 1980
Dented Pride
New York, New York · 1983
Dr. Quaalude
New York, New York · 1979
About the Author
Crime has been greatly on the increase among the lower classes [but] what strikes me as the strangest thing is that in the higher classes, too, crime is increasing proportionately. In one place one hears of a student’s robbing the mail on the high road; in another place people of good social position forge false banknotes; in Moscow of late a whole gang has been captured who used to forge lottery tickets, and one of the ringleaders was a lecturer in universal history; then our secretary was murdered from some obscure motive of gain.… How are we to explain this demoralization of the civilized part of our society?
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
Crime and Punishment
Introduction
The stories collected here are not about murder and madness among the rich and famous nor among the poor and downtrodden. They are about murder and madness—mania, paranoia, sociopathy—among people who inhabit the middle class. My protagonists are doctors, academics, businessmen, schoolteachers, and the children of such individuals, the kinds of people I, and many others like me, might know, entertain, work beside.
As a reader, I’ve always been most drawn to books about people with whom I could identify. When it comes to true crime stories, books about upper-crust villains who knock off their heiress wives or their miserly fathers in order to collect more millions, or about lower-depth, deprived poor devils who kill at the drop of a wallet or go crazy from the sheer shambles of their surroundings never entirely appeal to me. The lives of the leading figures seem remote. I like meeting on paper individuals I recognize, wandering in a world that is, somehow, familiar. And if ever I feel I’m being parochial in my taste, I remind myself that the novel came about in the eighteenth century because suddenly there was a new class of people—the middle class—and they wanted to read works about themselves or people like them.
All of this is by way of explaining why it was that when, in the mid-1970s, I first began to write about murderers and manics, sociopaths and suicides, I always chose to explore the lives of individuals from my own background. But there was something more. It seemed to me that one of the most important questions a writer might address when writing of crime and craziness was: “Am I capable of committing a crime or of suddenly going haywire?” It is a question that haunts many people when they hear of someone they’ve known who has gotten into trouble with the law or unexpectedly killed himself, and it always used to tantalize me. I wanted to address that question, but I felt that the motivations and even the psychology of the very rich and the very poor were so different from my own that I couldn’t really put myself in their place. So, remembering the age-old admonition to writers, “Write about what you know,” I stuck to criminals and disturbed characters who inhabited, as I did, the great middle of society.
Although I’m a “psychological” writer, concerned with what lies beneath the surface of behavior, I see my decision to write about murder and madness as primarily a literary matter. In the late 1950s, I was studying for a graduate degree in literature, teaching English at a college, and writing short stories. I had little use for journalism then. Fiction, I felt, was the only suitable practice for a writer seeking to maneuver the minds of men and women.
I’d learned this from my professors, who almost never discussed nonfiction except for works of criticism and literary biography. I suppose I was provincial, but I was a product of my times. Tom Wolfe (no relation of mine, I’m sad to say) has written of literary values in the fifties: “The literary upper class were the novelists. They were regarded as the only ‘creative’ writers, the only literary artists. They had exclusive entry to the soul of man, the profound emotions, the eternal mysteries.” As to journalists, “They were regarded chiefly as day laborers who dug up slags of raw information for writers of higher ‘sensibility’ to make better use of.” Not wanting to be a mere documentarian—for that’s how I viewed journalists—I concentrated on writing fiction.
By the early 1960s, however, having realized I was a writer and not a scholar, I’d given up teaching and graduate school and taken a job at Time Inc. I was in the belly of the journalistic whale, but I ignored my surroundings. A researcher by day, at night I went home and worked on short stories. But something was happening to me. I felt frustrated by the work I was producing. I wanted to tell stories, to have an engine on my tales that would drive them from suspenseful opening scenes to ironic or moving ends. But for the most part I was dwelling on my own psyche and limited experience of life, and my work seemed to lack narrative drive. I yearned to sprinkle the salt of plot over my paragraphs, but plots didn’t come to me. My imagination was, I decided, impoverished.
Around that time, I began to collect newspaper articles that might trigger my recalcitrant imagination. I have them still, in a graying folder full of yellow clips: June 8, 1962, “Still No Clue to Killer. Five days of questioning have given Topeka police a fair outline of Daphne Rhodes’ habits, an incomplete outline of her last hours alive, and no single useful clue to her killer. Since the 26-year-old New York divorcee was found raped and strangled in her apartment Sunday, a two-man team of detectives has repeatedly questioned the small circle of Menninger Clinic patients who were her friends and rechecked her apartment in a fruitless hunt for leads.” August 21, 1967, “Body of American Missing in Prague Is Found in River. A body identified as that of Charles H. Jordan, an American official of a Jewish relief organization, was found today in the Vitava River in Prague. An examining physician in Prague said the body had been in the water for several days. He was unable immediately to give the cause of death.”
I felt a little embarrassed by that folder of mysterious tragedies and hid it in the back of a drawer. But I knew by then (not that I’d learned it in college or graduate school; those were the days of the so-called New Criticism, and we studied almost exclusively an author’s output, not his sources) that many of the writers I admired had treated themselves to the inspiration of current events. Defoe had read accounts about a man marooned on a desert island, and created Robinson Crusoe. Flaubert had been told by a friend about a doctor’s dissatisfied wife who’d killed herself after having a series of lovers, and invented Madame Bovary. Dreiser had collected news stories about an ambitious shirt factory foreman who had drowned his pregnant millhand girl-friend in order to marry a socialite, and brought forth An American Tragedy. I kept hoping that the news events I was clipping would help me write richer fiction.
Also, around that time, the late 1960s, a new kind of journalistic work began to appear. In 1965, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was published. He called it a “nonfiction novel,” a term that irritated a lot of my academic friends, but the book did indeed have many of the elements of a novel—a strong sense of place, characters whose internal thoughts as well as external acts were explored, and, most important, sequential action. In 1969, Norman Mailer published Of a Fire on the Moon, in which he himself became a character in the marvel of the moon shot. Gay Talese was writing about Timesmen as if he had access to the pathways of their neural space. Tom Wolfe was turning English on its head and making me dizzy, euphoric. Journalism had become more personal and unpredictable, and consequently suddenly exciting to me.
It was then that the idea first occurred to me that instead of using real events to fuel my fiction, I might try using fictional techniques to fuel nonfiction. I looked at my mystery clips and thought how challenging it would be to find out more about the events they described and, employing dialogue, dramatic scenes, and sequential action, try to turn some of them into nonfiction short stories. If I did, I thought, I’d never reproduce verbatim, as some nonfiction writers were doing (and regrettably still do), the bleak bones of research such as court transcripts, police records, and meandering interviews, but I’d rely on the selectivity that the pursuit of fiction had taught me, the discipline of making each detail telling and pace more prominent than packing.
I didn’t, however, get the opportunity to try out my idea until the mid-1970s. Then I had what I will always think of as, callous though it may seem, the good fortune to have known someone involved in the kind of enigmatic tragedy I had habitually been clipping and was longing to write about: Cyril and Stewart Marcus, twin gynecologists, had been found dead from mysterious causes in a littered, garbage-ridden New York apartment; I had once been a patient of Stewart Marcus. I was able to convince New York magazine to let me write about the brothers.
I later wrote a novel, Private Practices, that was inspired by the situation of the twins. But I had been bitten by the bug of actuality. And soon I began to concentrate on writing nonfiction accounts of murder and madness that tried at once to give the facts but also to let the story unfold, to emulate the short story by offering scenes and creating a feeling of immediacy.
I wrote the pieces that appear in this volume between 1975 and 1985. “The Professor and the Prostitute,” which comes first, was the last one I did, and it comes closest to what I had in mind when I first dreamed about making real events read like invented tales. Here, more than in any of the other, shorter pieces, the information gathered from interviews, transcripts, police records, and the like is buried in a snug narrative nest. But all the strands of that nest, even the lines of dialogue and paragraphs of interior musings, come from court documents or interviews.
Curiously, however, having at last taken a stylistic idea and gone with it as far as I could, I began to feel its confines. One is limited by available facts. The mind cries out to know the things one wasn’t told, could not discover. What did the professor’s wife really think about her disloyal husband? What did the prostitute’s parents really think about their risk-taking daughter? There are things nonfiction accounts can never tell us, for invariably some of the principals of a story will not cooperate, or they hide their true feelings, or they are simply not in the habit of probing their minds and motivations to the extent, or with the depth, that a writer requires. Thus to attempt to dramatize real events while forcing oneself to stick to available source material is to be in a new kind of writerly prison, the victim not of impoverished imagination but of inventiveness longing to swirl free.
Well, that’s a writer for you—never satisfied. As Philip Roth has written, “If you want to be reminded of your limitations virtually every minute, there’s no better occupation to choose. Your memory, your diction, your intelligence, your sympathies, your observations, your sensations—never enough.”
One last word. I mentioned that I wanted to explore, in my pieces, the question of whether I myself could do the things my characters did. Whether the reader could. Today, these questions seem almost quaint to me, but at the time I began to write about murder and madness, I was under the sway of that pop psychology tenet that holds that the murderer, the swindler, the matricide and patricide, even the infanticide, are people “just like us.” We all harbor aggressive thoughts, feelings of entitlement, surges of wrath and rage, goes that argument. And thus we too might one day, under certain stresses, experience fates like those of some of the people described in this book.
My investigations taught me otherwise. Often, when I’d begin researching a story about some startling act committed by an apparently upstanding middle-class citizen, an act of self- or other-directed destruction, it would appear that the aberrent deed that had captured my interest had happened out of the blue. But delving invariably revealed that my protagonists had a history of psychological instability. They acted, not out of the blue, but out of markedly gray troubled pasts. They suffered from psychiatric diseases like mania, severe depression, or drug abuse, or classic emotional character disorders, like sociopathy or hysteria.
No doubt there is, somewhere, a fine humanitarian impulse behind our willingness to believe that those who are violent toward themselves or others are people just like us. But to some extent we hold this belief out of ignorance of how certain personality disorders and psychiatric illnesses can foreshadow chaos and catastrophe. The stories in this book shed light on this matter and attempt to convey all I have learned, in the course of writing them, about the psychological forces behind tragic and mystifying events.
THE PROFESSOR AND THE PROSTITUTE
Boston, Massachusetts
1983
From the moment I first heard about the case of William Douglas, a professor at a medical school in Boston accused of murdering a young prostitute with whom he had fallen in love, I was intrigued. Naturally, I wondered if the professor had killed the prostitute. But more than that, I wondered about the love affair. I found the notion of a respectable man losing his heart to a hooker fascinating.
I wouldn’t be the first writer to do so. The love of a professor for a prostitute had inspired Heinrich Mann’s The Blue Angel. Dostoyevsky had written about a scholar’s passion for a prostitute in Notes from the Underground, then returned to the subject two years later, creating a similar entanglement for Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Anatole France, Somerset Maugham, Émile Zola, and a host of other writers had also addressed the matter, probing in powerful novels and short stories the love of reputable males for reprobate females. There is something about such relationships that tantalizes the imagination.
No doubt this is because they speak to a secret part of ourselves, a place where reason disappears and fantasy takes over. To love a prostitute, to enter her world of unbridled sexuality, is an archetypal fantasy for men, just as to be a prostitute, to be free of the inhibitions of society, is an archetypal one for women.
In April 1983, I determined to write about Douglas and went to New England to research the story and attend the trial. Shortly after I started, Douglas, who had been maintaining his innocence for over a year, unexpectedly confessed to having killed his prostitute-sweetheart, Robin Benedict. The murder mystery was solved. But I continued my exploration, for to me there had all along been something far more compelling about the story than knowing whether or not the professor had killed the prostitute. It was the drama of fantasy made real.
The Professor in Nighttown
One night in March 1982, William Henry James Douglas, a professor of anatomy and cellular biology at Tufts University’s School of Medicine in Boston, decided, as he often did when he worked late into the night, that he was too keyed up to go directly home and to bed. His work was intricate, demanding. He needed to relax; he needed a drink. Sex. A way of losing the self by embracing another.
A different man might have gone home, poured himself a Scotch, and, placing a needy, affectionate hand on his wife’s sleeping body, awakened her to his troubles and his longing. But for Douglas, such an act was out of the question. He and Nancy, married for two decades and the parents of three children, hadn’t made love in years. Indeed, he felt he no longer loved her, at least not in the romantic way he yearned to be in love. And when, recently, Nancy had taken a night job in a nursing home, he hadn’t tried to discourage her, hadn’t even raised the slightest objection. What difference did it make when they no longer even slept in the same room?
Forty years old and feeling that life had passed him by, Douglas packed up his briefcase, shut the door to his malodorous laboratory, and hurried through the empty, echoing corridors of the medical school. He would go to a bar, he decided. Maybe even get himself a prostitute. It wouldn’t be the first time. And where was the harm, as long as Nancy and the children didn’t know?
A few moments later, he was strolling down the streets of Boston’s red-light district, known as the Combat Zone, an area of strip joints, peep shows, and pornographic bookshops, of garish, multicolored light bulbs and crude signs advertising such attractions as “Live Acts Live!” and “Nude College Girls!”
The Zone is a small area, a mere four blocks or so. And it is so close to Boston’s new cultural center and to several of the city’s most prominent hotels that ordinary citizens frequently wend their way through. But its natural denizens are pushers, pimps, and prostitutes, and they are so frenzied that even the police who patrol the area speak of them with a certain amount of astonishment. “Sometimes I don’t believe the kinds of characters we’ve got here,” one member of the squad that polices the mean streets said to me. “I wish I could show you the footage we shot of activities in the Zone, things like the frames where one girl, pissed off at a customer, stands in the parking lot arguing with him and then suddenly grinds out her cigarette in his cheek.” He went on to mention that muggings and knifings, beatings and thefts, were commonplace, and that even killings were not entirely rare.
Bill Douglas wasn’t fearful. Perhaps he felt his bulk protected him. He was tall and weighed close to 275 pounds. Or perhaps he felt at ease because he knew the Zone well. It abuts the soaring, sterile architecture of the medical school, and ever since he’d joined Tufts a few years before, he’d made frequent forays into the area. Whatever the reason, he shuffled slowly down one of the Zone’s side streets, peering into the most popular hangouts, and finally slipped into a bar called Good Time Charlie’s.
When I visited Charlie’s, I was struck by the fact that despite its cheerful, backslapping name, it was extremely dreary. The customers, chiefly young sailors or seedy, down-at-the-heels foreigners, looked more lonesome than libidinous. Downcast, they drooped forlornly over their drinks, sipping steadily and eyeing with a minimum of interest the topless and bottomless dancers bumping and grinding mechanically to the sounds of a distant jukebox. Even when a tune ended and the dancers, in whatever state of undress they found themselves, climbed down from the overhead runway and perambulated through the smoky bar to put fifty cents in the jukebox, they—and the nearness of their naked flesh—did not seem to arouse the lethargic, lonely drunks.
Of course, the dancers weren’t much to look at. They were, for the most part, bony or flabby or haggard. Nor were most of the prostitutes who frequented the bar particularly appealing. They were getting on in years; their expressions were obscured beneath heavy coats of makeup; their clothes were garish. But oddly, here and there, were some young prostitutes who were fresh-faced, beautifully built, handsomely dressed.
I’d come to Charlie’s with a friend, a prosperous, proper Bostonian who’d never been in a Zone bar before but had agreed to accompany me for my safety’s sake and also, I suppose, out of curiosity. All evening, as I interviewed the bartender and several prostitutes who had known Robin Benedict, my friend kept saying, “How could a man like Douglas—an academic—be attracted to women like these? Sex, yes. But attracted? Involved?” He was disdainful, uncomprehending. Yet, before the night was out, he would alter his views. One of the handful of beautiful, well-groomed prostitutes approached him, and soon he was buying her drinks and listening to the story of her life.
She was young, dressed in an Ultrasuede suit, wore her hair in a librarian’s twist, and spoke impeccable Boston English. Once, when she got up for a moment, my friend whispered to me, “I’m getting a bit of insight into your professor now.”
The woman who’d picked up my friend was called, she told him, Sabrina, and when he asked her what a nice girl like her was doing in a place like Charlie’s, she said—and he liked believing her—that she was here just temporarily. As soon as she got a bit of a nest egg together, she’d be going back to her studies, finishing her M.A. in anthropology at Boston University. My friend was fascinated and talked with her animatedly, only to be bitterly disappointed when the manager of Good Time Charlie’s suddenly arrived, and, worried that we might be detectives, shooed Sabrina out of the bar.
Robin Benedict must have been a lot like Sabrina. Certainly, she was beautiful, slim and willowy with wide dark eyes, luxuriant, raven-colored hair, and smooth pale skin with an underglow of topaz and tourmaline. She dressed conservatively, wearing slacks or skirts with matching blazers. And she had a lively, outgoing manner, a high-spirited way of putting shy men at ease.
Douglas, a diffident man and always something of an observer from the sidelines, may have noticed these appealing traits about Robin and, attracted by them, put down his drink and tried to strike up a conversation with her. Or she may have addressed him first, sliding onto a barstool alongside him and offering him the usual Good Time Charlie’s invitation to sex, “Hey, honey, lookin’ to go out tonight?”
What is certain is that within minutes of their first conversation, Robin Benedict took William Douglas to a trick pad she had rented on Boston’s fashionable Beacon Street.
I’d always thought of Beacon Street as the home of Boston’s most affluent Brahmins, and certainly it retains that reputation in the national consciousness. But while the old, elegant town houses still line the street, most are no longer occupied by individual families. They have been converted into compact condominiums, headquarters for college associations, or small, shabbily decorated furnished apartments. Students and young, poorly paid professionals rent the apartments, but so too—often without the other occupants’ realizing it—do prostitutes. Apparently they have many johns with a sexual preference for erotic activity at a good address.
William Douglas had sex on Beacon Street with Robin Benedict that night, staying with her for half an hour and paying her the obligatory $50. Then he went home to the suburbs.
Perhaps, when he got there, he looked in on his sleeping children, fifteen-year-old Billy, fourteen-year-old Pammy, and twelve-year-old Johnny, and afterward had his favorite late-night snack, milk and cookies. Or perhaps he went into his bedroom, delved into the recesses of his closet, and got out his pornography collection, books and magazines with titles like Gang Up on Gail, Little Sarah’s Slave Training, Forced to Submit, and Illustrated Gang War Torture, stacks of ads recommending massage parlors and escort services, and folders of newspaper articles about prostitutes.
Robin returned to Good Time Charlie’s. Possibly when she did she stopped for a minute to talk with the only close girlfriend she had there, another prostitute named Savitri Bisram. Perhaps Robin and Savi relaxed for a few moments, giggling about the fat man’s funny speech and his unfortunate looks. Douglas had a hesitant way of expressing himself, a recessed chin, thin lips, and, for all his girth, tiny hands and feet. But more probably Robin simply sauntered into Good Time Charlie’s, surveyed the men at the bar, and found herself another john. Robin sometimes made as much as $1,200 a night. “Her typical workday,” Douglas would later say, his words betraying a certain amount of grudging admiration, “was from three-thirty or four o’clock in the afternoon until at least three and usually until four in the morning.”
The home to which Douglas returned that night was in Sharon, Massachusetts, a neat, relatively new suburb, popular with liberal, community-minded young families. Douglas’s house was on Sandy Ridge Circle, a well-landscaped street a few minutes’ drive from the center of town. Here the houses, many with bay windows, fireplaces, and broad porches, have basketball nets in the driveways and bicycles, tricycles, and automotive toys scattered on the lawns. Sharon, and in particular Sandy Ridge Circle, is a fine place to bring up children.
Bill and Nancy had moved there as soon as he’d received his appointment at Tufts in 1978. It was only about a thirty-minute drive to the medical school, and it had a good school system. Bill Douglas worried about things like that. He placed great store in education.
He’d come by his the hard way. The child of lower-class parents—his mother, an immigrant from Germany, had been a maid, his father a plumber—he’d had to work during his high school days in upstate New York and to attend a less than distinguished government-subsidized teachers’ college, Plattsburgh State, in Plattsburgh, New York. While he was in college, his father died in a construction accident. There was no money for graduate school. Bill finished Plattsburgh, married Nancy, a heavyset, plain young woman, and settled down to life as a small-town high school science teacher. He had gone as far academically as he could afford to go. But after a year or two of teaching, he applied for and managed to obtain a National Science Foundation fellowship for a year of postgraduate study at Yale.
The intellectual atmosphere of New Haven altered Douglas, made him more ambitious. He began to dream of becoming a researcher and a professor, not just a science teacher, and when his year at Yale was up, he sought other grants and continued his postgraduate studies at Brown University. His mother was dead by then, but he had a new family. Nancy had given birth to Billy and Pammy. In 1970, a young father who had made his way to broad intellectual horizons despite inauspicious beginnings, he received his Ph.D. and landed his first college position, as associate professor of biology at Edinboro State College in Pennsylvania.
Bill did well at Edinboro, garnering praise from students and supervisors alike. But the school was a backwater and he longed now to be in the scientific swim. A year after starting at Edinboro, he found himself a new position, a research job at a private institution, the W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center in Lake Placid, New York. There he would be director of the center’s electronmicroscopy facility as well as associate director of education.
Once in Lake Placid, he quickly began making a name for himself in research circles. His field was tissue culture, and he specialized in studies that involved isolating cells and then growing them outside the body—a process known as in vitro, or in test tube, research. He worked on many projects, among the most elegant of which were his studies of surfactant, a waxy substance secreted in the lungs that permits them to inflate and deflate properly, but that is absent in the lung tissue of infants born prematurely.
He also applied himself to family life. Nancy, no doubt affected by the currents of the women’s movement that were sweeping the country in the early seventies, had decided to go back to school to study nursing. She had also given birth to their third child, John. Bill tried to be a modern father, assisting with household chores and taking an active role in his children’s lives. He chaperoned them on camping trips, chauffeured them to speed-skating lessons, and became the local peewee hockey coach. He also tried to be loving toward Nancy, once taking an entire week off from his job in order to nurse her after she’d had a miscarriage.
But most of the time what he did was work. His industry was prodigious. He began publishing regularly in scientific journals and soon was serving on their editorial boards. He began submitting remarkably well received grant applications to private foundations and the National Institutes of Health and soon was serving on the NIH’s review panels, overseeing and evaluating the work of his peers. He took on additional responsibilities by teaching at his alma mater in Plattsburgh and at nearby North Country Community College as well. And he became a consultant for the American Cancer Society and for the Department of Medicine at Memorial Hospital in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
Then, in 1978, he at last entered the scientific big time. Tufts University made him an offer, and he left Lake Placid to become an associate professor at the Tufts Medical School. He was still extremely industrious, and he taught, as well, in the university’s dental and veterinary schools. Wherever he taught, he was much appreciated by students. At the medical school, he was consistently voted the best teacher in his department. One student told me that he was enormously considerate, always willing to answer questions or go over material that was complex; another said that of all his teachers, Douglas was the most concise and easy to understand.
But, like most academic scientists, Douglas’s heart was in his research, and it was to this that he primarily devoted himself. In the next handful of years, he published more than sixty articles in prestigious scientific journals and applied for and received so many research grants that his lab became the busiest and most richly endowed in the Department of Cellular Biology and Anatomy.
There, he was engaged in myriad projects. A famous one, sponsored by the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, involved developing an alternative to the Draize technique, a method of testing the toxicity of cosmetics intended for human use by injecting their chemical components into the eyes of rabbits. But he was doing research for the U.S. Navy as well, and continuing his efforts to culture surfactant outside the body, and traveling to scientific conferences all over the country and in Europe. As one of his colleagues said, “His achievements were not obscure and unimportant. They were serious and cogent projects which made notable contributions to science.” Bill Douglas was, in 1982, on his way to becoming a major American scientist.
After his first meeting with the vivacious young prostitute, the distinguished professor got in touch with her again and saw her three times in the next two weeks. Each time, she gave him half an hour. Each time, he gave her $50. They met late at night and spent the expensive half hour in Robin’s Beacon Street apartment. It was sparsely furnished. She kept in it only the barest essentials—a bed, a nighttable, a dresser—and a handful of clothes, all of them robes. She didn’t really live in the apartment, she explained to Bill. Her home, her real home, was in Natick, some twenty miles away. She didn’t tell him she lived there with the man who had introduced her to prostitution.
Could he see where she lived? he asked her once. He was intrigued by her.
She promised to take him there someday. And she suggested that in the future the two of them spend an hour together. Bill agreed. He was to say later, “My feelings at that time were that she was very nice to me, and enjoyable to be with.”
Those first weeks of their relationship were astonishing to him. He had disported himself with prostitutes before, always careful to conceal the practice from Nancy by telling her that he had to stay late in his lab or return to it after dinner because he was under great pressure. This was easy, since he genuinely felt tense and pressured most of the time and, both at Lake Placid and at Tufts, he had gotten into the habit of working in his lab until well after midnight. It was only later that, secure in the knowledge that both his family and his colleagues were asleep, he would seek sexual surcease. But while he had known prostitutes, he had never known one like Robin. She was not only sexually inventive, but so glamorous that she stirred in him more than physical passion. She aroused in him fantasies about love that had haunted him since his adolescence. He found himself wishing he could just hold her hand and go walking with her on the Boston Common, take her sunbathing on some secluded beach, find an idyllic river and spend an afternoon canoeing. He wanted to share cultural experiences with her, too, and romantic, candlelit dinners.
One day he confessed these yearnings to Robin, who offered to make his dreams come true. And soon, just as he’d fantasized, they began to go to the movies together, to attend concerts and plays, to take drives in the country, and to stroll on the Common, feeding the ducks with little bits of bread. But Robin was a businesswoman, and she exacted her price. She demanded that Bill pay her $100 an hour for whatever they did together, whether it was having oral sex or buying pizza by the slice and eating it on a park bench, whether it was having anal sex or sitting cross-legged on the grass, sharing soulful reminiscences. One night, remembering his wish, she took him to her apartment in Natick and cooked dinner for him. She charged him not just for the ingredients and the time she spent shopping for and preparing the food, but also for the time she spent eating it with him. The evening cost him several hundred dollars.
Bill didn’t care. He not only felt like a boy again but in some way was a boy again. At his desk in the lab, he scrawled long letters to her, pouring out his adoration in gushing, adolescent sentiments and a large, open handwriting. “Dearest Robin,” he wrote her, his sentences tumbling to the very edges of the notepaper, “Knowing you has made my life brighter and happier. You are a remarkable, wonderful woman and being with you makes me a very fortunate man.” “Dear,” he wrote her, “You are a beautiful person and deserve only the very best in life!”
One night at midnight, he took her to see the movie to which all the young couples of the time were flocking, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Then, just as all the young couples were doing, they went to see it again. Then again. And again. The Rocky Horror Picture Show cost him $800.
By May of 1982, he couldn’t get enough of her. She flattered him. She called him her “favorite prof.” She expressed interest in his research. And he began to see her as someone she wasn’t, as a girl with rare artistic and musical abilities and a mind that was just crying out for knowledge. He wanted to meet her friends and family and to educate her, to play Pygmalion to her Galatea. In a way, his way, he was in love.
What kind of man falls in love with a prostitute today, when sexual companionship is relatively easy to come by? The answer is, of course, a repressed man, a lonely, insecure man. Other men, reaching the height of their careers and experiencing classic midlife yearnings, tend to solve their longing for a new and vital romantic attachment differently, particularly if, like Douglas, they have power and favors to dispense. They have affairs with interesting colleagues or ambitious young protégées. They divorce and remarry. That Douglas’s solution was different has much to do with the fact that, for all his professional success, he was socially inept, an outsider.
He never had many friends. People who knew him during his years in Lake Placid told a reporter he would become silly after having a drink or two and that it was difficult to have a conversation with him. They thought he had a drinking problem or that he considered friendship frivolous. At Tufts it was the same. “He was very shy,” said one fellow scientist. “He was very reserved,” said the acting chairman of his department. “The only topic he ever felt comfortable discussing was the lab,” said Professor Ronald Sanders, a colleague who had known him for years. “He simply never spoke about anything but our work. And that was true whether we were here in the lab or had gotten together for more festive, presumably social occasions. One Thanksgiving I had dinner at the Douglas house. It was stultifying. Nancy didn’t say anything at all, and Douglas just talked about the lab all night.”
Bill was apparently even less comfortable around women than he was around men. Sanders had the impression that there was something “asexual” about him. “There were plenty of women in our lab,” he told me. “The lab had four female technicians, two female grad students, and a female postdoc. But as far as I know, Douglas never made any advances or innuendoes, or even personal remarks, to any of them.”
Why was he so aloof? The answer seems to lie in his upbringing. Eleanor, his stolid, religious mother, with her job cleaning other people’s homes and other people’s squalid hotel rooms, brought him up strictly, laying great stress on propriety. Billy, his plumber father, wanted him to make something of himself. He was their only child, and he had been born late in his mother’s life. They doted on him, but they demanded obedience; when he took liberties, they chastised him severely. He was expected to be quiet and unobtrusive around home, to keep himself and his room clean, to apply himself to his studies, to be polite to adults, and above all to avoid the kinds of activities to which other little boys, similarly disciplined, looked forward. Roughhousing. Hanging out. His parents felt that play was wasting time and that, in any event, when boys played together they just got into fights.
Perhaps their reasons were loving. Perhaps they were overly cautious about their son because he was their only child and there would never be another; doctors had warned the aging Mrs. Douglas not to attempt a second pregnancy. Perhaps they were overly strict because they yearned—for the boy’s own good—to see him achieve a higher, more respected place in American society than theirs. Or perhaps they secretly disliked their son, wanted to crush his spirit. It can happen. Whatever their reasons, they overprotected and undersocialized the boy, placing upon him fierce demands for self-control and achievement. As a young child, Bill struggled hard to meet those demands, and when he transgressed and was punished, he apologized, made himself abject, promised he’d never be bad again. And eventually he learned to behave so well that his parents gave him the approving appellation “Little Man.” But in light of his subsequent behavior, there is no doubt that behind his façade the “Little Man” was in much more turmoil than his parents knew, or wanted to know.
All through the spring of 1982, Bill played the “Little Man” role in relation to both his women. With Nancy he was uxorious, dependent, telephoning her several times a day to ask her opinion about a planned activity or to inquire whether there were any tasks she wanted him to perform on his way home. With Robin he was ingratiating, accommodating, always offering to help out with her domestic chores, to move furniture for her, to pick up her mail, to get broken objects repaired. And for a time it must have seemed to him that, cooperative and cajoling, he could handle having two women, could ride the crest of a secret affair without crashing to the shores of discovery and disgrace. Indeed, only one thing worried him in the beginning: he really didn’t have the money to afford Robin. At least not for much longer. Within just a few months of his seeing her, he’d gone through his and Nancy’s entire personal savings, some $16,000. Then one day in the late spring it occurred to him that he might be able to get the money with which to swing the high cost of Robin Benedict. His grants entitled him to hire personnel. Why not employ Robin, put her on the payroll of some of his research projects at Tufts?
It was, he thought, a brainstorm of an idea. Robin had told him—as clearly so many of the girls at Good Time Charlie’s tell their customers—that she was only going to be a hooker for a short time, just long enough to get some capital together. Then she was going to look for more respectable work. His willingness to believe her was part of his whole fantasy about her, his notion, not that she was a hooker with a heart of gold (even he knew that wasn’t the case), but that she was a hooker with a golden brain. (He was so persuaded of her intellect that he eventually enrolled her in one of his scientific groups, the Tissue Culture Association, although there may have been vanity as well as admiration in this. He published scientific papers in the association’s journal, In Vitro, and no doubt hoped she would read them, or at least notice them, and be impressed.) Therefore, putting Robin on the Tufts payroll seemed a solution to his dilemma that had advantages all around. Not only would it enable him to go on affording her, but it would bring her closer to him, give her an awareness of his importance in the scientific world, and start her out on her path toward respectability.
Soon thereafter, he sat down at his desk in the lab and wrote Robin a lengthy memo setting forth his plan. He would tell Tufts that she was working for him. Tufts would pay her for that work $200 a week, by university check, which would cover his first two-hour visits with her each week. He knew she might find it a nuisance to be paid by check, but in the end she might discover that it was in fact beneficial to earn money this way because it would legitimize her. “When you retire from ‘business,’” he pontificated, “your résumé will not have a five-year gap.”
Robin liked the scheme, and from that time forward, he claimed she was a graduate student from MIT whom he had hired to illustrate cell cultures.
The woman who had caught the fancy of the odd but respected professor was only twenty years old and had been out of high school for only two and a half years. But she was already well entrenched in prostitution. Robin Benedict had turned up in the Combat Zone in the beginning of 1982. Almost immediately she came to the attention of the Boston Vice Squad. Detective Billy Dwyer spotted her on the street, told her to get moving (Boston permits solicitation only indoors, not out), and received a sharp, sarcastic response. “She was irritating, aggressive, too full of backtalk for her own good,” he told me one night.