Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (28 page)

When that interviewer asked Chipp about his relationship with his wife, he replied, “I always felt this is somebody who has a lot of depth. Who has a soul within her that is something I’m able to plumb, frequently. When I read a book or when she reads a book, for a second you may be deep in one yourself, but you want to share it with that other person.”

Mrs. Chipp put it this way: “I can’t imagine not having him there.
And
this doesn’t mean that we do everything together. . . . I would drive him crazy and he would drive me crazy. But we always know the other one is there and that we have this relationship and that makes us both very content. . . . We’re very different. We’re not different in what we like in life. We’re very, very close in what we like in life.”

Rereading my own interview notes, I found a comment to myself: “He was perhaps the happiest man in the Study.” I recalled the end of my interview with him five years before, when I had asked Chipp how he and his wife depended on each other. He looked off into space, choked up, and fought back tears. “Gosh,” he blurted out, “just by being there. If she goes first, it would be pretty traumatic.”

She did, and it was. Losing a spouse to death is often the most painful blow of old age.

John and Nancy Adams: Try, try again.
Here’s a happy marriage that took longer to happen. It’s the story of the proper Bostonian I’m calling John Adams, Esquire. In the first half of his life he was married three times, but those marriages lasted only nine years
in toto.
He met his fourth wife at the age of forty-five and has spent the forty-two years since then living with her very happily indeed. In contrast, I’ll offer a few notes on the life of Carlton Tarryton, M.D., whom we met briefly in
Chapter 5
, and who also had three divorces and four wives.

Tarryton and Adams resembled each other a lot in their first twenty-five years. They came from unhappy and isolated childhoods, with parents who spent a lot of time away. (Blind raters reported that they would not have wished to endure the childhood of either of these men.) They were bad losers. They manifestly lacked self-discipline; Adams often played hooky, and they were heavy drinkers and irresponsible students in college, earning grades in the bottom tenth of the Grant Study spectrum. They were both among the small
minority
of men to whom Study investigators ascribed the traits “Poorly Integrated” and “Lack Purpose and Values.”

There were two big differences between them, though. John Adams had a sibling with whom he was close, and in his teens there had been a stepfather whom he deeply loved. At twenty he said about his stepfather, “I really liked him more than any person I have ever known.” Tarryton was an only child and never had a parental figure whom he admired.

By the time they were thirty, their lives were beginning to diverge. Tarryton, who had gone to medical school, was often drinking a fifth of whiskey a day. He was extremely careful to remain sober when he was working, but his engagement in his career was limited. He maintained that he believed in Christian Science and that he had become a doctor only for the paycheck; in actuality, however, he made less money than any other practicing physician in the Study. He became an active alcoholic, and destroyed his brief and allegedly happy fourth marriage when he fell off the wagon one time too many at age fifty. In despair, he gave up and took his own life.

Adams went on drinking heavily too. But he was always able to maintain enough control over his alcohol use that it didn’t lead to problems in his academic life or elsewhere. He was on the Law Review at Stanford. By forty he had won an award for public service, and made partner in an excellent firm in Boston. It wasn’t all good news. He married and divorced three women. But he had some insight into his marital problems, which were due, he thought, to his own “emotional immaturity coupled with the habit of gravitating to persons whose emotions were less stable than my own.”

After his third divorce he began drinking less and exercising more. And he met Nancy, who became his fourth wife. A highly competent and emotionally supportive person, she could stand on her own and even offer Adams some of the caretaking he needed instead of wanting
him to keep her together all the time. (Some Study members with unhappy childhoods achieved gratifying lives by devoting themselves to those more needy than they, but this otherwise useful altruistic coping strategy served less well in marriage than in the rest of life. Marriage seems to work best when both parties can gratefully allow the other to bring them breakfast in bed.)

In his fifties, after seven years of marriage to Nancy, Adams was feeling so good that he confessed to “incurable optimism.” He stopped answering questionnaires for a while, but when he resumed at the age of sixty, he reported his marriage as “perfectly happy” and suggested that it was “maturity that makes this marriage work.” He explained that in his previous marriages he had been “attracted to weakness, and that all my previous wives had major flaws of a psychiatric character.” And thirty-two years after he and Nancy married, Adams wrote that it was not his career but his marriage that had “turned my life into an absolute joy.”

Adams retired young and began writing semi-autobiographical short stories, transmuting much of the pain of his early life into art. I was intrigued to note that the interviewer who met him when he was thirty and still very unsettled had perceived this fledgling lawyer as “sensitive, bright—like a writer of fiction.”

When Adams was eighty he was interviewed by Maren Batalden, who mistrusted his optimism; she granted that the marriage was “genuinely happy,” but gave his wife credit for this. But at eighty-eight he was as cheerful as ever. It was clear to me, too, that there was some exaggeration going on; his optimistic assertion that there had been no decline in his physical activities couldn’t possibly be true.

But so what? There were three times as many optimists among the happily married as among the unhappily married—a very significant difference. Samuel Johnson seems to have had a point when he quipped that a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.
Besides, I reflected, if at eighty-five you’re still playing tennis, your only medicine is Viagra, and the happiest seven-year period in your life is “now,” neither your marriage nor your physical health can be all that bad, even if your glasses are a bit rose-colored.

It came as a surprise to me that bleak childhoods were not always associated with bleak marriages. As we saw in
Chapter 4
, warm childhood predicted both future trust in the universe and future friendship patterns. And it was very significantly associated with life flourishing as measured by the Decathlon. Still, Camille finished in the top quartile in that test. With the exception of a man’s closeness to his father, childhood environment did not predict stable marriage, and even where a warm paternal relationship was lacking, good marriages could be made—eventually. Indeed, marriage seemed to be a means for making good on a poor childhood. After almost fifty years of following disadvantaged youths, psychologist Emmy Werner noted that “the most salient turning points . . . for most of these troubled individuals were meeting a caring friend and marrying an accepting spouse.
10
Childhood trauma does not always blight our lives, and the good things that happen to us keep on giving. Restorative marriages and maturing defenses are the soil out of which new resilience and post-traumatic growth emerge.

So it was for both the College and Inner City men. The Chipps and Oliver Holmes had very happy childhoods. But for the men who didn’t, good marriage seemed to have been part persistence and part the luck of the draw—Gilbert meeting Sullivan. My mother used to say that two people who are healthy can easily have a good marriage, but a great marriage takes a lucky match between two neurotics. John Adams made one such reparative marriage; Adam Newman made another. Others from the Study have been illustrated extensively elsewhere.
11

Eben
and Patricia Frost: The limits of containment.
Fifty-four of the Grant Study men celebrated golden anniversaries in “so-so” marriages—marriages that were neither particularly conflicted nor particularly loving. Their relations with their children and siblings were as warm as those of the happily married; so were their general relationships and social supports. Their childhoods were no less caring, their adaptive styles no less good, and they remained sexually active no less long. So what was different? These men reported that they were “very content” very significantly less often than the happily married men in all aspects of their lives, and this general tendency might have influenced the way they perceived and reported on their marriages. They had been significantly less close to their fathers. Their objective health on average was not quite as good as that of the men in happier marriages, and they were somewhat less likely to have close and confiding relationships of any kind, in or out of marriage. But most critically, as Eben Frost’s story will make clear, not everyone brings to marriage the desire (or is it the capacity?) for intimacy.

Frost grew up in a family that was scratching an annual income of $1,000 1939 dollars out of a Vermont hillside. He walked three miles each way to a two-room schoolhouse in the winter, and in the summer he worked on his parents’ dairy farm. He knew that he was lonely and that he needed a job where he could talk to people. By the time he was ten, in silent rebellion against endless chores, he had secretly decided to leave the farm forever. He would go to college and then to Harvard Law School. And that is exactly what he did.

There was little outward warmth in the Frost family. The Frosts cared for each other, but they never exactly said so. The father was described as “unruffled” and “a great man of character and old-world morality.” The mother “never let things prey on her mind.” She told the Study little about Eben except that he was nice to live with.
“When
we had a job around the house to be done with neatness, we called in Eben.” But feelings were not discussed. Eben told the Study psychiatrist, “The family bonds have been almost entirely lacking insofar as the tie of intimacy is concerned.”

Eben was valedictorian of his high school class; he “ran the school” during his time there. But he felt that his greatest strength was his “ability to make friends.” At college he preferred team sports, and what he enjoyed most about the law was always contact with his clients. When he first entered the Grant Study, he was observed to be “well-poised, extremely friendly, very active, forceful, and energetic.”

Even at eighteen, Frost knew that he paid a price for the self-sufficiency that got the jobs done around the house and then took him to Harvard. He knew the limits of his talent for friendship, too. He admired the kind of marriage in which couples become completely absorbed in each other, but he knew it wasn’t for him. “Although I hate nobody,” he said, “I’m sometimes afraid I can love nobody.” At twenty-five, Frost said of himself, “I’m a very easygoing character,” and twenty years later, “I’m the most reasonable of men.” That sweeping globality of expression—a very easygoing character, the most reasonable of men—remained typical of Frost over years of interviews and questionnaires, and seemed to serve as something of a Distant Early Warning Line. It signaled pride in the extent of his extreme containment, but also an undertone of threat: thus far and no further. And he did appreciate that his sweet reasonableness could be infuriating to others. “I’m so self-sufficient, or something, that I actually don’t have any rough spots. This does not mean that things are perfect, it’s just that nothing really bothers me—and I’m well aware that this is not necessarily an ideal constitution—I’ve been this way all my life.”

When he was in college, one observer called Eben “supernormal.” Time did not produce much change in that regard. When I met him at his twenty-fifth reunion I thought he was supernormal too, except
in
matters of intimacy. Frost exemplified and embodied the feeling tone of the “so-so” marriages, which were faithful, harmonious, and enduring, but lacking in warmth. The Study, as I’ve said, made many and repeated queries about the men’s marital situations, and this included engagement and wedding plans. Frost’s answers were utterly unrevealing until at twenty-four he wrote with a laconic nonchalance worthy of Calvin Coolidge, “Married on furlough.” Nothing more, even though it turned out that his marriage had been in the works for many months.

As Study queries continued, Frost went on replying in his characteristic compliant but circumspect way. Asked about marital problems, he wrote, “Only the stupid or the liars will say ‘none,’ but that is my answer.” The years of follow-up suggest that he was neither dim-witted nor dishonest, but he was limited. At age thirty he wrote that his wife was the person in his life whom he most admired; at forty-seven he regarded his marriage as stable. His wife’s personality, he said, produced no problems for him. But he knew that his permanent reserve was a problem for her. This concerned him, but—as he saw it—there was nothing to be done about it; it was just the way he was.

When I met him, Frost presented himself as a charming, extroverted, happy, outgoing man who was very interested in people. He was calm, incisive, and unambiguous, and he had a contagious ease about him. He was a good-looking man with a fine sense of humor, and at forty-seven he looked far more like an old-money museum trustee than an impecunious farm boy who had somehow grown up to practice law. He described all his activities in terms of other people. It was only when I tried to push him into discussing close relationships that the No Trespassing signs appeared. He balked like a horse, becoming less cooperative and more abrupt until I returned to less charged material.

When he was eighteen, the Study internist noted that he was
in
“extraordinarily good health.” This remained true. At forty-seven, Frost had never spent a day in the hospital or missed work due to illness. For over thirty years he described his overall health as “excellent.” He wasn’t ignoring things, either; he went for regular physicals that turned up nothing worse than hemorrhoids. So much for the supposed dangers to one’s health of keeping feelings locked away; Eben Frost never in his life found, or wanted, anyone to confide in.