(1961) The Chapman Report (9 page)

For Dr. Chapman, what had begun as a routine pseudo-fatherly task now became an obsessive scientific challenge. Lemur and marmoset were forgotten. The human mammal was the game. Several years later, when he spoke, and the world listened, Dr. Chapman would explain his emotions during those trying days: . “Like Columbus, I found I was on an uncharted sea. Almost every avenue of human endeavor had been lighted, but human sexual

relations remained a terrifying unknown area, darkened by ignorance. Some brilliant scholars had explored the field, of course. Darwin, Freud, Dickinson, Havelock Ellis, had done heroic pioneer work. There were also other sex historians and investigators. But I felt that real factual data, understandable and valuable to the masses, did not exist, and what did exist was often spoiled by the moral and social prejudices of the authors. After I had done my first tentative probings into the love life of adolescents, I foresaw that a further series of great works devoted to specific categories of sexual behavior must be done-so that the inexperienced young and their uninformed elders might apply sexual knowledge to their own lives. And so, first with my own meager savings, then with contributions from friends, then with sums earned by commercial poll-taking in other fields, and, at last, with the full support of Reardon, I began my investigations. When I proved that scientific information was being uncovered, I finally received the backing of national private funds.”

Presumably, nephew Jonathan was left to find his own way-and to await publication of Sexual Patterns in 307 Adolescents and A Sex Study of the American Bachelor several years thence.

It was in the early days of his investigations, before he had received public approval, that Dr. Chapman ran into the greatest resistance. To determine a basis for interviewing and sampling, to test the value of his questions, he needed guinea pigs. Most members of the faculty, and their wives, were shocked and disapproving. At last, Dr. Chapman was forced to resort to bribes: purchasing subjects (and erratic memories of their teenage years), from among students and idlers in the town, at so much a head, with the same calculation that blood is bought in a hospital for transfusion. Several times, local members of the clergy called upon him and tried to warn him, as tactfully as possible, that his investigation into adolescence was sinful, useless, corrupting. In desperation, Dr. Chapman pressed his nearest and dearest into the cause-interviewing his sister, his brother-in-law, several other relatives lured to the house of infamy on their vacations. And, finally, he interviewed himself, including in his personal confessional not merely experiences up to adolescence but his entire sexual history. His first collated findings in book form, obtained with the help of one assistant interviewer, earned him cash and some un-grammatical fan mail, but no national renown. Only when he confined his results to the professional journals after his next investigation were his colleagues and the great public beyond piqued, titillated, and impressed, and soon he was an institution, and a force.

Yet, Paul wondered, what were Dr. Chapman’s answers when he had interviewed himself?

The train lurched around a curve. Paul fell against Horace, dropping his pencil. Hastily, guiltily, he retrieved it.

“Did you get the last figures?” Dr. Chapman was asking.

“I think you’d better repeat them,” said Paul.

Dr. Chapman nodded. “This was a supplementary question for married women who stated that they had participated in extramarital relations.”

“Yes,” said Paul.

Dr. Chapman read aloud. “Question. We would like to know the number of men, other than your husband, with whom you have had sexual intercourse since your marriage? Answer. Fifty-eight per cent, one male partner. Twenty-two per cent, two to ten male partners. Fourteen per cent, eleven to twenty-five male partners. Six per cent, twenty-six to fifty male partners.” Without looking up, he asked, “Correct?”

“Correct,” said Paul.

“And I thought East St. Louis was a hick town,” said Cass.

Dr. Chapman cast him a pained glance.

Cass shrugged. “Forgive me. I’m punchy.”

“I can see that,” said Dr. Chapman. “We should be finished in ten or fifteen minutes.”

He resumed reading in a persistent monotone. Sometimes his words were lost to the relentless clackety-clacking of the train wheels. Paul listened to the lulling duet of voice and steel, and he wished that Dr. Chapman would let them travel by air. But, since only the four of them knew the intricate symbol language of the questionnaire, Dr. Chapman felt flight too dangerous to the project. Yet he would not allow them to travel separately, to insure the project’s survival, because he found these sleeper jumps useful for proofing. The proofing, Paul felt, was the most tedious part of the project. After each community sampling, in the interests of accuracy, Dr. Chapman and the team separately tabulated the questionnaires and drew up percentages for the particular community, so that regional variations could be measured against the national whole. Between cities, week after week, they compared their total percentages on all questions and answers.

Still, out of this meticulous and grinding paper work would grow a report that would be a sensation. Dr. Chapman’s first survey had been intended for the broad lay public. Aside, from squibs in Time and Newsweek, a paragraph in Winchell and an editorial in Scholastic, it was received as a passing oddity and invested with no more scientific authority than a syndicated reply to a lonelyheart’s letter. Dismayed though he was by this cool reception, Dr. Chapman was heartened by a lesson bitterly learned. If you had something important to tell the general public, you did not go to them: you contrived to let them come to you.

Briefly, it appeared that he would have no opportunity to apply this lesson. The wind was out of Dr. Chapman’s sails, and he stood becalmed. Although his stimulated and challenged mind now teemed with new projects-especially one involving a survey of adult bachelors in America-he lacked sufficient financing to proceed. His first work, it was true, had won him a minor grant from the Department of Social Sciences at Reardon, as well as free office space in an unused college quonset hut (a relic of GI students and World War II known among undergraduates as “the TB ward”) and the prestige of using the school’s name on his letterheads. But, without a larger grant from some private fund or government source, this was not enough. And the private funds and federal agencies remained aloof.

Then, overnight, financial help had come from an unexpected quarter. An important Madison Avenue advertising executive (the father of two delinquent offspring in private schools) had read Dr. Chapman’s survey of adolescents, and had admired both his findings and his interviewing techniques. Presently, with the assistance of this advertising executive’s agency, and soon others, Dr. Chap man was in the survey business full-time. The money earned in grub street from three commercial surveys-one for a tobacco firm to learn why people chose the brands of cigarettes they smoked, another for a political party to learn what attributes voters preferred in the personality of a candidate for Congress, the third for a cosmetic company to learn male reactions to the color and scent of women’s make-up and toiletry-adequately provided the initial backing for Dr. Chapman’s second serious investigation.

By this time, Dr. Chapman had organized himself and his aides

into a nonprofit group called Survey Studies Center. The group possessed then, and forever after, two faces: the scientific face, beloved and publicized, and the commercial face, despised and not publicized, the latter making the former possible. Both Reardon College and Dr. Chapman continued to lend their names to the commercial section of Survey Studies Center, justifying this crass participation as other universities justified big football, but publicly their hearts belonged to the scientific section.

While the commercial section of Survey Studies Center was left to the management of a club-footed scholar with protruding thyroid eyes, Marke Hildebrand, formerly employed by Gallup and Roper, Dr. Chapman concentrated his own considerable energies on the second sex survey. Now, at last, he was able to profit from the lesson of his first failure. This second survey, on the sexual behavior of adult bachelors in the United States, was carefully slanted for a limited audience of researchers, investigators, teachers-scientists all. It was written wholly in technical language. But percentages dramatized in colored pie graphs, as Dr. Chapman shrewdly perceived, were nontechnical, and overnight the figures were adopted by newspapers and magazines, rewritten and popularized and capsulized, and spewed out to the astonished and excited public.

Dr. Chapman became a household name, a bedroom name, a springboard for jokes and leers and learned commentaries. “The Chapman Report,” as the lay press referred to A Sex Study of the American Bachelor, became an integral part of the American scene. Within four weeks, the imposing book headed the bestseller lists of the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and Publishers’ Weekly. In a short time, it had sold nearly a half a million copies. Except for a liberal fund set aside for personal expenses related to his work, Dr. Chapman retained not a single dollar of the thousands pouring in from book sales and lectures. All income was plowed back into his third serious project, A Sex History of the American Married Female, which, unlike the other two, was conducted in the bright glare of publicity, feverishly anticipated by millions of men and women alike.

Yes, the investigation was drudgery, Paul told himself; nevertheless it was fun. The fun of it was being in the limelight and committed to a project that everyone considered important. Also -and this could not be discounted-it was fun being privy to secrets that the entire population panted to know about. This was the real stimulation, and not the sex. Perhaps his university colleagues would never understand this aspect of it. Wherever Dr. Chapman was entertained, there were always some assistant or associate professors (who should have known better) who hinted that the stimulation came from prying into the love lives of women. But Paul knew that this was not true. He, Horace, and Cass were like three obstetricians, peering into hundreds of vaginal channels every week, unmoved, detached, occupied and preoccupied. The thousands of words of love poured into their ears had lost all meaning, and the love act had become as neuter as anatomical drawings in a biology book. Despite this, in East St. Louis, after hours, Paul had several times caught himself studying the calves of passing women-and, at last, on the final night, he had found a small, dark Italian girl, with an enormous bosom, in an expensive bar, and joined her, and an hour later, lay beside her in a hotel room that was not his own, enjoying the feast of her body, but enjoying little else.

Sitting here now, on the hard seat of the swaying train, half aware of Dr. Chapman’s droning voice, Horace’s thick cigarette smoke, Cass’s antagonistic crossing and uncrossing of his legs, he allowed his mind to drift backward to his own commitment to the project. It seemed this moment, approaching Los Angeles, nearing The Briars and two hundred more women and the survey’s end, that he had been a part of it forever. Yet, it had been only three years.

He had been thirty-two years old at the time, and had been less than a year at Reardon College. He taught “English Literature-Borrow to Beardsley,” and it was his third academic job. Before that, he had edited and written for a literary quarterly in Iowa, and as the result of an outstanding series of essays on English women authors of the nineteenth century, he had been invited (higher salary and transportation) to lecture at a private girls’ school in Switzerland, and later he had moved on as lecturer at a teacher’s college in Illinois.

During his several years in Berne, Paul had traveled considerably, and once, on a visit to the Vatican, he had become interested in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. From this grew a book, The Censorable Fringe, a scholarly yet lively study of authors under censorship. The subjects ranged from Tyndale and Rabelais to Cleland and Joyce. The book was published by an eastern university press, while Paul was still fulfilling his contractual obligation at the teacher’s college in Illinois. It brought him some minor

academic renown, and several impressive teaching offers, one from Reardon College. Although Paul had always regarded authorship as his true vocation, and the lecturing activity as something that paid the freight, he was not financially in a position to resist the Reardon bid. Too, he had another book, and needed a patron, and so, after a brief bout of indecision, he accepted the post in southern Wisconsin.

At Reardon, Paul quickly achieved popularity-first with his students, who enjoyed his irreverent comments on literary immortals, and second with the faculty wives, who were attracted to his appearance and status of bachelor. Paul was six foot tall, and a bookish slouch seemed to emphasize his height. His shock of dark hair was prematurely touched with gray-someone had remarked that it made him look as if he had a past-and his elongated, deep-lined face was otherwise too regular and attractive to be called Lincolnesque. He kept a spacious three-room apartment in town, puttered at notes on a book treating Sir Richard Burton as author, played tennis every Sunday, saw the Braves in Milwaukee once a month, and occasionally took Lake Forest girls dancing in Chicago.

He had not been on the campus a month when he heard about Dr. George G. Chapman and the strange doings in the quonset hut behind the Science Building. For most of the first half year that Paul was at Reardon, Dr. Chapman and his original team were on the road, quietly pursuing their male interviews. From time to time, they would return to the five dank, partitioned rooms in the quonset hut, rooms cluttered with fireproof file cabinets and enormous safes and a photographic-electronic monstrosity, conceived and designed by Dr. Chapman to reproduce and tally questionnaires, known as the STC machine. Several times, Paul caught glimpses of Dr. Chapman in his Oxford gray suit hastening across the green lawn. He was always pointed toward the Science Building, looking neither to right nor left, always hurrying, and always carrying an overstuffed briefcase. Paul had the impression of a big man-although later, he would realize that Dr. Chapman was of medium height but gave the feeling of size. His gray hair was neatly flattened by some expensive pomade, and severely parted; his face was broad and reddish, but not flabby; his chest and stomach were an enormous barrel that hung slightly over his low belt; his legs were spindly. He seemed precariously top heavy, like a quart bottle perched on toothpicks.