Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (27 page)

Over the last three decades of her life, Mrs. Ford visited the center regularly, greeting new patients with her experience and her honesty. “I will never forget the moment I heard ‘I'm Betty, and I'm an alcoholic,' ” says Farver-Smith, who was treated for alcohol dependence at the center in the mid-1990s. “That was life-changing for me.” When patients threatened to leave, Mrs. Ford shared her story. “Nine times out of ten, she convinced them to stay in treatment,” says Farver-Smith. Mary Tyler Moore attested to this in her 1995 memoir,
After All
. The “permanently perky, perennially composed” actress, as
People
magazine once described her, checked into the Betty Ford Center in 1984 to treat her alcohol dependence. Like Mrs. Ford, Moore bristled at some of the rules and expectations early on, which included mundane tasks like keeping a clean kitchen in the dorm. One night, Moore packed her bags and snuck out to a waiting taxi that whisked her off to the local Marriott. The next morning, the phone woke her. It was Betty Ford. “That phone call saved my life,” Moore wrote. “I returned on my knees, pleading for reentry.”

Since 1982, more than 90,000 people have been treated at the Betty Ford Center, including a long list of musicians, sports figures, politicians, television stars, and Hollywood actors—Elizabeth Taylor, Johnny Cash, Mickey Mantle, Drew Barrymore. Mrs. Ford's status as a former first lady made it clear that nobody was too famous or privileged to become an addict or to escape the
hard work of recovery, and today her facility is one of the most recognized treatment centers in the country. Mrs. Ford also served as a catalyst and motivator, prompting patients to think, “If she can do it, so can I.” Above all, Betty Ford was personally committed to everyone's recovery. At holiday barbecues at the center, she and Jerry threw on aprons and stood in the Southern California sun flipping burgers. “The lines went on forever,” says Farver-Smith, “because Mrs. Ford wanted to talk to each and every person.”

On July 8, 2011, Betty Ford died of natural causes at the age of 93. Her funeral took place at Grace Episcopal, the same church she and Gerald Ford had been married in 63 years earlier. Betty Ford was known to credit her husband with giving her the voice to speak out. Getting married to him, she once said, was “the best decision I made.” But it took Betty Ford, the midwestern dancer with grit and candor, to use that voice to tackle the stigma of substance use disorders and transform the lives of countless Americans. It's hard to disagree with Gerald Ford, who once told a gathering at the Betty Ford Center that “when the final tally is taken, her contributions to our country will be bigger than mine.”

J
UNE 1858 WAS AN ESPECIALLY
trying month for Charles Darwin, both personally and professionally. The great scientist, then 49 years old and a devoted father, had suffered through the agonizing illness and death of his beloved ten-year-old daughter, Annie, in 1851, most likely from tuberculosis. Another child, Mary, had died in infancy, and now both 14-year-old Henrietta and baby Charles, the youngest child of Darwin and his wife, Emma, were sick with infectious illnesses. “Etty” ultimately recovered, but Charlie, then about 18 months old, succumbed to scarlet fever. “Our poor Baby died on 28th at night,” Darwin wrote in a letter to his cousin William Fox. “What a miserable fortnight we have had.”

Trouble often comes in cascading torrents, and this was certainly true for Darwin. During that same month of June, Darwin received an envelope by mail that would not only catapult his professional life into a state of unexpected turmoil but change the course of scientific history. The correspondence came from Ternate, an island in the Dutch East Indies some 8,000 miles away from Downe, the small village southeast of London where Darwin and his family lived. Darwin knew and admired the writer, a fellow scientist and world traveler named Alfred Russel Wallace; his keen observations about native wildlife in a remote archipelago might have been welcome reading under other circumstances. But this correspondence contained far more than notes from a naturalist. Instead, in a concise essay, Wallace laid out an argument for evolution that was shockingly similar to the theory Darwin had been crafting—but not yet published—for almost two decades.

Wallace's paper hit Darwin with volcanic force. There was no mistaking the similarities in the two men's ideas about natural selection or the reality that Darwin, who had worked tirelessly to perfect his arguments, might be beaten to the punch on his life's work. “I never saw a more striking coincidence,” Darwin wrote in a letter to his mentor, the esteemed scientist Charles Lyell, after reviewing Wallace's work. An exceptionally ethical man, Darwin felt compelled to act honorably and informed Lyell that he would forward Wallace's paper to a journal for publication, knowing full well what that would mean for his own painstaking research. “So all my originality,” he wrote to Lyell, “whatever it may amount to, will be smashed.”

These colliding events at home and at work would have been stressful for any human being. But the impact on Darwin was especially complicated, because he was a man of chronically bad
health. For years, the scientist struggled with a long list of afflictions, including heart palpitations, stomachaches, and headaches, and throughout the course of his life his trials and his achievements were often paired with pain, immobilization, and isolation. We know this from his letters, his autobiography, his methodical health journal, and the observations of family and friends. “If the character of my father's working life is to be understood, the conditions of ill health under which he worked must be constantly borne in mind,” the botanist Francis Darwin reflected after his father died. “For nearly 40 years he never knew one day of the health of ordinary men, and thus his life was one long struggle against the weariness and strain of sickness.”

And yet doctors could find nothing intrinsically wrong with him. So what made Darwin so sick? Since his death in 1882, biographers, historians, physicians, and mental health experts have weighed in with dozens of hypotheses, most of which fall distinctly into one of two categories: an organic or “physical” disease, or a disorder of the mind. Is it possible that Charles Darwin was battling an infectious tropical bug, picked up on his famous travels aboard the
Beagle
? Was it irritable bowel syndrome or cyclical vomiting syndrome? Or were Darwin's lifelong symptoms psychosomatic—physical manifestations of ongoing mental stress?

The list of proposed diagnoses is so divergent you may as well be comparing a monarch butterfly to a great ape. But one key aspect stands out: Darwin was a worrier. He fretted about his children, about his work, about his deadlines, about his reputation, and, almost always, about what ailed him. Darwin, it could be argued, suffered from anxiety, one of the most common conditions on the planet. The revered scientist, the man who boldly proposed that “man is descended from a hairy quadruped furnished with a
tail and pointed ears,” was altogether very human. Sometimes, like the rest of us, he was one big bundle of nerves.

C
HARLES
R
OBERT
D
ARWIN WAS A
perspicacious naturalist from his earliest days on earth. Born in Shrewsbury, England, on February 12, 1809, he was the fifth of six children of Robert Waring Darwin and Susannah Wedgwood. Robert, a monumental man of six foot two and more than 300 pounds, was a prominent and well-respected physician, as well as a successful financier; Susannah was the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, an ambitious businessman who founded the Wedgwood pottery company and sold his elegant dinnerware to the highest ranks of British society, including the queen. His family's wealth afforded Darwin a privileged upbringing, giving him abundant freedom to travel and pursue his passion for science. Financial security meant he could dedicate his life to deep thinking and analysis, ultimately challenging centuries-old assumptions about how plants, animals, and humans came to be.

Smitten with the outdoors, young Charles was fond of taking long strolls on the grounds of The Mount, the Darwins' redbrick estate in Shrewsbury. Once, he became so lost in thought while walking to school that he fell off a high-set footpath, tumbling seven or eight feet to the ground. “Bobby,” as he was called early on by his family, also enjoyed fishing on the riverbank and wandering in his father's vast garden, where he helped record details about the flowering of plants. Above all, young Charles loved collecting. His stockpile included household items, like coins and letter-sealing wax, but he was especially keen on the earth's natural wonders: shells, birds' eggs, plants, minerals, rocks, and insects. In an autobiography written during the latter years of his life, Darwin
reflected on his enthusiasm for nature and how it distinguished him from his four sisters and his beloved older brother, Erasmus, who became a lifelong companion. “The passion for collecting, which leads a man to be a systematic naturalist, a virtuoso or a miser, was very strong in me,” Darwin wrote, “and was clearly innate, as none of my sisters or brothers ever had this taste.”

Darwin's father has been described as an overbearing man in both personality and size (legend has it that he ordered his footman to test the floorboards in a new patient's home to be sure they were strong enough to sustain his girth). In his autobiography, Darwin described his father in glowing terms: His kindness was “unbounded,” he was “generally in high spirits,” and “he was widely and deeply loved.” But his reminiscences were also peppered with references to a demanding side of Dr. Darwin, a man who was easily upset. “Many persons,” Darwin wrote, “were much afraid of him.” Darwin's mother, by contrast, remained little more than a fleeting memory. Prone to intestinal upset and headaches, Susannah Darwin began experiencing severe stomach pains in July 1817, when Charles was just eight years old. She died just a few days later, possibly from an abdominal infection.

Studies have shown that the loss of a parent in early childhood can significantly increase the risk of both depression and anxiety later in life. Little is known about the full impact of his mother's death, because Darwin had so little to say about her in his later writings. “I can remember hardly anything about her except her death-bed, her black velvet gown, and her curiously constructed work-table,” Darwin wrote in his autobiography. In a journal he noted that “except one or two walks with her I have no distinct remembrance of any conversations, & those only of very trivial nature.” Indeed, Darwin's earliest memory had nothing to do with his mother at all. Instead, he remembered sitting on his
sister's knee as she cut an orange for him and then being startled when a cow ran by the window. Still, although he never expressed great feelings of loss from his mother's death, he was profoundly affected by the
way
she died—quickly and inexplicably from pain in her stomach—according to Janet Browne, author of a highly acclaimed two-volume biography of Darwin. Darwin worried incessantly that he or his children had inherited a weak constitution from his mother's side of the family, and he knew from her experience that sickness could quickly turn deadly. “With all the increased sensibilities of an adult, and then the passionate absorption of a husband and father,” Browne writes, “he came to dread the minutest sign of internal disorder for the destruction it might herald.”

Robert Darwin never remarried. In the wake of their mother's death, Charles's older sisters stepped in to help raise him, and, soon after, Dr. Darwin sent his young son to a local boarding school in town. Charles was not intellectually stimulated there—he later described the school as a lackluster place that taught learning by rote—nor was he a standout student. He often escaped and ran home to spend time with his family. Darwin later depicted himself as a “very simple little fellow,” who was considered by his teachers and his father to be “a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect”—a modest appraisal that hardly matched the scientific genius he would become. Darwin found ways to enlighten himself, spending hours huddled under a window reading Shakespeare. But his chief passion early on was shooting birds. “I do not believe that anyone could have shown more zeal” for the sport, Darwin later reflected. “I became a very good shot.” At some point during his education, Darwin remembered in his autobiography, his father took note and warned Charles that his hobbies did not bode well for his future: “You care for nothing
but shooting, dogs and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”