Gracefully Insane (31 page)

The subsequent nurses’ notes are mercilessly thorough. No appointment, no friendship, no spat, no mood swing, no reading material (“Reading a book on ‘This Is Mental Illness’ w vivid case histories and therapy”) nor sortie outside the hospital (“Admitted movie [
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
] had depressed her”) would go unnoted in the narrow-lined nurses’ register. Viewed from the outside, June’s life does not seem half bad; she takes cabs to visit friends in the Boston area, she flies to New York and Chicago for vacations, she cooks up a storm in the Codman kitchen and occasionally jawbones the nurses into taking care of her cat, Ripple—although the hospital pharmacy draws the line at filling veterinary prescriptions. Late in her stay, the nurses catch June and two equally underage friends sharing a bottle of champagne in the Codman conference room.

But of course this is a mental hospital, not a summer camp. Conflicts with nurses, with doctors, and sometimes with other young patients frequently flare up:

At times, the nurses make note of June’s “loud and un-ladylike” behavior; but as the months progress, the tantrums diminish and June’s friendships on the ward strengthen and develop:

During a brief stay at the Massachusetts General Hospital, moved by the concern of her psychiatrist, nurses, and fellow patients who had come to visit her, June said, “she loves McLean and never ever wants to leave.” Three months later, June took a week-long trip to Chicago and called in to the ward several times to catch up on gossip or just to check in: “4/16/67 called in 7 PM to say she misses everyone.” Upon her return, “4/25/67 was met at the airport by staff member. Arrived on the hall. Was very happy to be back at McLean.”

A certain cynicism attends any hospital’s long-term treatment of wealthy patients who pay their bills in full and who subsidize the care of less fortunate souls. But in June’s case, McLean worked to cut the umbilical cord that was tethering the young patient to the hospital. June overnighted outside the hospital with several
sets of foster parents, never very satisfactorily. Some conflict or another always seemed to develop. For a time, June attended a progressive school that—this was 1968—was transforming itself into a commune. Her social worker and her mother reacted with horror:

But the fact was, June had graduated from McLean. Her discharge summary served as her transcript:

The teenagers who invaded McLean in the late 1960s and early 1970s
changed the character of the hospital forever. They blasted their
music in the halls, they took dope, and they engineered frequent escapes, which almost always resulted in a slump-shouldered taxicab ride back to the hospital from either Waverley or Harvard Square. The musician Clay Jackson told me he felt an obligation to escape “because everybody did that, and I’m a traditionalist at heart.... I got a bottle and took off for New York. I rented a hotel room in Times Square and looked at the weirdoes for a couple of days. Then I took a return bus and arrived back at the hospital just as they were about to call out the state police.” Jeff Garland of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, committed by his parents at age fifteen, escaped from McLean eight times, unsuccessfully. Private investigators sent by his parents inevitably returned him to Belmont. The ninth time was the charm. With $150 borrowed from wealthy friends on Bowditch, he first hid with two ex-patients in the Boston suburb of Brookline and then hitched up with another expatient in New York City. From there he moved to Minnesota. “Who would think of looking in Minnesota?” asks Garland, who is now a community activist in Hawaii. “Nobody’s crazy enough to go out there—only somebody who had escaped from McLean Hospital.”

At the tender age of twenty-two, a gorgeous, demure blonde named Maria Pugatch was the head nurse on Bowditch, the hall for male disturbed patients. Not infrequently her teenage charges, sporting their trademark uniform of black jeans, bare chests, and thick leather belts (when permitted) informed her they intended to “riot” and warned her to seek shelter. She did nothing of the sort and staved off many a putative disturbance by squaring her hands against her hips and daring the boys to act out. Male patients had no qualms about assaulting male aides and nurses, but they hardly ever harmed a woman.

Some floors of South Belknap—
Girl, Interrupted
is set on the second floor—and East House, where the female disturbed patients lived, were far wilder than the boys’ dorms. One favorite Belknap trick was to yank the fire alarms, which brought a pack of Belmont firemen onto the ward. There a clutch of girls would be waiting
for them, hanging from the exposed ceiling pipes, wearing no underwear. One patient, a woman who was caring for her newborn baby on South Belknap, remembered one of the venerable McLean dowagers, Agnes Sweeney:

And of course the kids were doing kid things: smoking dope, sneaking out to the woods for furtive sexual encounters (probably more talked about than consummated), and using “privileges” to get into Harvard Square or Boston and touch base with 1960s culture. A black nurse on Belknap took Kate Taylor and two friends to an Otis Redding concert and to the Roxbury nightclub Estelle’s after the show. “We sat there, these three white gals and our watcher from Roxbury,” Kate recalls. Another popular destination was the Boston Tea Party, a concert venue for A-list acts from all over the country. Rob Perkins remembers one outing to see the Jeff Beck group at the Tea Party when he and a group of friends helped push their friend Kim, a famous Bowditch escape artist, through a bathroom window. (He was later caught.) Munson Hicks, who was performing with the Cambridge improvisational troupe The Proposition and also teaching at the Arlington School, remembers appearing in a New Year’s Eve bill at the Tea Party with the Grateful Dead and his pupil Livingston Taylor: “There we were in coats and ties during the day, and backstage with the Dead at night!”

Dr. Michael “Mickey” Robinson, who ran Bowditch, occasionally treated his disturbed charges to a week at a summer camp in New Hampshire or to a skiing expedition in the winter. Bowditch—“no
country club,” several of my informants agreed—was for hard cases: heavily medicated, occasionally violent male patients. And yet, to the astonishment of the McLean higher-ups, the trips generally came off without a hitch. Robinson insisted that the boys “earn” their trips by holding car washes or performing chores, so they would see the connection between work and leisure. (In reality, their parents paid for most of the travel.) Participants remember the week at camp—to the extent that they remember it at all—as bucolic and restorative. Horseback riding, a classic McLean therapy when the stables were still active, intrigued the young men and supposedly schooled them in issues of power and control. “Horses were wonderful for these guys,” says Maria Pugatch, who remembers handing out meds on horseback. “It was a good way to overcome your feeling of being frightened and to overcome your power feeling. The frightened ones would learn that the horse would do what you told it, and the ones who were into control would learn that there was no reason to hurt the horse.” A few aides bunked down with the patients and doled out Thorazine caplets, washed down with Kool-Aid at night. Munson Hicks, now a successful actor, worked as an aide on Bowditch and described one of the ski trips to Waterville Valley for me. He remembered one of the patients becoming agitated when forced to wait in a long ski lift line. Munson paused for a moment, and we stared into each other’s eyes. Pissed off at long ski lines? There’s nothing mad about that!

The point of the trips, aside from pure recreation, was to see how the patients reacted to experiences in the “real world”—although the McLean patient’s real world could be quite removed from everyday reality. Maria Pugatch occasionally donned her best dress and high heels and hopped in a hired car with a group of male patients headed for the Ritz to celebrate a birthday. A boy’s parents would make the reservation, and Pugatch and her charges walked into the dining room like anyone else. Except for the individually labeled medication bottles in her purse, they could have been a well-to-do family out for a tasty meal.

Many former patients, the ones who got out of McLean in one piece, have positive memories of their times. “You had some of the most spirited people of our day in there—it was much more interesting than a lot of the progressive colleges of our time,” said my media executive friend in New York City. After leaving McLean, talk-show host Ellen Ratner attended Goddard College and received a master’s degree from Harvard. “I got more of an education at McLean than at Goddard, Harvard and covering the White House,” she told me.