Gracefully Insane (8 page)

One can envision the coupon-clipping Brahmins frog-marching this hapless custodian up the hill to McLean, and double-quick!

By just one year, Bond missed treating one of the most extraordinary
patients ever to enter the hospital: Stanley McCormick, the son of Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the combine harvester and one of the richest men in turn-of-the-century America. Stanley was both typical and atypical of the kind of patient checking into McLean in 1906: atypical in that he was far wealthier than even the carriage-trade clientele then finding its way to Belmont. He was so wealthy that his family would eventually hire away his McLean doctor and caretakers and relocate them to a private estate in Santa Barbara, California. But in other ways, Stanley was all too typical, because in the end he could not be helped.

Cyrus McCormick had three sons and two daughters. Of the three boys, Stanley was the youngest, the “sensitive” one. His mother, Nettie, a devotee of patent medicines and religious revivals, shuttled him among private schools in Chicago and generally smothered him with maternal care—and with strictures; when her children misbehaved, Nettie locked them in a dark closet. When Stanley was still a teenager, his sister Mary Virginia suffered a psychotic breakdown and never appeared in society again. He attended Princeton, played tennis marvelously, and studied art.
Stanley talked about becoming an artist and even attended an art school in Paris after his college graduation. But family pressure directed him to the McCormick Harvest Machine Company (later International Harvester), where he sat on the board of directors and occupied various executive posts. Stanley was bright and quick with numbers. But he struggled in his assignments. He agonized over decisions; underlings, sometimes frustrated by weeks’ delay in the most routine deliberations, circumvented him and complained about his behavior to his brothers. Judging from the numerous psychiatric reports written during Stanley’s forty-one years of mental illness, he suffered partly from what we now call an obsessive-compulsive disorder. His McLean write-up notes that “he kept six or eight different weights of underwear and he had a certain range of temperature for each set, and every morning it was almost impossible for him to decide what the temperature was going to be and which set of underclothing would be the proper one.”

Tall, handsome, and athletic, the young Stanley McCormick never felt particularly well. Working for the fast-growing family harvester business overwhelmed him. More than once, a family doctor diagnosed “nervous prostration,” and Stanley even bought a 45,000-acre ranch in New Mexico to serve as a sanctuary from the press of worldly concerns. One day in the summer of 1903, he reported looking at his face in a mirror and seeing only a blank. The next day, motoring through the ocean-side town of Beverly Farms on Massachusetts’s swank North Shore, he happened upon his childhood acquaintance, Katharine Dexter.

Katharine, who, like Stanley, was twenty-eight years old, was not the same little girl he had known in dancing school sixteen years before. The daughter of a prominent Chicago lawyer, she was attractive, self-possessed, and about to enter her senior year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Because of the many hurdles placed before the handful of women at MIT, Katharine took eight years to get her degree. Stanley wooed her assiduously,
if unconventionally. He was in one of his socialist phases and wanted to discuss the plight of the working class during their dates. Katharine, one of the wealthiest and most socially conscious women of her generation, was bored to tears. Worse still, he discussed his own failings in intimate detail. During one of their secret engagements, he confessed that he was a compulsive masturbator and had even made a leather harness that he wore at night to keep his hands away from his genitals. Although Katharine appreciated Stanley’s intelligence and love of the arts, the confessional, self-deprecating Stanley was more than she could stand. She wanted a real courtship—flowers, trips to the theater, fun! In the words of Stanley’s patient history, Katharine was “a girl who preferred light to shadows.” After her senior year, she fled to her family’s chateau in Switzerland—once occupied by Voltaire and by Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte—to be rid of Stanley. Incredibly, Stanley accosted her on the wharf in New York and told her that a leading urologist had given his genitalia a clean bill of health. Katharine sailed alone.

Stanley pursued her to Europe, and the rest is psychiatric history. He was handsome, temporarily clear-minded, and in love with her; Katharine capitulated. Against the better judgment of both families—Nettie, informed by telegram, flopped on her bed and wept for days—Katharine and Stanley married in Geneva in September 1904. Although the honeymoon lasted for nine months, the marriage was never consummated. (The presence of their respective mothers during parts of the trip could not have helped.) Most nights, Stanley refused to come to bed, scribbling letters until dawn. When he tried to make love with Katharine, he failed, blaming either his youthful masturbation or a sexual encounter he may or may not have had with a Parisian prostitute several years earlier.

After the marriage, the couple lived apart, with Stanley working for Harvester in Chicago and Katharine living in Boston. In 1906, Stanley’s dysfunctions came to the fore. He was forced to resign
from the family company and rejoined his wife at her home in Brookline, a comfortable Boston suburb. On account of his nerves, Stanley and Katharine spent that summer at a cottage in Maine. Once back at home, in the words of his doctors, “the patient’s wife reminded him that he had had a good rest, and that he was improved. Accordingly, she told him that there was no reason he should not discharge his physical obligations; an heir was wanted.” That effort, in late September, came to naught. Stanley went downhill rapidly and initially consulted the Dexters’ friend, the eminent Harvard neurologist James Jackson Putnam, who advised that he take fencing lessons and study German to distract his mind. A few days later, Stanley assaulted a dentist, whom he had allowed to pull a tooth without using anesthesia. Then he attacked an elevator operator, and he subsequently dragged a German tutor out of his office and into the McCormick home to administer the prescribed lessons. On the night of October 16, Katharine took him to McLean.

With the admitting doctors, Stanley was alternately pugnacious and delusional: “While looking into vacancy, he exclaimed, ‘Jack London! I’m glad to see you.’ When no one had spoken he repeatedly said, ‘Who is calling me?’ When restrained in bed he shouted ‘To Windsor! To Windsor!’” Katharine explained to the doctors that Stanley’s appeal to Jack London was not random: “She thinks at this time he was thinking of turning over his fortune to the socialists,” a notion that probably shocked Stanley’s family a good deal more than it shocked her.
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On the admission form, the doctors noted under “Heredity,” “All the family of nervous temperament, mother eccentric, sister insane.” The diagnosis on admission was “Manic-depressive? Dementia praecox? Fixed ideas?” Two years later, when two male nurses wrestled Stanley into a private railway car bound for his new home in Santa Barbara,
the diagnostic question marks remained. “Diagnosis on discharge: Psychopathic-inferiority + manic-depressive insanity? Dementia praecox?”

The hope in the fall of 1906 was that a period of complete rest and “detension” in one of the luxurious suites in Upham Memorial Hall would restore Stanley’s spirits. And for a period it did. In late October, he experienced “a period of steady improvement,” according to a summary of the doctors’ notes. “Patient perfectly clear, natural in attitude, showed good insight, and discussed his symptoms frankly.... Gaining in weight and sleeping well.” He received birthday gifts in early November and wrote daily letters to Katharine, who visited him often.

But in what would soon become a pattern, his clear periods were interrupted by episodes of abnormal behavior. His wife’s visits sometimes upset him; in conversations with his doctor, Gilbert van Tassel Hamilton, Stanley confessed that he had been impotent in his marriage. He remarked that his nurses were calling him a dog, and in response, he put his plate on the ground and lapped up his food with his tongue. He masturbated openly and flew into a rage when the nurses tried to stop him. Then a major setback occurred in December. Even though he admitted that he could feed himself, he chose to be fed through a tube forced down his esophagus. He attacked a doctor and tried to hang himself with the drawstring of his pajamas. That was viewed as a feeble suicide gesture because he was never left alone.

By the winter of 1906, Katharine and the McCormicks had already squared off in what would prove to be a forty-year battle for control of Stanley’s care and of his estate. Faced with evidence of Stanley’s decline, both sides agreed to appeal to Swiss-born Adolf Meyer, then viewed as the preeminent psychiatrist in America. Meyer journeyed from Manhattan to Belmont, examined Stanley, and delivered the bad news: Nettie’s youngest son was becoming catatonic.

Meyer, who would later become even more prominent as chief of Johns Hopkins’ prestigious Phipps Clinic, seemed to have the
Stanley McCormick case pretty well nailed. He reported that the patient

The December setback and Meyer’s bleak diagnosis engaged Stanley’s family in the worst possible way. It was Katharine who had had him committed and who for a time visited him every day. A trained biologist, she demanded and received daily, written reports from superintendent Tuttle, and she monitored Stanley’s care closely. But Nettie and her daughter Anita Blaine were quite wary of Katharine’s education and firmness of mind. “She thinks like a lawyer,” Anita remarked. “Her mind has the characteristics of a man’s mind,” Nettie told a friend, and neither comment was intended as a compliment. Nettie, of course, blamed the assertive and self-confident Katharine for her son’s breakdown. “[We] feel that heretofore in his times of perplexity and uncertain health K did not evince devotion to him, and did not, in illness, tenderly watch over him—and has not appeared that she was proud of him,” she wrote to a friend. Meyer, stupidly, enmeshed himself in the family drama. As a paid consultant to the McCormicks, he began agitating for Katharine to divorce Stanley, an outcome fervently desired by Nettie and her other children. Even the McCormicks’ lawyer knew that Katharine had a strong claim on Stanley’s fortune, which did not prevent him from offering her a generous financial settlement to divorce her husband and leave him to his family’s care. Katharine spurned the buyout offer.

Inevitably, Katharine and Nettie clashed over Stanley’s care. Katharine opted to stick with McLean’s genteel regimen, or moral treatment, for two years. McLean’s superintendent Tuttle opined that Stanley “will pull out of it if he can be kept quiet and given time.” Nettie was much more critical of the McLean doctors’ approach. During the first few weeks of her son’s convalescence, she sent her family doctor, Henry Favill of Chicago, to Waverley to check up on Tuttle and Hamilton. Nettie wanted to bring “the great Vienna doctor [Richard von Krafft-]Ebing,” or France’s Valentin Magnan
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into the case. Favill let her down gently, saying in a letter that no foreign doctor could work miracles in absence of a precise diagnosis: “I think that the matter would have to be determined by individuals in this country.” When Stanley experienced his brutal relapse in December, Nettie claimed that “the doctors who are relied on to know things were incautious—and unaware of the brittle condition of Stanley’s mind.” The following month, Nettie wrote to Dr. Tuttle from the Watkins Sanitarium in Glen Springs, New York:

At the end of the letter, she wrote,
“I am not hearing as I wish from my son.”
In fact, the doctors had cut her out of the reporting loop. Tuttle and Stanley’s attending physician, Hamilton, were sending their medical notes only to Katharine and the “reasonable” family member, Anita. This did nothing to silence Nettie, who wrote to Hamilton, “Can you not devise a purely
oxygen cure
for him—that is—live in a cloth room—with one side removed—adjacent to a
closed
room, with fire warmth—then
live
in the cloth room, having it warmed if needed, but live in a
cloth room
most of the time. He gets but little oxygen—the real article.” Or, “How would it do to begin with rubbing
just one leg,
at first with cool water—not too cold—
just one leg below the knee,
then, next day, the
whole leg.
... The method of doing only one member at a time does away with the argument that application of cool water would throw him into excitement.”