The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution (13 page)

“How do you tell if a girl’s ticklish?” she would ask, and then pause for effect. “
You give her a test-tickle
.”

The parties lasted late into the night and left nearly everyone drunk. Inebriated or sober, Lizzie was razor sharp, every bit her husband’s intellectual equal when conversations were not so scientific. She spoke French and Russian fluently—Goody affectionately called her Lizuska. But not all guests found Lizzie charming. “She reminded me of something of a witch really,” one scientist said. “I don’t mean she was unpleasant but
she had this sort of demeanor
.” She sometimes lashed out wildly at unsuspecting visitors. Women who paid too much attention to her husband were most likely to come under attack. At other times she would blow up for no apparent reason at all. Laura remembered one explosion that ended with Lizzie storming out of the house and saying she would never return. Calmly, Goody got in his car and drove behind her, creeping along at two miles per hour,
until Lizzie relented
, climbed into the passenger seat, and came home.

To Goody, the mood swings were familiar. If Lizzie’s behavior became too erratic, he would ask if she’d remembered to take her thyroid medicine. But it’s unlikely that her abrupt mood swings were the result of a thyroid condition, as Dr. Leon Speroff, Pincus’s biographer, has pointed out. By asking about her medicine, Speroff wrote, Goody may have been signaling to his wife that she had crossed a line of acceptable behavior and needed to dial it down. “When she was good she was very, very good,” recalled Pincus’s brother Alex, “but when she forgot to take her thyroid [medicine] there would be demonstrations of jealousy and temper that through the years alienated a great many of Goody’s colleagues, associates, and supporters. . . . [I]t was
an important factor in Goody’s life history
.”

Having crashed a car in one of her early attempts at driving, Lizzie
refused to get behind the wheel
. Goody sometimes asked his secretaries to serve as Lizzie’s chauffeurs. Some complied but others refused, in part because it wasn’t part of their job descriptions and in part because
Mrs. Pincus could be so disagreeable
. There was one more consequence of her mood swings and long mornings in bed: Goody, who was colorblind, became known as a poor dresser because he was unable to match his shirts and ties without Lizzie’s help.

Through years of marriage to this challenging and thrilling woman, Goody still felt the urge to scribble sappy poems just as he did as a teenager, and on those mornings when the muse struck while Lizzie slept he would leave a few lines of poetry beside her on the pillow so she would read it
as soon as she woke
.

Even after decades of marriage, Goody and Lizzie remained deeply in love—so much so that some members of the family felt their children did not always get the kind of attention they deserved. Between his long hours at the lab and constant doting on his wife, Goody did not have a lot of time for John and Laura. At one point when Laura was still in grammar school, Lizzie insisted that her husband schedule more time with their daughter. Goody and Laura began making regular trips to Boston to attend plays and concerts. Laura enjoyed the outings, although she
remembered her father sleeping
through most of the performances.

Pincus had no formal office. He had no graduate students to support his lab work. He was both a scientist trying to push the limits of what other scientists had deemed possible
and
the cofounder of a business operation responsible for paying bills and meeting payroll each month. His goal remained the same: to do great work. But it was complicated. And so he zigged and zagged, chased big grant money as well as big ideas, and ordered his staff to continue experiments even when they appeared to be going nowhere. He inspired his subordinates with his confidence and ingenuity.

To his laboratory workers, he was a fatherly figure in an age when fatherly figures were kind and stern but not overly warm. He greeted them with smiles, not hugs or slaps on the back, and he was never seen in the office in anything other than a coat and tie. To new acquaintances and young scientists, he was frightening at times. “He projected the image,” said Oscar Hechter, who worked with Pincus at the Foundation, “of
a man who had freed himself from trivial matters and was indestructible
.” M. C. Chang’s wife, Isabelle, described Pincus as both charming and terrifying. “I used to be very afraid of him,” she said. “When he looked at you, you had the feeling he stared right through you.
Nobody dared tell him a lie
.” At scientific conferences, Pincus made it his habit to sit in the front row, where he would often appear to be sleeping on and off during lectures. But after almost every presentation, he would sit up tall and raise his hand to ask the question that no one else had asked. He wasn’t trying to show off or show up the presenter. He asked because he wanted answers. So famous was Pincus for his postlecture questions that at least one scientist said he suffered nightmares preparing for a presentation Pincus planned to attend: “I dreamed that Pincus . . . was sitting in the front row, fingering his mustache and listening to every word, expecting excellence,”
Sheldon Segal
, a colleague, recalled.

Despite his exile from Harvard, Pincus was beginning to establish a reputation for leadership among his peers. He was not only a brilliant scientist, but he also had a gift for organizational work. The Laurentian Hormone Conference became the biggest and most important hormone conference in the world, and as a result, Pincus, with no university or corporate affiliation and no landmark discovery to call his own, became an influential player in the scientific community. He helped decide which scientists would be invited to the conference each year, who would be permitted to present papers, and whose papers would be cited in the yearly conference reports. At the start of each conference, he and Lizzie would host a cocktail party, inviting only about fifty of the conference’s hundreds of scientists. “
When you went to the Laurentian
Hormone Conference,” recalled the biochemist Seymour Lieberman, “you genuflected before two people—one was Goody and the other was his wife. . . . She was cocky as hell and she used to keep Pincus in line.” To be worthy of an invitation was to know one had truly arrived.

For Pincus, there was yet another reason to volunteer as the conference’s organizer: Each year, in reviewing applications from scientists seeking to present papers, he would be among the first to learn of important new advances in the field.

Lieberman was struck by Pincus’s Machiavellian tactics and wondered if his aggressive style was a response to the poor treatment he’d received at Harvard. “There were two kinds of people when it came to Pincus,” he said, “those who didn’t like him and were frightened by him, and those who were just frightened by him. The second group, which was the larger, treated him
like an emperor
.”

Yet in reality, Pincus was an emperor without a kingdom.

EIGHT

The Socialite and the Sex Maniac

I
N THE FALL
of 1950, shortly before Gregory Pincus first met Margaret Sanger, Sanger received a letter from a seventy-five-year-old woman named Katharine Dexter McCormick. It read:

I want to know a) where
you
think the greatest need of financial support is today for the National Birth Control Movement; and b) what the present prospects are for further Birth Control research, & by research I mean contraceptive research.

Sincerely yours,

Katharine Dexter McCormick

(
Mrs. Stanley
")

For Pincus and Sanger, the timing of the letter could not have been more fortuitous. Katharine Dexter McCormick was one of the world’s wealthiest women, and after years of personal struggle and tragedy, she was at last free to spend that wealth.

McCormick was the recently widowed wife of Stanley McCormick. In their wedding photo, taken in 1904, Katharine and Stanley posed arm in arm on the grounds of Prangins, Katharine’s chateau outside Geneva, Switzerland. The chateau was made of turreted stone and boasted twenty rooms, formal gardens, and a majestic lawn that rolled to the shore of the lake. No one knew exactly how old the place was, but some portions dated to the Crusades. Voltaire had lived there once, as had Napoleon’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte.

At the time of her wedding, Katharine was twenty-nine years old, fierce and lovely, a leader in the women’s movement and one of the first women to graduate with a degree in science from MIT. She had haunting eyes and a voice so soft and sweet it made men overlook, or at least tolerate, the incendiary things she often said. Deferring her plans to attend medical school, she married Stanley—the youngest son of Cyrus McCormick, inventor and manufacturer of the mechanized reaper and one of the wealthiest men in the world. They were the match of the year, the socialite and the millionaire. Stanley struck an ideal figure: tall, broad-shouldered, athletic, and a Princeton graduate. In their wedding photo, he wears a white tie and tails and clutches a top hat in his left hand. His left knee is slightly bent and his left foot is lifted, as if he’s off-balance, not sure what he’s supposed to do with the beautiful woman on his arm. In fact, at the time of the photo, he was indeed off-balance, not physically but emotionally. He was hearing voices. Seeing things. The urge to harm women was becoming increasingly difficult to resist. He had been smothered all his life by his powerful mother and now he was marrying an equally powerful young woman, and a frightful storm of emotions was building, catastrophically, behind what appeared in the photo to be a perfectly calm and happy face.

Soon after the wedding, which in so many ways resembled a marriage between two royal houses, the fairy tale turned into a horror show. Katharine may have been attracted by Stanley’s timidity and his tendency to give in to her demands, but she could not have imagined how deeply disturbed he was nor what life with her new husband would entail. She began to get a glimpse on their honeymoon, however, when he refused to come to bed and instead stayed awake at night scribbling manically in a book and refusing to tell her what he was writing. One page among the scribbles would turn out to be his will, and in it he would leave his vast fortune to his wife, not his mother.

It was an important breakthrough for Stanley to separate himself from the viselike grip of his mother, but unfortunately the psychic struggle was too much for him to bear. His mind was shattering. Ten months after their wedding, the couple still hadn’t consummated their vows, and Stanley’s behavior grew increasingly bizarre. Katharine thought he might improve as he settled into marriage and distanced himself from his mother, but the more Katharine talked of her desire for sex and her wish to have babies, the more disturbed Stanley became. Eventually, doctors diagnosed him as schizophrenic.

At the time, most severely mentally ill patients were placed in asylums, where they remained until their deaths, but Katharine McCormick had the money and the determination to do differently. She hired the finest doctors in the world and used her background in science to lead a team of researchers to pursue cures. She moved her husband to Riven Rock, the McCormick family’s 34-acre mission-style estate in Santa Barbara, California. Riven Rock had stone bridges, a bell tower, and a nine-hole golf course, as well as heavily padlocked doors and gates. From the terrace, Stanley could scan the grounds, where a lazy creek ran through banks planted with rhododendrons and azaleas, and where he could gaze out at the Pacific Ocean and Channel Islands to the west and the Santa Ynez Mountains to the north and west. It may have been the most gorgeous prison ever built. Ironically, it was Stanley who had built it. Riven Rock had been purchased and turned into a private insane asylum for his older sister, Mary Virginia, in 1897. Stanley supervised its design and construction, never suspecting that his sister would be moved elsewhere and he would so soon become its sole occupant.

Katharine would not divorce her husband, though Stanley’s relatives urged her to do so. Even as he became more distant and his behavior worsened, she refused to quit or abandon him. Stanley stuck his hands in the toilet, threw food, and
masturbated publicly
. He became especially violent in the company of women, which explained why Katharine could only watch him from a distance, sometimes through binoculars, hiding among the begonias in the gardens at Riven Rock. She approved funding to build a primate laboratory—the first in the world—because her husband’s doctors believed that by studying apes they would find the cure for Stanley’s obsessive sexual behavior. She also dedicated herself to finding a medicinal cure for his illness, putting to use her money, connections, and education in science. She funded research into schizophrenia at the Worcester State Hospital, where Hudson Hoagland and Gregory Pincus would later work, and at Harvard University, launching some of the first programs to examine the link between endocrinology and mental illness. She devoured medical journals, looking for answers that others might have missed.