The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (35 page)

Dukie says, “Doug, don’t.” Doc cries out, “Don’t do it!”

In an endless moment of quiet and slow motion, a monster—a roiling billow of the anger, stress, frustration, and fear within him—has forced itself out of Kelley, and it is as visible to the family as a storm cloud that rules the sky. This creature, which has never before dared show itself so brazenly, is now horribly present. It has taken over Kelley’s soul. It understands the powerful drama of the situation and the thrall in which it holds its helpless audience. Under its control the Old Man opens his palm and places something in his mouth. He swallows.

“No, Doug, no,” Dukie says.

Kelley drops like a slackened marionette and strikes the stairs below. The monster has risen up and away. Dukie runs up and reaches out to
touch her husband. She pulls him down to the bottom of the stairs. He is still alive, gasping and staring in disbelief. She cradles his head; they talk, share a few words. Something in the performance has gone wrong. The illusion was not supposed to go this far. Together Dukie and Doc drag Kelley down the hallway to the bathroom by the entry. As Dukie runs off to call for help, Doc pours water into Kelley’s mouth, trying to flush out the poison.

Still standing behind the sofa, Doug is stunned. Someone soon leads the children out of the house through the front door, and as he passes his father, who lies on the floor, his top half under the bathroom sink and his legs in the hallway, Doug glimpses Kelley’s face. Racked by seizures, the eyes bulge red and the mouth trickles foam. The boy thinks, “I never want to die that way.” Then he is yanked away from the man’s shell, and the kids spend hours at a neighbor’s house. “It never occurred to me that he would die until Mom came home and told me. . . . I thought he’d pull it out,” Doug says. Doctors had pronounced Kelley
dead upon arrival at 4:56 p.m. at Herrick Memorial Hospital in Berkeley.

Police superintendent Holstrom came to the house that night. He gazed at Doug, took him to his bedroom, and searched for words. “This is terrible,” he told the boy. “Don’t hang onto it. He can remain alive in your poor heart, but move on and take him with you.” Move on—this won’t define you. Doug has never forgotten the policeman’s kindness.

Dukie later tried to appease Doug with a childish explanation of what had happened. “We were arguing, honey,” she said. “Your father burned himself with the pan.” Her words didn’t come close to describing what Doug had witnessed. His father had not perished because of a kitchen spill, and he knew it. Dukie remained loyal to Kelley in her incomprehension. To her, the suicide remained forever inexplicable. Kelley left behind no note. “
I never did know why. He wasn’t unhappy,” she insisted when a San Francisco reporter interviewed her more than forty years later. “I just put it out of my mind. I don’t want to try to remember. . . . [I]t’s not anything I want to think about. It is just a mystery.”

Doug has never stopped pondering the suicide. He is his father’s son—he wanted to know more. He could have escaped the tragedy, Doug believes. Kelley could have stopped it up until the point he grabbed the cyanide and created the possibility of an act with no return. A truly big man could have contained his rage, could have put out the fire, but Kelley was really no bigger than anyone else. Doug ultimately concluded that his father had been grandstanding on the landing of that staircase, and that the accumulated force of his emotions and inner pain had carried him away. The son believes that the rational thinking that Kelley advocated through general semantics had suddenly abandoned him.

Because Kelley’s death had not been natural, county officials conducted an autopsy, which revealed no diseases that might have sent the psychiatrist into despair. (Rumors had circulated that Kelley was distraught over the advance of a serious stomach or intestinal disorder.) Kelley’s cremated remains found a final resting place two days after his suicide in Truckee, in the McGlashan family cemetery plot. There Charles McGlashan’s memorial dominates Kelley’s marker and everyone else’s. Few people attended the memorial service, and Dukie, afraid of traumatizing the children, would not allow them to go. The house on Highgate Road grew darker.

Kelley’s suicide filled the pages of Bay Area newspapers for several days. Nearly every article reported the shock with which his friends and colleagues learned of his death and their scramble for an explanation. They raised the possibility that Kelley felt overcome by the burdens of work, a fatal disease, or a sudden realization of the insidiousness of criminal behavior. Some suggested an inevitability to his death. A writer for the
Berkeley Gazette
somberly recalled that “
Dr. Kelley had once said that the professional life of a psychiatrist was about 15 years—after that he either went crazy, or committed suicide. He had been practicing since 1940.” Each article failed to mention the argument that had preceded Kelley’s final act, and many even reported that he had embraced Dukie and wished her a happy new year just before swallowing the cyanide. The
San Francisco Examiner
noted nonsensically that “
as far as anyone knew, his life held not a single dark secret.”

Speculation quickly swirled about the source and significance of the cyanide. Had Kelley provided the Reichsmarschall with poison? Journalists covering the suicide variously reported that Kelley’s fatal dose was a souvenir from Nuremberg or had been a gift from Göring. In some ways, perhaps it was, though certainly not literally. But Göring’s example demonstrated that a man who fears he will need a poison pill will keep one handy.

Everybody tactfully, if somewhat negligently, spared Dukie any questioning. Although she gave a statement to the police, no official investigators or reporters ever followed up with her. Any direct connection between Kelley’s and Göring’s deaths “is ludicrously ridiculous and smacks of the sort of [irrational] association—certainly not informed cognition—of some ulterior motive which stems from the author’s own problems,” she declared. Noting that it would have been unethical and illegal for her husband to have assisted in Göring’s suicide, she wondered “
if that’s the sort of thing these accusers would have done.” And she dismissed the notion that Göring had given a cyanide capsule to Kelley as simply “
nuts!”

Dukie even doubted that Kelley took his cyanide in capsule form. He held “what appeared to me from across the room to be a powder,” she wrote in 1985. “
I never saw the container, but from the way he held it palmed, I would say it was probably round and large enough for him to quickly grab some ‘powder’ in his other hand, put it in his mouth, and gulp it down.” She also believed that Kelley perished almost instantly, while Doc was pouring water into his mouth, because “I heard a thud while I was talking [on the phone] and I think he must have dropped dead at that point—very quickly and painlessly.” There was a lot of wishful thinking in her account. Kelley’s death, as Doug could see, was not painless. Kelley’s doctor had told reporters that nobody would plan ahead to swallow cyanide because the chemical “
burns painfully” in the throat. Besides, the question that Dukie never addressed was the most obvious one: Why did the doctor use cyanide?

There were guns in his office—a self-administered gunshot would have been quicker, cleaner for the victim, at least, and more manly. If Kelley wanted melodrama that New Year’s Day, why not display a gun or knife
to generate a frisson in his anguished audience instead of holding some substance, unknown to the onlookers, concealed in his hand like a palmed coin? As a physician well acquainted with criminal practices, Kelley knew that ingesting cyanide led to one of the most painful and unpleasant deaths we can inflict upon the human body.

There was more behind Kelley’s choice of that particular poison and that exceedingly rare form of suicide, a train of thought more complicated than grandstanding and letting the devilish drama of the moment carry him away. The cyanide was a deliberate evocation of Göring’s defiant suicide and the Reichsmarschall’s pose of a hero backed into a corner. When Kelley fetched the cyanide, he signaled the arrival of his final stand against a fate worse than death that lay ahead. Death provided the quickest and noblest escape for the overwhelmed psychiatrist from an ignominious future—a descent into incompetence in the face of his insecurities, responsibilities, and pressures. Just as Göring’s high opinion of himself would not permit him to suffer the indignity of hanging, Kelley could not allow himself to appear as a bungler unworthy of praise or recognition. The pain of death would end the more intense pain of staying alive.

In his 1950 book
The Psychology of Dictatorship
, Gustave Gilbert had explained Göring’s plunge into Nazism by observing, “It was the zest of high and fast living, of heroic playacting, that appealed to him.” Kelley loved that same kind of high-emotion, fast-accelerating life journey before an awed audience—and their similarities probably account for the close bond that he and Göring formed. But in both cases, when their heroic rides approached their bitter, agonizing ends, they chose to bail out. It is no coincidence that cyanide, a poisonous agent with a uniquely dramatic effect on the body, was their selected means of escape.

Obituaries and public eulogies extolled Kelley’s best qualities while unknowingly demonstrating how effectively the psychiatrist had hidden his private life from his acquaintances. “
For almost 30 years we were extremely close friends,” wrote Dariel Fitzkee, a fellow magician. “I had never known him to do an impulsive thing in all those years. . . . Doug had told me, as I presume he had told others, that no one really knows his own breaking
point.” Kelley ended his life, Fitzkee speculated, because he worked himself too hard and cracked under the strain. “Even for such a complex man, the answer is that simple.”

Eventually the press stopped reporting on the suicide, the cards of condolence no longer poured in, and what remained of the Kelley family was left to itself.

10

P
OST
M
ORTEM

A
fter the police left, after her husband had been cremated and his ashes buried, when the remaining Kelleys returned to the home on Highgate Road, Dukie struggled to take control of her family. It was as if the stage-coach driver had been shot, and she had to grab the reins of the runaway horses. She found herself surrounded by Kelley’s lab apparatus, books, artifacts, and gadgets, without the presence of the collector himself to give them meaning or life. Although she had always been a loving presence in her children’s lives, she didn’t know how to be an active parent. Her husband had done the disciplining, driving, earning, and idea making. The cooking had been Kelley’s job as well. Dukie did not have the slightest idea how to make a meal.

She put many of Kelley’s belongings up for sale within a year of his death,
including crystals, mortars, beakers, pipettes, Bunsen burners, an autoclave, a microscope, slides of botanical specimens, an algae collection, a hoard of mounted poisonous plants, a bubble sextant, two human skulls, a relief map of California, a Polaroid camera with flash, the tape recorder from his desk drawer, an oil refinery model kit, and a model steam engine. But she kept much more, including the psychiatrist’s large collection of medical records, papers, notes, Rorschach results, and souvenirs from his months in Nuremberg.

Dukie also tried to keep her husband’s ideas and opinions in circulation. She authorized a reissue of
22 Cells in Nuremberg
in 1961. Accounts
of the Holocaust, such as
The Diary of Anne Frank
, were starting to attract readers’ interest, but Nazi war criminals still felt like tired news to many. Kelley’s book sold poorly. Greater acclaim came to his
Criminal Man
TV series, which aired on educational television stations around the country during the year after his death and won KQED a Sylvania Award for excellence in television production. Dukie hoped to capitalize on that success by plugging the long-dormant criminology manuscript that Kelley had begun with Gordon Waldear. Waldear spent months completing and trying to interest publishers in this volume, but the book never materialized. Publishers noted that it had little chance of catching on without the dynamic Douglas M. Kelley around to promote it and feature it in his trademark spellbinding lectures.

After failing to generate interest among publishers for the Kelley-Waldear book, Dukie reached further. She did not want to see her husband’s ideas and work disappear. She thought Kelley’s career could form the basis of a dramatic TV series, so she contacted television writer Frank L. Moss—whose credits included episodes of
Route 66
and
U.S. Marshal
—and tried to reel in a TV producer. The premise of the series shrank to “a consulting psychiatrist and his adventures in the world of crime and criminology” before vanishing altogether.

In the summer of 1961 the family left the house on Highgate Road and moved into another one higher up in the hills, with floor-to-ceiling windows that gave a view of the entire bay and admitted light, light, light.