The Professor and the Prostitute (3 page)

The intellectual atmosphere of New Haven altered Douglas, made him more ambitious. He began to dream of becoming a researcher and a professor, not just a science teacher, and when his year at Yale was up, he sought other grants and continued his postgraduate studies at Brown University. His mother was dead by then, but he had a new family. Nancy had given birth to Billy and Pammy. In 1970, a young father who had made his way to broad intellectual horizons despite inauspicious beginnings, he received his Ph.D. and landed his first college position, as associate professor of biology at Edinboro State College in Pennsylvania.

Bill did well at Edinboro, garnering praise from students and supervisors alike. But the school was a backwater and he longed now to be in the scientific swim. A year after starting at Edinboro, he found himself a new position, a research job at a private institution, the W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center in Lake Placid, New York. There he would be director of the center's electronmicroscopy facility as well as associate director of education.

Once in Lake Placid, he quickly began making a name for himself in research circles. His field was tissue culture, and he specialized in studies that involved isolating cells and then growing them outside the body—a process known as in vitro, or in test tube, research. He worked on many projects, among the most elegant of which were his studies of surfactant, a waxy substance secreted in the lungs that permits them to inflate and deflate properly, but that is absent in the lung tissue of infants born prematurely.

He also applied himself to family life. Nancy, no doubt affected by the currents of the women's movement that were sweeping the country in the early seventies, had decided to go back to school to study nursing. She had also given birth to their third child, John. Bill tried to be a modern father, assisting with household chores and taking an active role in his children's lives. He chaperoned them on camping trips, chauffeured them to speed-skating lessons, and became the local peewee hockey coach. He also tried to be loving toward Nancy, once taking an entire week off from his job in order to nurse her after she'd had a miscarriage.

But most of the time what he did was work. His industry was prodigious. He began publishing regularly in scientific journals and soon was serving on their editorial boards. He began submitting remarkably well received grant applications to private foundations and the National Institutes of Health and soon was serving on the NIH's review panels, overseeing and evaluating the work of his peers. He took on additional responsibilities by teaching at his alma mater in Plattsburgh and at nearby North Country Community College as well. And he became a consultant for the American Cancer Society and for the Department of Medicine at Memorial Hospital in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

Then, in 1978, he at last entered the scientific big time. Tufts University made him an offer, and he left Lake Placid to become an associate professor at the Tufts Medical School. He was still extremely industrious, and he taught, as well, in the university's dental and veterinary schools. Wherever he taught, he was much appreciated by students. At the medical school, he was consistently voted the best teacher in his department. One student told me that he was enormously considerate, always willing to answer questions or go over material that was complex; another said that of all his teachers, Douglas was the most concise and easy to understand.

But, like most academic scientists, Douglas's heart was in his research, and it was to this that he primarily devoted himself. In the next handful of years, he published more than sixty articles in prestigious scientific journals and applied for and received so many research grants that his lab became the busiest and most richly endowed in the Department of Cellular Biology and Anatomy.

There, he was engaged in myriad projects. A famous one, sponsored by the New England Anti-Vivisection Society, involved developing an alternative to the Draize technique, a method of testing the toxicity of cosmetics intended for human use by injecting their chemical components into the eyes of rabbits. But he was doing research for the U.S. Navy as well, and continuing his efforts to culture surfactant outside the body, and traveling to scientific conferences all over the country and in Europe. As one of his colleagues said, “His achievements were not obscure and unimportant. They were serious and cogent projects which made notable contributions to science.” Bill Douglas was, in 1982, on his way to becoming a major American scientist.

After his first meeting with the vivacious young prostitute, the distinguished professor got in touch with her again and saw her three times in the next two weeks. Each time, she gave him half an hour. Each time, he gave her $50. They met late at night and spent the expensive half hour in Robin's Beacon Street apartment. It was sparsely furnished. She kept in it only the barest essentials—a bed, a nighttable, a dresser—and a handful of clothes, all of them robes. She didn't really live in the apartment, she explained to Bill. Her home, her real home, was in Natick, some twenty miles away. She didn't tell him she lived there with the man who had introduced her to prostitution.

Could he see where she lived? he asked her once. He was intrigued by her.

She promised to take him there someday. And she suggested that in the future the two of them spend an hour together. Bill agreed. He was to say later, “My feelings at that time were that she was very nice to me, and enjoyable to be with.”

Those first weeks of their relationship were astonishing to him. He had disported himself with prostitutes before, always careful to conceal the practice from Nancy by telling her that he had to stay late in his lab or return to it after dinner because he was under great pressure. This was easy, since he genuinely felt tense and pressured most of the time and, both at Lake Placid and at Tufts, he had gotten into the habit of working in his lab until well after midnight. It was only later that, secure in the knowledge that both his family and his colleagues were asleep, he would seek sexual surcease. But while he had known prostitutes, he had never known one like Robin. She was not only sexually inventive, but so glamorous that she stirred in him more than physical passion. She aroused in him fantasies about love that had haunted him since his adolescence. He found himself wishing he could just hold her hand and go walking with her on the Boston Common, take her sunbathing on some secluded beach, find an idyllic river and spend an afternoon canoeing. He wanted to share cultural experiences with her, too, and romantic, candlelit dinners.

One day he confessed these yearnings to Robin, who offered to make his dreams come true. And soon, just as he'd fantasized, they began to go to the movies together, to attend concerts and plays, to take drives in the country, and to stroll on the Common, feeding the ducks with little bits of bread. But Robin was a businesswoman, and she exacted her price. She demanded that Bill pay her $100 an hour for whatever they did together, whether it was having oral sex or buying pizza by the slice and eating it on a park bench, whether it was having anal sex or sitting cross-legged on the grass, sharing soulful reminiscences. One night, remembering his wish, she took him to her apartment in Natick and cooked dinner for him. She charged him not just for the ingredients and the time she spent shopping for and preparing the food, but also for the time she spent eating it with him. The evening cost him several hundred dollars.

Bill didn't care. He not only felt like a boy again but in some way was a boy again. At his desk in the lab, he scrawled long letters to her, pouring out his adoration in gushing, adolescent sentiments and a large, open handwriting. “Dearest Robin,” he wrote her, his sentences tumbling to the very edges of the notepaper, “Knowing you has made my life brighter and happier. You are a remarkable, wonderful woman and being with you makes me a very fortunate man.” “Dear,” he wrote her, “You are a beautiful person and deserve only the very best in life!”

One night at midnight, he took her to see the movie to which all the young couples of the time were flocking,
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
. Then, just as all the young couples were doing, they went to see it again. Then again. And again.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
cost him $800.

By May of 1982, he couldn't get enough of her. She flattered him. She called him her “favorite prof.” She expressed interest in his research. And he began to see her as someone she wasn't, as a girl with rare artistic and musical abilities and a mind that was just crying out for knowledge. He wanted to meet her friends and family and to educate her, to play Pygmalion to her Galatea. In a way, his way, he was in love.

What kind of man falls in love with a prostitute today, when sexual companionship is relatively easy to come by? The answer is, of course, a repressed man, a lonely, insecure man. Other men, reaching the height of their careers and experiencing classic midlife yearnings, tend to solve their longing for a new and vital romantic attachment differently, particularly if, like Douglas, they have power and favors to dispense. They have affairs with interesting colleagues or ambitious young protégées. They divorce and remarry. That Douglas's solution was different has much to do with the fact that, for all his professional success, he was socially inept, an outsider.

He never had many friends. People who knew him during his years in Lake Placid told a reporter he would become silly after having a drink or two and that it was difficult to have a conversation with him. They thought he had a drinking problem or that he considered friendship frivolous. At Tufts it was the same. “He was very shy,” said one fellow scientist. “He was very reserved,” said the acting chairman of his department. “The only topic he ever felt comfortable discussing was the lab,” said Professor Ronald Sanders, a colleague who had known him for years. “He simply never spoke about anything but our work. And that was true whether we were here in the lab or had gotten together for more festive, presumably social occasions. One Thanksgiving I had dinner at the Douglas house. It was stultifying. Nancy didn't say anything at all, and Douglas just talked about the lab all night.”

Bill was apparently even less comfortable around women than he was around men. Sanders had the impression that there was something “asexual” about him. “There were plenty of women in our lab,” he told me. “The lab had four female technicians, two female grad students, and a female postdoc. But as far as I know, Douglas never made any advances or innuendoes, or even personal remarks, to any of them.”

Why was he so aloof? The answer seems to lie in his upbringing. Eleanor, his stolid, religious mother, with her job cleaning other people's homes and other people's squalid hotel rooms, brought him up strictly, laying great stress on propriety. Billy, his plumber father, wanted him to make something of himself. He was their only child, and he had been born late in his mother's life. They doted on him, but they demanded obedience; when he took liberties, they chastised him severely. He was expected to be quiet and unobtrusive around home, to keep himself and his room clean, to apply himself to his studies, to be polite to adults, and above all to avoid the kinds of activities to which other little boys, similarly disciplined, looked forward. Roughhousing. Hanging out. His parents felt that play was wasting time and that, in any event, when boys played together they just got into fights.

Perhaps their reasons were loving. Perhaps they were overly cautious about their son because he was their only child and there would never be another; doctors had warned the aging Mrs. Douglas not to attempt a second pregnancy. Perhaps they were overly strict because they yearned—for the boy's own good—to see him achieve a higher, more respected place in American society than theirs. Or perhaps they secretly disliked their son, wanted to crush his spirit. It can happen. Whatever their reasons, they overprotected and undersocialized the boy, placing upon him fierce demands for self-control and achievement. As a young child, Bill struggled hard to meet those demands, and when he transgressed and was punished, he apologized, made himself abject, promised he'd never be bad again. And eventually he learned to behave so well that his parents gave him the approving appellation “Little Man.” But in light of his subsequent behavior, there is no doubt that behind his façade the “Little Man” was in much more turmoil than his parents knew, or wanted to know.

All through the spring of 1982, Bill played the “Little Man” role in relation to both his women. With Nancy he was uxorious, dependent, telephoning her several times a day to ask her opinion about a planned activity or to inquire whether there were any tasks she wanted him to perform on his way home. With Robin he was ingratiating, accommodating, always offering to help out with
her
domestic chores, to move furniture for her, to pick up her mail, to get broken objects repaired. And for a time it must have seemed to him that, cooperative and cajoling, he could handle having two women, could ride the crest of a secret affair without crashing to the shores of discovery and disgrace. Indeed, only one thing worried him in the beginning: he really didn't have the money to afford Robin. At least not for much longer. Within just a few months of his seeing her, he'd gone through his and Nancy's entire personal savings, some $16,000. Then one day in the late spring it occurred to him that he might be able to get the money with which to swing the high cost of Robin Benedict. His grants entitled him to hire personnel. Why not employ Robin, put her on the payroll of some of his research projects at Tufts?

It was, he thought, a brainstorm of an idea. Robin had told him—as clearly so many of the girls at Good Time Charlie's tell their customers—that she was only going to be a hooker for a short time, just long enough to get some capital together. Then she was going to look for more respectable work. His willingness to believe her was part of his whole fantasy about her, his notion, not that she was a hooker with a heart of gold (even he knew that wasn't the case), but that she was a hooker with a golden brain. (He was so persuaded of her intellect that he eventually enrolled her in one of his scientific groups, the Tissue Culture Association, although there may have been vanity as well as admiration in this. He published scientific papers in the association's journal,
In Vitro
, and no doubt hoped she would read them, or at least notice them, and be impressed.) Therefore, putting Robin on the Tufts payroll seemed a solution to his dilemma that had advantages all around. Not only would it enable him to go on affording her, but it would bring her closer to him, give her an awareness of his importance in the scientific world, and start her out on her path toward respectability.