The Professor and the Prostitute Read online

  The Professor and the Prostitute

  and Other True Tales of Murder and Madness

  Linda Wolfe

  For

  M.P. and J.P.W.

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Professor and the Prostitute

  Boston, Massachusetts · 1983

  From a Nice Family

  Dallas, Texas · 1981

  The Strange Death of the Twin Gynecologists

  New York, New York · 1975

  The Downward Drift of a High School Star

  Torrington, Connecticut, and New York, New York · 1981

  A Tragedy on Eighty-ninth Street

  New York, New York · 1980

  The Transsexual, the Bartender, and the Suburban Princess

  Rockland County, New York · 1981

  The Lady Vanishes

  Nantucket Island, Massachusetts · 1980

  Dented Pride

  New York, New York · 1983

  Dr. Quaalude

  New York, New York · 1979

  About the Author

  Crime has been greatly on the increase among the lower classes [but] what strikes me as the strangest thing is that in the higher classes, too, crime is increasing proportionately. In one place one hears of a student’s robbing the mail on the high road; in another place people of good social position forge false banknotes; in Moscow of late a whole gang has been captured who used to forge lottery tickets, and one of the ringleaders was a lecturer in universal history; then our secretary was murdered from some obscure motive of gain.… How are we to explain this demoralization of the civilized part of our society?

  —Fyodor Dostoyevsky,

  Crime and Punishment

  Introduction

  The stories collected here are not about murder and madness among the rich and famous nor among the poor and downtrodden. They are about murder and madness—mania, paranoia, sociopathy—among people who inhabit the middle class. My protagonists are doctors, academics, businessmen, schoolteachers, and the children of such individuals, the kinds of people I, and many others like me, might know, entertain, work beside.

  As a reader, I’ve always been most drawn to books about people with whom I could identify. When it comes to true crime stories, books about upper-crust villains who knock off their heiress wives or their miserly fathers in order to collect more millions, or about lower-depth, deprived poor devils who kill at the drop of a wallet or go crazy from the sheer shambles of their surroundings never entirely appeal to me. The lives of the leading figures seem remote. I like meeting on paper individuals I recognize, wandering in a world that is, somehow, familiar. And if ever I feel I’m being parochial in my taste, I remind myself that the novel came about in the eighteenth century because suddenly there was a new class of people—the middle class—and they wanted to read works about themselves or people like them.

  All of this is by way of explaining why it was that when, in the mid-1970s, I first began to write about murderers and manics, sociopaths and suicides, I always chose to explore the lives of individuals from my own background. But there was something more. It seemed to me that one of the most important questions a writer might address when writing of crime and craziness was: “Am I capable of committing a crime or of suddenly going haywire?” It is a question that haunts many people when they hear of someone they’ve known who has gotten into trouble with the law or unexpectedly killed himself, and it always used to tantalize me. I wanted to address that question, but I felt that the motivations and even the psychology of the very rich and the very poor were so different from my own that I couldn’t really put myself in their place. So, remembering the age-old admonition to writers, “Write about what you know,” I stuck to criminals and disturbed characters who inhabited, as I did, the great middle of society.

  Although I’m a “psychological” writer, concerned with what lies beneath the surface of behavior, I see my decision to write about murder and madness as primarily a literary matter. In the late 1950s, I was studying for a graduate degree in literature, teaching English at a college, and writing short stories. I had little use for journalism then. Fiction, I felt, was the only suitable practice for a writer seeking to maneuver the minds of men and women.

  I’d learned this from my professors, who almost never discussed nonfiction except for works of criticism and literary biography. I suppose I was provincial, but I was a product of my times. Tom Wolfe (no relation of mine, I’m sad to say) has written of literary values in the fifties: “The literary upper class were the novelists. They were regarded as the only ‘creative’ writers, the only literary artists. They had exclusive entry to the soul of man, the profound emotions, the eternal mysteries.” As to journalists, “They were regarded chiefly as day laborers who dug up slags of raw information for writers of higher ‘sensibility’ to make better use of.” Not wanting to be a mere documentarian—for that’s how I viewed journalists—I concentrated on writing fiction.

  By the early 1960s, however, having realized I was a writer and not a scholar, I’d given up teaching and graduate school and taken a job at Time Inc. I was in the belly of the journalistic whale, but I ignored my surroundings. A researcher by day, at night I went home and worked on short stories. But something was happening to me. I felt frustrated by the work I was producing. I wanted to tell stories, to have an engine on my tales that would drive them from suspenseful opening scenes to ironic or moving ends. But for the most part I was dwelling on my own psyche and limited experience of life, and my work seemed to lack narrative drive. I yearned to sprinkle the salt of plot over my paragraphs, but plots didn’t come to me. My imagination was, I decided, impoverished.

  Around that time, I began to collect newspaper articles that might trigger my recalcitrant imagination. I have them still, in a graying folder full of yellow clips: June 8, 1962, “Still No Clue to Killer. Five days of questioning have given Topeka police a fair outline of Daphne Rhodes’ habits, an incomplete outline of her last hours alive, and no single useful clue to her killer. Since the 26-year-old New York divorcee was found raped and strangled in her apartment Sunday, a two-man team of detectives has repeatedly questioned the small circle of Menninger Clinic patients who were her friends and rechecked her apartment in a fruitless hunt for leads.” August 21, 1967, “Body of American Missing in Prague Is Found in River. A body identified as that of Charles H. Jordan, an American official of a Jewish relief organization, was found today in the Vitava River in Prague. An examining physician in Prague said the body had been in the water for several days. He was unable immediately to give the cause of death.”

  I felt a little embarrassed by that folder of mysterious tragedies and hid it in the back of a drawer. But I knew by then (not that I’d learned it in college or graduate school; those were the days of the so-called New Criticism, and we studied almost exclusively an author’s output, not his sources) that many of the writers I admired had treated themselves to the inspiration of current events. Defoe had read accounts about a man marooned on a desert island, and created Robinson Crusoe. Flaubert had been told by a friend about a doctor’s dissatisfied wife who’d killed herself after having a series of lovers, and invented Madame Bovary. Dreiser had collected news stories about an ambitious shirt factory foreman who had drowned his pregnant millhand girl-friend in order to marry a socialite, and brought forth An American Tragedy. I kept hoping that the news events I was clipping would help me write richer fiction.

  Also, around that time, the late 1960s, a new kind of journalistic work began to appear. In 1965, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was published. He called it a “nonfiction novel,” a term that irritated a lot of my academic friends, but the book did
indeed have many of the elements of a novel—a strong sense of place, characters whose internal thoughts as well as external acts were explored, and, most important, sequential action. In 1969, Norman Mailer published Of a Fire on the Moon, in which he himself became a character in the marvel of the moon shot. Gay Talese was writing about Timesmen as if he had access to the pathways of their neural space. Tom Wolfe was turning English on its head and making me dizzy, euphoric. Journalism had become more personal and unpredictable, and consequently suddenly exciting to me.

  It was then that the idea first occurred to me that instead of using real events to fuel my fiction, I might try using fictional techniques to fuel nonfiction. I looked at my mystery clips and thought how challenging it would be to find out more about the events they described and, employing dialogue, dramatic scenes, and sequential action, try to turn some of them into nonfiction short stories. If I did, I thought, I’d never reproduce verbatim, as some nonfiction writers were doing (and regrettably still do), the bleak bones of research such as court transcripts, police records, and meandering interviews, but I’d rely on the selectivity that the pursuit of fiction had taught me, the discipline of making each detail telling and pace more prominent than packing.

  I didn’t, however, get the opportunity to try out my idea until the mid-1970s. Then I had what I will always think of as, callous though it may seem, the good fortune to have known someone involved in the kind of enigmatic tragedy I had habitually been clipping and was longing to write about: Cyril and Stewart Marcus, twin gynecologists, had been found dead from mysterious causes in a littered, garbage-ridden New York apartment; I had once been a patient of Stewart Marcus. I was able to convince New York magazine to let me write about the brothers.

  I later wrote a novel, Private Practices, that was inspired by the situation of the twins. But I had been bitten by the bug of actuality. And soon I began to concentrate on writing nonfiction accounts of murder and madness that tried at once to give the facts but also to let the story unfold, to emulate the short story by offering scenes and creating a feeling of immediacy.

  I wrote the pieces that appear in this volume between 1975 and 1985. “The Professor and the Prostitute,” which comes first, was the last one I did, and it comes closest to what I had in mind when I first dreamed about making real events read like invented tales. Here, more than in any of the other, shorter pieces, the information gathered from interviews, transcripts, police records, and the like is buried in a snug narrative nest. But all the strands of that nest, even the lines of dialogue and paragraphs of interior musings, come from court documents or interviews.

  Curiously, however, having at last taken a stylistic idea and gone with it as far as I could, I began to feel its confines. One is limited by available facts. The mind cries out to know the things one wasn’t told, could not discover. What did the professor’s wife really think about her disloyal husband? What did the prostitute’s parents really think about their risk-taking daughter? There are things nonfiction accounts can never tell us, for invariably some of the principals of a story will not cooperate, or they hide their true feelings, or they are simply not in the habit of probing their minds and motivations to the extent, or with the depth, that a writer requires. Thus to attempt to dramatize real events while forcing oneself to stick to available source material is to be in a new kind of writerly prison, the victim not of impoverished imagination but of inventiveness longing to swirl free.

  Well, that’s a writer for you—never satisfied. As Philip Roth has written, “If you want to be reminded of your limitations virtually every minute, there’s no better occupation to choose. Your memory, your diction, your intelligence, your sympathies, your observations, your sensations—never enough.”

  One last word. I mentioned that I wanted to explore, in my pieces, the question of whether I myself could do the things my characters did. Whether the reader could. Today, these questions seem almost quaint to me, but at the time I began to write about murder and madness, I was under the sway of that pop psychology tenet that holds that the murderer, the swindler, the matricide and patricide, even the infanticide, are people “just like us.” We all harbor aggressive thoughts, feelings of entitlement, surges of wrath and rage, goes that argument. And thus we too might one day, under certain stresses, experience fates like those of some of the people described in this book.

  My investigations taught me otherwise. Often, when I’d begin researching a story about some startling act committed by an apparently upstanding middle-class citizen, an act of self- or other-directed destruction, it would appear that the aberrent deed that had captured my interest had happened out of the blue. But delving invariably revealed that my protagonists had a history of psychological instability. They acted, not out of the blue, but out of markedly gray troubled pasts. They suffered from psychiatric diseases like mania, severe depression, or drug abuse, or classic emotional character disorders, like sociopathy or hysteria.

  No doubt there is, somewhere, a fine humanitarian impulse behind our willingness to believe that those who are violent toward themselves or others are people just like us. But to some extent we hold this belief out of ignorance of how certain personality disorders and psychiatric illnesses can foreshadow chaos and catastrophe. The stories in this book shed light on this matter and attempt to convey all I have learned, in the course of writing them, about the psychological forces behind tragic and mystifying events.

  THE PROFESSOR AND THE PROSTITUTE

  Boston, Massachusetts

  1983

  From the moment I first heard about the case of William Douglas, a professor at a medical school in Boston accused of murdering a young prostitute with whom he had fallen in love, I was intrigued. Naturally, I wondered if the professor had killed the prostitute. But more than that, I wondered about the love affair. I found the notion of a respectable man losing his heart to a hooker fascinating.

  I wouldn’t be the first writer to do so. The love of a professor for a prostitute had inspired Heinrich Mann’s The Blue Angel. Dostoyevsky had written about a scholar’s passion for a prostitute in Notes from the Underground, then returned to the subject two years later, creating a similar entanglement for Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Anatole France, Somerset Maugham, Émile Zola, and a host of other writers had also addressed the matter, probing in powerful novels and short stories the love of reputable males for reprobate females. There is something about such relationships that tantalizes the imagination.

  No doubt this is because they speak to a secret part of ourselves, a place where reason disappears and fantasy takes over. To love a prostitute, to enter her world of unbridled sexuality, is an archetypal fantasy for men, just as to be a prostitute, to be free of the inhibitions of society, is an archetypal one for women.

  In April 1983, I determined to write about Douglas and went to New England to research the story and attend the trial. Shortly after I started, Douglas, who had been maintaining his innocence for over a year, unexpectedly confessed to having killed his prostitute-sweetheart, Robin Benedict. The murder mystery was solved. But I continued my exploration, for to me there had all along been something far more compelling about the story than knowing whether or not the professor had killed the prostitute. It was the drama of fantasy made real.

  The Professor in Nighttown

  One night in March 1982, William Henry James Douglas, a professor of anatomy and cellular biology at Tufts University’s School of Medicine in Boston, decided, as he often did when he worked late into the night, that he was too keyed up to go directly home and to bed. His work was intricate, demanding. He needed to relax; he needed a drink. Sex. A way of losing the self by embracing another.

  A different man might have gone home, poured himself a Scotch, and, placing a needy, affectionate hand on his wife’s sleeping body, awakened her to his troubles and his longing. But for Douglas, such an act was out of the question. He and Nancy, married for two decades and the parents of three children, hadn’t m
ade love in years. Indeed, he felt he no longer loved her, at least not in the romantic way he yearned to be in love. And when, recently, Nancy had taken a night job in a nursing home, he hadn’t tried to discourage her, hadn’t even raised the slightest objection. What difference did it make when they no longer even slept in the same room?

  Forty years old and feeling that life had passed him by, Douglas packed up his briefcase, shut the door to his malodorous laboratory, and hurried through the empty, echoing corridors of the medical school. He would go to a bar, he decided. Maybe even get himself a prostitute. It wouldn’t be the first time. And where was the harm, as long as Nancy and the children didn’t know?

  A few moments later, he was strolling down the streets of Boston’s red-light district, known as the Combat Zone, an area of strip joints, peep shows, and pornographic bookshops, of garish, multicolored light bulbs and crude signs advertising such attractions as “Live Acts Live!” and “Nude College Girls!”

  The Zone is a small area, a mere four blocks or so. And it is so close to Boston’s new cultural center and to several of the city’s most prominent hotels that ordinary citizens frequently wend their way through. But its natural denizens are pushers, pimps, and prostitutes, and they are so frenzied that even the police who patrol the area speak of them with a certain amount of astonishment. “Sometimes I don’t believe the kinds of characters we’ve got here,” one member of the squad that polices the mean streets said to me. “I wish I could show you the footage we shot of activities in the Zone, things like the frames where one girl, pissed off at a customer, stands in the parking lot arguing with him and then suddenly grinds out her cigarette in his cheek.” He went on to mention that muggings and knifings, beatings and thefts, were commonplace, and that even killings were not entirely rare.