The Professor and the Prostitute Read online

  Bill Douglas wasn’t fearful. Perhaps he felt his bulk protected him. He was tall and weighed close to 275 pounds. Or perhaps he felt at ease because he knew the Zone well. It abuts the soaring, sterile architecture of the medical school, and ever since he’d joined Tufts a few years before, he’d made frequent forays into the area. Whatever the reason, he shuffled slowly down one of the Zone’s side streets, peering into the most popular hangouts, and finally slipped into a bar called Good Time Charlie’s.

  When I visited Charlie’s, I was struck by the fact that despite its cheerful, backslapping name, it was extremely dreary. The customers, chiefly young sailors or seedy, down-at-the-heels foreigners, looked more lonesome than libidinous. Downcast, they drooped forlornly over their drinks, sipping steadily and eyeing with a minimum of interest the topless and bottomless dancers bumping and grinding mechanically to the sounds of a distant jukebox. Even when a tune ended and the dancers, in whatever state of undress they found themselves, climbed down from the overhead runway and perambulated through the smoky bar to put fifty cents in the jukebox, they—and the nearness of their naked flesh—did not seem to arouse the lethargic, lonely drunks.

  Of course, the dancers weren’t much to look at. They were, for the most part, bony or flabby or haggard. Nor were most of the prostitutes who frequented the bar particularly appealing. They were getting on in years; their expressions were obscured beneath heavy coats of makeup; their clothes were garish. But oddly, here and there, were some young prostitutes who were fresh-faced, beautifully built, handsomely dressed.

  I’d come to Charlie’s with a friend, a prosperous, proper Bostonian who’d never been in a Zone bar before but had agreed to accompany me for my safety’s sake and also, I suppose, out of curiosity. All evening, as I interviewed the bartender and several prostitutes who had known Robin Benedict, my friend kept saying, “How could a man like Douglas—an academic—be attracted to women like these? Sex, yes. But attracted? Involved?” He was disdainful, uncomprehending. Yet, before the night was out, he would alter his views. One of the handful of beautiful, well-groomed prostitutes approached him, and soon he was buying her drinks and listening to the story of her life.

  She was young, dressed in an Ultrasuede suit, wore her hair in a librarian’s twist, and spoke impeccable Boston English. Once, when she got up for a moment, my friend whispered to me, “I’m getting a bit of insight into your professor now.”

  The woman who’d picked up my friend was called, she told him, Sabrina, and when he asked her what a nice girl like her was doing in a place like Charlie’s, she said—and he liked believing her—that she was here just temporarily. As soon as she got a bit of a nest egg together, she’d be going back to her studies, finishing her M.A. in anthropology at Boston University. My friend was fascinated and talked with her animatedly, only to be bitterly disappointed when the manager of Good Time Charlie’s suddenly arrived, and, worried that we might be detectives, shooed Sabrina out of the bar.

  Robin Benedict must have been a lot like Sabrina. Certainly, she was beautiful, slim and willowy with wide dark eyes, luxuriant, raven-colored hair, and smooth pale skin with an underglow of topaz and tourmaline. She dressed conservatively, wearing slacks or skirts with matching blazers. And she had a lively, outgoing manner, a high-spirited way of putting shy men at ease.

  Douglas, a diffident man and always something of an observer from the sidelines, may have noticed these appealing traits about Robin and, attracted by them, put down his drink and tried to strike up a conversation with her. Or she may have addressed him first, sliding onto a barstool alongside him and offering him the usual Good Time Charlie’s invitation to sex, “Hey, honey, lookin’ to go out tonight?”

  What is certain is that within minutes of their first conversation, Robin Benedict took William Douglas to a trick pad she had rented on Boston’s fashionable Beacon Street.

  I’d always thought of Beacon Street as the home of Boston’s most affluent Brahmins, and certainly it retains that reputation in the national consciousness. But while the old, elegant town houses still line the street, most are no longer occupied by individual families. They have been converted into compact condominiums, headquarters for college associations, or small, shabbily decorated furnished apartments. Students and young, poorly paid professionals rent the apartments, but so too—often without the other occupants’ realizing it—do prostitutes. Apparently they have many johns with a sexual preference for erotic activity at a good address.

  William Douglas had sex on Beacon Street with Robin Benedict that night, staying with her for half an hour and paying her the obligatory $50. Then he went home to the suburbs.

  Perhaps, when he got there, he looked in on his sleeping children, fifteen-year-old Billy, fourteen-year-old Pammy, and twelve-year-old Johnny, and afterward had his favorite late-night snack, milk and cookies. Or perhaps he went into his bedroom, delved into the recesses of his closet, and got out his pornography collection, books and magazines with titles like Gang Up on Gail, Little Sarah’s Slave Training, Forced to Submit, and Illustrated Gang War Torture, stacks of ads recommending massage parlors and escort services, and folders of newspaper articles about prostitutes.

  Robin returned to Good Time Charlie’s. Possibly when she did she stopped for a minute to talk with the only close girlfriend she had there, another prostitute named Savitri Bisram. Perhaps Robin and Savi relaxed for a few moments, giggling about the fat man’s funny speech and his unfortunate looks. Douglas had a hesitant way of expressing himself, a recessed chin, thin lips, and, for all his girth, tiny hands and feet. But more probably Robin simply sauntered into Good Time Charlie’s, surveyed the men at the bar, and found herself another john. Robin sometimes made as much as $1,200 a night. “Her typical workday,” Douglas would later say, his words betraying a certain amount of grudging admiration, “was from three-thirty or four o’clock in the afternoon until at least three and usually until four in the morning.”

  The home to which Douglas returned that night was in Sharon, Massachusetts, a neat, relatively new suburb, popular with liberal, community-minded young families. Douglas’s house was on Sandy Ridge Circle, a well-landscaped street a few minutes’ drive from the center of town. Here the houses, many with bay windows, fireplaces, and broad porches, have basketball nets in the driveways and bicycles, tricycles, and automotive toys scattered on the lawns. Sharon, and in particular Sandy Ridge Circle, is a fine place to bring up children.

  Bill and Nancy had moved there as soon as he’d received his appointment at Tufts in 1978. It was only about a thirty-minute drive to the medical school, and it had a good school system. Bill Douglas worried about things like that. He placed great store in education.

  He’d come by his the hard way. The child of lower-class parents—his mother, an immigrant from Germany, had been a maid, his father a plumber—he’d had to work during his high school days in upstate New York and to attend a less than distinguished government-subsidized teachers’ college, Plattsburgh State, in Plattsburgh, New York. While he was in college, his father died in a construction accident. There was no money for graduate school. Bill finished Plattsburgh, married Nancy, a heavyset, plain young woman, and settled down to life as a small-town high school science teacher. He had gone as far academically as he could afford to go. But after a year or two of teaching, he applied for and managed to obtain a National Science Foundation fellowship for a year of postgraduate study at Yale.

  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 Edin
boro 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.