Gracefully Insane (26 page)

Shurcliff reported that Louis killed Delia—the same maid who had been upbraided for serving him lemonade in the pantry—because she threatened to resign. In a self-published memoir, Shurcliff, a landscaper to the rich and famous, wrote that Louis “flew into a rage and effected her immediate resignation by choking her to death!”

Whatever the motive, the crime heaped shame upon the venerable Shaw family. “It was on the front pages of everything,” Parkman Shaw lamented to me. Indeed it was. “Bay State Scion Admits Strangling His Maid,” barked the
New York Herald.
“Louis Shaw Second Held in Strangle Death,” cried the
Boston Globe.
The press had a field day. No story failed to mention Shaw’s Harvard degree, his dilettante’s lifestyle—he is alternately described as a “wealthy retired writer,” “a mystery writer,” a “country squire,” and a “part-time author”—and his esteemed antecedents. Old Boston still remembers that Louis’s father, Robert Gould Shaw II, had married Nancy Langhorne, who later became “the nutty Lady
Astor.” The former Mrs. Shaw went on to marry Lord Astor and became a champion of social reform and “Tory democracy” (and, more disturbingly, of pro-Nazi sentiment) in midcentury England. She was also the first woman to win election to Parliament. At McLean, Shaw bruited to one and all that he was “related to the Astors,” which, strictly speaking, he was not. Louis was the only child of his father’s second marriage.

Louis had plenty of money, and he hired a deft, Harvard-trained lawyer who just happened to be a distant cousin, James Barr Ames of the white-shoe law firm Ropes and Gray. At his arraignment in Salem District Court, it emerged that Louis had been seeing a psychiatrist for more than ten years, and he tried to pick a fight with the clerk who read out the criminal charge. Louis never came to trial. Ames had him committed first to the state asylum at Bridgewater and then to the far more comfortable and familiar surroundings at McLean. “I don’t believe cousin Louis was ever indicted,” says Parkman, whose memory on this point of family lore proves to be quite precise. “He was remanded to Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and then some time later he graduated to the McLean hospital where he was well liked and well respected.”
²¹

After a stint on Bowditch Hall, where Robert Lowell immortalized him as “Bobbie,” Louis transferred to Upham Memorial, affectionately known as the “Harvard Club” because at one time, each of its majestic corner suites was said to have been occupied
by a graduate of Harvard College. Indeed, when Louis arrived on Upham, there was no shortage of well-bred ladies and gentlemen to greet him. He must have felt right at home.

When they first committed themselves to the Belmont move in the
1880s, the McLean trustees approved construction of only two buildings: Belknap House, a combined office and residence space for thirty women, and Appleton, a residential ward for eight female patients. More or less out of the blue, George Phineas Upham, a partner in the merchant banking firm of Upham, Appleton, and Company, approached the board and offered to finance a third building as a memorial to his son, George Phineas Jr. A graduate of Harvard like his father, the young man had joined the family business but died unexpectedly at age thirty-two. Whereas the trustees had been using the leading institutional architects of the day, Upham insisted upon using his personal architect, William Peters, who had designed many a splendid residence in Boston’s Back Bay. The resulting hall, Upham Memorial, was and is by far the most grandiose structure on the McLean campus. Sitting across the vast, grassy bowl from the rest of the hospital, Upham is a lavish, sprawling brick colonial pile larger than many hotels—and intended to house just nine male patients. (Women lived there, starting in the 1960s.) The exterior is bright red pressed Somerville brick trimmed with white Georgia marble. The foundation (“underpinning”) is “hammered Troy Granite,” according to the announcement of its completion; the roof is covered with “dark Eastern slate.” The ground floor had two grand, open hallways, each featuring a sweeping, carved wooden staircase; the dining room; and four suites, each with fireplace and private toilet and bath. Writing for the
American Journal of Insanity,
Dr. Henry Hurd picked up the description:

Hurd neglected to mention the basement, with its large kitchen, pantry, storeroom, and sitting-room and dining room for the nursing staff. The basement also had “a special arrangement for Turkish and plunge baths, etc.,” including three rooms and a dressing room, according to the hospital’s annual report.

Geography isolated Upham. Because the grassy bowl—which doubled as the final fairway and hole in McLean’s small-scale golf course—dipped about forty feet below ground level, no tunnels could be built connecting Upham to the rest of the campus. Upham had its own kitchens and functioned quite autonomously when winter snowstorms prevented staff and patients from entering or leaving the building. In McLean’s modern era, as fees shot up and hospital stays became shorter and shorter, Upham resembled its own planet, populated by wealthy, chronic, long-term patients impervious to or uninterested in restorative therapy, who would live out their days wandering the corridors of George P. Upham’s magnificent memorial to his son.

In the 1950s and 1960s, just when Alfred Stanton was trying to get the hospital moving again, Upham became a classic “back ward,” a dumping ground for chronically ill, elderly patients—practically all of them rich—whose families had cut lifetime financial
deals with the hospital. There was little incentive to “cure” the Uphamites because their families had paid good money never to see them again. “It was really a level four rest home,” explains Dr. Bernard Yudowitz, who helped run Upham in the early 1970s. “These were people who were quite benign, very interesting and highly intelligent, who lived in their own world. These were the people who had been in the cottages in the pre-Stanton era,” he says.

Dr. Richard Budson, who also worked on Upham, remembers the hall somewhat differently. As a young resident, he was startled by McLean’s indifference to the mental health of this vestigial population:

For many years, Upham was the ward that time forgot. There was a huge fir tree in front of the hall, where the Christmas lights stayed up well into the spring. “We would have a hall meeting every week,” Yudowitz says, “and the topic would be ‘When are we going to take the Christmas tree lights down from the tree outside?’ And it could never be resolved.” In March, sometimes as
late as April, a maintenance worker would make his way over to Upham with a ladder and take the lights down.

Although the criminal justice system had transported Louis Shaw
about fifty miles from his Topsfield mansion, he really had not traveled very far at all. Upham in the 1950s and 1960s resembled a private, Ivy League residential club more than the chronic schizophrenic ward of a mental hospital. Scofield Thayer had mailed out his 1927 Christmas cards from Upham. Carl Liebman, the wealthy, Yale-educated Man Who Knew Freud, was still there, along with a host of oddities from McLean’s curio shop of the American aristocracy. There was a woman called “The Moth” because she had jumped out of the Massachusetts General Hospital tower building and lived. The hospital’s best-known oddball patients, Henry and William Ziegel, lodged there, in separate suites and rarely on congenial terms. Henry, an erudite Harvard man given to barking, “Henry Ziegel! Harvard, Class of 1913! You can tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much!” at passers-by, uncharitably referred to William as “my idiot brother.” A natty dresser, Henry was a published research chemist and received American Chemical Society periodicals at Upham, where they attracted plenty of comment. Deemed harmless, he was allowed to take the trolley into Cambridge to audit chemistry classes at Harvard. Inevitably, he would return to Belmont and announce that “Cambridge was on fire,” news doubtless intended to cause great consternation at McLean. In shop, Henry also assembled clocks from old parts and offered them as gifts to his nurses and doctors in gratitude for their care. Several dozen rudimentary “Ziegel clocks” are gathering dust in New England homes; it would be a miracle of engineering if any were still working.

Another star in the Upham firmament was Frank Everett, a gentleman from Colorado. Everett, who had been hospitalized after
threatening family members, was famous for being the only McLean patient whose name appeared on a Secret Service watch list. He had written a letter threatening the life of the president—no one remembers which one—and the hospital had to dial a certain number in Washington if Everett ever escaped. He did once escape, and the number was dialed—and then redialed shortly afterwards, when he was discovered hiding in the McLean cafeteria.

Everett was a great worrier, indeed a paranoid, who employed a younger, female patient as his “poison tester.” Like many patients, he feared medications. Even among McLean old-timers, he was something of a world-class “med-tonguer,” meaning that he could stash any number of pills in the back of his mouth and spit them out when the nurses averted their gaze. When the maid came to clean his room, dozens of pills would clatter up through the metal handle of the vacuum cleaner. “M&Ms, my dear, just M&Ms,” he would mumble, as several days’ worth of psychopharmaceuticals were sucked off his carpet. Two voices spoke to Frank Everett: the good “Lenore” advised him through his right ear, and the bad “Beasley” spoke to his left ear. When it came time to swallow medication, “Beasley” prevailed.

Eternal vigilance was the price of Everett’s paranoia, and instead of sleeping on his bed, he often slept sitting upright in a rocking chair in the hall outside his room. One of his favorite companions was Upham’s young psychiatrist-in-chief, Dr. Harvey Shein, whom he would allow to sit in his beloved rocker while the men shared a cigar and cracked jokes. “When Harvey died, Frank turned that chair to the wall and never sat in it again,” a friend of Everett’s told me.