The Inner Circle (35 page)

I was on my feet before I knew what I was doing, before I realized she wasn't talking to me at all. Corcoran swung round in his chair, his eyes shrunk back in his head. He was wearing his two-tone shoes, I remember, and he began to grind one foot into the floor as if he were putting out a cigarette. Prok laid a hand on my shoulder, and I felt a wave of shame wash over me.

Iris never moved. “You don't own me—or John or Purvis either.”

“Take your wife out of here, Milk, will you,” Prok said. “Take her home.”

“No,” she said, her voice rising, “no—not until you tell me who elected you God.”

“Corcoran,” Prok called over his shoulder, “will you come in here please,” and we all watched as Corcoran pushed himself up from the desk and crossed the room on stiffened legs. He edged in beside us, looking unsure of himself, and still Iris hadn't moved from the doorway.

“All right, Corcoran,” Prok said then, and I hadn't gone to my wife, hadn't touched her, the three of us ranged there against her like a scrum awaiting the drop of the ball. “Just tell me please if you've explained the situation to Mrs. Milk?”

Corcoran bowed his head. “Yes,” he said.

“I'm sorry, I didn't hear you—”

Corcoran looked first to Iris, then to me. “Yes,” he repeated.

“Good,” Prok said, “very good. And, Iris, if you would”—and he was already moving forward, already taking her by the arm and guiding her toward the door of the inner room—“I'd just like to have a few words with you in private, if I may.”

Then the door closed and I went back to work.

I don't think any of us—not Prok, my fellow members of the inner circle, President Wells, the NRC or even the W.B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia, the book's publisher—was quite prepared for the furor that greeted publication of the male volume in January of 1948. Prok had chosen Saunders, a staid and colorless publisher of medical texts, over the big commercial houses in New York (and believe me, once word was out, they all came knocking), in a conscious effort to avoid any sort of misguided marketing effort or sanguine publicity that might cheapen or sensationalize our findings. Above all, what we wanted was to be regarded as scientists, to legitimize the field of sex research and elevate it to its proper place among the behavioral sciences, and yet at the same time there was a real reformer's zeal in Prok that made him want to deliver up our results to the widest possible audience. And so, yes, he did arrange for press interviews—press conferences, actually—so that the word would get out, but in a sober, rational and controlled way. And he chose Saunders to produce the book in a plain, no-nonsense hardcover volume that was indistinguishable from any other scientific or medical compendium sitting forgotten on the back shelves of bookstores, libraries and physicians' offices. It sold for $6.50, or more than twice what the average book retailed for at the time. There were 804 pages, including appendices, tables, bibliography and index. And it was dedicated, soberly enough, “To the twelve thousand persons who have contributed to these data and to the eighty-eight thousand more who, someday, will help complete this study.”

“Sober,” “staid,” “clinical”—no matter what adjective you want to use, the press wasn't having it. Every magazine and newspaper in the country exploded with sensational headlines—“50% OF MARRIED
MEN UNFAITHFUL!” “PREMARITAL INTERCOURSE RAMPANT!” “KINSEY SAYS MEN REACH PEAK TEN YEARS AHEAD OF WOMEN!”—and that sort of thing, always in caps and tailed by the flogging exclamation point. The book began to fly out of the shops, 40,000 copies in the first two weeks, and it was soon topping bestseller lists across the country. By March, there were 100,000 copies in print, and by June 150,000.
Time
magazine called it the biggest thing since
Gone With the Wind.
And Prok, who'd authored every last word of it, was suddenly ubiquitous, his face staring out from the pages of every publication you could imagine, and his words—his statistics,
our
statistics—on everybody's lips. In fact, things grew so out of control that we could barely get in and out of the offices without a press of reporters, admirers and sensation seekers trying to run us down, and work on the project came to a decided halt for those first few months. (And can anyone forget those jukebox ditties, Martha Raye with her “Ooh, Dr. Kinsey,” and Julie Wilson with “The Kinsey Report,” and worst of all, “The Kinsey Boogie”?)

For me, it was nothing short of hellish. I've never been comfortable in front of a camera and while I do think I can hold my own as an interviewer on the job, as an interviewee I'm afraid I'm a bust. (“You're just shy, John,” Iris would tell me, “not sex shy, just plain shy.”) It was hard on Mac too. While the reporters tried to corner me and Corcoran—and Rutledge, because he'd joined us by this time—we were able to present a united front, and in the eyes of the press we were subsidiary in any case, mere sidemen to Prok's bandleader, but Mac was left exposed. If
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
revealed men for what they were—human animals engaging in a whole range of activities, from anal intercourse to extramarital affairs and relations with nonhuman animals—then what was it like to live with the man who routinely quantified and correlated all this behavior? What was the
woman's
perspective on it?

In interview after interview, Mac bore up under the pressure and scrutiny as if she'd been born to it, but I knew different. It wasn't that she was reticent, like me, but simply that she'd always seen her role as an
accommodator, as Prok's helpmeet, and she felt that the reward for all his tireless work and the genius of his conception should be entirely his, all the glory and the limelight, and that she should stand in the background and let him have his due. But they wouldn't let her. The women's magazines especially—
McCall's, Redbook, Cosmopolitan.
They were mad to feast on the details, to get in under her skin, poking and probing and hoping against hope to turn up something odd and out of the ordinary, something outré their readers could latch on to in order to put all this
male
business in perspective. He counted orgasms and he had a wife. Who was she? Who was she really?

Mac invited them into the house, one and all, to let them answer the question for themselves—she was just an ordinary housewife, that was all, no different from any of their readers, except that her husband went off to the Sex Institute every morning while theirs packed lunches for the factory or the downtown office—and she baked the journalists cookies and persimmon tarts and sat knitting in her rocker by way of demonstration. When they asked if her lifestyle wasn't about to change, if she wouldn't soon become wealthy off the royalties from the book and start swathing herself in furs and hiring maids to do the cooking and cleaning and child-rearing, she pointed out, dourly, that all proceeds from
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
were pumped back into the Institute and that they never saw a penny of it, that, in fact, the book had
cost
them money because the writing of it had prevented Prok from revising his biology textbook, which at least would have brought them a small yearly something. Just take a look at Prok's wardrobe, she told them—he's only got one decent suit to his name. Rich? They were anything but. In fact, Mac projected exactly what Prok expected her to: a kind of safe and sterile warmth that would keep the critics at bay and the housewives of America satisfied to the point at which some of them might even begin to feel a little superior. It was a bravura performance.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Why I bring it up at this juncture is to impress on you how vital it was for us to keep our activities secret—for all of us—and never to let slip even the faintest hint of impropriety or behavior that anyone could fasten on as deviating from the norm in
any way. Thus, we were all married, and to all appearances happily married, and we all had children. We had to present an unimpeachable front to the public—we were the sex researchers and we were absolutely and rigorously normal, no prurience here, no wife-swapping or sadomasochism or sodomy on our platters—but as the years went by, and the public scrutiny intensified, it became ever more problematic. And Prok. Prok seemed to enlarge into his role, to try ever increasingly and recklessly to push the boundaries both personally and professionally, and in the later years we were all waiting for the roof to fall in, for Prok to be arrested and shackled and hauled off to the flash of photographers' cameras for soliciting sex in a public restroom or engaging in immoral acts at one of the bath houses he increasingly frequented on our field trips. It never happened. I suppose a part of it can be attributed to luck, but he
was
cautious for the most part, never admitting anyone into the inner circle unless he was absolutely sure of him, and on top of that there was the impregnability of the persona he presented to the public. He was Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, Professor of Zoology, father of three, contentedly married, above suspicion or even rumor. He built a fortress around us, data compacted into stone, stone piled atop stone, and we all climbed up hand-over-hand to man the battlements.

And so, when Violet Corcoran did come to town and she and the girls had had a chance to settle in, Prok made a point of hosting a small gathering at Bryan Park for just the six of us and the children—it was his way, I think, of smoothing over any potential situation that might arise among us and of reinforcing our bond as well. That was one of the things about working with Prok, about being his protégé—he always managed to make each of us feel a vital part of the enterprise, wives included, as if we were members of a secret society, which, in some respect, I suppose we were. And the children were a part of it too—they might not have understood what was going on among the adults, but they did, I'm sure, appreciate that they were bound up in something unique.

There was an easygoing, friendly feel to our outdoor gatherings, a familial current that was prominently, but never artificially, on display. We
had children, just like anyone else—Prok's and the Corcorans', and later the Rutledges' and John Jr.—and if our neighbors should see us gathered there in public over a smoking grill, the older children kicking a ball while the younger picked buttercups or climbed trees, we were recognized as performers in the rite of the familiar and all was understood and all forgiven. People might say,
Oh, look there's Dr. Sex with his wife and children and his colleagues and their children too, roasting wieners on a stick like anybody else, and the children have their bicycles with them, look at that, and I'll bet the ants'll have a high old time of it, don't you?
We picnicked a lot in those days.

But back to that particular gathering, at Bryan Park, the first to include the Corcorans
en famille.
Iris didn't want to go. She categorically refused, in fact, at least at first. Prok had guillotined her affair. He'd talked to her behind closed doors—lectured her, berated her—and she'd listened to him only because it meant my job if she didn't, but she was resentful, and though I don't like to think about it even now, she was in love. Still. With Corcoran. I woke up early that Saturday and went to the grocer's while our biggest pot rattled on the stove with the tumbling diced wedges of the potatoes I'd peeled the night before, and another, smaller pot seethed with eggs cooking hard in their shells, and yet I can't say I was looking forward to the picnic myself. I'd been tentative around Iris ever since the confrontation at the office, and I felt we were just beginning to make progress, to appreciate each other again in a tender and loving way, and I didn't want to do anything to threaten it.

When I got back from the store she was still in her dressing gown, the Victrola turned up too loud and Billie Holiday annihilating all hope, phrase by phrase, bar by bar, with her unfathomable lisping sorrow. I heard that voice and I felt like pulling out a gun and shooting myself, but Iris was at the table, slicing egg and chopping onion, and when I came through the door she looked up and gave me a rueful smile. I didn't say anything for fear of breaking the spell, just set the bag on the table—mayonnaise, in the twelve-ounce jar, paprika, apple cider vinegar—and went into the bedroom to dig out an old blanket to spread on the grass. We'd talked the night before about the practical importance
of accepting the invitation—Prok wanted us there and we were going to have to go, it was part of the job, part of the commitment—and I could see that Iris was softening. Yes, it would be awkward, we both admitted that, and, yes, Violet Corcoran would be there, but we had to move forward, get it over with, get it out of our systems, didn't we?

I'd been sitting at the foot of the bed, idly plucking at the raised pattern of the bedspread while Iris lay propped against the headboard, her feet splayed before her, beautiful feet, high-arched and bobby-socked, feet that I loved as I loved every part of her. I wanted to make amends, wanted her back, fully, in body and soul both.

“We're above all this, Iris,” I argued, “we are. Truly. Sex is one thing and marriage another. Commitment. Love. That's what we have. There's just no room for raw emotion in this business, and you know it as well as I. We're professionals. We have to be.” I'd paused then, studying her face, but she was staring down at the book in her lap and wouldn't meet my eyes. “Besides,” I said, “if anyone should get, well, emotionally upset, you'd think it would be me—and Violet. What about her? Shouldn't she be the injured party? Because, if—well, you know what I mean.”

She'd looked up then, the outflow of her eyes, the faintest ripples of irony at the corners of her mouth. “Yes, John,” she said, “you're the injured party, you, always you.”