The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (34 page)

Kelley put his son through memory training, and Doug regularly visited the Stanford and UC–Berkeley campuses to take psychological and
intelligence tests from the best in the business: Bruno Klopfer, Alfred Korzybski, and S. I. Hayakawa. If he suddenly decided Doug needed to learn about astronomy, Kelley would bring in an astronomer who ran the nearest planetarium to give the boy home lessons. He skipped Doug over three and a half years of school. Despite his own overbearing authority, which brooked no challenges, Kelley taught his son to question the authority of others. Every day young Doug was subjected to some aspect of his father’s regimen: “When I woke up, Dad would hand me a protein shake, stand next to the heater, and hold out the paper with words for me to memorize for the day.” Kelley performed his fatherly tasks with sternness, anger, and absolute inflexibility. He aimed to create a high-level thinking boy, the sharpest observer and intellectualizer one could possibly make from a child. As a guide and expert on rational thinking, Kelley exuded the confidence that he knew everything. His ultimate end was to teach Doug how to arrive at rational conclusions “and then distance yourself and see how others are viewing you,” Doug recalls.

On one level, the reactions of others were important to Kelley, because only from outsiders could praise—and thus a smidgen of something approaching gratification—come. But he had bigger principles in mind when he inculcated in Doug the benefits of closely observing other people. Scrutinizing the behavior of others, paying close attention to what they say and how they move, leads to predicting their behavior, Kelley believed. The psychiatrist told his son that forecasting people’s behaviors after carefully examining them can result in something called tele-empathy, the ability to feel what others are feeling and thinking. Kelley himself was a master of this skill, able to attract everyone’s attention at a party, speak persuasively, project sheer competence, and read the crowd at a magic performance. If nothing else, Kelley’s domineering mentorship passed on to his son that ability to interpret the feelings of others. He absorbed how to gauge the atmosphere of a place, the mood of its inhabitants, and ways to circumvent people who stood between him and his goals.

“I can get a good sense of how a room feels. . . . The value of that is staggering, but the weight and burden of it is terrible,” Doug says. He used the talent Kelley brought out in him to sniff the air of his own home to forecast
whether this would be the day of one of his father’s explosions or not. But a child has enough to worry about in his own thoughts and feelings without trying to understand a world of adult complexes and impulses. As a result, as Doug neared adolescence, he began rejecting the basic premises of his father’s teaching. “I didn’t want to achieve, lead, or take control,” he says. He refused to grow up to become the person Kelley imagined he would be, and he continued “to love a part of myself,” he says. Doug, who resented his father’s refusal to accept any opposing points of view, began drinking and smoking pot when he was eleven years old. Secretly he retrained himself
not
to focus on figuring out what was going on around him. Slowly Doug learned to value something his father never understood, the individuality of others. Kelley’s doomed attempt to create a brilliant, perfect son—a true McGlashan heir—was the one continuous project to occupy him from soon after he returned from Germany to the end of his life. It was as if, having looked into the dark Nazi minds and found nothing there to fundamentally separate them from himself or anyone else, Kelley was determined to try to create in his son a better, stronger, more ideal creature, someone who was not vulnerable to whatever weaknesses in the human condition had permitted the staggering wartime atrocities. Perhaps, too, Kelley invested so much hope in his son’s future because he had begun to realize his own failures. He was clearly a man in torment; perhaps Doug would be spared if his father could prepare him for and fortify him against a world of criminality, ignorance, pettiness, and—evidently—evil.

“The Old Man always gave us presents for our birthdays. He would take us wherever we wanted, and he was often playful,” Doug says. But Kelley’s own frustrations left him with few tools for good fatherhood. “He never understood that we were different from him and not just his children.” Doug, at the age of seven, found himself coolly planning ways to escape his father. “If I get on the refrigerator with a hatchet, will I be fortunate enough to cleave him in the head before he knows it is coming?” he remembers thinking. But he was not a violent child, and instead he “learned to shut up and hunger and survive, but I needed to be let go and be free.”

Having Douglas Kelley as a father proved both a boon and a curse. The boy learned the joy of knowledge and the adventure of curiosity. He acquired the gift of reading people and spent pleasure-filled hours cultivating his own mind. At the same time, he faced the full force of a terribly conflicted guide, a top psychiatric diagnostician in distress who refused to go see a psychiatrist. As a father, Kelley was capable of love but had little idea how to open himself to his children. When he drew close to them, the unresolved rage he carried chilled them. He careened through their lives like a runaway train.

This upbringing weighed on Doug as he pondered his fate in his basement bedroom. “I had rages and would go nuts and destroy my room, and then I would put it back together. I slept lightly because I didn’t know if the Old Man would get drunk and come down and beat me.” Doug felt confident that his father’s violence would not get out of control, but he feared it nonetheless: “I knew it was sort of dangerous.” Kelley could lose his temper for any reason, or for no reason at all. But sometimes the psychiatrist came down simply to kiss the boy on the forehead. Doug never knew which version of his father was approaching each time he heard the heavy footsteps on the stairs.

Doug engaged in angry imaginary dialogues with his father. “In the end [I would mentally say to the Old Man], you can think you know everything, but you can’t get my essence. You cannot break me or get here,” he declares, pointing to his heart. “That nugget you can’t get—you’ll have to kill me.” Sometimes Doug stepped out of an upper window and sat on the roof to consider the enigma of his father. “It was hard to understand how someone with all that facility, who could give help to others, couldn’t help himself. It’s still somewhat baffling,” he admits. Kelley’s acquaintances and colleagues had little idea of the degree to which he was psychologically disturbed.

A closet that opened to the hallway adjoined the Kelleys’ bedroom, and when thunderbolts flew between their parents, the children would close themselves in it and listen to the sharp voices as they penetrated the wall. “I’d go in there and wrap myself in her fur coat and listen,” Doug says. “I thought they were crazy. Dad was angry, a cold intellectual anger, but hers
was softer anger. He was so dominant. I remember a massive fight about something Bennett Cerf had said on TV. I knew Mom was right.” But it was his father who prevailed. “I had the fear that one of them would die. Mother’s fear was that he would end up destroying the family or himself. Such a big man couldn’t say, ‘I’ve got something wrong with me.’”

Seeking help from a fellow psychiatrist, in Kelley’s mind, would have tainted his authority. Who could he possibly see who wouldn’t know that he was a world-renowned authority on the Rorschach, a police consultant who screened out unfit cops, an expert on violence and criminal behavior? For God’s sake, he must have lamented at his lowest and most angry moments, who could understand a guy who treated Nazis, the most notorious criminals of the century, and couldn’t fathom his own fits of mayhem? Who would keep it quiet? He had built a magnificent public persona based on his competence, authority, rationality, and control—although at home he shed that garb to drink in his shorts and T-shirt and constantly threatened eruption. Dukie later acknowledged to her son that his father was “too prestigious” to be caught visiting a psychiatrist.

So Kelley’s frustration and anger remained bottled up. The emotions heaved in cycles of work and violence, amid continual demands from the responsibilities he had taken on to distract himself from his inner turmoil. He shuttled among classes, criminal consultations, TV appearances, lectures, police screening, his own writing, and husbandhood and fatherhood. He cooked dinner every night, met with and dissected psychopaths, tried to guide children not yet in adolescence into high intellectual achievement, and entertained audiences—all while leaving his own volatility and psyche unexamined. His weight crept up along with his stress. Over time he noticed the twinges of a duodenal ulcer—not the sort of thing that would curb his craving for spicy foods—and popped Tums much as Göring had snacked on paracodeine. His personal physician, Harry Borson, warned Kelley that the ulcer probably was the result of the strain of overwork. But never did Kelley waste thought on taking care of himself.

Others could see the dangers of Kelley’s fast and brutal track. Lewis Terman warned him of the danger of spreading himself so thin.
“I am
amazed by the number of activities you are engaged in and can’t help but wonder whether it is too many for your long-range professional good,” Terman wrote to Kelley in 1955. Terman, an older man who had known Kelley since the psychiatrist’s childhood, owned up to having the same workaholic tendencies himself, a habit he regretted. In reply, Kelley defensively described how he had increased his work efficiency by accelerating the pace of his activities to get everything done. “For example,” Kelley wrote, “
preparation for a speech or paper ordinarily takes [me] 20 to 30 minutes unless, of course, a major research project is involved.” He admitted, though, that he could not continue to capably juggle the tasks of parenting, teaching, and researching, and he promised to heed Terman’s cautions. But he never did—his inner demons proved too relentless. That same year, Kelley’s mother June died, which—though he left no record of his feelings—must have devastated him.

George Dreher, a family friend, took notice of the load Kelley seemed to bear. Around the fall of 1957, he observed that Kelley “
was feeling the weight of his exceptional workload,” he wrote to Dukie several months later, “but only now am I sensing how much inner strain this signified. It is probable that not only I, but many others who should have understood and responded, were hindered by the impression of his obvious competence and vitality.” By the time Dreher wrote his letter, however, it was too late.

When he was forty-five, Douglas M. Kelley’s professional pressures, internal grievances and disappointments, and marital unhappiness flared up in a violent ignition. Doug can project a flickering replay of the nightmare scene in his mind. It is New Year’s Day 1958, late afternoon, twenty-four hours past his tenth birthday. The Christmas tree still stands in the corner of the living room, and Doug’s younger siblings Alicia, then eight, and Allen, four, are playing together on the floor by the fireplace. A football game fills the screen of the color TV, and Doug and his grandfather, Doc, are watching it. Kelley and Dukie are preparing dinner in the kitchen.

There is a commotion in the kitchen. Something has happened. The voices grow louder. The words aren’t understandable, but they rise in pitch. Doc looks up and listens. Kelley and Dukie are taking turns shouting at each other. They’re fighting—there’s no doubt. It goes on until the Old Man throws open the door and strides into the living room. He is talking gibberish, spouting sounds of anger. Won’t take it anymore, he bellows. He spins round the corner and runs upstairs into his study and slams the door shut. A blue porcelain doorstop trembles, topples over, and rains pieces from the second floor into the living room. Dukie enters the room and looks at Doc. “This one’s bad,” she says.

Doc rises and begins to herd the children out of the room. Alicia and Allen go out, but Doug has taken a position behind the sofa, nestled in the crook of the piano. He feels compelled to witness what happens. Then, after seconds pass, it does happen. The Old Man marches out of his study and appears at the top of the stairs. He holds something in the palm of his hand. Gliding quietly, Dukie moves to the foot of the stairs. Kelley descends to the landing and faces his wife, father, and son like an orator. “I don’t have to take this anymore!” he howls. “I’m going to take this potassium cyanide and I’ll die in thirty seconds. I’m going to take this, and nobody will care!”