Gracefully Insane

by Alex Beam

  Walter told me more than once that “psychiatry has improved a lot,” but he didn’t sound particularly sincere. How had it improved? There are “more meds than forty years ago. It’s sort of encouraging and it’s sort of disappointing.” How is it disappointing, I asked? “It’s a mixed bag,” he answered, changing the subject.

  Two weeks later, I saw the McLean staffer who had sat in on our conversation. We both agreed that the meeting had not yielded much. On the one hand, I felt I had failed to make a positive connection with Paton—psychotherapy is hard! On the other hand, I felt that her presence, which was probably necessary for legal reasons, had exacerbated an already awkward situation. What did she learn, I asked? She told me that while Walter and I had been speaking, she had been calculating the number of days he had spent at McLean and then multiplied that number by $195. Since 1948, give or take a few hundred thousand dollars—long-term discounts were common for good customers—the Paton family had spent $3.5 million to lodge Uncle Walter at McLean.

  Toward the end of the 1960s, the character of Upham gradually began to change. In 1966, the patients must have been surprised to see a rare black face at their morning meetings; the great blues singer Ray Charles, then thirty-five years old, came onto the hall for a week-long “observational” visit.

  Charles was on Upham not by the grace of a well-invested trust fund but by the grace of a broad-minded federal judge. A year earlier, customs agents at Logan Airport had busted Charles for possession of heroin and marijuana when he landed in Boston at 3 A.M. after a private plane flight from Canada. The blind singer’s lawyers managed to delay sentencing for a year, and when the case came before Judge Charles Wyzanski, he offered Charles an alluring deal: four years’ probation if the defendant agreed to check into McLean every six months for observation and if he tested negative for drugs. Charles described his first visit to Upham in his 1978 autobiography Brother Ray:I went to sleep at about eight. At midnight I woke up to go to the toilet, and I was freezing to death. Godamn, it’s cold in here. Can’t understand it. Don’t these people care about heat? I wondered. So I put on my robe and tiptoed out to the hall. Man, it was warm as toast out there—comfortable and cozy as it could be.

  I knew what they were up to. When you’re withdrawing from drugs, coldness quickens your sickness. You’ll probably have chills when the temperature is normal, but when it’s really cold, you suffer something awful. They wanted to see how bad I’d start shaking.

  I called for the head nurse.

  “Look mama,” I said. “I’m not blaming you. I know you don’t make the rules. But sweetheart, if I catch pneumonia, I’m gonna sue this place so bad that everyone here is gonna be working for me. I’m gonna own this joint. Got it?”

  Five minutes later warm air was flowing through the ducts and I was snuggled back in bed.

  There was a piano in Upham’s huge, ground-floor living room, and Charles gave impromptu concerts for his hall mates. He reported that he played with “a classical cat, who could really wail.” “The nicest part was meeting one of the nurses who I got next to a little later on,” he added. Charles and the nurse remained an item during his subsequent visits to McLean, where he never tested positive for drugs.

  Another nonstandard patient arrived on Upham in the early 1970s: Joan Tunney Wilkinson, daughter of the famous boxer Gene Tunney and sister of then-senator John Tunney. Wilkinson—young, beautiful, and well connected—had transferred into McLean from Broadmoor psychiatric prison in England.

  According to press reports, Wilkinson “attacked her husband with a chopper” on Easter Sunday, 1970, in their home in Chenies, Buckinghamshire, a small village thirty miles from London. Although various insinuations were made concerning the couple’s “hippy” lifestyle, no motive was ever adduced. Wilkinson’s lawyers explained that she had suffered from schizophrenia for nine years, which won her admission to Broadmoor and eventually to McLean, where she could be closer to her family. At McLean, Wilkinson befriended a black cat named Felina and came under the sway of the Christian revival group The Way. She became a Bible-thumping companion of fellow murderer Louis Agassiz Shaw. At hall meetings, where Frank Everett would sometimes utter random cries of “Germs!” and “Pestilence!” Wilkinson was wont to say, “Louis, we must confess our sins.” His inevitable answer: “Oh, Joan, no.” If Louis ever confessed, he saved it for the confessional.

  Around the time Wilkinson checked in, young people—really young people—started appearing on Upham. McLean had set up an adolescent treatment unit in the basement of the hall, and for the first time sixteen- and seventeen-year-old patients were roaming the same corridors as Liebman, Shaw, and the Ziegel brothers. The young patients, mostly boys, were disturbed, disturbing, disruptive, and even destructive. One boy put his hand through a screen that was supposedly designed to handle a 2,000-pound blow. Others knocked down the plaster flowers that adorned the light fixtures on the ground floor. Walter Paton recalled that one boy broke into the medication cabinet and assaulted a nurse who tried to stop him, breaking her glasses. The trashing of Upham had begun.

  By the time I arranged a visit in April 2000, Upham was a disaster area. I remember Roberta Shaw, at that time McLean’s director of public affairs, a somewhat abashed security guard, and myself standing on the second floor shoe-deep in plaster fragments, paint chips, feathers, and pigeon droppings, staring up at the oncemagnificent atrium skylight that channeled sun down into the building’s entry foyer. As part of its general downsizing, McLean had abandoned Upham a couple of years previously, partly because the hospital no longer needed the space and partly because Upham was not connected to the other buildings by Olmsted’s tunnel system and thus was less convenient to maintain. Once the equivalent of a luxury hotel with nine superbly appointed suites, Upham had been fricasseed into ever-shrinking quadrants of offices and bedrooms over the years. Just before it was closed, Upham was a “gap sleeper,” or temporary shelter for homeless men and women who drifted into McLean during the winter. Locked and abandoned after that, it had become a home for pigeons and mice and was awaiting the restoration efforts of the Northland Development Corporation, which planned to convert the stately mansion into five separate town houses, each priced at $600,000.

  The security guard had reason to be abashed. Upham had not only been left to the elements; it had also been robbed and vandalized. An antiques thief had joined McLean’s security force and systematically stripped Upham of valuable furnishings, mostly carved wooden mantelpieces, picture frames, and sconces. The Belmont police found fingerprints on a shard of mirror cast into the nearby forest, and the robber was eventually nabbed at a western Massachusetts antiques fair. McLean had managed to keep the embarrassing incident more or less under wraps. Under siege from thievery, pigeons, rodents, and the ravages of time, not much remained of the stately interior of McLean’s magnificent “Harvard Club” except for the portrait of young George Phineas Upham Jr. hanging above the fireplace in the ground-floor salon.

  10

  Diagnosis

  “HIPPIEPHRENIA”

  It was by no means easy for us to decide when someone had crossed the border from hippie to hippiephrenia.

  Dr. Alan Stone

  During his first major concert tour in 1969, James Taylor used to introduce his song “Knockin’ ’Round the Zoo” with a few words about his stay in Belmont. “Here’s a tune I wrote at McLean to make a million bucks,” he told one youthful audience. “McLean, that’s a mental hospital—O.K., anybody here from McLean? Let’s hear it for McLean.” Few people clapped, of course, because very few young people had spent time in mental institutions. But Taylor, then sporting a shoulder-length mop of dark, grimy hair, would grin sheepishly at the light smattering of applause and proceed with his cryptic paean to his nine-month stay in the “zoo”: There’s bars on all the windows and they’re

  counting up the spoons

  And if I’m feeling edgy, there’s a chick who’s paid to be my slave

  But
she’ll hit me with a needle if she thinks I’m trying to misbehave.

  For a mellower, preppy cohort of the 1960s generation, the softsinging Taylor siblings—James, his talented brother Livingston, and the singer always known as Sister Kate—put McLean on the map. “For the Taylors,” Time magazine noted sardonically in a 1971 cover story on James, “the McLean experience would soon become what Harvard is for the Saltonstalls—something of a family tradition.” A washout at tradition-bound Milton Academy, James thrived at McLean’s newly opened Arlington School. “We didn’t have that jive nothingness that pushes most kids through high school,” he said. “You can’t tell a whole bunch of potential suicides that they have to have a high school diploma.” The product of a liberal, moneyed household, Taylor relished what he saw as the reassuring structure of the typical McLean day: “Above all, the day was planned for me there, and I began to have a sense of time and structure, like canals and railroad tracks.” Taylor never claimed that McLean “cured” him—less than three years after “escaping” from the hospital, he found himself addicted to heroin and checked in to the more bucolic, twenty-three-bed Austen Riggs sanitarium in Stockbridge, Massachusetts—but it enabled him to establish a modus vivendi with the modern world. He and his sister Kate both have homes on Martha’s Vineyard, and both have compared the island’s laid-back pace to the asylum of McLean. “It was a pretty slow pace,” Kate recalls. “Very slow. No pressure. And that continues for me, living on Martha’s Vineyard, out here at the end of the trail” James now calls his McLean timea lifesaver. I think it was a lifesaver. I’ve always thought of it like a pardon, or like a reprieve, with a sort of medical stamp of approval. Once I got there, my main concern was that they wouldn’t let me stay, that they’d find out that I wasn’t a serious case, that my bed might be needed by someone more worthy. I didn’t want to be turned out of the place. I didn’t want to go back to the life that I had been unable to lead.

  Although James wrote his first two songs while still a patient in 1965, his path to success ran through New York City and then London, where he met the Beatles’ producer Peter Asher, who finetuned the Taylor sound for the Apple label. (James’s “escape” from McLean is still the subject of legend. Because he had committed himself voluntarily, he could not escape. He did, however, bolt for Manhattan without signing the customary “three-day,” the required three days’ notice before checking oneself out.) But Kate and subsequently Livingston launched their careers at McLean. Searching for therapies that might connect with their musicaddled, alienated charges, McLean hired a young rock musician named Paul Roberts to conduct music therapy classes. Roberts had studied psychology at Brandeis and tried to play music on the wards at Metropolitan State, where he had gone to work as an aide to avoid the Vietnam draft. “It was sort of prison-like,” Roberts recalls. “Their method of containing someone was to throw him in a locked room.” The public-sector nurses started commenting that guitar strumming did not figure in his job description. Roberts got the hint and began looking around for work. A friend mentioned that nearby McLean, far better endowed than the struggling state hospital, actually had a music therapy department. But they did not have a sitar-playing cool guy; as it happened, McLean and Roberts had been looking for each other.

  McLean had three practice rooms, each with its own piano, and was perfectly happy to turn the cafeteria over to any of the four bands that Roberts organized—the Zoo, the Strawberry Discharge, and Ronnie and the Waverley Squares (McLean overlooks Waverley Square)—and most famously, Sister Kate’s Soul Stew and Submarine Sandwich Shoppe, headlined by Kate Taylor. The Sandwich Shoppe played for money at Brandeis, at a Cambridge peace fair, and for a “social” at the Institute of Living, a mental hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. Roberts was not exactly sure what he was doing, but whatever he was doing, it was working. One catatonic patient, a gifted saxophone player, began communicating first with fellow band members and only later with his therapists. One of the bands became a long-running group therapy session, trying for its members but ultimately useful in resolving shared conflicts. Ronnie of the Waverley Squares was a Janis Joplin-like blues belter. “They couldn’t give her enough Thorazine on the unit, but in music therapy, she was normal,” Roberts remembers. Kate Taylor was revealed to be a hauntingly mellifluous singer, and she signed a recording contract soon after leaving the hospital.

  “Some of the psychiatrists were hip to the fact that real therapy was taking place,” says Roberts, who now pursues his singing career with his wife in Redbird, Colorado. “People were getting better, but I didn’t know or care why it was working. I was just experimenting in the dark. These kids needed to express themselves through loud rock music, and it worked. I was putting in sixty, seventy, eighty hours a week. I was completely enthralled by what was going on.” Roberts prepared a lengthy presentation on his band therapies for his academic mentor, who just happened to be Morris Schwartz of Brandeis, the same Morris Schwartz who coauthored The Mental Hospital with Alfred Stanton and the “Morrie” of Tuesdays with Morrie. Roberts’s report included interviews with his performers, most of whom testified to finding extraordinary release with their bands. A vocalist named Laura told Roberts, “It’s magic, almost. I mean, I have said that I’m going to kill myself in the morning, and then in the afternoon I’m singing my heart out. It’s brought me time and time again out of depression.” Understandably, some band members found the interpersonal dynamics overwhelming. When Roberts asked a keyboard player named Tom what it was like to perform in the band, Tom answered, It’s a drag, because you work for months and months and then you get into these hassles like who is loudest, who is soft.... I’ve always approached it as work. A lot of people think playing in a band is all fun and games but it isn’t, it’s work. It forces you to relate to other people, to consider how other people are feeling. It’s very difficult to go ahead as though everything was a machine; you’re working with people. For me the communication is with the music because I have difficulty in talking.

  Before dropping out of Brandeis, Roberts’s roommate had been an academically gifted history student named Jon Landau, who had musical ambitions of his own. Landau had his own band, and when Roberts came over to his house, the music therapist started talking up the talents of a severely withdrawn vocalist and guitar player, Livingston Taylor—James’s and Kate’s younger brother. Livingston was at the Arlington School and was supplementing his musical education at the Berklee School of Music in the Back Bay. The rest, as it were, is history. Landau forsook his own musical ambitions and produced his first record, Livingston Taylor, a beautiful collection of ballads that included at least one song with a McLean theme: “Doctor Man.” A second Landau-Taylor collaboration, Liv, included “Carolina Day,” with the words memorializing Livingston’s therapist, Dr. Harvey Shein. Landau, who had been working as a rock critic at the Boston Real Paper, went on to become one of the most famous and powerful music producers of all time when he abandoned journalism to manage the career of a singer who, he believed, represented “the future of rock and roll”: Bruce Springsteen.

  The Taylors were blessed—or cursed—with fame, but they were not the only successful musicians sojourning at McLean. As a Harvard undergraduate, Clay Jackson had played bluegrass guitar and mandolin with the Charles River Boys in the early 1960s and had backed up a crystal-voiced young folksinger named Joan Baez, who occasionally played concerts at the hospital. “She was a skinny little black-haired girl who had a voice you could hear for two blocks,” says Jackson, whose life journey took him from Cambridge to London to Tangier to McLean and now back to his family home in Kerrville, Texas, where he is looking forward to receiving his first Social Security check: “I’ve sort of made an effort not to contribute to society,” he says. The godson of James Taylor’s father Isaac, John Sheldon, also ended up at McLean with Kate and Livingston, and after touring with James in the mid-1980s, he has carved out a successful performing career in western Massachusetts. After graduating from the Arling
ton School, Sheldon was approached by a young musician named Van Morrison to help him record a new album. “It was very odd,” Sheldon remembers:Van was living in Boston. “Brown-eyed Girl” was a hit, but Van didn’t have any money because his record company—well, that’s a whole other story. Anyway, he was broke. He had a band, but he didn’t have a guitar player, because the guitar player had been murdered. I didn’t know that at the time. That was just one of the strange things that surrounded Van.

  I never did audition. I left my phone number with his manager, and he told me to check back with them. A little later I got call from this manager, asking me, “Where do you live?” I said, “Cambridge.” “Can we come over?” I was seventeen years old, nobody had heard me play, I had been living in the hospital, so there was no one they could have talked to....

  So they come over to my parents’ house—Van, the manager, and the bass player, and we went down to the basement, which is my band room, and we started playing music. I’d been playing the blues all winter, and Van loves the blues, so I got the job.

  John is a superb guitarist whose recordings have something of the outlaw edge that David Bromberg brought to the early Bob Dylan records. Now in his mid-forties, his mannerisms are those of the classic McLean graduate: He is jittery, funny, smart, and direct, and he is raising two children in the Pioneer Valley near Amherst. Thirty years ago, when he was just sixteen years old, he spent the summer touring New England with Morrison’s band. Life with Van was never dull:Van tried to move into my house, but my Mom wouldn’t let him. Then one day he shows up and says he’s had a dream, and in the dream he’s supposed to get rid of all the electric instruments. So the drummer gets fired because he’s too loud, and we start rehearsing with bass and acoustic guitars. They start working on stuff like “Madame George,” but I’m getting really bored, because I want to play rock and roll, I want to play loud.