Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America

by Turner, Christopher

  When A Book of Dreams came out in 1973, Peter Reich was criticized for not being able to state clearly whether he now believed in orgone energy or not, though it is precisely this irresolution that makes the book such a compelling read. In 1988, in a preface to a new edition of the book, Peter Reich wrote: “The forty-four-year-old husband and father is a private person to whom this all happened a long time ago. He waits, he watches. A critic once said that Wilhelm Reich had grabbed truth by more than its tail. How much more? Does anybody know? Does Orgone Energy exist? So, yes, the son is still hedging.”60 Almost twenty years later he is still equivocating; his is an ambivalent, complicated relationship to his father’s ideas and inventions. “Perhaps it is the easy way out,” Peter Reich speculated in his book. “Keeping one foot in the dream—but it is deeper than that. My childhood is the dream.”61

  “You know, he was like Obi-Wan Kenobi,” he repeated. “He was all there, all the time. He would get drunk—he did have a bad drinking problem. And he beat my mother up. But it’s funny, that doesn’t detract in my mind. He would get drunk because he was so lonely. One by one [his friends] got to the eye-rolling point. They kept peeling off. At a certain point I just think he started spiraling and he knew that it couldn’t go on anymore. [The Yugoslav filmmaker Dušan] Makavejev said that everybody has a blind spot when it comes to Reich, and I think that’s true. But where does that blind spot begin?”

  In 1956 Peter Reich spent the summer at Summerhill. When a military plane flew overhead he told Neill that it had been sent to protect him against his father’s enemies. Neill told Peter that this was nonsense—the planes weren’t his guardian angels but were passing overhead because there was a large U.S. atom bomb base several miles from Summerhill. When Reich heard of Neill’s response, he told his inner circle that Neill was “unreliable” and was not to be trusted. “I was genuinely concerned about Peter and his fears of overhead planes,” Neill protested to Reich when he heard he’d been blacklisted. “And his grown-upness which is not real, for he wants to be childish and play a lot of the time…He looks too anxious. I think he is trying to live a part…‘I am the only one who understands what Daddy is doing.’ He may understand but his emotions are all mixed up. He isn’t Peter Reich; he is Peter Reich plus Wilhelm Reich. And, dear old friend, call this emotional plague or what you will. To me it is just plain truth.” After wishing Reich luck, Neill signed off, “Goodbye Reich, and God bless you.”62

  “And what if he did go mad?” Neill wrote in 1971. “Often [Reich] said that our asylums are full of people who aren’t mad enough to live in our sick civilization…It is an odd world if Reich were mad and the politicians and the Pentagon and the color-haters are sane.”63

  Peter took me to a shed crammed full of bicycles, tools, and discarded car batteries. In the back of the shed, accessible via a path cleared through all the bric-a-brac, was an orgone energy accumulator. There was a blue chair inside it with a cushion on the seat. “This is like the first ones ever made,” Peter said proudly, “like the one Eva is sitting in in the accumulator booklet, where she’s pictured with a black band over her eyes. This is the real McCoy! Hop in.” When I was shut inside the device he instructed me, “Breathe deeply, Chris, breathe deeply!”

  On top of the box I noticed that someone had stowed an old multicolor hobbyhorse that looked as though it had been fashioned from driftwood. It struck me as an apt crown for Reich’s machine—Freud had called Reich’s orgasm theory his hobbyhorse.

  I imagined how Peter must feel when he sits in his father’s contraption, the device that caused his downfall. In his book, Peter wrote of all the emotions that bubbled back to the surface when he revisited Orgonon in the mid-sixties, the first time he’d been there since his father’s funeral: “His father’s world was still locked away inside of him; he was a kind of young soldier, guarding a mystery that nobody seemed to understand.”64 Perhaps, for Peter, sitting in the orgone accumulator was as close as he could get to such a vault. Perhaps it functioned as a sort of crypt. Sitting in there, surrounded by swirls of orgone energy, might be a bit like having his dad’s comforting arms wrapped around him.

  The FDA had a representative from its Los Angeles office visit Reich’s property in Arizona at the end of 1954. They wanted to see whether he had transferred operations there and was still building accumulators in violation of the injunction. Reich, absorbed with the idea of a red fascist threat, refused to grant them permission to inspect the property. He suspected the FDA official was a spy, interested in finding out about the mysterious properties of the orur Silvert had brought down from Maine (Reich told the marshal that FDA agents were more like Russians than Americans). He wrote in Contact with Space, “The attack by the food and drug agents upon orgonomy was no more than an expresson of terror of the Cosmic Energy on the part of sick men. It, therefore, ‘did not exist’; its discoverer was to this view either a ‘quack’ or a ‘lunatic.’”65

  Reich believed the injunction was unconstitutional—a mere “nuisance”—and wrote to Neill: “We have won the case against the FDA factually,” sure that it would be overturned on appeal.66 If it did stand, he thought, it would cut off only one strand of his research (albeit one that now brought in three thousand dollars a month) and free him to concentrate on his cloudbusting and “cosmic engineering” work.

  No accumulators were being made in Arizona. But Reich, as the FDA was soon to find out, had not recalled any of the devices already on hire and was still collecting rental payments. Letters to users informing them that the device had been banned had been printed but were never sent. In his absence, Reich put Silvert in charge of affairs at Orgonon and the financial operations of the Wilhelm Reich Foundation, and Silvert continued to send bills to users of the boxes on Reich’s behalf. These were now stamped on the bottom, “Make checks payable to ORUP DESERT and send to Orgone Institute Research Labs, Inc., 50 Grove Street, New York 14, N.Y.” (This was Silvert’s New York address.)

  In early June 1955, after Reich got back from his desert trip, two FDA inspectors came to Rangeley to see whether Reich was complying with the terms set out in the decree. They traveled with a deputy marshal to protect them because Reich was known to carry firearms. The marshal went in to announce their arrival but Reich refused to see them, though he made a brief appearance on the observatory balcony to vent some spleen. The deputy marshal later told the U.S. attorney Peter Mills that he had been left with the impression from this brief encounter that “Reich was a madman.” The FDA noted that Mills had “indicated that the court would not be too happy about having a madman in his court and we might have some difficulty in fostering contempt of court procedures against Reich.”67

  The next day the FDA officers sought out Tom Ross, who, despite having received a telegram from Reich instructing him not to cooperate with “FDA PHARMACEUTICAL MOSCOW AGENTS,” agreed to be interviewed. He told them that the previous winter Silvert had picked up all of Reich’s remaining banned literature and accumulator panels (enough, he thought, for one hundred boxes) and had driven them in a truck to New York. According to an affa-davit Ross later gave, when he asked Silvert whether this action was legal, Silvert said that “consulting an attorney was like seeing a doctor—you ask his advice, and then you do what you think is best, whether or not it agrees with what he said.” Whether Silvert acted with or without Reich’s knowledge was later a subject of much debate. “I would say he didn’t complain,” Ross said when asked if Reich had been angry on hearing the news. “He said, ‘I wonder if it was wise,’ or something to that effect.”68 Reich certainly accepted the profits that Silvert passed on to him.

  The FDA, with minimal detective work, soon came up with an inventory of everything that Silvert had tried to salvage: 4 bundles of wooden cabinets knocked down; 1 cabinet assembled; 361 loose panels; 338 cartons of books or literature. They also tracked down and visited a user who had written to Silvert asking where he should return his accumulator. Silvert instructed him to return it not to
Rangeley, where it was supposed to be destroyed, but to Mr. Tom Mangravite at 25 West Third Street in Manhattan.

  They began surveillance of Silvert’s apartment in New York and Mangravite’s loft. Inspectors were able to see piles of accumulator panels through Mangravite’s windows and observed cars arriving and collecting accumulators. The FDA notes take on the air of a noir film: “While the premises were kept under surveillance, nocturnal activity in the traffic of orgone accumulators was observed. A resident of the neighborhood told an inspector that the windows are covered by blankets when there is activity in the building at night.”69 Inspector Irving Feldman tailed a Chevrolet that had been picking up panels, but lost the car when it raced through two red lights.

  On July 13, at 5:15 p.m., Inspector F. P. Hamill, posing as a patient of Elsworth Baker, walked toward Mangravite’s building. As he passed a colleague who was on surveillance in a nearby doorway, he switched on the “Midget Radio Transmitter” he carried in his pocket. He rang the doorbell, and when Hamill entered the dark hallway he could see a young man waiting for him at the top of a stairs. He estimated that Tom Mangravite was about twenty-six; he was approximately five feet ten inches, with black hair. Mangravite was a sculptor and an electromechanical designer for Bell Laboratories, where he worked on the invention of the first mechanical ten-digit telephone. He also did cabinetwork and carpentry on the side, which is where the accumulators came in. According to the strait laced and besuited inspector, who insisted on describing Mangravite in his report as a “businessman,” Mangravite “was attired in rather odd clothes, a white shirt and light brown pants. He seemed a little bit nervous.”70 They entered a basic carpentry workshop, where there was a “cache” of accumulator panels from Rangeley; Hamill estimated there were enough for sixty or seventy devices.

  The undercover inspector told Mangravite that he’d bought an accumulator several years ago from the Wilhelm Reich Foundation but hadn’t used it for some time. Recently he’d received a note from Dr. Silvert suggesting that he might want to improve his accumulator by adding some cables and he wanted to try these adaptations to treat some trouble he was having with sinusitis, a stiff neck, and a deaf left ear. Mangravite explained that the cables should be drilled through the walls of the box and placed in running water or, if that wasn’t possible, simply a bucket, so that the accumulator could be “grounded” to draw off some of the deadly orgone energy (DOR) that might otherwise build up in the accumulator.

  The FDA inspector had Mangravite mail him the cable he’d come to buy, so that Mangravite could be shown to have broken the law barring Reich from trading in orgone paraphernalia across state lines. Hamill said the cable wouldn’t fit in his pocket, which Mangravite thought was odd, as he was wearing a bulky topcoat (to hide his recording device), even though it was June. The first time Mangravite knew that he’d been tricked was when the cable and its packaging appeared as evidence in the criminal trial in which he now found himself involved.

  At 2:15 p.m. the next day different FDA officers arrived with an inspector from the New York City Department of Health to make an official inspection.

  I met Tom Mangravite in his offices at New York University, where he teaches camerawork in the film program. A slight eighty-year-old man with sunken eyes, neatly parted white hair, and a gray mustache, Mangravite was wearing beige trousers and a white shirt—exactly the same wardrobe that the undercover FDA officer had described as strange: “I was a sculptor and a painter!” Mangravite replied incredulously when I pointed this out. “I was probably wearing khakis and a white shirt. That’s my get up attire!

  “These guys were completely square, I guess,” he continued. “The FDA guy who came down to my studio on a Saturday morning—he was an odd man. He told me that Dr. Baker had sent him to see me. He was thin, he was gray, he was pinched. And it shocked me. I thought, What the hell kind of a therapist is Baker if this guy’s one of his patients, because the man had nothing in his eyes. I still remember the feeling I had. He was just a complete drain. Apparently the FDA had rented a factory space and were watching my studio from across the street. What a waste of money. I also had a roof space, and they reported on the breast size of one of the young ladies I was sunbathing with…I think if there wasn’t a sexual element to orgonomy, Reich would have been left alone. They figured that this group, with all the sexual freedom stuff, had to be a bad thing.”71

  Mangravite lived in Greenwich Village, moved in bohemian circles, and had read a few of Reich’s books. When he suffered depression after separating from his first wife, a Reichian friend referred him to Silvert. Silvert’s small treatment room-cum-studio in the neighborhood was furnished with a single bed that served as the couch. Mangravite had the impression that he lived as well as worked there. “You were nude, a lot of deep breathing, pounding on pillows, and screaming” is how Mangravite described the therapy that followed. “The aim was to attain a full orgasm, where your body’s completely in it and everything goes with it.”

  Mangravite described the “big aura” and “the godlike qualities” that were projected onto Reich by his followers, and I asked him whether he thought the Reichians formed a sort of cult. “There was a real cliquish flavor to it,” he acknowledged. “The apostles, the therapists, they were really bowing at his feet; he was very much the leader. They made the assumption that Reich was as healthy as he claimed he wanted other people to be, that he had accomplished it [orgastic potency], so it’s a surprise when you read all these books, like his son’s, saying that Reich never took a shower nude, that he always took a shower in his underpants. He had foibles. But obviously he was a genius, there’s no question about that.”

  The physicians were a very formal lot who always referred to each other by their surnames, which Mangravite found very strange at first. But this formality was only a façade. “Everyone was very sexually active,” Mangravite revealed. “There was a lot of free love involved. Casual encounters went all the way from, you know, ‘Let’s fuck,’ to getting to know each other and having three or four relationships going at one time.” Having read Ilse Ollendorff’s memoir of her time with Reich, Mangravite concluded, “Reich was obviously screwing anyone he wanted, though he was married—she was very nice about it.”

  Mangravite characterized Silvert as a “very rigid” apostle: “He was trying to out-Reich Reich; any little thing Reich said, he’d jump on.” Reich was “on his own little mountaintop up there” in Maine, and his version of Reich was seen through his therapist’s eyes. “Every time [Reich] made a new discovery it became the law, as passed down through the therapists to the patients, and it all got digested and regurgitated in different ways. Everything was filtered and twisted by Silvert.”

  Silvert soon had Mangravite using an accumulator as an adjunct to therapy. Mangravite told me that he experienced a “sensation of warmth and pleasure” sitting in his device, and found that it quickly cleared up headaches and other small ailments. He was curious enough to repeat some of Reich’s other experiments, and he kept a log of the temperature difference before and after he used the box. He custom-made forty or fifty devices, including some child-sized ones for the nursery run by Paki Wright’s mother, over which he took particular care: “Some of the ladies wanted special colors and what not.” Silvert sold Mangravite’s carefully constructed creations for four hundred dollars, four times what he paid Mangravite to build them.

  Mangravite also constructed a cloudbuster and he prided himself on his version’s being more scientifically accurate than the more primitive devices Reich used. He added a “protractor-type thing,” so that as you tilted it you could tell what angle it was pointed at and were therefore able to keep more accurate records. Mangravite and Silvert did weather work in New York: “We had a cloudbuster mounted on a truck near Canal Street,” Mangravite recalled of the eight-wheeler and its strange load, “and we’d go out, myself and Silvert, at four or five in the morning, and in the evening, to work on the weather experiments. We’d go down to the
piers on the Lower East Side, and to ground the thing we’d throw the cables into the river water.” They did this every day for two years. Mangravite claims that they were able to clear up the DOR that accumulated over Manhattan’s skyscrapers with the device.

  A month after his return to Orgonon from his desert expedition, Reich was charged with contempt of the injunction. The FDA lawyers argued that he had violated the terms of the court order by failing to recall and destroy accumulators and literature, in refusing the FDA permission to inspect his property in Arizona and at Orgonon, and in shipping accumulator parts from Rangeley to New York, where they continued to be sold. Reich was asked to appear in court the following month “to show cause why legal proceedings shouldn’t be initiated” against him.

  On June 9, 1954, McCarthy lost the fearful grip he’d held over the country during the earlier fifties. In the Army-McCarthy hearings, in which McCarthy was accused of exploiting his position to get special privileges for one of his assistants, who had been drafted, the army’s lawyer, Joe Welch, struck the killing blow. The hearings were televised, and the coup de grâce was watched by many in the twenty million households that had TV sets at the time. McCarthy was clearly drunk—he kept a bottle of boubon in his briefcase and started drinking in the morning—and his inebriated, red-faced, bullying ugliness was plain for all to see.

  When Welch challenged McCarthy to give the attorney general a list of the one hundred thirty Communists who, he claimed, worked in military defense plants, the senator tried to undermine him by pointing out that someone from his Boston law office was a former member of the National Lawyers Guild, which he accused of being “the legal bulwark of the Communist Party,” and therefore a Communist. Welch, in defense of a member of his law firm, uttered his now legendary putdown: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” When McCarthy continued his character assassination of the young man, who was fresh out of Harvard Law School and was in fact the secretary of the Young Republicans League and not a Communist, Welch famously exclaimed, “’Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”72