The Genius Factory

by David Plotz

  Graham dispatched his newly hired deputy, a former sanitation engineer named Paul Smith, to find another crop of donors, men who could write equations all morning, ski all afternoon, and make love all night. Graham had known Smith for almost twenty years. Smith had thought about little else than genius sperm banking since 1960, when, as a nineteen-year-old Berkeley undergraduate, he had read an article by Hermann Muller. Smith believed with a convert’s passion that genius sperm banking could change the world. Smith had written fan letters to Muller and struck up a great friendship with the old scientist. (Muller even tried to marry Smith off to his daughter.) Smith had accompanied Muller to the 1963 Pasadena meeting where Muller and Graham wrote the initial plans for the sperm bank. Graham and Muller had even invited Smith to serve on their first advisory board in the early 1960s. But after earning an engineering degree at Berkeley, Paul fled to England in 1965 to avoid having to serve in Vietnam. He spent fifteen years in Britain, working as a printer and road engineer, then returned to the United States right before the launch of the Nobel Prize bank in 1980. When Smith heard the first news reports about the Repository, he hopped into his car, drove across the country to Escondido, knocked on Graham’s door, and volunteered for the cause. Graham appointed him manager of the bank, offered him a $26,000-a-year salary, gave him a dealer-fresh, banana yellow VW Beetle, and told him to go forth and multiply.

  In every way Paul Smith was Graham’s opposite. Graham was short, Paul was tall. Graham was a neat freak, Paul a slob. Graham was gracious, Paul was socially awkward. Graham’s mind was orderly, Paul’s was anarchic. With his little head on his gaunt, endless body, Smith looked a little bit like a spermatozoon himself. He had the face of the actor Ed Harris and the manner of an addled but brilliant professor. He spoke in a flat, creaking voice; long pauses separated his words. Sometimes he scarcely seemed aware of the world around him. He walked like a John Cleese character, all knees and flailing elbows. He cared little for his personal appearance. His hair flew away in odd, mad-looking wisps. He loved dogs and bred them; he was constantly coated with a mat of dog hair. Yet he had a sharp mind, a wickedly dry wit, and, most important for Graham, a messianic zeal for genius sperm banking that surpassed Graham’s own.

  Smith recruited for Graham as if his life depended on it. He haunted the campuses of Caltech and Berkeley—he preferred Caltech because “parking was easier.” He pored over Who’s Who and scanned lists of Fields Medalists and other hotshot scientists, seeking men who were brilliant, good-looking, and willing. His luck was spotty: he landed only eight donors in more than a hundred solicitations. “Some of the men had a vasectomy. Some said their wife wouldn’t let them. And some probably thought I had been sent by the Devil himself.” Smith would go to almost any length to get his sperm. On the rare occasions when someone agreed to give, Smith would immediately drag the donor somewhere—anywhere—where he could jack off. That might mean a quickie motel, or worse. One donor recalls Smith handing him a cup and directing him into a public bathroom at the University of California, Berkeley (surely not the first time a Berkeley bathroom was used for a curious sexual purpose, but still . . .). Smith’s finds included a prize math professor, student prodigies, and dazzling computer scientists. Meanwhile Graham, working on his own, recruited others, such as Edward Burnham and the Olympic gold medal–winning Donor Fuchsia.

  From the beginning, the Repository had more applicants than sperm—a state that would persist until it closed nineteen years later. Every sperm donation produced only a handful of usable semen straws. But each client needed a couple of straws every month, and it usually took several months to get pregnant. Graham couldn’t sign up donors fast enough and couldn’t get them to donate often enough to meet the demand. They were busy men, and Graham didn’t pay them, so it was hard to persuade them to donate frequently. He and his employees ended up taking a triage approach, supplying what little sperm they had to the women who seemed most likely, or most desperate, to get pregnant.

  Graham didn’t enlist any minority donors, mostly but not entirely for lack of trying. Graham’s racial views were complicated. He retained the childhood prejudices learned in Harbor Springs. He felt uncomfortable around blacks and considered them mentally inferior to whites. Like Shockley, he felt his conclusion was scientific, not emotional. The “IQ of the average Negro,” he would say with certainty, is “twenty-two points lower than that of the average white American’s.” (That was ten more points than even Shockley claimed.) When Lori Andrews, a lawyer and bioethicist, applied to Graham for Nobel sperm as a kind of stunt, he asked her for legal help: he said he wanted to find a way he could give sperm to her—a single white woman—but not to a single black woman.

  Although Graham shared Shockley’s racist conclusions, he didn’t make a federal case of them. For Graham, race was a footnote to the larger story of genetic decline everywhere. He was willing to believe that genius could appear in anyone. But his fixation on IQ made him think it was much less likely among blacks and Hispanics. Graham was a racist but not always a white supremacist. He ranked blacks and Hispanics below whites in intelligence, but he ranked Asians above whites. He frequently tried, and always failed, to recruit Asian donors. And though he had grown up in a distinctly anti-Semitic town, Graham hugely admired Jews, whom he believed to be disproportionately intelligent. A large number of his donors were Jewish.

  Graham’s prejudice didn’t stop him from trying to recruit blacks. When Smith—who didn’t share Graham’s racial views—identified a brilliant black donor candidate, Graham encouraged him. They were both disappointed when the man’s diabetes disqualified him. The bank remained lily white. According to three former Repository managers, no black women ever applied for Repository sperm. This isn’t too surprising, since there were no black donors and people usually choose a sperm donor of their own race. The Repository did have Asian and Arab applicants who got pregnant.

  In the early 1980s, Graham worked hard to turn the Repository into a respectable business, rather than a ludicrous one: Graham’s wife didn’t like keeping the sperm at the Escondido estate. Not only had the house been picketed, but a Japanese trespasser had once made a run at the sperm, only to be nipped by a family dog. So Graham gave Paul Smith a room at his Del Mar beach house and moved the sperm tanks down there with him. Finally, in the mid-1980s, Graham resettled the bank in a three-room suite in downtown Escondido. The office was in the back of a real bank building, a source of amusement to visitors.

  Graham donated generously to Republican causes, but his notoriety hurt him. Some politicians he supported—Governor Pete Wilson, for example—shied away from him at political events (though Graham did score an invitation to the Reagan White House, among a group of other California businessmen). His reputation didn’t dampen the attendance at his famous parties. Graham would throw open “Shadybrook”—whose manicured ten-acre grounds were Graham’s other pride and joy—serve milk he had milked from his own goats, show off his horses, and bring in an old-fashioned ice cream wagon to scoop Baskin-Robbins. Graham sometimes invited donors to the parties and would slyly drop hints to them that other donors were in the room.

  Graham reveled in the theater of the genius sperm business. He grandly instructed his employees to “go out and change the world!” Whenever a reporter visited—which was often after Graham lifted his interview ban—Graham made a great show of removing his sport coat and pulling on a short white lab coat, as if to say: Here I am, a man of science. (In fact, nothing that qualified as science was practiced at the Repository. It was a mailroom, not a lab; its main activity was packing frozen vials into shipping canisters and handing them over to the Federal Express guy.) Still, Graham relished posing for photos in his lab coat. He liked photographers to shoot him as he opened a liquid-nitrogen vat, so that he was wreathed in a billowing cloud of vapor. The pictures were weird and compelling—a perfect, if ominous, advertisement for the product.

  Even more than the PR, Graham adored the process of recruitin
g donors. To most people, Graham was polite but cool. With his donors—with any man he admired—he fawned. Except for his vanity about his looks, Graham wasn’t very impressed with himself. Despite his wealth and extraordinary creativity, Graham never felt he belonged in the company of the men he was recruiting. He could easily have donated sperm to his own bank, but he never did so—he said that he was too short and not accomplished enough. It was an odd personality quirk. Even while conscripting donors who were manifestly less intelligent, less creative, and less good-looking than he was, Graham believed them worthier of posterity. Graham gushed about them: “These are just dandy guys. They have it all. They have the physique, the looks, the brains, that it would be good for everybody to have. There wouldn’t be a lot of political problems and economic problems in the world if everyone was like these guys.”

  Graham seduced his targets like a lover. He literally got crushes on them. (He wanted to have their babies.) He arranged meetings as if they were first dates. He dressed to the nines—immaculate sport jacket, tie, pressed white shirt, black leather belt with a silver “RKG” buckle. He took them to long dinners—he was a famously slow eater—where he flattered them with questions about their work, their life, their families. He studied up on his men—not merely the Nobelists, but even later donors whose achievements were meager—reading their academic papers, memorizing details from their entry in Who’s Who of Emerging Leaders. He didn’t use first names; anyone who could conceivably be called “Doctor,” he called “Doctor.”

  If he was traveling to see a donor—and he was known to fly across the country for a quick meeting—he would invite the donor back to his hotel room after dinner, to try to collect a first sample. He would work the candidates over to lure them to his room. “The oddest thing about contributing was that I felt like a girl. I felt feminine,” says one of Graham’s donors. “He took me to dinner, he tried to get me back to his hotel room. . . . And I said, ‘Now I know what women feel like.’ ” The recruits often felt powerless to resist Graham. He was so flattering, and the donations mattered so much to him. They couldn’t bear to disappoint him. Graham didn’t pay his donors—he was the only sperm banker who didn’t pay—but that was part of the seduction. He made them want to do it.

  And when he found his man, how thrilled he was! He took one look at Donor Grey-White and exclaimed, “What a specimen!” The first time Graham persuaded Edward Burnham to give a sperm sample, Graham paced outside the bathroom anxiously, like an expectant father. When Burnham emerged with the cup, Graham grabbed it from his hand, swabbed some of the semen on a slide, rushed over to the microscope, and peered down at Burnham’s spunk. After a moment, he stood up, made a fist, and shouted, “Yes! You’re just the man I thought you were!”

  By 1982, Graham had good donors; he had sperm; he had customers. But he still didn’t have babies. Twenty-five years ago, artificial insemination with frozen sperm was a crapshoot. (Today’s ovulation kits and hormone shots have boosted success rates considerably.) Finally, in April 1982, the hex was broken. An Arizona couple named Joyce and Jack Kowalski gave birth to the Nobel Prize sperm bank’s first baby, Victoria Kowalski. Her birth remained secret till June 29, when The National Enquirer broke the story with a two-page spread: “Mother of First ‘Nobel’ Sperm Bank Baby Tells Her Incredible Story: Our Miracle Baby Could Be America’s Hope for the Future.” Months earlier, the Enquirer had approached Graham’s assistant Paul Smith, offering $20,000 for an exclusive on the first baby. He had passed the Enquirer on to the expecting Kowalskis.

  The Enquirer feature, in classic tabloid fashion, revolted and mesmerized at the same time. Joyce was said to have chosen Victoria’s donor father from a list of “the greatest minds of our time,” picking “a famed mathematician with a genius IQ of over 200.” Joyce described Victoria as “a baby who could be the first of a new breed of genius children.” She recalled cradling Victoria in her arms for the first time. “Her dark blue eyes flashed with intelligence. ‘What will she become?’ I mused. ‘A female Thomas Edison or Einstein.’ . . . I imagine her as a young child studying college textbooks. I see her working out complex mathematical equations quicker than a computer.”

  Whatever dim views readers had of a genius-sperm-bank-going parent, Jack Kowalski confirmed them. He told the National Enquirer, “We feel we have a duty to raise this child for the betterment of society. We’ll give her the best educational opportunities possible. We’ll begin training Victoria on computers when she’s 3, and we’ll teach her words and numbers before she can walk.”

  Instead of restoring the luster Shockley had stolen from the Repository, the Kowalskis tarnished it again. Graham and Smith hadn’t vetted them carefully enough. As reporters chasing the Enquirer scoop soon discovered, the Kowalskis were convicted felons. When they applied to the bank, the couple had just been sprung from federal prison, where they had served a year for using the identities of dead children to secure credit cards and bank loans. That wasn’t the worst of it: the Kowalskis had also lost custody of Joyce’s two children by her first husband. According to the first husband, Jack Kowalski had sent his stepson to school in his pajamas wearing a sign that said he was a bed wetter. Jack Kowalski also apparently tried to bully the first two kids into becoming prodigies, abusing them if they didn’t work hard enough: “My daughter was made to wash dishes in superhot water if she did not toe the academic line,” Joyce’s first husband alleged. The Kowalskis disappeared after the press started pursuing them, eventually settling in backwoods Arkansas and homeschooling Victoria.

  The Kowalski fiasco reflected the Nobel bank’s general chaos. Graham was a hands-off manager, and his employees ran the bank haphazardly. Records were a mess, when they were kept at all. Often, the bank didn’t track what sperm it gave to what mother. The donor-coding system was inconsistent. Some donors were numbers; others were colors; others were numbers with colors. Sometimes colors were reused: there were at least two different Donor Oranges, and a Donor Orange/Red. There was a Donor Yellow, a Donor Brown, and a Donor Yellow/Brown. The donor catalogs were rife with misspellings. It couldn’t have made a great first impression when applicants read about “Donor Corral,” “Donor Fucshia,” and “Donor Turquois.” Some genius!

  Paul Smith’s eccentricities were also troubling, at least to his assistant, Julianna McKillop. A disgruntled customer sued the bank, claiming that the vials sent by Paul had contained barely any sperm, certainly not enough to get her pregnant. Graham settled the lawsuit out of court. A little later, Smith drew the bank another suit, this one for libel. He told an interviewer that any woman who wanted to bear “defectives” should go to the Sperm Bank of Northern California. The rival bank sued. Smith was something of a showman, and his stunts were not usually helpful to the Repository. To ensure his anonymity—and thus protect the identities of his donors—Smith would be photographed only when wearing a surgical mask. He would even do TV interviews wearing the mask—an affectation that seemed less a useful precaution than an oddity.

  But never mind, women kept applying. The National Enquirer story produced another hundred applicants. A bunch of pleading letters followed every media mention. Nothing helped the bank’s reputation more than little Doron Blake, the bank’s second baby, born in August 1982. His mother, Afton Blake, had failed to get pregnant by her first choice, one of the Nobel laureates. She had managed to conceive by Donor Red #28—a computer scientist and classical musician. (He also suffered “slightly” from hemorrhoids, according to his catalog entry.)

  Doron Blake, the Nobel sperm bank’s celebrity baby, on the cover of the August 1983 Mother Jones. Courtesy of Mother Jones

  Afton was a “transpersonal” psychologist; one of her specialties was plumbing her patients’ past lives. She was a shy, socially clumsy woman, but she had the psychologist’s faith in openness. Secrets were poison; everyone should tell everything. (Within minutes of meeting me, for example, Afton was sharing her sexual dreams about Bill Clinton.) The media appetite for supe
rbabies was gluttonous, and Afton was happy to feed it. She did interviews while she was pregnant. She went on TV with Doron when he was two weeks old. At two months she posed him for People, a straw-haired little charmer. She put him on the cover of Mother Jones at a year, in Maclean’s a couple of years later. She let California magazine ride the school bus with him, showed him off on 48 Hours, 60 Minutes, Primetime Live, you name it. The New York Times even published an editorial for the occasion of Doron’s first birthday, “An Ideal Husband.” It wrote of Afton, “She knows nothing but good of [the donor]. Her son can have nothing but pride in his amusing, athletic, intelligent, music-loving Dad. And Dad, who was to Doron’s mother what the bee is to the flower, was equally free to buzz away. Why ruin so perfect a relationship?”

  Doron obliged by being a prodigy, or so his mother kept reminding everyone. “Doron” was Greek for “gift,” as Afton would tell reporters. This produced stories that began by marveling at the many “gifts” of the boy named “Gift.” Afton let a reporter arrange a psychological exam for Doron when he was all of four months old. The psychologist declared that Doron had a mental age of eight months. As a newborn, Doron could mark time to classical music with his hands. By age two, he was using a computer. He was playing chess at five. By kindergarten, he was scanning the Iliad and learning algebra. A year later, he had written a draft of his first children’s book. Two years later, he was poring over Einstein’s theory of relativity.

  All of this was passed on to reporters by Afton, along with even more intimate information: that Afton had breast-fed him till he was six. That she had bought him a subscription to Playboy so he could learn about sexuality. That she wanted him to grow up to be like Gandhi or Churchill.