by Ann Wroe
Surrogacy is a novelty of the rich world. While a desire to have children may be common to all, this has conflicted in poor countries with a concern about rising populations. If there are surrogate births in China or India, no one is reporting them.
In America and Europe, producing a child is seen as a right. Being deprived of a child, it can be argued, takes away that right. The traditional remedy has been adoption, but, with the growth of welfare services, fewer single mothers now surrender their babies, while others will have chosen abortion. Medicine has sought to fill the gap. Sometimes an egg collected from an “infertile” woman will grow in the surrogate mother. However, even if the surrogate’s egg is used, the baby should at least be a bit like Dad.
One of the charms claimed for surrogacy is that a baby can be partially designed to order. So a white, fair-haired infant may eventually grace the nursery, if that is what the couple wants. The surrogate baby is formally turned over to its biological father whose wife can then adopt it. But what if the surrogate mother is so attached to the child that she refuses to hand it over? This is what happened in 1986 in the celebrated “Baby M” case arising out of a surrogacy arranged by Mr Keane.
The surrogate mother, Mary Whitehead, asked a court to allow her to keep Baby M. The case went to a higher court, where the judge did his best to play Solomon. The father who had ordered Baby M was given custody but Miss Whitehead was awarded visiting rights. In a separate case Miss Whitehead sued Mr Keane for not screening her adequately and there was an out of court settlement. In another case involving Mr Keane’s firm, a baby died because, it was said in court, the father did not have “parenting skills”.
The Baby M and other cases brought surrogacy great publicity, much of it unfavourable. Some American states made surrogacy illegal. Latterly, Mr Keane has had a practice in Indiana, where it is legal as long as all the parties involved in a surrogacy live elsewhere (most surrogate law is confusing). In Britain, surrogacy is legal but soliciting for surrogate business and advertising were banned under a law passed in 1985. Some American firms see Britain and other European countries as a promising market, but prospective clients usually have to go to the United States to
choose a surrogate mother and arrange the contract.
There can be snags bringing home a baby born abroad. What is its nationality? What happens if twins are born and the contracting couple will take only one child? Lawyers try to rise to such challenges. Surrogacy is a new, interesting and profitable business. A baby, nominally free to a normal couple, becomes an expensive product in the marketplace. Only luxury items take nine months to make. Miss Whitehead was paid $10,000. Today a surrogate mother may charge a lot more. Some agencies in America reckon on a bill to the happy couple of up to $65,000, to include the costs of doctors and psychologists as well as the fee to the surrogate mother. A Russian agencyoffers a similar service for a competitive $25,000. Comes the market, comes the product. Advertising on the internet, a prospective surrogate mother (blonde hair, green eyes, Caucasian) is reassuring: “My husband is very supportive.”
Apart from distaste about the commerce of surrogacy, some critics claim that the baby suffers psychologically. A woman is not a hen producing eggs, goes the argument: the baby bonds with the surrogate mother in her womb and is upset when handed over to a stranger. No one knows if this is true, so anyone can join in. Mr Keane kept his counsel in the moral, religious and medical arguments that kept the chat shows busy but, according to friends, was hurt by much of the criticism. He was an outgoing personality, one of five children of parents who had come to the United States from Ireland. He took a simple view of his work: some women could have children, some could not. What was wrong with the have-nots being given a helping hand? He reckoned that he had arranged the births of about 600 children (and had two sons of his own). Some parents were so grateful that their child was named Noel, or, if appropriate, Noelle.
Karl Kehrle
Karl Kehrle (Brother Adam), saviour of the bees, died on September 1st 1996, aged 98
The achievement of Karl Kehrle, a Benedictine monk, was to breed a very decent British bee. Wherever in the world apiarists meet they speak in awe of Mr Kehrle’s sturdy bee, which produces lots of honey and is reluctant to sting. Like the British themselves, it is a mongrel, combining the virtues of the native bee with those of worthy bees from elsewhere. Mr Kehrle once heard of a promising bee said to be found only in central Africa. Although in his 80s, in poor health and carried on the back of a friend, he tracked the bee down on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro.
Selective breeding has been going on in a random way for thousands of years since animals and plants were first domesticated. Gregor Mendel (1822−84), like Mr Kehrle a monk, laid the foundations of what has come to be called genetics. Mendel did clever things with garden peas, but had no success with bees, whose sexual practices remained a mystery to him. Queen bees, it is now known, mate with a drone, or several drones, while on the wing. Then, loaded with sperm, they return to the hive for several years, producing huge numbers of bees. Mr Kehrle pioneered artificial insemination for bees, impregnating his queens with the sperm of immigrant bees. “A very delicate operation,” remarked a colleague of Mr Kehrle.
His Buckfast bee, named after the abbey in Devon where Mr Kehrle was a monk, became an unusual export, earning many thousands of pounds for the order. Numerous Buckfast bees have been imported by commercial honey producers in the United States, where disease has caused widespread damage. (The Benedictines, a fairly liberal order, have a talent for making money: their abbey in northern France makes a liqueur, much in demand despite being too sweet for some tastes.) Mr Kehrle became a celebrity within the bee world, lecturing here, picking up an honorary doctorate there, written up in bee journals, made a vice-president of Britain’s International Bee Research Association. A species of bee was named after him. It wasn’t a bad career for someone who, as he occasionally remarked, had no formal education at all.
Karl Kehrle was born in Germany. His mother, a keen Roman Catholic, heard that the monks rebuilding their abbey at Buckfast, shut down in the reign of Henry VIII, needed workers. So Karl, not quite 12, was sent to England. He wasn’t strong enough to lift stones, so he helped with the bees. By 1919, aged 21 and now a monk named Brother Adam, he was the abbey’s master beekeeper. He set out to save the native British bee, which was being wiped out by a disease called acarine. He cross-bred Italian bees, which were free of acarine, with some of the abbey’s bees that had eluded the disease. The cross-breeding was a process that was continued under Mr Kehrle over subsequent years with the help of other foreign bees.
Some bee people, while admiring Mr Kehrle’s skill as a beekeeper, note that his innovations owed much to the work of Ludwig Armbruster, a fellow German (later a victim of the Nazis), who, following up the work of Mendel, published research on bees and genetics. Mr Kehrle was, by contrast, a hands-on, practical man. But this was no bad thing. Someone has to turn theory into practice. He was unsurpassed as a breeder of bees. He talked to them, he stroked them. He brought to the hives a calmness that,according to those who saw him at work, the sensitive bees responded to. He was very upset when two of the abbey’s queen bees were stolen, and remarked on the frailty of humans. Bees, he said, would never behave like people. “He loved the bees almost as much as he loved God,” said a colleague.
A mischievous comment, perhaps. Yet even in the brotherly community of an abbey little jealousies can arise over a colleague who seems to have got more than his fair share of attention. In 1991 Mr Kehrle asked the abbey to provide him with a qualified assistant to help with research into the varroa parasite, which, like the acarine disease of the 1920s, is threatening British bees, and is at present controlled, although only partially, by chemicals. The abbot turned down the request, and apparently felt that, after 80 years at the abbey, it was time for Brother Adam to part from his bees and spend the remainder of his life on monkish duties. “I am sure that he would consider himself
a monk first and a beekeeper second,” said the abbot, not entirely convincingly. Mr Kehrle handed over his hives to young monks, but was never unwilling to give advice.
He said he wanted to live to 100. The astonishing thing is that he lived as long as he did. Physically, he was not strong. His journeys abroad in search of bees, often partly on foot or by donkey, were exhausting. He suffered several heart attacks. Doctors routinely told him he would never work again. Several times he received the last rites of his religion, but clambered from his bed to see how his bees were managing without him. If an interest in life can keep you going, it certainly worked with Karl Kehrle.
Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick, cinema’s master of pessimism, died on March 7th 1999, aged 70
It is the dialogue that seems especially puzzling in “2001: A Space Odyssey”, Stanley Kubrick’s best-known film. Why is it so awful? The film is marvellous to watch. The use of a Strauss waltz, “The Blue Danube”, as accompanying music is both innovative and successful. But the wooden words? Still, Mr Kubrick was forgiven when the film came out in 1968. Even great directors should be allowed to make mistakes.
That view, though kind, was itself mistaken. As the film has been watched and watched again, and increasingly admired, the dialogue has come to be accepted as appallingly accurate. This is the new minimalist language, call it min-lan, invented by Houston’s space people and now used wherever simple messages need to be put over quickly. Motorway signs, advertisements, even television soaps, all use min-lan. Mr Kubrick anticipated a world where a tiny spoken vocabulary, and even fewer written words, were all you needed to get by. The eloquence of, say, “Casablanca”, made in 1942, had been superseded by the frugality of Hal, the talking robot in 2001. Of all the horrors, existing and potential, confronted in Mr Kubrick’s films, the abandoning of literacy is perhaps the most dismaying. Books, newspapers, if they survived at all, would be for an elite, and regarded in an urgent world as irrelevant as medieval manuscripts.
Stanley Kubrick himself did his best to insulate himself from what he regarded as the pains of modern living, which included cars, flying and the attentions of reporters, while carrying on with his career as a maker of films with a world-wide audience. In the 1960s he moved from Hollywood to England and bought a statelyish house near, but not too near, London. Here he lived with the fourth of his wives and three daughters. When making a film he would be driven each day, at not more than 30 miles an hour, to Pinewood studios, a well-equipped survivor from the days when Britain had a large and flourishing film industry. During his time in England he gave few interviews and avoided having his picture taken, which is why published photographs of him are as a younger man.
The young Kubrick had a quick success. He took a snap of a man selling newspapers reporting the death of President Roosevelt. Look magazine bought the picture and offered him a job. He was poised to go to university, but at 17 who could turn down such a chance? Later, Mr Kubrick was to disparage formal learning, as self-educated people sometimes do. “I never learned anything at all at school,” he said. He was, anyway, hardly a teacher’s favourite: films were his only real interest. In New York he could see practically every film that was ever made, either at the commercial cinema or at the Museum of Modern Art. He said that seeing so many bad films made him feel he could do better. He left Look and, with money borrowed from his father, a doctor, he made a number of short documentaries which he sold to a Hollywood company.
Hollywood was sufficiently impressed by his talent to allow him to make some low-cost feature films, among them “Paths of Glory”, set in the first world war, his first critical success, in 1957. Two years
later he was given real money to spend on “Spartacus”, a Roman epic. At 29 Mr Kubrick was regarded as a major director who could name his own terms. But he disliked working as part of a team. He sought control of the script, the editing, the lighting, the music, as well as the direction, as he had in his early shoestring movies. Only then could he accurately convey his dark view of the world, which in some ways accords with that of Thomas Hobbes, a 17th-century English philosopher remembered for his observation that life in the state of nature is “nasty, brutish and short”. Stanley Kubrick’s great films, “Dr Strangelove”, “A Clockwork Orange”, “Lolita” and “2001”, are, as far as Mr Kubrick could order things, untouched by any hand other than his.
England gave him freedom. Far from the moguls of Hollywood, he could indulge his costly obsession for perfection. He shot the closing of a car door more than 70 times before he was satisfied it looked right. Actors would be taken mercilessly through a scene again and again. Some would quit, fleeing into the arms of theirpsychiatrist. Actors were flattered to be asked to work in a Kubrick film, but for some once was enough. “You don’t have to be nice to be talented,” Kirk Douglas said of Mr Kubrick. 2001 took so long to make that its backers asked if they would have to wait until then to see it.
His final film, “Eyes Wide Shut”, was 12 months overdue when it was completed just before he died. Mr Kubrick has been customarily secretive about it. Little has been revealed, although there are rumours that in it Tom Cruise wears a dress. The film is due to be shown in July or thereabouts, and the moguls seem confident that it will be successful, commercially and critically as most Kubrick films have been. Stanley Kubrick might have been odd, but in the end he delivered the goods, and such goods.
Konrad Kujau
Konrad Kujau, forger of the Hitler diaries, died on September 12th 2000, aged 62
As a forger, Konrad Kujau began modestly, getting free meals with fake luncheon vouchers. He had stumbled on a truth, pithily expressed by Shakespeare, that the world is a “great stage of fools”. He was not at all surprised when the fools lined up to acclaim his most ambitious work, the Hitler diaries. The diaries were bought by Stern, a German magazine, Britain’s Sunday Times and America’s Newsweek. This, they claimed, was the scoop of the century. Hugh Trevor-Roper, an authority on the Hitler period, was among the luckless academics who dispelled doubts about their authenticity. Yet the diaries were later shown to be forgeries by the simplest of scientific tests. The paper and the ink had been made long after Hitler had died. Mr Kujau had made the paper look old by soaking it in tea.
The gullibility of those taken in by the diaries may be excused, or at least explained, by the fact that Hitler was, and remains, the most intriguing monster of modern times. By the 1980s, when Stern first got wind of the diaries, it seemed that everything about Adolf Hitler had been found, sifted, published, and published again. Now here was a rich new seam of Hitleriana. There was this entry in 1936 when Germany staged the Olympic Games: “Must not forget tickets for Eva.”
No editor of a popular paper could resist the evident charm of Hitler as a human being, and so banal. Better get me the file on Eva Braun. Was she sexy?
Konrad Kujau was sent to jail for four and a half years for his deception. Some Germans felt he had got off too lightly, and in fact he was released after three years. But most felt he had done no real harm. In 1996 he ran for mayor of Stuttgart and received 901 votes. A television film was made of his career, treating it with much heavy German humour. It was considered a riot by everyone except Mr Kujau, who felt that not enough credit had been given to his talent as an artist.
He did have a gift. He could paint. And he had what painters call a “good eye” for detail. As a young man Konrad Kujau had studied art in Dresden, in what was then East Germany. He moved to the West in 1957, worked in menial jobs and saved up enough money to open a shop in Stuttgart. His wares were Nazi memorabilia and autographs of personalities from the Hitler era, which he forged along with his luncheon vouchers. Aware that there was a market for anything connected with Hitler himself, he forged some poems, an opera and watercolours by the Führer and his diary covering a few months in 1935.
Gerd Heidemann, a Stern employee who patronised Mr Kujau’s shop, was intensely interested in the diary. Where did it come from? Were there any
more like that? The story that Mr Heidemann subsequently told Stern was that diaries kept by Hitler over a period of 12 years had been salvaged from a German aircraft that had crashed after leaving Berlin just before the city fell to the Russians and were now for sale. The story seemed to add up. A plane had crashed in the locality and at the time specified. Who knew what dirty dealing went on in East Germany? Stern agreed to buy the diaries under conditions of strict secrecy, and several million dollars were passed to Mr Kujau via
Gerd Heidemann, who took a generous commission (and, like his accomplice, was later jailed).
For two years Mr Kujau laboured in a back room in his Stuttgart shop, penning the thoughts and deeds of Hitler in a fair copy of the Führer’s spidery handwriting, using a steel nib. One by one the volumes were handed over, 62 in all, to a grateful and marvelling Stern.
Mr Kujau was proud of his skill and, in later life, was always happy to give a quick lesson on forgery to reporters. He was upset when a German archivist, late in the day, called his work “superficial”. It was the sheer volume of the diaries that fooled the experts. Hugh Trevor-Roper noted that the collection “coheres as a whole”. There was plenty of source material – biographies of Hitler, contemporary newspapers and soon. Sometimes Mr Kujau wore a general’s uniform of the Nazi period to get him in the mood. After a time Mr Kujau felt that he was Hitler. “As I wrote about Stalingrad, my hand began to shake.” Many forgers have had a similar experience. The most famous was Thomas Chatterton, an 18th-century writer who forged poems that he said were written by one Thomas Rowley, a medieval monk, and which continue to be much admired.
