The questionnaires, concrete as they were, were an invaluable source of information. The men’s idiosyncratic responses to standard questions revealed the adaptive styles and behaviors that colored all the other facets of their lives. As one man put it, “We reveal ourselves whenever we say anything.” One man sent in a questionnaire two years late because he had just found it under his bed; I wasn’t surprised to find evidence of passive aggression in other areas of his existence. We didn’t have to depend on words or dream reports, because (as I’ll show in Chapter 8) the Study’s prolonged and repeated opportunities for observation allowed us to see so-called ego defenses made tangible in concrete behavior. During the years that we overlapped, Charles McArthur was an enthusiastic supporter of this interest.
In 1967 I also began obtaining two-hour interviews of the men, because no questionnaire can convey a person’s flavor the way a face-to-face meeting can. This was the first systematic interviewing since Margaret Lantis’s tenure in the early 1950s, and the new practice of re-interviewing about every fifteen years has continued through my directorship up to the present.
My second major research interest, maturation, came to life shortly after I joined the Grant Study. My father died when he was forty-four and I was ten. I retained an indelible memory from 1947, my thirteenth year, of his twenty-fifth reunion book, where photographs of barely post-adolescent college seniors sit next door to the portraits of mature forty-six-year-olds. When the Grant Study men returned for their twenty-fifth reunions beginning in 1967, I experienced my interviews with them as eye-openers; I myself was still a callow thirty-three, but I understood right away that I had unconsciously been waiting for this encounter for twenty-five years. After that, my interest in adult maturation competed with my interests in defense and resilience.
The single most personally rewarding facet of my involvement with the Grant Study has been the chance to interview these men over four decades. The magic of transference hasn’t hurt. I am fifteen years younger than they, and when I began, I could not forget that I had been in kindergarten when they had entered the Study. I wanted to call them all “Sir.” But they invariably treated me as respectfully as college sophomores would treat a Study physician. I met no condescension, and because I already knew so much about them, the interviews were often remarkably intimate. But they reinforced a belief that the questionnaires had already inculcated in me: that however they may try, people can never neutralize their personalities.
There was an intensity to many of the interviews that was both gratifying and surprising. Often talking with these men was like resuming an old friendship after a period of separation, and that made me feel a little guilty, for I had done little to earn the warmth and trust that they offered. But I soon discovered that whether the men liked me or I liked them had less to do with me than with them. The men who found loving easy made me feel warmly toward them, and left me marveling at my tact and skill as an interviewer. In contrast, the men who had spent their lives fearful of other people and gone unloved in return often left me feeling incompetent and clumsy, like a heartless investigator, vivisecting shy innocents for science.
With some of the men the interviews felt like psychiatric consultations; with some like newspaper profiles; with some like talks with an old friend. I learned to associate a man’s capacity to talk frankly of his life with positive mental health. With maturity comes the capacity and the willingness to express emotion in meaningful words.
I learned quickly that the men’s responses to me paralleled their ways of relating to people in general. One man, for example, evaded the first few questions I asked him, and then turned to me and said expansively, “Well, let’s hear about you!” At first I thought I had just been inept, but then I saw a comment from a staff psychiatrist in 1938: “This boy is more difficult to interview than any I have encountered in the group.” One of the warmest, richest personalities in the Study invited me to his home for breakfast at 7 a.m., cooked me a soft-boiled egg, and then extended the interview well past the two hours that I had requested. This in spite of the fact that he was working a sixteen-hour day, that he was moving his entire household to New York in two weeks, that his son was graduating from high school in eight hours, and that he himself had just suffered a devastating business reversal that was front-page news. Far less busy but more socially isolated men would put me off for a week and then meet me in the most neutral setting possible—two of them chose airports!
Some men came to Cambridge to be interviewed, but in most cases I went to them—to Hawaii, Canada, London, New Zealand. One man—only one—seemed very reluctant to be interviewed. But once the interview began he allowed it to extend through his lunch hour, and gave me a lengthy, exciting, and startlingly frank account of his life. Other men readily agreed to see me, but retreated behind ingenious obstacles. Two took every opportunity to interpose their large families between themselves and me when I visited, while others kept their families well out of sight the whole time I was there. There were cultural differences, too. All the New Yorkers and most of the New Englanders saw me in their offices, and few offered me a meal. Virtually all the Midwesterners saw me at home and invited me to dinner. The Californians were evenly divided. Several wives were openly suspicious of the whole enterprise. One spoke so stridently into the telephone that sitting across the desk from her husband I could hear her refuse to see “that shrink” under any circumstances.
Between 1967 and 1970, I re-interviewed a random 50 percent sample of the Study classes of 1942–1944. In 1978–1979, Eva Milofsky, the social-worker daughter of Sigmund Freud’s personal physician Max Schur, re-interviewed the rest. Most of the surviving men were interviewed again as they reached retirement age around 1990, almost half by me and the rest by the very gifted Maren Batalden, M.D., whose work will appear in more detail in coming chapters. When the surviving men were about 85 (2004–2006), they, and their wives, were interviewed once more by Robert Waldinger and his team. The Grant Study is probably unique in having obtained so many interviews over so many years. And since the administrative reorganization in 1970, the Study has managed to track the men from the Glueck Inner City cohort in a fashion virtually identical to our follow-up of the College cohort; both cohorts are now included as subjects in any major Study publication.
To keep reliably in touch with two cohorts over many years is a tough business, and for the last twenty years that business has been in the hands of Robin Western, MFA, our reincarnation of Lewise Gregory. Western has been a tactful and insightful interviewer and a skilled detective, finding our strays and luring them back to the Study. She has been a meticulous and skilled archivist, maintaining seventy years of collected data in manageable order. She’s been a key research colleague, planning every questionnaire and wheedling the men’s physical exams (with the men’s written permission, of course) out of their doctors’ offices and into ours. To top it all off, she’s been a wonderful friend. If the Grant and Glueck Studies are now among the longest in the world, much credit goes to the perseverance and thoroughness of Robin Western.
Every time I settle down to analyze this wealth of material, yet another of the many richnesses of longitudinal studies becomes clear. No single interview, no single questionnaire, is ever adequate to reveal the complete man, but the mosaic of interviews produced by many observers over many years can be most revealing. One member of the Study, for example, was always seen as dynamic and charismatic by the female staff members, but as a neurotic fool by the males. One shy man from a very privileged background came across to a staff member from a similar milieu as charming, but a colleague from a working-class family thought he was a lifeless stick.
Some concealed truths emerged only after the Study members had been followed for a long time. One reticent man was thirty before he revealed that his mother had had a postpartum depression following his birth. This had not emerged either in his psychiatric interviews at nineteen or in Lewise Gregory’s family interview. One man kept his homose
xuality secret until he was seventy-five, another until he was ninety. In general, few of the men acknowledged a wife’s alcoholism until they were over sixty-five. They were far more honest about their own alcoholism, extramarital affairs, and tax evasion.
In 2005, Robert Waldinger, M.D., a research psychiatrist with a particular interest in intimate relationships, succeeded me as director as the Study. From 2004 to 2006 he re-interviewed and, even better, videotaped consenting married couples and obtained their DNA. In recent years, some of the men have consented to fMRI studies, in an attempt to clarify the positive emotions involved in intimacy. I’ll illustrate some of his work in Chapter 6. Some men have donated their brains to the Study. These are further generous sowings whose value will likely not be appreciated for many years.
SOME NOTES ON FUNDING
Keeping the Grant Study in continuous funds for forty years was an anxiety-provoking challenge, but one that with flexibility, resourcefulness, and some sheer good luck I was able to meet.
Since the Career Research Scientist Award that provided my salary for thirty years included no research funds, in 1971 I wrote to the Grant Foundation requesting $800 to pay the retired Lewise Gregory Davies, now in her seventies, to reenlist recalcitrant Study members once more. At that point we had perhaps seventeen nonresponders. Douglas Bond, former staff psychiatrist to the Grant Study (1942), chairman of the Grant Foundation, dean of Western Reserve Medical School, and son of the Earl Bond who had been advisor to both Arlie Bock and William Grant, came to visit me at Harvard. He listened to my ardent plea on behalf of this uniquely valuable longitudinal study, and then he wrote us a check for $50,000 ($280,000 in 2009 dollars). This astonishing munificence provided the seed money for the grant requests and infrastructure by which we obtained continuous funding for the Grant Study for the next three decades. The timing was fortuitous, because the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism had just opened, and money was relatively plentiful.
Our funding from the NIAAA between 1972 and 1982 required us to pay explicit attention to alcoholism. It also supported the questions in which I had been primarily interested—involuntary coping, relationships, and adult maturation—but the study of alcoholism proved so fascinating that I have given it a chapter of its own (Chapter 9).
The first publication to emerge during my directorship, when the men were about fifty, focused explicitly on prescription drug abuse by the forty-six Study men who became physicians. I used responses from questionnaires and interviews to contrast the frequency of mood-altering drug use and abuse by these men with use and abuse by other Study participants. In this case, the Study’s demographic homogeneity presented a convenient means of obtaining a matched control group for the physicians. The physicians were twice as likely to use and abuse mood-altering drugs as the controls.31
The publication of this paper in the New England Journal of Medicine brought attention to the Grant Study, and it also helped me address an important issue in longitudinal research: whether the process of being studied alters the course of participants’ lives. Would the Grant Study doctors, most of whom read the Journal, change their self-prescribing behavior in response to my paper? Sadly for them, but happily for my trust in the validity of prospective design, we found ten years later that mood-altering drug abuse had actually increased among the physicians, but not among the controls (who were much less likely to have read the article). Despite my prediction that the doctors would modify their habits (or at least their answers), their misuse of drugs actually got worse. The controls’ did not. This result also confirmed my impression that the men were being remarkably honest in their questionnaires.
In 1983, I published The Natural History of Alcoholism, which summarized years of research.32 That same year, to put our next research phase on a more secure financial footing, I accepted an endowed chair in psychiatry at Dartmouth. This meant that Dartmouth would pay my salary, and scarce research funds could be reserved for purposes more interesting than keeping me housed and fed. For ten years the Study moved with its files to Hanover, although it remained the administrative responsibility of Harvard University Health Services.
In 1986 the focus of the Study turned to aging. I was still primarily interested in adaptation, but I was a true Willie Sutton of a researcher, going where the money was. As with the alcohol studies, though, once I learned a little about the subject, I found myself fascinated. And, of course, the matter of aging is absolutely intrinsic to a study of this kind—and to my interest in adult maturation—which was very soon brought vividly home to me.
My first application to the National Institute on Aging was turned down cold. The reason was simple. The proposal’s age-phobic fifty-one-year-old author had offered to follow the men’s aging prospectively—as progressive decline. (I’ll say in my own defense that Shakespeare thought the same way in his youth.) The vigorous seventy-eight-year-old chairman of the NIA research grant committee, eminent gerontologist James Birren, made it abundantly clear that that was not how he viewed aging, and he denied my grant request in no uncertain terms. Forgiving and generative, however, he also undertook to raise my consciousness; and thoroughly chastened but now able to envision aging as a positive process, I rewrote the application. The NIA agreed to fund us, and in 2002 the resulting book, Aging Well, captured the inspirational reality of aging as James Birren both imagined and exemplified it. It was a study of the aging process in real time, and it put to scientific rest the negativity of mid-life popular “experts” on aging like Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan. The National Institute on Aging continues to support the Study to this day, and I hope that Chapter 7 will persuade any readers who happen to doubt it that there are worse things in life than living to ninety.
In 1992, Brigham and Women’s Hospital offered me secure funding, and the Grant Study came home to Boston. It remained at Brigham and Women’s until 2010, when Robert Waldinger, director since 2005, moved it to the Massachusetts General Hospital.
PERSPECTIVES—THEIRS AND OURS
We at the Study have often been asked what effect the men’s membership in it has had on them. When we’ve asked them, most have said that it had no direct effect on them, and indeed there is little to suggest that it has changed their lives in any major way. But as a group they have enjoyed their participation. In 1943 one man wrote, “The Study impressed me by its thoroughness, its interest in the little things, its ability to make the subject feel a part of it rather than a guinea pig. Now it is a gratifying reassurer and friend.” A second very shy Study member, who had asked the comely but six years older Lewise Gregory to go to the theater with him (she went), wrote, “I feel my friendship with you (the Study) has more than paid back anything that I put into it.” Yet another man wrote, “The very act of being a participant, receiving and pondering the follow-up questionnaires, etc. . . . has made me more self-consciously analytical about my personal development, life choices, career progress, and the like.”
Staff members, of course, have our own answers about how the Study has affected us, and I will illustrate here one effect that the Study had on me. Here follows the story of my engagement with one Study member, Art Miller. It’s a story of detective work, of which there is plenty in an enterprise like this. It’s a story of adaptation. But more than anything, for me it was an object lesson about the dangers of judgment. Precipitous conclusions are a constant danger to incautious scientists, and the story of Art Miller is my best reminder that a long perspective is our only true protection against it.
THE STORY OF ART MILLER
In 1960, Art Miller disappeared. He came back safely from the war, and told John Monks that he had seen no heavy combat. He went to graduate school, earned a Ph.D. in Renaissance drama, and became an English professor. His published scholarly essays can still be downloaded with Google’s help. But then he vanished. For twenty years he was the only “lost” member of the Study. It wasn’t until 1980 that I managed to reach his elderly mother, who told me that he had quit
his university job long ago and moved to Western Australia, where he was raising his family and teaching high-school drama. I called telephone information in his small town. They sent a man out to his house on a bicycle (things are different in the Outback), only to find that he had moved. The operator called up the headmaster of Miller’s school in the middle of the night so as to be able to call me with the new phone number when it was daytime in Boston. When I called Miller at home and told him that I might be coming to Australia, he sounded delighted and insisted on giving me supper and a bed for the night. This evasive man seemed genuinely interested in seeing me.
When I got to Melbourne and called to schedule a meeting, it was the end of the school term, a difficult time for Art. Nevertheless, he agreed to a visit. When I arrived, his front door was open. A note revealed that he was still at the school play, but a nice dinner was laid out and a cold beer was waiting for me in the icebox. Miller and his wife got back after I had been there about an hour, and as the interview proceeded, we made a significant dent in the bottle of Scotch that I had brought as a house present. He had told me that he had moved to Australia out of disaffection with the United States. For one thing, he was afraid that drugs would endanger his children’s adolescence; he had not liked “the cut” of their friends. For another, he was committedly against the war in Vietnam. There were some nonspecific reasons for his alienation as well; as he put it, “There was so much anger in the air.” I found myself wondering briefly if perhaps he had been running from something.
On the phone calls that followed my visit, Miller was always courteous to me. He never returned another Study questionnaire, however, and he never revealed his whereabouts to Harvard. The last time I reached his number, his daughter told me that he had died of cancer.
Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study Page 10
