The Nazi and the Psychiatrist

by Jack El-Hai

  So Kelley’s frustration and anger remained bottled up. The emotions heaved in cycles of work and violence, amid continual demands from the responsibilities he had taken on to distract himself from his inner turmoil. He shuttled among classes, criminal consultations, TV appearances, lectures, police screening, his own writing, and husbandhood and fatherhood. He cooked dinner every night, met with and dissected psychopaths, tried to guide children not yet in adolescence into high intellectual achievement, and entertained audiences—all while leaving his own volatility and psyche unexamined. His weight crept up along with his stress. Over time he noticed the twinges of a duodenal ulcer—not the sort of thing that would curb his craving for spicy foods—and popped Tums much as Göring had snacked on paracodeine. His personal physician, Harry Borson, warned Kelley that the ulcer probably was the result of the strain of overwork. But never did Kelley waste thought on taking care of himself.

  Others could see the dangers of Kelley’s fast and brutal track. Lewis Terman warned him of the danger of spreading himself so thin. “I am amazed by the number of activities you are engaged in and can’t help but wonder whether it is too many for your long-range professional good,” Terman wrote to Kelley in 1955. Terman, an older man who had known Kelley since the psychiatrist’s childhood, owned up to having the same workaholic tendencies himself, a habit he regretted. In reply, Kelley defensively described how he had increased his work efficiency by accelerating the pace of his activities to get everything done. “For example,” Kelley wrote, “preparation for a speech or paper ordinarily takes [me] 20 to 30 minutes unless, of course, a major research project is involved.” He admitted, though, that he could not continue to capably juggle the tasks of parenting, teaching, and researching, and he promised to heed Terman’s cautions. But he never did—his inner demons proved too relentless. That same year, Kelley’s mother June died, which—though he left no record of his feelings—must have devastated him.

  George Dreher, a family friend, took notice of the load Kelley seemed to bear. Around the fall of 1957, he observed that Kelley “was feeling the weight of his exceptional workload,” he wrote to Dukie several months later, “but only now am I sensing how much inner strain this signified. It is probable that not only I, but many others who should have understood and responded, were hindered by the impression of his obvious competence and vitality.” By the time Dreher wrote his letter, however, it was too late.

  When he was forty-five, Douglas M. Kelley’s professional pressures, internal grievances and disappointments, and marital unhappiness flared up in a violent ignition. Doug can project a flickering replay of the nightmare scene in his mind. It is New Year’s Day 1958, late afternoon, twenty-four hours past his tenth birthday. The Christmas tree still stands in the corner of the living room, and Doug’s younger siblings Alicia, then eight, and Allen, four, are playing together on the floor by the fireplace. A football game fills the screen of the color TV, and Doug and his grandfather, Doc, are watching it. Kelley and Dukie are preparing dinner in the kitchen.

  There is a commotion in the kitchen. Something has happened. The voices grow louder. The words aren’t understandable, but they rise in pitch. Doc looks up and listens. Kelley and Dukie are taking turns shouting at each other. They’re fighting—there’s no doubt. It goes on until the Old Man throws open the door and strides into the living room. He is talking gibberish, spouting sounds of anger. Won’t take it anymore, he bellows. He spins round the corner and runs upstairs into his study and slams the door shut. A blue porcelain doorstop trembles, topples over, and rains pieces from the second floor into the living room. Dukie enters the room and looks at Doc. “This one’s bad,” she says.

  Doc rises and begins to herd the children out of the room. Alicia and Allen go out, but Doug has taken a position behind the sofa, nestled in the crook of the piano. He feels compelled to witness what happens. Then, after seconds pass, it does happen. The Old Man marches out of his study and appears at the top of the stairs. He holds something in the palm of his hand. Gliding quietly, Dukie moves to the foot of the stairs. Kelley descends to the landing and faces his wife, father, and son like an orator. “I don’t have to take this anymore!” he howls. “I’m going to take this potassium cyanide and I’ll die in thirty seconds. I’m going to take this, and nobody will care!”

  Dukie says, “Doug, don’t.” Doc cries out, “Don’t do it!”

  In an endless moment of quiet and slow motion, a monster—a roiling billow of the anger, stress, frustration, and fear within him—has forced itself out of Kelley, and it is as visible to the family as a storm cloud that rules the sky. This creature, which has never before dared show itself so brazenly, is now horribly present. It has taken over Kelley’s soul. It understands the powerful drama of the situation and the thrall in which it holds its helpless audience. Under its control the Old Man opens his palm and places something in his mouth. He swallows.

  “No, Doug, no,” Dukie says.

  Kelley drops like a slackened marionette and strikes the stairs below. The monster has risen up and away. Dukie runs up and reaches out to touch her husband. She pulls him down to the bottom of the stairs. He is still alive, gasping and staring in disbelief. She cradles his head; they talk, share a few words. Something in the performance has gone wrong. The illusion was not supposed to go this far. Together Dukie and Doc drag Kelley down the hallway to the bathroom by the entry. As Dukie runs off to call for help, Doc pours water into Kelley’s mouth, trying to flush out the poison.

  Still standing behind the sofa, Doug is stunned. Someone soon leads the children out of the house through the front door, and as he passes his father, who lies on the floor, his top half under the bathroom sink and his legs in the hallway, Doug glimpses Kelley’s face. Racked by seizures, the eyes bulge red and the mouth trickles foam. The boy thinks, “I never want to die that way.” Then he is yanked away from the man’s shell, and the kids spend hours at a neighbor’s house. “It never occurred to me that he would die until Mom came home and told me. . . . I thought he’d pull it out,” Doug says. Doctors had pronounced Kelley dead upon arrival at 4:56 p.m. at Herrick Memorial Hospital in Berkeley.

  Police superintendent Holstrom came to the house that night. He gazed at Doug, took him to his bedroom, and searched for words. “This is terrible,” he told the boy. “Don’t hang onto it. He can remain alive in your poor heart, but move on and take him with you.” Move on—this won’t define you. Doug has never forgotten the policeman’s kindness.

  Dukie later tried to appease Doug with a childish explanation of what had happened. “We were arguing, honey,” she said. “Your father burned himself with the pan.” Her words didn’t come close to describing what Doug had witnessed. His father had not perished because of a kitchen spill, and he knew it. Dukie remained loyal to Kelley in her incomprehension. To her, the suicide remained forever inexplicable. Kelley left behind no note. “I never did know why. He wasn’t unhappy,” she insisted when a San Francisco reporter interviewed her more than forty years later. “I just put it out of my mind. I don’t want to try to remember. . . . [I]t’s not anything I want to think about. It is just a mystery.”

  Doug has never stopped pondering the suicide. He is his father’s son—he wanted to know more. He could have escaped the tragedy, Doug believes. Kelley could have stopped it up until the point he grabbed the cyanide and created the possibility of an act with no return. A truly big man could have contained his rage, could have put out the fire, but Kelley was really no bigger than anyone else. Doug ultimately concluded that his father had been grandstanding on the landing of that staircase, and that the accumulated force of his emotions and inner pain had carried him away. The son believes that the rational thinking that Kelley advocated through general semantics had suddenly abandoned him.

  Because Kelley’s death had not been natural, county officials conducted an autopsy, which revealed no diseases that might have sent the psychiatrist into despair. (Rumors had circulated that Kelley was dis
traught over the advance of a serious stomach or intestinal disorder.) Kelley’s cremated remains found a final resting place two days after his suicide in Truckee, in the McGlashan family cemetery plot. There Charles McGlashan’s memorial dominates Kelley’s marker and everyone else’s. Few people attended the memorial service, and Dukie, afraid of traumatizing the children, would not allow them to go. The house on Highgate Road grew darker.

  Kelley’s suicide filled the pages of Bay Area newspapers for several days. Nearly every article reported the shock with which his friends and colleagues learned of his death and their scramble for an explanation. They raised the possibility that Kelley felt overcome by the burdens of work, a fatal disease, or a sudden realization of the insidiousness of criminal behavior. Some suggested an inevitability to his death. A writer for the Berkeley Gazette somberly recalled that “Dr. Kelley had once said that the professional life of a psychiatrist was about 15 years—after that he either went crazy, or committed suicide. He had been practicing since 1940.” Each article failed to mention the argument that had preceded Kelley’s final act, and many even reported that he had embraced Dukie and wished her a happy new year just before swallowing the cyanide. The San Francisco Examiner noted nonsensically that “as far as anyone knew, his life held not a single dark secret.”

  Speculation quickly swirled about the source and significance of the cyanide. Had Kelley provided the Reichsmarschall with poison? Journalists covering the suicide variously reported that Kelley’s fatal dose was a souvenir from Nuremberg or had been a gift from Göring. In some ways, perhaps it was, though certainly not literally. But Göring’s example demonstrated that a man who fears he will need a poison pill will keep one handy.

  Everybody tactfully, if somewhat negligently, spared Dukie any questioning. Although she gave a statement to the police, no official investigators or reporters ever followed up with her. Any direct connection between Kelley’s and Göring’s deaths “is ludicrously ridiculous and smacks of the sort of [irrational] association—certainly not informed cognition—of some ulterior motive which stems from the author’s own problems,” she declared. Noting that it would have been unethical and illegal for her husband to have assisted in Göring’s suicide, she wondered “if that’s the sort of thing these accusers would have done.” And she dismissed the notion that Göring had given a cyanide capsule to Kelley as simply “nuts!”

  Dukie even doubted that Kelley took his cyanide in capsule form. He held “what appeared to me from across the room to be a powder,” she wrote in 1985. “I never saw the container, but from the way he held it palmed, I would say it was probably round and large enough for him to quickly grab some ‘powder’ in his other hand, put it in his mouth, and gulp it down.” She also believed that Kelley perished almost instantly, while Doc was pouring water into his mouth, because “I heard a thud while I was talking [on the phone] and I think he must have dropped dead at that point—very quickly and painlessly.” There was a lot of wishful thinking in her account. Kelley’s death, as Doug could see, was not painless. Kelley’s doctor had told reporters that nobody would plan ahead to swallow cyanide because the chemical “burns painfully” in the throat. Besides, the question that Dukie never addressed was the most obvious one: Why did the doctor use cyanide?

  There were guns in his office—a self-administered gunshot would have been quicker, cleaner for the victim, at least, and more manly. If Kelley wanted melodrama that New Year’s Day, why not display a gun or knife to generate a frisson in his anguished audience instead of holding some substance, unknown to the onlookers, concealed in his hand like a palmed coin? As a physician well acquainted with criminal practices, Kelley knew that ingesting cyanide led to one of the most painful and unpleasant deaths we can inflict upon the human body.

  There was more behind Kelley’s choice of that particular poison and that exceedingly rare form of suicide, a train of thought more complicated than grandstanding and letting the devilish drama of the moment carry him away. The cyanide was a deliberate evocation of Göring’s defiant suicide and the Reichsmarschall’s pose of a hero backed into a corner. When Kelley fetched the cyanide, he signaled the arrival of his final stand against a fate worse than death that lay ahead. Death provided the quickest and noblest escape for the overwhelmed psychiatrist from an ignominious future—a descent into incompetence in the face of his insecurities, responsibilities, and pressures. Just as Göring’s high opinion of himself would not permit him to suffer the indignity of hanging, Kelley could not allow himself to appear as a bungler unworthy of praise or recognition. The pain of death would end the more intense pain of staying alive.

  In his 1950 book The Psychology of Dictatorship, Gustave Gilbert had explained Göring’s plunge into Nazism by observing, “It was the zest of high and fast living, of heroic playacting, that appealed to him.” Kelley loved that same kind of high-emotion, fast-accelerating life journey before an awed audience—and their similarities probably account for the close bond that he and Göring formed. But in both cases, when their heroic rides approached their bitter, agonizing ends, they chose to bail out. It is no coincidence that cyanide, a poisonous agent with a uniquely dramatic effect on the body, was their selected means of escape.

  Obituaries and public eulogies extolled Kelley’s best qualities while unknowingly demonstrating how effectively the psychiatrist had hidden his private life from his acquaintances. “For almost 30 years we were extremely close friends,” wrote Dariel Fitzkee, a fellow magician. “I had never known him to do an impulsive thing in all those years. . . . Doug had told me, as I presume he had told others, that no one really knows his own breaking point.” Kelley ended his life, Fitzkee speculated, because he worked himself too hard and cracked under the strain. “Even for such a complex man, the answer is that simple.”

  Eventually the press stopped reporting on the suicide, the cards of condolence no longer poured in, and what remained of the Kelley family was left to itself.

  10

  POST MORTEM

  After the police left, after her husband had been cremated and his ashes buried, when the remaining Kelleys returned to the home on Highgate Road, Dukie struggled to take control of her family. It was as if the stage-coach driver had been shot, and she had to grab the reins of the runaway horses. She found herself surrounded by Kelley’s lab apparatus, books, artifacts, and gadgets, without the presence of the collector himself to give them meaning or life. Although she had always been a loving presence in her children’s lives, she didn’t know how to be an active parent. Her husband had done the disciplining, driving, earning, and idea making. The cooking had been Kelley’s job as well. Dukie did not have the slightest idea how to make a meal.

  She put many of Kelley’s belongings up for sale within a year of his death, including crystals, mortars, beakers, pipettes, Bunsen burners, an autoclave, a microscope, slides of botanical specimens, an algae collection, a hoard of mounted poisonous plants, a bubble sextant, two human skulls, a relief map of California, a Polaroid camera with flash, the tape recorder from his desk drawer, an oil refinery model kit, and a model steam engine. But she kept much more, including the psychiatrist’s large collection of medical records, papers, notes, Rorschach results, and souvenirs from his months in Nuremberg.

  Dukie also tried to keep her husband’s ideas and opinions in circulation. She authorized a reissue of 22 Cells in Nuremberg in 1961. Accounts of the Holocaust, such as The Diary of Anne Frank, were starting to attract readers’ interest, but Nazi war criminals still felt like tired news to many. Kelley’s book sold poorly. Greater acclaim came to his Criminal Man TV series, which aired on educational television stations around the country during the year after his death and won KQED a Sylvania Award for excellence in television production. Dukie hoped to capitalize on that success by plugging the long-dormant criminology manuscript that Kelley had begun with Gordon Waldear. Waldear spent months completing and trying to interest publishers in this volume, but the book never materialized. Pu
blishers noted that it had little chance of catching on without the dynamic Douglas M. Kelley around to promote it and feature it in his trademark spellbinding lectures.

  After failing to generate interest among publishers for the Kelley-Waldear book, Dukie reached further. She did not want to see her husband’s ideas and work disappear. She thought Kelley’s career could form the basis of a dramatic TV series, so she contacted television writer Frank L. Moss—whose credits included episodes of Route 66 and U.S. Marshal—and tried to reel in a TV producer. The premise of the series shrank to “a consulting psychiatrist and his adventures in the world of crime and criminology” before vanishing altogether.

  In the summer of 1961 the family left the house on Highgate Road and moved into another one higher up in the hills, with floor-to-ceiling windows that gave a view of the entire bay and admitted light, light, light.

  Occasionally, as Kelley’s suicide receded into the past, friends tried to set Dukie up with men. She took the kids with her on one notable date with a man who proposed a day trip on his boat. Things went wrong from the start—her son Allen toppled off the gangplank and fell into the water. “I’m fine on my own,” she often grumbled to the kids. “Why are they setting me up?” As she forged ahead, she realized she did not need a man in her life to “bother” her. She believed she had already been married to the best she would find. A stoic, loyal southerner, she remembered all that had been exciting and satisfying about her marriage, and she buried the bad. She decided that she and Doug, as she always called her husband, had made the best of their fates.