The Harrad Experiment

by Robert H. Rimmer

  “Bill is too possessive. He doesn’t give a damn about my mind, but he wants my body exclusively,” she said. Adamantly, she added, “If you don’t want me, don’t worry, I can take care of myself.”

  I saw her occasionally and kept trying to tell her to go home, but then she met a man who was evidently free to take off with her. Much later, she converted to Catholicism, lived with some Sisters of Charity, and occasionally served as housekeeper for a priest.

  During the next twenty-five years, Erma, Bob, David, and Nancy became “the inseparables.” This was no Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice scenario. We saw the film much later and shrugged at the silly ending. We weren’t swingers. We never made love as a foursome. Our travels together eventually took us to Florida, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, Greece, and Israel. We were often casually naked together and slept with each other’s spouses, but we never made sexual comparisons to each other.

  During the first year, we passed through occasional moments of jealousy, but it became increasingly clear that our love for each other was “in addition to and not instead of.” Sexual and intellectual sharing became a natural way of life between the four of us, but we were careful never to reveal our sexual exchange to anyone.

  We never merged households, but perhaps we would have, as I proposed in Proposition 31, had we all lived into our seventies. We maintained separate families in our attractive, middle-class homes. We loved our biological children as well as each other’s kids, who then ranged from five to thirteen years of age. Many years later, as a foursome, we enjoyed the fun of being both biological as well as surrogate grandparents.

  Parents and Friends: Love and Prejudice. Each of us grew emotionally and mentally in the unique marriage that I would later fictionalize (to Nancy’s horror) and expand into alternate lifestyles in Proposition 31, Thursday, My Love, Come Live My Life, and The Love Explosion. Seeing Erma through David’s eyes, I learned to appreciate her abilities to tackle almost any project that required mechanical and physical adeptness and to do it all by herself, if necessary.

  Seeing Nancy through my eyes, David began to realize that her wide reading from childhood, her love of music—she introduced us all to the joys of opera—and the fact that she had me as a lover was making his wife a much more exciting woman.

  Seeing David through mine and Erma’s eyes, Nancy slowly became aware that David might not have a Park Avenue-style medical practice, but that he was one of the most caring medical practitioners around. He was a man who loved all of his patients, although many never paid him and tried to barter for his services. David blended his love for his family and ours with caring medicine and never-ending laugher. Whenever you find laughter in my novels, in scenes like that of the meshuganah ape in The Harrad Experiment or the party on Trotter Island in That Girl from Boston, David was the inspiration.

  For me, it was a turning point in more ways than one. Two years after the four of us met, FH, now seventy years old, decided to become chairman of the board of Relief. When I was forty, he elected me president. My brother, Richard, at thirty-two, had finally joined the company. In twelve years, I had tripled the revenues of the company, which were now over $2 million annually. FH had given Richard and me each 14 percent of the outstanding stock.

  Blanche was now wearing diamonds and mink and spending a month each year traveling with FH. But Blanche didn’t ingratiate herself with her daughters-in-law, whom she never really liked. In fact, she often told her friends that the reason they lived so well was that “I gave them my dividends.”

  FH wasn’t making me too happy either. When I told him that I had two boys to send to college, his answer involved a mixture of the following: “You’re not doing too badly financially ... if your Jewish doctor friend is making more money than you, that’s your problem. I told you to use Relief as a steppingstone. Anyway, you don’t have to worry, because someday you and Richard will own it all.” He didn’t add, “If you live long enough.”

  Nor did he or I realize that I was slowly moving a different kind of steppingstone into place. Thanks to Nancy and David, I not only discovered Jewish life and religion, but a sense of family and a caring, ethnic continuity that was a far cry from the warring relationship that Blanche and FH had with their families.

  In the meantime, it was no longer a case of “some of our best friends are Jews.” All of mine and Erma’s friends were Jews. While it was impossible for me to convert to any religion—I was a humanist then without knowing the term—I not only read widely about Judaism, but I was also fascinated with the Israeli kibbutz. Long before Leo Rosen, and with no credentials, I was compiling a Yiddish dictionary. Beginning with The Harrad Experiment and culminating with The Byrdwhistle Option, many of my heroes were Jewish. In the bibliography of Byrdwhistle I extolled the contribution of Yiddish to the American language.

  Continuing to live a life that now encompassed David and Nancy, Erma and I were soon under fire from Blanche and FH. They belonged to a popular local club which excluded Jews. FH’s argument was that Jews did the same. Spending a week on the Cape with Nancy and David, I was shocked to discover that there was no room at the inn when they saw David.

  But I was horrified when FH and Blanche refused to come to our house when David and Nancy (or any other Jews) were there. (Keep in mind that we lived next door!) FH believed that he wasn’t prejudiced, because he did business with many Jews. “They have their ways and we have ours. They don’t want you either.” He was wrong. Even Orthodox Jews were delighted with my curiosity and wish to learn about their customs and rituals. After my first novels were published, I was invited to speak at many temples and synagogues—Orthodox, Conservative, and Reformed. Not a year went by when we weren’t guests at Passover dinners.

  Late-Blooming Writer. I was now writing. My anger at religious prejudice slowly combined into a larger-than-life hero, Yale Marratt. When the novel was finished, I knew it was much too long. Two years later, seventeen publishers had rejected the book. I finally decided I needed an agent and picked Scott Meredith, who today is a millionaire literary agent. For fifty dollars, he agreed to read the novel. He liked parts of it, but told me that I had committed the ultimate no-no. Women read all the novels, and I would never sell one extolling bigamy. As Nancy had told me, chuckling, when she read the finished manuscript, one of the women had to die. Since Cynthia was Jewish, she was the most likely one. My ego was rudely punctured. The original manuscript seemed unsalable. I was a prophet without an audience. But I wasn’t about to rewrite Yale Marratt.

  If I hadn’t known David and enjoyed him almost as much as I did his wife, I probably never would have written That Girl from Boston, my next novel. Most of it takes place on an island in Boston Harbor called Peddocks. David’s hobby was fishing for Boston flounder (the harbor wasn’t as polluted then), and he was also the preferred doctor for all residents on the island, who, over many years, had built unheated and unelectrified houses on Peddocks. To support himself, David had wrestled his way through medical school, and I included a wrestling scene in the novel. That Girl from Boston pits upper-class Bostonians against the lower-class Irish.

  Ultimately, That Girl from Boston sold a half-million copies. Before she died in an automobile accident, Jayne Mansfield wanted to star in a movie based on the novel. But in 1960, after I finished it, fifteen publishers and all of the major paperback publishers thought it was too sexy. They felt it would be the target of local religious groups who were trying to control the distribution of paperbacks with sexy covers and content.

  Neil Doherty, an employee, asked if he could read my manuscripts. That Girl from Boston delighted him, but as a Catholic, Yale Marratt shocked him a bit, although he liked it. Later, he did an excellent editing job, introducing the bigamy trial at the beginning and then concluding the book with it. He wondered what would happen if we started a publishing business ouselves. All we needed was a little money. Neil knew how to edit and we knew how to get a book printed. One of the best printers in the country,
Plimpton Press, was in nearby Norwood. A year later, I told Plimpton Press that Relief would guarantee the cost of printing 7,000 copies of That Girl from Boston.

  We soon discovered that it wasn’t going to be easy. The world wasn’t ready for Challenge’s belief that, in the words of an editorial on the dust jacket, “Writers should not only reflect their society, but they have the moral obligation to become the vanguards for a new and brighter world where the sexual relationship is no longer something hidden or depraved.” On the cover was a picture of the heroine, Willa Starch, wearing a pair of abbreviated panties and walking out of Boston Harbor onto Peddock’s Island. The Boston Globe refused the advertisement as “too salacious.” Challenge Press’s brazen invitation to enjoy sex with laughter made many reviewers and bookstores nervous.

  Ultimately, Challenge’s finances were in very poor shape, our books weren’t being advertised and sold, and some promising ideas were aborted. My daydream of joining the ranks of Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, and James Jones, went down the drain.

  Harrad and Success ... and Mixed Success. Finally, in 1966, through a fluke I discovered Sherbourne Press in Los Angeles, which decided to publish a third novel I had written, which I had called “Experiment in Marriage.” They named it The Harrad Experiment.

  Sherbourne sold 10,000 mail-order copies of the book in a hardcover edition with a conservative jacket. The promoter and owner wasn’t interested in bookstore distribution, and the book was rarely found in a bookstore. His audience was a mailing list of 200,000 sex-book buyers, which included the names of 6,000 doctors. I was assured that they were steady buyers, since they had never learned anything about sex in medical school.

  I often wonder who bought the hardcover edition of The Harrad Experiment. It never appeared in any library that I could discover, and I never received any letters from readers. Most of them probably couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw the introduction and the annotated bibliography.

  The publisher insisted that 10,000 copies wasn’t a bad sale for what he though was a first novel. He finally produced a second edition and sold 17,000 copies. Suddenly, I received a phone call telling me that Harrad had been sold to Bantam, who loved it. Bantam was the biggest paperback publisher in the United States. The advance was small-$10,000-but I shouldn’t worry. Bantam was going to sell millions of copies in paperback.

  In September 1967, Bantam released Harrad with a sexy cover and the slogan “The Sex Manifesto of the Free Love Generation.” I saw the cover before publication and protested that the Harrad idea certainly wasn’t “free love,” but no one listened to the author. Across the country and in major colleges and university areas, Bantam was trying a new technique. They used billboards with a very sexy come-on to promote the book. Within a month, Harrad had sold 300,000 copies, and within the year, it was one of the top-selling paperbacks of 1967, with a million copies in print. Over three million copies were sold during the next twelve years.

  I couldn’t believe what was happening. Overnight, I was both famous and infamous. Letters were pouring in from all over the country and I was happily dictating answers to all of them at my company’s office.

  I had already written another novel, The Zolotov Affair, about a high-school chemistry professor who had learned the secret of alchemy and how to transmute lead into gold. Zolotov tries to use his discovery to save the world by threatening to destroy the world economies which are based on gold. Although Sherbourne wasn’t excited about it, the press published it anyway because they were afraid of losing me. A year later, Bantam brought it out in paperback, but didn’t push it. I was suddenly in the doghouse with both Sherbourne and Bantam.

  In the meantime, on weekends, I was writing Proposition 31, the story of a two-couple marriage, justifying and exploring in another dimension our happy relationship with David and Nancy. The response to Harrad via thousands of letters that I was receiving proved that millions of perople were searching for answers to their marital and premarital problems, and that a Harrad-style undergraduate education, utopian though it might seem, might lay the foundation for what I called the “corporate marriage” of two to three couples. The novel takes place in California, and the title refers to a proposition that is put on the California ballot if enough voters agree in advance.

  Writing the novel in 1967, I was only vaguely aware of the developing Human Potential movement. But then Abraham Maslow, whom 1 had first discovered through Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique, phoned me. “I decided that I have to meet you,” he chuckled. “The kids are all reading Harrad and driving me crazy.” He taught at Brandeis and lived in Aubumdale, about fifteen miles from Quincy. It was the beginning of a friendship that would last until his untimely death in Menlo Park, Calif. Abe was one more hero/mentor in my life, to whom I paid tribute in The Byrdwhistle Option.

  I was now living in three separate worlds. One, in the prosaic business world where 99 percent of the people I encountered had never heard of Bob Rimmer, the writer. A second private world with Erma, David, and Nancy, where I could at least integrate what I was writing, and then the publishing world, where I was slowly learning my way around without an agent.

  The subsequent publishing history of my novels contains elements of excitement and disappointment, as is usual with most authors. Suddenly, I was a hot literary property. In the next five years, I wrote one novel after the other, including The Premar Experiments. This was a sequel to Harrad that expanded the concept to include low-income and black students and introduced a thirteen-week work/study cycle.

  It was followed by Thursday, My Love, proposing another style of two-couple relationship that I called “synergamy,” to replace monogamy. Next came Come Live My life, involving a very practical approach for monogamous couples to switch spouses and enjoy a two-week vacation with another wife or husband. I was able to negotiate a $100,000 guaranteed advance on each.

  It would seem that I was on the fast track to becoming a millionaire writer, but during the late seventies a new “I gotta be me ... I’ll do it my way” philosophy was sweeping the country. The 1960s were over. Publishers were convinced I was a leftover hippie. New American Library agreed to publish my novel Come Live My Life in 1976 and Love Me Tomorrow in 1978—but only as original paperbacks, which meant there would be no reviews in the major media.

  Most of the enthusiastic readers of my earlier novels never knew the later ones existed. Two years later NAL, which had published nine of my novels, let them all go out of print. The happy, multiple-sexual relationships that I proposed in these and other novels and which I believe could take place within the framework of lifetime monogamy were presumably too utopian for the Reagan-inspired generation, which still believes it can have it all and monogamy too.

  Real Tragedy. Then suddenly, in 1975, writing and publishing were of no importance. It seemed as if a heart operation, performed at Mass General, would alleviate Nancy’s problems and prolong her life—people with rheumatic heart disease rarely live beyond their early sixties and Nancy was nearly sixty. We were all afraid that she might die suddenly if her heart began to fibrillate out of control.

  I had prolonged Nancy’s life in The Premar Experiments, where I fictionalized her as Ellen.

  Nancy’s real-life valve implant was successful, but in the process, Nancy got an infection. After a terrible month, hooked to every possible piece of lifesaving equipment, unable to talk to us for weeks, she died. Our two-couple marriage was over. We were reduced to a potential menage à trois, which didn’t work. David thought that sharing one wife was an inequitable situation, though we remained good friends. A lonely man, missing the years the four of us had shared together, David died of a heart attack two years later.

  It was 1976. I was nearing my sixtieth birthday. Suddenly, Erma and I were alone. Our son Bobby received an M.D. from Downstate University of New York. He was doing his residency in cardiology at Boston University and was married. Steve, despite my warnings not to get affiliated with the family busine
ss, was working for Relief, but his wife wanted him to quit and become a teacher with her. Blanche and FH were still traveling. Erma and I, still very two-couple oriented, had found no new friends.

  We continued to travel, first to Guadeloupe with David, his daughter, and her family, where the volcano Soufriere had nearly exploded the year before. It was the subject of a documentary film by the famous German filmmaker Werner Herzog, and Gaudeloupe interested me as a setting for a novel. Two years later, because I wanted to experience a Caribbean island during Carnival, we went back to Guadeloupe with another couple, and I wrote “Soufriere, the Volcano.” It was drastically rewritten by a new editor at NAL as a typical romance novel, a type which was then selling like hotcakes. It was published in 1980 as The Love Explosion, and although I protested, NAL insisted on retaining the annotated bibliography, which they thought was popular with my readers. It made no sense at all in the revised format. Today, I look upon “Soufriere, the Volcano” as an unpublished novel

  Suddenly, I became like a man without a country. While I was experiencing publishing disappointments, it became obvious, since no one in the Rimmer family except me would put a dime into Relief, that the potentially profitable company was in trouble. After long negotiations, I sold the company. The new owners assumed Reliefs debt and guaranteed what amounted to a $200,000 payment divided between Richard and me over a period of ten years. I managed to exclude FH from the payoff. He was eight-five, and I assumed that he already had more than enough money. But when he discovered what I had done, he was so incensed that he revised his will, excluding me and my family.

  It didn’t matter. It was obvious that I would never become wealthy through inheritance. Over a period of twenty years, I had earned a million dollars writing. Combined with my income from Relief, it wasn’t enough to make me a millionaire, but Erma and I had lived well and had a loving family with four grandchildren.