America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation (19 page)

A subject in one of those filmed S/M marathons was the even more sexually hyperactive Samuel Steward, an English professor at Chicago’s DePaul University, who emerged as Kinsey’s close friend (but not lover). In Kinsey, with whom he spent about seven hundred hours between 1949 and 1956, Steward found “an ideal father…who listened and sympathized.” For Steward, later a celebrated tattoo artist, as for many gay men of his generation, Kinsey provided an existential anchor. By presenting homosexuality as a relatively common “outlet”— according to his data, about 10 percent of men were more or less exclusively homosexual—Kinsey offered hope of a more tolerant future, something that has been realized in recent initiatives such as gay marriage laws and the ban on discrimination against gays in the military. Steward’s history took Kinsey a remarkable five hours to record—ninety minutes was typical—because he had had several hundred sex partners. “The thing that amazed him most of all,” observed Steward, “was that…I was a ‘recordkeeper.’” Becoming an “unofficial collaborator,” Steward shared his “Stud File,” which featured three-by-five index cards on each lover.

Though Kinsey never revealed much about his private life to Steward, this fellow obsessive could sense the inner turmoil, which struck him as particularly acute in those final few years. “But had he…controlled the demon within,” mused Steward, “he would not have been Dr. Kinsey.”

Behind the adult sex doctor’s inner torment was a lonely child’s terror. During his first decade, Alfred was racked by a string of serious illnesses, including rheumatic fever and typhoid fever, and was often bedridden; on a couple of occasions, the boy, who missed as much school as he attended, was close to death. And then, just as the high school student started gravitating toward an academic pursuit that he loved—field biology—he came smack up against another nearly lethal enemy—his tyrannical superfather.

The first child of Alfred Seguine Kinsey and Sarah Ann Charles was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, on June 23, 1894. Alfred Charles had two siblings, Mildred, born in 1896, and Robert, born in 1908. A night-school graduate of Manhattan’s Cooper Institute (today Cooper Union), Alfred Seguine taught shop practice at Hoboken’s pillar of higher education, the Stevens Institute of Technology. Promoted from instructor to professor in 1908, Alfred Seguine followed in the path blazed by Stevens’s star alumnus, Frederick W. Taylor, “the father of scientific management” and author of the definitive treatise on shop management, with whom he networked. To avoid confusion with his hated father, who eventually published a series of engineering textbooks, Prok—an abbreviation of Professor Kinsey, this was the nickname by which he would be known once he got to Indiana—would later sign all his correspondence “Alfred C.”

The overbearing paterfamilias was a zealous Methodist who foisted his religion on the family; on Sundays, the children had no choice but to join him and do triple duty—attend Sunday school, morning services, and evening prayer. The opinionated and petulant Alfred Seguine, who frequently invoked the specter of a vengeful God, rubbed just about everyone he ever came across the wrong way. On account of his obliviousness to the feelings of others, Alfred Seguine has been described by Stevens alums as “a pompous ass” and “the great I man”—crunching the numbers, students proved their hypothesis that he used the first person singular far more frequently than any other faculty member. While Alfred’s mother was not a menacing presence, the boy could not connect with her, either. Having received only four years of schooling, Sarah Kinsey was withdrawn and passive; she readily accepted the role the reigning bully assigned to her—that of cook and maid. Forced to make ends meet on a shoestring budget, she would often dispatch her firstborn to beg local merchants to extend the family’s credit—an errand that left him feeling humiliated. Alfred Charles always resented her for not doing more to stand up to his father. Little good did the compliance do her; after nearly forty years of marriage, Alfred Seguine would demand a divorce and marry a much younger woman.

Until 1904, when Alfred Seguine’s finances improved enough to afford a move to the white-collar community of South Orange, the family lived in a series of cold-water tenement flats near the Stevens campus on Fifth Street. While Hoboken, when first laid out in 1804, was a summer retreat from Manhattan, by the late nineteenth century it was a densely populated factory town. Between 1860 and 1900, its mostly working-class population, which was teeming with immigrants from Germany, Ireland, and Italy, shot up from 10,000 to 65,000. With soot, filth, and garbage everywhere, children were routinely endangered. In August 1898, the
New York Evening Journal
ran an article headlined
RAT BITES BABY IN ITS BED,
which detailed the woes of Mrs. John Kloepping, the distraught mother of an eight-month-old daughter, who lived on Eighth Street—just a few blocks from the Kinseys. She was forced to abandon her rat-infested apartment in the middle of the night.

Kinsey would always hate Hoboken and everything associated with it. Years later, when he became an avid horticulturist, he would exclude the few flowers that grew there—marigolds, zinnias, and wisteria—from his garden. As an adult, he could not stomach potatoes, a mainstay of the dinners served up by his parents.

With Hoboken’s unsanitary conditions largely to blame for the medical afflictions that nearly killed the boy, the man emerged as a neatnik. After meals, the adult Kinsey had a habit of systematically picking up all the crumbs scattered on the table with his fingertips and then placing them back on his plate. In his research trips—first as a field biologist and then as a sexologist— Prok, who always took a cold bath or shower first thing in the morning, would insist that his assistants do the same. When he lacked empirical evidence—say, he spotted a dry towel or had not heard the hum of the water—he would not hesitate to badger them into submission by emitting an abrupt “You smell!” To acquit himself of this dreaded duty, his colleague Paul Gebhard would turn on the shower while he shaved. The Hoboken native would also constantly monitor the cleanliness in his office. Thirty years into his tenure at I.U., Kinsey fired off an angry missive to a campus administrator about his frustration with “the worst janitor service that I have ever seen.” Likewise, when visiting members of his staff at their desks, he would not hesitate to straighten their pencils and line up their papers.

In the ten-room house that his father rented in the Melville Woods section of South Orange (a leafy suburb of New York City), the young Alfred got a new lease on life. No longer was he hemmed in. He slept above his parents in his own room in the attic. His health woes behind him, the adolescent delighted in exploring the undeveloped hills adjacent to the garden, which he helped to maintain on the family’s one-eighth-acre plot of land. While Alfred was not able to cultivate human friendships, he did bond with plants and animals. During long hikes, he collected many botanical specimens, particularly pressed leaves and ferns. He also enjoyed bird-watching. And like Gregor Samsa, the alienated protagonist of Franz Kafka’s
The
Metamorphosis
, who sought escape from the clutches of his oppressive parents by turning into a bug, Alfred turned to bugs, with whom he began a lifelong love affair. His favorites were caterpillars, mosquitoes, beetles, and ants. At the YMCA camps, which he began attending every summer from the age of fourteen, he was known as the resident “bugologist.” By high school, the budding naturalist was also sticking his nose in a book every chance he could get. He emerged as the class valedictorian, who, according to a prophecy contained in his Columbia High yearbook, was destined to emerge as “a second Darwin.” Summing up Kinsey’s persona, his classmate Hazel Balch later recalled that he was the go-to guy “if you wanted to talk bugs maybe, but he didn’t have fun.” Though Alfred was handsome—nearly six feet, he was fit and lean with golden-blond hair, which he kept neatly trimmed—his nerdiness and aloofness squelched much interest from the fairer sex. “He wasn’t,” stressed Balch, “the type who appealed to girls.” And even if the shy Alfred had sent some sparks flying, his father would not have allowed him to date. In the strict rules laid down by Alfred Seguine, a mover and shaker in South Orange’s Methodist community, attending dances—even the prom—was verboten.

Nearly all of the young man’s relationships with bipeds pivoted around pedagogy. At his father’s behest, Alfred taught Sunday school classes and took on a leadership role in the Boy Scouts of America. In 1913, he became one of the nation’s first hundred Eagle Scouts, an honor still reserved for an elite minority. By then, Alfred was also imparting his love of nature as a counselor at Kamp Kiamesha in the Kittatinny Mountains in western New Jersey. In the musical realm, he was both mentor and mentee. An enthusiastic pianist who possessed the diligence to practice his favorite classical compositions for hours on end, Alfred gave lessons to younger children to pay for his own instruction. The most important figure in his South Orange days turned out to be Natalie Roeth, his high school biology teacher. As the head of the biology club, she led students on trips around the countryside where they searched for plant and animal specimens. Alfred was eager to show her his new discoveries. He would always remember the time he tracked down Dutchman’s breeches, a small white flower whose seeds were spread by ants. For the rest of his life, Kinsey would correspond regularly with Miss Roeth. Not long after the male volume appeared, Kinsey wrote to thank her for doing “more than anyone else at the very crucial age to turn me to science.” As much as he respected the scholarly acumen of this graduate of Mount Holyoke College, he cherished her nurturing of his developing mind even more. This maternal surrogate was the one person in his youth who valued his unique sensibility.

Master and pupil would be Kinsey’s only template for human connection. And after completing his doctorate at Harvard, he was never again the novice. In nearly all his subsequent relationships—even with Mac, his three surviving children, Anne, Joan, and Bruce (his first child, David, died of a thyroid problem at the age of three), university colleagues, neighbors, and coworkers—Kinsey presented himself as the scientific expert who at any moment would break out into “a little lecture.” “He was a teacher—always,” recalled his elder daughter, Anne. This was Kinsey’s way of regulating his nearly crippling interpersonal anxiety and staying in control. This scion of two self-absorbed parents never learned how to be himself in the presence of others. However, Kinsey could easily become someone else.

Paradoxically, this lack of a core identity served him well when it came time to collect sex histories. “The con approach was deliberately cultivated by him,” observed his informant, Samuel Steward, “so that he could win the trust of the person being interviewed; in like manner, he took up smoking and drinking (very, very gingerly) to put his interviewees at ease.… [He had a] talent for talking to the most uneducated hustlers and prostitutes in their own language, no matter how coarse.” Late in life, the man who could not relate to others as equals found comfort in the companionship of young children. “Our birthdays were two days apart,” Reed Martin, the son of Clyde Martin, the chief number cruncher on both Kinsey reports, told me in a phone interview, “and we celebrated them together. When I turned eight in June of 1954, he bought me a toy train set, and he helped me set up the track in my house. He was always asking me, ‘What are you thinking?’ I felt close to Prok, who was my good friend.”

After giving the valedictory address at his Columbia High graduation in June 1912, Alfred Charles stayed put. Alfred Seguine had mapped out his son’s future, and his namesake had no choice but to follow orders. The following September, the eighteen-year-old began pursuing a mechanical engineering degree at the Stevens Institute, the only college to which he was allowed to apply. For the next two years, he commuted with his father to Hoboken on train rides that must have sizzled with tension. The star student rebelled by nearly flunking out; in the spring semester of his freshman year, he got a 46 in Descriptive Geometry. That year, the only course in which his grade exceeded 90 was shop management, which he took from “the great I man” himself. But after completing his sophomore year, Kinsey made a gutsy move. Without telling his father, he abruptly withdrew from Stevens and began to make plans to attend Bowdoin College in Maine.

In his application to graduate school, submitted during his final year in college, Kinsey offered an explanation of why he transferred from Stevens to Bowdoin. “I had started at Stevens,” he would confide in Harvard’s secretary of graduate education, “only because my father wisht [
sic
] it. After two years work there I was convinced and finally convinced my father that I could not be interested enough in engineering to make it a life work. Finally he gave his consent, and I changed to Bowdoin to major in biology in which I have been interested for nine years.” But this version of the family drama smoothed over the truth. In fact, a wounded and outraged Alfred Seguine did not come around; instead he bullied his son by refusing to support his education any longer. But by the middle of the summer of 1914, the determined youngster patched together a couple of scholarships, which enabled him to attend this exclusive private college. That September, armed with a single parting gift from his father—a $25 suit—Kinsey trekked off to Maine to build a life of his own. Thus was born both the man and the compulsive risk taker who would continue to take on established authorities. Except for a few brief visits, he would have little to do with either parent again.

As soon as he arrived at Bowdoin, Kinsey began to thrive. He went there for the two top-notch biology profs, and they did not disappoint. In his first week, he bonded with Dr. Alfred Gross during an ornithology hike. “He knew his birds thoroughly,” observed the much-impressed Gross, who soon gave Kinsey free run of his house to practice the piano. The next semester, Gross’s colleague, Dr. Manton Copeland, who also possessed a newly minted Harvard Ph.D., offered Kinsey that perfect part-time job at the college’s biology museum. Nothing could have thrilled Kinsey more than the painstaking task of labeling and putting in cases its massive collection of plant and animal specimens.