Love at Goon Park (39 page)

And yet Harry was a man whose career had flourished in the companionship of bright, capable women. He'd married two of them, after all. In the time since Peggy's death, there were once again signs that Harry was a man lost without a companion. His friends and colleagues and students, and even his children, pitched in to help. Helen LeRoy and Ken Schiltz, fed up with his shabby clothes, took Harry shopping and outfitted him in style. Harry continued to put in the extra hours at the lab. But he wrote to former students that he was finding life without Peggy extremely difficult. He was fixed on the world of twosomes, happily married or not, around him. He was going to faculty parties again, asking people whether they were married. “After Peggy died, Harry was fascinated by people's relationships,” says Wisconsin psychologist Charles Snowdon.

Harry had never liked being alone. He knew the importance of companionship and comfort. He longed for it. He started thinking not about some new, bright relationship but about an old one. He'd regretted failing at his first marriage. He began to think now about starting over. He and his first wife had always stayed loosely in touch
because of their two sons. Harry had not been a stay-at-home father but he'd never chosen to disconnect from his older sons. Peggy had always insisted on his keeping a distance from his other family. But when Harry had business trips that brought him nearby, he'd visited his children anyway. His older son, Bob, had continued to write to him: “He always wrote back. The fastest reply was when I called him Harry in a letter. I was twelve. He wrote back and said, ‘You call me Dad.'”

At the time when Harry began thinking again of Clara, she was also on her own. Clara had remarried twice. Shortly after the divorce from Harry, she had chosen a very different kind of partner. Robert Potter had studied at a technical school and was employed as an industrial parts salesman. The Potters decided to move to the Southwest. Clara had lived there as a child and loved it. They bought a small ranch outside Reno. Clara had wanted a full partner in parenting and now she had it. Her second husband took his new fatherhood seriously: “He was shrewd, tough, a strict disciplinarian, extremely fair,” says Bob Israel, looking back. “He was a wonderful man and he cared a great deal about us. Not the hugging and touching type. But he was always there, and if we wanted an opinion, he would listen and he would say what he thought.” To Harry's outrage, Bob and Rick took the last name of Potter. In an angry note to the clerk of the court in Dane County, where his divorce was handled, Harry wrote that he would continue to pay the child support. But, “I make this payment and any subsequent payments under protest since I have learned that the children have been living ... under assumed names.”

The Potters didn't stay in Reno. They had a child there, a little boy named Thomas, who was born in 1949. Two years later, the child drowned in a drainage ditch behind the ranch house. They simply left, fled the place, moved to the Carmel Valley in California. They started a children's clothing store and named it Little Tyke in honor of their dead son. Clara continued answering Terman's questionnaires, but there was little trace of her early joyfulness. After Thomas's death, she mailed back forms full of blank spaces as if she didn't have the energy or heart to write about her life.

She had more trouble to come. Robert Potter suffered from bleeding ulcers. In 1960, after a series of operations to try to mend his stomach walls, he died of a resulting infection. Clara decided again on a new start. Searching for a complete change, she decided to try hotel management school, was accepted into a program in Tennessee, packed up, and moved again. She married a fellow student, Clint Thompson, but the marriage was brief. “He was a nice guy,” recalls Bob Israel. “But whenever he touched alcohol he was just out of control.” She divorced Thompson in 1965, after two years, and took a job as a counselor in the University of Tennessee's school of nursing in Knoxville. Clara Thompson was working there when her first husband, troubled by regrets and loneliness, came calling.

They picked up the old, good relationship with startling speed. “I've always said that Dad never really stopped loving Mom,” Bob Israel says. Harry felt, at least, that Clara knew him, for better and for worse. He wrote her a poem to that effect: “The things that cause you no surprise / are all my lies and alibis / for you can all too easy see / the faults that are a part of me.”

They were remarried March 1972, eight months after Peggy's death, in a small civil ceremony in Knoxville. The newlyweds celebrated by partying late into the night with an old psychology friend, University of Tennessee psychology professor William Verplanck. The reunited couple then went on a honeymoon tour of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Harry wrote to Verplanck that “we plan our third honeymoon in Hawaii. We are too old to pass up any chances since the next could easily be our last.” He also thanked Verplanck for his company on the wedding night and sent him a bit of Harryesque verse: “Courage strong and honor bright / Courage usually lasts the night.”

Clara's reports to Stanford turned suddenly exuberant again; she wrote of her “unexpected happiness in remarriage to my present husband.” The Harlows settled into a condominium on a newly developed street of apartments, condos, and small shops in the western suburban edge of Madison.

By this time, though, Harry had been in Madison for more than four decades. The NIH primate center had another director now, named Robert Goy, who had his own plans for the place. Harry admitted to his friends that he was tired. Even the prospect of new monkey experiments suddenly lacked its former appeal. Harry wrote to a long-time friend, Duane Rumbaugh, a Georgia State psychologist, that he would like to compare the abilities of rhesus macaques with gorillas and chimps. “The only reason why we are not doing it is that we are bankrupt, financially, mentally, and emotionally.”

There were other reasons to feel weary. Harry was noticing an odd shakiness, the occasional unnerving loss of balance and focus. His doctors would warn him that this looked like the start of Parkinson's disease. They would see what they could do to slow it down with medication.

Meanwhile, Clara was remembering everything she had disliked about Madison's weather. “Normal human beings can't live in this god-awful climate very long,” Harry told a local reporter. “Wisconsin has a highly humid environment and many people should not live in a highly humid environment,” he went on. “For example, it gives me mild to intolerable rheumatism. It gives my wife hopeless asthma.” As the damp air continued to trouble her breathing, Clara pushed harder for a move to a better climate. She still loved the dry, bright air and coppery landscape of the Southwest and preferred the region to any other place she had ever lived. She urged Harry at least to look there. He wrote to some of his former students: John Gluck, now at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque; and two others, Jim King and Dennis Clark, who had settled at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

All three responded with open invitations. He and Clara decided to take a vacation exploring the Southwest—and its universities. As it turned out, the psychology department in Arizona had come up with an ingenious way of recruiting well-known faculty at almost no cost. It would offer unpaid “research professor” positions to retiring scientists who had achieved great acclaim in their fields. “You know what happens to giants,” Harry joked. “They go to seed.” These well-known
researchers could have an office, work on what they liked, bask in the clear Arizona light. They could also add to the prestige of the Arizona university with very little cost to said university. Neil Bartlett, who was then the head of the psychology department, recalls urging Harry to choose his school over New Mexico. “And I said, well come on to Arizona because you have two students here,” Bartlett recalls. “There's only one in Albuquerque.”

Meanwhile, to Gluck's exasperation, his department head hesitated to hire a faculty member more famous than he was. And so Jim King suddenly heard from his old professor: “Harry just called me up one day and said he was coming.” Bartlett had not firmed up the position but, after King called him, he hurried over to the administration offices and settled it. “I told the president that Harry would bring recognition to the university.”

In 1974, Harry resigned from the University of Wisconsin. He insisted that this was mainly about the medical reasons. The Harlows were “condemned [by their health] to live in Arizona,” he explained to a local newspaper. Truthfully, though, Harry would rather have stayed. He had spent most of his life in Madison—it was home. He might joke about the weather but here was the lab he had worked so hard to build, his good group of graduate students, his closest friends and long-time colleagues. All his best work had been done here, memorable results accomplished against long odds. It hurt him to leave; it was like the physical wrench of walking away from a love affair. “I have an enormous affection for Wisconsin,” he admitted. “You can't teach in a school for forty-four years and not have some affection. You can't be married for forty-four years and not have some affection. It's the same thing.” Leaving Wisconsin was like leaving himself—it was here, after all, that he'd reinvented love and, really, invented Harry Harlow.

Of course, he started adding to the lore as soon as he moved. Byron Jones, now a professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State, was a graduate student at Arizona then. He still remembers the day Harry arrived. Jones was standing in the department office when the phone
rang. The secretary turned to him and said, “There's some crazy guy on the phone that wants someone to pick him up at the airport.”

Jones asked her who was calling.

“Harry Harlow,” she replied.

Jones grinned. “Tell him we'll be right out,” he said.

Harry and Clara bought a condo in a place as unlike Madison as possible. Their new home was part of a Spanish-style development; the homes had white stucco walls and red tile roofs and were tucked into a planned landscape of graceful palm trees and magenta-brilliant bougainvillea. It didn't take Clara long to begin dressing up their life further. She bought herself a fur coat. She dressed Harry in tweedy sports jackets and elegant suits. She'd collected crystal, more than enough for all occasions, during their trip to Ireland. “They had two china cabinets filled with Waterford,” says Penny King, an Arizona schoolteacher and Jim King's wife. “And Harry was natty. She kept him a fashion plate.” Clara ruthlessly restricted Harry's drinking. She insisted that he exercise. Harry routinely rode a city bus part of the way to the university and walked the remaining mile and a half. She'd drive to campus later and work at the library and then pick him up in the evening. “He was in great condition, especially compared to what he'd been like at Wisconsin,” the Kings agree, almost in a chorus.

Harry reintroduced himself to his sons. Bob, by that time, had changed his name from Potter back to his father's old family name of Israel. Bob Israel was working as a fundamentalist preacher, near Portland, Oregon, and he was surprised and delighted to find that his father would support him in that calling. “I think this is where your heart is,” he still remembers his father saying. “When I saw him again it felt like we hadn't missed a beat.” Rick Potter lived closer, in nearby Phoenix, where he worked for the state government. But although he saw his father more often, he didn't have that sense of picking up an old relationship. The years apart were too long and the memories too few and too scattered. “He could be disarming,” Rick Potter says. “But we never were father and son. Over the years in Arizona, we were two grownups.” They got along fine, he says. But
Rick never forgot which parent had been there for him. “My mom was the one who loved me and spent time building that bond.”

Clara had had many years to think about the collapse of her first marriage with Harry. And she believed that Harry's love of psychology meant that he couldn't maintain a relationship with someone outside its charmed circle. She was now convinced that it was the University of Wisconsin's refusal to let her continue with psychology and the “change of vocation that had led to the divorce.” Clara didn't plan to make that mistake again. She didn't want to. She had dreamed of being a psychologist. Now she had a chance to win some of that dream back. As Clara Harlow, she had been given the title of research associate at Arizona and a carrel in the library for her work. She had obtained recommendations not only from Harry but also from Stanford University psychologist Robert Sears, who had become the keeper of the Terman gifted study.

Sears wrote a warm letter on Clara's behalf. He had known Clara since she was a graduate student and, he wrote, “in the early years she was one of the brightest and sharpest young women I knew in the psychology area.” Clara told Sears that she hoped eventually to be recognized on her own, to see “if I am approved without being under the shadow of the name of the master.”

Clara had an idea of her own about childhood play. She wasn't thinking of it in the way Harry and Peggy had, as an exercise in adult behavior, or as a way of negotiating and building friendships. She was thinking more of the mechanics of motion and what they accomplished. In a sense, her concept follows the moving surrogate mother idea that Bill Mason had explored, that one needs physical motion for healthy development. Both the Harlows admired that work. From Arizona, Harry wrote to Bill Mason, telling him that he was perhaps the smartest “surrogate graduate student” that he had ever worked with. In the same letter, Harry added that he thought Clara showed that same kind of promise.

Clara was interested in the times that we just play by ourselves. After all, if no friends are available, we may skip and dance, tumble
and swing all on our own—and all to the good. Perhaps “self-motion” play, as she called it, is also part of building that strong body and capable nervous system. At least that was a primary argument in a paper that Clara wrote with Harry as co-author. The paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And, if the idea that dancing alone may sometimes be biologically necessary came from Clara, the wry description of how it works came distinctively from Harry: “Human self-motion play takes place primarily outdoors. When it takes place indoors, parents protest.”