The Mad Sculptor (16 page)

Afterward, Bob felt deeply debased by the incident. “I was so damned ashamed of myself for taking such an old-looking bitch,” he said. Even more mortifying to him, however, was his inability to control his sex drive. The entire unfortunate incident only confirmed in him a resolution he had recently formed.

As he explained to Chuck Smith—who initially dismissed the whole business as just another of his friend’s oddball ideas—Bob had decided that the best way to conserve his sexual energy for the sake of visualization was to chop off his penis.

10

The Gedeons

A
CCORDING TO BOB
, he left the Burke Foundation to get away from a couple of female employees who began to make life miserable for him after he rebuffed their sexual demands. “There were two girls there,” he told an interviewer. “One I had intercourse with and she asked me to do it again and I said ‘No,’ and from that time on she hated me like bloody murder. The other girl I didn’t do anything with and she hated me like bloody murder, too. There was so damn much trouble that I decided to leave.” A report by a social worker, however, tells a different story. By July 1932, Bob had gotten into so many “violent quarrels with other patients” that he fled the convalescent home before his “unmanageable temper” landed him in serious trouble.
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Back in Manhattan, the only work he could find was washing dishes in the cafeteria of the New York Supreme Court building, a job so low-paying that he could barely afford a bed in a Bowery flophouse. Within a few weeks of his arrival, he was spending his nights in a cardboard shack in the homeless community that had sprung up in Central Park—one of the makeshift shantytowns known as
“Hoovervilles” that proliferated across the United States during the Great Depression.

A chance encounter with his friend Chuck Smith changed the course of his life. Smith, who had left Burke’s a few weeks before Bob, was working as a short-order cook and renting a room in a brownstone belonging to the family of an acquaintance, a young woman named Ethel. Hearing of his friend’s desperate circumstances, he offered to let Bob share his bedroom, free of charge, until he was back on his feet. Of course, Chuck would have to get his landlords’ permission. Why didn’t Bob come to the house that evening and Chuck would introduce him to the family? The address was 240 East 53rd Street. The family’s name was Gedeon.

A Hungarian émigré who had come to New York City twenty-five years earlier, Joseph Gedeon was a slight, skinny fellow whose hollow cheeks, long, pointed nose, scraggly moustache, and piercing eyes—magnified by pince-nez spectacles—gave him the look of an unusually cunning rodent. Though capable of a certain dapperness, his preferred outfit at home and at work—baggy trousers, frayed suspenders, and an old buttoned undershirt—endowed him with a vague air of seediness, made more pronounced by the hand-rolled cigarette perpetually dangling from his lips.

He met his wife, the former Mary Caratsoki—Hungarian-born like himself—at a dance. They married after a brief courtship and moved to Astoria, Queens. A “Magyar beauty in her youth,” Mary allowed herself to slide into a plump and dowdy middle age, though, even in her forties, she retained enough traces of her former loveliness to strike most observers as “still a comely person.”
²
A small dowry she brought to the marriage, supplemented by the savings they managed to scrape together from Joe’s assorted odd jobs—janitor, bartender, industrial painter—allowed them to purchase a run-down brownstone on East 53rd Street in 1929. Moving into the ground floor, they rented the other bedrooms to boarders and briefly operated a basement speakeasy that was quickly shut down by police. In the meantime, Joe—who had apprenticed in his youth
to an upholsterer—opened his own shop a few blocks away.

There were two daughters in the family. The elder, twenty-year-old Ethel, affected a severe look—horn-rimmed eyeglasses, brunette hair brushed back into a tight bun—that did little to disguise her beauty. Three years earlier she had been swept off her feet by a smooth-talking cabbie named Louis Gramatecki and eloped with him. The marriage was swiftly annulled, evidently because Gramatecki proved impotent on their wedding night—“ice cold,” as Ethel put it. Within twenty-four hours, she had returned to her parents’ brownstone, while Gramatecki moved into his widowed mother’s apartment, where, the following year, he “locked himself inside the kitchen, closed the windows and turned on the gas.”
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Even lovelier than Ethel was her kid sister, Veronica—Ronnie, as everyone called her. At fifteen, she already exuded a lush sexuality that, in coming years, she would cheerfully exploit and that would ultimately turn her into an icon of tabloid titillation.

Meeting no objections from the Gedeons, Bob moved into Chuck Smith’s room in the third week of October 1932. His efforts to suppress his sexual urges on behalf of his visualization had been markedly unsuccessful. He was plagued by lewd fantasies of Alice and found it impossible to keep from masturbating. The proximity of the two nubile Gedeon sisters only made matters worse. On Wednesday, October 27, less than a week after he moved in with the Gedeons, he resolved to end his torment once and for all.

That evening, he went into the toilet and, as he afterward described it, “put a strong rubber band around my prick to make it numb so it wouldn’t hurt.” Leaving the house, he “walked the streets, then went all the way to Brooklyn by subway in order to kill time to leave it on till my penis got numb so that I wouldn’t feel the pain.” It was one in the morning by the time he returned to the brownstone. Inside the bathroom, he took “a brand new Gillette razor blade” he had bought for the purpose and placed the edge against the base of his penis. Then he started to cut.
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11

Wertham

D
ESCRIBING HIS FAILED ATTEMPT
at “self-emasculation,” Bob later explained that he’d been forced to stop when the pain became too intense. “On the outside of my prick, I didn’t feel it at all. When I got to the inner cords—Jesus Christ, it hurt so damn much, you have no idea. I kept on trying just a little bit at a time until I got to the place I couldn’t stand it.”

With the rubber band tourniquet still binding the base of his penis, Bob made his way to the Bellevue Hospital emergency room, arriving shortly before 2:30 in the morning. Giving his name as “James Adamson,” he calmly explained what he had tried to do and asked the young night intern to finish the job. Utterly nonplussed, the intern bandaged the cut and advised Bob “to come back the next day.”

Another slightly older physician was on duty when Bob returned just after daybreak. Ignoring Bob’s pleas that he complete the amputation, the doctor snipped off the rubber band with surgical scissors, sutured the wound—an “ugly, deep laceration” requiring seven stitches—applied antiseptic dressing, and had him admitted to the psychiatric ward.
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He would remain there until March 17, 1933.

During his five-month stay at Bellevue, Bob was examined by some of the city’s most eminent psychiatrists, including Drs. Menas Gregory, head of the hospital’s psychiatric division, and Walter Briehl, an acolyte of Wilhelm Reich’s and, later in his career, a pioneering practitioner of group therapy. The physician who spent the most time with him, however—and with whom he formed the deepest and most enduring bond—was Fredric Wertham.
²

At the time he first treated Bob Irwin, Wertham was still twenty years away from becoming the boogeyman that, in certain circles, he remains to this day. He attained his enduring notoriety in 1954 with the publication of his best seller
Seduction of the Innocent
, a luridly illustrated attack on comic books as the leading cause of criminal behavior in children. In a decade when, according to one national poll, juvenile delinquency ranked higher on the list of public concerns than open-air atom bomb testing, Wertham’s screed helped incite a nationwide campaign against the comic book industry, culminating in a Congressional investigation that drove dozens of publishers out of business and forced the rest to adopt a strict (and, in the minds of most fans, ruinous) censorship code.
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To comic book devotees then and now, “Dr. Werthless” (as he was caricatured in the pages of
Mad
magazine) was nothing but a witch-hunting zealot, stirring up a panic among the parents of America for his own self-promoting reasons.
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That Wertham has earned such a nefarious reputation in the cultural history books seems sadly unfair, since—far from being an unscrupulous fearmonger in the mold of Joe McCarthy—he was one of the city’s most liberal and enlightened psychiatrists. However misguided his crusade against the comics, it was motivated by a passionate concern with the psychological and social roots of criminal violence.

Born and raised in Nuremberg, Bavaria, Friedrich Ignanz Wertheimer (as he was originally named) developed an early love for British culture during summertime visits to relatives in England. He was especially enamored of the novels of Charles Dickens and deeply
impressed by their power to stir the conscience of the public and inspire social reform. As he later told an interviewer, Dickens taught him a lesson he never forgot—“that by expressing oneself properly, one can affect lives.”
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Following a year at the University of Munich, where he began his medical studies, Friedrich left Germany and enrolled in King’s College London. His schooling was interrupted by the outbreak of the Great War. As a German national, he was sent to an internment camp, where he worked in the infirmary and spent his free hours reading texts on psychology. When the war ended, he returned to Germany to complete his medical studies, receiving his MD from the University of Würzburg in 1921. He interned briefly in Munich with Emil Kraepelin—the psychiatric pioneer who devised the standard system for the classification of mental disorders—and, during postgraduate study in Vienna, paid a memorable visit to Sigmund Freud. Not long afterward, in August 1922, the twenty-seven-year-old Wertheimer left Europe for good, emigrating to America to work with Professor Adolf Meyer, director of the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

It was during Friedrich’s years in Baltimore that he became a naturalized U.S. citizen and changed his name to the marginally more American-sounding Fredric Wertham. In other ways, too, this period proved the most transformative of his life. Under the influence of Meyer—who stressed the “importance of the home, the school, and the community in shaping the development of young minds”
⁶
—he began to look beyond traditional Freudian theory, with its emphasis on infantile sexuality, and to focus on the larger social forces that help shape the personality (an approach that would ultimately lead to his concern with media violence). As one of the only psychiatrists in the city willing to treat African-Americans, he formed a close association with the legendary attorney Clarence Darrow, who frequently called upon him to examine and testify on behalf of indigent black defendants. A highly cultured man with a lifelong passion for art and literature (his correspondents included George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Mann, and W. Somerset Maugham, and in later years,
he counted Arthur Miller and Richard Wright among his friends), he became part of H. L. Mencken’s Saturday Night Club, an informal gathering of two dozen members who met weekly to play music, dine on traditional German fare, and drink home-brewed beer. Among his patients at Phipps was Zelda Fitzgerald, several of whose watercolor paintings would eventually form part of his impressive art collection.
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Wertham remained at Phipps until December 1931, when he moved to New York to assume the position of senior psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital. That same month—following years of concerted effort by a committee composed of jurists, criminologists, and mental health experts—New York City passed a law establishing a psychiatric clinic for the Court of General Sessions, at that time Manhattan’s major criminal court. At a “moment when American courts, prisons, and asylums were beginning to look to psychiatry for scientific explanations of criminal activity,”
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the clinic—staffed by members of Bellevue’s psychiatric department—was responsible for evaluating the mental condition of all convicted felons and providing a report to the presiding judge that would assist him in determining an appropriate sentence. When the clinic went into operation on January 4, 1932, Fredric Wertham was one its three full-time members.
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Though he had been involved in various criminal cases in Baltimore, providing assistance to Clarence Darrow, it was his work for the new Court of General Sessions clinic that altered the course of Wertham’s career and turned him into one of the nation’s leading forensic psychiatrists. Within a few years, he had become a familiar name to readers of the tabloids as an expert witness in some of the most sensational trials of the day, including that of the cannibal pedophile Albert Fish.

To Wertham, the sixty-five-year-old Fish—who had spent his entire adult life preying on children and practicing “every known sexual perversion and some perversions never heard of before”—was manifestly insane, and he was stunned when the jury returned a guilty verdict and the old man was sentenced to death. In a subsequent
meeting with Governor Herbert Lehman to plead for commutation, Wertham argued that, with Fish spared from death and committed to an institution, science would have a chance to study the man’s twisted psychology and learn something that might help prevent future crimes against children. “Psychiatry is advanced enough,” he insisted, “that with proper examination such a man as Fish can be detected and confined before the perpetration of these outrages.”
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