Adventures in the Orgasmatron (46 page)

In one of Goodman’s group sessions, when someone complained of lack of sexual companionship, Goodman went around the circle and set up a week’s worth of dates. “See, that wasn’t so difficult,” he reassured her. He was not beyond offering his own neurosis-busting services to patients of either sex, and once agreed to accompany a patient who invited him on an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. He joked about setting up a College of Sex so as to put his vast experience to educational use. “I’m a sociopath,” he warned a potential client. In a diary entry written in 1957, Goodman looked back on the previous decade and concluded that he’d made “a false cultus-religion (an obsession)” of sex: “The sexual act itself had just about the meaning of a ritual communion sacrifice.”
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Eight

In late 1946, a journalist named Mildred Edie Brady visited Reich in Forest Hills. Ollendorff opened the door and ushered Brady upstairs. As Brady made her way up the staircase she observed the photographs of the Milky Way and other astrological formations that decorated the walls. They were hung almost as if to give the impression that one was ascending to the heavens. Brady entered Reich’s second floor office to find a “heavy set, ruddy, brown haired man of 50, wearing a long white coat and sitting at a huge desk.”
¹
He looked up from his writing as if he were interrupting a great thought, and sprang up from his desk to meet her.

An influential journalist already greatly respected in New York and Washington for the diligent work she had done since 1930 on politics and advertising, Brady, then forty, had become a pioneer in the new consumer advocacy movement. She now lived in California with her husband, Robert Brady, a professor of economics at Berkeley, with whom she had been instrumental in founding the Consumers Union in 1936. One of her colleagues at Berkeley described her as “a highly articulate person with a well-developed sense of outrage.”
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Brady was also something of a beguiling interviewer. A former model with strawberry blond hair and striking green eyes, she was by all accounts full of energy and charm. In her youth she had come to New York from the Midwest with dreams of becoming an actress, and her thespian bent found an outlet in her undercover investigations into consumer issues.

Brady had first come across Reich when a friend of hers who had been diagnosed with cancer obtained an orgone box and begun to sit in it, hoping for a cure. When Brady, who considered this to be “crack-pot nonsense,” made inquiries about Reich and his device, she was astonished to discover that many of the psychoanalysts she spoke to on the West Coast agreed with his theory of the orgasm and the psychic origins of cancer.

Brady told Reich that that she was bringing good and interesting news from friends on the West Coast. Though in retrospect this would seem to have been intentionally misleading, it was not entirely untrue; she had been to see many of his followers in California, and whatever her view of it, she was the first to relay to Reich in any detail his burgeoning influence there. Still, she had just had dinner with some of his analytic enemies, at a party hosted by Lawrence Kubie, the man whom Reich suspected of denouncing him to the FBI. The assembled guests had regaled her with stories of Reich’s psychotic performance at the Lucerne congress in 1934, where he had set up camp on the lawn of the conference hotel. However, they defended his work prior to that.

“Reich’s following is growing,” Brady wrote to Dexter Masters, her Consumers Union colleague (he was a former lover).

If you talk to most of the analysts for any length of time, you generally find that they agree with Reich about everything except orgone. This embarrasses them. But actually I think Reich speaks the truth when he says that the only difference between him and his critics is that he dares to carry to its logical end the basic concept of Freud. And in that logic he reaches not only the psychoanalytic conclusions he does but the political implications as well—in a word, anarchism or nihilism.
³

Theodor Adorno famously wrote, in
Minima Moralia
(1951): “In psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.” From a different point of view, Brady essentially agreed with this sentiment. Reich’s excesses showed the true danger of psychoanalysis—the plague Freud had brought to America, in her view, was anarchy.

Brady believed that the vogue for psychoanalysis in the United States was akin to that for astrology in Rome in the first and second centuries. As Masters would later explain, “Her concern was less with Reich than it was with what she saw as a rather thin cultism growing out of a rather passionate nonsense…Mildred found the orthodoxy absurd and Reich a menace.”
⁴

Brady’s article “The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy” appeared in the April 1947 issue of
Harper’s Magazine
. It was the first time many Americans outside of a handful of radicals on both coasts had heard of Reich, and they came to know him as Brady cast him: the eccentric and misguided inventor of the orgone box, and the intellectual inspiration for a nascent youth movement in the San Francisco Bay area that was being led in Big Sur by the novelist Henry Miller (famous for his banned works of erotica,
Tropic of Cancer
and
Tropic of Capricorn
) and, to a lesser extent, in Berkeley by the anarchist poet Kenneth Rexroth (who presided over the anarchist forum, the Libertarian Circle). They were people Reich had never met and places he’d never been.

Miller had returned to America in 1940, after a sexually adventurous decade in Paris—the “Land of Fuck”—and immediately embarked on a three-year-long, 25,000-mile road trip across the country. His travelogue,
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
(1945), was intensely critical of the United States, which he presented as spiritually bankrupt, full of conformity, prejudice, philistinism, and sexual repression. He acknowledged that the generation of émigrés with whom he’d returned to America saw it as a world of hope, as representative of the future, but Miller wrote, “To me it was a world I knew only too well, a world that made me infinitely sad.” He found only glimmers of authenticity in the renegades and escapists he met on the road.
⁵
In 1944, at fifty-two, he settled with his third wife in Big Sur to escape a civilization he deemed to be sick, and to enjoy the hot sulfur springs and simple life. In keeping with Miller’s outlaw infamy, they lived in a former convict’s cabin on the edge of a cliff that plunged a thousand feet into the sea.

Miller, “the sage of Big Sur,” was so destitute that he wrote an open letter to readers of
The New Republic
begging them to send him clothes (“love corduroys”), art supplies, and any sum of money in return for one of his watercolors. He used a child’s cart to haul these gifts the mile and a half up the hill to his home, wearing nothing, he wrote in a memoir, “but a jock-strap.”
⁶
His charity appeal was a “howling success.”
Time
magazine called Miller a “free-loving, free-sponging American-from-Paris,” but in Miller’s mind, donors were sponsoring an idealistic venture: his attempt to fuse sex and mystical religion to discover a utopian alternative to the “villainous status quo.”
⁷

Miller’s legend as a literary pornographer was enough to associate Big Sur with anarchy and sexual liberation. Battered contraband copies of his books, brought back from Europe by GIs, circulated in bohemian circles and assured his underground reputation (they would not be publicly available in the States until 1964). A martyr to censorship and a vocal pamphleteer against the war, Miller attracted his share of cultish acolytes, or “Millerites,” who flocked to Big Sur hoping to emulate him. “They were all filled with a desire to escape the horrors of the present and willing to live like rats if only they might be left alone and in peace,” Miller wrote of these postwar dropouts, both veterans and conscientious objectors, who were searching and struggling for a better way.
⁸
“The cyclotron not only smashed atoms,” Miller wrote of the invention that had led to the atomic bomb, “it smashed our moral codes.”
⁹

Miller had inherited his shack from George Leite, a twenty-four-year-old poet who was nicknamed Blackie the Bandit because of his dark Portuguese good looks. Leite and his wife, Nancy, stayed on in Big Sur in a neighboring hut, where they absorbed Miller’s philosophy. Miller would no doubt also have been affected by Leite’s enthusiasm for Reich. Miller encouraged Leite to start
Circle
, an anarchist and pacifist literary magazine based in Berkeley that both he and Rexroth contributed to and that included laudatory articles about Reich. Outside Leite’s office, like a sentry post, stood his homemade orgone box.

Mildred Brady’s secretary, Lucille Marshall, told me that Brady was “entranced” by Leite because he had two live-in helpmates: his wife stayed home to raise their two children while his mistress helped him earn a living.
¹⁰
“We had a wild and crazy life,” Nancy Leite bashfully explained when I asked her about this domestic arrangement. “In some ways it made life easier, in some ways it made life more difficult.”
¹¹
Jody Scott, Leite’s mistress, arrived from Chicago in 1946 just in time to help Leite fold his struggling magazine; she had the job of returning manuscripts to Tennessee Williams, Anaïs Nin, and Lawrence Durrell. “I shared a house, his wife, and
Circle
magazine, and coauthored a book with George Leite,” Scott remembered, “and he did indeed possess an orgone accumulator and used it daily, explaining to me that Wilhelm Reich was a genius who worked under Freud and that Reich had invented this marvelous device to step up an individual’s vital powers, necessary because we’ve all been horribly crushed and injured by a suppressive society.”
¹²

Brady visited Leite and Miller, who, she wrote in her piece, were turning the coastal hills below San Francisco into “the cultural Mecca of the twentieth century.”
¹³
Literary immigrants now flooded there, spilling out of San Francisco down Highway 1 and turning the Pacific coastline around Big Sur into what Brady describes as an unsightly shantytown version of Paris’s Left Bank or 1920s Greenwich Village; she described these willing castaways as all “beards and sandaled feet…corduroys and dark shirts.”

The anarchist-inclined literati were interested in poetry, philosophy, painting, but above all, she contended, sex. Reich was their guru—their “ultimate authority.” According to Brady,
The Function of the Orgasm
(1942) was “the most widely read and frequently quoted” bible of the avant-garde group. “Even at the poetry-readings,” Brady mocked, “you are likely to find someone carrying a volume of his turgid and pretentious prose.”
¹⁴

In a long, well-written, and well-researched piece, Brady skewered this fringe community for its avant-garde posturing. She ridiculed its members for their confident belief that they formed “a biological elite” of the “orgastically potent,” beacons from a nonrepressed world amid a sea of “orgastic cripples.” These conscientious objectors, dropouts from both war and life, had developed a belief system that rationalized their stubborn policy of nonparticipation. Their anarchism and search for salvation through sex seemed to echo 1920s bohemia, but she found them to be more snobbish and reactionary than their forebears.

Brady disliked the new generation’s largely misogynistic and less progressive religion of ecstasy, for which she felt that Reich’s ideas were largely responsible:

These builders of the new Paris in the nineteen-forties would profoundly shock their agnostic predecessors of the twenties with their sentimental mysticism; for bohemia today is profoundly religious…A sojourn in the Greenwich Village of the twenties [wouldn’t prepare] you for love as “the ecstasy of the cosmos” or for the “sexual sacrament” as the acme of worship. Back in the postwar of World War I, sexual emancipation was stoutly defended and practically furthered by the younger generation…but it never got mixed up with the deity. Sex in those days was a strictly worldly affair and nobody’s business but our own. “The great oneness,” however, is an intimate participant in the sexual emotions of his worshippers. In fact, he reveals himself fully only in the self-effacing ecstasy of the sexual climax. This, they hold, is the moment of deepest spiritual comprehension of “the other reality,” the one moment when there is living communication between “the vital force” and the individual.
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