Gracefully Insane (29 page)

The Taylors were blessed—or cursed—with fame, but they were not the
only successful musicians sojourning at McLean. As a Harvard undergraduate, Clay Jackson had played bluegrass guitar and mandolin
with the Charles River Boys in the early 1960s and had backed up a crystal-voiced young folksinger named Joan Baez, who occasionally played concerts at the hospital. “She was a skinny little black-haired girl who had a voice you could hear for two blocks,” says Jackson, whose life journey took him from Cambridge to London to Tangier to McLean and now back to his family home in Kerrville, Texas, where he is looking forward to receiving his first Social Security check: “I’ve sort of made an effort not to contribute to society,” he says. The godson of James Taylor’s father Isaac, John Sheldon, also ended up at McLean with Kate and Livingston, and after touring with James in the mid-1980s, he has carved out a successful performing career in western Massachusetts. After graduating from the Arlington School, Sheldon was approached by a young musician named Van Morrison to help him record a new album. “It was very odd,” Sheldon remembers:

John is a superb guitarist whose recordings have something of the outlaw edge that David Bromberg brought to the early Bob
Dylan records. Now in his mid-forties, his mannerisms are those of the classic McLean graduate: He is jittery, funny, smart, and direct, and he is raising two children in the Pioneer Valley near Amherst. Thirty years ago, when he was just sixteen years old, he spent the summer touring New England with Morrison’s band. Life with Van was never dull:

Van Morrison’s train left the station, and John Sheldon was not on it. The ethereal, acoustic album that Morrison cut for Warner Brothers turned out to be
Astral Weeks,
which some cognoscenti insist is one of the greatest rock records of all time. As it happened, McLean was represented on the album. The haunting flute solos that backstop songs like “Cyprus Avenue” and “Madame George” were provided by John Payne, a talented Harvard musician who interrupted his undergraduate studies to obtain a McLean “degree.” As one doctor explained to me, with a knowing smile, “Music therapy at McLean was the path to greatness.”

Most of the young people who fetched up at McLean hailed from the
social elite: Payne was a cousin of Robert Lowell; Isaac Taylor was
a well-to-do doctor who worked for a time as dean of the medical school at the University of North Carolina. The son of John Marquand, at the time one of America’s best-known novelists, was at McLean, as was the daughter of the legendary cartoonist Al Capp. Peppered elsewhere on the wards were Yankee Forbeses, a department store heiress, a Mafia don-in-waiting, and so on. “It was the great Cambridge sociology experiment,” remarks Susanna Kaysen, author of the McLean memoir
Girl, Interrupted,
by which she means the warehousing of the troubled children of the well-to-do. Kaysen’s own father was running Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study when she was hospitalized. “The old definition of the Proper Bostonian used to be someone who lived on Beacon Hill and had an uncle in McLean,” Merton Kahne says. “As the clientele got younger, I used to joke that we were redefining the Proper Bostonian. Now it was someone at McLean who had an uncle on Beacon Hill.”

The McLean youth movement was a response to what an economist might call a market opportunity. Psychiatry was a booming field, flush with confidence in its therapeutic powers. Doctors were pouring out of the medical schools and were looking for patients to analyze. Many insurance companies were paying for up to six months of inpatient care, and the field of adolescent psychiatry was burgeoning. And there was no shortage of troubled young people. The 1960s need no introduction here: Drugs, rebelliousness, and rejection of parental authority were the order of the day, especially in the socioeconomic strata that had access to psychiatric care. (In her official history of the hospital, Silvia Sutton remarks that “delinquent adolescents from less-advantaged homes had other destinies, such as reform school.”) Conveniently, doctors developed a catchall diagnosis for their teenage clientele: “adolescent turmoil.” “These were people who probably wouldn’t be considered severe enough to be hospitalized now,” says Dr. Michael Sperber, who worked on South Belknap and Bowditch during the 1960s. “Their curse was that somebody had some money in the family. It wasn’t like managed care is today. There
was a lot of money around, and as long as people had a bank account, you’d find something that they should work on.”

Barbara Schwartz, a social worker who started at McLean in 1962, remembers that the young people began to invade the hospital in the early 1960s, at the end of the Stanton era, even before the well-documented scourges of drugs, sex, and rock and roll:

Not surprisingly, there was no small amount of cynicism among the young people concerning the hospital’s motivations. I interviewed a successful forty-something media executive in lower Manhattan who was still bristling with anger, both at his father for sending him to McLean and at the hospital for diagnosing him with an unspecified “character disorder.” He showed me a photograph of himself in a football uniform and with long hair. “I was a hippie,” he remembered.

When she retrieved her McLean file to write
Girl, Interrupted,
Susanna Kaysen noticed that her diagnosis was “borderline personality
disorder” (BPD), another controversial catchall, popularized and promoted by McLean’s own John Gunderson, the same doctor who managed the decade-long schizophrenia study for Alfred Stanton in the 1960s.
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To this day, Kaysen, like many members of the psychiatric profession, is not exactly sure what her diagnosis meant: “BPD—a psychiatrist once told me that’s what they call people whose lifestyles they don’t like.” John Sheldon also managed to see his case file. “If you look at my notes, it just said ‘adolescent turmoil.’ It’s not even clearly diagnosed. The thinking was, ‘This guy’s having a tough adolescence. Let’s lock him up so he doesn’t hurt himself.’”

The McLean party line, articulated to me in an interview by Shervert Frazier, the cerebral Texas doctor who ascended to the post of psychiatrist-in-chief in 1972, was that the kids were on drugs. Sitting in Frazier’s well-appointed office, decorated with an old-fashioned painting of a sailing ship on the wall, I could not help feeling that I was talking to one of my own parents or to one of any of my generation’s parents, indeed, of every generation’s parents: well-meaning, avuncular, out of touch. At age seventynine, Frazier has kept himself in marvelous shape; he swims and lifts weights, and I first met him hiking the antique, oak-paneled corridors of the administration building during the ten-minute breaks between his therapeutic appointments. His speech, for all its fineries of thought, still twangs of the Lone Star State. He speaks in clear paragraphs; indeed, when he later lost his job in a plagiarism scandal, his defenders suggested that his habit of dictating finished journal copy probably did him in, so adept was he at assimilating materials that he had read or heard, that his brain
never processed their provenance. So here is Frazier, McLean’s psychiatrist-in-chief for twelve years, on the subject of his rambunctious, youthful charges:

One of Frazier’s contemporaries, Dr. Alan Stone, weighed in along similar lines in a lengthy review of the movie
Girl, Interrupted
made from Kaysen’s book. Stone was a resident at McLean and later became director of residency training there before defecting to Harvard Law School, where he now teaches. He writes of the 1960s kids: