The Genius Factory (12 page)

Saturday Night Live
ridiculed Shockley and the bank in a skit entitled “Dr. Shockley’s House of Sperm,” starring Rodney Dangerfield as himself. In the skit, Dangerfield was the most popular donor at “Shockley’s House of Sperm”—a sperm bank whose wide selection trumped that of “Jizz World” and “Jelly Barn.” Clerks pleaded with customers to buy “some Linus Pauling”; they offered a sale on “the David Susskind.” But all anyone wanted was Rodney Dangerfield, Rodney Dangerfield, Rodney Dangerfield. Meanwhile, in the back room, Rodney was getting exhausted as order after order piled up: “Are you kidding? I can’t. No way! No way! You kidding? It can’t be done! . . . You’re gonna kill the goose that laid the golden egg!”

Shockley adored the attention. It had been several years since he had made headlines, and he was delighted to be causing trouble again. Shockley, not Graham, became the public face of the sperm bank throughout 1980. Shockley, not Graham, was interviewed on
Good Morning America
and
Donahue.
(Shockley had the presence of mind to mock himself on
Donahue.
He stood up, all five feet, six inches of him, shed his suit jacket, and turned in a full circle in front of the audience. “It would be ridiculous for me to say I was a superman.”

The bank and Shockley became inextricably linked in the public mind, and that proved disastrous for Graham. Despite his occasional flashes of wit, as on
Donahue,
Shockley mostly used his media appearances as occasions to appall his audiences. He spouted his racist theories of dysgenics and showed off charts of whites’ and blacks’ reproductive rates. He described the potential Nobel Prize babies as a “crop” and demonstrated his wonderful paternal instincts by expressing not a whiff of interest in the sperm bank children he might father. He cooperated with all journalists who called, to ill effect. He even sat for a profile in
Hustler
magazine. It began with memorable cruelty:

Jacking off for mankind! Somehow the scene comes off as comic, and maybe even a little sad: Imagine hand lotion or box of tissues at hand, and, of course, to excite the scientific imagination—a visual aid. A copy of
Hustler
perhaps. Confident in what he is doing, Shockley urgently pumps and pumps.

Outside a few feet distant, stands a California multimillionaire named Robert Graham. He is 73 and dressed in a business suit. With him is a white-jacketed technician, at the ready. They wait anxiously.

At length—success!

The door to the room opens. Shockley, who once opened the door to America’s manned-space-flight program and a host of electronic marvels by helping to invent the transistor, shuffles out and hands over the warm specimen, a sticky splotch of semen deposited in a small plastic bag.

Playboy
subjected Shockley to its famous interview in August 1980—Bo Derek was on the cover. In the course of it, Shockley admitted he hadn’t known that sperm from older men carried a higher risk of birth defects. He also told
Playboy
about his disappointment in his own children, managing to insult his kids, humiliate his wife, and aggrandize himself, all at once. “In terms of my own capacities, my children represent a very significant regression. My first wife—their mother—had not as high an academic achievement standing as I had.”

Shockley’s return to notoriety didn’t last long. He made a brief, and hilariously bad, run for the U.S. Senate in 1982 as the “Anti-Dysgenic Candidate,” finishing seventh in the California Republican primary with only 7,000 votes. He embarked on bizarre projects, including commissioning a novel that was supposed to do for genetic decline what
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
had done for slavery. (His author, a dentist’s wife, wrote the first chapters of
Huntsville: A Journey into Darkness
before the project foundered.) He belittled his great physics research: dysgenics, he declared, was far more important than the transistor. His innate suspicion degenerated into paranoia. He taped every telephone call. He forced reporters to take a statistics quiz before he would agree to an interview.

Shockley, who had hobnobbed with kings and dazzled the world’s greatest minds, ended in the gutter of American politics, allied with cranks and racists. During his senate campaign, the KKK offered to rally in Shockley’s support and canceled only when Shockley’s lawyer dissuaded them. Neo-Nazi newspapers took to reprinting Shockley’s writings. When Shockley won a libel suit against an Atlanta columnist who had compared him to Hitler, the jury awarded him only $1 in damages: Shockley was such spoiled goods, the verdict seemed to say, that his reputation couldn’t be damaged.

The Repository for Germinal Choice never received another vial of Shockley’s sperm after 1978. This was a shame, a former Repository employee told me, because Shockley’s sperm “quality”—if not his “human quality”—was very high. But after the
Playboy
interview, Shockley was spooked by the idea that his geriatric sperm might have health problems. He didn’t want to donate until the Repository gave him a more thorough physical. It never happened.

The mocking and alarmist media coverage took its toll on Robert Graham and his sperm bank. When Shockley’s involvement was publicized, protestors descended on Graham’s estate, chanting outside his iron gates. Graham and his wife fled the protests and hired round-the-clock Pinkertons to guard his precious sperm. Baffled by the public rage, Graham retreated from the press. He ducked interviews for two years. His dream had become a farce.

Graham’s other two Nobel donors quit when the bank went public; they feared a Shockley-style mauling. So by late 1980, Graham found himself presiding over a Nobel Prize sperm bank that had no Nobel Prize donors, no Nobel Prize sperm left in storage (it had all been shipped out), and no Nobel Prize babies. None of the first three women who’d been inseminated with Nobel sperm had gotten pregnant. In fact no one inseminated with the Nobel sperm ever got pregnant. The Nobel Prize sperm bank would never produce a single Nobel baby.

The bad publicity did not deter those who mattered most to Graham: customers. Every day the Nobel sperm bank was flayed in the press. But every day more applications—applications from desperate women—arrived at Graham’s office.

And Graham remained an irrepressible evangelist for his cause. He had customers but no Nobelists, so now he needed some new seed—some dazzling, backflipping, 175 IQ sperm—to give them. Graham was nothing if not a canny businessman. He had built a multimillion-dollar eyeglasses company that depended on a fickle public’s taste. He understood that he had to please his customers. This was a radical notion in the fertility trade, where doctors were accustomed to bossing around their forlorn infertile patients. Graham had begun with the notion of limiting his clientele to women who belonged to Mensa or had an IQ of at least 120. “I don’t want a whole flock of ordinary women,” he had declared. Graham quickly ditched that plan. If he wanted a popular bank, he realized, he would have to take any woman—or at least any married woman with an infertile husband—who applied.

More important, Graham had learned that his customers didn’t share his enthusiasm for brainiacs. The Nobelists had afflicted Graham with three problems he hadn’t anticipated: first, there were too few of them to meet the demand; second, they were too old, which raised the risk of genetic abnormalities and cut their sperm counts (a key reason why their seed didn’t get anyone pregnant); third, they were too eggheaded. Even the customers of the Nobel sperm bank sought more than just big brains from their donors. Sure, sometimes his applicants asked how smart a donor was. But they usually asked how good-looking he was. And they
always
asked how tall he was. Nobody, Graham saw, ever chose the “short sperm.” Graham realized he could make a virtue of necessity. He could take advantage of his Nobel drought to shed what he called the bank’s “little bald professor” reputation. Graham began to hunt for Renaissance men instead—donors who were younger, taller, and better-looking than the laureates. “Those Nobelists,” he would say scornfully, “they could never win a basketball game.”

Graham dispatched his newly hired deputy, a former sanitation engineer named Paul Smith, to find another crop of donors, men who could write equations all morning, ski all afternoon, and make love all night. Graham had known Smith for almost twenty years. Smith had thought about little else than genius sperm banking since 1960, when, as a nineteen-year-old Berkeley undergraduate, he had read an article by Hermann Muller. Smith believed with a convert’s passion that genius sperm banking could change the world. Smith had written fan letters to Muller and struck up a great friendship with the old scientist. (Muller even tried to marry Smith off to his daughter.) Smith had accompanied Muller to the 1963 Pasadena meeting where Muller and Graham wrote the initial plans for the sperm bank. Graham and Muller had even invited Smith to serve on their first advisory board in the early 1960s. But after earning an engineering degree at Berkeley, Paul fled to England in 1965 to avoid having to serve in Vietnam. He spent fifteen years in Britain, working as a printer and road engineer, then returned to the United States right before the launch of the Nobel Prize bank in 1980. When Smith heard the first news reports about the Repository, he hopped into his car, drove across the country to Escondido, knocked on Graham’s door, and volunteered for the cause. Graham appointed him manager of the bank, offered him a $26,000-a-year salary, gave him a dealer-fresh, banana yellow VW Beetle, and told him to go forth and multiply.

In every way Paul Smith was Graham’s opposite. Graham was short, Paul was tall. Graham was a neat freak, Paul a slob. Graham was gracious, Paul was socially awkward. Graham’s mind was orderly, Paul’s was anarchic. With his little head on his gaunt, endless body, Smith looked a little bit like a spermatozoon himself. He had the face of the actor Ed Harris and the manner of an addled but brilliant professor. He spoke in a flat, creaking voice; long pauses separated his words. Sometimes he scarcely seemed aware of the world around him. He walked like a John Cleese character, all knees and flailing elbows. He cared little for his personal appearance. His hair flew away in odd, mad-looking wisps. He loved dogs and bred them; he was constantly coated with a mat of dog hair. Yet he had a sharp mind, a wickedly dry wit, and, most important for Graham, a messianic zeal for genius sperm banking that surpassed Graham’s own.

Smith recruited for Graham as if his life depended on it. He haunted the campuses of Caltech and Berkeley—he preferred Caltech because “parking was easier.” He pored over
Who’s Who
and scanned lists of Fields Medalists and other hotshot scientists, seeking men who were brilliant, good-looking, and willing. His luck was spotty: he landed only eight donors in more than a hundred solicitations. “Some of the men had a vasectomy. Some said their wife wouldn’t let them. And some probably thought I had been sent by the Devil himself.” Smith would go to almost any length to get his sperm. On the rare occasions when someone agreed to give, Smith would immediately drag the donor somewhere—anywhere—where he could jack off. That might mean a quickie motel, or worse. One donor recalls Smith handing him a cup and directing him into a public bathroom at the University of California, Berkeley (surely not the first time a Berkeley bathroom was used for a curious sexual purpose, but still . . .). Smith’s finds included a prize math professor, student prodigies, and dazzling computer scientists. Meanwhile Graham, working on his own, recruited others, such as Edward Burnham and the Olympic gold medal–winning Donor Fuchsia.

From the beginning, the Repository had more applicants than sperm—a state that would persist until it closed nineteen years later. Every sperm donation produced only a handful of usable semen straws. But each client needed a couple of straws every month, and it usually took several months to get pregnant. Graham couldn’t sign up donors fast enough and couldn’t get them to donate often enough to meet the demand. They were busy men, and Graham didn’t pay them, so it was hard to persuade them to donate frequently. He and his employees ended up taking a triage approach, supplying what little sperm they had to the women who seemed most likely, or most desperate, to get pregnant.

Graham didn’t enlist any minority donors, mostly but not
entirely
for lack of trying. Graham’s racial views were complicated. He retained the childhood prejudices learned in Harbor Springs. He felt uncomfortable around blacks and considered them mentally inferior to whites. Like Shockley, he felt his conclusion was scientific, not emotional. The “IQ of the average Negro,” he would say with certainty, is “twenty-two points lower than that of the average white American’s.” (That was ten more points than even Shockley claimed.) When Lori Andrews, a lawyer and bioethicist, applied to Graham for Nobel sperm as a kind of stunt, he asked her for legal help: he said he wanted to find a way he could give sperm to her—a single white woman—but not to a single black woman.

Although Graham shared Shockley’s racist conclusions, he didn’t make a federal case of them. For Graham, race was a footnote to the larger story of genetic decline everywhere. He was
willing
to believe that genius could appear in anyone. But his fixation on IQ made him think it was much less likely among blacks and Hispanics. Graham was a racist but not always a white supremacist. He ranked blacks and Hispanics below whites in intelligence, but he ranked Asians above whites. He frequently tried, and always failed, to recruit Asian donors. And though he had grown up in a distinctly anti-Semitic town, Graham hugely admired Jews, whom he believed to be disproportionately intelligent. A large number of his donors were Jewish.

Graham’s prejudice didn’t stop him from trying to recruit blacks. When Smith—who didn’t share Graham’s racial views—identified a brilliant black donor candidate, Graham encouraged him. They were both disappointed when the man’s diabetes disqualified him. The bank remained lily white. According to three former Repository managers, no black women ever applied for Repository sperm. This isn’t too surprising, since there were no black donors and people usually choose a sperm donor of their own race. The Repository did have Asian and Arab applicants who got pregnant.