The Lie Detectors (22 page)

For his part, Keeler always struggled to keep a tight rein over his own emotions. In a "Personal note to self" entitled "Be Friendly," he admonished himself, "Whatever you do in dealing with people, think of
their feelings."
Among the pieces of advice he underlined:
"Never allow anyone to know you are disturbed or angry."
It was advice he tried to heed. For instance, he always adopted a friendly pose in his dealings with John Larson. He reproached himself for shouting at polygraph subjects who refused to bend to his will, and he tried to maintain an outward calm no matter how high his own blood pressure rose.

In sum, Keeler affected an "American cool," the pose of emotional detachment favored by corporate salesmen, noir detectives, and research scientists—all for similar reasons. Emotion, or at least its public display, was unmanly. It was a sign of clouded judgment and self-interest. To succeed at his job, the salesman, the detective, or the scientist—or someone, like Keeler, who passed himself off as all three—had to appear objective, meaning that he had to see things from the other fellow’s point of view, if only to close the sale, solve the crime, or address the problem to the satisfaction of his peers. If he became too involved with any particular sale, case, or problem, it would be that much more difficult to move on to the next. This was bad for business, bad for crime-fighting, and bad for research. Passions like love, jealousy, or vengeance were dangerous distractions in a service economy. Dale Carnegie himself once praised Leonarde Keeler as a fellow laborer in the field of applied psychology.

Of course, self-control, both mental and bodily, is also the first prerequisite for being a good liar. And Keeler always claimed that he could beat his own machine.

The ethos of emotional detachment had another virtue at mid-century; it was considered good for your health. The same psychological stresses that made the lie detector’s needles twitch could also inflict bodily harm. The mind-body traffic ran both ways. Walter Cannon—the physiologist who first identified psychosomatic diseases like "soldier’s heart"—advised patients to minimize emotional disturbance. Digestive, cardiovascular, and neurological disorders could be exacerbated by bouts of intense rage or grief or passionate love—perhaps even by attempts at their suppression. It was on the latter front that Keeler needed help. His most effective aid in his struggle against emotion was alcohol.

Keeler’s principal patron and drinking companion in those prewar years was Gene McDonald, the founder and president of the Zenith Radio Corporation, known as "the Commander" for his expeditions above the Arctic Circle. McDonald was a self-made millionaire and hard-drinking womanizer who entertained revelers aboard the
Mizpah,
his 185-foot motor yacht, outfitted with three ostentatious staterooms, a radio station, and a crew of twenty-seven. The Commander—a titan of capitalism who did not believe in self-control—lived on board with his wife, Inez Riddle, a musically talented beauty queen whom he bullied about her secret doings.

McDonald brought the Keelers along for cruises, including a trip to the Caribbean to help President Trujillo of the Dominican Republic reorganize his police force. Life on board was a continual party. When drunk, McDonald often became violent and fired out of the portholes. Among his gifts to Keeler was a copy of
Liquor, the Servant of Man,
a book defending alcohol as integral to a balanced life: good for the heart, less addictive than smoking, a spur to sexual ardor (though, in excess, a cause of temporary impotence), and an all-around stimulant and social lubricant.

The Commander was an iconoclast, open to new scientific vistas, among them mind reading, spiritualism, and graphology. Like Keeler’s father, the Commander hoped Keeler’s lie detector would serve as a gateway to the parapsychic realm. In 1938 McDonald promoted a series of Sunday radio programs in which listeners were asked to "read" correctly the order of J. B. Rhine’s famous ESP cards as McDonald flipped them over in the studio: wave, square, star, cross, circle. Among the 1 million responses, McDonald had statisticians identify 379 "sensitive" individuals, who were then invited to try their psychic skills at eight o’clock in the evening, Central Time, when he and the Keelers, broadcasting from the
Mizpah
over KFZT, would conduct a series of activities: flip over some more ESP cards; deliberately misset a clock; open a book to a random page; and finally let Mrs. K. do something to her husband aboard ship, with listeners to determine what she had done and whether it was pleasant or nasty. Unfortunately, the listeners failed miserably; that is, they did no better than chance. The majority wrote in to say that Mrs. Keeler had done something pleasant to her husband; some guessed a kiss; others guessed that she shook his hand. In fact, Kay had jabbed a pin into Nard’s left thigh.

In formal settings, Kay could be awkward. In action, she was fearless. She did not back down from a challenge: not in the hills of Kentucky, not on the witness stand, not with her husband. Nard had always taken pride in his wife’s intelligence, courage, and accomplishments. But her recklessness—and her success—discomforted him. Leonarde Keeler, for all his hard-boiled pose, was, by his own admission, a deeply conventional man. Billed by the newspapers as partners against crime, husband and wife were also rivals. It was in a rueful tone that Keeler acknowledged that her detective agency pulled in more money than his.

The
Chicago Herald and Examiner
ran a flattering twelve-part serial about her, "The Girl on the Case." Though the all-female agency soon reverted to a one-woman operation, Kay pushed ahead. She prized her independence above all. In the view of her onetime secretary, "Kay was temperamental. Friendly one day; the next you couldn’t please her. She had a complex personality."

No sooner had her lab begun to prosper than she lost interest. Suddenly she began devoting all her spare time to learning to fly. Nard joked that he would have to take up flying again if he wanted to spend any time with her. She bought her own honey of a car: a Buick convertible coupé with a green body and khaki top. When she drove through town, heads turned.

Soon everyone was noticing the friction. Keeler’s adoring sister certainly noticed it: "You’re both too intelligent, interesting and attractive not to iron out your maladjustments….Then if the difficulties are insurmountable, break it up." Even Agnes de Mille, who now thought Nard "incurably" in love with his wife, saw that they were unhappy. "It was the core of Nard’s nature to dominate," she recalled, "and Kay refused to be dominated." When one of her document cases netted Kay $2,000 she secretly sent $500 to her parents. Not that Nard would have objected, she hastened to add, but "it does make life simpler not to discuss things with people who may raise a lot of questions and might not agree with what you intend to do anyway."

They fought about politics. Nard, like his father and August Vollmer, had always been a reform Republican who believed in the rule of law. He despised Franklin Roosevelt, and as the election of 1940 approached, he complained that "Rosenfeldt" (as he called the president) was taking America to war in order to usher in totalitarianism at home. But Kay had long ago gravitated toward the Roosevelt camp. At the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1932, she surprised herself with her passion. She admitted that most of their respectable acquaintances were Republicans. "Maybe that’s because most respectable people are conservative." Soon she was an avid New Dealer, thrilled with Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936, and distressed when some workingmen celebrating their victory mistook her for a fancy Republican just because she was wearing a fur coat. In 1940 Agnes de Mille overheard Nard explode when Kay told him she was planning to vote for Roosevelt again: "You’re voting for that megalomaniac?" De Mille recoiled at the vehemence of his words, but Kay did not blanch. The repartee of Nick and Nora had turned sour.

In the dissolution of a marriage there are events that leave no trace. During the spring of 1940 Nard and Kay’s differences reached a breaking point, and the two separated. Nard took a room in the Chicago Towers Club, and Kay moved into a large apartment in a stately three-story building on Dearborn. Kay had regrets—"I’ve made so many mistakes lately that I am losing confidence in my judgment"—but she was determined to start a new life.

For a short period later that year, they reconciled and Nard moved into the apartment on Dearborn. As late as October 1940, he was still pretending to his family that things were fine between them—though Kay was more often at the airfield than at home. Then, on December 11, while interrogating a suspect, Keeler "cracked up." His systolic blood pressure shot past 200, a physician was called in, and an hour later he was in the hospital, where he stayed for four months. The doctors ordered him to cut out alcohol and cigarettes. They advised him to reduce his workload. His pals Burt Massee and the Commander made daily visits. "Kay drops in when she has time." By the time he was released in the spring of 1941, Kay had taken a room at the Lake Shore Athletic Club. He moved back into the apartment on Dearborn, where he lived for the rest of his life. The time had come to call it quits for good.

Their friends told him they were better off apart. Nard’s sister announced that she had always felt they weren’t suited to each other. Even Vollmer admitted that he had always considered Kay "not quite normal." The awful truth was that Nard had finally done what a criminologist on a case would have done long ago: he had had his wife tailed by a private eye, who discovered that she had betrayed him, repeatedly, with many lovers, over many years.

It was a new twist on one of the oldest jokes in the world: Did you hear the one about the lie detector’s wife?

The detective’s report has not survived, nor has any of the correspondence between Nard and Kay. So how do we know, at this historical distance, what happened? Because Keeler reported Kay’s betrayal to someone he trusted. "[He told me] the same story, over and over," recalled Agnes de Mille in her unpublished memoirs. "How Kay had betrayed him, how he had put a detective on her and found out that she had betrayed him with lover after lover." And we know that he confronted Kay with her betrayal, because members of the Applegate family recall her telling them that he had once had her followed by a detective.

The world’s premier lie detector, skilled at reading bodily responses for signs of deception, had been fooled by the woman whose body he supposedly knew better than any other. As George Orwell once noted, nothing is more painful for a policeman than being laughed at.

Kay initially planned to file for divorce on the grounds of cruelty. This idea horrified Nard, mostly because of the publicity it would entail. Luckily, she had no evidence for her unspecified charge, and he refused to acquiesce to her accusations. In the end, to get a quick divorce, she filed on the grounds of "abandonment." On June 20, 1941, Katherine Keeler resumed her maiden name, Katherine Applegate.

In public Nard affected nonchalance. He informed the press that the couple still planned to work as a sleuthing team when a case required it. "Sure my machine works," he informed one columnist a few years later. "In fact, it works so well that my wife and I made a pact never to test it on each other."

Even with his family, Nard put on a brave face. He called the divorce his "new birthday." "I am now free, white and twenty-one," he boasted to his sister. Kay, he explained, had chucked her criminology business to pursue her dream of flight. "I have a hunch that she is attempting to simulate Amelia Earhart and expect that she will be flying bombers to England. She’s just that nuts!"

It was nearly true. Within a year Kay had left town with her lover, René Dussaq, a handsome Latin American adventurer with a pencil moustache and colorful past. Born to a Swiss family in Argentina and raised in Cuba, where his father was an ambassador, he had been an Olympic oarsman, a Golden Gloves boxer, a tango dancer, a Hollywood stuntman, a wing-rider, and a deep-sea diver. He had been involved in several South American revolutions, held degrees in several scientific fields, and was fluent in six languages. Kay had found a man even more adventurous than Nard. By December 1942 she and René were married and living in Washington,D.C., where Dussaq had been recruited into the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA), while Kay took up civilian aviation defense, then joined the Women’s Auxiliary Service Pilots (the WASPs).

Leonarde, in the meantime, had returned to the empty apartment on Dearborn to face another betrayal. The previous year, during his troubles with his health, Keeler had hired one of Larson’s former assistants to help out on cases. While Keeler was in the hospital, the assistant had copied Keeler’s client list and files with the intention of starting his own business. Keeler secretly recorded the assistant’s confession to these deeds, then fired him.

Why is anyone unfaithful? Kay’s threat to obtain a divorce on grounds of "cruelty" might seem to suggest that Leonarde had himself been unfaithful, or violent, or otherwise abusive. Certainly in later years he had a series of mistresses. And he was known to have an explosive temper. Or perhaps it was inadequacy on his part, caused by alcohol, stress, and high blood pressure. Or perhaps Kay did what she did because she wanted to. What other explanation is there, really? She was always a woman of iron determination. Kay’s mother wrote a letter of consolation to her former son-in-law: