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SHRINK WRAPPED DRUGS AND ROCK 'N' ROLL WERE REGULAR FEATURES OF LIFE AT MCLEAN PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL IN BELMONT. FOR JAMES TAYLOR AND MANY OTHER AFFLUENT YOUNG PEOPLE, IT WAS A COMBINATION OF PROGRESSIVE MUSIC SCHOOL AND COUNTRY CLUB, WITH BARRED WINDOWS.
By Alex Beam DURING HIS FIRST MAJOR CONCERT TOUR IN 1969, JAMES TAYLOR used to introduce his song "Knockin' 'Round the Zoo" with a few words about his stay at McLean Hospital in Belmont. "Here's a tune I wrote at McLean to make a million bucks," he told one youthful audience. "McLean, that's a mental hospital - OK, anybody here from McLean? Let's hear it for McLean." Few people clapped, of course, because very few young people had spent time in mental institutions. But Taylor, then sporting a shoulder-length mop of dark, grimy hair, would grin sheepishly at the smattering of applause, and proceed with his cryptic paean to his nine-month-long stay in the "zoo": There's bars on all the windows and they're counting up the spoons
And if I'm feeling edgy, there's a chick who's paid to be my slave To the mellow, preppy cohort of the '60s generation, the soft- singing Taylor siblings - James, his talented brother, Livingston, and the singer always known as Sister Kate - put McLean on the map. "For the Taylors," Time magazine noted sardonically in a 1971 cover story on James, "the McLean experience would soon become what Harvard is for the Saltonstalls - something of a family tradition." A washout at Milton Academy, James thrived at McLean's newly opened Arlington School, which provided classroom instruction for troubled youths. "We didn't have that jive nothingness that pushes most kids through high school," he says. "You can't tell a whole bunch of potential suicides that they have to have a high school diploma." The product of a liberal, moneyed Cambridge household, Taylor relished the reassuring structure of the typical McLean day: "Above all, the day was planned for me there, and I began to have a sense of time and structure, like canals and railroad tracks." Taylor never claimed that McLean "cured" him - less than three years after "escaping" from the hospital, he found himself addicted to heroin and checked in to the more bucolic, 23-bed Austen Riggs sanatorium in Stockbridge in the Berkshires - but it enabled him to establish a modus vivendi with the modern world. He and his sister both have homes on Martha's Vineyard, and both have compared the island's laid-back ambience to the asylum of McLean. "It was a pretty slow pace," Kate recalls. "Very slow. No pressure. And that continues for me, living on Martha's Vineyard, out here at the end of the trail." Although James wrote his first two songs while still a patient in 1965, his path to success ran through New York City and then London, where he met Beatles producer Peter Asher, who fine-tuned the Taylor sound for the Apple label. (James's "escape" from Mc Lean is still the subject of legend. Because he had committed himself voluntarily, he couldn't escape. He did, however, bolt for Manhattan without signing the customary "three-day," the required three days' notice before checking oneself out.) But Kate and subsequently Livingston launched their careers at McLean. Searching for therapies that might connect with their music- addled, alienated charges, in 1967 McLean hired a young rock musician named Paul Roberts to conduct music therapy classes. Roberts had studied psychology at Brandeis University in Waltham and tried to play music on the wards at Metropolitan State, a public hospital near McLean where he had gone to work as an aide to avoid the Vietnam draft. "It was sort of prisonlike," Roberts recalls. "Their method of containing someone was to throw him in a locked room." The nurses started commenting that guitar-strumming didn't figure in his job description. Roberts got the hint and began looking around for work. A friend mentioned that nearby Mc Lean, far better endowed than the struggling state hospital, actually had a music therapy department. But they didn't have a sitar-playing cool guy; as it happened, McLean and Roberts had been looking for each other. McLean had three practice rooms, each with its own piano, and the administration was perfectly happy to turn the cafeteria over to any of the four bands that Roberts or gan ized: the Zoo; the Strawberry Discharge; Ronnie and the Waverley Squares (McLean overlooks Waverley Square); and, most famously, Sister Kate's Soul Stew and Submarine Sandwich Shoppe, headlined by Kate Taylor. The Sandwich Shoppe played for money at Brandeis, at a Cambridge peace fair, and for a "social" at the Institute of Living, a mental hospital in Hartford. Roberts wasn't exactly sure what he was doing, but whatever he was doing, it was working. One catatonic patient, a gifted saxophone player, first began communicating with fellow band members, and only later with his therapists. One of the bands became a long-running group therapy session, trying for its members but ultimately useful in resolving shared conflicts. Ronnie of the Waverley Squares was a Janis Joplin- like blues belter. "They couldn't give her enough Thorazine on the unit, but in music therapy, she was normal," Roberts remembers. Kate Taylor was revealed to be a hauntingly mellifluous singer and signed a recording contract soon after leaving the hospital. "Some of the psychiatrists were hip to the fact that real therapy was taking place," says Roberts, who now pursues his singing career with his wife in Redbird, Colorado. "People were getting better, but I didn't know or care why it was working. I was just experimenting in the dark. These kids needed to express themselves through loud rock music, and it worked. I was putting in 60, 70, 80 hours a week. I was completely enthralled by what was going on." Roberts prepared a lengthy presentation on his band therapies for his academic mentor, who just happened to be Morris Schwartz of Brandeis (the "Morrie" of later Tuesdays With Morrie fame). Rob erts's report included interviews with his performers, most of whom testified to finding extraordinary release with their bands. A vocalist named Laura told Roberts: "It's magic, almost. I mean, I have said that I'm going to kill myself in the morning, and then in the afternoon I'm singing my heart out. It's brought me time and time again out of depression." Roberts's Brandeis roommate had been an academically gifted history student, Jon Landau, who had musical ambitions of his own. Landau had his own band, and once when Roberts dropped over to his house, the music therapist started talking up the talents of a severely withdrawn vocalist and guitar player, Livingston Taylor - James and Kate's younger brother. Livingston was at the Arlington School and was supplementing his musical education at the Berklee College of Music in Boston's Back Bay. Landau forsook his own musical ambitions and produced his first record, Livingston Taylor, a beautiful collection of ballads released in 1970. It included at least one song with a McLean theme: "Doctor Man." A second Landau- Taylor collaboration, Liv, included "Carolina Day," with words memorializing Liv's therapist, Dr. Harvey Shein. Landau, who worked as a rock critic at The Real Paper, went on to become one of the most famous and powerful music producers of all time when he abandoned journalism to manage the career of a singer who he believed represented "the future of rock and roll": Bruce Springsteen. Most of the young people who fetched up at McLean Hospital hailed from the social elite. The Taylor siblings' father, Isaac, 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 Mc Lean memoir Girl, Interrupted, by which she means the warehousing of the troubled children of the well-to-do. Kaysen's own father had been President Kennedy's deputy national security adviser; he was running Princeton University'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," says a former director of residency training at McLean, Dr. Merton Kahne. "As the clientele got young er, I used to joke that we were redefining the proper Bostonian. Now it was someone at McLean who had an uncle on Beacon Hill." T he 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 booming. And there was no shortage of troubled young people. The '60s 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 at McLean 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." Not surprisingly, there was no small amount of cynicism among the young patients concerning the hospital's motivations. A successful 40- something media executive in lower Manhattan still bristles with anger, both at his father for sending him to McLean and at the hospital for diagnosing him with an unspecified "character disorder." Displaying a photograph of himself in a football uniform, with long hair, he says: "I was a hippie. I hated jocks, and I didn't fit into any group. I hated most drugs - except for pot - but that didn't matter, because there wasn't any distinction between someone who used marijuana and someone who used heroin. As far as they were concerned, you were in the `drug culture.' I refused to cut my hair, and I could have stopped smoking pot at any time. "To have a hospital say I had a character disorder was a complete scam. Mc Lean was scandalous to me. I don't think anyone ever spent the night there and didn't get diagnosed with a character disorder." When she retrieved her McLean file to write Girl, Interrupted, Kaysen noticed that her diagnosis was "borderline personality disorder," another controversial catchall. To this day, Kaysen, as well as many members of the psychiatric profession, isn't exactly sure what her diagnosis meant: " BPD - a psychiatrist once told me that's what they call people whose lifestyles they don't like." The McLean party line, as articulated by Shervert Frazier, the cerebral Texas doctor who ascended to the post of psychiatrist in chief in 1972, was simple: 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 couldn't help feeling that I was talking to one of my own parents, or one of all of my generation's parents, indeed of every generation's parents: well- meaning, avuncular, out of touch. At age 80, 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 10-minute breaks between his therapeutic appointments. His speech, with all its fineries of thought, still twangs of the Lone Star State. He speaks in clear paragraphs; indeed, when he was demoted in 1988 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 he had read or heard that his brain never processed their provenance. So here is Frazier, Mc Lean's psychiatrist in chief for many years, on the subject of his rambunctious youthful charges: "These young people were usually from well-to-do families who wanted another opinion about what was going on with their children. Mainly, the families didn't know how many drugs, or what drugs, they were using, they just knew there had been a noticeable change in personality, and they wanted to know what caused the change in personality and what could we do about it. "As you know, street drugs were readily available and were cheap at that time, and people were going to India and to ashrams, people were joining politically inspired groups and cults, too. Essentially, we had a lot of adolescents around here with 40, sometimes 400 LSD trips and a lot of brain damage as a result. We saw use of every kind of drug under the sun - angel dust, LSD, Ecstasy - drugs that had been around for years and years and years - plus all the street drugs, including marijuana, hashish, cocaine, heroin, which they called H. These people were addicted, and their behavior while under the influence of drugs was erratic. They were not themselves, and at times they were dangerous to themselves and to others. Their friends didn't recognize them and vice versa. Many of them had disowned their families. Nobody in the old-line families had ever seen anything like it - all they ever did was drink martinis." It's easy sport, poking fun at authority figures who wring their hands over young people's psychological disturbances. But if doctors like Frazier wax pom pous and uninformed about the children of the '60s, then where does the truth lie? Certainly a huge percentage of youngsters experimented with some drugs. But only a tiny fraction of young people ended up in mental hospitals. So if drugs didn't cause mental disturbances, what did? Or if heavy drug use testified to some deeper anxiety, what was it? Peter Storkerson, a man now in his late 40s who spent eight months at McLean in 1967, thinks the problems began when the younger generation failed to live up to the expectations of what is now portentously called the Greatest Generation. His own father played football in college with the legendary Knute Rockne and ran a successful business that employed 1,500 people. Six feet tall, Storkerson is small-boned and slight. "My father was the model I was given, one I had no way of fulfilling," he recalls. "In my family, you grew up with a certain set of expectations about how you are going to perform, how you are going to succeed, and if it doesn't happen to be appropriate, you have no real alternatives." A man whose first three names are Pierrepont Edward Stuyvesant used words like Storkerson's to describe the anguish felt by the children of the aristocracy, many of whom landed in McLean. This man's father had never worked, inhabited a huge seaside manor, and confiscated Roosevelt dimes from his son, so much did he hate the socialist depredations of the New Deal. "The sons and daughters of the old families couldn't commiserate with anyone," Pierrepont told me. "We had our own confusions and incoherence, but the parents wouldn't speak to us about it. There was this terrific need to talk about it." If the kids weren't sick in the conventional sense, then one has to ask: How were they treated, and, more important, how could they show evidence of being "cured" and get out? The treatment hadn't changed much over the years, although, of course, the young people weren't subjected to insulin-shock or electric-shock therapy. Many of them were still medicated with Thorazine, the powerful antipsychotic drug left over from the 1950s. The drug effectively sedated even the most hyperactive teenager and generated bizarre side effects, like the aimless "Thorazine shuffle," lolling tongue, and the "Thorazine tan." The drug heightens the skin's sensitivity to the sun, so on their occasional outings to the beach or the New Hampshire woods, the boys and girls had to be extra careful to wear long pants and long- sleeve shirts, to avoid quickly baking to a golden ocher. "It's really a heavy and stultifying tranquilizer," James Taylor recalls. "It's a blunt instrument and a very heavy-handed way of dealing with mental health problems. It felt like someone had cast my head in concrete." But the primary course of therapy remained the hours of talk psychotherapy and the "milieu," referring to the generally supportive surroundings of caregivers, the gorgeous grounds, and the absence of siblings and parents, who were sometimes assigned the fashionable therapeutic term "schizo phren o genic." Of course, the milieu cut both ways. Many socially mal adapted troublemakers suddenly found themselves in the company of other troublemakers, and antisocial behavior was reinforced. In some respects, life on the inside was not so different from life on the outside. As in every college dorm, the KLH stereo was the centerpiece of each room, and drugs - the supposed root of all psychological evil - were available. Former patient Rob Perkins remembers blasting the Chambers Brothers' raucous anthem "Time Has Come Today" ("Time has come today / Young hearts can go their way . . . / I don't care what others say / They say we don't listen anyway") at top volume with some friends in a locked room in Bowditch Hall, the male disturbed unit, until aides broke the door down. The perpetrators would lose their stereos, their albums, and all privileges. One after another, they would regain their possessions and their freedoms - and then pull the same stunt all over again. Some of the Arlington School students were outpatients and went home at night and brought dope back into the hospital; some of the ward aides shared their stashes. Subjected to frequent checks, the patients evolved ever more inventive hiding places: a toothpaste tube; a hole in a windowsill; under the pin of the ninth golf hole, which sat smack in front of the administration building. "There was this real country club aspect to the whole place," musician John Sheldon recalls. "You could hide anything, you could get anything; somebody was always going into town and coming back with something. McLean was the first place I ever got marijuana. The first night I was there, I was in the bathroom and this guy came in and said, `How cool are you?' I said, `What are you talking about?' And he said, `You want to get stoned?' So that's when I started smoking pot! Isn't it a riot? I don't know whether to laugh or cry, when I think about it." The teenagers who invaded McLean in the late 1960s and early 1970s changed the character of the hospital forever. They blasted their music in the halls, they took dope, and they engineered frequent escapes, which almost always resulted in a slump-shouldered taxicab ride back to the hospital from either Waverley or Harvard Square. Jeff Garland of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, committed by his parents at age 15, escaped from McLean eight times, unsuccessfully. Private investigators sent by his parents inevitably returned him to Belmont. The ninth time was the charm. With $150 borrowed from wealthy friends on Bowditch, he hid first with two former patients in Brookline, then took shelter with another former patient in New York City. From there he moved to Minnesota. "Who would think of looking in Minnesota?" asks Garland, who is now a community activist in Hawaii. "Nobody's crazy enough to go out there - only somebody who had escaped from McLean Hospital." At the tender age of 22, a gorgeous, demure blonde named Maria Pugatch was the head nurse on Bowditch. Not infrequently, her male teenage charges, sporting their trademark uniform of black jeans, bare chests, and thick leather belts (when permitted), informed her they intended to "riot" and warned her to seek shelter. She did nothing of the sort and staved off many a putative dis turb ance by squaring her hands against her hips and daring the boys to act out. Male patients had no qualms about assaulting male aides and nurses but hardly ever harmed a woman. Pugatch occasionally donned her best dress and high heels and hopped into a hired car with a group of male patients headed for the Ritz to celebrate a birthday. A boy's parents would make the reservation, and Pugatch and her charges walked into the dining room like anyone else. Except for the individually labeled medication bottles in her purse, they could have been a well-to-do family out for a tasty meal. "There were many occasions," Pugatch says, "where you'd be with someone who'd been walking around the ward pulling out pieces of his hair and mumbling nonsense, and they would walk into the Ritz and you wouldn't be able to tell. They had impeccable manners. The Ritz was of course a place they might have frequented. They were extremely wealthy, and they were used to this. The waiter would come around, and the patients would say, `Maria, what would you like?' "Occasionally, you'd see somebody start to go off a little. A little mumbling, maybe rolling their eyes, or showing a tic or something. Then I would just pull out their medicine, each in a separate labeled bottle, and they would go to the men's room to take a pill. "There wasn't ever a time when these men didn't say, `I can't thank you enough for your discretion.' Then they would be so sad. It was so gut-wrenching, because some of them would say, `I would really like to be here on a date with a young woman,' and then they'd have to go back to McLean, and leave me at the ward door with a little nod." Surprising as it may seem, many former patients, the ones who got out of McLean in one piece, have positive memories of their time there. James Taylor now calls his McLean time "a lifesaver." "I've always thought of it like a pardon," he says, "or like a reprieve, with a sort of medical stamp of approval. Once I got there, my main concern was that they wouldn't let me stay, that they'd find out that I wasn't a serious case, that my bed might be needed by someone more worthy. I didn't want to be turned out of the place. I didn't want to go back to the life that I had been unable to lead." "You had some of the most spirited people of our day in there; it was much more interesting than a lot of the progressive colleges of our time," says Ellen Ratner. After leaving McLean, Ratner, now a syndicated talk show host in Washington, D.C., attended Goddard College in Vermont and received a master's degree from Harvard. "I got more of an education at McLean than at Goddard, Harvard, and covering the White House," she says. "It was nirvana for me. I was on a hall with all the Seven Sisters represented. I was in high Boston culture. Al Capp's daughter was there, [the poets] Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell were there. I could go out any time I wanted; I had more freedom than any teenager I knew. "McLean Hospital seemed like a great option for me. And it was. It was one of the best experiences of my life." |
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