She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity (24 page)

To the film critic Eugenia Collier, these outcomes didn't matter. She still felt betrayed. “
I believe that Haley sold out,” she said in 1979. She accused Haley of getting rich off of a painful absence at the heart of African American life. “I think,” Collier said, “that I would give almost anything I own to know who my African ancestors were.”

Roots
drove another boom in genealogy, not just among African Americans but in its white audience, too. At first these new genealogists could only riffle through the same old library folders, the same parish records, and the same census forms as the genealogists who came before them. But by the end of the twentieth century, the Internet had become a powerful new tool for their searches. Governments and churches put their records online. Genealogists shared their research with each other on online forums and through new companies. By one estimate, genealogy has now become
the second-most-popular search topic on the Internet. It is outranked only by porn.

Before the online age, my own family tree looked like a split elm, half killed by a blight. While my mother could trace Goodspeeds and other ancestors back to the Puritan colonies and to England, we knew little about my father's line. But the Internet held a wealth of details about his side of the family. My relatives have documented how my great-grandfather Jacob Zimmer traveled from the Ukraine to Newark in 1892. We learned that some of Jacob's brothers also came to America, while other Zimmers stayed behind. My brother, Ben, who has inherited the genealogy allele from my mother, discovered some pictures of their village on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's website.
The photos are of heaps of bodies, either freshly shot or excavated just after the war. The Zimmers did not have to be herded into concentration camps to be murdered. The Nazis brought the slaughter to them.

As powerful as genealogy has become, it still gives us only abstract assurances of a biological connection. My birth certificate makes me pretty certain my parents did indeed pass down their genes to me. But babies can be switched, stolen, removed. Fathers can deny paternity. Paperwork can be lost or botched. Online, faulty information can propagate across the planet,
their falsehoods infecting one database after another. The only inescapable proof for our biological ancestry is what we inherit in our cells.

Judges had to grapple with genealogy's uncertainties for centuries before biologists could offer any help. When faced with paternity disputes, Roman courts relied on the principle of
pater est quem nuptiae demonstrant
: The father is the one whom marriage points out. A married woman's children should always be treated as her husband's children, even if she gave birth a year after his death. In later centuries, judges sometimes followed this principle far beyond what nature could allow. In 1304, a husband who had been away from England for three years came home to find a new child in his house. He went to court to deny being the father. But the judge rejected his case, declaring “
the privity between a man and his wife cannot be known.”

Over time, judges developed another guiding principle that came to be called “
bald eagle evidence.” If something looks like a bald eagle, in other words, it probably had bald eagles for parents. “I have always considered likeness as an argument of a child being the son of a parent,” a British judge said in 1769. “For in everything there is a resemblance, as of features, size, attitude, and action.”

Judges were still deciding if children looked like their fathers well into the twentieth century. But the rise of genetics and molecular biology prompted some scientists to wonder if it might be possible to categorically establish kinship, to see the very atoms of heredity that tie families together.

One of the first attempts to bring this science to court was made by the actor
Charlie Chaplin. In 1942, Chaplin began an affair with an aspiring young actress from Brooklyn named Joan Barry. Chaplin treated her like a toy to be discarded. But when he eventually abandoned Barry, she did not go away quietly. Instead, she smashed the windows of his mansion and broke in one night, armed with a gun, demanding he take her back. By then, Chaplin had already moved on to another affair, this time with a teenager named Oona O'Neill. Barry responded by telling a Hollywood gossip columnist
that Chaplin had seduced her and left her pregnant. In June 1943, well into Barry's pregnancy, her mother filed a civil paternity suit against Chaplin on behalf of her unborn grandchild. She demanded $2,500 a month, plus $10,000 in prenatal costs.

Soon, Chaplin was facing not just a civil suit but a criminal one as well. J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, had always found Chaplin a suspicious character; his anti-Nazism seemed to Hoover no different than Communism. Now he relished the opportunity to find some dirt on the actor. In February 1944, Chaplin was charged with violating the Mann Act by transporting Barry across state lines for immoral purposes while she was still a minor. He was also charged with conspiring with Los Angeles police to put Barry in jail for vagrancy.

Gawkers and reporters packed a Los Angeles courthouse for the criminal trial, which dredged up lurid details about Chaplin and Barry's affair. While Chaplin admitted to sleeping with Barry, other men testified that they had been with her during the same period. The jury acquitted Chaplin of all the charges, prompting cheers from around the courthouse.

Next came the civil case over Chaplin's paternity. Between the two trials, Barry had given birth to a girl she named Carol Ann. Chaplin's lawyers came into court ready to raise the prospect that Carol Ann was the daughter of one of Barry's lovers who had testified in the criminal case. And then they would present evidence that Carol Ann could not be Chaplin's daughter, because she had not inherited his genes.

Chaplin's lawyers could not actually read Carol Ann's genes. In the 1940s, scientists still weren't sure what genes were even made of. The best they could manage was to trace the effects of those genes through pedigrees. Sometimes those effects took the form of hereditary diseases, such as PKU. But there was one inherited trait that could be traced through just about everyone:
their blood type.

Blood types were first discovered in 1900, and eight years later a Polish serologist named
Ludwik Hirszfeld demonstrated that they followed Mendel's Law. A gene called ABO encodes a protein that sits on the surface of red blood cells. The most common variants are A, B, and O. Both A and B are
dominant over O—in other words, if you inherit an A variant from your mother and an O from your father, you're A. Only if you inherit two O's do you have O blood type. Inheriting A and B leads to blood type AB.

Hirszfeld realized that these hereditary rules made it impossible for families to have certain combinations of blood types. If a child is blood type A, then one of its parents must carry the A variant. It's simply impossible for a type O mother and a type B father to have a type A son, for example. Writing in the
Lancet
in 1919 Hirszfeld and his wife, Hanka, predicted that under certain circumstances this discovery would make it possible “
to find the real father of a child.”

In 1926, a court in Germany used blood types to resolve a paternity dispute for the first time. Gradually the practice gained more attention, although many remained skeptical of its accuracy. In the months leading up to Chaplin's civil trial, his lawyers negotiated a deal with Barry's team. In exchange for $25,000, Barry would agree to have herself and her baby tested for their blood types. If the rules of heredity eliminated Chaplin, she would drop her suit.

The tests turned out exactly as Chaplin had hoped. Barry had type A and Carol Ann had type B. Those findings pointed to an inescapable conclusion: Carol Ann's father, whoever he might be, had to have type B blood. Chaplin was type O. Carol Ann had thus inherited nothing from Chaplin.

Yet Barry refused to drop the case. She had gotten a new lawyer, who would not abide by the deal made by her previous ones. Chaplin's lawyers brought the blood test results to the judge to get the case thrown out of court. But blood type tests were still such a novelty in California that the state offered no legal guidance about their reliability. The judge allowed the case to proceed, and in January 1945, Chaplin was back in court.

Throughout the trial, fifteen-month-old Carol Ann sat on her mother's lap. Barry turned her daughter's face toward the jury to allow them to gather bald eagle evidence, judging whether she looked like Chaplin or not. “
Showing none of the temperament of her mother, Plaintiff Joan Berry [sic], who sobbed on her attorney's shoulder, or Defendant Chaplin, who shouted his
denials, she quietly amused herself by napping, yawning and gurgling,” a reporter for
Life
wrote.

Chaplin's lawyers countered the bald eagle with blood. They called a doctor to the stand to explain the blood-type results “
with charts, diagrams, and elaborate explanations,” as the Associated Press reported. They introduced a report into evidence that included tests from two other doctors, one appointed by Barry's lawyers and a neutral one. “
In accordance with the well accepted laws of heredity,” the doctors declared, “the man, Charles Chaplin, cannot be the father of the child.”

Once the lawyers had introduced all their evidence—the blood test, the stories of sex with other men around the time that Carol Ann was conceived, the bald eagle evidence of her infant face—they left the jury to decide the matter. Barry's lawyer urged them to recognize Carol Ann's place on the Chaplin family tree. “
You'll sleep well the night you give this baby a name,” he promised them.

To the jury, Mendel's Law could apparently be stretched like taffy. They told the judge they were deadlocked, with seven jurors convinced that Chaplin was not the father, and five that he was. Barry's lawyers filed a second suit. This time, they won, the jury deciding Chaplin was indeed Carol Ann's father.

The decision set off an uproar. “
Unless the verdict is upset,” the
Boston Herald
declared, “California has in effect decided that black is white, two and two are five and up is down.” Nevertheless, Chaplin was ordered to pay $75 a week to support Carol Ann. All told, he would go on to pay her $82,000. The toll that the case took on his reputation was even greater. No one in Hollywood wanted to work with the little tramp anymore. Chaplin left Hollywood for good.

The court's decision ultimately didn't help Joan Barry much either. Her mental health spiraled downward until 1953, when she was found wandering the streets, holding a child's ring and a pair of baby sandals, repeatedly saying, “
This is magic.” Barry was taken to a mental hospital for treatment. After her release, she disappeared. Carol Ann was left to Barry's relatives to raise, a child of a vanished mother and a never-known father.

The California legislature was so embarrassed by Chaplin's case that it quickly told state courts to treat blood-type tests as conclusive. The tests would go on to resolve many other paternity disputes, although they also had one profound limitation. They could only rule certain men out. They could not definitively rule men
in.
Carol Ann's test showed that Chaplin could not be her father because her father must have had type B blood. Millions of men were left as possible parents. The problem with a blood-type test was that it was based on a comparison of a few different versions of a single protein. It could not reveal things that could definitively prove a hereditary bond between one child and one parent.

Those things do exist, though. They are the bases of DNA in our genomes. But it would not be until the late twentieth century that scientists invented technologies enabling them to read
bits of our genetic material. Even in short fragments, there was enough information to reunite some families—even after they had been dead for decades.

In 1917,
Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, Tsarina Alexandra, along with their five children, were captured by the Ural Soviets. The Soviet revolutionaries held them in a house in Yekaterinburg for months, only to execute them along with their servants. In the years after the revolution, investigations into the killings failed to find the bodies. Rumors circulated that one or more of the children escaped the slaughter and slipped out of the Soviet Union. Over the years, more than two hundred people came forward claiming to be a prince or a princess.

In the 1970s, a Yekaterinburg geologist named Alexander Avdonin developed an obsession with the mystery. He snooped through archives for clues to what had happened. After years of research, Avdonin and some friends discovered a shallow pit not far from the house where the family had been held. The pit yielded bones from nine different people. Some of the skulls bore bullet holes; some of the bones had been pierced with bayonets.

Avdonin kept the grave a secret until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. When he revealed his discovery, the Russian government launched a
forensic investigation of the skeletons. Researchers discovered gold and silver in the teeth, a sign the remains belonged to aristocrats.

As part of the investigation, the Russian government enlisted a British forensic scientist named Peter Gill. Gill was able to extract fragments of DNA from the bones. The fragments contained repeating sequences called short tandem repeats. This sort of genetic material can tell scientists a lot about heredity because it is especially prone to mutations. In some cases, cells accidentally duplicate some of the repeats. In other cases they cut some out. (These mutations aren't harmful because the segments are not involved in making proteins.) Over the generations, families will gain distinctive sets of short tandem repeats. Two people who share a matching set are probably close relatives. Examining the Yekaterinburg bones, Gill found that segments in the children matched either one of the adults or the other. In other words, this was a family.