The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (33 page)

Kelley often cooked up ambitious meals when he and Dukie hosted dinner parties for neighbors and friends. Dukie had never really learned how to cook, and Kelley insisted on taking charge of the preparation. The psychiatrist could not resist making himself the center of attention at these gatherings. He often prepared a prized duck recipe at such meals, and the fanfare with which he displayed the duck press, dropped the bird inside, and started cranking the big handle to extract the juices was an important part of his staging and performance. He would pour gravy into a special tureen and proudly ladle a serving onto each plate. He found other ways to grab the spotlight, as well. At one gathering outdoors on the Kelley patio, the visitors noticed a large animal—a badger or a possum—creeping through the yard. Kelley, ever the master of ceremonies, astonished the guests by rising from the table and cornering the animal, which triggered its instinct to play dead. Not content to leave the creature alone, Kelley grasped it by the tail and raised it high for everyone to admire. Or perhaps it was so they could admire him. Kelley was a showman to the end, ever eager to place himself center stage, at the heart of the action—no matter how strange.

Here and elsewhere, the Kelleys never discussed politics, and the children never learned which political candidates they favored, except during the 1952 presidential election, when Kelley and Dukie wore Ike buttons. It was the McCarthy era of academic intimidation, and Dukie warned Kelley never to sign any petitions; they would come back to soil his reputation. Your name was your most valuable possession, they believed, and you had to guard it. It was a tense, watchful time.

The native westerner and Bay Area boy came out in the frequent road trips Kelley took during summers and academic sabbaticals with his kids. Suddenly he would declare a four-month vacation and would pile the children and an assortment of camping gear into an old DeSoto that he had modified by removing the jump seat in the back, thus transforming it into something like a four-wheel-drive Jeep. Visiting Arizona and New Mexico, the family would tour Native American land; gather archaeological and craft collectibles; and dig into whatever the local cuisine, culture, and religion set in their path. These were serious pursuits of knowledge that Kelley designed for his children, intended to spark the sort of ravenous curiosity that afflicted him.

He tried to make the kids eat any exotic foodstuff they encountered, including, on one occasion, abalone. Alicia drew the line there, and none of her father’s attempts to get her to swallow the sea creature succeeded. He tried to make each excursion into a learning opportunity for the children. They were never at rest. When the family returned home, they carried as many artifacts as they could fit into the DeSoto, objects that Kelley would add to his collections of souvenirs that opened windows into science, anthropology, and history. “He was like a spider gathering a lot of different things,” son Doug recalls, and the psychiatrist’s predatory collecting soon filled the house on Highview Road. Kelley told a friend that he coveted a whale fetus to add to his artifacts and that he would “
swim across the Bay” to get his hands on one.

Kelley felt reenergized after these trips. He was like his grandfather, who decades earlier had often hiked to the sites of the moldering Donner cabins
near Truckee in search of inner calm. Kelley similarly believed in the benefits of escaping from familiar surroundings, and he felt stronger after immersing himself in another place, new hunting grounds for artifacts, fresh physical and cultural worlds to ponder. And, like his attorney grandfather, Kelley tapped the power of attentive listening: the technique of making a show of concentrating on everything an interviewee, patient, or client says, of drilling his green-eyed gaze into the souls of the people around him, to kindle flattery and crumble secrets.

The family was often dragged to Truckee and Donner Lake. That was the place he identified as his origins. As throughout his life, he considered his mother’s family, the McGashans, to be his worthy, heroic ancestors. He never sought out his father’s roots. On one trip into the mountains, he cradled a beer can while driving and got drunk. His aggressive driving frightened the children. “He was a great driver, but he took risks,” Doug says. Dukie often sat next to him, grimly quiet, with her knuckles bleaching white. The risks Kelley took as a driver, and the anger that seeped out when he spent time with his family, revealed a painful ember in his soul. Teaching, consulting for the police, writing a torrent of articles on psychiatry and criminology, marriage, and fatherhood all weighed upon him. Convivial but stubborn, he clashed with some of his university colleagues, and academic politics stressed him. He could be prickly and petty, turning minor disagreements into disputes. On one occasion he took umbrage at a $17.50 fee that a hospital billed to give Dukie an X-ray. He wrote to the hospital’s chief administrator, no less, in sneering terms, that the charge seemed “
a little high as I interpret the ethics of professional courtesy. However, I suppose you have your own private standards.”

Kelley’s inner rage, however, involved far more than type-A stress. The household he had grown up in was loud and full of dissatisfied commotion. June Kelley, the brilliant and precocious lawyer who had devoted herself to her father’s reputation and welfare, had grown hard and embittered in her final years. She reared Kelley never to feel satisfied with what he had, always to crave to know, obtain, climb, and deserve more. The roots of
June’s mental tumult are unknown, but she lived in darkness, anger, and fear. Danger lurked everywhere, and June taught her son to think fast and find the threats. Kelley’s filial role was to support June emotionally and keep her going.

From childhood, part of Kelley was fun-loving, quick witted, jovial, and a player of tricks and games—that joy came from his father, Doc, the dentist to whom he never felt very close. Doc was no man of accomplishment, and he practiced from the same office on Irving Street in San Francisco for nearly fifty years. His home, frozen in time with its linen-draped furniture and heavily curtained windows, was upstairs. The other part of Kelley was a furious achiever for whom praise was essential, a man who could not find contentment no matter how high he scrambled. June pulled those strings. “He didn’t know how to let little Douglas Kelley Sr. come out and play with big Douglas Kelley Sr.,” son Doug observes. Learning and acquiring information fueled him, but never to a conclusion that satisfied him. From criminology he really needed an explanation for his own emotional blow-ups and craving for recognition. But his research and teaching left him at a loss. He careened wildly in his work and vented frustration. “He was a cross between a sponge and a rampaging bull,” Doug says. “He was a Renaissance man on speed.”

The discovery that had dawned on him at Nuremberg—that the behavior of some of the worst criminals of modern times could be attributed to no psychiatric type or any specific mental illness—continued to rattle him and animate his ferocious output of research and work. And fueled by alcohol, he lashed out unpredictably against his family. The children feared him.

Dukie tried her best to love and support her volcanic husband. She was strong, and Kelley knew he had a good partner in her. They shared an actual family melody, a high-low-low musical phrase that Kelley would pucker and whistle when he was looking for her in or out of the house. When Dukie responded, it signified a connection that went beyond words. Dukie knew her husband loved her, but she quietly regretted his inability to provide attention that felt soft and gently affectionate, too. Most of the time she could handle his moods and keep him from collapsing beneath
his burdens, although she resented Kelley’s bond with his mother, who was still very much alive. Dukie complained that he was closer to his mother than to her. Many times, though, the Kelleys’ arguments escalated without logic or apparent reason. They could argue about anything, the meaning of a clue on
What’s My Line?
or the reason for the newspaper boy’s misplacing their paper. Kelley’s voice grew more stentorian during their altercations. Dukie’s voice was shrill, by no means weak, but his vocal blasts overpowered anything she said.

Anything could happen between them. A dinnertime dispute resulted in a smashed glass, and Dukie, who didn’t realize that she was hurt, served Doug a plate smeared with her blood. When the boy pointed it out, she carefully wiped off the blood with a towel and calmly handed the plate back to him. The children watched transfixed one day when Kelley and Dukie shouted at one another in the sun-drenched corridor on the second floor that ended at the psychiatrist’s office. They faced each other outside the magic closet. The kids lived in a near-constant state of apprehension, but they did not expect to see Kelley level a gun at her. His finger tightened on the trigger and a shot reverberated around the house. He had lowered the gun at the last split-second before he fired, and the bullet left a neat hole in the wood-paneled floor at Dukie’s feet. She later covered the spot with a rug. It was all just a tremendous piece of showmanship, wasn’t it? But the children’s minds raced: “If he had shot her, would he have shot us?” Doug remembers thinking. “That was the secret our family kept: Periodically, the Old Man went crazy.” He often would go upstairs “to look at the bullet hole in the hallway floor.”

Dukie believed she had her own cause for anger against her husband. In 1950, soon after the Kelleys’ move to Berkeley, Dukie’s father witnessed one of the psychiatrist’s rages, an explosion in which the potential for violence was obvious. A quiet and placid man, Mr. Hill was outraged by the treatment he saw his daughter receiving. He remained upset for a long time, soon suffered a stroke, and died. Dukie blamed Kelley not only for her father’s death, but for destroying her ideal of family life, a picture of love, warmth, and growing devotion derived in part from the sunny novels of Clarence Day. She wanted this sort of emotional environment for
her own family with Kelley, but his outbursts and pent-up fury made that impossible. When her own anger boiled over and she sank too low, she would pack up some clothing, grab her purse and the youngest children, and spend a day or two with relatives in the Bay Area. “Once I told Dad I really missed them,” Doug remembers. “He said, ‘Me, too—let’s go and get them.’ We got them and drove back home.”

Perhaps inevitably, Kelley—the collector, analyst, pursuer of insight into the dark corners of the human mind, and one-time magician—made it his goal to rear an exceptional eldest son. Young Doug would be a guinea pig for aggressive techniques to spur mental development from the moment of his discharge from the hospital maternity ward. The son replaced Göring, Hess, and Rosenberg as the father’s experimental subject. At home the boy received a barrage of tutoring, information, and insistent exercises in brain-building. To this day, he still feels the pain and pressure of Kelley’s observation exercise, which would be set up as a contest for his son. Sitting in the living room, he would ask Doug to inspect their surroundings, taking note of as many details as he could. After telling the boy to leave the room, Kelley would make a slight change in the room’s arrangement—even as slight as nudging a pencil across the coffee table. “What’s different?” Kelley demanded when his son came back in. The exercise inspired dread and panic in Doug, as well as excitement and satisfaction when he identified the difference. It was a strange combination of feelings.

“I practiced IQ tests all the time,” Doug says. Kelley reported Doug’s IQ scores—usually in the mid-150s—to school officials and to his old acquaintance Louis Terman, who still directed his influential study of gifted children at Stanford. In 1952, when Doug was four years old, the
Saturday Evening Post
featured the family in an article about high-IQ people and Terman’s study. The accompanying photo showed Dukie leaning over Doug, who clutched a baby doll as he sat on a sofa and looked back expectantly. Sister Alicia sat at his side. Kelley hovered above them all, the only standing figure and the brainiest looking of the bunch. Wearing a silk tie that glistened in the light, Kelley’s eyes bored into the top of Doug’s head.