Adventures in the Orgasmatron (71 page)

The “great experiment,” as the penitentiary in Lewisburg, the centerpiece of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, was known, was about a mile north of downtown Lewisburg. You had to drive along a meandering country road for about a mile, until, as one visitor in the 1950s described it, you reached “an abruptly impassable barrier, a massive concrete wall thirty feet high and more than one thousand feet long,” like a “skyscraper on its side.” There were redbrick watch-towers at each corner and inside were “factories, ball fields, lawns, and the huge main prison building, also built of brick.”
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Alger Hiss had been imprisoned at Lewisburg from 1951 to 1954. “Three years in jail,” Hiss said of his experience at Lewisburg, “is a good corrective to three years at Harvard.”
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Like Hiss, Reich was deemed important enough to have his own cell—everyone but the most prominent prisoners, and known homosexuals, slept in dormitories at Lewisburg. In the cell next door to Reich, sharing a view of the twenty-one-foot-high prison wall, was the thirty-year-old Harvey Matusow, the manic-depressive paid informer who had made the link between sexual permissiveness and communism before McCarthy’s committees and contributed to the climate of fear that led to the witch hunts.

Matusow himself saw Reich as a victim of the conspiratorial culture he had helped fuel. As Matusow put it in an interview in 1995, “To me, Reich, although he was totally anti-communist, was the prime victim of McCarthyism. Because, if the silence that Mc-Carthysim engendered had not existed at that time, the hue and cry about his persecution would have been much greater. But the intimidation of society in those times prevented any outbreak in defense of his rights.”
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Matusow, the paid informer, had testified against numerous Communists, including Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a founding member of the ACLU, the only organization that rallied to Reich’s defense (she was expelled when she joined the Communist Party).

In 1955, after his marriage to McCarthy’s wealthy backer collapsed, Matusow admitted to having made up evidence against the union leader Clinton Jencks and published a confessional book,
False Witness
(1954), to explain why he had done so. For a brief moment Matusow was a household name—and a final embarrassment to the already discredited McCarthy—shedding an unfavorable light on the government system of shady paid informants (between 1952 and 1954 the Justice Department had eighty-three informants on its payroll).

Matusow’s confession caused a sensation and he and his publishers were subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury, accused of having made the whole thing up. Matusow had begun a new career as “Cockyboo the clown,” performing at children’s parties, and appeared before the grand jury almost as a vaudeville star (as he told a government lawyer, to the amusement of the investigating committee, he was also developing a children’s toy, which he called the “stringless yo-yo”).
The Washington Post
billed him as a “Congressional entertainer.” He also had a nightclub act that satirized the army-McCarthy hearings by narrating the proceedings as if it were a baseball game. Matusow explained, “I was a clown on the nightclub floor in the evening and a government witness during the day.”
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Conservatives claimed that Matusow’s recantation was fake—if he was lying then, how did you know he wasn’t lying now?—and the small radical press that published
False Witness
was portrayed as the control center of the latest Communist plot. Nevertheless, Matusow was sentenced to five years in prison for perjury, of which he served just under four years. But he felt that, in bringing down McCarthy and helping to end what he saw as McCarthy’s reign of mass hysteria, he had finally become the hero he’d always wanted to be.

Matusow remembered the day in 1953 that he first heard of Reich, as it was also the day that Dylan Thomas died of alcoholism after a particularly long drinking bout. Matusow and some friends were mourning the death of the poet in his favorite haunt, the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street in Lower Manhattan, when another regular burst in and announced excitedly that their cat had just delivered seven kittens in one of Reich’s orgone accumulators. Four years later, Matusow found himself face-to-face with the machine’s inventor when he was checking two books by Dylan Thomas out of the prison library (where Hiss had checked out the complete works of Lenin’s widow). Reich, who had been assigned to work in the library, where he shuffled around stacking shelves, stamped the books with a two-week return date; Matusow asked him what it felt like to be surrounded by all this literature, knowing his own books would never be among them. “It’s not the end of the world,” Reich replied.
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Reich was optimistic that his friends in high government would swiftly work to free him. He was so confident of this, according to a “classification study” compiled by a prison social worker, that he was “merely living from day to day,” not engaging with other prisoners and just waiting expectantly for his imminent release. “Reich had no friends in prison,” Matusow remembered, describing how Reich used to spend sixteen hours a day alone in his cell:

He kept to himself. Small talk in prison had him as a con man who got rich people to sit in strange boxes that allowed them to make love better. To others he was the flying saucer man who would stand in the exercise yard every day at lunchtime, looking directly into the sun. Just looking, and saying to the few cons who’d stand nearby, “They’re coming, can’t you see them, they’re coming.” Cons would smile, turn to one another, smile some more…Mad scientist in prison, just like in the movies.
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There was another reason for Reich’s isolation: he told Karrer that he feared another inmate would murder him (William Remington, a former government official who had been one of the first victims of McCarthyism, had been beaten to death while incarcerated there in 1954). Reich applied to Eisenhower for a presidential pardon that May, and he was absolutely confident it would be granted by his fantasy friend. The document, “My Unlawful Imprisonment,” was inscribed “To President Eisenhower Personally”:

I have “done wrong” in having disclosed to mankind the primordial, mass free Cosmic Energy that fills the Universe. This energy rules all living processes and the lawful behavior of celestial function; it determines our emotions, our First Sense of Orientation, judgment and balance. I have “done wrong” in having discovered and made politically accessible the basic force in nature that for millennia was called GOD in many tongues. God was made earthly, reachable and understandable within man’s heart and intellect, without in astrophysical manifestations.

The consequences of this discovery are truly dangerous to the emotional beliefs and intellectual constructions of man; to his total natural scientific outlook, to his accustomed social, planetary and emotional (= cosmic) existence. My technological achievements in the global atmosphere have already been adopted in special departments of the United States Air Force and were developed further…the US film “Earth vs Flying Saucers” depicts certain aspects of my contribution to the space problem technology, especially with regard to counter measures against Space Ships. I am certain that my implicit trust in my friends in the US Government will never be disappointed.
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The film Reich refers to, which had been released the previous year, depicts an antimagnetic gun that robs invading spaceships of their ability to defy gravity so that they crash like Icarus to the earth—once again, Reich felt he was living the movie; after all, hadn’t he written in
Contact with Space
two years before that he had managed to extinguish UFO lights with his space gun?

In October 1957 the Russians launched Sputnik (which means fellow traveler” in Russian). As the shiny twenty-three-inch ball orbited the earth, Matusow reflected on his anti-Communist-inspired crimes: “I was thinking every hour and a half, the consciousness of humanity is up there…Because we see ourselves for the first time. This little ball became this mirror going around the earth.”
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Reich was unimpressed by the Soviet achievement. He wrote to Peter that it was a “nice stunt like a ball thrown upon ocean waves and tossed about helplessly” but that it could never be an active navigation vessel like a spaceship run on orgone energy.
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On his release from prison in 1960 Matusow moved to England; he returned to America in the early seventies to live in a Massachusetts commune, and then in a Mormon community in Utah. He died in a car crash in 2002. In his unpublished memoir,
Cockyboo: The Stringless Yo-Yo
, the manuscript of which is held in the archives of Sussex University, there is a chapter called “The Day Reich Died.” As well as being the “flying saucer guy,” Matusow wrote, Reich was also known as the “Sex Box man.” Matusow remembered that, in prison, rumors abounded about Reich and his machine: “There was a Sex Box story for every hour and every day.” He described how the notorious Reich might be described to a new inmate:

“Hey, man, see that mother with the red nose?”

“Yeah, what about him?”

“He’s the Sex Box man!”

“What the hell is the Sex Box man?”

“Whatta you mean—you don’t know? Everyone knows about the Sex Box man. It was in all the papers. He kinda made a big wooden sex coffin, and a guy and a chick would crawl into it. They’d have to make love for an hour before he’d let them out. It was a big porno raid. Everyone read about it.”
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The fact that Reich had an angry skin condition but that the strikingly attractive Karrer, who was half his age, was a frequent visitor seemed to be living proof that the box worked, said Matusow. When Reich was seen in the refectory talking to the publisher Sam Roth, who was imprisoned in Lewisburg for the second time on pornography charges, more fuel was added to the rumors that were already circulating. When Roth’s case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1957 it was ruled that, to be considered obscene, works had to be “utterly without redeeming social importance.” Sexually explicit works by Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce could now be published and sold without censorship. Unfortunately, the “pornography” for which Roth was indicted, which included Victorian photographs of nude ten-year-old girls, was not thought to fall into this redeeming category.

On November 3, 1957, when Reich failed to appear for the 6:30 a.m. roll call, Matusow remembered, there was confusion as prison wardens checked to see that a convict hadn’t escaped. The clanging sound of the steel doors echoed down the corridors as each cell in the block was searched. Reich was found at 7:04 a.m. Doctors estimated that he’d been dead for three to four hours. According to his prison file, “Reich [was] lying on his back, fully clothed except for shoes, on top of the bedclothes. The condition of the bedclothes indicated that the bed had been slept in, his eyes were closed…froth on his lips.”
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A postmortem showed “severe sortic stenosis and myocardial scarring,” indicative of a massive heart attack.

Reich’s death went almost unreported. Norman Mailer’s
Village Voice
, the paper that would play a sizable role in turning Reich into an intellectual martyr of the counterculture, ran a short tribute.
Time
ran a brief obituary:

Died. Wilhelm Reich, 60, once-famed psychoanalyst, associate, and follower of Sigmund Freud, founder of the Wilhelm Reich Foundation, lately better known for unorthodox sex and energy theories; of a heart attack in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, Pa., where he was serving a two-year term for distributing his invention, the “orgone energy accumulator” (in violation of the Food and Drug Act), a telephone-booth-size device which supposedly gathered energy from the atmosphere, could cure, while the patient sat inside, common colds, cancer and impotence.
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Reich, who had been much preoccupied by the idea of his death, had left detailed plans as to how he should be buried. Dr. Herskowitz arrived at Orgonon for the ceremony accompanied by a fellow orgonomist, Dr. Charles Oller, who had also joined Reich’s circle in the late forties and who had been Karrer’s last analyst. It was a cold and gray afternoon, just three days after Reich’s death, and they brought with them a suitcase of clothes in which Reich was to be dressed for burial. They drove past an abandoned cloudbuster on the driveway, its guns pointed at the damp sky, creating a stark silhouette. A little farther up the hill was an even “greater shock,” as Dr. Oller wrote in his account of the funeral: there were “three smashed accumulators scattered on the ground in haphazard fashion, burned and charred, the insides torn out and strewn on the grass.”
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Up at the observatory, workmen were building a makeshift mausoleum under the observatory porch; through the glass you could see Reich’s open coffin on a large laboratory table covered with a Persian rug in the center of the long scientific hall.