The Genius Factory (3 page)

Robert Graham was born into the local gentry—the respectable year-rounders who were acknowledged by the summer folk but not of them. His father, Frank Graham, was the local dentist and prospered by treating both locals and tourists. Frank had graduated first in his class at the University of Michigan dental school, married Fern Klark, and settled in Harbor Springs in 1903. He built himself a fine shingled Victorian house on East Bluff Drive, the street where the richest townies lived. Fern Graham was a gracious, gentle woman, but Frank was chilly and formal. When he took a walk on the town beach, he wore a coat and tie. Frank was a clever man, however, an inveterate tinkerer. He invented a new carburetor for boat engines and designed a collapsible keel for sailboats. After the
Titanic
sank, Frank spent years trying to build a better lifeboat.

The oldest of four children, Robert inherited his mother’s grace and his father’s inventiveness and formality. But he may have inherited even more from Harbor Springs. Growing up in the resort town instilled in Robert Graham a lifelong obsession with the rich and the great. (This is a man who titled the longest chapter in his autobiography “Princes and Princesses I Have Known.”) In summer, Graham caddied at Harbor Springs’ two private golf courses, Harbor Point and Wequetonsing. Graham caddied to earn pocket money—75 cents for eighteen holes—but also to spend time around powerful men. The respectful adulation he would perfect as a genius sperm banker—he learned that on the golf courses of Harbor Springs. Some eighty years later, Graham wrote about caddying in his memoir: “I know of no other situation in which a boy can be in the company of leading and outstanding individuals, hours at a time. He can learn some of their ways of thinking and talking, their matters of concern and some of their foibles.” (Graham carried the bags of famed baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, among others.) Caddying prodded Graham’s ambition in another way: it made him greedy. The Graham family was plenty prosperous, but he was a townie, a second-class citizen, practically a ragamuffin compared to Harbor Springs’ majestic summer migrants. Like many middle-class kids who spend their lives around the rich, Graham smelled money and developed an appetite for it. “I saw these wealthy summer people enjoying themselves at leisure and concluded that wealthy was the way to be.”

Harbor Springs is also where young Robert learned his first, unfortunate lessons about race. Graham’s ancestors were fairly recent arrivals in America—there were Welshmen and Czechs in the near past—but they were very white and very Protestant. These traits were virtually requirements for living in Harbor Springs, a town that was as prejudiced as you’d expect for Michigan in the 1920s. This, after all, was when Henry Ford was at the height of his influence and his anti-Semitism. Jews and blacks were excluded from Harbor Springs’ clubs, of course—not that there were any around, except for the black servants of some summer folk. The many Indians who lived around Harbor Springs were second-class citizens, mostly confined to jobs in manual labor. In Harbor Springs, Graham developed the discomfort with nonwhites that he would never lose.

By the time he graduated from Harbor Springs High School in 1924, Graham had acquired a distinctive bantam charm that he would carry till his death. He was not a tall man—five feet, eight inches on a good day—but he carried himself like one. He had the posture of a Prussian Army colonel, and his head was huge for his body. Graham was vain, and he had much to be vain about: His chest was broad from swimming, his legs strong from running. He had jug ears, eyebrows so bushy they looked fake, and a vast chin—but these aggressive features combined in a fortunate way. His hair, thick and brown with a widow’s peak, was slicked back in the fashion of the day. Many girls thought him gorgeous, and he knew it. His classmates voted him the best-looking boy in the class of 1924. They liked him, too. Next to his picture in the Harbor Springs High School yearbook, it said, “Here good sense and good nature are never separated.”

Robert Graham in the Harbor Springs High School yearbook, 1924.
Courtesy of the Harbor Springs Library

At eighteen, Graham headed off to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, intent on shedding his bourgeois roots. Frank Graham had urged his eldest son to follow him into dentistry, but Robert loathed the idea of “fooling around in people’s mouths.” He wanted to do something more ambitious. He set out to become the next Enrico Caruso. His voice had dazzled audiences in Harbor Springs, and he believed he could be a star. He spent eight years studying music at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. He sang leads in student operas and twice soloed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House during university tours.

In 1932, at the pit of the Great Depression, he graduated and moved to New York City to be discovered. He wasn’t. He blew an audition at Radio City Music Hall. With the brutal rationality that would eventually make him a good businessman, he recognized that no amount of teaching would ever make him a Caruso: his voice was too erratic. He returned abjectly home to Michigan. Very quickly, he blotted his musical career from his memory. It had been, he said, a “waste.” When he wrote his memoir sixty years later, he scarcely mentioned it and left out entirely the fact that he had married another singer and had children with her. All that Graham let himself remember from his singing years was what he
always
remembered: his brushes with famous men. How his uncle, the celebrated architect Ernest Graham (the Wrigley Building, Equitable Building, Flatiron Building), had paid for his New York music lessons. How he had befriended Arnold Gingrich, later the founding editor of
Esquire.
*
 
¹
How he had spent a weekend at Frank Lloyd Wright’s house, where he had been awed to see Wright so engaged in “exalted discourse” that the architect didn’t notice he was drooling egg yolk all over his shirt and tie. In a poor man, Graham would have considered dripping egg yolk the sign of a slovenly mind. But in Wright, it meant genius.

Graham remained determined to get rich, but he needed a new path. He was blessed with a clear-eyed view of himself. “[I] have no great gifts, but no great weaknesses, either.” He knew he was disciplined: He never drank alcohol or coffee, never smoked, never gambled. He solved problems quickly, and his hands were as agile as his mind. He loved hard work and believed in its moral virtue. With all this in mind, Graham settled on a second career: optometry. It was an odd but inspired choice. Though deeply unglamorous, optometry was a profession of gadgets—not very good gadgets. Graham relished the challenge of trying to improve eyeglasses and the tools that made them. He earned an optical degree from Ohio State in a mere eighteen months—inventing a new kind of lens along the way—and landed a coveted job at Bausch & Lomb immediately after graduation. When America entered the Second World War, Graham was a father in his mid-thirties. He spent the war figuring out how to use the optical technology in captured German equipment to improve American artillery scopes and binoculars.

When the war ended, Graham was working for the optical giant Univis. It was a drag. Graham was a salesman, and he was good at it—gracious, elegant, smart—but his heart wasn’t in it: he lacked the salesman’s profligate bonhomie; he didn’t have the patience to explain things to people he thought were stupid. Graham liked the
tinkering
of optometry, not the salesmanship. So Graham threw himself at the profession’s number one problem: Why were eyeglasses so bad? Lenses were still made of glass, which meant they were fragile and dangerous. Thousands of Americans suffered eye injuries every year when their spectacles shattered.

Graham saw the future, and it was . . . plastics. Despite decades of attempts, no one had been able to manufacture a plastic lens that was as reliable and scratch resistant as glass. Graham thought he could. In 1947, when Univis refused to dedicate itself to plastic lens research, Graham quit, recruited a partner, and poured all his money into starting a new company, which they called Armorlite. Graham moved to southern California, the red-hot center of the postwar industrial economy, and tried to make plastic eyeglasses. He failed and failed and failed. After a fiasco using Plexiglas, Graham began to experiment with a little-known plastic called CR-39. It had been used to make B-17 fuel tanks during the war.

CR-39 was a disaster, too. It shattered the lens molds, and it shrank too much as it dried. But Graham persisted with it and perfected CR-39 lenses at the end of 1947. Armorlite’s lenses revolutionized the optical business. In the 1950s, Armorlite thrived but still served a niche market. Then fashion came to Graham’s aid. Large lenses were the vogue of the 1960s, and they could be made only of lightweight plastic. Armorlite boomed. Graham employed five hundred workers at his Pasadena factory. He marketed his product aggressively and was a great showman: When he gave a speech, he would yank off his Armorlite spectacles, fling them into the air, let them fall as the audience gasped, and then pick them up, unscathed. Graham kept on tinkering—he helped perfect contact lenses, developed the first antireflective coating for plastic lenses, and manufactured the first UV-protective lenses, among other inventions. He was a hero in his small corner of American business. Optical societies rained medals down on him. The National Eye Research Foundation dubbed him “The Man Who Made It Safe to Wear Glasses.” He also became incredibly rich. During Armorlite’s lean years, Graham took his salary in stock; by the time Armorlite struck gold, he controlled nearly the entire company. Graham risked all on Armorlite and made it back thousands of times over.

But Graham was dissatisfied. His personal life was messy. Graham had divorced his first wife after she had borne him three children, then played the field with a sportsman’s relish. He was an incorrigible flirt, and his sharp good looks, dapper dress, and impeccable manners helped his cause. He remarried, unhappily, to a woman his brother Tom described as an “alcoholic showgirl.” That miserable union produced two more children, but it was headed toward divorce when his wife swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills and died. He wiped this second wife from his history books, too. (Graham possessed the great American gift of amnesia. He forgot nasty parts of his past as if he were erasing a chalkboard.) With a lack of awareness that would be funny if it weren’t sad, he described the second marriage in his memoir with a single sentence: “I had recently concluded an embittering marriage and swore never to put my neck into that noose again.” He fathered another child—out of wedlock, according to his brother—and then found wife number three in 1960. Marta Ve Everton, an ophthalmologist twenty-one years his junior, was whip smart, elegant, religious, and altruistic. She was the great love of Graham’s life. She bore him two children, bringing his total to eight.

Graham had an ambivalent relationship with his brood. He liked the idea of family in theory but bungled it in practice. Like his own father, he was emotionally distant with his kids. His three daughters thrived, especially Marta Ve’s two girls. But three of his boys found serious trouble. One apparently killed himself. Another suffered a traumatic head injury as a boy, never quite recovered, and died in middle age after a difficult life. A third moved to the Pacific Northwest and cut his ties with the family. Graham seemed ashamed of some of his sons; he would sometimes avoid introducing them to his friends.

Graham’s success in a too-narrow field, his huge, almost-but-not-quite-happy family, his fascination with the rich and famous: in the late 1950s, all these helped inspire the passion that would define the rest of his life. Graham came to believe—more strongly than he believed anything—that society was doomed unless smart people had more children. He vowed to help them do it.

Graham’s obsession began with a mistake. Graham’s childhood idol had been an inventor named Ephraim Shay. Shay had designed the “Shay locomotive”—a powerfully geared steam train that could climb steep hills. Mining and logging firms bought Shay trains by the hundreds. He made a fortune and retired to Harbor Springs in the late nineteenth century. He was the town’s most celebrated resident, famed for his fertile mind and generous heart. He engineered Harbor Springs’ water supply. He built experimental boats that he docked in the town harbor. In winter, he hammered together hundreds of sleds for the town’s children, including young Robert Graham. When Shay died in 1916, it hit ten-year-old Robert hard. He believed that Shay had died childless. The inventor’s barrenness lodged in Graham’s head and eventually goaded him to act. As an adult, Graham would write, “God had planted some of His best seed in our town, but it had died out. They still name streets and schools for Ephraim Shay. The great bronze tablet which recounts his accomplishments still stands. But the genes which determined his extraordinary nature have died out. Ever since, the extinction of exceptionally valuable human genes has been a concern of mine.”

In fact, Graham was wrong about Shay. The inventor’s “seed” was alive and well and spreading all over America. Shay had fathered a son before moving to Harbor Springs. In 2000, three years after Graham’s death, about 160 of Shay’s descendents, all carrying his “exceptionally valuable” genes, celebrated their ancestor at a reunion in Harbor Springs.