The Mad Sculptor (18 page)

The records of Bob’s life at Rockland have, by and large, been lost to time. From the few surviving documents, we know that, owing partly to his willingness to perform menial chores—making beds, mopping floors, cleaning windows—he was afforded certain privileges. Unlike the typical male patient who (as Allen Bernard discovered) slept in communal wards with seventeen other men—“manic depressives, dementia praecox patients, paranoiacs, sex maniacs, and syphilitics in advanced stages of the disease”
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—Bob was given a room of his own. Thanks to Wertham’s influence, he was also encouraged to pursue his sculpting as part of his occupational therapy and even permitted to use sharp-edged modeling tools. As in Bellevue, he took commissions from staff members for small portrait busts of themselves and their family members and managed to squirrel away more than fifty dollars for future use.
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Periodically, he exploded in one of his uncontrolled outbursts of rage. One newspaper reported that Bob “was in no less than twenty-five fights during his stay” at Rockland and that “even the attendants were afraid of him.”
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Following a particularly vicious assault on a fellow patient in early June, he was briefly banished to the hospital’s “Siberia”—Building 37, the violent ward, where, in violation of a state law that required “that a patient be taken out of restraint at least once every two hours,” inmates were routinely kept in straitjackets for weeks at a time.
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He also made repeated escape attempts. In late August, he got as
far as the bus station in Orangeburg before being picked up by orderlies sent out in search of him. A few months later, on November 17, he made it all the way to Manhattan. Once there, he proceeded directly to 44 Gramercy Park—the home of Dr. Fredric Wertham.

Bob had no trouble locating Wertham’s apartment. For months, the psychiatrist had been conducting a cordial correspondence with his former patient, using his personal letterhead stationery. Wertham had even sent some snapshots of himself in response to a request from Bob, who planned to make a portrait bust of the doctor and present it to him as a gift.
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Apologizing for showing up so unexpectedly, Bob chatted aimlessly for a while before getting around to the point. He had run away from Rockland, he explained, because he “felt too restricted” there and was hoping that Wertham might “help him get work in a convalescent place.” After spending some time convincing Bob that he would be better off back at the asylum, Wertham, who was scheduled to attend a psychiatric meeting that evening, asked him “whether he would go along with me and let me present him to the doctors as an instructive case which could be of benefit to other patients.” Though Bob had mixed feelings about being treated “like a bug in a bottle,” he consented.

Seated on the platform beside Wertham, Bob, who seemed cheerful to the point of giddiness once he found himself in the spotlight, readily fielded questions from the audience of about sixty psychiatrists, including a few of the city’s most prominent psychoanalysts. He spoke openly and without hesitation about the most intimate details of his sex life, impressing the doctors with his candor. Asked about his attempted self-castration, however, he gave contradictory replies. At first, he declared that he had completely abandoned the idea. “I have come down to common sense. I realize I’ve been sick for years and that these ideas are impractical.” At a later point, however, he suggested that, under certain circumstances, he might revert to his former behavior. “My whole mind was warped. If I get up against it again, I’ll be that way again.”

With Bob still present on the platform, the psychiatrists turned to a diagnosis of his case. After some debate, most concluded that Bob suffered from hebephrenia, a subtype of schizophrenia characterized “by foolish mannerisms, senseless laughter, delusions, and regressive behavior,” and—like all forms of the disease—not susceptible to psychotherapy. Wertham, however, was inclined to disagree. He had come to believe that Bob was suffering from a mental condition heretofore unrecognized by the psychiatric community.

The essence of the syndrome was a “state of high emotional stress,” caused by a profound psychological conflict or traumatic event in the patient’s past. Eventually, the person becomes possessed by the delusion that he must commit an act of extreme violence as “the only way out.” A definite plan takes shape in his mind. After a period of resistance, the urge to violence becomes overwhelming. Once he has carried out the act, his inner tension is relieved and he assumes “a superficial appearance of normality.” At this stage, there is the potential for full “insight and recovery, with the reestablishment of emotional equilibrium.” Without such “an inner adjustment,” however—best obtained through psychotherapy—the patient is almost certain to experience a recurrence of the disease, “during which he is capable of anything.”

At that point, Wertham was still in the process of refining his theory. Eventually, he would claim to have discovered a new “clinical entity” and would give it a name. Borrowing a term from Swiss psychiatrist Hans W. Maier, he would call it the
catathymic crisis.
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The meeting lasted late into the evening. Afterward, Bob was taken to Bellevue’s admitting office. He spent the night in the hospital before being bused back to Rockland the following morning.

He remained at the state asylum for another six months. For the most part, he was “quiet and cooperative,” though he was still subject to periodic fits of unprovoked fury. On one occasion, for example, several recent graduates from the NYU medical school were visiting Rockland. Among them was a young doctor named Jeremiah Last. As they toured the facilities, they came upon Irwin working on
a piece of sculpture. Struck by its craftsmanship, Last offered Bob a compliment. The words were barely out of his mouth when Bob, flying into a rage, threw down his tools and hurled himself with a roar at the startled doctor.

“I backed away,” Last later recounted, “and it took several of my fellow students and an attendant to restrain Irwin. He kept roaring and shouting. He seemed to have unbelievable strength for a man of his build.”
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The piece that Last had paused to admire was a plaster statue of a “strange faun-like” creature with the torso of a young girl, the “shaggy shanks of a mountain goat,” and a face that bore a striking resemblance to Bob’s. It was done so artistically that hospital authorities had it gilded and placed on permanent display at the entrance to the main building. In subsequent years, newspapers would make much of the bizarre piece as symptomatic of “the tormented mind of its creator.” In an era when even the average tabloid reader was culturally literate enough to recognize the name of the ancient Greek satyr-god of the forests, punning headlines would describe it as a self-portrait of the artist as a “Psycho-Pan.”
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Deemed “much improved” by his supervising psychiatrist, Dr. George Ettling, Bob was discharged from Rockland on May 16, 1934. Heading straight for Manhattan, he took a room at a cheap boardinghouse on West 66th Street. One week later, he paid another visit to Dr. Wertham. Though Wertham agreed that Bob’s stay at the hospital “had evidently had a good effect on him,” he was concerned about the sculptor’s continued obsession with visualization and urged his former patient to keep in touch with him.
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Living off the money he had earned at Rockland from his artwork, Bob searched for a job that would utilize his sculpting skills. In early June, he was hired as an assistant by Gilbert Maggi, owner of Chelsea Realistic Products, a commercial sculpting firm on West 28th Street specializing in plaster display items. By all accounts, Bob was an exceptionally skilled and efficient worker and “was soon turning
out little commercial statues faster than his employer.”
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With a seemingly secure job and a little extra money in his pocket, Bob decided to move out of his dingy room on the Upper West Side and into more congenial quarters. In early July, he returned to 240 East 53rd Street—the home of the Gedeon family.

13

The Snake Woman

N
EARLY TWO YEARS
had passed since Robert Irwin had last set eyes on Ronnie Gedeon. During that time, she had blossomed into a stunning young woman of seventeen. Headstrong and (as the tabloids never tired of reporting) “boy crazy,” she had dropped out of high school after three semesters to pursue a career as a beautician, enrolling in one of the franchised “academies” operated under the name of A. B. Moler. A renowned figure in American tonsorial history, Moler had opened the world’s first barber college in Chicago in 1893 and authored a number of standard textbooks in his field, including the 1911
Manual of Beauty Culture
, the bible of the beautician’s trade. His course of study, however—which encompassed not only the intricacies of the marcel wave, the cable twist, and the bob curl but also the treatment of various scalp diseases and facial blemishes—proved too rigorous for Ronnie, and after six months she quit the school, joining the ever-growing ranks of the unemployed.
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Out late virtually every night with a different boy, she clashed constantly with her Hungarian-born father, who railed against “this
rotten American system where children laugh at their parents and start running wild before they cut their teeth.”
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On several occasions, after she brazenly ignored her curfew and returned home tipsy with drink, he resorted to corporal punishment.

For her part (as she confided to her diary), Ronnie saw her father as “spineless and irresponsible” and felt a desperate need to escape from the household. She found it in the spring of 1933, just after her sixteenth birthday, when she eloped with Bobby Flower, a family friend whose parents ran a bowling alley on East 15th Street. The marriage was annulled within months, and by early 1934, Ronnie was living back home. Shortly afterward—fed up with his daughter’s disobedience and the way his wife always “took Ronnie’s side instead of mine”—Joseph Gedeon moved out of the apartment and took up residence in a cubbyhole space in his upholstery shop on 34th Street.
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He had recently decamped when Robert Irwin came to live at the Gedeons’ home, a dilapidated three-and-a-half-story brownstone on East 53rd Street, divided into a basement apartment for the family and upstairs rooms for the boarders.

Bob was not immune to Ronnie’s physical charms, which—since she often lounged around the premises in dishabille—he had ample opportunity to observe. To his mind, however, she was nothing but “a beautiful, brainless, fluffy thing.”
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He was far more attracted to her demure, sober-minded older sister, Ethel.

Following her own brief, ill-fated teenage marriage, Ethel had returned to school, taking a secretarial extension course at Hunter College in Long Island City. Having mastered the principles of stenography, she soon found a job at
Vanity Fair
magazine. Quick-witted, industrious, and possessed of a natural elegance, she was promoted within months to private secretary to Helen Norden, the magazine’s managing editor (and mistress of its publisher, Condé Nast). Before long, Norden had grown so fond of Ethel that she began to invite her “along on her prowls through Café Society,” where the working-class young woman mingled starry-eyed with “stage stars, society figures and a number of artists.”
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From the moment of her annulment, Ethel had been courted
by a longtime acquaintance, an aspiring lawyer named Joe Kudner. Though fond of him, she found herself intrigued by the good-looking young sculptor who had returned to board with her family. Their relationship began in earnest when Bob came downstairs from his attic room one Monday evening to pay his weekly rent of four dollars and found Ethel alone in the living room of the Gedeons’ high-ceilinged English basement.

“These come hard nowadays,” she said with a rueful smile as he handed her the crumpled bills.

“They do now,” he said. “But mark my words—my turn will come. I’m down now, but I’ll be on top someday.”

“By your sculpting work?” said Ethel.

“Certainly by my sculpturing work,” Bob exclaimed. “I’m on the track of something right now that will make me eternally famous—I call it visualization.”

It was, as Ethel later explained, the first—though by no means the last—time she heard of “this idée fixe of Irwin’s.”
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Impressed by some small pieces he had brought back with him from Rockland, she agreed to let him sculpt her head. While she posed for him in her living room, they engaged in lively (if largely one-sided) conversation about art, religion, and other of Bob’s obsessive topics. In the following weeks, she accompanied him on a jaunt to the Metropolitan Museum, where he showed her his favorite statue, a full-size plaster reproduction of the Colleoni of Verocchio—an enormous equestrian statue depicting the Venetian mercenary-soldier Bartolomeo Colleoni, accoutered for battle and astride a huge stallion.

Steering “me past everything else in the West Hall—‘that drivel,’ he called it—Irwin told me to stop at the foot of the pedestal of the figure,” Ethel recalled. “He made me look at it first dead on and close up.” Then—speaking as if he himself had been to Italy and viewed the original monument—he continued: “This is the way it hits you in the open place in Venice, where it is gilded bronze. You come up right under it and get the feeling that horse is going to trample your brains out. And the feeling carries right in up to that
head, as you step back.” After pausing for a moment to contemplate the statue, he said in a tone that startled Ethel with its vehemence: “Just look at the way it flows. Why, it’s more alive than nine-tenths of the fools who glance at it with dead eyes as they walk past and see nothing but a guy on horseback.”
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