T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

“Sober,” “staid,” “clinical”—no matter what adjective you want to use, the press wasn’t having it. Every magazine and newspaper in the country exploded with sensational headlines—“50 % OF MARRIED MEN UNFAITHFUL!” “PREMARITAL INTERCOURSE RAMPANT!” “KINSEY SAYS MEN REACH PEAK TEN YEARS AHEAD OF WOMEN!”—and that sort of thing, always in caps and tailed by the flogging exclamation point. The book began to fly out of the shops, 40,000 copies in the first two weeks, and it was soon topping bestseller lists across the country. By March, there were 100,000 copies in print, and by June 150,000. Time magazine called it the biggest thing since Gone With the Wind. And Prok, who’d authored every last word of it, was suddenly ubiquitous, his face staring out from the pages of every publication you could imagine, and his words — his statistics, our statistics — on everybody’s lips. In fact, things grew so out of control that we could barely get in and out of the offices without a press of reporters, admirers and sensation seekers trying to run us down, and work on the project came to a decided halt for those first few months. (And can anyone forget those jukebox ditties, Martha Raye with her “Ooh, Dr. Kinsey,” and Julie Wilson with “The Kinsey Report,” and worst of all, “The Kinsey Boogie”?)

For me, it was nothing short of hellish. I’ve never been comfortable in front of a camera and while I do think I can hold my own as an interviewer on the job, as an interviewee I’m afraid I’m a bust. (“You’re just shy, John,” Iris would tell me, “not sex shy, just plain shy.”) It was hard on Mac too. While the reporters tried to corner me and Corcoran — and Rutledge, because he’d joined us by this time — we were able to present a united front, and in the eyes of the press we were subsidiary in any case, mere sidemen to Prok’s bandleader, but Mac was left exposed. If Sexual Behavior in the Human Male revealed men for what they were — human animals engaging in a whole range of activities, from anal intercourse to extramarital affairs and relations with nonhuman animals — then what was it like to live with the man who routinely quantified and correlated all this behavior? What was the woman’s perspective on it?

In interview after interview, Mac bore up under the pressure and scrutiny as if she’d been born to it, but I knew different. It wasn’t that she was reticent, like me, but simply that she’d always seen her role as an accommodator, as Prok’s helpmeet, and she felt that the reward for all his tireless work and the genius of his conception should be entirely his, all the glory and the limelight, and that she should stand in the background and let him have his due. But they wouldn’t let her. The women’s magazines especially— McCall’s, Redbook, Cosmopolitan. They were mad to feast on the details, to get in under her skin, poking and probing and hoping against hope to turn up something odd and out of the ordinary, something outré their readers could latch on to in order to put all this male business in perspective. He counted orgasms and he had a wife. Who was she? Who was she really?

Mac invited them into the house, one and all, to let them answer the question for themselves — she was just an ordinary housewife, that was all, no different from any of their readers, except that her husband went off to the Sex Institute every morning while theirs packed lunches for the factory or the downtown office — and she baked the journalists cookies and persimmon tarts and sat knitting in her rocker by way of demonstration. When they asked if her lifestyle wasn’t about to change, if she wouldn’t soon become wealthy off the royalties from the book and start swathing herself in furs and hiring maids to do the cooking and cleaning and child-rearing, she pointed out, dourly, that all proceeds from Sexual Behavior in the Human Male were pumped back into the Institute and that they never saw a penny of it, that, in fact, the book had cost them money because the writing of it had prevented Prok from revising his biology textbook, which at least would have brought them a small yearly something. Just take a look at Prok’s wardrobe, she told them — he’s only got one decent suit to his name. Rich? They were anything but. In fact, Mac projected exactly what Prok expected her to: a kind of safe and sterile warmth that would keep the critics at bay and the housewives of America satisfied to the point at which some of them might even begin to feel a little superior. It was a bravura performance.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Why I bring it up at this juncture is to impress on you how vital it was for us to keep our activities secret — for all of us — and never to let slip even the faintest hint of impropriety or behavior that anyone could fasten on as deviating from the norm in any way. Thus, we were all married, and to all appearances happily married, and we all had children. We had to present an unimpeachable front to the public — we were the sex researchers and we were absolutely and rigorously normal, no prurience here, no wife-swapping or sadomasochism or sodomy on our platters — but as the years went by, and the public scrutiny intensified, it became ever more problematic. And Prok. Prok seemed to enlarge into his role, to try ever increasingly and recklessly to push the boundaries both personally and professionally, and in the later years we were all waiting for the roof to fall in, for Prok to be arrested and shackled and hauled off to the flash of photographers’ cameras for soliciting sex in a public restroom or engaging in immoral acts at one of the bath houses he increasingly frequented on our field trips. It never happened. I suppose a part of it can be attributed to luck, but he was cautious for the most part, never admitting anyone into the inner circle unless he was absolutely sure of him, and on top of that there was the impregnability of the persona he presented to the public. He was Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, Professor of Zoology, father of three, contentedly married, above suspicion or even rumor. He built a fortress around us, data compacted into stone, stone piled atop stone, and we all climbed up hand-over-hand to man the battlements.

And so, when Violet Corcoran did come to town and she and the girls had had a chance to settle in, Prok made a point of hosting a small gathering at Bryan Park for just the six of us and the children — it was his way, I think, of smoothing over any potential situation that might arise among us and of reinforcing our bond as well. That was one of the things about working with Prok, about being his protégé—he always managed to make each of us feel a vital part of the enterprise, wives included, as if we were members of a secret society, which, in some respect, I suppose we were. And the children were a part of it too — they might not have understood what was going on among the adults, but they did, I’m sure, appreciate that they were bound up in something unique.

There was an easygoing, friendly feel to our outdoor gatherings, a familial current that was prominently, but never artificially, on display. We had children, just like anyone else — Prok’s and the Corcorans’, and later the Rutledges’ and John Jr. — and if our neighbors should see us gathered there in public over a smoking grill, the older children kicking a ball while the younger picked buttercups or climbed trees, we were recognized as performers in the rite of the familiar and all was understood and all forgiven. People might say, Oh, look there’s Dr. Sex with his wife and children and his colleagues and their children too, roasting wieners on a stick like anybody else, and the children have their bicycles with them, look at that, and I’ll bet the ants’ll have a high old time of it, don’t you? We picnicked a lot in those days.