I wonder what she [Adele] thought when my letter came. Her answer took a motherly and, at the same time, destructive attitude. I resent the motherly, and resent even more the fact that Adele believes she knows enough about me after such a short acquaintance to be able to call my way of life “moral tragedy.”
Whether it really is or not is not the important question. In my letter, I tried my best to stem mounting anger. I fear that she will not write again. Although I hope against hope that she will. I need desperately to write to someone other than my sister and mother. The familiarity of what they say in every letter is becoming monotonous and is not in the least helpful. I am always disappointed when the letters I receive bear the familiar writing of my father’s or Evelyn’s green ink. And yet, I need their letters desperately.
In another entry, dated February 1, 1955, Felix further described his “self-consciousness” in social settings.
“A dream about dignity, it escapes me,” the notation begins. “The past few days I have been unable to concentrate on my dreams upon awakening although I know that I have dreamt. All the officers went to a dance tonight. I wanted to go, but knew that the evening would have been painful.”
Two weeks later, on February 15, Felix wrote again of his social anxiety. This time, it prevented him from attending a surprise party being thrown for the captain of his naval unit. According to the notation, Felix had accepted an offer by a friend named Dean to get him a date for the winter affair, knowing full well that he would not attend the event.
“This evening I told Dean with a smile that I would not be able to come,” Felix wrote. “I told him that there was an important reason, and he of course, misunderstood me.
“How can I tell anyone what the real reason is? Can I say to my friend, ‘Sorry, Dean, I cannot go because of my self-consciousness.’ It would make me utterly miserable. The girl would think I was crazy. I would have to laugh, and it would simply be too painful for me. This is what I would have had to say. How impossible my existence is.”
Felix also wrote about a letter he sent to his older sister, Evelyn, in which he tried to explain his state of being.
In this letter, I expressed what has long been turned over in my mind, i.e., the anger and guilt which I direct towards my parents for having made me what I am, a helpless, utterly self-conscious and miserable individual.
Instead of the closeness I once felt for my parents, there is now anger and resentment. The guilt, which I once felt for their sake, I have emplanted [sic] in them. Mother’s letters now leave me with a cruel kind of coldness. In the letter, I announced my determination to sever, although not entirely, relations with Harrison [Felix’s hometown in New York].
Perhaps this sounds dramatic, yet it must be so. I also told EV [Evelyn] that I felt myself to be basically a simple individual who has by accident had a complex personality thrown on his rather weak body. And this is exactly my feeling. The simplicity and sometimes naivitee [sic] of my desires, thoughts and pleasures are a violent contrast to the complexity of my psychic structure. It is as if my psychic existence and my true nature were two separate entities joined by a foolish or blind will. Where I asked to choose between discarding my simplicity and my personality, there would not really be a choice.
At twenty-three, Felix was slowly coming apart, yet, his silent suffering only magnified his problems. He had never dealt with the psychological trauma he suffered as a young boy in war-torn Europe. There was much secrecy surrounding the horrific crimes of World War II, and there was no counseling available to the tens of thousands of victims. Those lucky enough to have survived received no special treatment.
Everybody was expected to go on. And outwardly, most did.
In September of 1955, the navy transferred Felix back to a base in Brooklyn, New York, for shore duty. He was unhappy with the assignment and unhappy to be back home. His only consolation was that he could resume therapy with Dr. Goldstein. According to the doctor’s records later obtained by the U.S. Navy, Felix attended ten sessions with the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist recorded that he was “agitated,” “depressed,” and “concerned over sexual problems,” “lacked an interest in a career,” and “was preoccupied with philosophical and cosmic concepts.”
A sexual history complied by Dr. Goldstein during his sessions with Felix disclosed that Felix began masturbating at the age of twelve, but “masturbated with guilt” and “felt confused regarding sexual facts until fifteen years of age.” He began dating at sixteen, and by the age of twenty, was involved in a relationship with a well-to-do aspiring actress. We’ll call her Fannie.
Felix’s guilt over masturbation and confusion over sexual gender were not remarkable since about 50 percent of American males reportedly experience those same feelings, according to experts. What was unusual was that, since puberty, Felix had been obsessed with his sister, Evelyn.
“Incestuous fantasies involving his older sister have preoccupied him since adolescence,” Dr. Goldstein noted in his official report.
It is interesting that Evelyn was fifteen when Felix began to fantasize about her—the same age that Susan was when she first went to see him in 1972.
On Friday, October 14, 1955, Felix met with Dr. Goldstein but his session did not appear to lift his spirits, and the following day, he felt no better. While torrential rainfall and high winds only added to his gloom, he had a date that night in Manhattan, so he forced himself to get dressed, pack a bag, and make the forty-mile drive to the city.
It was 5:30 PM when Felix met Fannie for their date. Although he wasn’t in love with her, he enjoyed her company. She put him at ease and allowed him to be himself. He had gotten tickets to La Ronde, a performance based on the 1897 play Der Reigen (Hands Around) by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. The story begins with the seduction of a soldier by a prostitute, who transmits syphilis during their encounter. The disease is then passed on to each subsequent and interconnected character in subsequent acts until it finally reaches the Count who, in the end, makes love to the prostitute from the first scene, thus closing the circle. The play was still considered somewhat risqué and had sparked outrage when it was first performed in Germany in the early part of the twentieth century. It had been labeled “obscene,” and for a time, was banned from the theater.
As the performance progressed, Felix confided to Fannie that he was seeing a psychiatrist and had an appointment the previous day. Fannie noticed that he seemed more glib than his usual somber self. During his previous visit to New York, he had confided his unhappiness at home—due, primarily, to his relationship with his mother. Now, he seemed more displeased with his naval assignment to Brooklyn and expressed his desire to be stationed somewhere in Europe.
Smiling, Felix turned to Fannie and announced that he had contemplated suicide.
Staring back, Fannie giggled. He couldn’t be serious, she thought, he was grinning when he made the pronouncement.
“I’ve already tried it once,” he announced. Felix said he had actually turned on the gas burners in his house, but while waiting for death, “had grown bored with the whole thing.”
Unsure how to respond, Fannie grabbed his hand to comfort him and recounted the story of her brother’s suicide several months earlier while he was on active duty in the army. As Fannie told the sad tale, she found Felix’s response worrisome. Suddenly, he was listening very intently, inquiring about every detail, particularly regarding the method her brother had employed.
After the theater, Felix and Fannie returned to her place where they spent the night together. The following afternoon, they attended a matinee featuring Marcel Marceau, but once the film ended, Felix became frighteningly sullen and announced that he wanted to go home.
“Call me the minute you get to Harrison,” Fannie begged when he dropped her off around 5:30 that Sunday evening. She knew that his parents, Eric and Johanna Polk, had traveled to Rochester for the weekend to visit their daughter, Evelyn. With Felix’s brother, John, stationed overseas, the
re would be no one at home to look after him.
Felix sounded increasingly dejected when he telephoned from Harrison just after 7 PM. Worried, Fannie phoned him again later that evening. She was relieved when he picked up the line just after 10 PM, but became distraught as she listened.
“It’s too late for the world,” Felix repeated over and over into the receiver. “Too late, too late.”
Fannie tried to console Felix, but he soon admonished “don’t call back anymore” and hung up the phone.
Frantic, and convinced that Felix was in trouble, Fannie begged her mother to phone the police.
It was nearing 10:30 PM when Felix sat down at the typewriter. He felt compelled to release his emotions on paper:
I have done what for a long time, I know I must do. When a rock is thrown into water it sinks. It must sink, as now must I. My minds (sic) is so heavy with wretchedness, with utter loneliness, with an unknown past, a frightening future and an intolerable past present that no choice remains. I don’t fear death at all. What it is, but non-life. And what is life but a continuous torture? This final act is not sudden or impetuous. I have known that someday it would take place. The question has only been, where, when, and how. Until a few weeks ago, there has always been some spark, some hope, which prevented me from the obvious. This night there is no hope. There is nothing; and tomorrow and tomorrow.
Of regrets, I have few. It would be folly for anyone to assume the blame for something of which I myself and no one else is responsible. I say goodbye to a hateful world with a smile. In life, I hated pity and in death I want none. Had I not come this far in life my loss would perhaps have been easier. I have forgotten the world and now the world much [sic] forget me.
Rising from the desk, Felix grabbed the keys to the family car. Feeling stronger than he had in a long time, he took one last look around and headed for the garage. Sliding into the passenger seat, he put the key into the ignition and started the engine. The hum of the motor was comforting, and he felt great relief that he had the courage to do what he wanted to do so many times before.
Police records show that an anonymous call came into the Harrison Police Department sometime after 11 PM that Sunday night, October 16. The female caller did not give her name; she was just a concerned citizen who wanted to report a “possible suicide” at 308 Harrison Avenue, the home of Eric and Johanna Polk.
Officer Pat Pizarello responded to the “mysterious phone call” and “lights on” dispatch to the Polk residence. Armed with a flashlight, he began to examine the grounds. Hearing a noise coming from inside the garage, he flung open the door to find the space filled with carbon monoxide gas. There was a car parked inside with its motor running and Felix was on the floor adjacent to the car’s front right wheel. At one point, he had been in the passenger seat but had apparently slipped to the garage floor when he became unconscious.
“I had suicidal thoughts before but never thought I’d have nerve enough to try it,” Felix later told psychiatrists at the U.S. Naval Hospital at St. Albans, New York.
Ironically, Felix Polk would be murdered 46 years later, almost to the day.
Chapter Eight
A TRAGIC MIX
Three years after his suicide attempt, Felix met and married Sharon Mann, an attractive music student at the Julliard School in New York City, who was just eighteen when the couple was first introduced in 1956. At the time, Felix was on temporary leave from the U.S. Naval Reserve, and he was employed as a social worker at the Cedar Knolls School in Hawthorne, New York County, while studying for a master’s in social work at Manhattan’s Albert Einstein College. On weekends, he worked as a recreation therapist at the Linden Hill School for Disturbed Adolescents in Westchester to supplement the monthly disability payments of $231 he had begun receiving from the navy. He was also seeing a private psychiatrist three times a week, paying $15 a session.
Two years after his marriage, on September 26, 1960, Felix received an honorable discharge from the U.S. Naval Reserve for a “physical disability.” That same year, he and Sharon relocated to northern California. There, Felix enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he did additional undergraduate coursework. Deciding he wanted to help people like himself to get well, he applied and was admitted to the university’s PhD program.
While Felix earned his doctorate, Sharon supported the couple, and later, their small family. On October 2, 1962, she gave birth to a son, Andrew D. Polk, and three years later, on March 23, 1965, a daughter, Jennifer, was born. That same year, Felix was awarded both a PhD in clinical psychology and a second bachelor’s degree—a B.S. with honors—from Berkeley University.
The following summer, he traveled to England on a National Institute of Mental Health fellowship, where he remained for two years treating adolescents and families as a staff clinician at London’s Travistock Clinic and Institution. Though records are sketchy, it appears that Felix saw little of his wife and children during that time.
Returning to California in 1967, he landed a plum post as chief psychologist at the Alameda County Mental Health Services in Oakland where he was responsible for overseeing the psychological services for all the clinics and hospitals in the county. In addition, he was an instructor at both Hayward State University in Hayward and at Holy Names College in Oakland. While Felix was beginning to experience success, Sharon, was also excelling in her career, quickly gaining acclaim as a pianist and piano teacher.
By all accounts, the couple seemed happy. Felix and Sharon shared a love of classical music, and for one birthday, Sharon gave her husband a cello. Nancy Lemmon, a teenage babysitter who lived across Cragmont Street from the family in Berkeley, recalled in a telephone interview Sharon’s excitement the evening she presented the expensive instrument to her husband, saying that Felix was overjoyed by the gift and was anxious to learn to play. He had long dreamed of owning a cello and was overwhelmed by his wife’s thoughtfulness.
Nancy was a young teen when she began caring for the Polk children and recalled the couple vividly, stating that they were respectful of each other’s interests and seemed a good match. Felix was always welcoming when Nancy came over, making her feel at ease in his lovely home. While Nancy admitted that she never really knew what type of work Felix did, she assumed he was a college professor because of his intelligence and attire—often a tweed jacket and slacks. Sharon, too, was smart and always attractive in feminine outfits and little makeup.
Nancy was not the only one who believed that the marriage was solid. While their friends agreed that Sharon was the more outgoing of the two, the resounding sentiment was that the two seemed compatible. With Felix’s advanced degrees and Sharon’s blooming career, the couple seemed destined for success.
Things continued to improve for the young couple when at the age of thirty-six, Felix opened his private practice in the yellow clapboard house on Ashby Avenue in downtown Berkeley, several blocks from the house the couple purchased on Los Angeles Avenue. Their new residence was larger than the one on Cragmont and was located just below Arlington Circle in the center of the city. By 1969, Felix’s private practice was flourishing, and he decided to leave his post with Alameda County to devote more time to his patients. His specialty was the treatment of families and adolescents who were “acting out.”
In late 1971, he attended a weekend workshop on Erhard Seminar Training (EST), a new-age movement founded on the Zen-based approach of master and disciple. The session, led by the movement’s founder, Werner Erhard, had a powerful effect on Polk. Friends reported that the thirty-nine-year-old therapist left the workshop believing he had gained more knowledge in that one weekend than during his four years of graduate school. EST, which literally means “it is” in Latin, promoted the idea that through the application of “programming and reprogramming,” people can rewrite their lives, allowing them to be “set free and born again.” Erhard’s theory was that all problems and limitations were in the mind, and people had been “hypnotized during normal
consciousness” to develop debilitating habits and beliefs that could be changed through “conscious rewiring.”
For Felix, this new-age theory made perfect sense, and he embraced it wholeheartedly. Perhaps Susan Bolling was his first disciple, since it was not long after his EST session that the fifteen-year-old walked into his Berkeley office for an evaluation.
There is no written record of exactly when the sexual relationship between Felix Polk and Susan Bolling began. According to Susan, she was fifteen the first time Dr. Polk “molested” her. She claimed he invited her to sit on his lap during one appointment, and by their fourth session he had raped her after placing her in a “drug induced” hypnotic trance. When pressed, Susan could not recall details of the alleged assault or explain why it had taken her more than twenty years to recall the abuse. She insisted, however, that it reached a point in her teenage life when the only time she left the house was to attend her sessions with Dr. Polk.
Before long, Susan grew to dread the appointments, but she claims she never really understood why. There is little question that Susan and Felix engaged in a sexual relationship during their time as patient and therapist. What remains unclear is how that relationship began. According to Susan, all she knew was that the panic—the pounding in her chest, the struggle to catch her breath—never subsided. In fact, it grew worse.
Often, therapists who transgress and have a relationship with a patient are depressed. Rather than predators, they are more often broken in some way. Such was the case with Felix Polk. Susan Bolling was fifteen and needed him. The idea of being needed made Felix feel powerful and sexually charged. In his mind, he and Susan were spiritual comrades, connected by their shared abandonment by their fathers. Susan’s father had left the family when she was six, just like Felix’s father had done—although his action was not by choice, but at the behest of the Nazis.
Final Analysis Page 8