(1961) The Chapman Report

by Irving Wallace

  THE CHAPMAN REPORT

  Irving Wallace

  First published in Great Britain by

  Arther Barker Ltd 1961

  Copyright (c) 1960 by Irving Wallace

  TO MANY WOMEN and A FEW MEN

  IT IS possible that several of the many women with whom I have crossed paths in the years between puberty and the present will look into this book as they might into a mirror and, through some personal alchemy, see a reflection of themselves. To one and all, I assure them, I would have been totally incapable of capturing their beauty, habits, experiences, and elusive femininity on paper, even if I had wanted to do so. They possessed, all of them, too much complexity, as I possessed too little art, to serve as prototypes for the women in these pages.

  The women in the morality play that follows are pure -fiction-creatures of the author’s imagination-and if any female reader finds here the remotest resemblance to herself, or to any other human being, living or dead, I must firmly state that the resemblance is one of incredible coincidence.

  I must make the same disclaimer to male readers. If, somewhere in this happy land, there is a man who feels illused because he believes that he inhabits these pages, let him be relieved of the notion at once. Every man in this novel, from first page to last, is the result of make-believe.

  Among readers of both sexes, there may be a temptation to ascribe to Dr. Chapman and other sexologists in this novel some of the characteristics and methods of real-life sex historians like Drs. Alfred C. Kinsey, G. V. Hamilton, Robert L. Dickinson, Lewis M. Terman, and others. Those who wish to play out the fantasy, and enjoy the fun of it, may do so, but at their own risk, not mine. For their speculations will have no basis in fact. Since 1915, when the pursuit of sexual behavior by scientific investigators first began, dozens of notable men and women have honorably served this occupation. I have never met, nor even seen, one of them. Nor have I met any of their associates.

  I have undertaken to use, in a work of the imagination, an occupation that is a phenomenon of our time, a time in which I grew up, an age preoccupied with sex, with surveys, with confessions, with statistics. I have invented a group of sexologists and shown them at labor. If, by wildest chance, one of them resembles in some way someone who is alive, or was alive, 1 will be flattered at the accidental accuracy and perception of my pen, but surprised, too, since every character in this book is a product of my working daydreams.

  I leave the patient reader with the sensible words of W. Somerset Maugham: “This practice of ascribing originals for the creatures of the novelist’s fancy is a very mischievous one.”

  Irving Wallace Los Angeles, California

  ONCE A DAY, at exactly ten minutes to nine in the morning, a long, gray sightseeing bus, streaked with dust, lumbered up Sunset Boulevard and entered that suburb of Los Angeles known as The Briars. The uniformed guide and driver of the bus adjusted the silver microphone before his lips and resumed his soporific drone: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are now passing through The Briars …”

  No stir of excitement resulted among the passengers, already sated by the gaudy homes of motion-picture celebrities in Beverly Hills and Bel-Air, left behind twenty minutes before. The Briars, they heard, and sensed before they heard, held no more exotic wonders than the better sections of the towns they had briefly escaped in Pennsylvania, Kansas, Georgia, and Idaho. The Briars was, to sight, the model of perfect normalcy, and, therefore, nothing to write home about.

  Many of the passengers used this interlude to change their positions, massage their necks, light cigarettes, or make a remark to their neighbors as they waited for the transition to the more promising Pacific Ocean and its Malibu colony. But a few, mostly women with young faces and old hands, continued to gaze out their windows, admiring the relaxed, graceful, rural beauty of the suburb, wondering what the community was like and how it would be to become a member of its exclusive population.

  Many buses like this one had passed daily through The Briars, during the several decades of its development. And always, to the transient beholder, the surface vision of placidity, retreat, and conventionality prevailed. And, indeed, the obvious buildings and guidebook statistics were comforting and familiar. For The Briars was to Los Angeles what Lake Forest is to Chicago and Scarsdale is to New York City.

  Since it was a formal part of greater Los Angeles, without government autonomy of its own, the boundaries of The Briars had been fixed irregularly and erratically, long before, by a combination of local business boosters, realtors, and successive editors of throw-away weekly newspapers. Generally, it was regarded as a subdivision of eight square miles located on either side of curving Sunset Boulevard, between Westwood to the east and the Pacific Palisades to the West.

  The subdivision restrictions were such that almost all lots were oversize, and the houses, most often one-story colonial or contemporary ranch modern, were spacious and set back sixty or more feet from the wide, paved streets. Almost every house was partially obscured, and so made more tantalizing by green mounds of landscaped earth or by a ring of eucalyptus trees, by hedges of hibiscus or a high stone wall.

  A single major shopping area, advertised as The Village Green, much given to quaint shop structures (the shoemaker and barber labored under a modified Moulmein pagoda) and to exotic imported commodities and overpriced domestic products, gave sustenance to the area. Other indications of social conformity were the four elementary schools, the one junior high school, and the single senior high school. Almost defensively, the people of The Briars seemed to have built too many churches: two Catholic, one Latter-day Saints, one Methodist, one Christian Science, one Presbyterian, and one Jewish synagogue. At the fringes of The Village Green stood a branch of the main post office, a dimly lighted and understocked public library (the majority in The Briars bought their own books), an American Legion hall, an Optimist Club, a Junior Chamber of Commerce building, and the brick and stone, modernized Gothic edifice belonging to The Briars’ Women’s Association.

  Except for several streets of new apartment buildings, much addicted to heavy brass outdoor fittings and occupied largely by white-collar workers who commuted to the city, the avenues of The Briars were populated by houses owned for the most part by their possessors, instead of the local drive-in bank. The owners of these houses earned from $20,000 to $100,000 a year. Few were advanced enough in years to be retired. The Briars was a community of the relatively young or middle-aged. Although its politics were actually liberal, its outward aspect was sufficiently staid and conservative to discourage invasion by persons employed in the entertainment industries. Members of the retrenching motion-picture business rarely got farther west than the opulence of Beverly Hills, and members of the expanding television business preferred the activity and excitement of more metropolitan areas.

  Local realtors estimated that there were 14,000 men, women, and children in The Briars. The pages of the slender yearly telephone directory gave the occupations of the home-owners: a clothing-store proprietor, a structural engineer, a psychiatrist, a building contractor, a research analyst, a writer, a dry cleaner, a motel owner, a university president, an advertising executive, an art dealer, a pet-shop proprietor, an attorney-at-law, an accountant, an architect, a banker, a dentist.

  These were the men, and when they departed for their places of vocation, usually in the remote city, The Briars became a community of women.

  From behind the windows of the daily sightseeing bus, the passengers, predominantly female, stared with envy at those of their own sex whom they glimpsed in The Briars. There was always the slowly receding view of a blonde in Capri pants sliding into her low-slung Jaguar in a driveway, or an attractive dark-haired matron in an expensive orlon robe
chatting with the head gardener from the front steps, or the well-formed wives in tight white shorts gracefully and expertly bounding about on a private tennis court, or the redhead, her hair caught in a silk scarf, behind the wheel of a Lincoln Continental, steering into a parking spot in front of the shopping arcade.

  What the passengers in the sightseeing bus did not see they invented and embellished in their own minds. They could imagine clearly how these women of The Briars lived. In the mornings, the female population of The Briars sent their young off in chartered buses to airy schools; dawdled over breakfast served by colored maids while they leafed through the latest Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar; sunbathed in halters and shorts on contour lounges set on flagstoned patios; dressed leisurely in imported sweaters and skirts for luncheons with elegant friends on Wilshire Boulevard. And in the afternoons they browsed through magnificent, semi-exclusive dress shops, or relaxed in beauty salons, or attended tea or garden parties. And in the evenings, when they were not with husbands and friends in Palm Springs or Las Vegas or Sun Valley, they were in the city for an art movie, a play, a night club featuring the currently popular topical comedian. Sometimes they supervised an intimate dinner at home, or, in a silk shantung jump-suit, received guests (offering their warm cheeks to the men and cool handshakes to the wives) and drank immoderately, laughing at flirtatious sex jokes told against the dinning stereophonic phonograph. The morning following, while a maid sent the husband to work and the children to school, they indulged their hangovers with late sleep and awakened at last, vaguely regretting that they had not the time to read up for the approaching evening’s class in art appreciation. This was, in the eyes and minds of those on the sightseeing bus, how the women of The Briars spent their days, and, allowing for variations of individual tastes, this was actually how they did live.

  But, of course, there was more behind the facade of scarves, harlequin sun glasses, loose-fitting sweaters and snug-fitting pants, more behind the foreign sports cars and leather car coats, more behind the clipped hedges and doctored elms and large, gracious houses. Because, for the outsiders who were not part of this envied life, it could not be imagined or understood that here, too, existence was often as difficult as it was easy and that for many of the 14,000 in The Briars this was the worst of times as well as the best of times.

  The secret climate of The Briars, held as private as any Masonic rite, was, for most of its women, one of empty monotony, boredom, confusion. More often than not, the natives-as the parlor joke went-were restless. The malady was American and married female, but the women of The Briars chose to believe that it was exclusively their own. Yet they rarely gave voice to it, directly, openly, because they could not fully reconcile this continued unhappy unrest with material plenty.

  When the women of The Briars had been single and aspiring, they had wanted only to be married and comfortable, to wear emotional security like a favorite garment and limitations on free choice like a veil, and to dwell in a sylvan paradise such as this. Now, at last, they were married (or had been) for two or five or fifteen years, and they were comfortable, and they were regulated, and they were safe in a community admired by all, and yet, somehow, it was not enough. Inarticulate for the most, they wanted more-but exactly what they wanted they could not explain, even to themselves.

  And so they lost themselves in a bewildering maze of meaningless appointments, get-togethers, charities, activities, weekend flights; and to cease thinking of what was not there, they blurred their senses with vodka, sleeping pills, tranquilizing drugs, sexual experiments. And in this way, each dread morning was possible, and life went on unchanged, and seemed a vacuum, timeless except for the

  occasional awareness that a gray hair had dared to appear (obliterated quickly by a bleach), that the breasts sagged ever so slightly (supported hastily by the newest uplift brassiere), that the flesh on the hips was less elastic (pounded speedily firm by machine bands and Swedish hands), that the children were taller and taller (but now, at last, enemy Time triumphed, for there was no combating this fact that life was growing shorter and shorter).

  At five minutes after nine in the morning, the long, gray sightseeing bus, emerging from the most scenic thoroughfare in The Briars, regained its lane on Sunset Boulevard and started down the sloping highway toward destination beach.

  Standing on the pocked, asphalt, circular driveway, before her broad, one-story Georgian house, Kathleen Ballard waved a last time to her four-year-old daughter, Deirdre, in the back seat of the station wagon, which was part of the daily car pool taking her to the progressive nursery school in Westwood.

  After the station wagon had disappeared around the corner, Kathleen lingered a moment in the driveway. She studied the bed of yellow rose bushes nearby, particularly the row of blighted ones, reminding herself that she must consult Mr. Ito about some sort of spray treatment. She had first noticed the condition of the roses a few days before and had quickly forgotten them after they made her think of herself-how the outer bloom hid, from the casual onlooker, the deep inner sickness at the root, and nothing seemed amiss until you looked closely.

  Lifting her gaze from the roses, staring across the expanse of green front lawn, through the thick foliage that protected her from all but herself, Kathleen could still see the last of the familiar gray sightseeing bus as it moved slowly away and down the hill. She did not have her wrist watch-it was Albertine’s day off, and she had slept poorly, and taken a pill at dawn, and then overslept, so that there had been barely enough time to slip into a brunch coat and dress Deirdre for school. But now she knew, by the bus, that it was after nine o’clock and that she must do what she had promised Grace Waterton the night before she would do.

  Reluctantly, she started back into the front outer vestibule, moving between the graceful, fluted columns, past the tall potted cypresses, and entered the cavernous, empty, elegant house, resisting and resenting the hour that lay before her. Once in the kitchen, she turned off the stove, poured herself a steaming cup of coffee, and

  took it unsweetened to the white formica dinette table. Setting the coffee down, she found a package of cigarettes in the cupboard above the telephone. With the cigarettes and manila folder Grace had left her in one hand, and the telephone in the other, she returned to the table.

  After the first sip of warming coffee, she devoted herself briefly to the ritual of the morning’s initial cigarette. Inhaling deeply, then exhaling, she felt momentarily soothed. Even her slender fingers, nicotine-stained where they held the cigarette, trembled less as she continued to smoke. After a while she crushed the half-burned cigarette in the porcelain ash tray bearing the faded legend “Imperial Hotel, Tokyo” that was still on the table where Boynton had always kept it to remind him of past glories. She wondered why she did not replace the ash tray with one that would irritate her less, but she knew that it was because she did not have the nerve.

  The coffee was now merely warm, and she drank it down all at once. Thus fortified, she at last opened the manila folder. There were two sheets of paper inside the folder. On the first, neatly typewritten by Grace, were the names of a dozen members of The Women’s Association and their telephone numbers. Scanning the names, Kathleen recognized everyone as a friend or acquaintance or neighbor. Despite this, she still postponed the assignment of telephoning each.

  When Grace had dropped off the folder the evening before, Kathleen had immediately felt helpless before the older woman’s charging and aggressive heartiness. Grace Waterton was in her late fifties. Her gray hair, set several times weekly by a male hairdresser, resembled a tin wig. She was tiny, churning, and verbose. After her children had married, she had gravitated for two years between a swami in Reseda and a psychiatrist in Beverly Hills, and abandoned both for the presidency of The Women’s Association, which had become her entire life. In some bank, somewhere, there was a vice-president named Mr. Grace Waterton.

  Although Grace had finally intimidated Kathleen into accepting the folder, Kathleen had tried t
o object. She was exhausted, she pleaded, and busy. Besides, she had not seen any of the women for several months, not since the last Association meeting, and the telephone calls would necessarily be long and involved. “Nonsense,” Grace had said in her strident, no-nonsense tone of voice. “This is business, and you treat it as such. Just tell each one you’ve got a dozen more calls to make. Besides, I think it’s good for you. I don’t

  like it, Kathleen, the way you’ve been holing yourself up like a hermit. It’s not healthy. If you won’t get out to see people, at least talk to them.”

  Kathleen had not wanted to tell Grace, or anyone, that it was not what had happened to Boynton that had made her a recluse -or possibly it was, but in a way and for reasons different than they realized. When she had been married, and he was home, as so often he was, she desired only to be out of the house, to be lost in the noisy chaos of companionship, though it was against all her natural instincts. But in the year and four months since she had been alone, escape was not necessary. She had reverted to, and luxuriated in, the lonely independence that she had known, and loved and hated, before marriage.

  Suddenly, she had been aware that Grace was speaking again and that her visitor’s voice had softened slightly. “Believe me, Kathleen, dear, we all know what an ordeal you’ve been through. But no one will help you if you don’t help yourself. You’re still young, beautiful, you’ve got a lovely daughter-a whole life ahead, and you’ve got to live it. If I thought you were really unwell, darling, I’d be the first to understand. Of course, I can get someone else to make the phone calls instead of you. But we need you. I mean, like it or not, you’re still one of our most important and influential members. And you can see why I have to pick twenty of our most respected members to make these calls. I mean, it simply makes the alls carry more weight. Believe me, Kathleen, we need a full turn-oat, and everyone on our side-especially if the churches object to this meeting. I don’t know if they will, but there’s talk.”