Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  • • •

  Although most dwarfs are plagued by public mockery and can face serious restrictions and health problems, the cliché that they are cheery children seems to hold. Recent work suggests that this is most probably a form of compensation to ease social situations rather than a trait biologically linked to their condition. Many LPs feel, however, that this view of them trivializes the difficulty of their lives. Initial emotional development appears to be reasonably positive; on measures of overall happiness, LPs fare rather well in childhood compared to the general population. Parents have a difficult time as their children start to ask why they are so different. Euphemizing the details can be as toxic as playing them up. In Living with Difference, the anthropologist Joan Ablon writes, “Overprotectiveness is a pitfall most parents see themselves falling prey to at one time or another.” Dwarf children often complain of being infantilized. In his guide for parents of dwarfs, Richard Crandall, founder of the California-based Short Stature Foundation, recommends, “Don’t give in to the temptation to use a stroller beyond the normal age of stroller riding. Yes, your child may have to take four steps for every one you take, and this may slow you down at the mall. But it is better to arrive one-half hour early and walk together with your child at his pace than to treat him like a baby in a stroller.” The Restricted Growth Association (RGA), the British equivalent to LPA, summed up results from a 2007 survey by observing that those who were treated in a more normal fashion tended to become more self-confident, and in turn more accomplished as adults.

  In adolescence, LPs start showing higher levels of depression, as well as lower levels of self-esteem, when compared with their average-height siblings. Levels of depression seem to be higher for LPs with average parents than for LPs with LP parents, which may imply that despite best efforts all around, parents who know firsthand the trials of being an LP may be able to respond with greater empathy or sensitivity to their child’s experiences. More profoundly, it reflects the difference between growing up with a vertical identity and growing up with a horizontal one; dwarf children who grow up with adults built like them internalize a more self-affirming conception of normal than those who are surrounded by family members of average height and proportions. As teenagers reach their full height, the contrast between dwarfs and their peers is thrown into relief. At that point, many LPs who had been content to live in a world of average people begin to feel the acute need for contact with other LPs, for whom their appearance is not erotically aberrant. LPA and similar organizations can be a blessing, though they can, equally, be a trial; Ablon points out that attending LPA can traumatize people who have blamed all their problems on their dwarfism, and who must now come to terms with personal flaws.

  • • •

  Dwarfs are stared at more and more as they mature and cease to look simply younger than they actually are. One recent study observed that adults with achondroplasia have “lower self-esteem, less education, lower annual incomes, and are less likely to have a spouse.” The income statistic bears witness to institutional discrimination against LPs; the study found that while three-quarters of the dwarfs’ family members, presumably demographically similar to them in most regards, made more than $50,000 per year, less than a third of the dwarfs made that amount. The great majority of college-age LPA members attend college, but outside LPA, the numbers are probably much weaker. Michael Ain, who has achondroplasia and is now a pediatric orthopedic surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital, recalled his experience as a medical school applicant. “In the one field where you think people would be most understanding, they were the most bigoted. Doctors told me, ‘You can’t be a doctor. Don’t even apply.’ The first guy I interviewed with told me I couldn’t hold the respect of my patients, because of my stature.” The level of prejudice can be truly astonishing. Ruth Ricker, former president of LPA, took a tenant who rents space from her out to dinner, and the waiters kept addressing the tenant, asking, “What would she like to eat?” Ricker said, “I’m the one with the good job; I’m the one with the good education. I own the condo, she pays rent to me, and they’re treating me as if I’m completely incapable.”

  Some dwarfs who are not members of LPA regard their nonmembership as a political stance. John Wolin, an LP sports writer at the Miami Herald, summed up his issues with LPA by saying, “When one is different, when what you are has the ability to determine who you are, there is an urge to resist.” Another LP was quoted in Newsday saying, “Believe it or not, the hardest thing for a dwarf is to meet another dwarf for the first time. When you look into the mirror, you don’t see a dwarf. You see what you want to see. But when you see another LP on the street, then you see the truth.” Members of LPA often accuse such detractors of being self-loathers who have not come to terms with their dwarfism, and, indeed, Wolin describes being guided through an LPA conference by a younger woman who was a longtime member and said, “She was a lifetime of self-acceptance ahead of me.”

  • • •

  The day Beverly Charles was born in 1973, the doctors told her mother, Janet, that her daughter was always going to be small. But Janet, who had little education and no previous experience of dwarfism, did not understand how small. When she relayed the news to her husband—a Vietnam vet permanently in a wheelchair—he replied, “Small or large, we’ll love her just the same.” In the months that followed, Janet brought Beverly to the pediatrician once a week to monitor her growth, but Beverly was a poor eater and her weight stayed relentlessly the same. “The doctor said we didn’t need to worry unless she started losing weight, but that happened at about three months, and I was beside myself,” Janet recalled. It later turned out that Beverly’s nose was completely obstructed; she was unable to breathe and eat at the same time, so suckling was a constant challenge for her.

  The doctors in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where the Charleses live, referred her to specialists in Hershey. One of them recommended treatment at a clinic in Germany, and he said he would try to raise money to send Janet and Beverly there. “But I was afraid,” Janet told me. “I thought they’d see how little my child had grown and take her away from me.” Beverly’s dwarfism is most likely the result of a pituitary shortage, since she lacks the dysmorphism characteristic of the dysplasias, but the doctors in Hershey said there was no more they could do. No one told them that Johns Hopkins, less than two hours away, was a center of excellence in dwarfism, nor that Beverly’s form of dwarfism might well have responded to the timely use of injected growth hormone.

  It soon became evident that Beverly had significant learning disabilities. Her mother accompanied her on the school bus every day so she wouldn’t be alone. Elementary school was lonely; high school was horrible. “They teased me and teased me,” Beverly told me. One boy bullied her relentlessly. “I don’t believe in violence,” Janet said. “But I told Beverly, ‘Next time he bothers you, just punch him in the nose as hard as you can.’” The boy’s parents visited Janet and asked, “Where is your daughter who gave our son a bloody nose?” Janet pointed at Beverly, three foot seven, sitting on the sofa. The teasing stopped.

  After high school, Beverly continued to live at home, working first at a Salvation Army shop, then at a printing press. In 2001, when Beverly was twenty-seven, Janet saw a mention on TV of an organization called Little People of America. She had never heard of LPA or known that there existed any community of little people. The only other little people she and Beverly had ever encountered were an elderly couple who worked in a grocery store in downtown Lancaster. Janet called the head of the local LPA chapter, saying, “I have to talk to you about my daughter. Will you come have lunch with us at Friendly’s?” This was the beginning of what Janet calls Beverly’s “rebirth.” “I wasn’t lonely anymore,” Beverly said. They attended local LPA chapter meetings, always together, and the following year went to their first national convention.

  When I met the Charleses, Beverly was just a few days short of her thirtieth birthday and still lived at home. I was touched by he
r childlike affect: as we talked, Beverly sat curled in her mother’s lap. Janet assured me that outside the workday, they were never apart. “I don’t let her go anywhere alone,” Janet said. “Look how Elizabeth Smart was abducted—I don’t want to take any risks.”

  • • •

  In New England in the late 1950s, dwarfism was considered shameful, and when Leslye Sneider’s mother learned she had given birth to a dwarf, she had a nervous breakdown and spent three years in a psychiatric hospital. “My mother was thirty-eight,” Leslye said. “She has a very fragile makeup to begin with, and she just could not accept it. So she never saw me; never held me. I was born and she plummeted.” Leslye’s father did not do much better. “When the doctors told him that I was going to be a dwarf, and my mother was shipped off to McLean, it was the last straw. So he moved back in with his parents, and I was raised all around the state of Maine, by my maternal grandmother and a couple of my aunts.”

  When Leslye’s mother came home from the hospital, “she did her best with what she had,” Leslye remembered. “But my mother never got to grips with my being a little person. When we would go out shopping, and somebody would make a comment or stare, my mother would say, ‘Oh, God! Why do I have to deal with this?’” Leslye’s father remained distant; her closest relationships were with her babysitters, mostly French Canadians who had migrated to Maine. “They were from really wonderful, loving French Catholic families. I used to go to church with them, even though my parents were Orthodox Jews. I hate to think what my life would have been like without them.”

  At eleven, Leslye had never met another little person. That year, her mother became aware of LPA and took Leslye to a regional conference. When Leslye was sixteen, she attended her first national conference. “We’d receive newsletters all the time from the national organization, and there’d always be pictures of these young adults having this wonderful time. They were always the same ones. Within LPA, there are people on the sidelines, and people who are involved quietly, and then there’s the ‘in’ folks. Somehow, I fell in with that crowd.” Leslye had been miserable in high school. “I think LPA was what high school would have been had I been average-size.” Leslye pursued dating possibilities, but it was difficult to get to know someone well enough in a week for a long-term commitment. “Many of us end up in relationships that we would have maybe not ended up in had we had more time to think about it. I ended up with a wonderful person, but we were light-years apart in terms of interests,” Leslye said.

  For a long time, Leslye wasn’t told what had pushed her mother over the edge and into those long hospitalizations, but at some level she always knew. Her understanding that she had caused her mother to go crazy weighed heavily on her. “As a result of that, I’m very interested in early child development and object relations theory,” she said. “Probably also as a result of that, I have no children. I have a lot of unresolved anger instead.”

  Many of Leslye’s closest friends from LPA were from California, so she applied to UCLA and was accepted. She found a therapist and went on antidepressant medication, which she has taken ever since. “It made me realize that for so long, I’d been operating not quite up to par. All of a sudden, whoa. Is this what normal feels like?”

  Leslye was nearing fifty when we met and had made peace with her life. “I always come back to feeling that I wouldn’t have wanted it different,” she said. “I’ve had some amazing experiences as a result of being a dwarf.” Leslye befriended Dustin Hoffman when he was working on a project that included a dwarf. She became romantically involved for nine years with Paul Steven Miller and got to know many of the people in the first Clinton administration. “I was exposed to another life,” she said. “Paul was really instrumental in my going back to school.” When we met, Leslye was running Albuquerque’s Protection and Advocacy System, an important civil rights position within local government. “I sometimes wonder which has had a bigger effect on my life—my dwarfism or my depression and all the other depression around me,” Leslye said. “The dwarfism was easier to overcome than the sadness.”

  Since she and Paul split up, Leslye has been romantically involved with Bruce Johnson, an artist who is also a dwarf. “I wouldn’t be with Bruce if I weren’t little,” she said. “How can I regret being an LP when it led me here?” Bruce’s family had been the opposite of Leslye’s—open and accepting. When he was born, the doctor’s advice to his parents was “Take him home and treat him like any other baby,” and that is what they did. Despite this, he admitted, “Sometimes when I watch another dwarf, I feel like we’re pretending to be adults. It’s a life’s project coming to grips with, really, how you look.” Bruce is significantly disabled. “If I could do it over, I’d want not to be a dwarf. It’s been too difficult. I’ve had many more health complications and surgeries than Leslye, and I’m worn out. She’s the best thing about being a dwarf for me, but I’d have loved her anyway.”

  • • •

  Many dwarfs have agitated against dwarf-tossing, a “sport” in which a dwarf is put into a harness and a person of average height, often drunk, hurls him as far as possible onto a mattress or other padded surface. So far, laws against dwarf-tossing exist only in France, Florida, Michigan, New York, and the city of Springfield, Illinois. Both the Florida and French bans have survived legal challenges. The New York ban has required occasional enforcement since it was enacted in 1990. In March 2002, police issued citations to participants in a dwarf-tossing competition at a Long Island tavern; a February 2008 “dwarf bowling” meet planned by a Staten Island bar owner was canceled after a local newspaper reported that this variant on dwarf-tossing (in which a dwarf on a skateboard is rolled down an alley to knock over a set of pins) was also illegal. A 2005 SEC investigation into excessive and inappropriate gifts to securities traders found dwarf-tossing among the festivities featured at a lavish, $160,000 stag party financed by Fidelity Investments for one of its star performers.

  That such objectification still takes place today is shocking, but the practice seems particularly demonic given the skeletal problems that dwarfs commonly suffer, which can be exacerbated by impact. Dwarfs in dwarf-tossing competitions are often in difficult circumstances and can make a desirable nightly income from participating; some have protested that they should be allowed to earn their living however they want to and have pointed out that pro football also leads to damage to the body. Others believe that tolerating the practice injures not only those dwarfs who allow themselves to be tossed but also the rest of the dwarf community, creating a public perception of dwarfs as subhuman, and thereby perpetuating a climate of ridicule. Opponents of dwarf-tossing contend that the tossing of some dwarfs implies the tossability of all dwarfs and point out that woman-tossing or even dog-tossing would not be allowed.

  Some within LPA argue that it’s also humiliating for a dwarf to play an elf in the Radio City Christmas Spectacular. For many dwarfs, however, Radio City and similar venues are easy money, and dwarf actors point out that with few exceptions—most notably Peter Dinklage, who starred in The Station Agent and Death at a Funeral and won an Emmy for his role on the HBO series Game of Thrones—they are seldom hired for mainstream roles. One such actor said to me, “There’s an old Spanish proverb: I don’t care if people laugh at me as long as I keep warm.” The LP actor Mark Povinelli said, “When I first get a script, I flip through to see where I’m going to bite someone’s ankle or punch someone in the nethers or fight the tall guy.” In 2009, LPA banned the recruiters for Radio City from the conference. “My daughter did Radio City and she loved it,” one parent of a dwarf said. “She’s a pediatric oncology nurse. At no point in her life did she think she had to be an elf to make a living.” Joe Stramondo, chair of LPA’s advocacy committee and a doctoral candidate in bioethics at Michigan State University, said, “When people with dwarfism are portrayed negatively, they are usually portrayed by people with dwarfism. This complicates the issue.”

  Stereotypes are persistent. On the NBC
series Celebrity Apprentice, running back Herschel Walker was asked to make a viral ad about All detergent. “What about if we use little people and let them wash themselves in All detergent in the bathtub, and you hang them out to dry?” he said. Joan Rivers replied, “We can hang them out on my terrace.” Jimmy Korpai, father of a dwarf, argued that these celebrities were encouraging people to point and laugh at his daughter—a common occurrence for dwarfs, and one they find exhausting. Korpai said, “Imagine if I said what Herschel Walker did about a black person”; he filed a complaint with the FCC.

  When the skeletons of what appeared to be a race of dwarfs were found on the island of Flores in Indonesia, Alexander Chancellor wrote in the Guardian about the shockingly dismissive tone that was used to describe them. “The reports in the media began by describing these ancient dwarfs as belonging to a ‘human’ species, but then proceeded to distance them from us modern humans as comprehensively as they could, referring to them as ‘things’ and ‘creatures,’ despite the fact that they apparently knew how to make stone implements, could light fires without matches, and organised hunting expeditions. These are achievements beyond the capacity of most people you see at the checkout counter.” Today, the Aka, Efé, and Mbuti of central Africa generally grow no taller than four feet ten inches. The word Pygmies, often used to describe them, has been designated an insult, but that may be the least of their problems: African Pygmies are often worked to death as slaves, have been the targets of attempted genocide, and have even been cannibalized by aggressors seeking “magical powers.”

  A 2009 article by Lynn Harris on Salon about eliminating the word midget attracted extraordinary responses from what is in general an educated and refined readership. One wrote, “Deal with it. Grow a thick skin. Oh wait, that’s dwarves with the thick skin, isn’t it? I guess midgets have thin skin. Too bad. Sucks to be you.” Another said, “I wholly support any person or group of people informing me how they prefer to be referred to. However when those people tell me I MUST use only approved words my response is to tell them to kiss my ass.”