The Nazi and the Psychiatrist

by Jack El-Hai

  The native westerner and Bay Area boy came out in the frequent road trips Kelley took during summers and academic sabbaticals with his kids. Suddenly he would declare a four-month vacation and would pile the children and an assortment of camping gear into an old DeSoto that he had modified by removing the jump seat in the back, thus transforming it into something like a four-wheel-drive Jeep. Visiting Arizona and New Mexico, the family would tour Native American land; gather archaeological and craft collectibles; and dig into whatever the local cuisine, culture, and religion set in their path. These were serious pursuits of knowledge that Kelley designed for his children, intended to spark the sort of ravenous curiosity that afflicted him.

  He tried to make the kids eat any exotic foodstuff they encountered, including, on one occasion, abalone. Alicia drew the line there, and none of her father’s attempts to get her to swallow the sea creature succeeded. He tried to make each excursion into a learning opportunity for the children. They were never at rest. When the family returned home, they carried as many artifacts as they could fit into the DeSoto, objects that Kelley would add to his collections of souvenirs that opened windows into science, anthropology, and history. “He was like a spider gathering a lot of different things,” son Doug recalls, and the psychiatrist’s predatory collecting soon filled the house on Highview Road. Kelley told a friend that he coveted a whale fetus to add to his artifacts and that he would “swim across the Bay” to get his hands on one.

  Kelley felt reenergized after these trips. He was like his grandfather, who decades earlier had often hiked to the sites of the moldering Donner cabins near Truckee in search of inner calm. Kelley similarly believed in the benefits of escaping from familiar surroundings, and he felt stronger after immersing himself in another place, new hunting grounds for artifacts, fresh physical and cultural worlds to ponder. And, like his attorney grandfather, Kelley tapped the power of attentive listening: the technique of making a show of concentrating on everything an interviewee, patient, or client says, of drilling his green-eyed gaze into the souls of the people around him, to kindle flattery and crumble secrets.

  The family was often dragged to Truckee and Donner Lake. That was the place he identified as his origins. As throughout his life, he considered his mother’s family, the McGashans, to be his worthy, heroic ancestors. He never sought out his father’s roots. On one trip into the mountains, he cradled a beer can while driving and got drunk. His aggressive driving frightened the children. “He was a great driver, but he took risks,” Doug says. Dukie often sat next to him, grimly quiet, with her knuckles bleaching white. The risks Kelley took as a driver, and the anger that seeped out when he spent time with his family, revealed a painful ember in his soul. Teaching, consulting for the police, writing a torrent of articles on psychiatry and criminology, marriage, and fatherhood all weighed upon him. Convivial but stubborn, he clashed with some of his university colleagues, and academic politics stressed him. He could be prickly and petty, turning minor disagreements into disputes. On one occasion he took umbrage at a $17.50 fee that a hospital billed to give Dukie an X-ray. He wrote to the hospital’s chief administrator, no less, in sneering terms, that the charge seemed “a little high as I interpret the ethics of professional courtesy. However, I suppose you have your own private standards.”

  Kelley’s inner rage, however, involved far more than type-A stress. The household he had grown up in was loud and full of dissatisfied commotion. June Kelley, the brilliant and precocious lawyer who had devoted herself to her father’s reputation and welfare, had grown hard and embittered in her final years. She reared Kelley never to feel satisfied with what he had, always to crave to know, obtain, climb, and deserve more. The roots of June’s mental tumult are unknown, but she lived in darkness, anger, and fear. Danger lurked everywhere, and June taught her son to think fast and find the threats. Kelley’s filial role was to support June emotionally and keep her going.

  From childhood, part of Kelley was fun-loving, quick witted, jovial, and a player of tricks and games—that joy came from his father, Doc, the dentist to whom he never felt very close. Doc was no man of accomplishment, and he practiced from the same office on Irving Street in San Francisco for nearly fifty years. His home, frozen in time with its linen-draped furniture and heavily curtained windows, was upstairs. The other part of Kelley was a furious achiever for whom praise was essential, a man who could not find contentment no matter how high he scrambled. June pulled those strings. “He didn’t know how to let little Douglas Kelley Sr. come out and play with big Douglas Kelley Sr.,” son Doug observes. Learning and acquiring information fueled him, but never to a conclusion that satisfied him. From criminology he really needed an explanation for his own emotional blow-ups and craving for recognition. But his research and teaching left him at a loss. He careened wildly in his work and vented frustration. “He was a cross between a sponge and a rampaging bull,” Doug says. “He was a Renaissance man on speed.”

  The discovery that had dawned on him at Nuremberg—that the behavior of some of the worst criminals of modern times could be attributed to no psychiatric type or any specific mental illness—continued to rattle him and animate his ferocious output of research and work. And fueled by alcohol, he lashed out unpredictably against his family. The children feared him.

  Dukie tried her best to love and support her volcanic husband. She was strong, and Kelley knew he had a good partner in her. They shared an actual family melody, a high-low-low musical phrase that Kelley would pucker and whistle when he was looking for her in or out of the house. When Dukie responded, it signified a connection that went beyond words. Dukie knew her husband loved her, but she quietly regretted his inability to provide attention that felt soft and gently affectionate, too. Most of the time she could handle his moods and keep him from collapsing beneath his burdens, although she resented Kelley’s bond with his mother, who was still very much alive. Dukie complained that he was closer to his mother than to her. Many times, though, the Kelleys’ arguments escalated without logic or apparent reason. They could argue about anything, the meaning of a clue on What’s My Line? or the reason for the newspaper boy’s misplacing their paper. Kelley’s voice grew more stentorian during their altercations. Dukie’s voice was shrill, by no means weak, but his vocal blasts overpowered anything she said.

  Anything could happen between them. A dinnertime dispute resulted in a smashed glass, and Dukie, who didn’t realize that she was hurt, served Doug a plate smeared with her blood. When the boy pointed it out, she carefully wiped off the blood with a towel and calmly handed the plate back to him. The children watched transfixed one day when Kelley and Dukie shouted at one another in the sun-drenched corridor on the second floor that ended at the psychiatrist’s office. They faced each other outside the magic closet. The kids lived in a near-constant state of apprehension, but they did not expect to see Kelley level a gun at her. His finger tightened on the trigger and a shot reverberated around the house. He had lowered the gun at the last split-second before he fired, and the bullet left a neat hole in the wood-paneled floor at Dukie’s feet. She later covered the spot with a rug. It was all just a tremendous piece of showmanship, wasn’t it? But the children’s minds raced: “If he had shot her, would he have shot us?” Doug remembers thinking. “That was the secret our family kept: Periodically, the Old Man went crazy.” He often would go upstairs “to look at the bullet hole in the hallway floor.”

  Dukie believed she had her own cause for anger against her husband. In 1950, soon after the Kelleys’ move to Berkeley, Dukie’s father witnessed one of the psychiatrist’s rages, an explosion in which the potential for violence was obvious. A quiet and placid man, Mr. Hill was outraged by the treatment he saw his daughter receiving. He remained upset for a long time, soon suffered a stroke, and died. Dukie blamed Kelley not only for her father’s death, but for destroying her ideal of family life, a picture of love, warmth, and growing devotion derived in part from the sunny novels of Clarence Day. She
wanted this sort of emotional environment for her own family with Kelley, but his outbursts and pent-up fury made that impossible. When her own anger boiled over and she sank too low, she would pack up some clothing, grab her purse and the youngest children, and spend a day or two with relatives in the Bay Area. “Once I told Dad I really missed them,” Doug remembers. “He said, ‘Me, too—let’s go and get them.’ We got them and drove back home.”

  Perhaps inevitably, Kelley—the collector, analyst, pursuer of insight into the dark corners of the human mind, and one-time magician—made it his goal to rear an exceptional eldest son. Young Doug would be a guinea pig for aggressive techniques to spur mental development from the moment of his discharge from the hospital maternity ward. The son replaced Göring, Hess, and Rosenberg as the father’s experimental subject. At home the boy received a barrage of tutoring, information, and insistent exercises in brain-building. To this day, he still feels the pain and pressure of Kelley’s observation exercise, which would be set up as a contest for his son. Sitting in the living room, he would ask Doug to inspect their surroundings, taking note of as many details as he could. After telling the boy to leave the room, Kelley would make a slight change in the room’s arrangement—even as slight as nudging a pencil across the coffee table. “What’s different?” Kelley demanded when his son came back in. The exercise inspired dread and panic in Doug, as well as excitement and satisfaction when he identified the difference. It was a strange combination of feelings.

  “I practiced IQ tests all the time,” Doug says. Kelley reported Doug’s IQ scores—usually in the mid-150s—to school officials and to his old acquaintance Louis Terman, who still directed his influential study of gifted children at Stanford. In 1952, when Doug was four years old, the Saturday Evening Post featured the family in an article about high-IQ people and Terman’s study. The accompanying photo showed Dukie leaning over Doug, who clutched a baby doll as he sat on a sofa and looked back expectantly. Sister Alicia sat at his side. Kelley hovered above them all, the only standing figure and the brainiest looking of the bunch. Wearing a silk tie that glistened in the light, Kelley’s eyes bored into the top of Doug’s head.

  Kelley put his son through memory training, and Doug regularly visited the Stanford and UC–Berkeley campuses to take psychological and intelligence tests from the best in the business: Bruno Klopfer, Alfred Korzybski, and S. I. Hayakawa. If he suddenly decided Doug needed to learn about astronomy, Kelley would bring in an astronomer who ran the nearest planetarium to give the boy home lessons. He skipped Doug over three and a half years of school. Despite his own overbearing authority, which brooked no challenges, Kelley taught his son to question the authority of others. Every day young Doug was subjected to some aspect of his father’s regimen: “When I woke up, Dad would hand me a protein shake, stand next to the heater, and hold out the paper with words for me to memorize for the day.” Kelley performed his fatherly tasks with sternness, anger, and absolute inflexibility. He aimed to create a high-level thinking boy, the sharpest observer and intellectualizer one could possibly make from a child. As a guide and expert on rational thinking, Kelley exuded the confidence that he knew everything. His ultimate end was to teach Doug how to arrive at rational conclusions “and then distance yourself and see how others are viewing you,” Doug recalls.

  On one level, the reactions of others were important to Kelley, because only from outsiders could praise—and thus a smidgen of something approaching gratification—come. But he had bigger principles in mind when he inculcated in Doug the benefits of closely observing other people. Scrutinizing the behavior of others, paying close attention to what they say and how they move, leads to predicting their behavior, Kelley believed. The psychiatrist told his son that forecasting people’s behaviors after carefully examining them can result in something called tele-empathy, the ability to feel what others are feeling and thinking. Kelley himself was a master of this skill, able to attract everyone’s attention at a party, speak persuasively, project sheer competence, and read the crowd at a magic performance. If nothing else, Kelley’s domineering mentorship passed on to his son that ability to interpret the feelings of others. He absorbed how to gauge the atmosphere of a place, the mood of its inhabitants, and ways to circumvent people who stood between him and his goals.

  “I can get a good sense of how a room feels. . . . The value of that is staggering, but the weight and burden of it is terrible,” Doug says. He used the talent Kelley brought out in him to sniff the air of his own home to forecast whether this would be the day of one of his father’s explosions or not. But a child has enough to worry about in his own thoughts and feelings without trying to understand a world of adult complexes and impulses. As a result, as Doug neared adolescence, he began rejecting the basic premises of his father’s teaching. “I didn’t want to achieve, lead, or take control,” he says. He refused to grow up to become the person Kelley imagined he would be, and he continued “to love a part of myself,” he says. Doug, who resented his father’s refusal to accept any opposing points of view, began drinking and smoking pot when he was eleven years old. Secretly he retrained himself not to focus on figuring out what was going on around him. Slowly Doug learned to value something his father never understood, the individuality of others. Kelley’s doomed attempt to create a brilliant, perfect son—a true McGlashan heir—was the one continuous project to occupy him from soon after he returned from Germany to the end of his life. It was as if, having looked into the dark Nazi minds and found nothing there to fundamentally separate them from himself or anyone else, Kelley was determined to try to create in his son a better, stronger, more ideal creature, someone who was not vulnerable to whatever weaknesses in the human condition had permitted the staggering wartime atrocities. Perhaps, too, Kelley invested so much hope in his son’s future because he had begun to realize his own failures. He was clearly a man in torment; perhaps Doug would be spared if his father could prepare him for and fortify him against a world of criminality, ignorance, pettiness, and—evidently—evil.

  “The Old Man always gave us presents for our birthdays. He would take us wherever we wanted, and he was often playful,” Doug says. But Kelley’s own frustrations left him with few tools for good fatherhood. “He never understood that we were different from him and not just his children.” Doug, at the age of seven, found himself coolly planning ways to escape his father. “If I get on the refrigerator with a hatchet, will I be fortunate enough to cleave him in the head before he knows it is coming?” he remembers thinking. But he was not a violent child, and instead he “learned to shut up and hunger and survive, but I needed to be let go and be free.”

  Having Douglas Kelley as a father proved both a boon and a curse. The boy learned the joy of knowledge and the adventure of curiosity. He acquired the gift of reading people and spent pleasure-filled hours cultivating his own mind. At the same time, he faced the full force of a terribly conflicted guide, a top psychiatric diagnostician in distress who refused to go see a psychiatrist. As a father, Kelley was capable of love but had little idea how to open himself to his children. When he drew close to them, the unresolved rage he carried chilled them. He careened through their lives like a runaway train.

  This upbringing weighed on Doug as he pondered his fate in his basement bedroom. “I had rages and would go nuts and destroy my room, and then I would put it back together. I slept lightly because I didn’t know if the Old Man would get drunk and come down and beat me.” Doug felt confident that his father’s violence would not get out of control, but he feared it nonetheless: “I knew it was sort of dangerous.” Kelley could lose his temper for any reason, or for no reason at all. But sometimes the psychiatrist came down simply to kiss the boy on the forehead. Doug never knew which version of his father was approaching each time he heard the heavy footsteps on the stairs.

  Doug engaged in angry imaginary dialogues with his father. “In the end [I would mentally say to the Old Man], you can think you know everything, but you ca
n’t get my essence. You cannot break me or get here,” he declares, pointing to his heart. “That nugget you can’t get—you’ll have to kill me.” Sometimes Doug stepped out of an upper window and sat on the roof to consider the enigma of his father. “It was hard to understand how someone with all that facility, who could give help to others, couldn’t help himself. It’s still somewhat baffling,” he admits. Kelley’s acquaintances and colleagues had little idea of the degree to which he was psychologically disturbed.

  A closet that opened to the hallway adjoined the Kelleys’ bedroom, and when thunderbolts flew between their parents, the children would close themselves in it and listen to the sharp voices as they penetrated the wall. “I’d go in there and wrap myself in her fur coat and listen,” Doug says. “I thought they were crazy. Dad was angry, a cold intellectual anger, but hers was softer anger. He was so dominant. I remember a massive fight about something Bennett Cerf had said on TV. I knew Mom was right.” But it was his father who prevailed. “I had the fear that one of them would die. Mother’s fear was that he would end up destroying the family or himself. Such a big man couldn’t say, ‘I’ve got something wrong with me.’”

  Seeking help from a fellow psychiatrist, in Kelley’s mind, would have tainted his authority. Who could he possibly see who wouldn’t know that he was a world-renowned authority on the Rorschach, a police consultant who screened out unfit cops, an expert on violence and criminal behavior? For God’s sake, he must have lamented at his lowest and most angry moments, who could understand a guy who treated Nazis, the most notorious criminals of the century, and couldn’t fathom his own fits of mayhem? Who would keep it quiet? He had built a magnificent public persona based on his competence, authority, rationality, and control—although at home he shed that garb to drink in his shorts and T-shirt and constantly threatened eruption. Dukie later acknowledged to her son that his father was “too prestigious” to be caught visiting a psychiatrist.