The Secret History of Wonder Woman

by Jill Lepore

  Holloway included Marston’s entry for “Emotions, Analysis of,” in the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; she published it under Marston’s name alone. Its brief bibliography lists five sources, including a journal article by Marston and Byrne’s master’s thesis. But the entry’s entire purpose seems to have been to promote Marston’s theory of emotions, citing his work as demonstrating “a definite neurological basis for love and appetite as the two basic compound emotions.”21

  Marston had plenty of love and plenty of appetite. What he didn’t have was a job. When he wrote to Boring looking for work, Boring suggested that he write to the Harvard Appointments Bureau.22

  “I should like to register my name as desirous of a position teaching psychology next year at a salary of thirty five hundred dollars,” Marston wrote to the bureau. “I am especially interested in personality work, and clinical work in emotions.” He described himself as a “university and consulting psychologist.” One kind of work he had done, and would be happy to continue doing, was running “personality clinics for emotional readjustment of students,” like the clinic he’d run at Tufts, helping students learn to love their “love parts.”23

  “Dr. Marston has been serving as lecturer in our department during the present year and part of last year,” Columbia’s A. T. Poffenberger reported, in a letter of recommendation that he submitted to the Harvard Appointments Bureau. “He has made an excellent impression both in his teaching and in his immediate contact with students. He has directed a number of minor researches, although his work was primarily in our undergraduate department. We all like him as an associate and would seriously consider trying to retain him if a position suitable for him were available. Dr. Marston’s qualities warrant an unusually good position in my opinion.”24 Still, if Marston’s colleagues at Columbia had admired him, they’d have renewed his appointment, if only because the department had too many students and not enough teachers.

  Marston’s only unqualified letter of recommendation came from Leonard Troland, an expert in optics who was well versed in both physics and psychology. Troland had known Marston and Holloway since high school. He was also among the men in Emerson Hall whom Boring had roped into writing for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Troland contributed the entry on the color black).25

  “Dr. Marston is a personal friend of mine,” Troland wrote in his letter of recommendation. “I have known him for about 20 years. He is a Harvard Ph.D. in psychology and took up some of his work under my instruction. I regard him as a man of high ability and initiative, particularly in the field of research and teaching. He has had training and practice in the legal profession, as well as in psychology. He is well known throughout the country for his investigations and writing concerning the physiology of the emotions. Perhaps his most striking work has to do with methods for detecting intentional falsehood. I recommend him very highly.”26

  Boring offered a much more limited endorsement. “Dr. Marston is a very dynamic and effective psychologist, who is an expert in physiological research on the emotions and on certain phases of the problems of personality. He can teach and interest students. He will always be productive. Some people think that he is a little too much of a specialist.” Then he amplified this last point: “I may add that this matter of specialization is perhaps a little extreme, and that whatever he teaches it is likely to be colored by his own views. It is also true that his enthusiasm goes to the extent of a mild eccentricity. He might fit very well in some places, but in the average, normal, general department of psychology he would probably remain separated in his work, and even at times open to the charge of sensationalism.”27 This was candid and fair and, all things considered, generous.

  A more critical report came from Edward Thorndike, a colleague of Marston’s at Columbia. During the war, Thorndike had supported Marston’s work for Yerkes’s Psychology Committee. His opinion of Marston had since soured. Thorndike’s typewritten letter included a remarkable correction: “Dr. W. M. Marston is a competent psychologist lecturer in psychology.” The rest of the letter was not hopeful: “His success in past work is a measure of his future promise. It has been only moderate.”28

  But the most damning letter in Marston’s file came from Marston’s former adviser Herbert Langfeld, who had taught both Marston and Holloway and knew them both well. He had since left Harvard for Princeton. “As the Harvard records will undoubtedly show, Dr. Marston was an excellent student and always received very good grades as an undergraduate,” Langfeld began. “He got his Ph.D. degree without any difficulty.” Then Langfeld listed his reservations: “He has had several positions, which he has not been able to hold. Rumors have come to me from these various places, which I have not been able to substantiate. It therefore makes it very difficult for me to say anything further than that when he took his degree at Harvard he gave every promise of doing excellent work.” On the bottom of this Langfeld typed, “Confidential: for office only.”29 With a letter like that in his file, no one would hire Marston, ever. It was blacklist language. It was the kind of thing said about homosexuals. Marston never again secured a regular academic appointment.

  Holloway worked throughout her pregnancy. “If you don’t quit that job, that child will never be born,” Marston said to her. She left work on a Tuesday and took the train home to Darien, Connecticut. (Holloway never learned how to drive.) She nearly had the baby in the house, but when the contractions started, Marjorie Wilkes Huntley was there; she put Holloway in Marston’s car and raced her to Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. “Zaz got me to New York on time,” Holloway said.30 The baby was born on August 26, 1928. They named him Moulton.

  Olive Byrne with Holloway’s baby, Moulton Marston, in the fall of 1928 (illustration credit 16.1)

  “You are quite a sport to keep on with your job as you did,” Boring wrote to Mrs. Marston, sending congratulations.31 But Mrs. Marston very much intended to keep on with her job. Her husband was out of work. They had made other arrangements for the baby.32 Once, asked on a questionnaire about how soon she had returned to work after a pregnancy, she refused all the answers offered, checked off “Other,” and wrote in, “as soon as physically able.”33

  Holloway went back to work in New York, leaving her newborn in the country with Marston and Byrne.

  “The city air didn’t agree with the baby,” Olive Byrne wrote to J. Noah Slee that November, from Connecticut.

  “Them’s the facts of my seeming flitting about,” she told her uncle.34 More she did not say.

  THE CHARLATAN

  ON JULY 21, 1928, Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal Studios in Hollywood, took out an advertisement in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post:

  Wanted—A Psychologist

  Somewhere in this country there is a practical psychologist—accomplished in the science of the mind—who will fit into the Universal organization. He can be of real help in analyzing certain plot situations and forecasting how the public will react to them. As moving pictures are reaching out more and more for refinements, such a mental showman will have great influence on the screens of the world. I will pay well for such a person.1

  Laemmle, who was sixty-one and barely five feet tall, had opened his first nickelodeon in Chicago in 1906, when he was thirty-nine: he put 120 folding chairs in a converted clothing store on Milwaukee Avenue that he rented from an undertaker. Three years later, he founded the Independent Moving Pictures company, in New York, and began producing films in a makeshift studio on Eleventh Avenue. In 1912, he made the first “feature film,” a five-reeler. After earning millions of dollars making silent films starring Mary Pickford (“Uncle Carl,” as he was called, established the star system), he founded Universal Pictures in 1915 (the year Marston’s film, Jack Kennard, Coward, won the Edison prize), moved his operation to Los Angeles, and built Universal City Studios on four hundred acres. Laemmle wanted a mental showman in 1928 because the era of the silent film was coming to an end and he had no idea what to do. He was tired
and ready to retire. He didn’t much like talkies. And he was worried about the growing threat of censorship, against which a psychologist, he thought, might prove the best defense.2

  Marston and Byrne (together, in the back) conducting experiments at Columbia in 1928 (illustration credit 13.1)

  And so he took out an ad in the Saturday Evening Post. “While a lot of people may have taken the ad for a gag,” Variety reported, hundreds of letters poured in, some from “the greatest minds, psychologically speaking, in the country.”3 When Marston read Laemmle’s ad, he’d been blacklisted from academia and was about to become a father. He needed work.

  Marston’s interest in the movies had lately resurfaced. In January 1928, right after Holloway got pregnant, Marston and Byrne had conducted an experiment at the Embassy Theatre in New York. Marston invited reporters and photographers to watch as he seated an audience of six chorus girls—three blondes and three brunettes—in the front row of the theater. (When Boring said, in his letter of recommendation, that Marston had a penchant for sensationalism, he was alluding to the Embassy Theatre experiment.) Then he hooked the girls up to blood pressure cuffs—he called the device a “Love Meter”—and recorded their level of excitement as they watched the romantic climax of MGM’s 1926 silent film Flesh and the Devil, starring Greta Garbo. He claimed his findings proved that brunettes are more easily aroused than blondes.4

  “The experiment was made by Dr. William Marston, a lecturer on psychology at Columbia University; his laboratory was a Broadway theatre, and his audience was mostly press agents,” a newspaper in Wisconsin reported.5 Marston had founded an advertising agency; the MGM study was a publicity stunt. It worked. The story, picked up by the Associated Press and sometimes accompanied by a publicity photo featuring Marston, Byrne, and beautiful chorus girls hooked up to a tangle of machinery, appeared in papers all over the country. It was even featured in a newsreel, and shown in theaters: “Dr. William Marston tests his latest invention: The Love Meter!”6

  Marston was by no means the only psychologist in America interested in the movies. He wasn’t even alone among psychologists at Columbia interested in the movies. There was Walter Pitkin, for one. Pitkin, the American editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, was Holloway’s boss. He was also a psychologist. In 1905, Pitkin, who held no college degrees, had been hired as a lecturer in psychology at Columbia on the strength of a recommendation from William James. He also worked as an editor for the New York Tribune and the New York Evening Post. He was one of the most influential editors of the first half of the twentieth century. He was appointed professor of journalism at Columbia’s School of Journalism in 1912, its founding year. He taught there until his retirement in 1943. One of his best-known books was How to Write Stories, published in 1923.7 Marston met Pitkin through Holloway. He became one of Pitkin’s closest friends.8 They shared an interest in film, and in the intersection of storytelling and psychology. They went to a great many movies together.

  “He and I used to study the talking pictures from a psychological point of view,” Pitkin later wrote, “and we quickly agreed that Charlie Chaplin & Cohorts were either fools or liars (maybe both) in asserting that the talkie had a weaker appeal than the silent. You didn’t have to be terribly learned in matters of perception and general esthetics to know that, if the integration of sight and sound could be perfected, the esthetic effect would enormously surpass that of sight alone. So Bill and I became noisy rooters for the talkies. We were, I think, the first among academes.”9

  Other psychologists were interested in film, too, following Münsterberg’s pioneering work of the 1910s. An MA student in Byrne’s graduate program at Columbia had conducted a study about how much people remembered after watching a movie.10 In 1929, Will Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, wrote to the president of Columbia, offering money to fund research. (Hays was interested in gathering evidence in support of a censorship code.)11 Marston’s friend Leonard Troland had worked for the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation of California; in 1925, while still teaching at Harvard, he had been named Technicolor’s director of research. Later, he moved to California. (Troland, who killed himself in 1932, has been credited with developing both two-color photography and the technology behind color motion pictures.)12

  Not many psychologists, though, had as much experience as Marston in thinking about films and feelings. Universal Studios called him in for an interview.

  “Carl Laemmle Digs the Doc,” Variety reported on December 26, 1928, announcing that Marston, “Who Went Through Harvard Three Times Without Quitting, Will Tell ’Em How and What at Universal City.” Said Laemmle, “I have at last found the man.”13

  The next day, Marston was interviewed by a reporter for the New York Evening Post in Universal’s offices in New York. “Dr. Marston, who won’t write B.A., PhD, and LLB after his name in another week because Hollywood is touchy about such things, is going to be the psychological authority behind all forthcoming motion pictures from one big concern,” the Post reported. “He has just signed a contract as director of the new public service bureau of that corporation. His job will be to test out the emotional value of stories and treatment, to run the film through the chemical path of scientific scrutiny. That spells revolution for the good old blood and thunder, slush and sentiment school of the cinema.”

  “A motion picture must be true to life,” Marston said. “If a picture portrays a false emotion it trains people seeing it to react abnormally. It is a false emotion which shows man as the leader and dictator in a love affair. Woman should be shown as the leader every time. She controls and directs the love affair. Maybe she uses her supposed submission to a cave man to get more of a grip on him ultimately. But the picture should show cave man appeal operates only as a challenge to that woman to captivate that pretty tough bird!”

  He trotted out his theory of emotions and explained how he’d apply it to Universal films.

  “We expect to show the actual mechanics of the emotion of love, with the interesting aspects of submission and domination and captivation,” he said. “People always accept the truth once it is applied to their own experience. What they want is a successful love affair, and they will take anything that will help them to achieve this.”

  He explained that Hollywood offered him a bigger psychological laboratory than Harvard had.

  “The movies are the only known type of emotional stimulus wherein the experimenter can control the emotions of those who watch,” Marston said. “It can’t be done with any other vehicle at all. I hope to present these emotional problems to the audiences themselves by a series of educational aims showing the mechanics of emotion and also by letting spectators write their own endings to a picture.”

  The reporter concluded: “No regret tinges this optimistic scientist’s desertion of the laboratory and lecture platform for the motion picture studio. He is dedicating himself to a greater work.”14

  Marston had just finished a stint of teaching at NYU, where he’d offered a course during the fall semester, as an adjunct instructor.15 The first week of January, he went to Washington Square to clean out his office, and there, and then at Grand Central Station while waiting for the train back to Darien, he was interviewed by a student writing for the school newspaper—a piece of publicity Marston had no doubt arranged himself. Marston explained that his new job would involve approving every story before shooting. “In this manner,” he said, “a scenario will be made psychologically sound before it is turned over to the moving picture technicians for actual production.” He’d approve every film after production and before distribution, too. “No other organization,” Marston said, “not even the church, is so powerfully equipped to serve the public psychologically as is the motion picture company.”16

  Left to right: Carl Laemmle Jr., Elizabeth Holloway Marston, Moulton (“Pete”) Marston, William Moulton Marston, and Carl Laemmle in 1929, when the Marstons and Olive Byrne (not pictured) arrived in Holly
wood (illustration credit 17.2)

  In January 1929, Marston, Holloway, Byrne, and five-month-old Moulton took a train across the country. (Everyone called the baby Pete.) They left Huntley behind. They stopped in Chicago, where they stayed with Marston’s aunt Claribel, who, according to Holloway, “was so intent on having her friends meet the ‘GRREAT Doctor Marston’ that the baby, my companion, and I were completely neglected.” (By “my companion” Holloway meant Byrne.)17

  In California, they rented a house in the hills overlooking Los Angeles. Marston drove a Model T to Universal City. Holloway returned to her work for Encyclopaedia Britannica; she worked by post. And Byrne took care of baby Pete.18

  Marston, right, on the set of The Charlatan, at Universal Studios, in 1929 (illustration credit 17.3)

  Marston’s title at Universal was director of the Public Service Bureau. The plan was for him to work on a trial basis for a few months, with the possibility of signing a five-year contract. But first, Variety said, “he’s got to prove to the boys out west that a story shouldn’t have a happy ending simply because it is sobby in the preceding five and a half reels.” He was supposed to help with casting, story editing, and setting up camera shots and, in general, to “apply psychology wherever psychology is needed.”19

  Marston’s first idea was to run a contest for moviegoers. He persuaded Laemmle to offer $2,000 in cash prizes for the best answers to the question “Why do alluring women love homely men?” It wasn’t an experiment; it was a gimmick, designed to promote Laemmle’s latest film, The Man Who Laughs, one of the producer’s first attempts to use sound. The film, based on a Victor Hugo novel, tells the story of a blind girl who falls in love with a man whose face has been disfigured; his features are contorted into a hideous, permanent grin. Working in Hollywood, Marston said, would allow him to “read the riddle of the public taste.” Audience reaction to the love story in The Man Who Laughs, he said, “opens up an interesting discussion on an elemental psychological phenomenon”: Why do beautiful women love ugly men? He pointed, by way of example, to Arab sheiks and their harems. The sheiks, he said, are “middle-aged, swarthy, leathery skinned, hawk-nosed, thin-lipped men with bristly dirty beards, but who are the objects of adoration on the part of the captivating women whom they have cruelly treated.”20