Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection

by Deborah Blum

  By this time, though, Harry had been in Madison for more than four decades. The NIH primate center had another director now, named Robert Goy, who had his own plans for the place. Harry admitted to his friends that he was tired. Even the prospect of new monkey experiments suddenly lacked its former appeal. Harry wrote to a long-time friend, Duane Rumbaugh, a Georgia State psychologist, that he would like to compare the abilities of rhesus macaques with gorillas and chimps. “The only reason why we are not doing it is that we are bankrupt, financially, mentally, and emotionally.”

  There were other reasons to feel weary. Harry was noticing an odd shakiness, the occasional unnerving loss of balance and focus. His doctors would warn him that this looked like the start of Parkinson’s disease. They would see what they could do to slow it down with medication.

  Meanwhile, Clara was remembering everything she had disliked about Madison’s weather. “Normal human beings can’t live in this god-awful climate very long,” Harry told a local reporter. “Wisconsin has a highly humid environment and many people should not live in a highly humid environment,” he went on. “For example, it gives me mild to intolerable rheumatism. It gives my wife hopeless asthma.” As the damp air continued to trouble her breathing, Clara pushed harder for a move to a better climate. She still loved the dry, bright air and coppery landscape of the Southwest and preferred the region to any other place she had ever lived. She urged Harry at least to look there. He wrote to some of his former students: John Gluck, now at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque; and two others, Jim King and Dennis Clark, who had settled at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

  All three responded with open invitations. He and Clara decided to take a vacation exploring the Southwest—and its universities. As it turned out, the psychology department in Arizona had come up with an ingenious way of recruiting well-known faculty at almost no cost. It would offer unpaid “research professor” positions to retiring scientists who had achieved great acclaim in their fields. “You know what happens to giants,” Harry joked. “They go to seed.” These well-known researchers could have an office, work on what they liked, bask in the clear Arizona light. They could also add to the prestige of the Arizona university with very little cost to said university. Neil Bartlett, who was then the head of the psychology department, recalls urging Harry to choose his school over New Mexico. “And I said, well come on to Arizona because you have two students here,” Bartlett recalls. “There’s only one in Albuquerque.”

  Meanwhile, to Gluck’s exasperation, his department head hesitated to hire a faculty member more famous than he was. And so Jim King suddenly heard from his old professor: “Harry just called me up one day and said he was coming.” Bartlett had not firmed up the position but, after King called him, he hurried over to the administration offices and settled it. “I told the president that Harry would bring recognition to the university.”

  In 1974, Harry resigned from the University of Wisconsin. He insisted that this was mainly about the medical reasons. The Harlows were “condemned [by their health] to live in Arizona,” he explained to a local newspaper. Truthfully, though, Harry would rather have stayed. He had spent most of his life in Madison—it was home. He might joke about the weather but here was the lab he had worked so hard to build, his good group of graduate students, his closest friends and long-time colleagues. All his best work had been done here, memorable results accomplished against long odds. It hurt him to leave; it was like the physical wrench of walking away from a love affair. “I have an enormous affection for Wisconsin,” he admitted. “You can’t teach in a school for forty-four years and not have some affection. You can’t be married for forty-four years and not have some affection. It’s the same thing.” Leaving Wisconsin was like leaving himself—it was here, after all, that he’d reinvented love and, really, invented Harry Harlow.

  Of course, he started adding to the lore as soon as he moved. Byron Jones, now a professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State, was a graduate student at Arizona then. He still remembers the day Harry arrived. Jones was standing in the department office when the phone rang. The secretary turned to him and said, “There’s some crazy guy on the phone that wants someone to pick him up at the airport.”

  Jones asked her who was calling.

  “Harry Harlow,” she replied.

  Jones grinned. “Tell him we’ll be right out,” he said.

  Harry and Clara bought a condo in a place as unlike Madison as possible. Their new home was part of a Spanish-style development; the homes had white stucco walls and red tile roofs and were tucked into a planned landscape of graceful palm trees and magenta-brilliant bougainvillea. It didn’t take Clara long to begin dressing up their life further. She bought herself a fur coat. She dressed Harry in tweedy sports jackets and elegant suits. She’d collected crystal, more than enough for all occasions, during their trip to Ireland. “They had two china cabinets filled with Waterford,” says Penny King, an Arizona schoolteacher and Jim King’s wife. “And Harry was natty. She kept him a fashion plate.” Clara ruthlessly restricted Harry’s drinking. She insisted that he exercise. Harry routinely rode a city bus part of the way to the university and walked the remaining mile and a half. She’d drive to campus later and work at the library and then pick him up in the evening. “He was in great condition, especially compared to what he’d been like at Wisconsin,” the Kings agree, almost in a chorus.

  Harry reintroduced himself to his sons. Bob, by that time, had changed his name from Potter back to his father’s old family name of Israel. Bob Israel was working as a fundamentalist preacher, near Portland, Oregon, and he was surprised and delighted to find that his father would support him in that calling. “I think this is where your heart is,” he still remembers his father saying. “When I saw him again it felt like we hadn’t missed a beat.” Rick Potter lived closer, in nearby Phoenix, where he worked for the state government. But although he saw his father more often, he didn’t have that sense of picking up an old relationship. The years apart were too long and the memories too few and too scattered. “He could be disarming,” Rick Potter says. “But we never were father and son. Over the years in Arizona, we were two grownups.” They got along fine, he says. But Rick never forgot which parent had been there for him. “My mom was the one who loved me and spent time building that bond.”

  Clara had had many years to think about the collapse of her first marriage with Harry. And she believed that Harry’s love of psychology meant that he couldn’t maintain a relationship with someone outside its charmed circle. She was now convinced that it was the University of Wisconsin’s refusal to let her continue with psychology and the “change of vocation that had led to the divorce.” Clara didn’t plan to make that mistake again. She didn’t want to. She had dreamed of being a psychologist. Now she had a chance to win some of that dream back. As Clara Harlow, she had been given the title of research associate at Arizona and a carrel in the library for her work. She had obtained recommendations not only from Harry but also from Stanford University psychologist Robert Sears, who had become the keeper of the Terman gifted study.

  Sears wrote a warm letter on Clara’s behalf. He had known Clara since she was a graduate student and, he wrote, “in the early years she was one of the brightest and sharpest young women I knew in the psychology area.” Clara told Sears that she hoped eventually to be recognized on her own, to see “if I am approved without being under the shadow of the name of the master.”

  Clara had an idea of her own about childhood play. She wasn’t thinking of it in the way Harry and Peggy had, as an exercise in adult behavior, or as a way of negotiating and building friendships. She was thinking more of the mechanics of motion and what they accomplished. In a sense, her concept follows the moving surrogate mother idea that Bill Mason had explored, that one needs physical motion for healthy development. Both the Harlows admired that work. From Arizona, Harry wrote to Bill Mason, telling him that he was perhaps the smartest “surrogate graduate s
tudent” that he had ever worked with. In the same letter, Harry added that he thought Clara showed that same kind of promise.

  Clara was interested in the times that we just play by ourselves. After all, if no friends are available, we may skip and dance, tumble and swing all on our own—and all to the good. Perhaps “self-motion” play, as she called it, is also part of building that strong body and capable nervous system. At least that was a primary argument in a paper that Clara wrote with Harry as co-author. The paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And, if the idea that dancing alone may sometimes be biologically necessary came from Clara, the wry description of how it works came distinctively from Harry: “Human self-motion play takes place primarily outdoors. When it takes place indoors, parents protest.”

  The article was a beginning. But, even more, Clara wanted to work with Harry on a book, a definitive book. People had been trying to talk Harry into writing definitive books for years. During the early 1960s, Harry had been the psychology consultant for McGraw-Hill’s psychology tests. His old editor at McGraw-Hill, Jim Bowman, had coaxed and teased him to write a major book on his work, rather than just polish the contributions of others. Bowman thought, still thinks, that Harry Harlow was one of the smartest psychologists he ever knew. “He and I talked so many times. He was going to do a book. He was going to do a lot of books. It’s really interesting to me that he never did a big book. Because he could have.”

  Even in retirement, Harry kept receiving the book proposals. Bowman, retired from McGraw-Hill, still urged one more try. At his request, one of the younger editors in McGraw-Hill’s textbook division, Tom Quinn, stopped in Tucson to do some recruiting. “And Harry said, sure, he was interested, but I didn’t think he was really serious,” Quinn said. “He talked about some ideas he had but I had a hunch it wasn’t going to happen. I sent him a letter and I don’t recall ever hearing back.” Another of Harry’s former students, Stephen Bernstein, now at the University of Colorado, also thought he should do a book. The book Bernstein had in mind was actually the kind of book Clara was suggesting, a collection of Harry’s major works—the surrogate studies, the learning sets, sex differences, depression, the whole panorama of love. At one point, Clara suggested an almost lyrical title for that volume, The Lands of Love, but Bernstein had a more pragmatic project in mind.

  When Harry and Bernstein reconnected at a meeting in Switzerland, Bernstein remembered all over again what a “W. C. Fields kind of character” Harry Harlow was—they’d be driving through some quaint village and Harry would roll down the car window and shout greetings to startled pedestrians and farm animals alike. He was also reminded of what a good scientist his former professor was. He was afraid, without the book, that people wouldn’t remember that. There needed to be a record, Bernstein insisted, a place where people could find Harlow’s collected work. Harry agreed to Bernstein’s idea as long as the editing included Clara. Bernstein agreed.

  As the project grew, however, Bernstein sometimes regretted that commitment. He didn’t find Clara nearly as charming as he found Harry. He found her defensive and possessive. “We didn’t get along well,” he says simply. Back at Wisconsin, both Helen LeRoy and Steve Suomi also had struggled to adjust to Clara’s new role in Harry’s life. She was warmer and friendlier than Peggy had been, but, in her own way, equally as tough-minded. Suomi and LeRoy had both worked consistently with Harry, even during his marriage to Peggy, reading his drafts and helping improve them. Peggy had been happy to have their input. Both she and Harry thought that Helen, in particular, was an outstanding editor. But Clara didn’t take their suggestions as helpful. She took them as criticism. Shortly after she began working with Harry, Clara asked him to let her handle their manuscripts herself, without being second-guessed.

  “She thought she could be another Peggy,” says Suomi. “But she wasn’t, not in terms of academic training or of knowledge. Some of us were uncomfortable with her co-presenting with Harry, without the requisite academic credentials. A psychoanalyst might say this was her way of competing with and surpassing Peggy in Harlow’s eyes and with the rest of the world.” LeRoy, too, thought Clara was capitalizing on Harry’s fame, but “I’m not sure that it is fair to say that her later attempts at being a scientist were to compete with Peggy, but rather were Clara’s efforts to prove herself to others.”

  Bernstein acknowledges that the resulting book of Harry’s collected works, The Human Model, wouldn’t have been finished without Harry’s wife as a collaborator. “The book does owe to Clara,” he says. “Harry was declining physically by then. She made it happen.” Perhaps it was a good thing that Harry hadn’t taken on a bigger book project because he was now, in the late 1970s, starting to get sicker. The drinking, the smoking, the short nights and long lab hours, the depression, Peggy’s death, leaving behind his life at Wisconsin, the Parkinson’s disease, it was all catching up with him at once. He suddenly, almost abruptly, slowed to a stop. “He didn’t even do much writing,” says Dennis Clark, his former student then on the Arizona faculty and now a Tucson businessman. “He’d go in the office where they had a drip coffeemaker and he’d pull out the carafe before it was full and let coffee run all over. We often wondered if the drinking had done something to him.” Harry wondered that himself. He had cut back, at Clara’s insistence, but he couldn’t help suspecting that years of drinking had worn him out. “You would think his liver would have totally shriveled,” said Jim King. “There was all this alcohol he consumed, the almost continuous drinking.”

  Harry was so worried about that himself that he went to the doctor to have liver tests done. After the results came in, he told King about them, almost in disbelief: “You know, my liver is totally normal. I can’t believe it,” he said. King still can’t quite believe it himself, that Harry treated his body so badly and held together as long as he did. “I think Harry had good genes—in terms of his liver and in terms of longevity.”

  It was really the Parkinson’s disease that was steamrolling right over everything else. Harry was still taking medication for the disease but he was no longer responding to the drugs very well. He didn’t talk about the disease much, but when he visited his old colleagues they were shocked. He traveled to Tennessee to give a speech to the psychology department, urged by Clara, and he could hardly stand upright without help. His old friend, Verplanck, was shocked by how fast he seemed to be aging. During his notorious talk at the University of Washington, the psychology department head, Earl Hunt, had thought that the old Harry was flickering away, that sitting through the speech was like watching “an unfortunate act of a sick man at the end of a distinguished career. It had nothing to do with the great work he had done.” Harry gave a speech at Stanford and dismayed his old colleagues by blistering his hand while trying to hold a match. “When he was here, his hands were shaking,” Stanford psychologist Eleanor Maccoby says. “He was trying to light a cigarette and he held his finger in the flame and burned it. I don’t think he even noticed. It was very sad.”

  “As it got worse, he barely talked at all,” King says. “The shaking was better but he had the mask-like face of later Parkinson’s and he got quieter and quieter.” He would still come to work, but there was no more talk of studying monkeys or of intelligence tests or of yet someday writing the big book of love. Harry would retreat into his office, writing brief answers to letters, dreaming up new rhymes. “He was lonely,” King says. “He had this office but there wasn’t a great deal he could do. He sat in the office, he read things; he wrote doggerel.”

  We have to think of sour-faced-Dan

  Who, being a Parkinsonian,

  Could never laugh to show his glee,

  Or work upon one’s sympathy

  By looking sad when feeling pain.

  (He often tried but all in vain.)

  There were still flashes of the old Harry. “You know there was a head secretary there and he’d give her the verse to have the secretaries type it and she w
as just outraged by this. Somehow Harry heard about this, and so he would give the doggerel directly to the other secretaries. And you know, it was much more interesting than what they were typing ordinarily and he’d bring them bottles of liquor as a thank you, and I think they enjoyed it.”

  The only reason birds can fly

  Is they have faith and dare to try

  Of course, they’re helped by subtle things

  A fan-shaped tail and pair of wings

  In the summer of 1981, Harry’s memory began to fail. He was confused, and even hallucinated. He was in hospital for ten days in July and August and another six days in September. When he came home he was still bewildered. Once when he stumbled into the home of an elderly neighbor, the frightened woman alerted the complex with her screams. Clara decided to put him into a home. “The last few months have been a nightmare with Harry in a nursing home,” Clara wrote to Bob Sears, director of the Stanford gifted study. In November, she said, the director thought that Harry had suffered a stroke because he went into a coma and never surfaced again.

  I once approached the pearly gate

  And wanted in but was too late

  Harry Harlow died on December 6, 1981, at the age of seventysix. After his death, Clara edited another collection of his works, part of a centennial series on high points in psychology, that was put together by the academic house Praeger. She wove into it Harry’s research from beginning to end and she worked on it with complete determination. She wrote again to Sears and told him that her eyes were failing, they ached and blurred, but she was absolutely going to finish the book for Harry. It was published five years after his death under the title From Learning to Love, and Clara began it this way: “Harry Harlow was not always famous but he was always unique.”