Hugh Hefner is probably having sex right now. Is it a leap to say so? No, because 1) Hef likes a good leap and 2) he really, really likes sex.
In considering Hefner’s life, it’s best to begin with a snapshot of the present: A short, gray 73-year-old man being pawed in a Beverly Hills mansion by four nude or semi-nude models. The mansion has monkeys and peacocks in its lavish gardens. Two of the four models are twins. The man is smiling. A lot. In the background, radiating outward: a country’s worth of smaller homes, with fewer pawing models, less wildlife and the rest of us asking: How does he do it?
With Viagra, of course, and millions of dollars. Any man in possession of these things could be in the same snapshot. Indeed, when a chuckling Geraldo Rivera asked the Playboy editor, “Hef, how do you do it?” it reeked of manufactured naiveti. But Geraldo’s gosh golly-ism about wealth and power belies a deeper mystery: What is it about Hugh Hefner that ushered him through standard American tropes — mediocrity, lust, ostentation — to the degree of veneration he’s now wallowing in?
Part of it is his sense of romance — Hefner talks passionately about “the male-female connection.” And yet it’s a funny idea of romance. From the outset, man’s mark was often discernable in Playboy’s photos — a football pennant on the wall, a cigar burning in an ashtray near the frame — but it was the female side of the male-female connection that got all the play. The naked female side, to be precise.
Still, the adolescent reverence for women’s bodies bespoke a version of romance — albeit puerile, underfed — that other skin magazines lacked. Whatever Hefner believed respect for the fairer sex actually entailed, it was a respect he held at the core of his company’s enterprises. When the ’70s exploded with Playboy imitators — Penthouse, Hustler — Hefner responded with a newfound restraint. The “pubic wars” raged briefly (raising the bar on just how much skin could be found at the local newsstand), but Playboy dangled a seldom-seen white flag; there are limits, Hef decided, to what a classy rag like Playboy will show.
His chivalrous gesture marked a turning point for the magazine, or perhaps for the culture that now seemed to be eclipsing it. Two decades later, Hefner’s creation reads not as radical, but as a monument to what radical once was.
Radical and huge: In 1971, when Playboy Enterprises went public, the world was buying seven million copies of the magazine a month. Twenty-three Playboy clubs took the Playboy philosophy and served it with drinks. A shrewd marketing strategy had transformed the Bunny icon from a dopey adolescent idea (rabbits, see, they like sex — lots of it) to an immediately recognizable symbol of sophistication and style. Hefner, feeling philosophically obligated to embody the full playboy lifestyle, hosted a regular TV show that dripped v-neck sweater swank while spotlighting the best new acts.
Before the millions, before the publishing empire, before the first Playboy — before what Tom Wolfe called “one-handed magazines” were ever held in one hand at all — an 8-year-old Hugh Marston Hefner opened his mansion. It wasn’t, technically, a mansion back then — more of a small Chicago home, sans Bunnies. But it was the neighborhood hotspot, and if there was fun to be had, it was had at Hefner’s. His career would later make bank on the girl next door’s curves, but his life has always been about hosting.
Hefner’s seamless host persona allowed him to usher 20th-century America through some of its most dramatic changes. Boilerplate histories brusquely credit him with the sexual revolution and move on. In truth, the various and complex liberations that fall under this rubric (credit for which Hefner always splits with sex-science pioneer Alfred Kinsey) represent just a fraction of his influence. Hefner’s impact on notions of domesticity and single life, on male and female identity, on fashion, on publishing, on corporate branding wisdom — even on our understanding of the postal system — his impact on all of these are abundantly evident.
But first, a lurid magazine about sex. In 1953, creating Playboy was scarcely a stretch for Hefner: In high school he’d written an essay criticizing the lack of frank discussion about sex in America, and in his college newspaper he’d praised the recently released and controversial “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,” aka the Kinsey Report. The real stretch was for the rest of the country. Never before had nude pictures been successfully sent through the mail as a mainstream commercial venture. Indeed, the Marilyn Monroe photos, which appeared in Playboy’s first issue, had existed long before Hefner got his hands on them, but nobody had dared challenge the powerful U.S. Post Office and its anti-obscenity regulations. Hefner went ahead with his plans, visiting newsstands throughout Chicago on the day the magazine went on sale, to monitor progress. Fifty thousand issues sold nationwide — more than he ever thought possible.
In the ’90s, Hef borders on kitsch; in the ’50s, he was deeply radical. Looking back from an age of Jerry Springer and Hairy Butts magazine, it’s hard to imagine a historical moment when two exposed breasts could ignite a revolution. America has quietly rewritten an entire era of dangerously repressive Puritanism into the occasional parody of Donna Reed suburbia and a few movies about McCarthyism.
In retrospect, the ’50s seem to have been begging for an outlet like Playboy — either to focus its repressive prescripts, or to have a little fun. And Hefner answered the call: He worked all hours, dutifully attending photo shoots with beautiful naked women and gradually mining the unexplored realm of swinging life.
If there’s anything unfortunate about Playboy’s naked ladies — besides (depending on your point of view) their objectification or their idealization — it’s the way they obscure the authentically revolutionary impact of the publication: Playboy brought men indoors. It made it OK for boys to stay inside and play. Where other men’s magazines — Argosy, Field & Stream, True — affirmed their readers’ places in duck blinds and trout streams, Hef’s took men inside to mix drinks, sit by the fire and play backgammon or neck with a girlfriend. In what would later become an ironic collusion with feminists such as Betty Friedan, Playboy critiqued the staid institutions of marriage, domesticity and suburban family life.
Suddenly bachelorhood was a choice, one decorated with intelligent drinks, hi-fis and an urbane apartment that put white picket fences to shame. Sophistication had become a viable option for men: The Playboy universe encouraged appreciation of “the finer things” — literature, a good pipe, a cashmere pullover, a beautiful lady. America was seeing the advent of the urban single male who, lest his subversive departure from domestic norms suggest homosexuality, was now enjoying new photos of nude women every month.
The popular new male pastime came with an equally startling new wardrobe. If, as his own legend has it, Hefner liberated the human body, he did so in part by fitting it with nicer duds. Men once confined to drab grays and browns could now luxuriate in bold new styles. Appreciation for fashion, Hefner decreed, need not reside strictly in the female. The men’s style magazines that now clutter newsstands have Playboy to thank for making elegant threads suitably masculine. Sensual fabrics and the body-accentuating designs that are now commonplace in even the most middlebrow of men’s stores were virtually unheard of when Playboy first hit newsstands.
Not surprisingly, Playboy attracted more and more attention and controversy — and Hefner happily stepped into the lightning-rod position. For the camp that considered him a pervert, it was impossible not to speculate about the roots of his perversion. Much was said — and continues to be said — about his strict upbringing. Hefner himself, well-versed in the art of biography-ready self-deconstruction, has remarked, “I was a very idealistic, very romantic kid in a very typically Midwestern Methodist repressed home. There was no show of affection of any kind, and I escaped to dreams and fantasies produced, by and large, by the music and the movies of the ’30s.”
Indeed, Hefner seems to have belonged to that segment of the population raised down the street at the movie theater. But this does not account for Playboy magazine. Perhaps more revealing is a story that got less airtime: Despite the family’s rigid values, Grace Hefner once gave her young son an educational and rather forthright book about sex. “Gave” is misleading: she left it within reach and never said a word about it. In the 1930s, even this level of openness about sex in a middle-class home was rare. It’s hard not to find something telling in the gesture. At once progressive and strangely conservative, it suggests the relationship Hefner would later develop with sex itself: He became a radical reformer who never quite lost his old-fashioned romantic values.
The romantic values were sometimes hard-won. At 16, Hefner suffered a crushing, if somewhat propitious, indignity. Already a misfit in his staid Chicago high school, the artistic, ambitious and bright student now found himself rejected by the girl he adored. He considered his ennui one last time and reinvented himself head to toe: Hef, he would be called from that day on, and as Hef, he would never again have to know failure.
The reborn Hefner spent his last two years of high school in a whirl of charisma, charm and popularity. During the day, he devoted himself to friends and at night, to his passion for cartooning. If it happened to Hef, it happened to “Hef,” the cartoon character whose every adventure he chronicled with zeal, if not skill, in a strip, which was occasionally published in the school paper, other times simply handed around to friends. By the end of high school, 1944, he’d fallen in love again — this time reciprocated — and rushed off to the Army to serve as an infantry clerk.
Army life was miserable for Hefner, as he told his love Millie Williams in frequent letters. When he was discharged two years later — he’d been stationed at a typewriter stateside for the duration of his service — he returned to Williams with only the vaguest plans of cartooning for a living.
Hefner enrolled at the University of Illinois. As editor of the school’s humor magazine, he started a feature called Coed of the Month. In 1949, he graduated, — he’d doubled up on classes and finished in two and a half years — took a job at Esquire magazine and married Millie (mother of Christie, Playboy’s CEO).
Hef soon found that the American dream, at least as it was being dreamt in the early ’50s, didn’t work for him. The routine, the job — and later the wife — all felt constraining for Hefner. He left Esquire and went to work designing his magazine. Stag, as it was to be called, grew out of what Hef called a mature appreciation of the human body. The human body in question belonged to a young Marilyn Monroe — Hef had gotten hold of never-published photos of the budding star with “nothing on but the radio.” Changing the publication’s name to Playboy, he borrowed money from his mother (she always wanted him to become a missionary) and took loans out on his furniture. He sat down at the kitchen table and did the first layout of the magazine himself.
“Playboy isn’t like the downscale, male-bonding, beer-swilling phenomena that is being promoted now by some men’s magazines,” Hefner explained recently. “My whole notion was the romantic connection between male and female.”
Playboy quickly became far more than porn, even if the depth was lost on some fans. With his deep new pockets, Hefner was soon bringing in America’s best writers and pundits, in case anyone was reading it for the articles. Lenny Bruce, John Updike, Jack Kerouac and others were nurtured. And Alex Haley got his groundbreaking “Autobiography of Malcolm X” off the ground through his interview with the leader in Playboy.
Hefner worked to encourage his cultural revolution on other fronts as well. The Playboy Foundation, since its inception in 1965, has given away over $11 million in the name of social change. A devoted civil rights activist, Hefner funded assorted social action projects long before social action was hip.
Of course, the Foundation was scarcely enough to dissuade censure. As a testament to Playboy’s unique cultural situation, the magazine received, and receives, criticism from all sides. The conservative group Concerned Women for America claims Playboy “belittled marriage” and “made commitment a dirty word.” On the left, critics argue a similar point. And Naomi Wolf recently wrote, “A lot of men stay unmarried decade after decade because they bought the Hugh Hefner line that polygamist bachelorhood is ideal, and they lead largely empty lives.”
But Playboy also sought to help feminism, at least in terms of articulating its various divisions. As the women’s movement grew too massive and complex for any kind of heterodoxy, Hefner occasionally found himself marking assorted forks in the road. After Gloria Steinem went undercover as a Playboy Bunny in 1963 and published a scathing critique of the magazine’s degradation of women, thousands of women — many of whom made a living from various porn-related careers — responded with equal venom. That which Steinem called degrading, they said, was the very thing that granted them a level of economic and sexual freedom that few women had previously experienced.
Hef certainly doesn’t hold a monopoly on these watershed cultural moments. But a figure need not be responsible for brilliant history in order to play a brilliant role in it. Even if Hefner were nothing more than a lucky dope who accidentally stumbled upon cultural fault lines throughout his life, he is still genius enough to stumble upon them over and over.
Hef is happy. It’s an overwhelming happiness, one so insistent that the darker periods of his life — his divorce from Millie, his second divorce in 1989 from Kimberly Conrad — get strangely clouded by light. The familiar elements of his biography come in shades of pink, so to speak, and his biographers generally seem charmed by all the mirth. This is where Hefner gets interesting. Instrumental to his success is not just an impressive publishing instinct, but an unparalleled knack for spinning myth.
It’s not coincidence that Playboy is a household name — more so than other publications with comparable sales. The magazine has woven itself into American mythology, elbowed its way onto the landscapes of growing up, of being a man. The archetypal coming-of-age narrative is nothing without that first flustered glimpse of a centerfold in the 7-11 parking lot. An uncanny ability to tap into the country’s Zeitgeist has made Playboy as American as an apple pie sitting on a Thanksgiving table in a Norman Rockwell painting.
Even the Playboy Foundation feeds a certain brilliant fiction. As a part of its impressive good-deeds program, the foundation sets aside grant money each year for a handful of citizens whom it deems protectors of the First Amendment. As a result, patriotic has now been added to the list of attributes conflated with Playboy. The point is not that Hefner’s mythologies are untrue — often they reflect entirely accurate numbers, opinions and phenomena. Their cultural play takes shape in the way they are disseminated, true or not.
The myth doesn’t stop with the company. Hef himself has gotten generations to acknowledge his charm, to revere his lifestyle and even to call him by his high school nickname. He’s successfully transfigured himself from a man into a cultural icon. His silk pajamas, his Diet Pepsi at breakfast, his insistence on working from bed — these constitute a folklore few can generate. A species of rabbit even hops around in the man’s honor: Sylviligus palustris hefneri.
Bottom line, the guy’s likable. It’s a likability inextricably linked to his controversy, the kind that can only accompany 47 years of monthly nude centerfolds; we like him in spite of himself. Something in his air, or perhaps in the utter ridiculousness of a lifelong obsession with sex, begs forgiveness. His friendly smile, his candor, his unselfconscious cheer — these put him in a separate league from the strident, post-lapsarian Larry Flynt types. Whatever moral criticisms we have, Hef convinces us to also enjoy his persona. Like any great creator of characters, he imbued his with both flaw and humanity.
It’s an act, of course. Hefner has manufactured himself, his life, his mystique and our reverence. Long ago he created a swinging bachelor that would stir the world’s imagination, then did the same with a married one. Now he’s put his finger on that place in America’s heart for the unapologetic old horn-dog. He has tapped into the country’s need to at once adore and chuckle at a rejuvenated firebrand, to relive and rejigger a relationship it began nearly half a century ago.
Hef manufactured all this, and he’d be the first to admit it. With a Dickensian grasp of archetypes, he made a career of cooking up characters the world would love, or love to hate. From that first reinvention of himself in high school, the birth of “Hef,” he’s always extolled the benefits of a good makeover. And it’s this kind of honesty that tends to anticipate and occasionally ward off criticism. During a recent radio interview, when “Fresh Air’s” Terry Gross read him something of a riot act, it rang superfluous: Hefner has always been the first to admit his limitations, his flaws, his naked-lady obsessions.
And now Hefner’s back. Having recently ended his famous decade of domesticity (Kimberly Conrad still lives next door with their two children) Hef has again invented himself as America’s favorite bachelor. Hollywood again comes to parties at his mansion, and the floaty toys that had temporarily clogged the steamy grotto out back have made way for bathing beauties. An unabashed proponent of Viagra, Hef is doing his best Peter Pan act these days. And he’s doing it with Mandy, Brandy, Sandy and Jessica.
If America’s fascination with Hefner has indeed been rekindled as he claims, this rekindling is not so concerned with accuracy. In the great Playboy tradition, the icon has been airbrushed. The Hef we get is the swinger, the bachelor, the tycoon, the eccentric. He’s the guy who always gets the girl, and she’s the girl next door who just happens to have a killer bod and a deep commitment to sexual adventure. With Hef we get the apparel of the man — the lounging, the martinis, the sex — but not the man himself, and in this case, the man is actually interesting.
A new release from Grove Press sends the point home. Written by longtime Playboy columnist James Petersen and edited by Hefner, “The Century of Sex: Playboy’s History of the Sexual Revolution, 1900-1999″ chronicles America’s relationship with sex over the last 100 years. More than that, it testifies to what is perhaps Hefner’s greatest gift to his country: an impressive understanding of how sex has shaped 20th century America, and a commitment to share it. “Sex is the primary motivating factor in the course of human history,” Hef writes in the book’s foreword, “and in the twentieth century it has emerged from the taboos and controversy that have surrounded it throughout the ages to claim its rightful place in society.”
The rightful part will always be up for debate. Hef is just happy there’s a debate — and that he’s got four young naked women beside him to witness it.
OAKLAND — As evicted Occupy groups around the country suffer further dispossession (L.A. and Philadelphia camps were raided by police last night) the press release from Occupy Oakland read like a signal flare. At noon Tuesday, it announced, activists would retake Frank Ogawa Plaza and “create a model for a new wave of ‘Occupation’ protest throughout the United States.”
What actually happened was a little more ambiguous, to say nothing of strange. Also, it revolved around a teepee.
To invest in the high-volume, low-boil soap opera that seized a tiny corner of downtown Oakland today, one must trace Occupy’s strange evolution in recent weeks, and then one must throw all that out because Oakland’s its own weird thing. Militant, politically shrewd, economically screwed, energized, immature, determined, obsessive, scarred or none of the above, the Bay Area city has a proud history of inspiring passionate ambivalence. Occupy Oakland, for its part, is either a can of Jolt for a flagging international movement, or an embarrassment to a steadier one. Depends whom you ask is often as true about Oakland as it is about Occupy.
Frank Ogawa Plaza, aka Oscar Grant Plaza, has mostly been a calm acre of mud and patchy grass lately. The craziness that made the news has given way, via forcible eviction, to quiet clusters of discussion and coordination. On the eve of the planned re-occupation, I attended a chilly 6 p.m. general assembly meeting, plus another meeting about the Dec. 12 port blockade being planned. If Tuesday was to be the big day, I wanted to look in on a little one first.
The Occupy Oakland activists are a wily crew, and via supernatural anarchist powers they intuited my approach. Away went the bongos and weed and guns and bricks and frivolous liberal arts degrees. Out came a different terror, the agony of patient, sensible, rational, mind-numbing democracy.
“Point of process,” an older gentleman in a baseball hat was saying to a semicircle of 60 or so people, and I can no more transcribe what followed than I could the terms and conditions of my iTunes agreement. In the most tediously civil and cogent manner possible, the assembled 20-through-60-somethings spent an hour discussing the logistics of the port blockade. Should it start at 6 a.m.? Could someone get in touch with the truckers tomorrow? Point of information. Point of clarification. Straw poll? Very good, thanks, everyone.
It was lovely, and inspiring, and utterly incompatible with daily journalism, which prefers the kind of fireworks sure to come the next day. No bargain with the city had been struck. “If the 1 percent won’t share voluntarily … we will force change!” the press release had promised. It was anybody’s guess how police would respond, and the guessing had been tending toward pessimism.
When I returned in the morning, I did so with obligatory vinegar-soaked dishrag in my bag, but mostly it seemed inconceivable the city would pepper spray its way onto the front pages again. Many of the Occupiers I met seemed to feel the same, but with asterisks.
“Every time we say the police aren’t going to do something dumb, they surprise us,” Becca Von Behren told me in the hours before the vigil.
Von Behren, 30, is an attorney with a San Francisco veterans rights group and part of Occupy Oakland’s volunteer legal committee. There’s no clearer picture of a 99 percenter than a veteran my age, she told me. Over the last few days Von Behren was instrumental in helping to devise the legally savvy underpinning of the day’s planned vigil. The idea rested on precedent from a 1984 case called Clark v. Community for Creative Nonviolence. As she and another attorney from the committee explained it to me, that case established that elements of a protest designed for expression were protected by the First Amendment — even tents and teepees, if they’re used as symbols rather than for sleeping.
“Sleeping is not protected — they can ban that,” Von Behren said. “We’ll have a permanent and meaningful structure in the plaza, but nobody will be sleeping in it.”
I asked her what the meaning was. Specifically, I asked her how I should explain it to my mom, a proxy in my mind for everyone with growing sympathy for the movement and growing doubts about its tactics.
“Here’s what I said to my mom,” Von Behren said. “Regardless of whether measurable changes occur — and I’m not even sure what the metric would be — there are people out here involved in direct, deliberative democracy, discussing things usually not discussed among strangers. That kind of awakening is enough.”
Ten minutes later Zachary RunningWolf was standing before a small crowd in front of City Hall. RunningWolf is an elder from the Black Feet tribe and something of a celebrity in tree-sitting circles. A growing collection of police officers stood behind him, either smirking or being moved, it was hard to say. The crowd was being moved. The teepees would remind the public of the struggles of the Sioux, and of homeless workers during the Depression, and Resurrection City after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, and other occupations. Eight long teepee dowels came out, and the crowd cheered, and everyone moved to the building site, and then the police said any structure would be torn down and everyone responsible would be arrested.
The slow-motion confrontation that followed lasted nearly two hours. A handful of cops stood impassively as a knot of Occupiers shouted at them. Could they name the ordinance they were enforcing? No? Then how could they enforce it? Couldn’t they think for themselves? Why were they working for the 1 percent? They were idiots. No, they were part of the system, the system’s what’s idiotic. Thank you, sister. No, they idiots. Seven people shot last night and they need two dozen cops to guard a fucking teepee?
Meanwhile Von Behren and another volunteer attorney, Kirk Boyd, had gotten into City Hall. They arranged a meeting with a young, bearded fellow named Arturo Sanchez, assistant to the city administrator. Sanchez listened and conceded perhaps there’d been a misunderstanding regarding the intent of the teepee. He said he’d return in five minutes with an answer.
Five minutes became an hour so I spoke with an Oaklander outside in a pink sweat shirt, aged old enough to be your mother. She’s a paralegal who came down to see what the day would bring. She wouldn’t give her name because she feared retribution from the occupiers, with whom she’s furious.
“Look, I support regulating the shit out of Wall Street. I’m progressive and so’s the rest of Oakland — if Bernie Sanders was 20 years younger I’d stalk the man. But this? This is a nightmare. Oakland is sick of this,” she said.
“What if this is the next Woolworth’s?” I asked, thinking of that 1960 sit-in at a segregated lunch counter that ignited the civil rights movement. “How would you know?”
“They had a specific goal,” she replied. “Occupy Oakland has no focus, just rage. No sense of Glass-Steagall, for example. I try to get involved but they shoot me down.”
One of the officers getting yelled at was Lt. Freddy Hamilton.
“I’m sympathetic to a lot of what they say, but I also got a job to do,” he told me.
A young couple also on the scene spoke of their investment in Occupy Oakland.
“I was going to school in Alaska, studying natural science,” said Lucas Wilcox, 29. “But I stopped. Why go further into debt in an inherently dysfunctional system? This here, this is a hub. I don’t think democracy of this sort has ever happened in this country.”
By and by Sanchez came out and delivered what struck many as an arbitrary compromise: The teepee could be erected in a different spot, would have to be taken down between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. and this “encroachment permit” would only last three days.
“It’s not a victory till it becomes 24 hours,” Phil Horne, another attorney volunteering with Occupy Oakland, told me. “Occupation means occupation; we don’t turn it off at night. So we’re going to challenge this. No permit is required to exercise a right. That’s a slippery slope.”
The occupiers — who now numbered about 70 — debated the city’s position and there was more anger at the cops and at last a decision was made. Everyone surrounded RunningWolf, who climbed up on a metal chair under the boughs of two trees. He lashed eight modestly sized wooden dowels together with rope and then, in about four minutes, it was done.
The crowd clapped and made signs to hang on it then gradually trickled away. The police trickled away, too, at least until the evening’s vigil. The night before, when everything was quiet and calm, I’d asked a former Black Panther named Gerald Smith what, in the grand scheme of things, could come of today’s event. He made a face that said please understand the significance of what I’m about to say, and then said, “We’ll see, won’t we?”
The teepee stood about 12 feet tall and was tucked over at the edge of the plaza.
Sometimes we’re animals.
How else to account for a man who approaches a female chimp nursing its wide-eyed newborn, takes aim amid howling protests from nearby apes and blasts the mother with a tranquilizer dart — then snatches the sobbing infant and delivers it to an otherwise thoughtful, loving woman, who whisks the creature off to her New York brownstone?
It was science, this was the ’70s, and the gauntlet had been thrown down by none other than Noam Chomsky. While nonhumans may communicate with one another, the MIT linguist said, they are fundamentally incapable of language. Columbia University professor Herbert Terrace set out to disprove the assertion with an ambitious and groundbreaking study. The experiment that followed involved a cleverly named chimpanzee and some less-than-clever human choices. The fascinating, ultimately heartbreaking account has finally been told in journalist Elizabeth Hess’ primate biography, “Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human.”
Fancy Upper West Side address, nice clothes, summer in the Hamptons, fawning media attention, parents mellow enough to pass him their joint now and then — for a year and a half, Nim had a life many humans would envy. But that was the problem: He himself wasn’t human, merely raised to think he was. He bonded intensely with his adoptive family, and indeed learned around 125 words in American Sign Language, but in the end his fate wasn’t that of a true son. Funding for the project ran out, Nim proved more difficult to handle as he got older, and eventually he was unceremoniously sent away.
Terrace would make a dramatic concession to Chomsky on the language question, sending waves throughout the field. But the charismatic subject at the center of the study more or less vanished. Nim bounced through some of the assorted grim facilities that house chimps, all the while making it clear he longed for his human family. For a creature who would demand hugs after being disciplined, and bring tissues to his adoptive mother when she cried, relocating to a world of cages and strange, hairy beings was incomprehensible.
Ultimately Project Nim illuminated as much about humans as about chimps. There was never any exit strategy. The implications of humanizing a wild, and intelligent, creature seem to have eluded the people responsible. At the time New York magazine referred to the study as a “scientific revolution with religious consequences that occurs once every few hundred years.” One hopes it’s no more often than that.
Hess spoke to Salon from her home in upstate New York.
How did people respond when they’d find out you were writing a book about chimpanzees?
I got a lot of banana jokes. And people were surprised to see that these animals are so complicated, and so emotional, and that they form such deep and serious attachments to human beings. That’s why I wanted to write this. It’s a novel experience to read a biography of a wild animal.
I was surprised myself. When I discovered Nim’s story, it was like I was struck by lightning. No one really knew that story. He’d had these moments of incredible celebrity that were well documented, but ultimately what happened to him was a bit of a mystery.
The fact that Nim had been raised in a human family [by Stephanie and W.E.R. LaFarge], and learned how to operate around people, made him a very interesting subject. His life also allowed me to write about a variety of landscapes where chimps end up. The book takes you behind the scenes of a major behavioral language science experiment, and inside a primate breeding colony, and briefly inside a biomedical research lab, and ultimately to a sanctuary. Which in the end is about as good as it gets for any captive-born animal.
Can you describe the happy period when Nim first got to the house in New York?
Nim was with the LaFarges for 18 months, and most of that was a pretty happy time. I think it was incredibly exciting to have this baby chimp around. He loved to be held, he drank from a bottle. By the time he was 2 months, he could cling to walls and get up and down the banister. There was a giant waterbed in the living room that Nim loved to bounce up and down upon.
He was very beguiling. They dressed him in OshKosh and little T-shirts, and taught him how to sit at the table and use utensils. I think he really enjoyed being part of the family.
After funding ran out and Terrace declared the project a failure, Nim was taken from his loving home in New York, and bounced around various grim research facilities before he wound up at Cleveland Amory’s sanctuary, in Texas. Tell me about what it was like for Nim to be put back in a cage with other chimps after he’d only ever known humans.
It was terrifying. One graduate student described the response that all the [research] chimps had [upon being reintroduced to other chimps] as a nervous breakdown. Nim’s brother [and the subject of another study] Ally was so terrified and upset that he suffered a kind of paralysis for a while. They often pull out all their hair; they refuse to eat; some get beaten up by other chimps because they don’t know how to respond to them.
The former graduate students in New York believe that Nim had no idea he was a chimpanzee. One of them suggested to me that Nim might have thought he was going to grow up, lose all his facial and body hair and eventually look like the people who were around him. That would be a reasonable supposition. Throughout his life, Nim preferred to be with humans.
Toward the end of his life, he was paired with an ex-circus chimp named Sally Jones. That, I think, was the first deep relationship he had with his own species. They were inseparable. Sally was a lot older, a lot milder. Nim had a reputation for breaking out of his cage in Texas. When Sally came, he would break out of his cage, but then he’d remember her, and he’d go back and get her. He’d lead her out of the cage and they’d go on a little romp together. Cleveland Amory was always afraid that Nim was going to run off into the woods. But he had no desire to run away. Nim would go to the nearest house and bring Sally with him, and they would raid the refrigerator, go through the closets and try on any shoes that were lying around, and sometimes they’d get into bed and turn on the TV.
He was also dangerous. Chris Byrne, the manager at [Amory's] Black Beauty Ranch that Nim was closest to, learned that when Nim broke out, the best thing to do was to just be completely calm. He’d see Nim at the door and he’d say, “Nim, welcome,” as if Nim had been invited over for cocktails. He’d let him sit down for a while. Then he’d slowly lead Sally back to the cage, and Nim would eventually follow.
Can you describe the first time you met a chimp?
Oh yes. I went out to the Black Beauty Ranch to see the three adult chimps who were Nim’s companions when he died in 2000. I went out just to hang out with them, and learn what it’s like to look in their eyes. I certainly remember the first time I held hands with one of them. It’s quite a joyful-slash-terrifying experience.
Partly it’s so profound because they’re so humanlike. But another part is that they’re in a cage and you’re on the outside. There’s a built-in injustice to the relationship — there seems to be a clear consciousness about that in them. Nim used to sign “out” all the time. Anybody who passed by his cage in Texas, he’d start signing to them, to see if they knew any sign language. If they didn’t, he’d get disappointed and go to the back of his cage. He enjoyed signing and taught the other chimps some signs.
When they like you, they’re extremely gregarious. They want to show you things. They love books and magazines. There was a children’s book all about Nim while he was in New York, basically a photo book, and Nim kept his one copy of this book safe, even though chimps tend to wreck everything. He would bring it down and show the other chimps, then bring it back to his bunk and keep it under his sleeping area so that no one could destroy it. He would just look at pictures of his New York City family, and himself, over and over again.
What kind of response have you gotten from people who’d been involved with Nim?
Everybody felt so bad that they’d worked so hard to convince him he was human, and then he was just shipped off at the end of the experiment. There was no exit plan. No one ever asked, “What’s going to happen to the chimp?” In the ’70s, this is the way research was done. At the end of the experiment, the animals were either euthanized or sent to the next experiment down the line. Nobody asked questions about it. There was a tremendous amount of sadness and guilt wrapped around the whole project.
When Project Nim ended and Terrace finally published the results, years later, in Science magazine, he not only argued that Nim did not learn American Sign Language — that he was merely mimicking his teachers — he argued that all apes [in language programs] were mimicking their teachers. He basically tried to put a knife into the heart of all language research with animals. He sided with Chomsky. There were a lot of [other] projects under way at that time, and he had a huge effect on funding. It was a small, fragile movement to begin with. It took about five years for the field to recover.
Why do the language capabilities of a chimp matter?
I think they matter to different people for different reasons. The value of Project Nim is still hotly debated. The fact that chimps are really good at a gestural-based language is not surprising. Whether or not their use of ASL has anything to do with the way humans use ASL is still debated. What I can say is that those people who were around Nim had no problem understanding him.
Yet in Project Nim they made many mistakes. They brought Nim into a classroom, they made him hang his coat up on a hook, they sat him down at a little desk, and they drilled him in sign language. This is not a great way to teach a little human person, and it’s certainly not a great way to teach a chimp. Nevertheless they documented a vocabulary of more than 100 words and 20,000 different combinations. But the question of what Nim learned — everyone has a different point of view about it.
Now, we’re looking much more closely at the animal mind, not the way in which the animal might use a human language. And what we’re discovering is how little we know about how the animals communicate, and how little we know about their intellectual potential. Most of these captive animals have been born in captivity and locked in small cages their entire lives. If you did that to a human, it certainly wouldn’t stimulate their intellect. Now that we know these animals have consciousness and desires and emotions, we think of them as sentient beings. We wonder not only what they have to say but whether we’re doing the right thing by them, or to them.
It sometimes seems there’s a disconnect in our thinking about chimps. On the one hand, we know very well that they’re capable of seeming human — in movies and commercials they look and act very much like us. But on the other hand, people sometimes seem shocked when they find out how complex or intelligent they actually are.
I think that’s the lesson learned at Project Nim. This very adorable, humanlike baby turned into a wilder and wilder creature. People don’t realize that chimps aren’t forever these little people that are cute and funny. And they don’t realize that they’re actually an endangered species. They’re kind of an invisible species here, too — there are very few in zoos. Most are in research, and we don’t get to see those. The ones we see on TV and in ads are babies.
How many chimps are there in captivity in the U.S.?
I think around 2,000. Five hundred are owned by the government and are in research labs. Another 600 are in privately owned research labs. Then there’s a number of them in the entertainment industry and a number that are privately owned in exotic collections.
And there’s a huge, mostly hidden number in garages and attics, right? People take them in thinking they’ll always be cute and little, but they get big and unwieldy, and go on to live a very long time.
Yes. In the ’70s, the period I was writing about, it was a kind of fad to raise a chimp as a pet in your home, and treat it very much as a child. None of these did very well. They not only tear through the families, but they tear through the house. They eat everything and wreck everything in sight. They’re not easy to control. Marriages broke up, children were badly bitten, and people realized that while it was a really fun idea, the reality was far more harrowing than they’d imagined.
How does a chimp break up a marriage?
Chimps bond very tightly to their mothers. The fathers have very little to do with raising the babies. A lot of these women who had been raising orphan chimps [in the '70s] were suddenly engaged to be married, and their chimp babies would not accept their husbands.
What needs to change to improve the lot of apes and monkeys in this country?
We need to get the chimps, which have been in these small cages their whole lives, into sanctuaries where they can step on grass for the first time, and think about whether they want to climb a tree. We need to ask what we owe them, especially because many of these animals have given their lives to research. And once we start asking these questions, I think the answers are going to be so obvious. In many countries it’s illegal to use chimpanzees for any biomedical research, or any invasive research at all, and I think that really needs to happen here. I predict it will.
Just to anticipate some of the responses you’ll get for that, I want to be clear that the chimps being studied are not all saving human lives.
Oh no, not at all. But I think the whole attitude toward chimpanzees is finally starting to change. We’re going to be the last country to protect chimpanzees legally. It wasn’t so long ago that we were using them in car crash studies. We’ve used them for all kinds of useless toxicity studies. The AIDS studies were a disaster.
There’s a lot of research now that looks at how successful research on chimps has been — [and it's] relatively unsuccessful. I think we’re getting to a point where we have to ask, are they really necessary? Or are they being used because it’s a good way of getting grant money, or because they’re simply there?
I know the Wesley Autrey story is a week old, but if you’re not still processing it, and your eyes don’t still well up at the thought, then your heart is a pebble and you should be out pinching the elderly instead of online reading magazines.
Here’s the problem, looking back: I don’t know what to do with the world’s Wesley Autreys.
My heart isn’t a pebble but it is a corrupted little capitalist sponge; almost immediately after the New York construction worker’s stunning subway rescue, I found myself hoping some kindly billionaire would discreetly deliver him a whopping check for his incomprehensible good deed. (For those living under rocks, the 50-year-old jumped onto a subway track before an oncoming train to protect a teenager who’d suffered a seizure; Autrey laid his body on top of the young man’s, positioned himself between the rails, and let the train pass over them.) Later, when Donald Trump announced he’d be coughing up a $10,000 award, I snorted at his stinginess.
But maybe Trump gave $10,000 too much. Maybe an act so extraordinary as Autrey’s gets debased by a financial reward. To dive on a stranger before an oncoming train — I’m pretty sure that’s sublime. Money? Handy but not sublime. In such truly exceptional circumstances, shouldn’t our better selves strive to preserve the delicate miraculousness of such an act — not flatten it into a pecuniary equation?
Of course there’s always a reasonable argument for the pecuniary — that’s the brilliant insistence of capitalism. A whopping check could, in turn, facilitate other exceptional things. College tuition for his two little girls, for instance. And maybe it’s absurd to ask Autrey to perform the double heroism of refusing piles of money and gifts. Certainly it’s embarrassingly paternalistic to be debating whether a man far greater than myself should push future checks back across future tables — and don’t get me wrong, I only want this saint to get whatever he wants or needs. But I do think the sheer singularity of what he did compels us to ask how we can best match it. It’s the purity of Autrey’s altruism that moved us, so it stands to reason we should poke around for some purity, too.
This is abstract and sort of pointy-headed stuff, I know. But people like Autrey don’t come along every day, and just as their actions burrow down to our marrow for a short while, so too do they float upward toward bigger questions. Can we, as a society, really think of no other way to express our admiration and appreciation than with money? And if not, shouldn’t we be worried by that?
In the news frenzy that followed Autrey’s leap, one AP story dug up Daniel Santos, another New York hero, who in 1996 jumped 130 feet off a bridge into the Hudson River to save a woman trying to kill herself. It seems the tidal wave of appreciation didn’t have the effect the hero’s admirers might have wanted. “My life unraveled,” recalls Santos, who started drinking heavily afterward. “The publicity changed my life … It took me four or five years to get my life back.”
I’ve never jumped off a bridge or before a subway car to save a fellow human. I’ve never even jumped in front of a fellow human’s snowball. Like everyone, however, I have occasionally stumbled into pretty good Samaritanism. At 10, I left my father at the Safeway checkout line and chased the previous customer down the block with the $10 in change he’d forgotten. It was a long enough run that I had time to think — specifically, I thought about the different types of candy I’d be buying with my reward money. Were there a god of Teaching Little Boys Profound Lessons, the customer would have surprised me with a mere thank you. But, of course, even at 10 I knew the score. I went home with M&Ms, plus a Snickers for later. What might have been a faintly ennobling experience was instead tainted and transactional.
We live in an era of remarkable and varied peril, as cable news dutifully reminds us every few seconds; by extension, we encounter some heroes. Two days after Autrey’s subway rescue, two other New Yorkers rushed to catch a toddler as he fell four stories off a fire escape. Sept. 11 gave the country more courageous selflessness than we knew what to do with. In fact, we still don’t. That we still fight, here and there, over how to memorialize and honor the various souls who died trying to save others — well, maybe this reveals something beyond just the inevitable divisiveness of 9/11.
Perhaps what’s revealed is a kind of cultural anxiety over how to comprehend the humanity of those acts. We know they’re good, we know good things get rewarded — but our understanding stops there. In other cultures it’s often said that Americans lack the ability to process death; maybe the same is true about real goodness. These unselfish moments of compassion and bravery, maybe they’re the human equivalent of quantum physics for us. So we throw money: a prostration at the feet of incomprehension.
But there are practical limits to this hero-love — the cozy feeling unravels when we look to franchise it. On the verge of sending more poor troops to a dumb war to do Autrey-esque things daily, well, we’ll barely reward them with body armor, much less Disney vacations. And if we did compensate them all on the level they deserve, what about the brave Iraqi civilians, or the brave Red Cross volunteers, or the brave protesters back home, or… Once you start looking beyond subway tracks, the world’s suddenly lousy with fine, selfless humans. Should Trump pay them all? Actually, yes — of course he should. But in so doing, he might trample something delicate (and that’s even before we had to watch him name a building after his generosity).
It would be lovely if good deeds could be their own reward. Even lovelier if we’d never heard of rewards in the first place. Some terrifically ineffable thing took hold of Autrey last week, and the best I can wish him is that something equally ineffable will attend the rest of his days. In my fantasy, the Bronze Medallion from Mayor Bloomberg and the trip to Disney World give his daughters a hell of a January, but that later, when the fuss has died down, the Autrey family is visited by a goodness as deep and mysterious as that jump down into the subway tracks. And yes, if the guy’s goodness is such that it’s undiminished by a briefcase full of cash, I suppose I’m hero enough to accept it.
A teepee grows in Oakland (Credit: Chris Colin) 
