It’s 1959 and Louis Allan Reed is acting up. If it’s not the 17-year-old’s mood swings or the bad grades, it’s his recent displays of homosexual behavior. At their wit’s end, his parents give him what any other strict, conservative Jewish parents in middle-class Brooklyn would: electroshock therapy.
Three times a week, for eight weeks, Reed went to the Creedmore State Psychiatric Hospital for his dose of high voltage. The treatment is deadening. “You can’t read a book because you get to Page 17 and you have to go right back to Page 1 again,” Reed once recalled. “If you walked around the block, you forgot where you were.”
More than 40 years later, one looks at the life-as-art rock star, and that singular, imploring, reptilian look in his eye — he has said no one does Lou Reed like Lou Reed — and one wonders if 24 sessions was enough.
We take Lou Reed for a god. Not a benevolent one, necessarily — maybe not even a musical one. But look at how he stands there, in his black T-shirt and black jeans and wire-rim glasses and ugly snarl. Didn’t the Greeks have a god of attitude? The one who flew too close to the sun but then, instead of falling to the sea, flew even closer because he didn’t give a fuck? The 57-year-old founder of the Velvet Underground would have us believe no less.
The world first heard of Reed in the late ’60s, in connection with the Velvet Underground, the band the world had never heard of anyway. In the years since their quiet disintegration in 1970, the Velvets assumed a mythology that easily made up for the legions of fans they never had in their non-heyday. Reed and his former band mates — John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker — inspired the kinds of legends even the Beatles couldn’t hope for: They were the greatest rock stars whom no one ever listened to, the most popular group that never sold a record and, famously, the band that had only 500 fans, but from whom 500 new bands sprung.
Thirty-six years after the first gig, these legends are more than hokey — they’re immaterial. Not only have the Velvets secured their spot in rock history, they’ve grabbed such a prominent one that we can barely imagine the days of their famous obscurity. “Sweet Jane,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” “Heroin,” “Femme Fatale,” “I’m Waiting for the Man” — these VU originals passed through the realm of classics long ago, and have drifted almost irretrievably into the land of the overplayed, overcovered and overremembered.
Reed doesn’t care. If the world never spoke of the Velvets again, he would probably be happy. Or mad. Or uptight. Or indifferent. Whatever it is that he already is. This is the problem with Reed, and has been since the electroshock therapy days: No one really knows what to do with him. At once pretentious and humble, uncaring and epiphanic, faggy and rough, rock ‘n’ roll’s most famous junkie keeps breaking molds.
That’s not hot air. He was an iconoclast as early as college, from 1960 to 1964 — as an undergrad at Syracuse University, he wrote “Heroin,” maybe the Velvets’ greatest song — and only proceeded to get farther out. Later, once the band was together, he began putting together material that turned rock ‘n’ roll on its ear. Over spare melodies but full sound, he sung/spoke/muttered about drugs, S&M, transvestism and other aspects of his Lower East Side life. They were often banalities — the walk up the stairs to meet the dealer; the name of the street so-and-so had to run down — but they were banalities that rang with religiosity. It’s nothing short of euphoria when he meets his dealer, gets the heroin and heads back downtown. Not since has anyone made euphoria sound so good and so lonely.
The Velvet Underground played some great songs. They occasionally relied on the kindness of spaced-out strangers — now and then, it took patience to invest in the requisite VU trance — but even then, it was good music. But they were not the Beatles, not the Stones, not even the little finger of the Beatles or the Stones. As good and new as their songs could be, it was hardly their material alone that brought them fame. The Velvets had a patron who could do P.R. tricks in his sleep.
It was the last night of the band’s first regular gig when Andy Warhol strolled into the Greenwich Village tourist bar where they were playing. As out-of-towners politely sipped umbrella drinks, Reed sang about masochism and overdoses. Warhol swooned. Soon the conceptual artist had a band to manage, and the band had an image to cultivate.
Plus money. Warhol’s success as a commercial artist meant the Velvets had electricity for their amps and a ready-made stable of potential fans. With Warhol came the Factory, which in turn brought clout. The Union Square loft where Warhol’s art was mass-produced was already the center of the universe. The artsy, the hip and the strung-out all mingled in frenetic orbit around the Factory and its joyful contempt for bourgeois culture — to be at the center of a Factory happening was to be made, coronated. These recluses with cheap guitars and a drummer who played standing up — they were now Art.
In good conscience, we can credit Reed with maybe 20 really terrific songs. That’s no brilliant career. The mark he leaves on us is, rather, about coolness. He’s so cool. Him in those sunglasses in the Velvets; him in S/M gear in the ’70s; him in the ’80s saying “Take it, Lou” before playing his solo on “Beginning of a Great Adventure”; him in the ’90s taking Czech Republic President Vaclav Havel and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to the Knitting Factory to see John Zorn.
Nastiness constituted a large chunk of his charm. He would curse at his audiences, curse at the critics — he once mortified band mates with a Stalinist salute to a crowd in Europe. All this only confirms that we insist on seeing genius in an artist’s hatred of us, or perhaps in our own loving of an artist hating us. And there’s his perseverance, too: We adore the tenacity of an artist who continues to drag out this terrific rock clichi year after year, sneer after sneer.
Like the best coolnesses, Reed’s layers vanity and indignation with a kind of innocence too simple for layers in the first place. It’s a leather jacket in the summer; it’s chain smoking cigarettes he didn’t pay for. And just when you’re ready to roll your eyes, he knocks you over with an earnestness that makes you want to give him more cigarettes.
Along the way, the coolness rose to the level of Importance. Whereas his early enthusiasm for heroin was briefly radical, it was his subtler message about sexuality that continued to stand out: Elton John might’ve made it OK to be a gay musician, and maybe David Bowie made it cool, but Reed said faggy could be tough. He took all the machismo of simple, fuzz-toned power chords and mixed them with mascara. And the mascara didn’t say, “Accept me.” — it said, “Go to hell.”
Maybe more than with any other musician, Reed’s image is inseparable from his music. The same art/macho creation, the same white-hot frigidity we see in his posturing comes through every note of a Velvet Underground album. The songs are tough and loud, vocals clipping every other verse and guitars seldom in tune. Like Reed, they offer the illusion of not caring; in reality, he and his music are carefully crafted.
Reed is a charming bully. Like the wrong song and you’re a fool; ask about the meaning of some lyrics and he’ll end the conversation. The Velvets played with a similar brazenness. Listen to “What Goes On”: The chords D, C and G form a song in the key of G, meaning that resolution to the progression comes only with the G chord. But the band doesn’t play it that way. Through sheer insistence — emphasizing the D rather than the G — they force the resolution in the wrong place. And it works; somehow, the song doesn’t sound odd at all, and in fact is a real toe-tapper. It was a strange power the Velvets had over their listeners.
But such technical trivia generally remains the domain of more musically sophisticated acts like Steely Dan or Led Zeppelin; VU fans, for the most part, respond to the words. Like Bob Dylan, Reed is often regarded as a poet who happens to play guitar. As chief lyricist, he always claimed that his lyrics neither endorsed nor rejected any particular notion. “Heroin,” the song most picked on by prudish critics, supposedly didn’t encourage use of the drug, only stated that this was simply a fact of life for some.
Much is said about the VU’s ability to put a bony finger on such unsung tropes as grit, hopelessness and confusion. This is a miscalculation. Johnny Cash and B.B. King knew of bleakness when Reed was still trying on sunglasses. What distinguishes the Velvets here is, rather, their approach to these themes: Where those other songwriters arrived at bleakness over the course of a song, this was a foregone conclusion for the VU; their albums began on the edge and simply proceeded to crawl around the other side for the next 45 minutes.
Herein lies the appeal. Listen to VU fans — they are legion at this point and always outspoken — explain the phenomenon of first hearing the band play. Consistently, they refer to a revolutionary honesty within the lyrics. Cale once described the effect:
“All Bob Dylan was singing was questions — how many miles? and all that. I didn’t want to hear any more questions,” Cale said. “Give me some tough social situations and show that answers are possible. And sure enough, ‘Heroin’ was one of them. It wasn’t sorry for itself.”
More fiercely than in any other art, rock stars jockey for the distinction of telling it like it is. There’s no room for plurality, for saying, well, Dylan tells it like this and Reed tells it like that. There’s only one It in the business, and everything else necessarily falls short.
Reed’s raw brand of poetry has been permanently yoked, in rock history consciousness, with such characterizations as honest, direct, open and, most troubling, authentic. Grit, these characterizations insist, is somehow more “real” than prettiness. Such unexamined distinctions inform a fascinating perspective on the cultural moment the VU flagged: The Doors, Simon & Garfunkel, Dylan, the Beatles — these guys weren’t doing it for everybody, and the VU picked up where they left off.
These ideas about truth and authenticity helped shove the Velvet Underground into the realm of high art. Warhol contributed light shows and the contagious conviction that this was the new new thing. At Factory happenings, it became clear that the Velvets were on some sort of vanguard. Their reputation among the un-hip for being vulgar — born largely of their rumored penchant for sexual deviation — only confirmed their art-noise value.
In “Duck Soup,” Groucho Marx says, “He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.” Similarly, the small-but-intense infatuation with the Velvets’ newness occasionally obscured the fact that the music was really good. Tucker pounded out a spare, rocking rhythm; Morrison, Cale and Reed played great, fuzzed-out, thin guitar lines and Cale’s electric viola and organ buoyed the music with a trance-like drone. The songs were hypnotically simple. For a while, the band even held a ban on bluesy riffs; anyone who introduced one had to pay a fine.
Behind the music, things weren’t so fluid. The success had surprised everyone, and personalities clashed. Reed, it’s said, could fill an auditorium with his ego. Though Cale had far more training as a musician, Reed generally set the tone. The charming bully could also just be a bully. The story is familiar: creative differences, personality conflicts and different ideas about direction. In 1968, after the release of the second album, “White Light/White Heat,” Reed called a meeting with Morrison and Tucker to announce his firing of Cale.
It’s difficult to locate the precise beginning of the end. Warhol, though a close friend of Reed’s, had also been let go. Without Cale, things never sounded the same — his viola and organ had added the creepy hum that gave the Velvets their unique sound. The band continued to play, releasing “The Velvet Underground” in 1969 and “Loaded” in 1970. After “Loaded,” Reed left. Some say he wanted to pursue a solo career; others point to tensions with Morrison. Without their frontman, the band soon dissolved.
Rather than hover around his legend, invoking it from time to time when his star sinks a little, Reed pushed ever forward. He released 12 albums in the ’70s. A few became classics — songs such as “Vicious,” “Walk on the Wild Side” and “Sally Can’t Dance” got big — and many fell flat. He experimented more than the Velvets had, too. “Metal Machine Music” came out in 1975, for example, and stands as a collection of atonal guitar screechings and electronic noise, unleashing his magnificent nastiness.
In the ’80s, Reed tamed his Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal alter ego down to something more thoughtful. “New York,” released in 1989, offers a beautiful and epic tour of his favorite city, from welfare kids to the havoc wreaked by drug abuse. The songwriter who’d eschewed the optimism of the ’60s now showed no trace of detachment. His participation in Amnesty International events seemed to confirm that even crusty old curmudgeons could hold deep wells of sympathy beneath their leather. In the following years, he published “Magic and Loss” and then, briefly reunited with Cale, “Songs for Drella,” a gentle and compassionate tribute to Warhol. A kinder, gentler Lou had emerged.
(It makes sense, if relationships can be said to make sense, that the new Reed has recently married the new Laurie Anderson. Not only do the two represent New York cool, they represent old New York cool. Like Reed, Anderson has evolved from ’70s downtown art rogue to something far mellower in our minds; these days, we think of the revolutionary performance artist as something close to a folk hero.)
Transcendence and all, it took some time for America to make up its mind about Reed. (Europe is another story; like jazz, he’s always had some of his greatest fans across the pond. Havel has claimed his music played a “special special role” in the liberation of the Czech Republic.) The guy whose songs were once banned on the radio had, under our noses, become loved and even respected. Critics scrutinized his every move — his lyrics, his sexuality, his drug use — almost as though they were taunting him: Where is the asshole who used to call us assholes?
Indeed, Reed has forged an ambivalent relationship with critical attention. In true Reed fashion, he used the limelight to spurn all the limelight. He’d agree to interviews and then proceed to abuse the interviewer. He’s no recluse — as much as he resented mass media and all its trappings, his career thrived on it, and he never forgot.
Somehow, his responses to the press are endearing. You can almost picture Reed with a daisy: I love them, I love them not; I love them, I love them not. (Except, of course, that it’s impossible to imagine the Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal anywhere near a flower; if he actually held one, he would certainly smoke it, or at least give it a lecture.)
What the critics, and Reed himself, often miss is that his finest work is the cast of characters he’s concocted over the years. The music was often, and can still be, great — his latest album, “Ecstasy,” came out in April to favorable reviews. But the thing that entrenched itself was the attitude, the theatrics. It was a schizophrenic attitude, too, full of revisions, and the energy of schizophrenia never failed to charge his performances.
Like Bowie, Reed cultivated a variety of characters for himself to inhabit over the years. He could be the glam, blond pretty boy, the vicious sadist, the cantankerous preacher and, a perennial favorite, the snide New Yorker. He either defiantly resists pop with dark, non-radio jams or he purports to transcend it with self-consciousness, cutting the earnestness of a catchy pop tune with those cold eyes and those fuck-you cheekbones. But it’s still a catchy pop tune. “Sweet Jane”? Those chords snap and thrum like beautiful rubber bands.
“Ecstasy” returns to this territory, or at least closer than Reed’s been in a while. Again, he presents variations on the theme of transcendence. He has suggested that he’s demonstrated enough musical and lyrical variety (in, say, “Songs for Drella” and “Magic and Loss”) to earn a return to classic Lou Reed. The songs are familiarly filmic, telling stories that rely on powerful — often melodramatic — images, and a cast of characters whose rough edges sparkle for a fleeting moment. It’s that strange mix of heavy-handed and pluralistic we’ve come to expect: A man has his nipples sucked by whores, and that’s OK.
“Strange mix” is one way to put it; another is conspicuously inconsistent. So maybe we like Reed for his contradictions and flaws, and for the fact that he doesn’t know why we like him. That’s rock ‘n’ roll, after all: all innocence and rudeness, too dumb to be cunning and too bad to be bad.
Of course, beautiful dumbness isn’t enough — we require of our musical greats some kind of human understanding, too. Reed has always understood our heads, in some strange way: There are symphonies in there. Some are written by others — Mozart, the Beatles, Monk — and they got there because they’re perfect. They play at perfect times: when we’re on our bikes in the sun, or jumping into the shimmering lake or walking home from the bar where we toasted life with friends.
But we hear other music, too — imperfect notes we piece together ourselves from secret brain reservoirs. These soundtracks play when no other seems appropriate. Stepping out into the sun on a winter day and feeling a rusty screw in your heart, and sweating, wondering what your drugs were cut with, fearing this is the day you drop dead in a frothing heap on the way to the drugstore — in these moments, Lennon and McCartney don’t do the trick.
So we devise an accompaniment, too messy to be called music, and this is what Reed often touches. His songs sound like blissful death, other times nothing so elegant. They rub the private music that rises and falls with the beat of the ecstatic, broken heart. It’s the walk home from the bar, yes, but punctuated with miserable retching in an alley; it’s the jump in the shimmering lake only to find that quietly fluttering to the bottom is a strangely real option; and the bike in the sun? Well, the sun is black as hash.
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) 
