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  HE WANTED THE MOON

  “He Wanted the Moon does for mental illness what The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks did for the science of cancer: at once reveal suffering and heal it through knowledge. By allowing her father to be heard, Mimi Baird gives voices to all Americans silenced by mental illness down the decades. A miraculous story told in a miracle of a book.”

  —AMITY SHLAES, author of Coolidge and The Forgotten Man

  “He Wanted the Moon details the horrendous treatment commonly given to patients at a time when there was no known way ameliorating the dangerous and self-destructive behavior that often characterizes manic-depression. This is a fascinating and informative book that I would highly recommend.”

  —DR. ELLIOT VALENSTEIN, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan and author of Blaming the Brain

  “Mimi Baird’s short book about her father’s long struggle with mental illness is a tale within a tale. She longed to know why he had simply disappeared one day from her life, and what she found was his own vivid account of watching himself slide into darkness. Mimi has performed a quiet miracle, giving life back to a man everyone wanted to forget.”

  —THOMAS POWERS, Pulitzer-Prize winner and author of The Killing of Crazy Horse

  (photograph credit fm.1)

  Copyright © 2015 by Mimi Baird

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,

  an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House LLC,

  a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Permission credits can be found on this page and this page.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Baird, Mimi.

  He wanted the moon : the madness and medical genius of Dr. Perry Baird, and his daughter’s quest to know him / Mimi Baird; with Eve Claxton.

  pages cm

  1. Baird, Perry—Mental health. 2. Manic-depressive persons—United States—Biography. 3. Manic-depressive illness—United States—History. 4. Physicians—United States—Biography. I. Claxton, Eve. II. Title.

  RC516.B34 2015

  616.89′50092—dc23

  [B] 2014012743

  ISBN 978-0-8041-3747-8

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-3748-5

  Jacket design by Elena Giavaldi

  Jacket photographs all courtesy of the author

  v3.1

  To my two children

  JAKE AND MEG

  the pearls of my life

  Author’s Note

  This book is the culmination of many years collecting and assembling materials relating to my father, Dr. Perry Cossart Baird Jr. (Throughout this book, for brevity’s sake, we refer to him as Dr. Perry Baird.)

  Included here is my father’s original manuscript from 1944, as well as excerpts from his medical records and from letters he wrote and received.

  Readers should be aware that we have edited his manuscript—and the other original materials—in order to improve readability. Any amendments made were in the interests of consistency and clarity. In some places, spellings, tenses, and usage have changed and a word or two added for intelligibility. We have not used brackets to indicate these changes.

  My father’s writing work was repeatedly interrupted by his illness, and his original manuscript includes more than one draft in some sections (as well as passages unrelated to his stay at Westborough). We have distilled or trimmed the text in these instances for the sake of concision. We have not used ellipses to indicate where lines have been deleted.

  Throughout, we have been mindful to preserve the tone and meaning—and sometimes lack of clear meaning due to my father’s mental state—of the original writing. No names have been changed; no characters or events have been invented; no full sentences have been added.

  Our goal has been to fulfill my father’s wish: “to complete the job in the right way.”

  With Earth’s first Clay they did the Last Man knead

  And there of the Last Harvest sow’d the Seed

  And the first Morning of Creation wrote

  What the Last Dawn of Reckoning Shall read.

  Yesterday, This Day’s Madness did Prepare;

  To-Morrow’s Silence, Triumph, or Despair:

  Drink! For you know not whence you came, or why:

  Drink! For you know not why you go, nor where.

  —The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  Part I: Echoes from a Dungeon Cell

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part II: Echoes Down the Years

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Photograph Credits

  Source Credits

  About the Authors

  PART I

  ECHOES FROM A

  DUNGEON CELL

  PROLOGUE

  It was the spring of 1994 when I returned from work to find the package containing my father’s manuscript on my doorstep. I was fifty-six years old and I’d been waiting for some word of him for most of my life.

  I was a six-year-old child when he stopped coming home. My mother refused to say where he had gone, except to tell me that he was “ill” and “away.” That same year of 1944, she filed for a divorce and quickly remarried, closing the chapter of her life that included my father. I was never taken to visit him growing up; his name was rarely mentioned in our house. Since childhood, I had been informed in fleeting comments that he suffered from manic depression. I had seen him again only once, very briefly, before his death in 1959.

  The late-afternoon light cast long, sharp shadows across my entranceway and the box on the step. For decades my father’s manuscript had been kept in an old briefcase in the garage of a family member in Texas, all but forgotten. I had only recently learned of its existence.

  I picked up the carton and carefully brought it inside. I knew so little about my father, Perry Baird—only that he had been a doctor with a successful practice in Boston in his heyday. Yet I could vividly recall his presence in my early years: the gleaming white coat he wore at his offices, the sight of him at the Chestnut Hill train station where my mother took me to greet him, returning from his day’s work. After he disappeared, I felt the pain of a child who misses a parent, a feeling that had never completely left me.

  My hands trembling slightly, I took a knife and made a slit along the packing tape on top of the carton. Opening the flaps, I peered inside, glimpsing handwriting on the top sheaf. Cautiously—as if my father’s words might bite—I took a piece of the paper between my thumb and forefinger. It was creamy and slightly translucent, of the onionskin kind used for making carbon copies in the days of the typewriter. I could see that it was covered in many lines of penciled
script.

  I quickly put the page back and closed the carton. After fifty years of silence, it was going to take me a little while to work up the courage to hear from him again.

  Some days later, I reopened the box, this time pulling out a handful of pages, then another. Soon, the stack on my kitchen counter was over a foot high. I attempted to read my father’s words, but it was impossible to connect the sentences on one page with the next. Further investigation revealed that the papers had been shuffled out of order. After much searching, I located what appeared to be a title written in bold strokes: “Echoes from a Dungeon Cell.”

  It took many months to restore the manuscript to some semblance of order. As I rearranged the pages, I realized that these were my father’s memoirs. For the first time, I learned what had happened to him all those years ago. He had not vanished (as I had sometimes suspected as a child). He had not left us. He had been removed against his will to Westborough State Hospital, a psychiatric institution just outside Boston, where he had written about his experiences on the papers I held in my hands. My father was afflicted with a severe mental illness during a period before any effective treatment existed, many years before the advent of modern psychiatric medications. Like hundreds of thousands of mentally ill patients at that time, he was a victim of both his disease and the stigma surrounding it. He was shut away, institutionalized, his family advised to try to forget him, an edict my mother did her best to follow.

  The arrival of the manuscript in my life marked the beginning of a long journey to know my father. Along with the other traces I have found of him—in letters, his published articles, his medical records, and photographs—I was able to discover not only a father, but a writer and a scientist, a man whose insights were extraordinarily advanced for his times.

  Although Echoes from a Dungeon Cell was never published in my father’s lifetime, it was his great hope that it would one day find publication. In letters written after he departed Westborough, he explained:

  Last year when I was ill, I went through a series of adventures both colorful and painful. At that time I was asked to write the story of some of my strange travels and so, out of the cauldron of despair, came forth my manuscript. It is a long-continued account of every kind of suffering and disaster—February 20 to July 8, 1944. By going along slowly, depicting in detail the intricate succession of events, perhaps I can unravel and clarify the sequence of events and the relative importance of the various connecting links and contributing episodes …

  I believe that the inadequate understanding of manic-depression as displayed by friends and relatives imposes unnecessary hardships on the manic-depressive. I have read widely about manic depression, I have lived through five prolonged suicidal depressions, four acute manic episodes and many hypo-manic phases. I have learned by experience how all the treatments feel: straight-jackets, wristlets, anklets, paraldehyde injections, hot and cold packs, continuous tub, close confinement to small spaces, and all the many inventions that man has created for the manic-psychosis. As a patient, I have studied many other patients at four psychopathic hospitals, including one city and one state hospital.

  Out of my recent agonies came a dauntless furor scribendi and I have written a very readable book. It is my conviction and I know you’ll agree that artistic creativeness finds its best expression after it has been fashioned by the agonies and tortures that life imposes.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Dr. Perry Baird at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Boston

  When my father’s manuscript begins, he is forty years old and has lived with the diagnosis of manic depression for more than ten years. By now, he knows very well the symptoms of his disease, its dangerous, ecstatic highs followed by pitch-dark depressions. It is February 1944, and he has retreated to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston, as he often did when he felt himself becoming manic, in order to protect his family from his increasingly erratic behavior.

  Although he had informed my mother that he was going to the Ritz to work on his book, he soon became distracted from his work. My sister, Catherine, and I stayed with our mother in Chestnut Hill, just outside the city, oblivious to events unfolding around us.

  THE morning of February 20, 1944, I slept deeply but awoke at the Ritz after only three or four hours of sleep, feeling that strange manic exuberance. I bathed, shaved and dressed, had breakfast, and then started out for a walk across the Boston Public Gardens. I ran short distances and leaped wildly over the broad flowerbeds. Anyone who might have seen me from the hotel would have thought my behavior a little unrestrained. I felt wonderful but restless, feverishly overactive, impatient. After walking for about ten minutes, I located a taxi and drove to my home in Chestnut Hill. I felt possessed with demoniacal energy. I was acutely manic.

  When I arrived at my home, no one seemed to be there. I wandered around to the backyard and on impulse, climbed over the twelve-foot wire fence surrounding the deer park. I broke into a run. As I ran up and over an elevation of land in the deer park I saw a group of deer standing in the clearing. I wondered if I could run as fast as a deer and if I could catch one. I increased my pace by a sudden burst of speed. All of the deer except one turned and ran. This one deer stood her ground a few moments, wagging her funny little short white tail. Then she too turned and ran away. I hid behind a large boulder, and as the deer ran around in a circle they came past the boulder, and once again I tried to overtake them. The small herd of deer was led by a large stag that, as I jumped into his path, might have turned upon me, guided by his protective interest. Instead, he merely led his flock around me and they soon outdistanced me.

  After wandering around the deer park for a while and finding all the gates locked, I climbed back over the fence and went into the back door of my house. I found Nona, our maid, sitting at a table, her head in the crook of her arm, evidently crying. She must have known I felt upset. I went through the kitchen hurriedly, going into the dining room and through the living room, then out the front door.

  As I walked along without my topcoat or overcoat, I felt quite hot even though it was a rather cold day. The sun was shining brightly. I looked into the sun but was not dazzled by its glare. Soon, the sun changed its appearance. It was gradually transformed from a fuzzy ball of fire with a shapely outline into a round silver-like disc with a clear halo around it. I looked away from the sun and, as my eyes turned upon the snow in front of me, I could see smoothly outlined, deep yellow spots upon the snow.

  Soon, I arrived at the home of my good friend, the psychiatrist Dr. Reginald Smithwick. I walked across his lawn; then I stopped at his living room window. As was usual for him on Sunday morning, he was sitting in his armchair by the side of the fire, working on tables and texts of a scientific paper. I knocked and, without waiting long, went in.

  “Good morning, Reg,” I said.

  “Hi, Perry,” he replied. “Come and sit down.”

  I sat on the sofa and then lay down for a moment. I cannot recall the context of our conversation, but I admitted that I was somewhat manic and spoke of a feeling of greatly augmented physical strength. Saying this, I rose from my position, walked across the room, and picked up a poker by the fireplace. It was an iron instrument with a shiny copper sheath.

  “Just as an experiment, let me see if I can bend this poker into a figure eight or a bow knot,” I said.

  I started to twist the poker.

  “Don’t!” Reg said in a high-pitched and nervous voice, as if some important decision rested upon what was about to transpire. Paying little attention to what might have been interpreted as a very important warning, I went ahead and twisted the copper poker into the shape of a double circle.

  I could see that Reg was a little upset.

  “Will you call me a taxi?” I asked.

  Obligingly he went to the telephone immediately and called me a taxi.

  “Please take me to the Ritz hotel,” I said to the driver.

  As we drove to the Ritz, it seemed to me that the streets were sing
ularly deserted for a fairly advanced hour of Sunday morning. When the taxi pulled up in front of the Ritz there was no other car in sight.

  In the far corner of the lobby, one of my secretaries, Charlotte Richards, was waiting. I had called my office earlier and asked for someone to come. Charlotte seemed quite nervous.

  We stepped into the elevator and went to my room. There was another luscious copper and iron poker by the fireplace. I picked it up and went into my steel-bending performance.

  “I am the only one who would come,” Charlotte commented. “The rest were afraid.”

  During the following two hours or so, I dictated large amounts to Charlotte, drank enormous quantities of Coca Cola, and smoked Kool cigarettes almost constantly. The waiter brought up Coca Cola by the dozen bottles. I believe that the combination of Coca Colas and Kool cigarettes aggravated my state of excitation. My thoughts seemed to travel with the speed and clearness of light. I dictated and talked continuously.

  Why so much happiness in the manic state? Perhaps an ability to dwell upon only the pleasing phases of one’s past experiences and current problems, combined with an ability to shut out disturbing considerations; the process of thought seems not only clear and logical but powerful and penetrating, features made possible by focusing all attention upon the major facts, leaving out distracting details. Perhaps the euphoria is also in part physiological in nature, representing a spastic sudden flushing of areas of the vascular-bed long idle but now overactive; the escape is a transition from long phases of inactivity to a state characterized by an easy and abundant flow of energy.

  The phone rang in the bedroom. It was my wife, Gretta.

  “Good morning, Perry, how are you?” she asked.

  “Oh, just fine, dear,” I replied. “How are you? I’m here giving some dictation to Charlotte.”