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

  “He liked independent women,” Melinda Novak says. “Harry said what was on his mind and he expected that from you.” He liked to tease, though. She was running the slide projector in class for him one day—because he never could figure out how to use it—when he suddenly said to the class, “See Miss Novak there, I’m going to marry her tomorrow.” “I laughed, the class laughed, it was a good way to see if we were all awake.” Harry encouraged her research, supported experiments that she had designed, boasted about her to others, and, when she left, he gave her monkeys and cages to give her a head start on her new career. “And I have to tell you, there’s no support in my life for the idea that Harry was sexist. People would say to me, ‘Wasn’t he sexist?’ And I’d say, ‘Are you crazy? He was terrific to me.’”

  “But I will tell you that what he did used to do, what Harry liked to do, was to get a rise out of people. I’m not sure why, but he wanted this dialogue. One topic he liked to push buttons on was religion. He’d be at a religious school and he’d say something controversial. One of Harry’s favorite lines, and he used it many times, was to begin a lecture with a picture of two monkeys copulating, one atop the other, and then announce that he was going to call the talk ‘The Sermon on the Mount.’”

  His mounting joke was a regular feature in his talks. Sometimes people laughed. “He had the most perfect comic timing,” recalls McGraw-Hill psychology editor, Jim Bowman, who regularly attended APA conventions. “He’d put up the slide and kind of drawl, ‘I call this ... The Sermon on the Mount.’” And sometimes, as friends and colleagues remember, people stood up and left when Harry told that joke. Gig Levine remembers a psychology meeting in Germany in which the audience simply sat, unsmiling, in disapproving silence until Harry’s voice softened almost into a whisper as he finished his standard talk. Mostly, though, Harry couldn’t resist those wry sexual innuendos. They would come spontaneously into his head. Even at a session focused on the behavior of worms cut into regenerating segments, Harry’s first comment was “I’m glad humans aren’t the only animals to lose their heads over a piece of tail.” It was such off-hand comments and off-color jokes, Novak says, that began to get Harry into trouble. “People would call up the APA. They’d try to get him kicked out. They’d call me up and ask for the skinny on how he mistreated women. And they just got it wrong. He made controversial talks. Sex was something that Harry would use to get some kind of funny reaction.”

  Harry believed that the sexes were biologically different in ways that mattered. Once again, he couldn’t have been more politically out with the fledgling women’s movement. The more popular position was that males and females might look a little different physically but they were basically, fundamentally, alike. If women behaved differently, that was only because a sexist culture had taught them to behave differently. Biologically—barring some sexual apparatus issues—men and women were the same. Logical political sense stood behind that stance and it had to do with arguing for equal treatment.

  To Harry, the women’s movement was just wrong again. He’d been watching natural sex differences for a good three decades. Occasionally, he’d even made a point of telling people about it. Back in September 1961, during a speech to the APA in New York, he pointed out one such variation. Female monkeys are far more likely to stroke and pet when they groom another monkey. Males are brisk and businesslike, efficiently digging out dirt and bugs. “Caressing is both a property and prerogative of the girls. They show better manners too,” Harry said. Little male monkeys were more prone to make faces at each other, especially threat faces: “The females rarely make threat faces and almost never at the little boys they play with.”

  If he hadn’t been aware of those sex differences, some of his most important studies might have failed. When Harry and his students were trying to rescue troubled monkeys, especially the long-term isolates, they used females as peer therapists. The nervous and neurotic isolates needed to be stroked and gently handled. Threat faces and chase games would have only unnerved them further. If at this moment of selecting therapists, Harry had ignored male-female differences—or worse, pretended they didn’t exist—he doubted that the isolated monkeys could have been brought back into normal range.

  That didn’t mean that the monkeys were exact models of human children. But, as he emphasized in his speech, there were very clear parallels. In monkeys, Harry said, “real rough and tumble play is strictly for the boy monkeys.” The little females played, too, but left to themselves they chose less physical games such as chase or tag. Sometimes they were provoked into the games by small male monkeys, who seemed to chase the females around the cage for the sheer fun of it. Any parent, he said, could observe a similar pattern in human children just by watching boys and girls play. “There is no fundamental difference between a Madison park and a laboratory monkey playroom.” In his speech, he told the story of attending a second-grade picnic and watching almost identical behaviors: little boys screaming round the park, little girls chatting to each other. “No little girl chased a little boy, but some little boys chased little girls.”

  Harry had no doubt that, like other childhood play patterns, these sex-typed ones could predict adult behavior. The chatty little girls might grow up to be talkative women. The rowdy little males might become competitive and, perhaps, aggressive men. The nurturing behaviors learned by small females in childhood might carry over into the way they behaved as adult mothers—or friends. The adult males might continue to hone their skills at game playing and alliance building. They would probably continue to be less cuddly than the females. That was just the way it was. Biology influenced behavior and vice versa—and to Harry, it wasn’t worth arguing over. If the feminist movement flatly refused to consider that connection, well, it only added to his contempt for the movement. He expressed that once, in a pointed bit of doggerel: A woman’s libber’s not a saint / She’s just a girl with a complaint / The sexes aren’t created equal / A tragic story with no sequel.

  Harry never seemed to realize, entirely, that this wasn’t just a matter of silly politics. The issue mattered, much, to many people. It wasn’t right that bright, dedicated scientists such as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy should be accused of poor parenting when they were trying harder than many of their male colleagues to balance work and family. Such injustice seemed everywhere and the newly charged female awareness was prickly, defensive, and resentful. Women were poised to detect insult. As psychologist Carol Tavris put it, “Everyone’s consciousness was on hyperalert for signs of sexism.” And men, if they were reluctant to change what they did, were at least softening what they said about women. They saw danger signs out there. Many men were beginning to tiptoe a little more cautiously through what was clearly a well-mined political landscape.

  Harry ignored those signals. He continued saying what he thought, continued telling stories that had worked for him in the past; and he deliberately baited those who didn’t understand his approach. It wasn’t in him to give up on a good point—or a good joke—just because of an emerging sense of squeamishness about women. If his audience was outraged, well, that “tickled his perverse and sometimes waspish sense of humor,” Melinda Novak says.

  He didn’t hold back. Even Harry’s closest colleagues, such as Steve Suomi, worried about his contempt for moderation. Far too often he seemed to cross the line between being provocative and being offensive. Suomi wondered whether Peggy, that vigilant and intelligent editor, had been literally holding Harry back for years. Harry hinted as much to Tavris. His wife had refused to let him use some his best lines, he complained. Now he dusted them off, jokes that he’d been holding back for years. Helen LeRoy, his long-time friend and lab colleague, also tried to tone down his remarks. But they just kept bubbling out.

  Harry published an autobiographical history of the surrogate mother that looked backwards to his zoo days with the old orangutans Maggie and Jiggs. The tale included a story about the irritable Maggie when she was taken on soothing walks by the zoo director.
One day, Harry said, a child threw a rock at Maggie. The ape, angered, reared up into attack position. Desperate to stop her from injuring the boy, the zoo director looked around and saw the kid’s baseball bat on the ground. He picked it up and whacked Maggie with it. The orangutan halted, rubbing her head. She then put her hand back into the zookeeper’s and “let him lead her to her cage where she looked at him with loving admiration.” At last, Harry wrote, Maggie had found “a man who understood the psychology of females.”

  In a paper on surrogate mother experiments, “The Nature of Love—Simplified,” Harry discussed the importance of temperature in the surrogate mothers. He and his students had designed an extrawarm surrogate and a cooled-down one to check for the baby monkey’s responses to mother’s body temperature. “We felt we had really simulated the two extremes of womanhood—one with a hot body and no head and one with a cold shoulder and no heart,” he wrote. When Harry wrote about the isolated monkeys and their sexual incompetence, he described the restraining device that would harness a female so that a male could mount her. Harry didn’t call it a restraining device, though, or a reproductive apparatus, or any of those neutral terms that animal researchers like to use. This was, after all, the man who came up with “pit of despair” to describe depression experiments. So Harry informed his readers that the restraining device was “affectionately termed the rape rack.”

  He also sprinkled such comments through his speeches. Jim Sackett still shakes his head over Harry’s guest appearance at the University of Washington, after Sackett had become a professor there. “Did you ever see The Producers, that scene when the audience actually gets that the story is Hitler? That’s what they looked like here.” Scientists and students alike had their mouths hanging open; they were turning to look at each other in disbelief. “They were aghast. It could have been them in The Producers. He put all his sexist remarks into one talk, I think, and all the women’s libbers, remember this is the 1970s, they just left.”

  Jane Glascock, then a Ph.D. student in cognitive psychology at the university, talked excitedly with her friends when they learned that the famous Harry Harlow would be speaking. They were expecting to hear about love, about connection and relationship in its purest, warmest sense. Instead, the message came laced with antifeminist mockery, “derisive, sexist remarks of the most insulting and unsubtle kind.” Glascock listed them in a furious letter to her department head: Harry had said that “isolation-reared monkeys were forever confined to a stage of infantilism, which wasn’t so bad if you were a female.” He had praised Melinda Novak by saying she was so bright that “it broke his heart she wasn’t a man.” He had talked of hope springing eternal in the human breast, and then showed a picture of a nude woman: “Dr. Harlow obviously has his own problems. However, by playing for laughs by degrading and insulting women for want of substantial research matters to present, he has insulted all of us and made those who sponsored him appear nearly as foolish for doing so.”

  Glascock was sitting in the audience with Earl Hunt, her major professor, and, she says, “I remember him pretty much physically restraining me during Harlow’s talk. This was still fairly early on in the women’s movement and I was just so shocked and outraged by his behavior and his allusions. So I ran right home to my typewriter.” Looking back now, she’s less angry. Harry’s talk might have been one of the era’s more outrageous instances of sexual offensiveness, but hardly the only one. Harry Harlow, as she rapidly learned, was just one among many men slow in adjusting to the new realities. One film shown to grad students, on the subject of perception, involved the narrator at a party primarily following “this bimbo with these immense breasts while trying to make points about psychology. It was horrible.” In her memory, now, Harry is just one of the old boys, men of an earlier generation, who hadn’t been able to make the change when the world around them did, who were still learning, with shock, that women should be treated with the respect routinely given to men.

  There were moments when you might forget that Harry Harlow was a man who liked and appreciated smart women. He could sound as if women were not only a lesser half of the species but a drag on the better half. California psychologist Steve Glickman still recalls one such acid-edged conversation. Glickman, a professor of psychology at the University of California-Berkeley, is a noted expert on the link between hormones and behavior. After one particularly drunken party following a psychology conference in Chicago in the early 1970s, Glickman and his new wife, Christa, drove Harry home. It was 2:00 A.M. when they got to the hotel. “And Harry’s still not ready to have the evening end and he says, ‘Let’s have breakfast.’ And we’re sitting in this booth in the hotel coffee shop and all of a sudden Harry leans forward, avoiding Christa’s eyes, and says to me, ‘Now that you’re happily married, you’ll never get anything done.’”

  And yet Harry was a man whose career had flourished in the companionship of bright, capable women. He’d married two of them, after all. In the time since Peggy’s death, there were once again signs that Harry was a man lost without a companion. His friends and colleagues and students, and even his children, pitched in to help. Helen LeRoy and Ken Schiltz, fed up with his shabby clothes, took Harry shopping and outfitted him in style. Harry continued to put in the extra hours at the lab. But he wrote to former students that he was finding life without Peggy extremely difficult. He was fixed on the world of twosomes, happily married or not, around him. He was going to faculty parties again, asking people whether they were married. “After Peggy died, Harry was fascinated by people’s relationships,” says Wisconsin psychologist Charles Snowdon.

  Harry had never liked being alone. He knew the importance of companionship and comfort. He longed for it. He started thinking not about some new, bright relationship but about an old one. He’d regretted failing at his first marriage. He began to think now about starting over. He and his first wife had always stayed loosely in touch because of their two sons. Harry had not been a stay-at-home father but he’d never chosen to disconnect from his older sons. Peggy had always insisted on his keeping a distance from his other family. But when Harry had business trips that brought him nearby, he’d visited his children anyway. His older son, Bob, had continued to write to him: “He always wrote back. The fastest reply was when I called him Harry in a letter. I was twelve. He wrote back and said, ‘You call me Dad.’”

  At the time when Harry began thinking again of Clara, she was also on her own. Clara had remarried twice. Shortly after the divorce from Harry, she had chosen a very different kind of partner. Robert Potter had studied at a technical school and was employed as an industrial parts salesman. The Potters decided to move to the Southwest. Clara had lived there as a child and loved it. They bought a small ranch outside Reno. Clara had wanted a full partner in parenting and now she had it. Her second husband took his new fatherhood seriously: “He was shrewd, tough, a strict disciplinarian, extremely fair,” says Bob Israel, looking back. “He was a wonderful man and he cared a great deal about us. Not the hugging and touching type. But he was always there, and if we wanted an opinion, he would listen and he would say what he thought.” To Harry’s outrage, Bob and Rick took the last name of Potter. In an angry note to the clerk of the court in Dane County, where his divorce was handled, Harry wrote that he would continue to pay the child support. But, “I make this payment and any subsequent payments under protest since I have learned that the children have been living ... under assumed names.”

  The Potters didn’t stay in Reno. They had a child there, a little boy named Thomas, who was born in 1949. Two years later, the child drowned in a drainage ditch behind the ranch house. They simply left, fled the place, moved to the Carmel Valley in California. They started a children’s clothing store and named it Little Tyke in honor of their dead son. Clara continued answering Terman’s questionnaires, but there was little trace of her early joyfulness. After Thomas’s death, she mailed back forms full of blank spaces as if she didn’t have the energy or heart to wr
ite about her life.

  She had more trouble to come. Robert Potter suffered from bleeding ulcers. In 1960, after a series of operations to try to mend his stomach walls, he died of a resulting infection. Clara decided again on a new start. Searching for a complete change, she decided to try hotel management school, was accepted into a program in Tennessee, packed up, and moved again. She married a fellow student, Clint Thompson, but the marriage was brief. “He was a nice guy,” recalls Bob Israel. “But whenever he touched alcohol he was just out of control.” She divorced Thompson in 1965, after two years, and took a job as a counselor in the University of Tennessee’s school of nursing in Knoxville. Clara Thompson was working there when her first husband, troubled by regrets and loneliness, came calling.

  They picked up the old, good relationship with startling speed. “I’ve always said that Dad never really stopped loving Mom,” Bob Israel says. Harry felt, at least, that Clara knew him, for better and for worse. He wrote her a poem to that effect: “The things that cause you no surprise / are all my lies and alibis / for you can all too easy see / the faults that are a part of me.”

  They were remarried March 1972, eight months after Peggy’s death, in a small civil ceremony in Knoxville. The newlyweds celebrated by partying late into the night with an old psychology friend, University of Tennessee psychology professor William Verplanck. The reunited couple then went on a honeymoon tour of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Harry wrote to Verplanck that “we plan our third honeymoon in Hawaii. We are too old to pass up any chances since the next could easily be our last.” He also thanked Verplanck for his company on the wedding night and sent him a bit of Harryesque verse: “Courage strong and honor bright / Courage usually lasts the night.”

  Clara’s reports to Stanford turned suddenly exuberant again; she wrote of her “unexpected happiness in remarriage to my present husband.” The Harlows settled into a condominium on a newly developed street of apartments, condos, and small shops in the western suburban edge of Madison.