America's Obsessives: The Compulsive Energy That Built a Nation Read Free Page A

University who ran the Medical Center’s OCD Clinic for many years. But this rarely happens. More often than not, like the inflexible Charles Lindbergh, who insisted that his wife, the writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh, keep track of all household expenditures in detailed ledgers, those with OCPD tend to drive other family members into treatment. And Anne Lindbergh had to fight with her husband in order to see a psychotherapist, because he hated everything to do with psychiatry.
    OCPD is also sometimes confused with Asperger’s syndrome. “Aspies” do have some of the same core symptoms, such as rigidity, anger outbursts, and lack of empathy; they, too, can get caught up in repetitive or ritualistic behavior such as collecting bits of information (though they gravitate even more toward the totally useless variety). But the hallmark of this autistic spectrum disorder is the inability to read the social or emotional cues of others—something that doesn’t apply to obsessives. While obsessives can also be cold and distant, they are capable of occasional warmth and charm. For example, Estée Lauder had a remarkable knack for relating to customers, but not necessarily to anyone else; with both employees and family members, she was often demanding and unpredictable. And the characteristically tight-lipped Lindbergh eventually learned a thing or two about how to seduce women—techniques that he would need to feed his sexual addiction. If he had been a true Aspie, he would not have been able to maintain his long-term affairs with his three German mistresses, with whom he fathered a total of seven children. Aspies, who often have trouble connecting with their dates, certainly can’t do that kind of thing (nor, for that matter, can most of us, as it takes an obsessive innovator to build four families).
    While several of these seven super-achievers found a degree of happiness in marriage—including Lindbergh, who developed a deep and meaningful bond with Anne, even though he spent as little as two months a year with her—they all lived as fragmented individuals. Uncomfortable in their own skin, they often fiddled with their identity or created new identities. Estée Lauder (née Josephine Esther Mentzer) hid her Jewish background by inventing not only a new name, but also a bogus aristocratic family, whose origins she kept changing. Much to the amusement of his library colleagues, Melvil (né Melville) Dewey changed his last name to “Dui” after a business failure in his late twenties. On his love trips to Germany, Charles Lindbergh borrowed Superman’s pseudonym, Careu Kent; and the swinging bachelor Ted Williams would sometimes check himself into hotel rooms as G. C. Luther (“How do you doubt,” the perspicacious dissembler explained, “a name like G. C. Luther?”). While Thomas Jefferson didn’t hide his identity, he also had a secret lover—his slave Sally Hemings.
    These larger-than-life figures were several fully realized Shakespearean characters all rolled into one. Besides the sybarite and the upstanding family man (or woman), they housed a host of other contradictory selves such as the saint, the sinner, the rule maker, and the rule breaker. Like the young Steve Jobs, who rarely showered, Alfred Kinsey was a cleanliness nut who flirted with filth; the sex doctor enjoyed hanging around public bathrooms in order to count (and to hook up with) gay men searching for anonymous sex partners. Ted Williams helped save the lives of thousands of cancer patients through his tireless advocacy on behalf of the Jimmy Fund, a charity affiliated with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston; however, he also was, as he admitted, “horseshit” with his own three children. The Red Sox star was even two different people on the baseball diamond; the hyperfocused hitter coexisted with the lackadaisical outfielder, who sometimes turned his back to home plate in order to take phantom swings. For Williams, as for the others, the