Libertine Legacy

Martin Blinder's new book shows life in Washington hasn't changed that much.

BY JILL KRAMER

Talk about timing: Martin Blinder has just come out with a new novel about a president who has adulterous sex in the Oval Office. No, it's not about Bill Clinton. It's a mostly factual account of the presidency of Warren G. Harding, a man whose sexual excesses make Clinton look like a goody two-shoes. Titled Fluke, it pre-sents Harding as a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington type-a small-town guy with no political ambitions who finds him-self manipulated into the White House and somehow rises to the, er, grows into, uh, learns to meet the challenge.

Blinder likes a challenge too. Primarily a psychiatrist, he's found the time to write a number of books, including a travel book, a cookbook, a textbook and a handful of stage plays and screenplays. Fluke is his first novel. And "author" is just one of the many roles he's assumed over the years: he was on the San Anselmo Town Council from 1972-76, serving as mayor in his final year. And if you were frequenting jazz clubs about 10 years ago, you may have heard him on the piano, playing with his trio in Tiburon.

His close friend Denny Zeitlin, another piano-playing psychiatrist, tells me Blinder is also a tap-dancer and a stand-up comic. "He's one of the most multitalented people I've ever come across," says Zeitlin. "His book Psychiatry in the Everyday Practice of Law is really the standard. While he was still a psychiatric resident, he became interested in the drug lithium, which was being used in Europe but not used at all in the United States. He got the first experimental license to use it in the U.S. and set up the first lithium program here. And in addition to all that, he's managed to be a great friend, a really fine father and shown a lot of interest in his community. He manages to accomplish a tremendous amount."

Blinder is known best, to his dismay, for the psychiatric testimony he gave in the Dan White case, dubbed "the Twinkie defense" by the press. Blinder testified that, in the events leading up to his murder of San Francisco mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk, White had plunged into a deep depression, barricaded in his house and bingeing on junk food. "That little media sound-bite contin-ued to orbit around him for years," says Zeitlin, "whereas that whole Twinkie thing was a very small portion of his testimony. I think the media treated him unfairly on that score. But it didn't stop him from continuing to practice forensic psychiatry and calling things as he sees them."

Blinder came West from New York City to do his internship at San Francisco General and moved to Marin in the late '60s. I met him at his home, an 1895 four-story mansion with a wraparound Southern plantation-style veranda, up a narrow road near downtown San Anselmo.

As I walked through the garden, the sounds of a jazz combo greeted me before I reached the front steps. He likes to play his records loud, I thought. Certain he wouldn't be able to hear a knock on the door, I went to the window and saw him at a grand piano, rocking out. Must be playing along with the recording, I thought, rapping on the glass. Once I was inside, he showed me the source of his musical accompaniment: an electronic keyboard that he had programmed with all the instrumental parts.

He gave me a tour of the house that he shares with his two grown children-a daughter in law school and a son who's a banker. (His second wife died several years ago.) I lost count of all the rooms. There are five fireplaces, he tells me. A narrow, winding staircase leads down to a wine cellar. And one of the bedrooms has a view of the San Francisco Theological Seminary on one side and, on the other, Red Hill-the site of a massive slide that destroyed two homes in the early '70s and helped Mayor Blinder pass a restrictive ordinance against building on the tow's slopes. out in the garden, Blinder shows me his prized fruit trees, which he grows organically-macadamia nut, guava and other tropical exotica. "I go out and speak Spanish to them," he says,"so they'll think they're still in Guatemala."

Were you thinking about parallels with Bill Clinton when you were writing Fluke?

No, not at all. You know the lag time between the idea and seeing your book between covers. None of us had any idea of Bill and Monica's cavorting in the Oval Office at the time. I started writing it two years ago, well before the scandal broke.

Well, we knew about Gennifer Flowers.

Sure. But then, before Clinton became president, we knew this about Kennedy and Roosevelt and Jefferson. There wasn't anything contemporary that drew me to this. If anything, it's that I'm very interested in the narcissistic personality. These are folks who have an extraordinary need for validation, for adoration. They are attracted to the arts, the theater, politics, where they have the opportunity to get that kind of validation. And you have to be extraordinarily narcissistic, as well as being very bright and very persistent, to be a successful politician. To endure the hardship of climbing that ladder-to take the slings and arrows from the press, the loss of privacy, to spend your life raising money-it's a terrible life, so you have to really want that job. And for most men, the most direct, hard-wired route to getting validation is through the sexual favors of a beautiful young woman. So politicians, since time immemorial, have always had their groupies. If every politician in this country who committed adultery and lied about it resigned or were impeached, Washington and the 50 state-houses would be ghost towns.

From what you write, I understand that Harding didn't want to be president.

He was an exception, that's true. He was not a narcissist. He was an unlikely candidate for president; he was an average Joe who fell into the White House through a fluke. He didn't want it, he was not very good at it, although he got his act together toward the end.

But he had a tremendous sexual appetite. I've read that he had a long string of lovers that weren't even mentioned in your book.

Quite true. After the book was in galleys, I stumbled upon two more mistresses that I hadn't heard about before. They had just died, so their papers became available. But Harding had women stashed in every corner of his life.

You certainly romanticized him. I don't think he was really the romantic, benign figure that you portray.

[A pause.] I deliberately turned my eyes away from the sleaze factor. Some of his couplings with Nan Britton [one of two mistresses mentioned in the book] were pretty sordid, I thought. But you're right, I was selective. There's always a question of which facts you choose when you order up your novel.

There was an article in the Washington Post that said several of Harding's lovers, including nan Britton, blackmailed him. So she wasn't all that innocent, either.

[Laughs] That's what happens when you get interviewed by the Pacific Sun. You don't get away with anything. You're right, there was a sordid aspect to her as well. But that certainly wasn't why she went into it. She wasn't just doing it for the money. She was 15 years old when she met him. But toward the end, she did hit up poor Warren for the hush money.

Poor Warren? You really have a lot of sympathy for him.

Yeah. I have sympathy for people who are in over their heads. I've been in over my head myself now and then. And the irony of his poor guy finding himself in the most powerful position in the world with the brain of an avocado-there's an ironic tragedy about it. And there's some of Harding in all of us. To that extent, sure, I empathize.

I understand that officials in Harding's administration paid off his blackmailers and even silenced the women through intimidation. Did his colleagues in Congress find that as scandalous as they would today?

Good question. It wasn't until Gary Hart that this sort of stuff was fair game. If I'm right about narcissism, this stuff must have been rampant and we will never know about it because it was effectively suppressed. People were intimidated, people died young, they didn't have access to the press, or, if they did, the press wouldn't publish it. Nan spent four years getting her book published. So there's not much for historians to find. But my guess is that this was rampant, not just in the White House, but in Congress. And the pot's not about to call the kettle black. One politician is not about to call another on the carpet for committing the same kind of adulterous acts that he himself committed.

They're doing it now. It's only after they get caught, like Livingston, that they self-righteously resign.

Yes, and Hyde, with his "youthful indiscretion"-he was 42!

There was also a lot of graft and corruption in Harding's administration.

Yes, but I think Harding himself was scrupulously honest. I don't think that was an airbrush job on my part. He had very little money when he started out and he had very little money at the end.

So if he had lived[Harding died in office], you don't think he would have been impeached?

No, I think his reputation has suffered because he was not around to defend it. These uniquely odious cronies of his had the last word. And, by association, we tar him now. But he himself did nothing wrong. Except he was guilty of inattention and a dependency upon those who were familiar to him. Obviously, that's a liability in a head of state.

Tell me about yourself. When did you decide to go to medical school?

When I found out that I was allergic to animals and couldn't be a veterinarian. My father was a physician and the sort of man that any son would be proud to have as a father. He was a doctor's doctor. Sort of a cross between Spencer Tracy and FDR, if you can imagine that. I was torn between medicine and music. And I remember my father saying to me, "Your mother and I want you to know that if you choose music, we will support you in your endeavors just as we would if you choose medicine." So many of my friends' fathers said [voice gets high and loud in imitation of an irate parent], "A musician, you'll spend your whole life in smoky bars surrounded by loose women-your mother and i will cut you off without a cent!" Had he said that, I would probably be, to this day, in smoky bars dealing with predations of loose women had I survived the secondary smoke effects. But he very wisely gave me my choice. I became a doctor and right away went back and played piano again. So I ended up having both.

What brought you to Marin?

I'm a dedicated organic gardener. And a window box in San Francisco just doesn't cut it. When this property became available, with all it's opportunities for experimental orchards, I took it.

How did you get into local politics?

Like many of us, I had been known to write angry letters to City Hall. And I thought,"this is a waste of time-why not become City Hall and let people write angry letters to me?"

What made you angry?

Pollution. Overdevelopment. A disrespect for our natural resources. Up until then, Marin County was run by development-minded individuals. The chambers of commerce and the real estate lobby essentially ran the towns. Fortunately, I got elected with another environmentalist, and I could usually pic up that third vote. So we just stopped all the development and we started building parks and educating our police, opening up restaurants. There were no restaurants in Marin! Every time someone would come down to the city council for a use permit, the polic chief would shoot it down, because he would hear "bar." It took me awhile, but I finally brought him around.

The turnaround from prodevelopment to preservation was happening at the county level at the same time.

Right [Gary] Giacomini got in. Barbara Boxer got in. So we really made this place what it is today. I started a street tree-planting program, had Creek Park built. This was the last public property that bordered on our creek and they were going to pave it and make it a parking lot! I turned it into a park, and then sidewalk cafes started to open up along the creek. Trouble was, we used up all the money [building the park]. And I noticed in one of my nursery catalogs, the nursery was having a contest-"Why I Love Trees," in 25 words or less. I have no idea what I wrote, but I sent it in on behalf of the city and we won first prize. Two weeks later, these enormous trucks come with all those trees-the birches and the redwoods-we got them free!

How wonderful!

And during my administration [voice booms, like a speechifying politician], I am proud to say, we multiplied the parkland in San Anselmo twenty-fold. We got Robeson Park. Just before I got elected, that became available. They were going to take out all those wonderful fruit trees-we would had had condos there! I stopped that. We restored the mansion and we established a policy where, if you lived in San Anselmo and didn't have your own plot of land, you could have a plot at Robeson Park during the summer.

A community garden!

Yeah-a kibbutz! A kibbutz in Marin. Nobody knew I had these ideas, or I never would have gotten elected. They saw "Dr. Blinder," they thought I was a conservative guy.

They have community gardens in San Francisco these days, but they probably didn't back then.

No. We were the first. Memorial Park and Sorich Park-these are acres and acres of land that now belong to the public and will never, ever be developed. The hillsides were all going to be developed. But we put in such stiff ordinances that essentially nobody can build on them.

I think you're most famous for the Dan White case. Tell me about that.

Well, when juries give defendants a partial pass, as they did with Dan White-they convicted him of manslaughter-it's because, to some degree, the defense has enabled them to identify with the criminal. They understand why he did what he did. They may not approve of it, but they find themselves thinking, "there but for the grace of God go I." and psychiatric testimony is one of the ways that is done. The psychiatrist takes the jury from his earliest years right up to the moment he pulls the trigger and lets them see how a confluence of forces impinging on this man led him inexorably to his horrible act-an act which took the lives of two fine people, friends of mine as a matter of fact.

And yet you weren't biased against him?

How could you ever be unbiased when a man kills two people? Dan White was never gonna be my kinda guy. Plus the fact that he was right-wing and he killed two liberals. But you have to put your personal feelings aside and examine it clinically.

Looking back on it now, do you feel you did the right thing?

I don't know what "right" is in a case like this. I certainly did what was clinically supportable, in my view. If through eloquence I misled the jury, or through misapprehension of the clinical facts I missed the boat, then it was not the right thing. But juries hear a lot more evidence than the public, which just gets little snatches. The gay community were outraged and they certainly felt it was a miscarriage of justice. But I can't think about outcomes. I have to do my job, which is just to present the clinical facts even if the outcomes is not congenial with my own preferences.

He struck me as the kind of person who could easily kill again.

He did. He committed suicide a year or two after his release. I think he served six or seven years. He was a very depressed guy. And with people who are lethally depressed, you don't know till the last minute which way that gun is going to be pointed. Sometimes they point it in both directions. Suicide and homicide are a millimeter apart on the surface of the psyche.

When I read your testimony in your book Lovers, Killers, Husbands, Wives, it seemed to me that he fit the typical profile of the killer in the workplace.

Good point. And this awareness of violence in the workplace is also a new phenomenon. But we didn't connect the dots then. Retrospectively, I think Dan White would fit the profile. But the clinical facts are immutable. They don't change with times, they don't change with the politics. And my testimony is the same whether I'm called by the prosecution or the defense. Did I enjoy the insults from my liberal friends? Did I enjoy the character assassinations in my direction from the gay community, seeing me as some kind of homophobic gay-basher? Of course not! The nasty remarks my children had to put up with. All the things that happen to someone in a small community who takes an unpopular position. No, I don't like that! I would like to be [smiles] universally adored. But it ain't gonna happen. I was not universally adored as a city councilman. I made a lot of omelets. But I got a lot done.

Are you cooking up any new projects?

I've started a one-man play called Churchill. The world could use an admirable leader we could look up to and he was such a marvelous guy, and such a witty guy.

Yes. And so human! He was a man of passion and a great leader.

He was. Faithful to his wife for 57 years, but certainly passionate in all the good ways. His mother was such a tramp that i think it probably had a powerful Victorian effect on him. Immersed as I am now in Churchilliana, my children tell me that after a glass of wine I start to talk like him. Just to give you a sample [from the play]: "At a dinner party, Lady Astor was overheard to say to my wife, 'If I were Winston's wife, I'd poison his soup.' Whereupon a voice was heard to ring out-not quite sober, mine, I believe-'Madam, If you were Winston's wife Winston would gladly drink it down.' George Bernard Shaw sent me a note. 'Churchill-enclosed find two tickets to the opening of my new play. Please come. Bring a friend, if you have one.' I immediately wrote back, 'Shaw-cannot come to the opening. Will attend the second show, if there is one."