Madness Writers

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· Dr. Pamella Hosang, the unofficial dean of Caribbean nurses in New York, now retired, who nursed and taught nursing for fifty-two years, said that she'd had a difficult trip on the subway coming to the event. Service had been cut and the train was packed, and then it ran local. Her burgundy outfit looked elegant nonetheless. The title of her talk was "Opportunities in Nursing." There are many, because nurses are everywhere. Dr. Hosang didn't decide to be a nurse; she just sort of jumped into it in Jamaica when she was eighteen. She began as a registered nurse, kept studying, and became a community health nurse, a nurse researcher, a midwife, and a public-health nurse. She got her Ed.D. in nursing from Columbia. Beyond hospitals and doctors' offices, nurses also work in industry, in schools, and in informatics (computer sciences). There are nurses at airports. "Nothing is more exciting than being a nurse," she said, to nods of approval. Personally, she added, she was an admirer of Mary Seacole, but her lifelong hero had been Florence Nightingale. "She raised nurses from their previous lowly status as domestic servants, or even prostitutes, and made nursing a great calling," Dr. Hosang said.

· Mary Seacole, later in life, became a masseuse to Alexandra, Princess of Wales.

· Mary Seacole died in 1881, probably of a stroke. There is, or soon will be, a statue of her in London. ♦

This American Life

The making and remaking of Malcolm X.

by David Remnick April 25, 2011

"You're another of the white man's tools sent to spy!" Malcolm told Alex Haley when they first met. Photograph by Eve Arnold.

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Keywords Malcolm X; Manning Marable; "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention" (Viking; $30); "The Autobiography of Malcolm X"; Alex Haley; Biographies; Elijah Muhammad

On summer nights, in 1963, Malcolm X drove his blue Oldsmobile from Mosque No. 7, the Harlem headquarters of the Nation of Islam, to an apartment building on Grove Street, in Greenwich Village, where a freelance writer named Alex Haley sat waiting for him in an eight-by-ten-foot studio. There, the two would remain until early morning. Haley sat at a desk typing notes while Malcolm—tall, austere, dressed always in a dark suit, a white shirt, and a narrow dark tie—drank cup after cup of coffee, paced the room, and talked. What emerged was the hegira of Malcolm's life as a black man in mid-century America: his transformation from Malcolm Little, born in Omaha to troubled parents whose salve against racist harassment and violence was the black-nationalist creed of Marcus Garvey; to Detroit Red, a numbers-running hustler on the streets of Boston and New York; to a convicted felon known among fellow-prisoners as Satan; to Malcolm X, a charismatic deputy to the Nation of Islam's leader, Elijah Muhammad, and the most electrifying proponent of black nationalism alive. "My whole life has been a chronology of changes," Malcolm told Haley one night, and, in a few months, he would transform himself yet again, becoming El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, a Sunni Muslim.

When Haley first met Malcolm, in 1959, he had recently retired from a twenty-year career in the Coast Guard, and had embarked on a career as a journalist. He soon published articles about the Nation of Islam and Malcolm in Reader's Digest and The Saturday Evening Post. Haley was not at all in accord with the Nation's theology or its vehement ideology of racial separatism. He was a liberal Republican, an integrationist, who admired A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—the mainstream civil-rights leaders whom Malcolm denounced as "stooges" and "lackeys."

"You're another of the white man's tools sent to spy!" Malcolm told Haley at their first meeting. Despite their obvious differences, though, Malcolm thought that Haley's articles had been fair. After interviewing Malcolm for Playboy, Haley persuaded him to collaborate on an "as told to" autobiography. They would split a twenty-thousand-dollar advance from Doubleday.

The first sessions on Grove Street were frustrating, as Malcolm spent countless hours praising the wisdom of Elijah Muhammad, and avoided all mention of his own life. Then came a night when Haley asked Malcolm, "I wonder if you'd tell me something about your mother?" Malcolm's voice softened. Walking in a tight circle, he said, "She was always standing over the stove, trying to stretch whatever we had to eat." He began to tell the story of his life, how the family's house was burned to the ground by the white racists of the Black Legion, how his white teacher told him he could never be a lawyer ("That's no realistic goal for a nigger!"). They talked until dawn, accumulating much of a first chapter, which Haley titled "Nightmare."

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Haley's ambition was to write a bestseller; in Malcolm, he recognized not a great man, necessarily, but a great story, even a dangerous one. By 1964, Malcolm had fallen out with the Nation of Islam, and he became convinced, rightly, that he did not have long to live. Followed all his public life by the F.B.I. and the police, Malcolm was now being pursued by the Nation, with its thuggish "pipe squads," the Fruit of Islam. Haley cared for Malcolm, but he cared for the book no less. "I sometimes think that you do not really understand what will be the effect of this book," he wrote Malcolm in a long letter. "There has never been, at least not in our time, any other book like it. Do you realize that to do these things you will have to be alive?" In order to fend off deadlines, meanwhile, Haley wrote buoyantly to his agent and editors, insisting that the book would "sweep the market like wildfire": "For this man is so hot, so HOT, a subject . . . this book is so pregnant with millions or more sales potential, including to make foreign rights hotly bid for!"

On February 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom, in Washington Heights, multiple assassins fired shotguns and pistols at Malcolm as he stepped to the lectern for a speech. Two hours after hearing the news, Haley wrote to his agent, "None of us would have had it be this way, but since this book represent's [sic] Malcolm's sole financial legacy to his widow and four little daughters . . . I'm just glad that it's ready for the press now at a peak of interest for what will be international large sales, and paperback, and all."

The publisher, Nelson Doubleday, fearing for the lives of his staff, cancelled his deal with Haley; Barney Rosset, the bold and ingenious proprietor of Grove Press, picked up the contract. He would not be sorry. Between 1965 and 1977, "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" sold six million copies worldwide, and the book continues to sell briskly, both to general readers and to students for whom it is required reading. In 1992, Spike Lee set off a bout of "Malcolmania," with his three-hour-plus film. In its wake, people as unlikely as Dan Quayle talked sympathetically about Malcolm. A poll showed that eighty-four per cent of African-Americans between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four saw Malcolm as "a hero for black Americans today." The video for Public Enemy's "Shut 'Em Down" put Malcolm's face on the dollar bill. A vivid but secondary figure in his own time, Malcolm X had achieved the status of an icon. And he did it with a book that he never lived to see published.

For nearly twenty years, Manning Marable, a historian at Columbia, labored on what he hoped would be a definitive scholarly work on Malcolm X. During this period, Marable struggled with sarcoidosis, a pulmonary disease, and even underwent a double lung transplant. Recently, he completed his rigorous and evenhanded biography, "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention" (Viking; $30), but, in an echo of his subject's fate, he died on the eve of publication. One of his goals was to grapple with Malcolm's autobiography, and although he finds much to admire about Malcolm, he makes it clear that the book's drama sometimes comes at the expense of fact. Haley wanted to write a "potboiler that would sell," Marable observes, and Malcolm was accustomed to exaggerating his exploits—"the number of his burglaries, the amount of marijuana he sold to musicians, and the like." Malcolm, like St. Augustine, embellished his sins in order to heighten the drama of his reform.

The literary urge outran the knowable facts even in the most crucial episode in Malcolm's childhood. One evening, in 1931, in Lansing, Michigan, when Malcolm was six, his father, Earl Little, a part-time Garveyite teacher, went to collect "chicken money" from families who bought poultry from him. That night, he was found bleeding to death on the streetcar tracks. The authorities ruled his death an accident, but Malcolm's mother, Louise, was sure he had been beaten by the Black Legion and laid on the tracks to be run over and killed. Perhaps he had been, but, as Marable notes, nobody knew for sure. The autobiography (and Lee's film) presents the ostensible murder as established fact, and yet Malcolm himself, in a 1963 speech at Michigan State University, referred to the death as accidental.

It's indisputable that the family suffered terribly, from both racism and humiliating poverty. This was an era of lynchings, Jim Crow, and economic depression. Malcolm says he was sometimes "dizzy" with hunger. His mother became a barely functional depressive, given to mumbling to herself for hours in a rocking chair; she was eventually institutionalized. Malcolm, who was sent off to a series of foster homes and an all-white school, scarcely saw her for twenty-five years. Even if Malcolm's autobiography intensified the colors of his story, the general grimness of "Nightmare"—his sense of deprivation and hurt, his rage at white society—is borne out by Marable's scholarship.

Malcolm worked for a while on Pullman trains, clowning for the passengers, and eventually landed in Roxbury and Harlem, where he was a small-time gangster, with a conk and a zoot suit, pimping and selling dope, hanging out with musicians, hustlers, and prostitutes at famous nightspots like the Roseland Ballroom and Small's Paradise. Like Charlie Parker before him, he washed dishes at Jimmy's Chicken Shack. He not only ran numbers but wagered on them, too: "Every day I would gamble all of my tips—as high as fifteen and twenty dollars—on the numbers, and dream of what I would do when I hit."

Although the autobiography portrays him as apolitical during these years, this seems to have been a dramatic device to signal ignorance before enlightenment. Marable tracked down a reliable witness who says that Malcolm "would talk often about how his father used to get brutalized and beat up on the corner selling Marcus Garvey's paper, and he would talk a lot about Garvey's concepts in terms of how they could benefit us as a people."

In Boston, Malcolm worked for William Paul Lennon, the son of a successful Rhode Island merchant. In 1944, Malcolm was a "butler and occasional house worker" at Lennon's house on Arlington Street, near the Public Garden. In the autobiography, he writes about his friend Rudy, who went to see the "blueblood" every week: "He paid Rudy to undress them both, then pick up the old man like a baby, lay him on his bed, then stand over him, and sprinkle him all over with talcum powder. Rudy said the old man would actually reach his climax from that." Marable writes that, "based on circumstantial but strong evidence, Malcolm was probably describing his own homosexual encounters with Paul Lennon." When this suggestion first surfaced, in a tendentious 1991 biography by Bruce Perry, the criticism was huge, but Marable insists that the evidence is now more compelling.

The days of Detroit Red came to an end in 1946. Malcolm and another hustler named Shorty Jarvis, along with their two white girlfriends, went on a robbery spree, and Malcolm was arrested trying to get a stolen watch repaired. After the judge gave him and Jarvis concurrent eight-to-ten-year sentences, Malcolm's lawyer told him, "You had no business with white girls!"

At Charlestown State Prison, Malcolm boasted about his criminal exploits, got high on nutmeg, and met a jailhouse autodidact who convinced him of the virtues of books. Malcolm started reading Kant and Nietzsche, H. G. Wells and Herodotus; he even tried to memorize the dictionary. In 1948, he received a letter from his older brother Philbert saying that he and others in the family had converted to the Nation of Islam—"a program designed to help black people." After reading up on the Nation, Malcolm sat in his cell and wrote twenty-five drafts of a one-page letter to Elijah Muhammad, pledging his spiritual loyalty. In a welcoming reply, Elijah Muhammad enclosed a five-dollar bill.

If you are a believer (and very few are these days), the origins of the Nation of Islam stretch back thousands of years, to a time when blacks, the "original people," were assaulted by a mutant white race created by an evil "Big Head" scientist named Yacub. The whites achieved dominion over the earth and blacks "went to sleep," mentally and spiritually. The purpose of the Nation of Islam was to rouse the black man from his slumber. (Armed spaceships come into it, too.) Such were the teachings of Wallace D. Fard, an ex-con, silk salesman, and eccentric storefront preacher who turned up in a Detroit ghetto around 1930. Fard also had more earthly advice. He told his followers to avoid alcohol, to work hard and save money, to own their own businesses, and to regain a sense of the nobility of their race. His Nation of Islam represented a cultish offshoot of a venerable American movement, black nationalism.

One summer night, in 1931, at a former Garveyite meeting hall in Detroit, a onetime sharecropper from Georgia with a fourth-grade education named Elijah Poole came to hear Fard preach, and afterward told him, "I know who you are, you are God himself." "That's right," Fard said. "But don't tell it now. It is not yet time for me to be known." Fard set up operations in Chicago, and Poole became his minister. In 1934, Fard mysteriously disappeared and the apostle, now called Elijah Muhammad, took command of the Nation of Islam.

The Nation that Malcolm joined when he was released, in 1952, was tiny and largely apolitical. Its members, who numbered in the hundreds, were instructed not to vote. Elijah Muhammad, who was remarkably uncharismatic, quickly recognized in Malcolm a dynamic and tireless organizer and speaker, and dispatched him to Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, and, finally, Harlem, to establish new temples. While the civil-rights movement developed in the South, Malcolm went from ghetto to ghetto in the North, the Midwest, and California. He turned white supremacy on its head—whites were "blue-eyed devils"—and urged solidarity with the emerging independence movements of Africa and Asia. His early appeal was based less on the coherence of his political ideas than on the raw excitement of his presence at the lectern, the fierce clarity of his rhetoric, and (for all his verbal ferocity) a certain cool charm, even toward white reporters. For many poor, young, urban blacks, King was too middle-class and genteel, too Southern, too churchly and high-flown; Malcolm had lived as they had. "Nobody could handle Malcolm," Louis Farrakhan, his protégé and eventual enemy, said. "I never saw Malcolm smoke. I never saw Malcolm curse. I never saw Malcolm wink at a woman. I never saw Malcolm eat in between meals. He ate one meal a day. He got up at 5 o'clock in the morning to say his prayers. I never saw Malcolm late for an appointment. Malcolm was like a clock." By 1961, according to Marable, the Nation had as many as seventy-five thousand members.

Even outsiders were impressed. Malcolm "is an excellent speaker, forceful and convincing," one F.B.I. informant said, in 1958. "He is an expert organizer and an untiring worker," whose hatred for whites "is not likely to erupt in violence as he is much too clever and intelligent for that."

Malcolm was not above appealing to the worst instincts of his followers. "Jews run the country," he said. Women were "tricky, deceitful, untrustworthy flesh." As a way to mock the passive resisters of the mainstream civil-rights movement, he distinguished between the honest masses, the "field Negroes," and the perfidious "house Negroes," who were forever looking to their white masters for privilege and approval. (The political scientist Adolph Reed points out that the famous slave-revolt leaders—Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and Gabriel Prosser—were house slaves.) Malcolm's desire to rouse his followers and scandalize the white majority could lead him to disastrous miscalculations: in January, 1961, he met with representatives of the Klan, in Atlanta, confiding to his hooded interlocutors, "The Jew is behind the integration movement, using the Negro as a tool."

But the former numbers runner had an appetite for the high-stakes gamble. While King sought to enlist the sympathies of the white majority in order to achieve racial integration, Malcolm, the incendiary separatist, freely indulged his penchant for outrage. In June, 1962, a plane crashed in Paris carrying mostly well-to-do white passengers from Atlanta. In front of more than a thousand people in Los Angeles, Malcolm said that the disaster was "a very beautiful thing": "We call on our God—he gets rid of a hundred and twenty of them."

By 1959, fissures had emerged between Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad. Some of Elijah's lieutenants resented Malcolm's fame, his appearances with Mike Wallace and other television interviewers; others worried that Malcolm was angling to take over the Nation when Elijah died. But the tensions took on seamier aspects. In 1958, Malcolm married a woman named Betty Sanders, but by the following year the marriage (which is portrayed sentimentally in Lee's film) was foundering. Malcolm sent a distressed letter to Elijah Muhammad:

The main source of our trouble was based on SEX. . . . She placed a great deal more stress upon it than I was physically capable of doing. . . . At a time when I was going all out to keep her satisfied (sexually), one day she told me that we were incompatible sexually because I had never given her any real satisfaction. From then on, try as I may, I began to become very cool toward her. . . . She later said she was going to seek satisfaction elsewhere.

Somehow, Elijah's lieutenants learned about Malcolm's problems, and did not hesitate to spread humiliating rumors.

Later that year, Malcolm heard that a young secretary at the Nation's headquarters with whom he had had a romance before he married Betty was pregnant, and, he subsequently learned, with Elijah Muhammad's child. Indeed, Elijah had impregnated other young women. When the woman asked Elijah for money, he was cruel and dismissive, saying, "You must think I'm a fool or Santa Claus." When she called again, he told a minister who heard the exchange, "It looks like she will have to be put down." By the early sixties, Malcolm had confronted Elijah about his sexual behavior, further offending the leadership of the Nation.

Finally, the relationship between Malcolm and his mentor exploded. Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm defied the Nation's instructions to stay quiet and said that the murder in Dallas represented "the chickens coming home to roost." He added, "Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad. They've always made me glad." Elijah Muhammad "silenced" Malcolm X. Officially, the punishment was supposed to last just three months, but there seemed no chance of resolution. Malcolm was on his own. "I hadn't hustled in the streets for years for nothing," Malcolm told Haley. "I knew when I was being set up."

In 1964, Malcolm decided to reform his soul, alter his politics, and refashion his public image. After touring Africa and the Middle East for two months, during which he made the hajj, he returned to Harlem an orthodox Muslim, a man in flux. His Garveyite belief in entrepreneurial capitalism shifted to socialism. He disavowed separatism. In a letter to a Times reporter, M. S. Handler, he wrote, "Some of my very dearest friends are Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, and even atheists—some are capitalists, socialists, conservatives, extremists . . . some are even Uncle Toms—some are black, brown, red, yellow and some are even white."

Malcolm's shift in the last year of his life, as dramatized in his autobiography, is what allowed middle-class blacks and white liberals to admire him. When Bill Clinton wore an "X" cap, he was not railing against blue-eyed devils; he was gesturing to this late, "humanistic" Malcolm. (He was also making a fashion statement.) Yet even in the final passage of his life Malcolm failed to build a serious political movement or create a coherent point of view. He had only a brief time left to him; everything was not resolved or reconciled. He was still full of contradictions, praising King one day, ridiculing him the next, hailing Elijah Muhammad before one audience, then denouncing him before another. He still could not accept nonviolent revolution. Three days before his death, Malcolm said, "I'm man enough to tell you that I can't put my finger on exactly what my philosophy is now."

Malcolm clearly made his deepest impression on the American consciousness through his collaboration with Alex Haley. By joining Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Richard Wright in the act of literary testimony, Malcolm became part of the most essential genre of African-American literature. With its depiction of racism and struggle, with its search for purpose, identity, community, and a name, Malcolm's autobiography followed a familiar pattern—what the scholar Robert B. Stepto calls the "narrative of ascent." "Autobiographies do not form indisputable authorities," W. E. B. Du Bois wrote. "They are always incomplete, and often unreliable. Eager as I am to put down the truth, there are difficulties; memory fails especially in small details, so that it becomes finally but a theory of my life."

But what do Malcolm's readers see in him? Writing two decades ago, Cornel West called Malcolm "the skeleton in the closet lodged in the racial memory of most black professionals." Consider the foremost black professional in the country—the President of the United States. After Barack Obama was inaugurated, he returned to the British government a bust of Winston Churchill that was on display in the Oval Office and installed a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. King is rightly regarded as the singular hero of the era that lasted from the Montgomery bus boycott, in 1955, to his death, in April, 1968. Malcolm was an electrifying spokesman for black dignity and selfhood, a radical prod to the mainstream movement, but his role in the civil-rights movement was marginal.

Yet, when Obama was young and trying to come to terms with his own identity, he read the autobiography and it affected him more deeply than even the works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin. In balmy Hawaii, at the most prestigious private school west of the Rockies, Obama found something in the narrative of a man who was also of mixed race, had lost his father, and needed to create a self. "His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me," Obama wrote of Malcolm in "Dreams from My Father." "The blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will." Obama, who adored his white mother and grandparents, was disturbed by Malcolm's desire to "expunge" the white blood in him. What he admired was the book's depiction of Malcolm's redemptive journey and his redemptive, universalist final year.

"I was never taken with some of his theorizing," Obama told me last year. "I think that what Malcolm X did, though, was to tap into a long-running tradition within the African-American community, which is that, at certain moments, it's important for African-Americans to assert their manhood, their worth. . . . That affirmation that I am a man, I am worth something, I think was important. And I think Malcolm X probably captured that better than anybody."

Obama dealt with black nationalists on Chicago's South Side both as an organizer and as a state senator. Louis Farrakhan's headquarters were within his district. When he first got to Chicago, he heard the nationalists on the radio and read their publication The Final Call. He came to see that their message had "twin strands," one that was an affirmation of pride and self-reliance and one that depended on hatred, a form of "magical thinking" that deluded those who "could least afford such make-believe." Of course, the complexities of that world reflect Malcolm X's own complexities, his contradictions and resentments and hopes.

The narrative that Alex Haley crafted is, in certain respects, profoundly comforting: it transforms those twin strands into a distinct before and after. Here was a Malcolm who could still embody the legitimate rage of a humiliated people but also become part of the very cultural firmament he anathematized—a Malcolm who could, and did, end up on a postage stamp. Although Manning Marable may not have succeeded in writing a definitive work, his considerable scholarship does remind us how much is elided by any tale of a pilgrim's progress. If the autobiography simplified reality, however, it kept faith with its subject's ambitions. By choosing to entrust his story to Alex Haley, Malcolm assured himself a lasting place in American culture. It was his most brilliant wager. ♦

Reality Replay

by Laurie Winer April 25, 2011

Bill and Pat Loud

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Keywords Craig Gilbert; "An American Family"; Television; HBO; "Cinema Verite"; James Gandolfini; Pat Loud

Craig Gilbert, the creator of "An American Family," the PBS series that documented the Loud family of Santa Barbara for seven months in 1971 and was a premonition of reality TV, has lived in a one-bedroom apartment on Jane Street for twenty-one years. He has the same patrician hair and beard that he had when he appeared on "The Dick Cavett Show," thirty-eight years ago, sitting uncomfortably alongside Pat and Bill Loud. On the show, he defended himself against charges that he had exploited the family and betrayed their trust. One recent morning, Gilbert, who is eighty-five, sat at his dining table peering at eight bottles of pills. A home-care nurse hovered nearby with a clipboard. He had just been released from the hospital after accidentally overdosing on Mucinex. Framed on a wall in the living room was an old cartoon from this magazine showing two couples at a dinner table. One woman smiles as she says, "I'm probably old-fashioned, but I felt much more at home with the Forsytes than I do with the Louds."

Gilbert talked about a dinner he'd recently had with James Gandolfini, who was doing research for his role as Craig Gilbert in "Cinema Verite," HBO's new docudrama about the making of "An American Family." Gandolfini had asked about an old rumor that Gilbert and Pat Loud had had an affair during the filming.

"I told him no in twenty ways," Gilbert said.

In 1973, American viewers were consumed with the five Loud children and their parents, who handled their travails with a composure that, depending on your point of view, was either admirable or chilling. Gilbert never worked again after "An American Family" aired, and he has spent the years since then trying to avoid the notoriety that came with his creation.

" 'An American Family' changed the lives of the Louds, and it changed my life," he said. "It was pretty damn tumultuous, and I don't want to go over it anymore." He went on, "The Mucinex episode was the climax of a six-month nightmare." Last year, one of the Loud children sent him a copy of HBO's script. "The story line was essentially fallacious," Gilbert said. He hired a lawyer to represent both his and the Loud family's interests, but although he voiced his displeasure, he did not sue. (The Louds, who also were reportedly unhappy with the script, ended up accepting a financial settlement from HBO for agreeing not to discuss it publicly.) "Cinema Verite" depicts Gilbert showing Pat Loud (played by Diane Lane) evidence of her husband's infidelity (Bill Loud is played by Tim Robbins), and then taking her up to his hotel room—all, the movie suggests, in the service of capturing their divorce on camera. Like Gilbert, Pat Loud has always maintained that the two did not have an affair. "If you are given the assignment to write a two-hour film that exposes the making of 'An American Family,' the only avenue to take is that the producer is corrupt," Gilbert said.

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"Cinema Verite" depicts another behind-the-scenes drama, between Gilbert and a married couple who worked on the series with him, Alan and Susan Raymond. Gilbert hired them to film and record sound for "An American Family." But the Raymonds balked at capturing several of the series' rawest moments. In the HBO version, Gilbert and Alan Raymond have a fistfight over whether to film what became a famous and painful scene between Bill and Pat at a restaurant, in which Pat finally loses her cool and calls her husband "a goddamned asshole."

Both men insist that they didn't come to blows. When asked to comment on this scene, Alan Raymond said, "I did push him. I should have punched him." Susan Raymond claims that Gilbert had a "Svengali hold" on Pat Loud, and said, "Craig destroyed that family."

Looking back, Gilbert blames the Raymonds for not being willing to observe the first rule of the form: never stop filming. "What did they think cinéma vérité is?" Gilbert said. "You shoot only certain things?" He also fought with the couple about their credit on the series. The Raymonds are still bitter that they weren't given proper credit for effectively creating reality TV, and Gilbert seems crushed by the knowledge that he did.

When "An American Family" began its broadcast, in January, 1973, the Loud family was devastated by the public's response. One critic called the family "affluent zombies," and the Times described Lance Loud, the gay son, as "camping and queening about like a pathetic court jester, a Goya-esque emotional dwarf." Gilbert remembers getting a late-night phone call from Pat after she had read the first of many scathing articles that would be written about her family.

"Pat was screaming," Gilbert said. "She'd taken a below-the-belt hit, and it hurt. That, right there, was the beginning of my own confusion. What have I done? What do I do?" He paused. "I've never resolved it. I didn't know what I had wrought. I still don't." ♦

The Rich Boys
An ultra-secretive network rules independent oil trading. Its mentor: Marc Rich

One brisk day last fall, globe-trotting oil executive Benjamin R. Pollner was leaving his luxury prewar apartment building on Manhattan's Park Avenue when detectives from Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau's office approached. They began asking him about his alleged involvement in the unfolding U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal. Pollner, a tall, lean sixtysomething who wears European-cut clothes and a world-weary visage, was taken aback, say investigators familiar with the incident.

He snapped that he was in a hurry to make an overseas flight and refused to answer questions. Before hopping into a car that whisked him off to John F. Kennedy International airport, Morgenthau's investigators say Pollner delivered a parting shot: "I did nothing in New York or the U.S. that would be considered illegal." To them, Pollner was admitting he had done something wrong -- just not in their jurisdiction. Pollner, who runs Taurus Petroleum mainly from offices in Geneva and London, hasn't set foot in the U.S. since, investigators believe. He didn't reply to several calls and e-mails.

On the morning of Apr. 14, David Bay Chalmers Jr., 51, who owns privately held oil-trading company Bayoil U.S.A. Inc., emerged handcuffed and bleary-eyed from his high-security mansion in Houston's ritzy River Oaks neighborhood. He had just been indicted by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York for conspiracy, wire fraud, and trading with a country that supports terrorism -- Iraq -- during the U.N. program. Chalmers has pleaded not guilty.

Another trader, Patrick Maugein, nonexecutive chairman of London's SOCO International PLC oil-trading company, has been under scrutiny by the U.N. for his alleged role in a complex oil-smuggling scheme during Oil-for-Food, the U.N. program that allowed Iraq to sell oil for humanitarian purposes during a period of strict sanctions. Although many deals were legitimate, Saddam Hussein at times demanded illegal surcharges for the right to buy oil at below-market prices. Friends of Saddam's regime allegedly received sweetheart oil allocations, investigators say. Maugein denies violating sanctions or paying illegal surcharges.

LEARNING FROM EL MATADOR
What do the three men have in common, aside from their dubious deals with Iraq? They all belong to the ultrasecretive informal network of traders who dominate global independent oil trading. They don't necessarily act in concert with each other, but they often chase the same opportunities. They are the Rich Boys. All operate in the world of onetime fugitive billionaire Marc Rich, the most-wanted white-collar criminal in U.S. history until his controversial pardon on President Bill Clinton's last day in office in 2001.

Rich came to prominence in the 1970s, when he worked at Phillips Bros. (later Phibro), then the biggest trader. With veteran partner Pincus "Pinky" Green, he pioneered "combat trading" -- getting trading rights from countries in turmoil. Rich, called El Matador for his killer instinct, did the deals. Pinky, "The Admiral," arranged shipping.

Traders soon learned the art of the Rich deal: Do whatever it takes. After Rich and Green left Phibro in 1973 to form their own company, they bought a house in the South of France and "stocked it with hookers from Paris and flew in oil guys who spent a week at their expense," says a former U.S. oil executive who knows Rich. "They got the oil contracts they wanted." A former Rich partner corroborates this. Green, who retired in 1992 after heart surgery, could not be reached for comment.

Rich is notorious for trading with Iran during the hostage crisis, South Africa during apartheid, and Cuba and Libya during U.S. trade embargoes. In 1983 he fled to Switzerland after being indicted by the Justice Dept. for racketeering, trading with the enemy (Iran), dodging a $48 million corporate tax bill, and other violations that could have resulted in 300 years of jail time. Rich's companies pleaded guilty to some charges and paid about $200 million in fines, penalties, and taxes, but the case remained open until the pardon. "Rich's philosophy is that no law applies to him," says Morris "Sandy" Weinberg Jr., the former U.S. prosecutor who pursued and indicted Rich in 1983.

Over the years, Rich has mentored scores of traders. Although the 70-year-old is past his peak in the business, according to industry experts, his protégés are thriving. "You could call it the University of Marc Rich," says a Senate investigator. As Alaskan and North Sea oil production declines, new supplies increasingly come from some of the most corrupt or politically unstable places on earth, such as Equatorial Guinea and Sudan. These are the new frontiers where major U.S. oil companies fear to tread because of sanctions, embargoes, and antibribery and anti-terrorism laws. But it's where these traders, many like characters out of the James Bond flick Goldfinger, make good money, especially when oil tops $60 a barrel.

Governments and law enforcers have long been suspicious of some Rich Boys. In a six-month investigation, BusinessWeek has pieced together the first comprehensive look at their sprawling and deliberately elusive operations. Our findings:

-- Rich has spawned the most powerful informal network of independent commodities traders on earth. He did it primarily by funding spin-offs and startups around the globe for decades, and by training scores of traders who have set up their own shops. Although Rich no longer maintains stakes in most of these outfits, he has helped create a network that, in sum, is far more formidable than his own company in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was the world's premier commodities trader.

-- The Rich Boys' often controversial activities are on the rise. They buy oil from places where corruption is extensive: Some of the Rich Boys have been named in scandals in Nigeria and Venezuela. They also sell oil from pariah states to U.S. refiners.

-- Although Rich testified in writing in March, 2005, to a House committee investigating the U.N. program that he was not in any way active in the Oil-for-Food program, documents suggest that he bought Iraqi oil in 2001 from various front companies, which BusinessWeek has identified. This took place just one month after his pardon. If so, it seems that Rich may have misled Congress. The CIA, the Senate, and others have concluded that from September, 2000, until September, 2002, buyers in the Oil-for-Food oil program had to pay illegal surcharges that Saddam used in part to buy weapons, though no documents show Rich made such payments. Some investigators believe Iraqi insurgents are now using that money.

-- One company from which Rich bought crude during this period was a front for extremist Russian and Ukrainian organizations. All were pro-Saddam; one was a staunch supporter of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. Another company was tied to a major money launderer for Saddam.

To reach these conclusions, BusinessWeek traced crucial connections from a number of official inquiries and documents. Key among these documents: shipping tables from the Middle East Economic Survey (MEES), the preeminent authority on tanker activity in the Middle East. These detail the ports, tankers, destinations, and buyers of Iraqi crude. Other insights came from a 2004 CIA report on Iraq, data from Switzerland's Federal Commercial Registry Office, and the many inquiries launched into Oil-for-Food. The Justice Dept., six congressional committees, a U.N. commission, Morgenthau's office, and several countries, including Switzerland, are all investigating the program. Extensive interviews with dozens of oil traders, government investigators, and energy experts around the globe helped form a clearer picture of how the network operates.

Rich did not respond to numerous requests for interviews. But Thomas Frutig, CEO of his major holding company, Marc Rich + Co. Holding, denied to BusinessWeek involvement in Oil-for-Food. Frutig declined to respond to other allegations, despite repeated phone and e-mail requests. Trader Clyde Meltzer, one of Rich's business partners in the 1970s who remains close to him, says: "Marc is the most upstanding guy you'll ever meet. It's untrue he ever did anything dishonest."

Rich's trading in 2001 sheds a harsh new light on his pardon, which is limited to his 1983 indictment. To revoke it would require a constitutional amendment. Even so, it's possible authorities could levy new criminal charges against Rich, who is worth up to $8 billion by some estimates, for activities not included in the pardon. A federal grand jury in New York is apparently still investigating whether any of the money Rich and other traders allegedly funneled to Saddam was used to fund terrorism. The U.S. Attorney's office declined to comment. In 2001, New York State sued Rich for tax evasion, seeking $137 million they say he owes. But given Rich's clout -- he is a major philanthropist, one of Switzerland's largest taxpayers, and extremely well connected -- he'll likely continue to enjoy the good life abroad.

MAVERICKS IN THE MIDDLE
Like Marc Rich + Co. holding, most of the Rich Boys have offices in the tiny Swiss canton of Zug, with its quaint stores, Gothic architecture, and low tax rates. These maverick middlemen typically don't own or operate oil refineries or wells. Instead, they buy oil from producers, line up buyers to refine it, and charter tankers to ship it. Oil trading is often nebulous and opaque. Title to a tanker's oil, for example, may change a dozen times before the ship reaches port.

Some of the Rich Boys, like Pollner and Chalmers, have never worked for Rich. They've merely done business with him or have connections to him through other traders. Typically, Rich has bankrolled or owned stakes in the traders' companies, or sold them to close associates. Among the mightiest is commodities giant Glencore International, based in a suburb of Zug, which boasts annual turnover of $72 billion, according to its financial disclosures, making it one of the world's largest private companies. Glencore owns scores of other commodities companies from Spain to Australia. Rich sold the firm to its management in 1994, and the company says it now has no connection with Rich. It is run by former Rich lieutenants Ivan Glasenberg and Willy Strothotte, according to its Web site.

Companies run by the Rich Boys span the globe. Consider Netherlands-based Trafigura Group, one of the world's top trading companies. According to industry experts and investigators, it was founded in 1993 by former Rich traders with money from Rich. Experts say he invested in companies like Trafigura to expand his empire, though most contend he no longer has a stake in them. Zug-based Masefield Group was also founded by former Rich traders. In Moscow, there's Milio International Ltd., formed by Rich traders in 1997. Rich's flight to Switzerland in 1983 didn't stop him from financing companies in the U.S., among them Novarco, a White Plains (N.Y.) commodities-trading business he established in 1997. He sold its oil contracts in 2002 to Richmond (Va.)-based Dominion Resources Inc. (D ), according to company reports.

Many of the Rich Boys' tactics may be hyperaggressive, but they're perfectly legal. One way they do business: exploiting opportunity in Eastern European or Third World countries in dire need of funding. Rich taught his disciples -- called Lehrlings, German for apprentices -- to lend cash-strapped companies money and get the right to buy their commodities, industry experts say. Last year, for example, Glencore loaned $40 million to Peru's second-largest zinc miner, Volcan Compañia Minera. Volcan agreed to sell zinc and other minerals to Glencore from 2004 to 2010.

At times, some Rich boys apparently use front companies -- opaque holding entities -- to disguise deals. According to Senate documents, they have set up fronts with innocuous names such as Rescor Inc. or Plasco Shipping. Based in tax havens with strong banking secrecy such as Panama, Liechtenstein, and Gibraltar, they come and go like flickering harbor lights once a deal is done.

David Chalmers found such companies useful in trading Iraqi crude during sanctions, according to the Senate subcommittee on permanent investigations. It alleged he routinely used a company called Italtech to do business in Iraq. The submarine-engine outfit was started in the late '80s by Chilean-Italian arms dealer Augusto Giangrandi, who headed the Bermuda subsidiary of Chalmers' Bayoil. Italtech opportunistically morphed into an oil trader in 1999. Chalmers' lawyer, Bart Dalton, says Italtech "was not a front company."

Ben Pollner, law enforcement officials believe, was behind Fenar Petroleum and Alcon Petroleum, registered in Liechtenstein in 1999, according to corporate registry documents. They were among the largest oil purchasers during Oil-for-Food, together exporting $2.47 billion worth of crude, according to a report by the U.N. Independent Inquiry Committee, chaired by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul A. Volcker. Investigators allege they paid tens of millions in illegal surcharges. The companies sold almost exclusively to Pollner's company, Taurus, MEES shows. "We've interviewed more than a dozen traders who claim [that although] Pollner was working on his own deals, he was often acting on behalf of Rich, too," says a senior prosecutor investigating possible Oil-for-Food violations.

THRIVING IN TROUBLE SPOTS
One reason the rich boys are so busy these days is because they thrive in a world of high oil prices and scarce reserves. Big U.S. oil companies are desperate for crude yet don't want to dirty their hands getting it from global trouble spots. Says a former partner of Rich's, who requested anonymity because he routinely trades with Big Oil: "Majors don't want to touch the oil, yet they want to buy it. If you think Pablo Escobar [the Colombian drug king] was guilty, weren't people who used cocaine, too?" In fact, half the crude on which Oil-for-Food surcharges were paid ultimately ended up with U.S. majors, according to the Senate. Says Richard Perkins, former director of worldwide oil trading at Chevron Corp.: "The majors are the bread and butter" of traders like the Rich Boys.

U.S. companies are forbidden from bribing officials. If they do, it can prove damaging. The Securities & Exchange Commission, for example, is probing Marathon Oil (MRO ), ExxonMobil (XOM ), Amerada Hess (AHC ), Chevron (CVX ), and others for allegedly bribing President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea and his relatives for oil rights. The companies say they're cooperating with the SEC and that they acted lawfully.

Oil majors are also under pressure to shun pariah states. For instance, there are tight limits on deals with war-torn Sudan because it backs terrorism and engages in genocide. But companies set up by the Rich Boys, including Trafigura and Glencore, are among those buying crude there, trade reports say. China is a big customer for the Rich Boys there and elsewhere. Still, says Hal C. Eren, principal attorney at Washington's Eren Law Firm and a former U.S. Treasury Dept. official, tighter controls have "created a situation that's definitely helping independent traders."

Because the Rich Boys operate in such secrecy, one of the few ways to see how they work is when they get busted or investigated. For example, in Nigeria last year, Petrodel, a firm run by former top Rich trader Michael Prest, Glencore, Trafigura, and several other firms, were accused by Nigeria's state oil company of inflating shipping costs by doctoring documents. The Nigerians demanded repayments of more than $100 million. Trafigura denies the allegations and says that all past problems have been resolved. A Glencore spokesman "vigorously disputes" the charges. Petrodel officials and Prest could not be reached for comment.

Some Rich Boys also have their hand in oil-rich Venezuela, whose leftist leader, President Hugo Chávez, is at odds with the Bush Administration. After an oil workers' strike in 2003, Glencore and two U.S. traders allegedly paid kickbacks to secure deals with oil monopoly Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), according to The Wall Street Journal. PDVSA denied accepting bribes and Glencore denied making any illegal payments.

THE SADDAM CONNECTION
Some of the most compelling details to emerge from Oil-for-Food probes revolve around Rich himself. BusinessWeek has pieced together information suggesting that, despite his denials, Rich did buy Iraqi crude from several questionable companies during the program. His name appears in shipping records compiled by MEES. These show he bought from four separate companies, starting in February, 2001: Onako Oil Co., a subsidiary of Alfa Group, one of Russia's largest conglomerates; an Egyptian company called International Company for Petroleum & Industrial Services (or INCOME, for short); and a Swiss company, Zerich, with ties to some extremist groups. The fourth, EOTC, remains a mystery. Hesham Sheta, vice-chairman of INCOME's parent company in Cairo, Egypt, International Group for Investments, confirmed that "Marc Rich has been INCOME's 'agent' [oil trader] since 1990" and that Rich bought Iraqi crude from INCOME in 2001. Zerich has since been liquidated. Alfa denies paying surcharges.

Rich tells a different story. In March he acknowledged his company was on the U.N.'s list of "approved" crude buyers but insisted in written answers to House International Relations Committee questions that "nothing ever came of it." A committee spokesman remarked at the time: "We believe [Rich] knows more than he wishes to acknowledge." Marc Rich + Co.'s Frutig reiterated an earlier press statement: "Marc Rich Holdings reject all the allegations relating to its involvement in the U.N.'s Oil-for-Food program in Iraq."

Even with the new information, it may be difficult for the authorities to prove that Rich did anything illegal. At the time, Saddam offered oil at cut-rate prices to his supporters, who would then sell it for a huge profit on the market. For two years leading up to September, 2002, the dictator demanded surcharges of up to 50 cents a barrel that he deposited in secret bank accounts, according to the CIA, the Volcker committee, and Senate documents.

While Rich's company bought crude from companies acting on behalf of those with allocations, no documents show he paid illegal surcharges. However, allocation holders would typically "pass on the cost of that surcharge," according to a recent Senate report. "[Buyers] were informed of the required surcharges, and either paid them directly or reimbursed the allocation holder." Hesham denies that INCOME paid illegal surcharges.

Saddam banked about $10 billion from oil surcharges and smuggling, says the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Initially it enabled him to live large, buying fleets of Mercedes and the finest wine, according to the CIA. But when pressure from the Bush Administration mounted in 2001, Saddam earmarked the money for a war chest that "is likely funding the current insurgents," says John Fawcett, an independent investigator tracking Iraqi funds who recently testified to the House Committee on Energy & Commerce.

Some Rich Boys were heavy hitters in Oil-for-Food. In February, 2001, for example, the U.N. Security Council reported that Glencore bought 1 million barrels of Iraqi crude destined for the U.S. The oil was diverted to Croatia, where it was sold for a $3 million premium, that went into a secret bank account. Glencore was caught by U.N. overseers, and later agreed to refund the money to the U.N. A Glencore spokeswoman says the oil was shipped to Croatia for storage and later shipment to the U.S. A CIA report alleges that Glencore paid more than $3.2 million in surcharges to Iraq, something it denies.

The numerous investigations into the U.N. program paint a complex picture of how Rich Boys allegedly work. In September, 2001, U.S. and U.N. authorities were tipped off by a Greek shipping captain, who feared his tanker chartered by Trafigura was involved in sanctions busting. Trafigura, run by former Rich traders Claude Dauphin and Eric de Turckheim, bought Iraqi oil from a Bermuda company called Ibex Energy, according to a U.N. report. Ibex was owned by another former Rich trader, Jean-Paul Cayré. SOCO's Patrick Maugein, once a top Rich trader, was close to former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz. The CIA alleges Maugein received oil allocations that he sold through Trafigura. Maugein denies paying illegal surcharges. Maugein says he knows one of Trafigura's founders. Investigators allege he had a contract with or a stake in Trafigura, something both the company and Maugein deny. Maugein and Trafigura also deny having commercial ties to Ibex.

DEALS WITH EXTREMISTS
Rich and those like him are so successful because they'll do business with virtually anyone if there are big bucks to be made. Both Rich and Pollner's Taurus Petroleum bought Iraqi crude in 2001 through the now-defunct Zerich, according to MEES shipping records. Zerich was a front for various groups that received oil allocations, a CIA report says.

Some of them, BusinessWeek has learned, are extremists, including Ukranian and Russian outfits that strongly supported Saddam -- as well as North Korean strongman Kim Jong Il. One, Russia's Peace & Unity Party, threw a birthday bash in Moscow in January, 2004, in honor of Kim. At it, Peace & Unity Chairwoman Sazhi Zaindinova Umalatova called Kim "an all-powerful treasured sword...when the imperialists are getting more undisguised in their military ambition," according to North Korea's news agency. Zerich also acted for the Ukraine Communist Party and the Ukraine Socialist Party. In all, Zerich bought $422 million worth of oil from Iraq, according to the Volcker committee.

In the early 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed, Rich quickly became the most powerful trader there. He was "a coach and sort of a godfather for several of the oligarchs," says Vladimir L. Kvint, a professor at American University's Kogod School of Business. Pollner worked for Chalmers at Bayoil then, and all of them sold Russian crude that they got through the oligarchs.

Rich has long had ties to Mikhail Fridman and his mammoth Alfa Group, says Kvint. In 2001, Rich nearly sold his company to an Alfa division: Zug-based Crown Resources Corp. (now called ERC Trading). During the U.N. program both Rich and Chalmers bought oil from Alfa units, according to MEES: Onako and Tyumen Oil Co., respectively. The CIA report alleges that Alfa paid illegal surcharges to Saddam during Oil-for-Food, which Alfa denies.

Rich is legendary for cultivating people in high places. Traders say he could reach practically any diplomat, oil minister, or dictator in an instant with a phone that some joked seemed surgically attached to his ear. Two of his key Mideast connections were the powerful Bakhtiar brothers, Esfandiar and Bahman. The Bakhtiars -- whose father, investigators believe, headed the Shah of Iran's secret police -- fled to Iraq after the Shah's ouster. Thanks to family ties, Saddam treated them like "adopted sons," says Jules B. Kroll, founder of Kroll Inc., hired by Kuwait to investigate Saddam's finances in 1991.

The Bakhtiar link helped Rich forge links with the Iraqi dictator, says the Kroll report. Kroll says it obtained faxes between Rich and the Bakhtiars describing Rich's intent to trade Iraqi crude through the brothers. Over two decades, Rich traded allegedly through two companies linked with the Bakhtiars: Jaraco and Dynatrade (now owned by INCOME's parent, IGI). The Bakhtiars set up Jaraco in Geneva in 1981. In 2004, the U.S. Treasury identified Jaraco as a major money-laundering conduit for Saddam's billions. Hesham Sheta says, "[One of the] Bakhtiars still acts as a consultant" to IGI, which in turn owns INCOME, from which Rich bought Iraqi crude during Oil-for-Food.

Rich, along with Pollner and Bayoil's Chalmers, were "very trusted by the Iraqi Oil Ministry," says Axel Busch, chief correspondent for industry newsletter Energy Intelligence. A street-smart Staten Island boy, "Pollner is considered a brilliant trader," says Busch. Cultivating relations with small refineries, particularly in the U.S., enabled him to handle big quantities of Iraqi oil by breaking it into smaller cargoes, say industry experts. Pollner, they say, began trading with Iraq before the 1991 Persian Gulf War and continued after a U.N. embargo.

For his part, Chalmers had loaned money to Iraq since the 1980s and received repayment in oil, according to industry experts. The scion of a wealthy Houston oil family, Chalmers, a tight-lipped trader and tennis ace with a taste for fancy cigars, was used to rubbing shoulders with the elite. But he never worked for Rich. Indeed, his lawyer Dalton says they were always "competitors" and "didn't act together in Oil-for-Food." Still, trade reports and CIA documents show they often did deals with the same people in the same places. Chalmers' deep pockets apparently appealed to Iraq's Oil Ministry. After the U.S. lifted its embargo in May, 2003, the ministry said it would sell only to major refiners, but it still allowed two traders to get supplies -- Bayoil and Taurus.

"EERIE" EXISTENCE
These days rich has opulent digs in several countries. He owns a palatial Moorish villa on Spain's ritzy Costa del Sol and a ski chalet in Saint Moritz, Switzerland. His powerful pals have included opera star Placido Domingo and former hedge-fund guru Michael Steinhardt, who, in a letter backing the pardon, called Rich "my friend...who has been punished enough." Former traders say Rich spends most of his time at Villa Rosa, his compound on Switzerland's glistening Lake Lucerne, surrounded by Picassos, van Goghs, and Mirós.

Rich still keeps offices in Zug. "It's eerie," says a financial executive who recently paid a call. "You go up in an elevator and step into a vestibule where you're asked over an intercom if you have an appointment and whom you're there to see. If you're on the list, a security guard opens a door to another room. There you see a receptionist who scrutinizes you. Then you're escorted into another elevator that takes you to a different floor."

Rich has slowed down since his pardon. He sold Marc Rich Investments in 2003 but still runs Marc Rich + Co. Holding, which has a trading operation and a real estate arm. U.S. authorities -- the Justice Dept., in particular -- are on Rich's case. As for some of the Rich Boys, it's possible that the U.N. or even the Swiss government, which is conducting its own investigation into Oil-for-Food, may act if they can prove wrongdoing.

Maybe Rich will once again elude his pursuers. He is fast becoming a mythic persona: Word is a TV series based on his life may be in the works. And the Rich Boys -- his legacy -- rule.

The Possibilian

What a brush with death taught David Eagleman about the mysteries of time and the brain.

by Burkhard Bilger April 25, 2011

"Time is this rubbery thing," Eagleman said. The best example of that is the so-called oddball effect. Photograph by Dan Winters.

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Keywords David Eagleman; Neuroscientists; Time Perception; Brain; Baylor College of Medicine; Falls; Timing

When David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling. Or so it seemed at the time. His family was living outside Albuquerque, in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. There were only a few other houses around, scattered among the bunchgrass and the cholla cactus, and a new construction site was the Eagleman boys' idea of a perfect playground. David and his older brother, Joel, had ridden their dirt bikes to a half-finished adobe house about a quarter of a mile away. When they'd explored the rooms below, David scrambled up a wooden ladder to the roof. He stood there for a few minutes taking in the view—west across desert and subdivision to the city rising in the distance—then walked over the newly laid tar paper to a ledge above the living room. "It looked stiff," he told me recently. "So I stepped onto the edge of it."

In the years since, Eagleman has collected hundreds of stories like his, and they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down. He remembers the feeling clearly, he says. His body stumbles forward as the tar paper tears free at his feet. His hands stretch toward the ledge, but it's out of reach. The brick floor floats upward—some shiny nails are scattered across it—as his body rotates weightlessly above the ground. It's a moment of absolute calm and eerie mental acuity. But the thing he remembers best is the thought that struck him in midair: this must be how Alice felt when she was tumbling down the rabbit hole.

Eagleman is thirty-nine now and an assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston. Physically, he seems no worse for the fall. He did a belly flop on the bricks, he says, and his nose took most of the impact. "He made a one-point landing," as his father puts it. The cartilage was so badly smashed that an emergency-room surgeon had to remove it all, leaving Eagleman with a rubbery proboscis that he could bend in any direction. But it stiffened up eventually, and it's hard to tell that it was ever injured. Eagleman has puckish, neatly carved features, with a lantern jaw and modish sideburns. In Baylor's lab-coated corridors, he wears designer jeans and square-toed ankle boots, and walks with a bounce in his step that's suspiciously close to a strut, like Pinocchio heading off to Pleasure Island.

If Eagleman's body bears no marks of his childhood accident, his mind has been deeply imprinted by it. He is a man obsessed by time. As the head of a lab at Baylor, Eagleman has spent the past decade tracing the neural and psychological circuitry of the brain's biological clocks. He has had the good fortune to arrive in his field at the same time as fMRI scanners, which allow neuroscientists to observe the brain at work, in the act of thinking. But his best results have often come through more inventive means: video games, optical illusions, physical challenges. Eagleman has a talent for testing the untestable, for taking seemingly sophomoric notions and using them to nail down the slippery stuff of consciousness. "There are an infinite number of boring things to do in science," he told me. "But we live these short life spans. Why not do the thing that's the coolest thing in the world to do?"