The Secret History of Wonder Woman Read online

  When I asked Mr. Byrne to tell me something about himself, he looked positively disappointed in me.

  “Haven’t I been telling you all about myself? I’m a 100% pulp product.”22

  So was she. In Family Circle, Olive Byrne wrote her own kind of pulp: women’s pulp, mother’s pulp, homemaker’s pulp. Her Family Circle stories are amazingly playful—full of fictions, and full of ambition. Marston wrote a novel, but in the 1930s, it was Olive Byrne, not Marston, who was studying the rules of pulp fiction. She was a 100 percent pulp product: an avid reader of fiction, a student of pulp, and, in her own relentlessly self-effacing way, a daring writer.

  “Struggling to write F.C. piece,” she noted in her diary early in 1936. “I ain’t no author.” If only she could tell the truth, she often thought, the truth of her own life. “Idea family history story on my mind,” she confided to her diary a few weeks later. “Wish I could write.” Her confidence failing, she turned to Marston, asking him to write on her behalf. “Got up a new idea for a column—Ri did in my name—for F.C.” This was always the temptation, with Marston: to hide behind him. But the great bulk of what she published under her name in Family Circle was her own writing. Sometimes the writing came slowly: “Started to work on F.C. story, didn’t get far.” Sometimes it was boring: “Will probably work on F.C. piece—Ho hum.” Sometimes she procrastinated: “Fooled around with F.C. piece.” But she knew, too, that some of what she wrote was good.

  “Finished F.C. story,” she reported. “Not bad.”23

  THE DUKE OF DECEPTION

  “LIE DETECTOR,” Olive Byrne’s profile of William Moulton Marston in Family Circle, appeared in grocery stores on November 1, 1935. On November 21, Marston told the press that an attorney named Lloyd Fisher had asked him to administer a lie detector test on his client, Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Hauptmann had been arrested in 1934 for the murder of the Lindbergh baby. Early in 1935, in a trial that had gripped the nation, he’d been found guilty and sentenced to death. Fisher had filed an appeal and, on October 15, Hauptmann had been granted a stay of execution while the U.S. Supreme Court entertained a motion to review his case. On October 16, Harold G. Hoffman, governor of New Jersey, visited Hauptmann in jail; he’d begun to suspect that Hauptmann might be innocent. “By using the lie detector,” Marston told the Washington Post, “we may learn new facts about the kidnapping and killing.”1

  Leonarde Keeler wanted to test Hauptmann, too. Because of the Frye ruling, the results from such a test weren’t admissible in court, but they did carry weight in criminal detection; Keeler’s patented polygraph had become routine in police interrogation. (It had become popular with businessmen, too: they used it to test their employees’ fidelity.)2 Contrary to what Marston told the press, though, Hauptmann’s attorney had not asked him to administer a lie detector test. “Mr. Lloyd Fisher, questioned about the report, replied that he had never heard of Dr. Marston,” one newspaper reported.3 In January 1936, Marston brought his lie detector to the governor’s office; Hoffman was considering Hauptmann’s request for clemency. “Personally,” the governor told the New York Times, “I would like to have a blood-pressure test made.” Marston said the testing would take at least two weeks and that, for his services, he’d charge about $100 a day.4 Marston never conducted the test, and the governor never granted Hauptmann clemency. Hauptmann died in an electric chair on April 3, 1936.

  But, in a few short weeks, Marston, an out-of-work detector of lies, had gotten more publicity than he’d had in years. He decided to dedicate himself to writing a book about the detection of deception while the interest in the Lindbergh baby story was still high. “I hope, even yet, to find a living human being whose mind contains information about the Lindbergh kidnaping,” he said. “If such a person exists, his secret knowledge can be read like print by the Lie Detector.”5

  The Lie Detector Test appeared on March 10, 1938. Marston inscribed a copy for his seven-year-old son: “For Byrne Marston—To help him always tell the truth. With love from Daddy.”6 His publisher sent a copy to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, seeking an endorsement.7 Hoover was not averse to providing blurbs—“Herbert A. Philbrick has performed an outstanding patriotic duty in his fearless presentation of facts in his book, I Led 3 Lives,” Hoover wrote on the back of a double agent’s exposé—but, on this occasion, he demurred.8 Instead, he opened a file on Marston.

  Much of The Lie Detector Test is devoted to asserting Marston’s claim to having founded the science of the detection of deception. Keeler had patented the polygraph machine, but this achievement Marston dismissed, arguing, “There never has existed, nor ever will exist a ‘machine’ which detects liars—it is a scientific test in the hands of an expert which does the lie detecting.”9 (When people asked Marston, “Where’s the lie detector?” he liked to say, “I’m the lie detector!”) Hoover’s office charged an FBI agent with reviewing Marston’s book. The agent reported, in a memo dated May 11, 1938, “The book is typical of all the work done by Doctor Marston in that it is written in an extremely egotistical vein and that the sole purpose of the book seems to be to establish the fact that Doctor Marston was the first to use the blood pressure test in the detection of deception.”10

  Marston’s Lie Detector Test also includes a chapter about James A. Frye. “The Frye case proved an opening wedge for the later admission of deception test evidence into court procedure,” Marston claimed. (Nothing could have been further from the truth; the Frye case closed the door on that evidence.) Marston also claimed that Frye had been convicted of second-degree murder, rather than first-degree murder, as a result of his having been given a lie detector test. “As far as Jim Frye was concerned, the test undoubtedly saved his life,” Marston declared.11 This wasn’t true, either. Frye had been convicted of the lesser crime not because his lawyers tried and failed to get Marston introduced as an expert witness but because, in his confession, Frye had claimed that the gun with which the murder had been committed had gone off accidentally; nothing at the trial established that the murder had been premeditated, a requirement for conviction of murder in the first degree.

  No one understood that better than Frye himself. After his conviction, Frye spent eight years in Leavenworth. He was then transferred to a federal penitentiary in Virginia, where he worked as a switchboard operator. All along, he maintained his innocence. In 1934, he requested a pardon. “My inability to prove an alibi was the sole cause of my conviction,” he wrote in his application for clemency. This application was denied. Frye also believed that his appeal had been a failure because Mattingly and Wood had ignored other errors in the trial in favor of supporting Marston’s attempt to have his evidence deemed admissible. As Frye pointed out, “There were more than one hundred exceptions made in the trial, yet only exceptions made in regard to the ‘Lie Detector’ were submitted to the higher Court.” In a clemency application he filed in 1936, Frye included a copy of “Lie Detector,” Olive Byrne’s profile of Marston in Family Circle. This application, too, was denied. Frye was paroled on June 17, 1939, after serving more than eighteen years in prison. After his release, he filed repeated petitions for a presidential pardon. He regretted that his attorneys had rested their argument on Marston’s credibility. He suspected that bias had contributed to his conviction, too: “This is Washington, and the question of race plays an important part even in the Courts.” His petitions were denied. Frye died in Washington in 1956. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.12

  Marston’s “love detector” tests, in Look, December 6, 1938 (illustration credit 20.1)

  Much of The Lie Detector Test is about deception in matters of the heart. “Despite the fact that women resort to deception more frequently than men in social situations,” Marston wrote, “I have found the more loving sex eager and anxious to abolish false pretenses which threaten intimate relationships or the welfare of their children.”13 He knew this, he said, from his experiments with the lie detector test, but also from
his practice as a consulting psychologist. Patients came regularly to the house at Rye, to the children’s annoyance. “Somehow, a raucous family house with a lot of people had to be converted into a quiet country preserve, like a rural rest home for those with bad nerves,” Byrne Marston remembered. “Four kids were told that today Dad had a client coming and absolute quiet was necessary. A dark sedan would come up the driveway slowly and disengage a somber, depressed-looking middle-aged person who would then disappear into the library with Dad, who got all dressed up in a good suit for these occasions. After an hour or two the client was off and Dad was back in his sleeveless undershirt and the normal hollering started up.”14

  Most heartache Marston diagnosed as the product of deceit. “In a majority of cases which are brought to me as a consulting psychologist for love or marital adjustment, there are self-deceptions to be uncovered as well as attempts to deceive other people,” he explained. “Beneath such love conflicts there is almost always a festering psychological core of dishonesty.”15

  Keen to sell his book, Marston engaged in a series of publicity stunts. He staged events for the press in which he administered “love detector” tests on pretty girls. He revisited his blondes-versus-brunettes experiments.16 He took out a booth at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Eleven-year-old Pete helped him build a contraption attaching the lie-detecting apparatus to a display. “You’d push a button and the light would go off,” Pete said. “It was like a giant thermometer. My dad loved that.”17 He boasted to reporters that he intended to found a Truth Bureau, to be affiliated with the FBI.18 He was in magazines. He was in newspapers. He was on CBS radio. He was so busy, “Olive Richard” told readers of Family Circle, that she could scarcely catch up with him:

  I offer my sincere apologies to those of you who have written and have received no help from Dr. William Moulton Marston, the FAMILY CIRCLE psychologist, or me. The past winter was an open season for influenza. (Dr. Marston had it at least twice.) However, the chief reason I haven’t been able to catch up with him lately is that so many other people have beaten me to it.19

  On November 21, 1938, Marston appeared in an advertisement in Life magazine, endorsing Gillette razor blades. Marston had a great appreciation for the power of advertising, if, as well, a great deal of cynicism about it. By the middle of the 1930s, the power of advertising had begun to make itself felt in the realm of politics. In 1934, after Upton Sinclair was defeated in his campaign to become the next governor of California, he labeled the advertising concern that defeated him a “lie factory.” Marston took much the same view. One of Wonder Woman’s most sinister adversaries, the Duke of Deception, runs an advertising firm called the Lie Factory. His workers—female slaves—operate a machine called a “Lieometer.” Their job is to write “plots, deceptions, false propaganda, fake publicity and personality camouflage.”20

  From “The Duke of Deception,” Wonder Woman #2 (Fall 1942) (illustration credit 20.2)

  The Gillette advertising campaign was Marston’s idea. He’d ap-proached Gillette early in 1938. The campaign was handled by Maxon’s Inc., an advertising agency in Detroit. The idea was for Marston to conduct a series of tests on men while they were shaving. As the advertisement explained, “Not knowing which blade is which . . . each subject shaves one side of his face with a Gillette Blade . . . the other with a blade of competitive manufacture.” The findings, the advertisement claimed, had been unequivocal: “9 out of 10 men tested by Dr. Marston express preference for Gillette blades.”21

  But, in fact, the findings had not been unequivocal at all, as a criminal investigator for the Detroit Police Department reported to the FBI in 1939. Marston had been asked to repeat his shaving cream tests at the Detroit police headquarters, with police officers looking on; under these circumstances, his subjects favored the Gillette blades only 50 percent of the time. Another polygraph expert, John Larson, a colleague of Keeler’s, was called in to attempt to replicate Marston’s initial, pro-Gillette results. He could not. Larson alleged that Marston then attempted to bribe him to fake his results, telling him “he stood to make around thirty thousand dollars for his part in the entire scheme.” An FBI agent investigated the case and sent a report to Hoover. At the bottom of the report, Hoover scratched a note: “I always thought this fellow Marston was a phony & this proves it.”22

  Life magazine, November 21, 1938 (illustration credit 20.3)

  FEMININE RULE DECLARED FACT

  ON NOVEMBER 10, 1937, Marston held a press conference and issued a prediction: women would one day rule the world. The story was picked up by the Associated Press, wired across the continent, and printed in newspapers from Topeka to Tallahassee. “Women Will Rule 1,000 Years Hence!” announced the Chicago Tribune. The Los Angeles Times reported, “Feminine Rule Declared Fact.”1

  The idea had hardly come out of nowhere. Betty Boop ran for president in a film released in 1932. Other campaigns were more serious. “The women of America could convert this country to a matriarchy if they wanted to assert their power,” a lawyer named Lillian D. Rock told reporters in 1935, the year she founded the League for a Woman President and Vice President. And she wasn’t talking about a thousand years distant. A woman would be elected president of the United States within twenty years, Rock said. “I’m certain of it.” These, after all, were the days of Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1935, three years before Superman appeared in comic books, Rock referred to the women she thought most eligible to run for president as “super women.” She thought Mary Woolley, president of Mount Holyoke, would make an especially strong candidate. A female American president might be twenty years away, Rock thought, but she expected Americans “to elect a woman Vice-President in 1936 or 1940.”2

  From Wonder Woman #7 (Winter 1943) (illustration credit 21.1)

  She wasn’t alone. “During the next decade,” Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary Louis Howe wrote in the Woman’s Home Companion in 1935, “not only the possibility but the advisability of electing a woman as President of the United States will become a very seriously argued question. And if the issues continue to be as they are now—humanitarian, education, etc.—it is not outside the bounds of possibility that a woman might not only be nominated, but elected, on the ground that women better understand such questions than men.”3

  Marston was stagier. He made his announcement at a two-hour press conference held at the Harvard Club of New York and said so much about his qualifications as one of the world’s most influential psychologists that the New York Times identified him, wrongly, as “former director of the psychological laboratory at Harvard.”4

  A matriarchy, Marston said, was inevitable. “Neglected Amazons to Rule Men in 1,000 Yrs., Says Psychologist,” the Washington Post reported. “Women have twice the emotional development, the ability for love, than man has,” Marston explained. “And as they develop as much ability for worldly success as they already have ability for love, they will clearly come to rule business and the Nation and the world.” There would be a new race of Amazons: “The next 100 years will see the beginning of an American matriarchy—a nation of amazons in the psychological rather than the physical sense,” he predicted. “In 500 years, there will be a serious sex battle. And in 1,000 years women will definitely rule this country.”5

  Marston’s arguments about women’s superiority drew on centuries of women’s writing and borrowed especially heavily from the philosophy of the nineteenth-century women’s movement, with its emphasis on women’s moral superiority—their “angelic” natures. When Carrie Chapman Catt explained why women deserved the right to vote, she said, among other things, that women were more loving, because maternal, and ought to vote because they brought a distinct vantage to social problems.6 In the 1930s, that was Louis Howe’s thinking, too. Twentieth-century feminists had tended to turn away from arguments for rights that rested on ideas about difference, rather than on ideas about equality. In 1933, when the National Woman’s Party’s Inez Haynes Gillmore, author of Angel Isla
nd, wrote an account of a century of women’s political activism, she called it Angels and Amazons.7 But Gillmore’s point, and sometimes Marston’s point, too, was that being an angel was horrible. (When Steve Trevor calls Wonder Woman “angel,” she’s irked. “What’s an angel?” she asks. “I’d rather be a woman.”)8

  But one twentieth-century feminist who kept on making nineteenth-century-style arguments based on women’s supposed superiority was Margaret Sanger. “She said women were very very great, she felt they were the strength of the future,” her granddaughter later said. “Those are the words she used, ‘Women are the strength of our future.’ They take care of culture and tradition and roles and they preserve what’s good. Men usually destroy.”9 Women were the future of the race, Sanger thought. So did Marston.

  The press conference during which Marston predicted a matriarchy was part of the promotion for a new book, Try Living, a collection of self-help essays that he’d earlier printed in popular magazines like the Rotarian.10 “Finished typing ‘TRY LIVING,’ ” Olive Byrne wrote in her diary on July 10, 1937. “Looks good.”11 The book was released on October 1.12 Marston’s argument, in Try Living, is that happiness can be found in doing what you love. At his matriarchy press conference, he listed six successful and famous people whose lives illustrated this formula; the Times reported, “They are—in the order of the importance of their contributions to humanity in general, in his opinion—Henry Ford, Mrs. Margaret Sanger, President Roosevelt, Thomas E. Dewey, Helen Hayes and Mayor La Guardia.”13

  In the 1930s, Margaret Sanger was the best-known feminist in the world. “When the history of our civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine,” H. G. Wells predicted in 1935. In London, she met with Jawaharlal Nehru; in India, she debated Mahatma Gandhi. In 1937, she was featured in Time and the Nation; in Life, her life story was told in a four-page photo spread. She achieved what she called the “greatest legal VICTORY in the birth control movement”: after attending a conference in Zurich, she’d arranged to have Japanese pessaries—diaphragms—sent to the United States; they were seized and destroyed by U.S. customs officers, a decision that was appealed. In United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that contraception did not violate obscenity laws if prescribed by a physician; the ruling effectively removed contraception from the category of obscenity. In 1937, the American Medical Association at last endorsed birth control.14 A matriarchy, Marston announced to reporters, was inevitable.