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The Deborah Ross Interview: Sex and the single chemist
Independent, The (London), Oct 15, 2001 by Deborah Ross
I meet Carl Djerassi - gosh, how many times a day do you have to spell out your name? "Oh, between 12 and 27 times," he replies happily - at Heathrow airport. From here, we'll be travelling to Frankfurt, to the book fair, where Professor Djerassi ("I tell ze Americans zat it is Jurassic, only viz a D in front and take off the C...") will be promoting This Man's Pill, Reflections on the 50th Birthday of The Pill, which he invented. I've not met him before, but recognise him instantly in the queue at check-in. He just looks so the scientist, so the chemist: satisfyingly Viennese, perhaps rather Sigmund Freud-ish, but with something of a wavy, snowy Colonel Sanders hair-do and little beard. I introduce myself. "Hello," I say. "I think you'll find I'm your hot date for today." "Oh, good," he says. "A hot date. I like ze sound of zat! How old are you? No! Iz not true! Let me see your passport. But you look like a child!" I think he might have been a bit of a goer in his time. I think maybe he still is. Possibly, if he hadn't invented the Pill, there would be lots and lots of baby Djerassis around.
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We move through to the departure lounge. He has something of a comedy left leg. A skiing accident, when he was 34, meant his knee had to be removed, and the femur and tibia bones fused together. This means the leg cannot bend, is as rigid as a pencil, but it wasn't a catastrophe then and doesn't appear to be a catastrophe now. I call him hop-along. "Come along, hop-along," I say. "I'm coming, I'm coming," he says cheerfully. He is 78, yet terrifyingly sprightly. He exercises daily, he says, on a cross-country ski machine, "Vich I like to do naked." He seems terrifyingly driven, too. First the chemistry, but now? Art collector, patron of the arts, philanthropist, entrepreneur, as well as novelist, poet, memoirist, playwright. He wrote his first novel when his third and current wife (Diane Middlebrook, a professor of English) left him momentarily during their courtship for a younger, literary type. Such is his determination, he decided to write her a novel, to woo her back. And such is his determination, he pulled it off. "It was an absurd motive, typically male, almost juvenile. I'm embarrassed, but pleased."
His dearest ambition now is to be considered "a serious playwright". He has a play, Oxygen, about to open in London plus another one, Immaculate Misconceptions, about to open in New York. Immaculate Misconceptions recently played in Bulgaria. "And the wife of the Bulgarian Prime Minister came!" He is blissfully vain. Whatever question I happen to ask him, he has answered somewhere in one of his books, and whatever book this happens to be, he just happens to have it in his backpack. First - and God knows what question I asked, although I wish I hadn't - I'm directed to pages 56 to 59 in Menachem's Seed, which is almost a masterclass on masturbation written from the female point of view. Now, I don't know about you, but masturbation before breakfast in an airport departure lounge has never especially been my thing. I am rather glad when our flight is called. Still, I will not hold it against him and suggest you don't either. Aside from anything else, he'd very likely topple.
Anyway, what was it like, Professor Djerassi, the day you discovered the Pill, which, I've just worked out, was precisely 50 years ago today, on 15 October, 1951? What were you wearing? What did you have for breakfast? How did you celebrate? Disappointingly, he says it wasn't like that. "There was no wonderful `eureka' moment. One only has those with theoretical discoveries. It's like being an architect. You draw up the plans, watch the building being built. It can take years and years. But when the last brick goes in, it is no surprise." Actually, the race at that time was to reproduce cortisone, which was being hyped as a possible wonder cure for arthritis. It was only when Djerassi lost this race that he turned to making an oral progestational compound. Progesterone was already being used to treat certain kinds of infertility and menstrual disorders but it had to be injected, which was painful and difficult. It was Djerassi who came up with a form of the hormone that could survive absorption through the digestive tract. Its possible use, though, as an oral contraceptive didn't come until later, after it was tested, and then approved by the FDA in 1960. Was this a big moment? "No, it was not sensational. What was sensational was the speed with which women took it up."
Of course, the moral, social and medical implications of the Pill have always been passionately debated, with the main backlash coming, perhaps, in the Seventies, when feminists particularly got heated about men controlling women's fertility and all that. Frankly, though, I can't be bothered to have a go at him about this because, let's face it, if you can't trust a man to go the corner shop and come back with what he's been sent for, how can you trust him with contraception? "Exactly!" he cries. When one of the air hostesses starts getting a little bit testy about his collapsible footstool cluttering up the aisle, I say: "Hang on. This is the man who's allowed you to have lots of sex and no unwanted babies. You should be proud to step over his footstool." She is immediately contrite. Ultimately, the Pill has proved a great liberation. And I say this even though I've never had much to do with it myself. Tragically, I've always found keeping the lights on to be as good a contraceptive as any.
