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The Deborah Ross Interview: Sex and the single chemist
Independent, The (London), Oct 15, 2001 by Deborah Ross
We arrive in Frankfurt, take a train part of the way to the fair, and then walk. Professor Djerassi likes walking. Truly, his energy is dazzling. He hops along feistily, while I, on my two legs that bend, trail along exhaustedly in his wake. I think he may be beginning to realise I am very much the age it says I am in my passport. At the fair, I'm surprised to note not only that he has fans, but so many. They want signed autographs, signed books, a chat. I tell him he's the Posh Spice of chemistry. "I am! I am!" he exclaims happily. He gives readings, interview after interview, a press conference. He charms everybody. He is obviously enjoying himself, but what ultimately keeps him going? It's not like he needs the money. The Pill made him rich, yes. Although he was given only $1 for the patent of his discovery, he was also given stocks in Syntex. How rich did this make you exactly? "I'm well-off. I can have what I want." He's built up a museum quality collection of Paul Klee paintings and owns a swish flat in Maida Vale, London, as well as a Californian ranch that he calls Smip - Syntex Made It Possible. How does he account for his continued drive? "Vell, I don't have a literary agent. I don't have a theatrical agent. And I do vant people to read my books, see my plays." It may have something to do with being a displaced Jew, too.
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He was born in Vienna where his father, Samuel, a Sephardic Jew originally from Bulgaria, was a doctor who specialised in VD. How... ahem... charming? "He called himself a dermatologist, as a cover, because he had a lot of society patients. He had the sort of waiting room where no patients ever saw other patients. As one came in the other would leave by a side door." He made a good living. "You counted your income by the number of syphilitics you were treating. Pre-antibiotics, you could be treating a syphilitic for three years." His mother, Alice, an Ashkenazi Jew, was a doctor who became a dentist. No, he says, he can't remember many a happy evening in his parents' company as they discussed the varying delightful symptoms of gonorrhoea and gingivitis. They divorced when he was four.
From then on, he lived with his mother in Vienna, but spent his holidays with his father in Sofia. Then, in 1938, after the Anschluss, his parents remarried (although only for two days) so that Carl's mother could escape Vienna for Bulgaria, which remained a safe haven for Jews during the war. In 1939, Carl and his mother travelled to America, where his father joined them in 1948. Carl didn't return to Vienna until a few years ago, when an Austrian television company made a documentary about him. "I went back to our apartment, and stood at the door I'd last seen in 1938. Inside, it was as I remembered it. A large lobby, big enough to play soccer. You
couldn't score goals, but you could dribble a small ball. And the wonderful chimneys that went all the way to the ceiling. In the winter, we would hold our blankets to the chimneys to warm them."
