What the Dog Saw [43]
These are not exactly the brand personalities laid down by Polykoff and Specht, because this is 1999, and not 1956 or 1973. The complexities of Polykoff’s artifice have been muted. Specht’s anger has turned to glamour. We have been left with just a few bars of the original melody. But even that is enough to ensure that “Because I’m worth it” will never be confused with “Does she or doesn’t she?” Specht says, “It meant I know you don’t think I’m worth it, because that’s what it was with the guys in the room. They were going to take a woman and make her the object. I was defensive and defiant. I thought, I’ll fight you. Don’t you tell me what I am. You’ve been telling me what I am for generations.” As she said fight, she extended the middle finger of her right hand. Shirley Polykoff would never have given anyone the finger. She was too busy exulting in the possibilities for self-invention in her America — a land where a single woman could dye her hair and end up lying on a beach with a ring on her finger. At her retirement party, in 1973, Polykoff reminded the assembled executives of Clairol and of Foote, Cone & Belding about the avalanche of mail that arrived after their early campaigns: “Remember that letter from the girl who got to a Bermuda honeymoon by becoming a blonde?”
Everybody did.
“Well,” she said, with what we can only imagine was a certain sweet vindication, “I wrote it.”
March 22, 1999
John Rock’s Error
WHAT THE INVENTOR OF THE BIRTH CONTROL PILL DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT WOMEN’S HEALTH
1.
John Rock was christened in 1890 at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and married by Cardinal William O’Connell, of Boston. He had five children and nineteen grandchildren. A crucifix hung above his desk, and nearly every day of his adult life he attended the 7 a.m. Mass at St. Mary’s in Brookline. Rock, his friends would say, was in love with his church. He was also one of the inventors of the birth-control pill, and it was his conviction that his faith and his vocation were perfectly compatible. To anyone who disagreed he would simply repeat the words spoken to him as a child by his hometown priest: “John, always stick to your conscience. Never let anyone else keep it for you. And I mean anyone else.” Even when Monsignor Francis W. Carney, of Cleveland, called him a “moral rapist,” and when Frederick Good, the longtime head of obstetrics at Boston City Hospital, went to Boston’s Cardinal Richard Cushing to have Rock excommunicated, Rock was unmoved. “You should be afraid to meet your Maker,” one angry woman wrote to him, soon after the Pill was approved. “My dear madam,” Rock wrote back, “in my faith, we are taught that the Lord is with us always. When my time comes, there will be no need for introductions.”
In the years immediately after the Pill was approved by the FDA, in 1960, Rock was everywhere. He appeared in interviews and documentaries on CBS and NBC, in Time, Newsweek, Life, The Saturday Evening Post. He toured the country tirelessly. He wrote a widely discussed book, The Time Has Come: A Catholic Doctor’s Proposals to End the Battle over Birth Control, which was translated into French, German, and Dutch. Rock was six feet three and rail-thin, with impeccable manners; he held doors open for his patients and addressed them as “Mrs.” or “Miss.” His mere association with the Pill helped make it seem respectable. “He was a man of great dignity,” Dr. Sheldon J. Segal, of the Population Council, recalls. “Even if the occasion called for an open collar, you’d never find him without an ascot. He had the shock of white hair to go along with that. And posture, straight as an arrow, even to his last year.” At Harvard Medical School, he was a giant, teaching obstetrics for more than three decades. He was a pioneer in in-vitro