Abstracted from The Independent - United Kingdom
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. 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. 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.
*Title, Changed by the Editorial Staff of Breaking news
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