The Quest for Cortisone

Chapter 9. Kendall Presses On

75 Chapter 9 Kendall Presses on I confess that it is not the situation which I should like to see a sister of mine apply for. —sherLoCK hoLMes, “The ADVenTure of The CoPPer BeeChes” nineteen thirty-six was not looking like a good year for the ladies. Amelia earhart was missing over the Pacific. Geraldine smithwick, a senior at the university of Chicago, thought she was having a good year, but it turned out she was wrong—she just didn’t know it yet. she’d recently married Luis Alvarez; the young physicist from rochester had passed his oral exams and received his PhD a few days earlier. in a month they would be heading off to his new job in Berkeley, California. But soon the war would separate the beautiful socialite from the scientist; they’d grow apart and eventually get a divorce. Mabel Alvarez, Luis’s aunt, was also in trouble. Artistically, things were never better. But her love life was delusional.1 That love life centered on Dr. robert h. Kennicott, a Los Angeles physician who had been born in Luverne, Minnesota, in 1892 (a southern Minnesota town much like rochester) and moved to Los Angeles in the 76| Chapter 9 1930s. Mabel met him through her brother, Dr. Walter Alvarez, who had introduced the pair to each other before he moved from California to Mayo. Kennicott was a prominent physician in Beverly hills with a celebrityoriented private practice that was unrivaled in Tinseltown.2 But celebrity medicine wasn’t driving the initial attraction between Mabel Alvarez and robert Kennicott. it was art. Dr. Kennicott was more than a high-profile physician to the stars; he was also an accomplished artist, a man with a talent for drawing and painting the human figure. he and Mabel attended art events throughout the southern California art community—exhibitions, sketching sessions (in which they often shared the same models), galas, gallery openings, parties, or whatever the social happening du jour offered. The two bohemians were “a natural match” for each other. Mabel, by far the better artist, encouraged and influenced Kennicott’s artistic style and direction, but her interest in him went well beyond art. she was in love with the handsome, charming doctor, and the romance for which she longed would span nearly a decade. her diaries described many occasions when she was assumed to be “Mrs. Kennicott” at various social events; she blissfully fantasized about that possibility and the idea of living “happily ever after” with her dream man. But love’s existential voyage from hollywoodland to Matrimonyland was doomed. As the years passed, there was frustratingly little forward progress in the relationship. Mabel Alvarez was blind to the reason for this, although nearly everyone else around her understood the cause with crystal clarity. robert Kennicott “was more interested, it would seem, in the male models that he painted” than he was in Mabel. in 1939 she suddenly realized that she had “hitched her dreams” of happiness to “a gay man who would never give her marriage.”3 in the end, Mabel’s dreams of marriage were brushed over with the pigments of pain and humiliation like a flea market painting done on a piece of cheap black velvet. The eventual breakup was devastating for Walter Alvarez ’s little sister. “My life [is] aimless now,” she wrote. “it . . . needs more context.”4 Moving to hawaii, her childhood home, she escaped the embarrassment and pressure of Los Angeles. once resettled, Mabel focused on rebuilding her art career. And, in the process, rebuilding her life. Mabel Alvarez’s delusions of love nearly destroyed her. But nick Kendall’s delusions were finally starting to pay off. in fact, his search for cortin was becoming less delusional every day. having barely survived his humiliating faux pas with the premature, misleading Kendall Presses On| 77 announcement that he had “found it,” Kendall was back at work looking for cortin—and trying to put a good Pr spin on the results he was getting. By 1936 Kendall had identified five separate compounds produced by the adrenal cortex.5 using the letters of the alphabet, he labeled them A through e based on their order of identification.6 A sixth compound, which would be called f, was on the verge of being isolated and crystallized. All of these substances seemed to be chemically related; more surprising, all were conclusively shown to be steroids...