Masters of Sex

For his date with Mary Virginia, Gordon borrowed the brand-new Garrett family car—a green 1941 sedan with a shiny chrome grill, protruding hood ornament, muscular fenders, and an ample backseat. They motored past rows of homesteads and crops, carved from the tallgrass prairie. That evening, they joined friends at The Palace, the town’s only theater, where the melodies and dancing of Hollywood musicals let them escape Golden City’s dullness. News-reels made them aware of another larger world outside their tiny hometown of eight hundred people. Bordering the Ozark Mountains, Golden City seemed closer to rural Oklahoma than big-city St. Louis—both in dirt miles and in Bible-thumping spirit.

Before heading home, Gordon turned the Plymouth off the road and dimmed its lights. Noise from the tires, pressing loudly against the gravel stones, suddenly came to a halt, followed by a palpable hush. Snuggled beside each other, Mary Virginia and her boyfriend parked in a secluded area where they would not be spotted.

In the front seat of the car, Gordon opened her blouse, loosened her skirt, and pressed himself against her skin. She didn’t move or resist, just stared at him in wonderment. Mary Virginia never had seen a penis before except, as she later remembered it, when her mother changed her baby brother’s diaper. On that night, shortly after her fifteenth birthday, Mary Virginia Eshelman—later known to the world as Virginia E. Johnson—was introduced to the mysteries of human intimacy. “I didn’t know anything about anything,” confessed the woman whose landmark partnership with Dr. William H. Masters would someday become synonymous with sex and love in America.

In her puritanical Midwest home, Mary Virginia learned sex was sinful, something far removed from the breathless tales of storybook romance she imbibed at the movies before World War II. Like many women of her generation, she learned that sex, at best, was a thankless chore, better left for the confines of marriage and bearing a family. Years afterward, she’d refer to Gordon Garrett anonymously as the “boy with fiery red hair.” She masked his identity just as she concealed any unpleasant truth about her life, any memory of love that eluded her. As she admitted decades later, “I never married the men I really cared about.” But she would never forget Gordon Garrett, or that night outside of Golden City, when the two teens lost their innocence.

Throughout high school, Mary Virginia shared many moments growing up with Gordon. About six feet tall with a farm boy’s physique, he was rugged enough to play on the school’s football team but sensitive to Mary Virginia’s finer interest in music. They were a steady couple during senior year, constantly seen together. Gordon was her beau.

After skipping two grades, Mary Virginia found herself considerably younger than the rest of her Golden City High School class, including the redheaded Garrett boy, already turned seventeen. Eager to please, she possessed light-brown hair bundled in corkscrew curls, empathetic gray-blue eyes, and demure, slightly pursed lips. She usually wore an enigmatic Mona Lisa-like grin, which could easily burst into an engaging smile. Like other Eshelmans, she had the distinctive bone structure of high cheekbones, an upright posture, and perfectly poised shoulders. Mary Virginia’s willowy frame suggested enough of a bosom to make her seem mature, though in their assessment some boys could be downright mean. “She was a tall, slim, flat-chested girl,” remembered Phil Lollar, then a slightly younger fellow who lived near her farm. “Just an average-looking girl.” But most teenagers in Golden City admired Mary Virginia’s sense of style in a place sorely in need of it. In this small-town world, she talked, dressed, and acted like a young lady, enough so that even friends in Golden City’s class of 1941 didn’t guess her true age. Her most memorable attribute was her voice—a captivating, finely nuanced instrument she developed as a singer. Gordon’s older sister, Isabel, said Mary Virginia’s clothes never seemed ragged or disheveled, the sorry way some farm kids appeared during the throes of the 1930s Dust Bowl. Her brother’s girlfriend “always kept herself clean and neat and feminine-looking,” Isabel recalled. “She was pretty.”

Driving in Daddy Garrett’s brand-new Plymouth seemed right and proper, as close to a royal carriage as Gordon could muster for his prairie princess. Unlike other Depression-era youth, Mary Virginia always acted confident in her tomorrows, perhaps because her mother, Edna Eshelman, wouldn’t have it any other way. “I think Gordon liked her a lot,” recalled his other sister, Carolyn. “Her mother was ‘the best is none too good’ and Mary Virginia was like that too.” The Garrett sisters perceived Mary Virginia as a good girl, the kind a boy like Gordon could proudly escort to the graduation dance and might someday contemplate marrying. Certainly, they assumed, she wouldn’t be found frolicking in the backseat of the Garrett family car.

At this tender age, Mary Virginia already understood the duplicities of modern life for young American girls like herself. She knew the right words to say, the customs to observe, the dishonesty among the moral zealots and fundamentalists insistent on a woman’s lot in life. Yet she resolved never to lose that independent part of herself. She would embrace life on her own terms, regardless of what her mother or anyone else said. Earnestly, she played the part of a “good girl”—both in school and at home—though in her heart she knew she was not. “I always lived the facade of mother’s little lady but I always did exactly what I wanted to do,” she explained. “I just never let it be known.”

On the night she lost her virginity, Mary Virginia’s experience wasn’t forced, sweaty, or profane. The simple act finished within minutes. Sex felt pleasant enough for her, though far from familiar. Any thoughts of orgasm, sexual performance, or mutual satisfaction—the stuff of her intense, lifelong scientific studies with Masters—were then the furthest thing from her mind. Instead she trusted her boyfriend to know what he was doing. Only later in life did she realize it was probably Gordon’s first time too.

“It just evolved and was very natural,” she said, both wistfully and amused, of their backseat encounter. “It would have shocked my mother to death.”

Though he possessed the natural skills of a gentleman farmer, Harry Eshelman didn’t burn with ambition. A rangy, slender man, Harry appeared satisfied with his own plot of land and lavishing attention on his only child. Photographs of Harry, with his long face and high cheekbones, show a resemblance to Ray Bolger, the affable scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. Mary Virginia was pleased to be the apple of Harry’s eye. “I was always considered to look more like my father and my father’s family,” she said proudly years later. “I was very much Daddy’s girl.” Harry could figure out just about anything—from building a house to solving his daughter’s algebra homework. A former cavalryman, he certainly knew plenty about horses, enough to do tricks to entertain the farm hands or to let his daughter ride the broad backs of the Percheron stallions in their backyard. “Mother would come screaming at him, ‘Watch that child!’ and he would just smile and wave and put me on,” she recalled. Inside their house, Harry taught his daughter how to iron her pleated skirt and made “wooden” shoes out of cardboard as part of her costume for a school concert. “There was nothing the man couldn’t do!” she said.

By the time she was five, Mary Virginia’s parents decided to leave southwest Missouri, already feeling the Depression’s grip. They ventured by train to California in search of a new beginning. In Palo Alto, Harry found work overseeing the lush greenhouses and gardens of a government-run hospital that tended to wounded soldiers. “It was a good job,” Virginia recalled. “We lived on the grounds, beautiful grounds with beautiful homes.” Placed in a progressive school with a kindergarten, she excelled in her studies. Verbal dexterity and a quick mind enabled her to finish eighth grade by age twelve.

To those fleeing Missouri’s arid flatlands, this hospital campus must have seemed like Eden, a garden to shelter them from the Depression’s onslaught. Instead of seeing gray dust clouds raking the skies, they marveled at the Pacific’s raw majesty and gazed along the shoreline at its misty splendor. On one festive occasion, Virginia recalled, her father went to the beach in a suit and straw hat. A photograph of him that day kept her childhood memory fresh. “I was in my little bathing suit, playing along in the surf,” she described. “I walked out a bit and got caught in the rolling surf. I was a little bit of a thing.” The waves toppled Mary Virginia, pulling her into the deep. Harry Eshelman, though fully dressed, didn’t waste any time acting the hero in his daughter’s eyes. “Daddy just walked out and saved me,” she remembered.

Inevitably, Edna had her fill of California. It had been her idea in the first place to migrate to the Golden State, along with other beleaguered midwesterners. But soon she grew homesick and disenchanted by her husband’s job as a glorified groundskeeper at the VA hospital. Edna’s mind was made up, to both her husband’s and daughter’s chagrin, and Harry knew better than to argue. He deferred to his wife’s wishes without much fuss. “My mother insisted that she wanted to go back home to her friends and family,” Virginia explained, even though most of her mother’s relatives had relocated to California. “She just longed to be back.” Harry contacted his father, still in Christian County, to help them find a new farm near Springfield, which he did—about fifty miles to the west. The Eshelmans and their young daughter packed their belongings and returned in the family car to a place in Missouri even more desperate than where they had started. “We came back and the only piece of land Granddad had available was in Golden City,” remembered Virginia. This accident of fate was further aggravated by Golden City’s insignificance. “It was a teeny-tiny place,” she recalled, “literally no one there.” Golden City touted itself as “the prairie hay capital” of the nation. For young people with bigger dreams, “Golden City was a place to get out of,” remembered Lowell Pugh, one of her contemporaries who grew up to be the town’s funeral home director. Girls like Mary Virginia had two options in life, he said, “getting married or getting out of town—that would have been the goal of any girl if she weren’t already married and pregnant.”

The Eshelman exodus from California to Missouri underlined another glaring fact: though Mary Virginia venerated her father, Mother ruled the family. Their struggle of wills proved to be the central drama of Mary Virginia’s young life. Edna’s ideas about womanhood provided the gold standard. Her daughter obediently accepted these rules—at least when within Mother’s gaze—and rebelled against them when out of reach. Appearances remained all-important in the Eshelman household. “She had a pretty clear concept of what a wife and mother should be—she playacted!” explained Virginia. “She really thought she was superior to the world or wanted to be.”

Edna Evans had been raised as a middle child in a family more humble than the Eshelmans. An attractive woman, she was thin and lithe, with cropped brown hair. If her husband looked out at the world with a friendly, naive stare, Edna’s eyes revealed a more skeptical and socially ambitious mien. She always seemed to be in some unspoken competition. Not much in Edna’s married life had turned out as she had hoped. Mired in Golden City, she seemed determined to master as much of her world as possible and to convey those lessons to her daughter. “Everyone doted on me and I grew up with the sense that accomplishment and talent were marvelous, but that marriage was the primary goal,” Virginia recalled. Mrs. Eshelman insisted the townsfolk refer to her daughter by both her first and middle names—Mary Virginia. “She wanted to call me by my double-name, in that era when everyone was ‘Judy Ann’ and ‘Donna Marie,’” Virginia remembered. Naturally, in a fit of teenage resistance, she instructed friends at Golden City High to call her only Virginia.

Living in a farmhouse five miles out from the center of this dusty misnamed town left Edna desperate for attention and a social life. Once a month, Mrs. Eshelman joined Mrs. Garrett and the other Golden City matriarchs in a monthly get-together, held in rotation at one another’s house, where they chatted, shared gossip, and enjoyed female companionship so often absent on the plain. “Edna was a more lively person [than Harry], an ambitious person for her family and herself,” said Isabel Garrett Smith. “She was very proud of Mary Virginia. She taught her well.” Although her husband emerged a New Deal Democrat in reaction to the Hoovervilles across the nation, Edna saw her own opportunity in the state’s Republican Party. “Her whole life was trying to differentiate herself,” explained Virginia. Politics provided a rare moment of excitement in the otherwise lackluster life on the Eshelman farm. No one felt this isolation more than Mary Virginia. A pear tree in the back of their farm became her reading room, where on pleasant afternoons she would leaf through the Bible or novels hidden from her mother, dreaming about the world beyond her view. “I didn’t have playmates,” she recalled. “I just used to read people. I always wanted to know what their lives were like. My grand-parents and relatives and adults used to visit us, and I spent all of my time asking, ‘Tell me about when you were little.’ I loved hearing about other people’s lives because, I guess, of being alone as an only child.”

One summer, Mary Virginia visited for a week with Edna’s older sister, who permitted her niece to roam about her spacious apartment. Tucked into a drawer, she found her aunt’s private possessions, including a stack of letters written by a man who was the head of a small private boy’s school in the Missouri foothills. According to family lore, her aunt, then in her forties, had nearly married him. Mary Virginia discovered why she hadn’t. “I found these wonderful love letters, written with passion I’ll never forget the rest of my life, and they were all tied with a ribbon,” she explained. “What unfolded was that he had gotten a local girl pregnant, and she would not even talk to him from then on. She walked away and never married anyone. It was this wonderful drama.”

Secret tales like these about the dangers of carnal love undoubtedly affected Edna’s own perception of her daughter’s budding sexuality and her determination to keep her from any temptation. “I was never told about menstruation or anything,” Virginia said. “There was a rigid rejection of anything sexual. You didn’t talk about it.” Of course, on a farm filled with horses, pigs, and other warm-blooded animals, it was difficult, if not impossible, to avoid a heated demonstration of the facts of life. Historians of the Ozarks, that rolling woodlands amidst the prairie, confirmed the bawdy nature of farm life. When not heeding the Lord’s scriptures, for instance, some rural folk practiced their own bit of paganism during the 1890s, engaging in sexual intercourse out in the fields to ensure a fertile crop. “As I grew up, I learned about women’s fears of pregnancy and the town prostitute,” Virginia recalled. The Golden City of Mary Virginia’s generation, according to mortician Lowell Pugh, who also serves as the town’s ad hoc historian, produced three young women who became prosperous ladies of the evening in Kansas City.

Avoiding the subject of intimacy became more knotty when Mother wound up pregnant, giving birth to a boy, Larry, twelve years younger than Mary Virginia. Nevertheless, Edna resolved that any lessons about sex—like all important ones she imparted to her daughter—would be done on her terms. One night before bedtime, Virginia was reading a book when Mother summoned her into her bedroom. As she entered, Edna’s narrow face appeared deeply concerned. Mother began muttering about sex, using obscure terms and elliptical phrases. “I was very young when she was trying to tell me about pregnancy and how one achieved it,” Virginia recalled. “She made no sense at all to me.” Young Mary Virginia listened silently but paid her no heed.

By the time Mary Virginia reached puberty and her body matured, her feeling of loneliness at home was unbearable. As her interest turned to boys, she noticed that she could gain their attention by flashing an approving smile, by standing a certain way, or with a flip of her hair. Vaughn Nichols, a schoolmate who lived nearby, remembered hot summer days when he would arrive in his truck at the Eshelman place. On his weekly rounds, he’d pick up two or three cases of eggs—thirty dozen to a case—and other produce to take to market. The Eshelman farm wasn’t much to look at. Harry and Edna lived in a white two-story house nearly a century old, surrounded by 160 acres of wheat, corn, oats, alfalfa, and hay. Around their barn, some three hundred chickens laid their eggs, a few cows waited to be milked, and hogs and pigs rolled in the slop. But Vaughn couldn’t keep his eyes off Mary Virginia. Forever seared in Vaughn’s memory was the image of Mary Virginia wearing “short shorts—real short—just because she thought I was going to be there, I guess.” If Virginia liked him, though, “she never did tell me,” he admitted. After watching a movie at The Palace in town, Vaughn and the other boys would dance with girls from Golden City’s eight-room high school, including Mary Virginia. Behind the silver screen, The Palace theater hosted a small café called The Green Lantern, where they fox-trotted and mingled. “All the girls were better dancers than we were,” Vaughn said, laughing. “Mary Virginia was really an outgoing girl.” But in high school, no boy mattered more to Mary Virginia than Gordon Garrett, whose family lived about two miles from the Eshelman farm. “He really had never gone with anybody that much before her,” said his sister Isabel. “I think she was one of those who had the nerve to speak up to him.”

Though an upstanding young man, Gordon, known by the nickname “Red” or “Flash,” could sneak a beer or two with pals in the dry state of Missouri without getting caught. He similarly evaded detection during his car rides in the moonlight with Mary Virginia. Gordon never let on about his conquests like boastful boys do. Instead he intimated about his special place in her life. “He was aware that he was my first,” she recalled. “He made some reference to that fact. As a male, how could you not know you were the first? It was pretty obvious.” Perhaps afraid he might have hurt her, Gordon inquired tenderly whether she was all right after they had finished. “He was not a poet by nature,” she recalled, “but he asked me about my own feelings about it, whether it was effective for me. I don’t know how he gauged that, but he was considerate and he was concerned. I didn’t know how to answer him.” Mary Virginia had no intention of confirming his claim that he was her first. She didn’t need to, she said, because “he just knew it.”

The senior-class yearbook placed their two photos purposefully together. Its “prophecy” section, which predicted the future for classmates with tongue firmly in cheek, published what everyone in the class expected to come true: