Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder by Claudia Kalb Read Free Book Online Page B

aircraft ever designed to transport military supplies and personnel. The H-4 Hercules, as he named it, was to be constructed out of wood with a wingspan bigger than a football field and a weight of about 200 tons. It was an intoxicating proposition for Hughes, but it was also impossibly ambitious. The government didn’t help when it proposed a formidable challenge: Build it in ten months.
    Given the scope of the project, Hughes sensed that it would be unworkable from the start, but he agreed to it anyway, amping up his stress. “The more he thought about potential problems, the more he worried and the less he slept,” write Barlett and Steele in their biography. Within the first year, Hughes had missed numerous deadlines and burned through much of the $9.8 million the government allocated for the project. But he was obsessed with getting it done. Told that the contract was being canceled in the winter of 1944, he flew to Washington and worked tirelessly to convince the higher-ups to grant him a temporary reprieve. But the “Spruce Goose,” as critics derisively called it, was doomed. By the time Hughes finished building it, the war was over.
    The Hercules project left Hughes strung out and exhausted. By then, his preoccupation with germs and the precautions he took to avoid them had “gone beyond what most people regard as normal,” according to Fowler. And a new symptom had emerged: Hughes began repeating instructions to the people who worked for him,either in person or in copious memoranda he dictated. In a memo about communication, he wrote, “a good letter should be immediately understandable … a good letter should be immediately understandable … a good letter should be immediately understandable” and “think your material over in order to determine its limits … think your material over in order to determine its limits … think your material over in order to determine its limits.”
    Repetition is a core feature of OCD. It often plays out in the fixations people develop, but it can surface in speech as well, as it did with Hughes. There are a variety of reasons for both manifestations. In some cases, it’s a struggle with perfectionism; an action or word has to be repeated over and over again until it feels just right. In other instances, it’s an effort to neutralize bad thoughts (“I’ve offended God”) or fears about terrible things that might happen (“My brother is going to crash his car”). The hallmark of OCD, which is believed to affect up to 3 percent of the population, is the pairing of recurrent obsessions, which are intrusive thoughts, feelings, and images (“I forgot to turn off the stove” or “Germs are everywhere”), and compulsions, which are purposeful attempts to protect, escape, or reduce discomfort (checking and rechecking the stove or repeatedly washing one’s hands).
    Checking and washing are the most common and well-known manifestations of OCD, but symptoms can vary widely. Some people feel the need to organize books, papers, or clothing in a particular order; others are obsessed with counting or odd routines, like touching a doorpost a specific number of times before entering a room. In one of its most challenging forms, OCD can grip people with fears about causing grave harm to other people, like sexually abusing a child or even killing a spouse. Without knowing for sure that something bad is
not
going to happen, people with OCD devise irrational methods to keep everything undercontrol. “One common theme that connects them all is intolerance of uncertainty,” says Jason Elias, an OCD specialist at the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Institute at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts.
    Plenty of people have borrowed the term “OCD” to make fun of the way they feel compelled to alphabetize their spices or wash their tennis shoes. And many of