As one of the original and longest-running researchers, Wanda Karlewicz’s insights—into the methodology of the study, Webster/Smithy’s early accomplishments, the synergy of the research team—are invaluable. Though she could easily fill a book with her memories and observations, she has never chosen to do so. While this may be to my personal advantage financially, it is distinctly regrettable for science.
Given this reticence and her well-known reclusiveness, the few recorded interviews Karlewicz has provided, always back-lit in dim lighting, become even more noteworthy as much for their rarity as for their inherent informative value.
Watching the video footage never fails to raise a frisson up my neck. From the shadows of the darkened soundstage, her amorphous figure shifts. One can see nothing but blackness where her face ought to fill the camera’s frame and an occasional wavering tendril at the side of her cheek, perhaps the shadow of her hair or a billowing scarf. Yet her voice remains articulate and clear in spite of her obscured figure, and it is easy to envision her striding through the corridors of Trevor Hall, announcing the day’s agenda and assigning tasks. Hers is the voice of knowledge and authority. It is the voice of the experiment.
What follows are selected transcripts from Karlewicz’s interviews with the BBC (1982) and PBS (1987) describing the formative stages of the study and the unusual hurdles it encountered…
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INT – DARKENED SOUNDSTAGE
Wanda’s profile appears as a darker shadow against a darkened background. She shifts and brushes something over her shoulder.
Interviewer: Can you state your name for us, for the record?
Wanda: I am Wanda Karlewicz, and from approximately January of 1973 to May of 1975, I acted as Senior Research Assistant on the Preis-Herald Primate Language Project—the Webster Study.
(Pause)
Interviewer: How did you get involved with the project?
Wanda: I was a graduate student in Yale’s linguistics program. Part of my curriculum included psychology courses under Piers Preis-Herald. We quickly developed a rapport: our academic interests overlapped and we shared a strong work-ethic and an ambition to blaze new trails in the fields of cognition and socialization. We worked well together. He became the primary advisor on my thesis and I became his assistant. I taught his undergraduate introductory classes when he was out of town, proctored and graded exams, and analyzed data in his labs...
…Piers had always been fascinated by communication, which made him a natural fit to supervise my linguistics research. When we met, he was exploring language acquisition in young children, but soon after, he switched his focus to communication in animals. Piers claimed a study involving an animal subject would be more persuasive. There are limits to how you can manipulate a human subject, whereas we could completely control the environment of an animal. Additionally, showing an animal could learn to communicate would be groundbreaking. Primate studies were then in their infancy. Robert La Fontaine had just published his initial studies with Osage as we were launching our research, but Piers identified weaknesses he thought we could improve.
Osage had been taught to sign the same way seals are taught to perform: by direct instruction and primary reinforcement. Webster would be motivated by a desire to communicate and be reinforced by acceptance from his human family. To encourage the chimp’s own initiative and reduce dependency on response-reinforcement, Piers chose to immerse him in a human lifestyle in which sign language communication was a natural and necessary feature. Once the chimp absorbed the building blocks of language—a vocabulary and rules of syntax—from human models, he could go on to produce original statements that would reflect his internal thought processes. We believed that in this way, we could learn what another species thought of the world, thought of us humans, thought of his own existence. The possibilities were dizzying...
…When Piers asked me to become one of Webster’s teachers, I leapt at the chance. I’m fluent in sign language thanks to a lifetime spent interacting with a Deaf younger brother. I had the skill set, the theoretical knowledge and the motivation, so I was a natural for the job. I developed lesson plans and selected the signs that would be introduced to the chimp. My lists were based on the ease of producing the sign as well as on the frequency or relevance of the word. I had to include a mixture of nouns and verbs and introduce abstract concepts like “where” and “when” as well as concrete ideas such as “there” and “you.”
Interviewer: Will you describe some of those lessons for us?
Wanda: Initial sessions involved me signing with another researcher so Webster could observe and imitate us. I worked with other volunteers from Piers’s classes and with Webster’s surrogate mother, Lorna McKenzie. Each co-signer had a varying degree of ability. Regrettably, I had to spend almost as much time instructing the other instructors as I did instructing Webster. It was important to get them to make clean signs for the sake of accuracy. We needed to verify that Webster’s gestures were true signs and that one sign did not become confused for another. I expended a lot of effort on legibility and sacrificed quantity for quality. I’ve always regretted that and wondered how differently the study might have turned out if we’d had more professional instructors during Webster’s critical period.
Interviewer: Tell us more about Lorna McKenzie. Why was she chosen to parent Webster?
Wanda: I don’t know if Piers had Lorna’s family in mind when he began the experiment or if he decided afterward she would be the right person to pick up the slack. Lorna had been Piers’s graduate assistant long before me, but instead of continuing in the field, she married and started a family. By the time Webster came along, Lorna was on her second marriage. One of her new stepsons was Deaf, and so she had had to learn some sign language to communicate with him.
Several volunteers from Yale and the surrounding institutions, including distinguished cognitive scientists, wanted to take in Webster. Yet, Piers insisted that the best way for Webster to develop human traits was by growing up in a ‘normal’ human family.
Given that prerequisite, I’m not sure I would have selected the McKenzies. Lorna proved to be a laissez-faire mother with only low-to-moderate signing skills. Nevertheless, the family lived just past the Connecticut/New York border in a large house with spacious fields and plenty of room to run and play. The nearest neighbors were a mile or so away, which we thought was an advantage. As we later discovered when we moved Webster to Newport, his vocalizing created a lot of disturbance. In retrospect, we should have started him in a more populated area as an infant and moved him to the country once he approached adolescence and became more…assertive.
Lorna was intrigued and couldn’t wait to ‘adopt’ Webster. Her husband, Wolf, was easygoing and humored her by agreeing to take responsibility for the chimp. I think he imagined that the experience would provide good fodder for one of his novels. That changed. Webster never adapted to Wolf. In fact, he was often hostile toward him. If I were a Freudian, I’d be tempted to speculate on the existence of an Oedipal complex in non-human mammals.
Interviewer: Can you elaborate?
Wanda: Webster never was comfortable with Wolf as a caretaker. He wouldn’t accept a bottle from him. He was frequently agitated in his presence, like a child suffering from separation anxiety and left with a strange babysitter. At a couple of play sessions, he bit Wolf on the hand—nothing requiring medical attention, but enough to break the skin…And Webster would sometimes defecate in Wolf’s study, usually after tension had been building between the two. It was uncanny. The family ended up putting a bolt lock on the study door, off the ground so Webster couldn’t reach it. That lock worked.
Interviewer: Did Webster resent the other children, too?
Wanda: Webster always liked to be the center of attention, and if he saw anyone receiving more of it than him, he would act to redirect the focus his way. Often, he would do so by creating a disturbance. He showed no special affinity toward any of the kids. We’d hoped he would develop a bond with young Stephen, the boy who signed, but Webster’s signing skills during this time never rose to the level where he could reliably communicate with the little boy, and Stephen was more interested in sports than in animals anyway. The other kids alternated between spoiling Webster like a special pet and complaining when he would mess up their rooms or monopolize Lorna.
Interviewer: How did you and Lorna McKenzie work together? Any rivalry?
Wanda (sarcastic): You mean because Piers had seen her first? No, we weren’t in junior high school. Our interaction was…amicable. We didn’t become friends, despite our similar academic background. Our personalities were different. I’m very disciplined. It’s one of my strengths as a teacher and a researcher, though it hasn’t always worked to my favor in casual interactions. Within the context of the experiment, I saw Webster as raw material to be shaped. I was interested in seeing what he could learn and produce. Lorna was…
Wanda rubs her forehead.
Wanda (cont.): …well, frankly, more of a hippie. Her approach to the study was phenomenological. She was interested in experiencing the moment and going “with the flow.” Lorna let Webster guide her instead of trying to guide Webster. I’d tell her the curriculum required him to obey certain rules and she’d retort that we needed to consider what he wanted. She wanted us to structure our lessons according to Webster’s interests and Webster’s wants, which varied from day to day and practically hour to hour. When he was inattentive and resistant to signing, Lorna wanted to cut short the lessons to let him play and “explore his own world.” She constantly preached to us about how crucial it was to listen to Webster, but she never bothered to document anything he did or “told” her, so we only had her word to rely on with regard to anything that went on in that house. It was absurd!
Piers tolerated her wishes to a certain extent. I think he worried if he opposed her too openly, she would drop out of the study and he’d be left to care for Webster himself. Ultimately, Lorna’s refusal to observe a scientific approach did nothing but harm for the project. Webster wasn’t performing to his best potential. Our Yale team visited the home periodically, and in a concentrated period of time devoted exclusively to signing, we were able to teach him a great deal. But nothing we did was ever reinforced in our absence, so by the time of our next visit, Webster would have forgotten so much that we’d have to spend about two-thirds of our time re-teaching everything from the last session. We couldn’t cover as much new ground as we needed.
The primate mind, like the human mind, is highly malleable for the first two-to-four years. Webster was going on two years old and was practically a little heathen. I worried we were squandering his best years. Jeff Dalton, with whom Piers had written the original grant proposal for the project and who was the videographer for all of our sessions, complained bitterly about the way Lorna was spoiling Webster. He wanted to stage an intervention, to urge Piers to pull Webster from the McKenzie home even temporarily. Jeff thought if we could keep the chimp for a week, a fortnight, in a more structured lab environment, we could make leaps and bounds and prove that Webster’s limitations were being imposed on him by his caretaker and not by his own lack of ability. It was one of the few times that we were in accord.
Interviewer: How did you convince Dr. Preis-Herald to revoke the McKenzies’ custody?
Wanda: We didn’t have to intervene. In the midst of all our fretting and plotting, Lorna announced she was expecting another baby and the family wouldn’t be able to keep Webster. Piers, bless him, wasn’t quite as blind as we’d feared. He had sensed that Lorna’s phase in the study was playing itself out and had already begun arrangements for a contingency plan. With my help, he prepared another grant proposal to rent housing for Webster and a team of student researchers. This time, he would be raised within a fictive family group instead of a house full of children. The new plan would allow for a more controlled environment where Webster could have regular lessons in a low-key, informal setting.
Interviewer: The infamous Trevor Hall.
Pause.
Wanda: Yes, it became that. I had been looking at homes in rural Connecticut, and not mansions either, but farmhouses. I was seeking a countryside setting similar to the McKenzies’ when Piers suddenly announced that he had rented us a mansion in Rhode Island. I was taken aback, but the romance of living and working in such a beautiful setting appealed to me. The house needed a ton of work. I’m sure the lessors counted on our cleaning and making improvements for basic living arrangements when they worked out the rental agreement. Even so, it was still a bargain for us; a blessing, I thought.
Even with a new home in place, we still needed to accomplish a tremendous deal of work in a short time period. Lorna had only given us six weeks’ notice. It had taken us almost six months to put together the initial phase of the study: three months’ build-up before we acquired Webster and another eight or nine weeks of prepping him in the lab and trying to teach the McKenzies a bit about chimp behavior. Now we had to prep the house, develop new lesson plans, and hire faculty.
Piers handled the hiring process himself. He held interviews at Yale, but also toured other campuses in the area and posted advertisements in academic journals to reach a wider audience. Jeff and I spent spring break working nonstop at the house. Fortunately, he’s very handy and was able to get the plumbing and wiring in order. Between us, we fixed up Webster’s quarters—hazard-proofed and furnished them.
I decided to seal off superfluous areas of the house. I also cleaned and furnished some of the bedrooms. I visited local yard sales and consignment shops and used my own money to get necessities like bedding, silverware, and a dining set. The house had been empty for so long. All that remained were some worn-out old chairs and rusty bedsprings from the years when it had been a boarding school. It was spartan, and I wanted Trevor Hall to seem welcoming to the people who would be giving their time and energy to the project.
I also purchased the journals and other supplies. Then I re-worked some of the original lesson plans I’d developed for Lorna, interspersed with some new ideas. I considered many educational textbooks and analyzed various methods to approach our goals. I structured the play sessions and scheduled meal and nap times. I even designed menus, for heaven’s sake, so that Webster could have a balanced diet to fuel his studies! As it turned out, I put in too much work…
…Once the new team assembled at the house, I encountered the same issues we’d faced with Lorna. For the most part, Piers’s recruits were talented and intelligent young scientists, but they were too easily enamored of the mansion and the excitement of working with a young chimp. Webster was charming and endeared himself to the ladies. Gail in particular fawned over him, though she was diligent in drilling him too. I constantly had to remind the team we had a mission and goals to reach. I had hoped by working with other scientists, I would be rowing in concert with likeminded, equally motivated instructors. Instead, I felt like a kindergarten teacher trying to make the students settle down for a nap. I know I made myself an ogre, but it couldn’t be helped.
I knew we couldn’t afford to waste any more time as Webster’s development progressed. His brain was wiring itself into its final configuration, and it was vital that language recognition and production be part of that configuration. Moreover, I understood even then —even if Piers and Jeff didn’t consider it—that Webster’s physical growth would place a ‘sell by’ date on our ability to work with him. As he got bigger, he was harder to carry around. And as he grew stronger, he became harder to discipline. We couldn’t make him sit still for a session. He began not to mind us. He learned he could push us around—literally. Somehow, that fact of life didn’t register on anybody else.
Nor did they seriously appreciate that we had to submit data to the board that had approved our work. We had to prove to the university we could achieve noteworthy results to continue receiving funding. You don’t get results by clowning around; you need to be organized, controlled, consistent, and persistent. You need to record everything and interpret it. The team at Trevor Hall acted like we were in a Shangri-La where nothing would ever change, no one would ever grow old, and we could play forever without being accountable to anybody. It was up to me to tell them that wasn’t so. Piers had so much on his plate: his own classes, his writing, his weekly broadcasts, more grant proposals. He simply couldn’t be on site every day to manage the study himself. I had to do it. I did the best I could, but I didn’t make any friends. They simply didn’t want to hear it.
Interviewer: Why do you think there was such a lack of cooperation from your colleagues?
Wanda: If I’m to be honest, a large part of the problem was my own doing. I guess I just don’t know how to inspire cooperation. I know I worry too much about giving other people responsibility, especially when the outcome is important. Most of the time, I just know I’m going to do a better job than anyone else, so why jeopardize the work by handing it off to someone inferior?
Early on, I tried to identify people on the team to whom I could delegate. Before anyone arrived at Trevor Hall, I read the profiles Piers gave to me and projected who would be a good ally. Jeff Dalton would have been an obvious partner because he already had a lengthy involvement in the study, but I sensed that he, like Lorna, had a personal relationship with Webster. After all,he gave the chimp the nickname. I wanted a cooler head to put with my own.
I had high hopes for Tammy Cohen. She was a good student; she had submitted an undergraduate writing sample with her application and it was excellent. She was the eldest child in a large family, so I imagined she was responsible and capable.
From the beginning, I expected Tammy to be more mature than the others. So when she showed up at Trevor Hall and immediately began whining about the rooming arrangements of all things, it floored me. I was surprised by her petulance. It really soured me. After that, I was less inclined to trust her. Tammy was one of the most serious and objective researchers in the group, but I gave up any thought of making her my lieutenant. In doing that, I made myself a target for resentment. We got off on the wrong foot and never found our way back. It was unfortunate.
Interviewer: How soon after you moved into Trevor Hall did the unexplained incidents begin?
Wanda: I said we weren’t going to discuss that…
Interview: Our viewers will want to know—
Wanda: I don’t care!
She rises from her chair and removes her microphone.
Wanda (cont.): This interview is over!
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