IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THIS CENTURY, IT WAS ROUTINEly believed that one could tell from people`s faces their mental capacities, personalities, even their characters. The so-called ”criminal type” could be recognized by such features as close-set eyes, a beetle brow and prognathous jaw, while brainy individuals could be distinguished by their alert eyes, high foreheads and so forth.
As with most myths, these theories, which made up a pseudoscience called
”physiognomy,” were peppered with inconsistencies. If smart people were sometimes said to have keen eyes, they were also reputed to have weak ones, a consequence of their reading too many books, and were thus prone, so the stereotype went, to wearing eyeglasses. In stature, they were variously presumed to be either gawky or diminutive and were almost sure to be disheveled because of cerebral preoccupations that made them forgetful.
All the individuals pictured in this photo essay have one thing in common: They are, by the best measures available, far above the norm in intelligence. Yet they are as different in physical appearance as it is possible to be. The architecture of their foreheads is eclectic. Their body type ranges from ecto to meso. Not a single one of them wears glasses. So much for being able to ”read” people by their looks.
Whether one can read people by their affiliations is a more interesting and pertinent question. These surpassingly bright folks all belong to Mensa
(it means ”table” in Latin), an international society whose sole criterion for membership is that one be in the upper 2 percent of human intelligence as measured by IQ scores.
Why should anyone join such an organization? Is it ego? Is it insecurity? Is it a desire to mingle with scintillating peers? Is it the hope that out of discussions with fellow Mensans will come solutions to mysteries of the cosmos? Some responses may surprise you.
Mensa has been written about ad nauseam. Probably it is part envy and part freak-show fascination, but the group attracts almost unceasing attention from the media. Just as people stayed glued years ago to radio`s ”Quiz Kids” program, so does today`s generation love to hear about the activities of the supersmart. They oohed when the world`s ”smartest” person, Marilyn vos Savant (”IQ 228.333 . . . ”)-a member not only of Mensa but of six other societies for the superintelligent (including Mega, which requires an IQ of at least 172, 40 points higher than Mensa`s cut-off point)-married artificial-heart inventor Robert Jarvik. Mensa even was the backdrop for a celebrated
”Columbo” episode on TV some years ago. Yet, if Mensa is a staple for features editors, seldom are the members themselves isolated under glass for study.
Robert Drea specializes in portraiture. A while back, having completed a Parisian showing of portraits of a cross-section of Chicagoans, he decided he wanted to zero in on a more focused group. Stumbling onto a monthly meeting of Mensa at the Ramada Inn O`Hare, he realized he had found what he was looking for. ”I was curious what sort of people would come together under the pretext of intelligence, so I took an advertisement out in their newsletter, and the respondents came one by one over four months and posed for me,” Drea says.
DREA STRIVES FOR DRAMA IN HIS PHOtographs. ”My approach is to achieve a timelessness, an absence of gesture,” he says. But again, appearances deceive, for despite the impassive exteriors, the interiors of these individuals fairly jump with energy and activity.
Mensans come in all varieties. Their number grows annually, and today the organization has some 80,000 members, 35,000 of them Americans. Among them are 29 meteorologists, 139 airline pilots, 540 nurses, 6 astronomers and Isaac Asimov. They also include a number of janitors, elevator operators and various other underemployed and unemployed types.
The Chicago area`s 2,100 Mensans hold their formal meetings monthly at the Ramada, bringing in outside speakers who hold forth on everything from politics and cryptology to avant-garde music and the Deep Tunnel project. But the group`s social calendar also features a dizzying array of outings, restaurants gatherings, home parties, puzzlefests, as well as meetings of individual special-interest groups, called SIGs. These SIGs are hotbeds of cerebral and not-so-cerebral passions, and they attract aficionados of everything from vampires to skydiving. There is even a biker SIG called
”Mensans from Hell.” Mensa membership costs $36 a year and entitles one to the monthly newsletters, which for a large number of members are their only active contact with the organization. (For more information, call 312-726-2225.)
On these pages are some very interesting people, among them David Katz, who played Yassir Arafat in the hit movie ”Naked Gun”; and Eve Cauley, who was the art director and production designer for such movies as ”Drugstore Cowboy” and ”The Untouchables.” You will also meet people who suffered some very personal experiences in the process of posing for Drea. There is William Rush, a voice coach who teaches sales people to speak with a credibility befitting their message in a program sponsored by Hall`s Mentholyptus. Rush lost his wife to an aneurysm weeks before he sat for Drea; overnight his face aged, he says. There is also Judith Barys, who, since her photograph was taken, has seen two of her close family members die of cancer and has lost 63 pounds. If there is a message, it is that the extraintelligent, unlike the very rich, are quite a bit like you and me.
CATHY STERRETT
A vice president of the Mensa Chicago chapter, editorial production coordinator at Scott Foresman & Co. and a seven-day-a-week body-builder.
”I`ve been in Mensa since 1982, when I received a letter telling me, for the first time in my life, that I was smart. It sounds dumb, but I never believed the reason that I had an unusual vocabulary and was made fun of constantly by my family was that I was smart. Joining Mensa changed my life. Imagine the impact on a person who always felt stupid, to have a piece of paper that said I was smart. I began to speak and act as if I was, and others began to act as if I was, and it reinforced me and became true.
”Mensa is my surrogate family. I have the brothers and sisters, mom and dad I`ve always wanted, who are interested in Egyptology, theater, art and music, who are exceptionally curious about everything and find nothing threatening and everything subject to debate. It`s a joy. Just like a family, we have weird Uncle Billy and strange Aunt Sally. ”Remember the `Barney Miller` show? It had Dietrich, the intelligent cop whom everyone turned to for bits of knowledge. Imagine a room filled with people like that.”
SHARON ROSS
Chicago public school teacher and founder of a Mensa special-interest group called Women of Independent Means and Minds. Mensa member since 1983.
”I grew up in all-white neighborhoods where it was popular to think that minorities had inferior intelligence. Chicago teachers also have to contend with the reputation of not being smart. So I joined Mensa, in part, to dispel those two myths.
”There are other blacks in Mensa, but they come and go. They come to a couple of meetings, get discouraged by the lack of other blacks and don`t come back. But there is no anti-minority sentiment in Mensa whatsoever. I`ve met with absolutely none of the bigotry I grew up with. Most of the members know how it feels to be an outsider, since they also grew up with a stigma because of their intelligence.”
AL SOLEY
Industrial designer from Joliet. Mensa member since 1981.
”If I were to sum up why I belong to Mensa, it is because I can. It`s a good feeling to belong to a rather elite group. But I don`t tell many people I`m a member. I`ve found that questions come up like, `If you`re so smart, why aren`t you a millionaire?` You can only answer a question like that so many times before you get sick. Also, if I`m wrong on any point, people who know I`m a member won`t let me live it down.
”Since I joined, I haven`t attended a single function, I`m ashamed to say. But I do enjoy the literature. I read it cover to cover every month. I don`t think there`s any pecking order within the organization based on IQ. It`s like temperature. If it`s 110 degrees or 120 degrees, what`s the difference? It`s hot.
”I finally got my college degree last June after bouncing around from school to school. I got my bachelor`s from North Central College in Naperville at the age of 39. It was a big thrill for me because it took me 20 years to get it. I delivered the invocation at commencement.”
WILLIAM RUSH
Voice consultant, pianist and former member of the Norman Luboff choir. Mensa member for 13 years.
”My joining was a fluke. I went through a two-day aptitude test to see what I wanted to do when I grew up and discovered I had incredible scores. They told me there are organizations for people with scores like I have. I`m an active member, off and on, depending on the needs of my business.
”The intellectual humility within the organization is astounding for a group of people who test so high. It would not be uncommon to find people there who have IQs of 180, even near 200. If asked, they will tell you. But you can sometimes get an idea from the concentration, the intensity, especially when you note that someone is picking up the line of thought even before you`ve finished the sentence, when it wasn`t all that uncomplicated to begin with.”
LESLIE MURRAY
Greeting-card designer. Mensa member since 1985.
”My sister dared me to try the Mensa test. She always thought I was such an egghead in school. I didn`t tell my husband or anyone else that I was applying, in case I didn`t get in. Now, when I do silly things like locking the keys inside the car, I think maybe they got my test scores mixed up with someone else`s.
”I don`t tell people I`m a member. They won`t play Trivial Pursuit with you anymore. People have the wrong idea about Mensans. They think we are constantly thinking about black holes and looking down on everyone else. The truth is, I walk around thinking other people are smarter than I am.
”But Mensa has given me more confidence in myself and my opinions. That`s another reason I joined. I`m an ex-model. I felt compelled to dispel the notion that I was an empty-headed decorative object. When I was modeling, I felt dumber and dumber as the years went by, because you are treated as a dumb person.”
TOM FULLER
Commercial photographer. Mensa member for six years.
”I was looking for a social organization, an opportunity to meet other people who would be thinking people, people I might have more in common with than those from the singles-bar scene. I was unmarried at the time.
”Ego wasn`t a part of it. I was very happy that I passed the test, but I never looked at my membership as a superiority thing. There are a lot of people who could join but probably don`t realize they have the potential to use their mind to its fullest.
”As a child, I was what they now call `gifted.` In my personal life, I did have a certain amount of trouble any gifted kid would have relating to the so-called normal world. I didn`t go to college the first time around. I did not take well to the traditional structured environment that`s typically found in American colleges. I`m currently going to Triton, working toward a degree in teaching photography.”
JUDITH BARYS
Auditor for the Clerk of the Circuit Court, District II, and part-time Realtor. Mensa member since 1980.
”I feel sorry for those who don`t go to meetings, because I`m continually surprised by Mensa. We are so varied in our interests you never know what you`re going to wind up talking about-the Cubs, poetry, solid-waste disposal. We also solve mutual problems by talking things over. It`s an informal think tank for us.
”Nobody thinks too much about it if you ask a stupid question. In school, if you were designated as the smart one, you were not allowed to ask anything off the wall. But in Mensa, we can ask stupid questions, and no one laughs. People don`t realize that about us. We`re almost normal.
”I`m a very active member. There have been a lot of changes in my life recently. I`ve lost 63 pounds since this picture was taken, and two members of my family have died of cancer. It makes a big difference in how you look at things.”
EVE CAULEY
Theater and film art director. Was art director for ”Drugstore Cowboy”
and production designer on ”The Untouchables.” Mensa member for five years. ”I had just moved to Chicago, and someone suggested I join Mensa as a way to meet new people. I was hoping to meet other gifted artists, but it didn`t work out that way. I met a few people I liked very much but mainly found it to be an older, somewhat geekish crowd, a lot of math and computer geniuses, not really my type of people. I`m not active at all now, and I`ll probably let my membership lapse.
”I`ve found a lot of really brilliant people who are not in Mensa, and I`ve always enjoyed the company of geniuses, be they friends, dates or fellow workers. I`m glad I gave Mensa a try, and I would not dissuade people from joining. But I`ve always been very independent and never made one group my main focus.”
DAVID KATZ
Says he has been ”a salesman for 27 years and an actor for 47, obviously the two of them concurrently for a lot of it.” Sells in New Jersey, where he recently moved, when he isn`t making movies; among recent roles, Yassir Arafat in ”The Naked Gun.” Mensa member for 13 years.
”Mensa has always been there for me as a social support network. I have lots of friends from whom I get good insights when I`m having a bad time. It`s a worthwhile organization for what it can do for people who are not socially adept. A lot of people call Mensa a genius organization. But to me, genius is where creativity and intelligence come together. There is no way to judge creativity, and a lot of the people I`ve met in Mensa have the intellect of computers. Obviously, all Mensans are supposedly smart or at least good test- takers, but there are some whom I wouldn`t let walk across the street alone and others whom I`d rather leave in the middle of the street. Some of them enjoy the rickytick politics of Mensa; they see it as a way to get a little power. My feeling is that if they got control, they would be in charge of 50,000 social misfits. They are a lot of great people, don`t get me wrong, but they can get a little wrapped up in the things they do.”
