Vanity Fair's Schools For Scandal

The Inside Dramas at 16 of America's Most Elite Campuses—Plus Oxford!

Graydon Carter

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501173752
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Vanity Fair's Schools for Scandal brings together the magazine's finest reporting on the scandals that have swept our nation's most elite campuses over the past twenty-five years—all collected in one definitive, "fascinating, eye-opening" ( Booklist ) volume edited by Graydon Carter and introduced by Cullen Murphy. Many of us have long suspected an American obsession with status. Now Graydon Carter has collected extraordinary articles from Vanity Fair that show the lengths we will go to achieve it, preserve it, or destroy it—from the enduring, shadowy influence of Yale's secret societies to the infamous "senior salute" at St. Paul's School; from the false accusations in the Duke lacrosse team's infamous rape case to the (mis)reportage of a sexual assault at the University of Virginia; from a deadly extreme-sport episode at Oxford to the Keystone Kop theft of a college's rare books to the allegations of fraud by the now-shuttered Trump University. Vanity Fair's Schools for Scandal brings focus to the perils facing American education today and how the life of the mind, and the significance of the institutions meant to foster it, has been negatively impacted by the partisan politics of privatization, tensions over so-called political correctness, the fraught dynamic of the teacher-student relationship, and what happens when visions for a bold future collide with the desire to maintain hidebound (or venerable) traditions.With an array of Vanity Fair 's signature writers—including Buzz Bissinger, William D. Cohan, Sarah Ellison, Evgenia Peretz, Todd S. Purdum, and Sam Tanenhaus, among others— Vanity Fair's Schools for Scandal presents a compelling if troubling account of the state of elite education today, and the evolving social, sexual, racial, and economic forces that have shaped it.

PERILOUS PATTERNS

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PHILLIPS EXETER ACADEMY

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“EXETER’S PASSION PLAY”

By Jesse Kornbluth

DECEMBER 1992

‘Everything your life has been about is over.” If one of his students had written that, Lane Bateman would have reached for his red pencil. But last July, Bateman wasn’t in any position to play drama teacher—the local policeman who delivered some version of this line carried a search warrant and was accompanied by half a dozen other lawmen. Shocked, Bateman opened his front door wider. Melodrama entered.

According to Bateman, the policeman said, “Let’s have a look at your film collection.”

“I have hundreds,” he replied. “I’ve collected movies for years. I’m like the school librarian—kids borrow tapes on weekends.”

“We know that buried deep inside It’s a Wonderful Life, we’ll find you having sex with students.”

The police had some reason to think this. A “confidential informant” had told them that the 51-year-old Bateman, chairman of the drama department at New Hampshire’s Phillips Exeter Academy, owned a world-class pornography collection featuring boys as young as 7. They believed that he bought and sold these videos, and they sought the computers that contained the names of his customers. “The I.R.S. will be brought in,” they reportedly warned him. “We’re sure you haven’t paid taxes on what you made.”

“Look outside,” pleaded Bateman, whose salary had never topped $40,000. “I drive a seven-year-old Ford Escort.”

His protest was dismissed. Soon Bateman was leading the police through his apartment, and, depending upon whom you believe, he either insisted that although he owned some child pornography he had never shipped any to anyone, or admitted that he both possessed and shipped it. Whatever he told the police, it was less eloquent than what they found: enough videotapes to fill eight footlockers (“No normal person would have so many,” a policeman said, according to Bateman), a 100-foot rope with a hot-water bottle tied to one end and boxer shorts tied to the other (“A trick from my magic act,” Bateman swore), a case of Albolene makeup remover (Bateman had told the informant it was “my fave” lubricant), video cameras and editing decks the authorities valued at $200,000 (“You only have this equipment if you’re producing and selling,” Bateman says one of the officers noted), and, in a hidden compartment beneath Bateman’s bed, videos labeled Ballin’ Boys Duo, Young Mouthful, and Now, Boys!

That afternoon, the police arrested Bateman. That evening, as Bateman waited in jail for his lover of 17 years to bail him out, he had a revelation: “I thought, By midnight, I can be dead. The idea was like a warm bath. This solves everything.” But when he returned home, his lover threw his arms around him. “With that, I knew I didn’t have to die,” Bateman says.

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From Exeter’s point of view, it would have been more convenient if he had killed himself. The following morning, as police were telling reporters that many of the 800 videotapes they had confiscated contained footage depicting sex acts “involving boys under 10,” an academy security guard delivered a brief note to Bateman’s home. In 79 words, Exeter principal Kendra Stearns O’Donnell fired him, ordered him out of his apartment within two weeks, and barred him from school property.

But no summary judgment on Exeter’s part could keep its name from being dragged through the mud with Bateman’s. Teachers get arrested for sex-related offenses all the time—but never at venerable, highly respected Exeter. If ever a school had an unblemished reputation, it was this New Hampshire powerhouse. Set in the state’s third-oldest town, Exeter’s ivy-clad buildings give it the appearance of a geographically displaced Harvard. It is. Only slightly smaller than arch-rival Andover, Exeter turns out students who are verbally acute, organized, and programmed to achieve; its graduates include Daniel Webster, Jay Rockefeller, and John Irving. While this factory for academic excellence doesn’t feed its fair-haired elite products into Ivy League colleges as it once did (of its 992 students, 5.2 percent are African-American, and 31 percent are on scholarship; of its 326 graduates last year, only 39 went to Harvard or Yale), Exeter is still the model of the American prep school, what the novelist John Marquand once called “the most beautiful and aesthetically satisfying of all New England schools.”

So the New England press fanned the story of the “Academy porn bust” and the suspect who “lived 10 years with male students.” Early in August, The New York Times took the story to a new level of scandal—it reported that in the raid on Bateman’s house police found videotapes showing 10 former Exeter boys nude or involved in sex acts. Although this charge was apparently untrue, all ambiguity vanished after that, and Exeter, like Bateman, was convicted in the press of every possible charge.

The media orgy was unsurprising—this was a subject with broad appeal. For those who couldn’t pay $17,000 a year to send a child to Exeter, Bateman represented an opportunity to throw rocks through elitist windows. For preppies and their parents, the idea that a well-disguised pedophile could gain access to even the most exclusive chicken coop was fresh reason to worry about the boarding-school experience. And for defenders of tradition, Bateman’s downfall was proof that Exeter’s principal—the first female to head the school in its 211-year history—had been wrong to champion “tolerance” and “diversity.”

Within Exeter, the Bateman story provoked a very different reaction: shock that one of the school’s most admired teachers could have done anything wrong. It usually takes four years for instructors to get tenure at Exeter. Bateman was tenured after just two; in his third year, he was named department chairman. In 1990 he won a prestigious faculty award that honors excellence in both classroom instruction and dormitory supervision. And each year there were students who told him, “If it hadn’t been for you, I wouldn’t have survived here.” So when Kendra O’Donnell claimed that Bateman was no longer “an appropriate role model,” there were many who disagreed.

In October, Bateman was convicted in Federal District Court in Concord, New Hampshire, of one count of possessing and two counts of transporting child pornography, as well as one count of forfeiture; slated to be sentenced by year’s end, he faces a possible 10 years in jail and a $250,000 fine. But while outsiders may be satisfied with the official resolution of the Bateman drama, questions still linger at Exeter. Who was Lane Bateman, really? Was he an obsessive sex offender, star of a secret production: Master Bateman and the Boys? Or was this The Children’s Hour: a case of a young informant with a grudge turning a private matter into a public scandal? In either event, how did this gifted drama teacher forget the Chekhovian adage that a gun displayed early in a drama will be fired at its climax—why did he keep that time bomb of kiddie porn ticking under his bed?

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Lane Bateman was raised by devout Mormon parents in Idaho Falls, Idaho, where a great many of his fellow citizens shared the Mormon belief that homosexual behavior was a sin. In this prim, self-contained community, Bateman’s most unusual childhood activity was directing his four younger siblings in beauty pageants and spooky dramas. “I grew up not watching TV,” says his sister, Judy, “because Lane was so much more interesting.” At 12, inspired by his drama instructor, he decided he wanted to dedicate his life to teaching theater. In Idaho Falls, this wasn’t a common male ambition; from then on, some schoolmates called him “Batwoman.”

“I met Lane when he was 17. . . . I knew he was gay the minute I met him,” says Sylvia Harman, one of his first drama coaches. “He didn’t. I remember him coming back from an acting seminar in Texas. The costumer there was gay, and Lane made fun of him. We all laughed, but I thought, Poor Lane, he still doesn’t know.”

Bateman was such a faithful Mormon that he dutifully enrolled at Brigham Young University. At 21 he finally had his recognition scene: “I was traveling with a group from school, and my girlfriend had our itinerary. Every place we stopped, there was a thick letter from her waiting for me. It got to the point I couldn’t stand to open my mail. Then, alone in a shower, I suddenly understood: I was homosexual. . . . I felt my psyche change. I wasn’t sick—I saw myself as an oppressed minority, and my feelings were valid.”

He came out to his girlfriend, took a year off to work in his father’s construction business, pulled himself together, graduated from college—and, he says, insisted on being “excommunicated” from the Mormon Church. Three years later, at 26, he became head of the drama department at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan. He was, by all accounts, an inspiring teacher: supportive yet objective, artistic but businesslike. And he was aggressively “normal”—when boys visited, his copy of Playboy just happened to be on display. “It was unnecessary camouflage,” a male student recalls. “I didn’t have a clue he was homosexual, and almost all the women were in love with him.”

“I told a friend I was mad for Lane,” says Gay Marshall, an Interlochen student who went on to sing “What I Did for Love” as Cassie in A Chorus Line on Broadway. “She told me he was gay. I was so relieved. I thought, Now we can be friends. But when I told Lane, he looked destroyed—he didn’t want anyone to know. He loved what he did so much he’d overcompensate to protect it.”

In 1969, New York police and homosexuals battled in what has come to be known as the Stonewall riot. Although reports of that event radicalized Bateman, he wasn’t ready to take more than what appeared to be a small, personal risk: when he was a drama teacher at Augustana College in Illinois, he fell in love with a 21-year-old student. But the young man’s mother complained to the school, and rather than risk publicity that might have ended his teaching career, Bateman resigned.

As a doctoral candidate at Southern Illinois University, Bateman was finally free to become what he describes as “militantly gay.” His Ph.D. thesis more than confirms this. Entitled “Three Proud Plays,” it consisted of three dramatic works, two of which celebrate the strengths of professor-student relationships, chronicle the threat to these affairs when the younger man’s parents show up, and are obviously inspired by his truncated romance at Augustana College. One of them, Lying in State, was a winner at the American College Theatre Festival. It was performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., in 1974, and got the author an agent at William Morris.

But Bateman had no desire to be recognized as a playwright. He wanted only to teach. His early mentor, Sylvia Harman, who had taught at Exeter off and on for a decade, knew of his dedication, and in 1980, when the school asked her to recommend a candidate for a job as drama teacher, she could think only of Lane Bateman. Before she endorsed him, though, she had a question: Would he have problems living with all those boys? “I have someone with whom I’m very much in love,” Bateman told her. “The problem is that I won’t be seeing him enough.”

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‘Where do you picture yourself in 10 years?” the chairman of Exeter’s drama department asked Bateman at his interview. “Right here,” Bateman replied. “I can’t imagine anything more satisfying than teaching at Exeter.” He had, without knowing it, paraphrased the school motto: Non sibi—Not for oneself. Two days later, he was offered the job.

At Exeter, he was a compulsive dramaturge: “Like Streisand getting hold of something, he’d learn everything about the sets and costumes of a play,” a former colleague notes. But he never tried to surround himself with kids who would make a similar commitment to the theater. He scheduled auditions for an entire season’s plays at the same time, so the bigger talents couldn’t snare all the good roles; when a colleague suggested that they put on The Normal Heart, the landmark Larry Kramer play about AIDS, he vetoed it less for political reasons than because there weren’t enough female roles. And he encouraged “fac brats”—teachers’ children, who are sometimes regarded as charity cases—to join the choruses of Godspell and Nicholas Nickleby.

Bateman had an acute understanding of the school and its clientele. Exeter is famous for its work load—students average three to four hours of homework a night—and he made it clear that he expected even the most dedicated of his drama wonks to get it done. “Face it, kids at Exeter aren’t going on to Broadway,” he told me. So he was blunt with them: Theater at Exeter isn’t a place to indulge specialness; it’s a place to explore your creativity, a safety valve for your frustrations. Your academic work comes first.

And he led by example. After a long day of teaching, an evening of rehearsals, and hours of dormitory supervision, he was still available for academic consultation. Even with all that, his batteries were still charged. “I was having trouble writing a script about Edith Piaf, so I descended on Lane,” Gay Marshall recalls. “The term was in full swing, but night after night he’d stay up and work with me until three A.M.”

On one visit to Exeter, Marshall saw a locked box in Bateman’s apartment. She asked him what it contained. “Nasty movies,” he said. She was about to urge him to jettison them when she reminded herself that this was Bateman’s well-contained private business.

Very private. Exeter is a school that now has a Gay/Straight Alliance—but only for students. Homosexual teachers don’t acknowledge their sexuality even to their colleagues; on a faculty that may be 10 percent gay, only one instructor has come out. Still, Bateman wouldn’t have shocked anybody if he’d announced that he was something other than a bachelor. But he never did. Few of his students knew he was gay; even fewer were aware that he was partnered with another instructor.

“It’s not healthy to be so secretive, but Lane never felt secure enough at Exeter to come out,” explains a friend who has long known of Bateman’s interest in pornography. “He lived in a dorm for 10 years, and there were kids walking in and out of his room late at night in their underwear. If he ever had a chance to do something with a kid, Exeter was it. But that’s not Lane—if the most gorgeous kid in the world had presented himself to him, he would have said, ‘Go take a shower.’ . . . He’s heavy into fantasy. These sex movies are the legacy of the closet.”

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Bateman says he purchased the material that ultimately brought him down several years before he started teaching at Exeter, when he was coming out of the closet and wanted to make up for lost time. “For a few years, you could buy anything, and I bought some films and books that featured young boys,” he says. “For me, these pictures were aesthetic, not pornography. I know people say, ‘These images are despicable—how can you think that?’ But the key point is that I identified with the boys, not the men. If someone young had grabbed me when I was that age and said, ‘Let me teach you something,’ I would have said, ‘Sure.’ . . . That’s what I see in those images—the most secret part of my being.”

But did he really “identify” only with the boys? Michael Caven, the “confidential informant” in this case, was only a boy when he met Lane Bateman in 1979. And Caven says that Bateman abused him sexually.

Bateman was then 38; Caven was 16. Bateman was head of the drama department at North Shore High School in Glen Head, Long Island, 20 miles from New York City, and Michael Pappas, as Caven was then known, was his student.

During free periods at school, Michael took his problems to his drama teacher. And then, early in 1980, according to Caven’s testimony, Bateman suggested that they work on a video project, and invited him to his house. There, Caven says, Bateman outlined the plot: a boy returns home from his first homosexual encounter, is overcome by shame, and kills himself in the bathtub. Although he’d never taken his clothes off for another man, Caven claims that marijuana and wine and the admiration he had for Bateman overrode his nervousness—he did what Bateman asked.

A few days later, Caven says, he returned to Bateman’s house to watch the edited video. Bateman again offered him marijuana and wine. And then, Caven insists, Bateman propositioned him. Although he didn’t give this testimony at the trial—it would have been too incendiary—Caven told me that “Bateman said, ‘I want to be the first man to make love to you.’ But that wasn’t sex. It was me and a current teacher in bed, with Bateman having given me wine and pot and having put poppers under my nose, putting Vaseline on his penis and sticking it in me—and he wanted me to believe he was doing me a favor! I had no erection, no orgasm. The experience was about pleasing my teacher, my friend, my father figure. My feeling was that I’d make him happy, and he’d love me.”

To keep Bateman interested in him, Caven says, he posed naked for some Polaroids on his third visit. Then Bateman announced that his roommate, who was out of the country, was returning, and that they weren’t just friends, they were lovers. This affair, he said, would have to end.

Lane Bateman says that none of this happened.

Michael Pappas, he agrees, often talked to him at school about the verbal and emotional abuse the boy said he experienced at home. But Bateman insists that talking never led to a video project and that it couldn’t have—in 1980, neither he nor the school owned a video camera. What did happen, he says, is that Pappas discovered where he lived by following him home after school; when he next had difficulties with his mother and stepfather, he fled to his favorite teacher’s house. Reluctantly, Bateman says, he let Pappas spend the night, but when Pappas crawled into bed with him, he rebuffed him. As for the Polaroids, Bateman insists that he took those pictures two years later, when Pappas was 18, at the young man’s suggestion. At that time, he says, his former student told him he’d found a new way to make money: hustling in New York City. (Pappas says he never had sex for money alone.)

In the fall of 1980, Bateman and Pappas went their separate ways. The teacher took up his new post at Exeter, and his student slipped off into a quite different world.

One of Michael Pappas’s schoolmates remembers him as “a tormented guy, a storyteller, people didn’t take him seriously.” Another classmate, now a prosecutor, says that “everything Michael said was a lie.” A North Shore d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Introduction
• Secrets & Rituals
• Morality Tales
• Phantom Charges
• Campus Controversial
• Perilous Patterns
• Follow The Money
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• About the Author
• Copyright