“Perhaps what is so compelling about the story of reunited twins is the implicit suggestion that it could happen to anyone,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Lawrence Wright observed in his 1997 book, Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are. “It feeds the common fantasy that any one of us might have a clone, a doppelgänger; someone who is not only a human mirror but also an ideal companion; someone who understands me perfectly, almost perfectly, because he is me, almost me. It is not just the sense of identity that excites us but the difference; the fantasy of an identical twin is a projection of ourselves living another life, finding other opportunities, choosing other careers, sleeping with other spouses. An identical twin could experience the world and come back to report about choices we might have made.”
Reunited twins, especially identical ones, are compelling to scientists for essentially the same reasons: They offer a unique opportunity to glean insight into the age-old question of nature versus nurture, genes versus environment, and with our growing understanding of the importance of epigenetics, the question of how these two factors act upon each other. If identical people are raised in different environments by different parents, what can that tell us about the degree to which our behaviors, personalities, health, and intelligence are innate or acquired? Among the conclusions of one of the best-known studies of separated twins, the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart: Identical siblings reared independently are roughly as similar as those reared together. Nature, in other words, makes a pretty strong case for itself.
In the canon of famously reunited twins, there are a few iconic, touchstone examples: the Jim twins, brothers parted as babies who went on independently to build alarmingly similar lives; Oskar and Jack, separated at six months, the former became a member of the Hitler Youth in Nazi Germany, the latter a Trinidadian Jew. More recently we learned of the Colombian brothers accidentally swapped in the hospital nursery so that two pairs of identical twins were raised as two seemingly fraternal, actually unrelated duos.
Then there are the Shafran/Galland/Kellman triplets, once notorious in their own right, and now the subject of an excellent new documentary, Tim Wardle’s Sundance award-winning Three Identical Strangers. In 1980, Bobby Shafran, an incoming student at Sullivan County Community College in Sheldrake, New York, arrived on campus to an unusually friendly reception. It was as if the strangers milling around his dorm already knew him. In fact, they’d mistaken him for a former classmate: Eddy Galland, who shared with Shafran more than just a passing resemblance. They had the same face, the same body, the same mannerisms, the same birthday; were both adopted; and had both been placed with their families by the same adoption agency: New York’s Louise Wise Services, now shuttered, then a pre-eminent institution for Jewish families seeking Jewish babies. They were twins, the boys quickly surmised, reunited after 19 years apart. Their story was splashed across the newspapers.
Photo: Courtesy of Neon
So much so that in Queens, David Kellman, another curly-haired, barrel-chested, 19-year-old adoptee—also born July 12—soon found himself staring at his mirror image(s) in the New York Post. What initially seemed like a story of reunited twins suddenly became an even bigger one: triplets separated at birth, raised within a hundred-mile radius of each other, completely oblivious to one another’s existence.
“The three of them ended up like puppies wrestling on the floor,” Kellman’s aunt recalls of the boy’s first meeting. “It was the most incredible thing. They belonged to each other.” The first part of Three Identical Strangers zooms forward with the same carousing, puppyish energy. The triplets were the toast of the human-interest news media. They appeared on talk shows, touting their uncanny similarities: All three smoked Marlboros; all three were high school wrestlers; all three liked older women. They scored cameos on Cheers and in Desperately Seeking Susan (that’s them, ogling a very young Madonna on the streets of Soho). They partied in the glittery 1980s New York City club scene, became roommates in a squalid Manhattan bachelor pad, and eventually business partners, opening a scene-y, kitschy restaurant called Triplets Roumanian Steak House a few blocks up from the onramp to the Holland Tunnel. (“Its dining room is the kind of brick-walled, blond wood contemporary space where you expect free-range chicken morsels in raspberry vinegar,” praised The Washington Post in 1988, “but the menu is the kind of old-fashioned Eastern European array that declares war on your arteries and massages your soul.”)
About halfway through Wardle’s documentary, the manic energy of the triplet’s first act takes a nosedive. “From the time we met till . . . till later . . . there was nothing that could keep us apart,” a present-day, middle-aged Shafran ominously remembers. By the mid-’90s, the easy intimacy the triplets had assumed began to curdle. In 1995, Lawrence Wright, working on a New Yorker story that he would later adapt into the aforementioned Twins book, contacted the brothers. He had come across an article that referenced a secret study conducted by a psychologist named Dr. Peter Neubauer in collaboration with Louise Wise Services. The agency had a policy of separating twins and other multiples for adoption (based on a recommendation from a different psychologist). Neubauer, Wright discovered, had seized the opportunity to launch the ultimate investigation into nature versus nurture: studying separated twins not, as other scientists had, only after they’d rediscovered each other, usually in adulthood, but over the course of their development as ostensibly singleton children. The adoption agency would feed him subjects, but the whole operation depended on a cone of silence: parents could not know that their new offspring had identical siblings, nor the nature of the social experiment in which their kids were unwitting participants (nor could they know, as the documentary later suggests, that they, themselves, may have been study subjects, too). They were pressured to keep their new babies enrolled in what they were told was a standard childhood development study of adoptees, allowing them to be observed regularly by a team of visiting researchers operating under false pretenses.
“Despite the controversy surrounding it, the study apparently violated no rules requiring informed consent for human experimentation,” Newsday reported in 1997, shortly after the project was exposed. “No such rules governing behavioral studies were in place at the time, and there were no laws prohibiting the separation of twins.” Watching Three Identical Strangers, I was reminded of Errol Morris’s recent Netflix docudrama series, Wormwood, another slow-burn thriller about a conspiracy and a cover-up. That film’s refrain, cribbed from Hamlet—“something is rotten in the state of Denmark”—works just as well here, though much of the power of Wardle’s documentary lies in our inability to identify the precise source of our apprehension.
More than half a century after the birth of the triplets, Neubauer’s methods raise serious ethical questions, including about the integrity of the junior researchers who made monthly house calls to each family, with full knowledge of the existence and close proximity of their subjects’ siblings. (Wardle interviews one such research assistant, whose lack of contrition is disconcerting.) The dark history of twin studies—favored by Nazi eugenicists and in the U.S. by those with racist policy agendas—doesn’t help, particularly given that all the children involved were Jewish (as was Neubauer, who fled his native Austria during the Second World War). Nor does the fact that Neubauer refused to outline his specific objectives, and to this day has never published his findings. He died in 2008, leaving instructions to keep his study notes under lock and key in an archive at Yale until 2065. Precisely what he was researching, why, and what he discovered remains a mystery, even after publicity generated by the documentary resulted in the release of portions of his records. They contain no formal conclusions, and leave large swaths of text redacted, presumably to protect the privacy of other study subjects, some of whom are likely still in the dark that they were born twins.
I was struck looking back at articles published after the triplets reunion in 1980, by an anecdote reported by People magazine: Shortly after their story was made public, the brothers—per the documentary then utterly oblivious to Neubauer or his project—were contacted by Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., the head scientist behind the aforementioned Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. Bouchard was hoping to recruit them as participants in his own study (it’s unclear whether he was aware of Neubauer’s activities). Their response, communicated by their newly hired agent: “What’s in it for them?”
The same year that the brothers found out about Neubauer’s machinations, Galland, following a series of what appeared to be manic-depressive episodes, tragically killed himself. Several years later, Triplets, the restaurant, closed its doors. The film implies that the relationship between the two surviving brothers cooled as well. Toward the end of the documentary, we finally see Shafran and Kellman together on camera; they appear less like siblings, more like slightly uneasy acquaintances, old war buddies with a trauma between them too big to ignore.
Wardle metes out details slowly, with an eye toward suspense, pacing the story almost like a psychological thriller. Most of the triplets’ tale of woe has been previously reported, but the director digs up a few salient clues to Neubauer’s intent. I’ll tread lightly so as not to spoil those revelations. Suffice it to say, little in the triplets’ lives, or in the choice to study them, seems insignificant: not the fact that many of the birth mothers of children in the study had complex psychiatric histories, nor the composition and class status of the families into which brothers were adopted.
Was Galland’s fatal battle with mental illness a function of his childhood experience as the son of, we’re told, a disciplinarian father who didn’t quite know what to make of his emotional, high-spirited son? Was it a function of the trauma of discovering that his childhood had essentially been engineered for the sake of science? Or was it a function of some deeper trauma sustained when he was separated at such a young age from his brothers?
And what made Shafran and Kellman more resilient than their genetically identical sibling? Would Neubauer’s findings have cast any light on these questions? We may never know, or at least not for nearly 50 years. But in the great debate between nature and nurture (something of a false dichotomy by current scientific standards), Wardle’s film, or at least the people in it, seem to favor nurture. The triplets’ differences may have ultimately been more important than their similarities. “We found the ways we were alike and we emphasized them,” Shafran insists. All three boys were wrestlers, but then again, they all had the same stocky, muscle-bound, thick-necked physique well suited to the sport. They all smoked Marlboros, but at that time, Marlboro was the most purchased cigarette brand in the U.S. They all preferred older women, but studies have actually shown that partners is one of the few areas where identical twins tend to differ.
“No matter how tantalizingly alike we may be, no one crosses the boundary between being alike and being the same,” Wright wrote back in 1997. What can the experience of any other person—even a genetic clone—really tell us about ourselves? There are no definitive answers. We leave David Kellman and Bobby Shafran in the Bardo: somewhere between ignorance and comprehension, between strangers and brothers.
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