“Women often think that sex and love are the same thing,” Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) tells Dr. William Masters (Michael Sheen) in the pilot episode of “Masters of Sex” on Showtime.
“But,” she says with a grin, “they don’t even have to go together.”
Just two episodes in, Caplan’s character on the racy drama is already shaping up as a trailblazing firebrand. On the show, based on the true story, Johnson is a woman ahead of her time in the late 1950s, when she’s hired as an assistant at Washington University in St. Louis, by gynecologist Masters. The two go on to conduct research about human sexuality that was initially considered highly controversial but would eventually radically inform and change how Americans think about sex.
But the legacy of the real Virginia Johnson, who died in July at age 88, is considerably more complicated, say those who knew the country singer-turned- sex researcher and her groundbreaking work.
Even on the surface, “Virginia Johnson was so unlike Lizzy Caplan, who I think is gorgeous,” says 99-year-old Shirley Zussman, a still-practicing New York sex therapist. She made the acquaintance of Masters and Johnson when they were colleagues of her and her husband, Leon Zussman, who also co-authored a text on human sexuality.
“Virginia was not good-looking and not sexy! But,” she says, “I think [Showtime] has to do that.” The sex studies in the lab are also glammed up: “All that pumping away in the first episode! It was all very scientific [in real life], very professional.”
Johnson’s true appeal, adds Zussman, was her drive. “What was remarkable was that Ginny made tremendous use of her opportunity — she came in as a secretary, and she created opportunity.”
Johnson was hired as Masters’ assistant. “This was a woman who was twice-divorced, 32 years old, looking to go back to school,” says Thomas Maier, author of “Masters of Sex,” the book on which the show is based. “She always saw herself as a diva — she had wanted to be an opera singer. And, in a way, she found her stage with Bill Masters.”
Johnson, who previously performed as a country singer on a Missouri radio station, had most recently been married to a bandleader — with whom she had two children before they divorced — when she met Masters. Though she lacked formal training, she adapted quickly to working as Masters’ assistant and became much more than that — invaluable to his study of the physiology of sex, in part because she was much more personable than he was.
“She understood people as a bundle of different emotions and contradictions, and Bill Masters was the flip side: He was a hard scientist,” says Maier.
She was also unflappable — raised on a farm in Springfield, Mo., she knew all about the birds and the bees. “She said, ‘I grew up on a farm, I’m a farm girl. I know all the aspects of animal husbandry,’ ” adds Maier.
Johnson became the one to convince people to take off their clothes in the lab for their research, and she was the driving force behind their interest in the ways in which the female orgasm is different.
Despite Masters’ commitment to treating her as a partner, Johnson was viewed condescendingly by others at Washington University, the site of the pair’s lab before they founded their own St. Louis facility in 1964, which would eventually be titled the Masters and Johnson Institute.
“She always felt disrespected by them,” says Susan Stiritz, senior lecturer and coordinator of sexuality studies at Washington University’s Brown School, who had a lengthy conversation with Johnson about a year before her death. “She never got a degree, and universities are very hierarchical organizations. According to Tom’s book, physicians slut-shamed her, pointing to sexy pictures from their studies and saying things like, ‘Oh, isn’t that Virginia in those photos? In those movies?’ ”
So long-lasting was Johnson’s feeling of bitterness about her treatment, says Stiritz, that she ultimately declined to attend a 2012 ceremony, organized by Stiritz and her colleagues, at which Johnson was to be given an award. “She told me, ‘I just want to put this whole thing behind me. It’s too painful,’ ” says Stiritz, who was dismayed to find Johnson so upset by the memories.
Stiritz, who teaches the pair’s texts “Human Sexual Response” (1966) and “Human Sexual Inadequacy” (1970) in her classes, describes Johnson as “a practical genius. It was her idea to do the therapy. She was every bit a partner.”
That partnership extended to her personal life: Although the duo initially began sleeping together at Masters’ behest to “avoid transference” onto their subjects, they married in 1971, years after publishing their studies. Masters left her in 1993 to wed his high school sweetheart.
She eventually started the Virginia Johnson Masters Learning Center in Creve Coeur, Mo., which focused on overcoming sexual dysfunction.
In Masters’ last years of practice, “There was no mention of [Johnson],” says Heather Raznick, a St. Louis-based therapist who interned for Masters. “She’s just as important — we can talk all day about blood flow and anatomy, but without translating that into how couples can use the information, you don’t have a treatment.”
Also surprising to some was her resistance to being called a feminist. Although the series presents her as a modern woman’s role model, the real Johnson didn’t see her actions in political terms.
“I told her, ‘I just want to thank you for all the work you’ve done. You’ve set women ahead centuries, the way you discovered how women’s sexuality worked, that vaginal orgasm was a myth, that female sexuality was more robust than male sexuality,’ ” says Stiritz. “But she didn’t think that feminism had helped women in their sex lives. She took the opportunity to say, ‘I’m not a feminist.’ I think she had negative views of feminism because of the way media so often represents it. She really was not interested in hearing me talk about it. She kind of shut me up.”
Zussman also thinks Johnson’s negative memories had to do with having wanted more of a life outside the lab than Masters was willing to give. “We certainly interacted with them, and we were friends,” she says, “but they were not a sociable couple. I think, at the later stages, she wanted something different. She wanted to go out, to go to the parties. And that was the last thing he wanted.”
When Showtime became interested in adapting Maier’s book, Johnson declined to be involved. “The idea of a TV show was too much,” says Michelle Ashford, the show’s creator. “She wanted nothing to do with it.”
Which saddens admirers such as Stiritz. “I just wish we could find some way to honor her and her life’s work,” she says. “I told her what a difference it made to everyone who used the knowledge that she and Masters gave us, and how appreciative we all were. If somebody said that about me, I would be so excited! But she didn’t really respond.
“She was gracious, but I think her career caused her a lot of pain.”