Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all six episodes of The Shrink Next Door ad-free.Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.By any measure, Marty Markowitz was a success.
He had an Ivy League diploma, a law degree, his own business, and plenty of money.But when he hit 38, he found himself feeling seriously overwhelmed. His rabbi recommended a therapist he knew, who had an office on Manhattan's east side.
I go into his office, which was, you know, a modestly furnished office with a desk and a chair and a couch.
The therapist's name was Dr. Isaac Hershkoff, but he told Marty to call him Ike.He was a young, handsome man with a round face, a close-cropped beard, and curly black hair. He was dressed casually in an open-collar shirt and shorts.
I sat down right across from him, and we looked at each other, and he said, OK, why are you here?
Marty had seen a therapist before, the kind who would listen while you lay down on the couch and talk about your dreams.This therapist was different.
His modus operandi was basically, I'm your pal, tell me what's bothering you, and let's take it from there.
Marty spent the whole session laying out his problems.He told Ike how his father and mother had recently died, how he'd inherited the family business, how he was having a hard time dealing with his new responsibilities.
When he'd finished, Marty says Ike looked at him and said, I'm going to take you on as a patient.And I said, OK, nice. Not only was Ike taking him on as a patient, but he made Marty a promise.He said, don't worry, I'll take care of everything.
I was overwhelmed.And to have someone say to me, don't worry, calm down.This is nothing to get upset about.We're going to straighten everything out. and we're gonna do it fast.Very comforting to me.Marty wrote him a check.
I think it was for $160, something like that, back in the day.
It was June 1981.Marty had come to Ike because he needed help.But if he had known what his new therapist had in store for him, he probably would have walked out the door and never come back.
From Wondery and Bloomberg, I'm Joe Nocera, and this is The Shrink Next Door.This is episode one.Welcome to the neighborhood.Every neighborhood has its share of mysteries.We can live our entire lives and barely know the people just one door down.
I have a summer house in South Hampton, a couple of hours outside of New York.This part of the Hamptons is called the Bayside.It's quiet, peaceful, a place to escape from the city in the hot summer months.
Sampson and Jackie Guyot have a house on the same street as me.
My name is Jacqueline Guyot, and we're married 35 years.
We're married 52 years.They've been coming here since the 80s.Most of the houses on our street are single-story with wooden clapboard fronts.Sampson and Jackie's house is no different.It's a lovely home, really.
But there's one house on the street that stands out.For starters, it's just bigger than most of the other houses.It's two stories instead of one, and it's the only one on the street with a separate guest house out back.
And then there's the way it looks.
The house is spectacular with windows and windows and windows.
Everything about it is over the top.
There's a pond with goldfish, lots of fish, and a waterfall to the pond, too.
It's bigger, bolder, brasher than anything else on the street. In 2010, my wife Dawn and I bought the house next door.And right away, our neighbor's place gave Dawn a headache.
The first thing I said to my husband was, we are going to screen as much as we can. on that property.And we did.
We ended up planting a border of bamboo.
That was the very first property that we tried to, through careful landscape design, screen.
Aside from what we could see from our yard, the house next door was the last thing on her mind.Or mine, for that matter.We'd just had a baby, so we were a little preoccupied.But even if we weren't paying attention to our neighbors,
They were paying attention to us.
From our mailman to the next-door neighbors, people quickly learned that Joe worked for the New York Times.
It wasn't long before a man popped over to our house to introduce himself.He was dressed like a maintenance man.Green khaki pants, a long-sleeved work shirt, and a faded baseball cap.
He welcomed us to the neighborhood, and then he handed us a folder of press clippings.
I literally just took them and said, thank you.But he wanted us to have them.You know, he really wanted Joe to have them.
There were articles that a psychiatrist, Dr. Isaac Hershkoff, had written, and articles that had been written about him. In mid-August, an invitation arrived to a summer barbecue next door, hosted by Dr. Hershkoff, Ike.
This would be the last of three big summer parties he threw every year.I went alone.To reach the front door, I had to cross a bridge over a fish pond.There were maybe 40 or so guests hanging out in the backyard.
I roamed about, stopping here and there to chat. I spotted the actor Richard Kind, just in time to see him do a belly flop into the pool.
There were a handful of other people, too, people I recognized as prominent New Yorkers, like Dr. Ruth, the TV personality and sex expert.It was a warm afternoon.I chatted with a few people, sipped on my glass of wine, and began to wander around.
At some point, I found myself in the living room. There was a fake giraffe bust, Venetian masks, plastic parrots hanging from the ceiling, even a giant gong.But what struck me most were the photographs.Lots and lots of photographs.
And in nearly every one of them, there was Ike.Ike with Henry Kissinger, Ike with Brooke Shields, Ike with Gwyneth Paltrow, even Ike with O.J.Simpson.It was like one of those diners where the walls are covered with pictures of celebrity patrons.
At that moment, the man himself appeared.He greeted me like a long-lost friend and said that my wife and I should come over soon for a drink.And then he was gone.
Sure enough, a few days after the summer party, the same maintenance man we'd met before showed up at our door again.This time, he brought an invitation for drinks. It was very formal, as if he was reading from a script.
I mean, like Dr. Hershkoff would want you to come over.Right.At such and such a time, on such and such a day.
The formality of it blew me away, and he was very, very exacting about how it had to go.So we went.One of the strangest evenings I've ever had in the Hamptons.
Or anywhere else, for that matter.
But definitely the Hamptons.
It was pouring rain.We headed over, umbrellas in hand.To get to the front door, we crossed a bridge.We could see Koi circling in the water below.Ike and his wife Becky welcomed us in and ushered us to a round kitchen table.
There were snacks laid out, carrots and celery.Ike served white wine. So what I remember is, the things that I really remember, him talking incessantly about being a sex therapist and a celebrity therapist.
And I can't remember the details, but that just really sticks in my mind that he kept going on and on about that.It was more like a monologue than a dialogue.That's what I remember.What do you remember?
I just remember thinking, these people are, I felt suffocated.
Ike talked about his work.
I've never said anything like it, but I remember thinking he was very brazen about the details of his life, considering we were strangers and also considering what he does.He did talk about an NBA, sports guys and somebody, a Yankees player.
I just thought he lacked a lot of discretion. given his field.
We listened politely as he went on and on.I just remember looking towards the door.Finally, after about an hour, I said we needed to get home.
And we got up to leave, and it was very clear that I wanted a photograph.
I think he came out and said, well, we'd like to get a picture of you.And it was just Joe.It wasn't Joe and I. Then it hit me.
Ike wanted a picture because in his eyes, a columnist for the Times was a kind of celebrity.
I remember a desperation.Can we get your photograph?You know, we'd like to get this photograph.I thought the whole thing was just
I couldn't see a way out.I was doomed to hang on the wall with Richard Kind, O.J., and Gwyneth Paltrow.Okay, I said.And Ike went to grab a camera, one of those instant Polaroid things.
He led me into an alcove where there were hundreds of other photos pinned to the wall.I didn't want to be another face on the wall, to tell you the truth.It felt weird.But I also wanted to be polite, and I really wanted to get out of there.
So I let Ike take my picture, pin it to his wall, and then we left as fast as we could.
I remember getting into our home, collapsing on the couch or something.
Dawn told me she never wanted to go back.
I remember saying to Joe it was a cross between a scene from Meet the Fockers and something, what was the other thing?Fellini, he said.
Fellini.There was no sign of the maintenance man the night Dawn and I went over, but I knew he was still around.Sometimes we'd be on our deck and we'd see him outside working in the yard.
My neighbor, Samson Guyot, saw him too.I remember during a conversation, I mentioned to Ike how beautiful his property is and how lucky he was, or is, to have this fellow that runs around all the time taking care of the property.
He remarked that, yeah, he was lucky.He's a good worker.
When I returned to the Hamptons the following summer, I noticed something strange at the house next door. I would see the maintenance man out on the property doing his usual work in the backyard.But Ike Hershkoff was gone.
I would never see him or his wife Becky in the Hamptons again.There were no more summer parties.It was as if they had simply disappeared.And that's when I learned that everything I had thought I'd known about my neighbor was wrong.It's a wild story.
That's the maintenance man. The guy who came to our door with the press clippings, the guy we saw working around the yard, that was Marty Markowitz, the same guy who had first gone to see Dr. Isaac Hershkoff as a patient nearly 30 years earlier.
There was a welcome mat, which said the Hirschkopf's.
On this fall day, Marty Markowitz is wearing khaki pants, a zip-up fleece, and Velcro sneakers.He's now 76, but looks at least a decade younger.He's small, wiry, and on this occasion, unshaven.
He has on a hat from the animal shelter where he got his dog.
Rusty, stay inside.Stay, baby.
Marty begins to show us around the property, starting with the fish pond.
We built the koi pond.This did not come with the house.
Marty says the pond was one of Ike's first additions.
There were a number of things that Ike had great ideas about, and one of them was to put a beautiful koi pond approaching the front entrance.We've had now koi in here for over 25 years.
We walk from the front hall into the living room. The furniture is mostly the same, but the walls are far less chaotic.
On this wall, there were pictures of celebrities.Why were there pictures of celebrities? Ike was a celebrity hound, and he went out of his way to get himself photographed with a variety of different celebrities, especially sports celebrities.
We walk down a hallway back into one of the two wings of the house.
We're now in the master bedroom.
Ike's bedroom.It's fairly ordinary, except for the absolutely massive staircase smack bang in the middle of the room.
While we're downstairs, we should look into the master bathroom. It's pretty damn big.There were unbelievable... You couldn't even walk in here.There were so many things hanging.There were birds hanging, flamingos hanging down.
There was all kinds of stuff.There was a giant double mirror over here, which opened up.Very kitschy kinds of stuff.
Was that cool at the time?
That's my producer, Krista Ripple.I never thought it was cool.I just thought it was, that's what he wants to do, let him do it.It wasn't my, you know, I wasn't using this bathroom.
The bathroom was one of Ike's answers to what he saw as the central flaw of the house.
He was a little disappointed that the house looked very ordinary, and so he felt it needed an addition.
The addition was a second-floor sunroom.
So here we are in the upstairs sunroom.It's quite a nice room.
In one corner is a life-size skeleton.From the sunroom windows, I can see the pool and the wooden deck that circles it. In the 80s and 90s, the pool had been the centerpiece of every summer party.
Today, it's covered, and dead leaves cling to the tarp.Hold on, Christopher.All right, I'm with you.We go outside.A trail winds through trees and towards the guesthouse, part of a separate lot.Don't walk into the pond.
So Ike had a grand plan to develop then the two properties and did a spectacular job.Right.It's not something that personally I would have ever done because I'm an easygoing guy.But there are parts of this back building here that are pretty weird.
Oh, this... The sundial in particular. The sundial isn't some small garden ornament.It's 40 feet tall, a copper prong thrusting up from the ground.
You know, they brought a guy in from France to do the copper turning.It's an old-world skill, because it has a copper roof, the building.
This gets to Ike's need to do everything different from everybody else.That's right.
And then there are the cows.He insisted on it.
Life-size statues of cows.There was a antique dealer here on the highway who put a few cows out there and Ike said to me, go there and buy a family of cows. Which we did.They're large.They're large.Yeah, large.Black and white.I like it.
I think it's kind of cute, especially with the baby cow.
Just past the family of cows is a full-size basketball court.
Yeah, Ike was a fanatic about basketball.
And then the crown jewel, the miniature golf course.
What do you do with the front yard?Of course you put in a nine-hole miniature golf course.But I thought it was an 18-hole.Yeah, the answer is it's 18 holes.
He insisted that each hole have two cups so that he could brag that it was an 18-hole golf course.
Ike even gave the course a name, Deerhead.And this basically was for the parties.This was to enhance the parties, wasn't it?
He did this to brag that he had a golf course.But it's actually a very, very good golf course.People frickin' love it.Everyone who comes out here and plays golf loves it.
It's definitely a place for entertaining, a fantasy land.But there's another side to this place, which Marty has buried underground.It's starting to rain, huh? That was the poor in the city, I think.The sundial isn't just another quirky feature.
It's also the entrance to the basement.A door at the base of the sundial opens to a flight of wooden stairs.The basement is unfinished and a bit dusty. There were dozens of green storage tubs and a few old bicycles leaning against the walls.
There are hundreds of framed photos spilling out from boxes leaning against the walls, even a pile of identical brass frames stacked in a corner.This is where Marty has stored most of Ike's stuff.
Party montages, tchotchkes from the various places in the house, more party montages.
We start to sort through the frames. Marty shows us one tall frame that holds a series of photos.Celebrities posing with Ike's youngest daughter.So there's Michael J. Fox, James Taylor.
Elton John, Dr. Ruth.Who is that?Oh, that's Sting.That's Sting.So all of that is stuff that was on the walls.
There are so many.I mean, how many?Oh, my God.
Years after everything had been taken down, there were still reminders of Ike.And not just the cow statues and the koi fish.Marty shows me a box full of New Yorker-type cartoons that Ike had hung in Marty's bathroom.
This is a cartoon with two panels.The first one has a man on a couch talking to a psychiatrist, asks him, are you afraid of change?The patient replies, no. The psychiatrist replies in the second panel, good, go get me a soda.
This was my relationship with Ike.Whatever he needed.
Marty's life with Ike had begun the moment he made the decision to walk into Ike's office in Manhattan nearly three decades earlier.
I'm very embarrassed that I let myself in on this thing, but it's like a cult.To me, I was in a cult.
But Marty wasn't in a cult.He was in therapy, or at least that's what it was supposed to be.
I haven't had anybody look after me for the 27 years, except him and his family.
Like everyone else who visited the house next door, I had no idea Marty was Ike's patient. Why would I?I remember the very first time you and I met, you knocked on my door and you said, I work for a very important psychiatrist in New York.
New York City.That's what you said.Very important New York City psychiatrist named Isaac Hershkoff.And he would like to invite you to a party.That's the very first time I met him.
That's right.He told me to say that to you, just like that.
Marty wasn't the maintenance man.He was the owner.He had bought the house back in 1986.He had paid for almost all the fantasy land.The cows, the miniature golf course, the sundial, the sunroom, everything.It was his house, not Ike's.
I first heard the real story about Marty from my neighbors, Jackie and Samson Guyatt.That fall, Samson and Jackie had been on one of their regular afternoon walks around the neighborhood.
They always made the koi pond in front of Ike's house their last stop before going home.
We loved watching the fish, especially the big ones.
And that's when he was moving stuff around on the house.
The house was in chaos.There were boxes everywhere.Marty was out front and there was no sign of Ike.
Everything was in tumult.A lot of things were off the walls, including the photos of Ike and his guests and everything like that.
He was sort of like cleaning out everything, and we were asking him what was going on, and he said, he's returning everything to Ike.And I said, what do you mean you're returning everything to Ike?
That's when Marty told Sampson something he'd never told anyone before.
He says, well, you know, this is my house.I don't want him here anymore.
We were floored because all those years we thought Ike was the owner.
They were also skeptical.I wasn't really convinced at first that what he was telling me was in fact true.
It was hard for me to believe that this kind of person needed psychiatric treatment where he couldn't do anything for himself, that everything else had to be taken over by his psychiatrist.
Not too long after I heard the neighborhood gossip, Marty came over to reintroduce himself to me.Not as the maintenance man this time, but as my neighbor.He told me he was on a mission.
He was de-Iking the house, taking down the constant reminders of Ike, the plastic figurines, the tchotskies, and of course, the photographs.
He had filled six giant trash bags with Ike and Becky's clothing, taken them to the UPS store, and had them shipped to Ike's apartment in Manhattan. Marty put everything else in the basement.
Not just the celebrity photos and frames, but home videos, birthday cards, legal documents, manuscripts, letters.
And it was very liberating, by the way, to take all that stuff down.Unfortunately, I had a place I could store it, the basement of the guest house.Otherwise, I would have thrown it out.It was an archive of his relationship with Ike.Some doctor, huh?
That first post-Ike summer, I'd see Marty outside.He still maintained the property himself, and sometimes I'd walk over and we'd talk.He would tell me stories about his time with Ike.
You know, I don't think you know this.On his birthday, he would insist that I give him a gift.Insist?Insist. So he would say, okay, it's my birthday.And we would walk around to 42nd Street to this sneaker store on 42nd Street.
And he would buy himself a fancy pair of sneakers.And that was my gift to him.
I've had plenty of therapy in my life and none of my therapists would ever demand that I buy them sneakers on their birthday.It was hard to imagine Marty described falling under Ike's spell so thoroughly that he let Ike take over a house he owned.
Sometimes Marty sounded as if he could hardly believe it.Other times he sounded angry.He called what Ike did to him existential evil.But I also found myself questioning Marty's version of events. Could it really have happened the way he described it?
A psychiatrist who had transformed a patient into his personal servant?As my wife Dawn liked to say, it takes two to tango.This was 2012, and I was still writing for the New York Times.I decided that this was a story I needed to investigate.
So I pitched it to my editors and got to work.That meant, of course, I had to talk to Ike. When I walked into Ike's office, one of the first things I noticed were the frames.
The wall behind his desk was a mini version of the old living room in the Southampton house.It was full of framed certificates from NYU Medical School, Queens College, Phi Beta Kappa, and a host of other institutions.
Ike's desk was a mess, overflowing with books and papers. We sat down, him on the couch, and me on a leather chair across from him.I placed a tape recorder on a table next to me, tested it once, and hit record.
Ike told me that yes, he had known Marty Markowitz for 30 years, and that for all of that time, he was the only one protecting Marty from the many people trying to take advantage of him.
But he also told me that Marty was a deeply troubled man, that recently Marty had embarked on a vendetta against him.
Marty, he told me, was someone he cared about deeply, and he couldn't understand why Marty had turned on him after such a long and fruitful relationship.After two hours, we decided to call it a day.We agreed to meet again in a few weeks.
We shook hands, and I left. But when I got home, I realized I had made a horrible, horrible mistake.The tape was blank.The interview was lost.To make matters worse, I never got the chance to speak to Ike again.He canceled the second interview.
But just because we didn't speak didn't mean I never heard from him again.
Dear Joe, I hope that you and Dawn enjoyed the Kentucky Derby and that your 60th birthday celebration was everything you had hoped it would be.With the benefit of time to digest them, I can now respond to MLM's accusations in an organized fashion.
This is the only way that I can reasonably defend myself.
Ike sent me several long emails.This isn't Ike, by the way.This is an actor.He'll be reading all of Ike's writing in this series.And within those long letters, Ike had a simple explanation for everything I was hearing.
Occasionally, people will do something that they might subsequently regret.Consciously, subconsciously, or unconsciously, they might not want themselves to take responsibility for that act.
Conveniently, there is an omnipotent Svengali to take the blame instead.Unfortunately, every psychiatrist and many other authority figures will at some point encounter this displacement problem.
Fortunately, there isn't usually a newspaper reporter living next door to publicize it.I believe that if you explore each allegation thoroughly, you will arrive at hopefully the same result.
Ike said he was devastated by the way Marty was behaving, and he couldn't understand where all the anger was coming from.
He pointed out that Marty Markowitz, who he refers to by the initials MLM or MM, was in fact a successful businessman with a law degree. And he needed to take responsibility for his own actions instead of blaming everything on Ike.
For 29 years on a regular basis, MLM would repeatedly express his gratitude to me for having, quote, saved his life.And more importantly for, quote, making his life a joy.
If, in fact, I had committed some existentially evil crime against him, wouldn't this CEO lawyer have been aware of it before someone apparently convinced him of it, months after we parted?And the house in the Hamptons?
Joe, you blame me for the fact that you thought that South Hampton belonged to me. During the time that I was there, you had far more contact with MLM than with me.
If he wanted you to know that Southampton in fact belonged to him, why didn't he tell you?Why was it my responsibility, not his?Why do you blame me?"
He also painted a very different picture of Marty.
MM felt strongly that any animal that wandered onto his two-acre Southampton estate was literally fair game. Raccoons, cats, dogs, wild or collared, old or young, were all threats to his precious koi fish, he claimed.
Ike wrote that Marty would catch animals in traps, and if they were still alive when he found them, he'd submerge them in rubber bins filled with water until the trapped animal drowned.
The fact that he continued this practice, even in the dead of winter when the koi were hibernating under a sheet of ice, invulnerable to predators, suggests that this was but another manifestation of his sadistic tendencies, also evident in his serial vendettas.
Ike made Marty's life a joy?Marty drowned animals?I had no idea who was right.Maybe Dawn was right when she said it takes two to tango.
Joe, I am sincerely sorry that our relationship has to end in this manner.
It pains me that you have such an apparently unalterably negative impression of me, for reasons beyond your writing this article, but I have to accept that there is nothing I can do about that.
After Becky and I had you and Dawn over for wine, appetizers, and enjoyable conversation two years ago, I had genuinely hoped to get to know you.Needless to say, it wasn't in this way. Warmly, Ike.
In the end, the story never ran in the Times.My editors told me that it needed more work.Shortly after that, I fell into a deep funk.And when I came out of it, I didn't have the energy to finish the story.
I made a few more calls, I did a few more interviews, and then I set it aside. I kept talking to Marty summer after summer.He was my neighbor after all.And the more he told me, the more questions it raised.
Had Ike taken advantage of Marty for decades?Or was there another explanation?What was real?What was fantasy?And if all this had gone down the way Marty said it did, why the hell was Ike still practicing psychiatry?
As the years passed, I never stopped feeling that I needed to finish what I started.So I took it up again.We called Ike.Yes, hello?
Hi, I'm trying to reach Ike Hershkoff.Yes, speaking.Hi, Dr. Hershkoff.My name is Krista Ripple.I'm a producer working for Wondery in Bloomberg.
I've been trying to get in touch with you because I've been talking to Marty Markowitz, and I'd love to just talk to you if you have a few minutes.
We invited him several times to give us an interview.
I'm not allowed to talk to you.That's all I can say.
We reached out to Ike again as I finished reporting this series.He sent several letters, like the one he'd sent back in 2012.In them, he strongly disputes how Marty describes their relationship. He says Marty made all his own decisions.
He says Marty bought those cows for the Hamptons' house on an impulse purchase, that Marty didn't want to sleep in the master bedroom.He said that Marty did buy him sneakers for his birthday, but that Marty also bought a pair for himself.
We share our innermost thoughts and deepest secrets in order for psychiatrists to help us.And we trust their discretion.Doctors, including psychiatrists, have long understood they have a kind of power, especially over their more vulnerable patients.
One of the principles of medicine, going back thousands of years, is to first do no harm.Doctors still follow this guidance to this day.
Maybe it's harder in the case of a psychiatrist to see whether they are helping or harming and where to draw the line.And maybe part of the answer was right next to me, inside the house next door.
From Bloomberg and Wondery, this is part one of six of The Shrink Next Door, a story about power, control, and turning to the wrong person for help. The Shrink Next Door was written and reported by me, Joe Nocera.Senior producer is Krista Ripple.
Bloomberg's head of podcast is Francesca Levy.Fact-checking by Molly Nugent.Sound design by Jeff Schmidt.Executive produced by George Lavender, Marsha Louis, and Hernán López for Wondery.
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