"Fight" Episode Roots in Book: Story of Virginia Johnson and the Army Captain: Read The Excerpt

The highly-praised "Fight" episode in Season 2 of "Masters of Sex" draws substantially from my book. Bill Masters' recollection of his difficult relationship with his father is one example, and readers can look up the chapter entitled "Never Going Home" to learn more.
But as a public service (sort of), here is an excerpt from the book about the Army captain that the character of Virginia Johnson played by the Emmy nominated actress Lizzy Caplan, talks about at length during the "Fight" episode. In doing the research for the book, I distinctly remember the emotional tone in the real-life Virginia's voice as she recalled this lost love from her youth.

Here's the excerpt from page 20-21:

With her flings and passing affairs, Virginia always managed

to get away unscathed. She never suffered a broken heart,

not the way Red Foley or Hank Williams crooned in their lovesick

songs. Never did she feel that way until she went out with an Army

captain following a show at Fort Leonard Wood. A stagehand told

her of a knock at the dressing room door. There she found the handsome

captain she’d met earlier at a swimming pool. The fragility

of life in wartime, the passion of youth, and the intimate dancing

to slow melodies at the Army base added intensity to their romance.

“The love of your life always has to do with a time and place more

than anything else,” she later explained. “The Army captain would

have been mine, I suppose.” In him, Virginia found a man as smart

and assertive as he was physically attractive, someone who was

her contemporary but possessed a wisdom about the world that

she admired, even coveted. “He was twenty-six and I wasn’t much

over eighteen,” she said. “He was just a magician in terms of handling

people.”

Over that summer, the two became inseparable. Though they

were brought together by physical attraction, the Army captain

kept enough presence of mind to let Virginia know of another girl

in his life. “When we first met, I knew he was engaged because

he said, ‘You remind me of my fiancée,’” she remembered. “But he

continued to go out with me.” Virginia ignored this telling aside,

convinced her own love and passion for him would be enough. She

became part of the Army captain’s social circle at the base, embraced

by his best soldier friends and their wives and girlfriends.

The Army captain’s closest pal at Fort Leonard Wood was a slightly

older man of the same rank, with a wife and small child, who managed

to keep a car on the base. He let the Army captain and Virginia

borrow it whenever they wanted. On long drives throughout

the Missouri countryside, they parked under the trees and made

love to each other with abandon. Certain of her feelings, Virginia

convinced him one day to drive about seventy miles to Springfield

so she could introduce him to her parents and relatives. “We were

together constantly—we went everywhere and did everything,” she

recalled. “I took him home to my grandmother’s and the family

met him.”

After nearly a year, Virginia knew she wanted to marry the

Army captain. She had forgotten their fleeting conversation about

his fiancée from a wealthy family back home. But one evening, the 

Army captain’s demeanor, once so open and loving, turned sullen

and contrite. He had trouble getting out the words he intended to

say. “He could hardly tell me that he was going to be married,”

Virginia recalled. “When he wound up marrying his fiancée, he

broke me into small pieces.”

As the news spread on the Army base, their circle of friends

seemed almost as crestfallen as Virginia. “They rallied around me

and got so angry with him,” she remembered. “They were absolutely

shaken that he had done this—stayed with me all this time

and then out of the blue, married.” Wives and girlfriends, perhaps

mindful of their own vulnerable relationships in wartime, commiserated

with Virginia. The captain’s best friend—the married

one who lent his car to them—kept telling her, “I’ll marry you, I’ll

marry you!” as if applying some emotional balm to remove the

sting. Soon afterward, another couple in their circle married, and

Virginia went to the wedding alone with a Brownie camera. After

the ceremony, she stood outside the old Anglican chapel as the

crowd threw rice at the happy couple. “I was taking pictures there

and someone took the camera from my hand and took a picture

of me. And I looked like my family had just died. In the photo, I

looked so incredibly sad. I just hadn’t recovered. I was just devastated.”

Virginia stumbled across the faded photograph of herself

later in a forgotten album. “That may be why I never married anybody

I really cared about,” she reflected about the Army captain,

“because there was an echo of being deserted, of being left and rejected.

Actually I wasn’t rejected. Not exactly. Because I was never

in the picture, really.”

Afraid of being hurt again in the same way, Virginia entered

into a series of relationships over the next few years that could be

intimate and sexual, but never carried the same hope of lasting

love. She learned to separate her feelings of love and desire, both

with the men she dated and with those she ultimately married. “I

had an active interest in sex,” she explained, “but never particularly

to the men I was involved with.”