Is He or Isn’t He?

As Dr. Jeffrey Morris escorts his visitor into the blood-drawing room, he glances over to the phone where 10--no, 11--lines light up the console, half of them blinking anxiously.

‘Everyone wants to tell his story,” says Morris, shaking his head.

While the particulars may vary, most of the calls will recount the same tale--the woman claiming her former boyfriend/husband/lover is the father of her child, his denying it.

Now it comes down to Morris and his staff at Long Beach Genetics to sort it out, amid test tubes and spectrophotometers and computers busily performing Bayesian statistical analysis to answer the $64,000 question: Is he or isn’t he?

Tucked away in a nondescript Rancho Dominquez business park, Long Beach Genetics is one of the country’s largest DNA testing labs devoted exclusively to parentage testing. This year, the facility will determine--with greater than 99% accuracy--whether the man in question is indeed the father in more than 16,000 cases. According to the American Assn. of Blood Banks, a nonprofit organization responsible for accrediting genetic testing facilities, there are about 75 DNA testing labs operating in the United States, up from 20 in 1988. Last year, the 51 labs accredited by the AABB performed 172,316 of the roughly 200,000 DNA tests done annually. While some parentage tests are performed to privately settle a question of paternity, the majority are conducted as part of legal action.

For entertainers, long the targets of paternity suits, the availability of genetic parentage testing adds a new wrinkle to predicaments once settled quietly between lawyers. After the conclusion in July of the Bill Cosby-Autumn Jackson case, in which Jackson was convicted of attempting to extort $40 million from Cosby by alleging he was her biological father, Cosby voluntarily took a blood test to settle whether he or the man named on Jackson’s birth certificate, Jerald Jackson, is the 22-year-old’s biological father. Jackson’s lawyer has said she will probably submit to a blood test, but not until her sentencing Oct. 22.

The bulk of Long Beach Genetics’ work comes from the offices of district attorneys as the courts try to track--some would say hunt--down the biological fathers of women applying for financial assistance through Aid to Families With Dependent Children, more commonly known as AFDC, as well as mothers not on welfare seeking child support from biological fathers. Between 75% to 80% of AFDC applications involve only one parent. Since 1988, single mothers have been required to name the biological father before they can receive child-support benefits. According to Barbara Catlow, assistant director of the L.A. district attorney’s Bureau of Family Support, paternity is in question in 90% of the 314,000 cases her office is processing where child support orders are pending.

“We do between 200 to 250 blood tests per month,” Catlow says, “although I expect that number to grow as we’re able to locate more of the men to be tested.”

Since very few of the men named in AFDC applications willingly step forward, the courts can compel them to submit to a blood test to determine whether the paternity allegation is true. The state of California pays medical technicians from Long Beach Genetics to make weekly visits to local prisons to draw blood for pending cases. (In far-flung cases, the lab can call on 2,000 hospitals and clinics worldwide where blood can be drawn.) As many recall from that popular genetics course, O.J. 101, DNA testing is performed by isolating and removing DNA from white blood cells. It isn’t necessary to examine all 100,000 pairs of genes in paternity tests; instead, geneticists isolate a handful of DNA markers so variable that, in 99.9% of the cases, only a parent could share the same genetic markers.

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This afternoon at long Beach Genetics, lab employees busy themselves opening sealed packages from the counties of San Joaquin, Stanislaus and San Diego, all containing blood samples waiting to be tested. For the mother, child and alleged father to be tested, it costs $450 and takes about 10 days to receive results.

“Here,” says Morris, a large, avuncular man in his mid-50s, as a staffer hands him a test tube filled with a clear liquid. “Look closely.”

As he swirls the vessel, something delicate and white--like a tiny piece of wet Kleenex--floats daintily in an alcohol solution. Morris smiles proudly. “This is a sample of about 600 micrograms of extracted DNA.”

Morris ushers his guest into the heart of the lab, where technicians bend carefully over racks of test tubes. Once extracted, the DNA strands are inserted into a slab of gel and suffused with an electrical charge that causes the DNA fragments to line up according to size. The fragments are sorted, and DNA probes--distinctively marked pieces of DNA--identify the specific fragments that will be used to assess the likelihood of paternity.

Many of the men ordered by a judge to give blood at the lab are, not surprisingly, less than thrilled to be there. “We don’t do any testing unless both parties agree or are under court order,” Morris says. “But we’re in the middle, which means we’re often viewed as an instrument of the devil.”

Frances Davis, a medical technician who draws blood for the tests (for her safety, there is always another technician in the room) points to a white button next to the phone.

“The panic button,” she proclaims, adding that she has had to use it on many occasions to summon help when, as she brought out the needle, men started swinging.

Yes, Davis says, she’s been threatened. Yes, she’s been offered bribes. And when she’s brought out the Polaroid camera to confirm identity, she’s had grown men suddenly leave the room, mumbling something about their mothers calling them. A few minutes later, a different man wordlessly takes the first man’s place on the blood-drawing couch.

Glen H. Schwartz, an Encino-based lawyer specializing in family law and paternity cases, is not surprised at such behavior. “These guys come in and they’re scared,” says Schwartz, whose clients include high-profile professional athletes and entertainment figures. “Many men allege to me that they’ve been set up, that this woman had sex with them for the sole purpose of collecting child support. In many cases, it’s true. But that’s not a defense.

“People ask me if there’s a way to medically beat a DNA test, and I tell them I’m not aware of any, but that doesn’t stop men from trying. I remember one case involving a football player in San Diego. He says he wants to come in early to have the blood test done. So the morning of the test, he pulls up in front of the lab in a limo, goes in and identifies himself as this football player. When they ask for ID, he says, ‘I don’t have any, the limo driver brought me here.’ Sounds plausible. They take the picture, fingerprint him and draw the blood. A little while later, two football players come in, and one points to the other and says, ‘This is the real guy.’ ”

“I remember speaking with one of the executives of a California football team, who said, ‘People think drugs are our biggest problem. It’s not. It’s the paternity cases.’ And this is true of all sports,” observes Schwartz, who, upon concluding this call, will go back to working on a case against a professional athlete he says makes more than $5 million a year.

One particularly tangled case involving money, paternity and DNA testing involves Larry Hillblom, the “H” of the DHL courier company, who died last year in a seaplane crash near his compound on the South Pacific island of Saipan. Although Hillblom stipulated in his will that close to $1 billion would go to the University of California upon his death, there may be loopholes big enough for, say, the child of a Filipino prostitute to crawl through. Five young women, including three Filipino call girls who claim Hillblom fathered their children, are suing his estate. The outcome of their cases may rest on DNA extracted from a mole removed from Hillblom’s face in 1993 and preserved in paraffin at Davies Medical Center in San Francisco.

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Ruth Graf, an associate attorney with the Los Angeles law firm Allred, Maroko & Goldberg, which frequently represents mothers in paternity cases involving high-profile athletes and actors, often takes her clients to Long Beach Genetics to witness the blood draw. “We like to reassure ourselves and our clients that tricks aren’t pulled, because often you’re dealing with very rich and powerful people and it can be a concern,” Graf says. “In one case, the athlete was out of state, so we hired a local attorney to go to the blood test. The athlete showed up early for his test before the attorney got there, and the lab went ahead and took his blood. We argued successfully in court to have the test repeated.”

Morris says he gets a number of calls from Hollywood types demanding discretion to sort out a possible indiscretion. “If the person is really prominent, the lawyer will call. We’ll open the lab on Saturday to do the draw so everything will be very discreet. But when the time comes, four limos pull up into our parking lot, and some guy steps out and starts signing autographs.”

In addition to serving as an occasional autograph-op, the parking lot at Long Beach Genetics also provides an unsettling venue for fistfights, car bashing and other forms of blood sport. According to Morris, the fiercest parking-lot confrontations are between the child’s mother and the man’s current girlfriend. “It happens a lot,” he says. “Sometimes they play demolition derby with each other and we have to call the sheriff.”

How were paternity suits handled before DNA tests? Blood tests became available in the 1930s but were useful only for indicating who wasn’t the father. Sometimes even this distinction hasn’t pulled much weight in court. In 1944, Charlie Chaplin was ordered to pay $75 per week to support a child who, according to the blood test, could not have been his. Chaplin paid. The child’s mother was later committed to a state mental hospital.

According to Scott Altman, a USC law professor, the courts have historically placed emphasis on a woman’s marital status in paternity cases. “If a woman was married, there was an ancient presumption that the husband was the father and the child legitimate,” he explains. “It was possible to rebut this assumption, although it was difficult because, one, the man had to demonstrate that he couldn’t have had sex with the mother, and, two, he had to prove that someone else had sex with her. Further, the man was traditionally prevented from testifying because the court felt it was unseemly to do so.”

The story was quite different if the woman in question was unmarried. “Since there was no issue of legitimacy, the woman would be allowed to identify the man as being the child’s father and indicate that she had sex with him and no one else,” Altman adds. “For his part, the purported father would try to disprove both these allegations. He would deny having sex with the woman and bring forth witnesses who would say that they did have sex with her--as many as he could come up with.”

Both defendants and claimants perjured themselves so often in these cases that frustrated judges sometimes concocted their own standards of proof. “I remember reading of one judge who held the child up in front of a jury, asking them who the child looked like,” Altman marvels.

Even with DNA testing, the law is sometimes less interested in genetic connections than social bonds. In 1989, the California Supreme Court heard the case of Michael H. vs. Gerald D., which involved a woman who had a child while moving freely between her husband and boyfriend. DNA tests determined the boyfriend was the biological father. When the woman reconciled with her husband, the boyfriend went to court to secure his paternal rights. The court ruled against him, saying that even though the boyfriend was the biological father, protecting the marriage was more important than protecting genetic paternity.

Finally, it comes down to one question: What makes a parent? Will DNA alone suffice? Personal relationship or genetic bond? And who gets to decide?

“DNA testing has made some things easier for the legal community,” says Altman, “but, ultimately, many of the hardest questions are not technical.”

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This morning at long Beach Genetics, the receptionist’s questions are quiet and familiar: Are you here to fill out an application? Do you need a pen?

There are no fistfights in the parking lot. No movie stars in limos. No football players trying to pull a fast one with a buddy. This morning, only one man sits in the waiting room. He looks to be in his mid-20s and has a chiseled chin and disarming smile. He’s here of his own volition to find out whether he is the father of his former girlfriend’s child.

“It’s supposed to be something like 90% accurate,” he says, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. “I mean, I kinda hope the kid is mine. He’s really cute. It’s just-- “

At that moment, Davis, with her quiet shoes and unblemished lab coat, opens the door to escort him into her blood-drawing room with its needles and panic buttons and flashing phone lines.

Five minutes later, the man returns to the lobby. When asked how it went, he smiles wearily.

“It didn’t,” he says, “hurt too much.”

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(Photograph)

Stylist: Ellen Giamportone. Clothing: hers from Sharon Segal at Fred Segal, Santa Monica; his from Politx, Beverly Center; child’s from Bloomingdale’s, Century City. Shoes: his and hers from The Swell Store; child’s from Feet at Fred Segal, Melrose Avenue. Models: Donna Guidry, Ted Raine and Matt Singer (child)/Cunningham, Escott, Dipene agency.