Carl Djerassi: Sex and the single chemist

He invented the Pill 50 years ago - it changed the world forever and made him very rich, so why today would he rather be known as a playwright?

I meet Carl Djerassi – gosh, how many times a day do you have to spell out your name? "Oh, between 12 and 27 times," he replies happily – at Heathrow airport. From here, we'll be travelling to Frankfurt, to the book fair, where Professor Djerassi ("I tell ze Americans zat it is Jurassic, only viz a D in front and take off the C...") will be promoting This Man's Pill, Reflections on the 50th Birthday of The Pill, which he invented. I've not met him before, but recognise him instantly in the queue at check-in. He just looks so the scientist, so the chemist: satisfyingly Viennese, perhaps rather Sigmund Freud-ish, but with something of a wavy, snowy Colonel Sanders hair-do and little beard. I introduce myself. "Hello," I say. "I think you'll find I'm your hot date for today." "Oh, good," he says. "A hot date. I like ze sound of zat! How old are you? No! Iz not true! Let me see your passport. But you look like a child!" I think he might have been a bit of a goer in his time. I think maybe he still is. Possibly, if he hadn't invented the Pill, there would be lots and lots of baby Djerassis around.

We move through to the departure lounge. He has something of a comedy left leg. A skiing accident, when he was 34, meant his knee had to be removed, and the femur and tibia bones fused together. This means the leg cannot bend, is as rigid as a pencil, but it wasn't a catastrophe then and doesn't appear to be a catastrophe now. I call him hop-along. "Come along, hop-along," I say. "I'm coming, I'm coming," he says cheerfully. He is 78, yet terrifyingly sprightly. He exercises daily, he says, on a cross-country ski machine, "Vich I like to do naked." He seems terrifyingly driven, too. First the chemistry, but now? Art collector, patron of the arts, philanthropist, entrepreneur, as well as novelist, poet, memoirist, playwright. He wrote his first novel when his third and current wife (Diane Middlebrook, a professor of English) left him momentarily during their courtship for a younger, literary type. Such is his determination, he decided to write her a novel, to woo her back. And such is his determination, he pulled it off. "It was an absurd motive, typically male, almost juvenile. I'm embarrassed, but pleased."

His dearest ambition now is to be considered "a serious playwright". He has a play, Oxygen, about to open in London plus another one, Immaculate Misconceptions, about to open in New York. Immaculate Misconceptions recently played in Bulgaria. "And the wife of the Bulgarian Prime Minister came!" He is blissfully vain. Whatever question I happen to ask him, he has answered somewhere in one of his books, and whatever book this happens to be, he just happens to have it in his backpack. First – and God knows what question I asked, although I wish I hadn't – I'm directed to pages 56 to 59 in Menachem's Seed, which is almost a masterclass on masturbation written from the female point of view. Now, I don't know about you, but masturbation before breakfast in an airport departure lounge has never especially been my thing. I am rather glad when our flight is called. Still, I will not hold it against him and suggest you don't either. Aside from anything else, he'd very likely topple.

Anyway, what was it like, Professor Djerassi, the day you discovered the Pill, which, I've just worked out, was precisely 50 years ago today, on 15 October, 1951? What were you wearing? What did you have for breakfast? How did you celebrate? Disappointingly, he says it wasn't like that. "There was no wonderful 'eureka' moment. One only has those with theoretical discoveries. It's like being an architect. You draw up the plans, watch the building being built. It can take years and years. But when the last brick goes in, it is no surprise." Actually, the race at that time was to reproduce cortisone, which was being hyped as a possible wonder cure for arthritis. It was only when Djerassi lost this race that he turned to making an oral progestational compound. Progesterone was already being used to treat certain kinds of infertility and menstrual disorders but it had to be injected, which was painful and difficult. It was Djerassi who came up with a form of the hormone that could survive absorption through the digestive tract. Its possible use, though, as an oral contraceptive didn't come until later, after it was tested, and then approved by the FDA in 1960. Was this a big moment? "No, it was not sensational. What was sensational was the speed with which women took it up."

Of course, the moral, social and medical implications of the Pill have always been passionately debated, with the main backlash coming, perhaps, in the Seventies, when feminists particularly got heated about men controlling women's fertility and all that. Frankly, though, I can't be bothered to have a go at him about this because, let's face it, if you can't trust a man to go the corner shop and come back with what he's been sent for, how can you trust him with contraception? "Exactly!" he cries. When one of the air hostesses starts getting a little bit testy about his collapsible footstool cluttering up the aisle, I say: "Hang on. This is the man who's allowed you to have lots of sex and no unwanted babies. You should be proud to step over his footstool." She is immediately contrite. Ultimately, the Pill has proved a great liberation. And I say this even though I've never had much to do with it myself. Tragically, I've always found keeping the lights on to be as good a contraceptive as any.

We arrive in Frankfurt, take a train part of the way to the fair, and then walk. Professor Djerassi likes walking. Truly, his energy is dazzling. He hops along feistily, while I, on my two legs that bend, trail along exhaustedly in his wake. I think he may be beginning to realise I am very much the age it says I am in my passport. At the fair, I'm surprised to note not only that he has fans, but so many. They want signed autographs, signed books, a chat. I tell him he's the Posh Spice of chemistry. "I am! I am!" he exclaims happily. He gives readings, interview after interview, a press conference. He charms everybody. He is obviously enjoying himself, but what ultimately keeps him going? It's not like he needs the money. The Pill made him rich, yes. Although he was given only $1 for the patent of his discovery, he was also given stocks in Syntex. How rich did this make you exactly? "I'm well-off. I can have what I want." He's built up a museum quality collection of Paul Klee paintings and owns a swish flat in Maida Vale, London, as well as a Californian ranch that he calls Smip – Syntex Made It Possible. How does he account for his continued drive? "Vell, I don't have a literary agent. I don't have a theatrical agent. And I do vant people to read my books, see my plays." It may have something to do with being a displaced Jew, too.

He was born in Vienna where his father, Samuel, a Sephardic Jew originally from Bulgaria, was a doctor who specialised in VD. How... ahem... charming? "He called himself a dermatologist, as a cover, because he had a lot of society patients. He had the sort of waiting room where no patients ever saw other patients. As one came in the other would leave by a side door." He made a good living. "You counted your income by the number of syphilitics you were treating. Pre-antibiotics, you could be treating a syphilitic for three years." His mother, Alice, an Ashkenazi Jew, was a doctor who became a dentist. No, he says, he can't remember many a happy evening in his parents' company as they discussed the varying delightful symptoms of gonorrhoea and gingivitis. They divorced when he was four.

From then on, he lived with his mother in Vienna, but spent his holidays with his father in Sofia. Then, in 1938, after the Anschluss, his parents remarried (although only for two days) so that Carl's mother could escape Vienna for Bulgaria, which remained a safe haven for Jews during the war. In 1939, Carl and his mother travelled to America, where his father joined them in 1948. Carl didn't return to Vienna until a few years ago, when an Austrian television company made a documentary about him. "I went back to our apartment, and stood at the door I'd last seen in 1938. Inside, it was as I remembered it. A large lobby, big enough to play soccer. You couldn't score goals, but you could dribble a small ball. And the wonderful chimneys that went all the way to the ceiling. In the winter, we would hold our blankets to the chimneys to warm them."

Do you remember the Nazis? "Oh, yes. Yes! And when I came to America I had a phobia, like most Jewish refugees. 'Are you Jewish?' someone would ask, and I'd worry they had an anti-Semitic agenda. I didn't hide the fact I was Jewish, or a refugee, but I did not advertise it. In Vienna, the Nazis put up a poster showing a smiling kid with a hooked nose. 'Kill The Jews', the poster said. And then years later, when I was passing a news-stand in America I saw Mad magazine, with the picture of the smiling kid on the front, and I thought, that's the same kid! Of course it wasn't, but I started having a phobia about walking past news-stands where the magazine was on display. I saw anti-Semitism where it did not exist. Even now, my wife finds it amusing when I say: 'Do you think this is too Jewish?' "

His mother did not settle well in America. "She was a typical, dissatisfied European refugee." It was hard for him, too. It's not like they'd ever been a religious family. They were, in fact, more Austrian than Jewish. "So when we were kicked out, we had no religion to fall back on. We were totally naked." So did you use work, and achievement, to re-establish a certain identity for yourself? Here are my chemistry achievements? This is who I am? "Absolutely. Absolutely." What do you think collecting art says about you? "I think anyone who collects anything is trying to fill a certain void." And yours is? "Perhaps I have emotional blank walls I wish to adorn and embellish."

His ranch in California is also home to the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, which offers patronage to struggling artists, as well as a community in which to work. He set this up in memory of his daughter from his second marriage, Pamela, an artist who committed suicide in 1978. She took a fistful of pills, then walked off into the forest, where she was found dead some days later. This, of course, is not something a parent can ever recover from. "In the three or four years up to her death, we'd become extremely close. I saw her the day before, when she seemed in a very good mood." How does he account for it? Clinical depression, he says. "She had her ups and downs..." Is depression chemical, do you think? "Oh yes. For sure. People consider Prozac a dirty word, but it's been a life-saving drug in many instances." Still, something decent has come out of it, what with the Artists Program. By filling his own voids he has, ultimately, done nothing but good for others.

It's time to get back to London. Another walk, another train, another footstool set up in an aeroplane aisle. Then a taxi, which drops him first at his swish Maida Vale address. It's very late, but he'll still do another four hours work tonight. "I get 50 e-mails a day, vich I must answer." Tomorrow, it's an interview with BBC TV news at 8am, then an interview with the World Service, then an evening lecture at the Royal Institution. Do you ever get tired? "Only ven I'm bored." He hops up to his front door, with as much energy as he had when we first met at 7.30am. Me, though? I'm absolutely worn out. Tonight, I'll be keeping the light on, that's for sure.

'This Man's Pill' is published by Oxford University Press at £12.99