THE HUMAN CONDITION NEAT FREAKS : The Urge for Order

Who can forget Felix Unger, that self-confessed fussbudget in “The Odd Couple,” fretting over the cigarette butts in Oscar’s ashtrays, his footprints in the kitchen, his slamming and banging that ruined the souffles? Felix was so fastidious that when he had finished polishing all the shoes in the house, he started shining the shoe trees as well.

With similar determination, the Leary siblings ordered their lives in “The Accidental Tourist”: Rose, arranging her groceries in the cupboards alphabetically; Macon, with his household efficiency system, sloshing his dirty laundry underfoot as he showered.

The fanatically neat have always been a little different from the messier majority of the human race.

The garden variety may roll their toothpaste tubes into impeccable cylinders, sharpen their pencils to the same length, arrange the books on their shelves by subject and size and hang their shirts in their closet in rainbow bands of the color spectrum. In serious cases, the neat have been known to whip out a vacuum cleaner at dinner parties.

Doctors have a term for them: obsessive-compulsive personalities or, in their graver state, obsessive-compulsive disorders.

More simply, they are people who like to arrange and clean, to order and organize. Up to 15% of the population exhibits some sort of obsessive-compulsive behavior, according to Alexander Bystritsky, head of UCLA’s Anxiety Disorders Clinic, with cleaning and neatness compulsions combining to form three-fourths of the problems.

Behind the straightening up lurk pathological doubts and fears of unknown dangers. “It’s very superstitious, magical thinking,” says Fred Penzel, who heads the Western Suffolk Psychological Services in Huntington, N.Y., and has a large clientele of the zealously tidy.

Still, psychiatrists and psychologists acknowledge that the urge for order can be a patchy sort of condition. The same person may cross-reference his or her record collection and yet leave dirty dishes piled in the sink for a week: Cleanliness and neatness don’t necessarily go together.

Both run in families, however, according to the latest studies conducted by David Pauls, a geneticist at Yale University. Preliminary data from interviews with more than 100 people exhibiting obsessive-compuslive disorders show that 20% of their relatives met criteria for the disorders, compared to only 1.5% of the relatives in a control group.

For the merely finicky, their aim to be impeccable is often a source of satisfaction, even delight.

Take Dee Michel. A 38-year-old librarian at Los Angeles’ main branch, Michel becomes rapturous at thoughts of classifying, cataloguing, referencing and list-making. He lovingly describes his shelves of gently sloping books and speaks passionately about creating new retrieval systems.

Although he sometimes works out front at the reference desk, “it’s the organizing I love,” he enthuses.

Like most of his soul mates, Michel says he has no idea what gave rise to this orderliness. He just started arranging schoolbooks as a child and thought everybody did until he entered Brown University. With a pack rat as a roommate, he recalls, “I didn’t know who was weird.”

Today, he freely proclaims that “classifying anything” makes him happy. Recently, he sat down with his collection of nearly 100 buttons and began sorting them by color.

But even systems of order are flawed by contradictions--and soon Michel began to doubt his chosen strategy: “I thought, ‘Well, sometimes color isn’t the most important thing. If I want a red button for a red shirt, that’s OK. But if I want a button by size, I’ll have to look through all the bags of different colors.’ ”

Still, ranking buttons is a breeze compared to sorting out human relations. “People aren’t so simple,” Michel allows.

Indeed, it is living in the real world of people and their peccadilloes that disconcerts neatniks.

The disorder Penzel asserts, “can cause great problems. It can cost a marriage or a job. These people generally get on other people’s nerves. They are very critical and perfectionistic.”

And they are not particularly concerned about the sensitivities of their sloppier spouses and friends.

The inherently tidy will say, “ ‘Yes, I’m neat. If you don’t like it, stay away from me,’ ” warns Bystritsky, whose patients can spend whole days cleaning house and washing themselves.

Average neatniks say they recognize friendship and understanding as loftier values than method and order. It’s just that the urge for symmetry and perfection is sometimes more powerful.

For instance, Cecil Conner, a New York lawyer raised in the South, entertains with grace and hospitality--until he spies a lopsided lampshade.

“I always get up and fix it,” Conner sighs. “I apologize--instead of paying attention to my guests, I’m worrying about the furniture. . . . I’m sure they’ll notice and think badly of me. How can I have a crooked lampshade?”

In more serious cases, victims suffer anxiety over their condition. Venice artist D. J. Hall concedes that she is “sometimes painfully aware” of her neatness.

Even so, the litany of her housekeeping is impressive: She begins the day by picking up lint from her husband’s socks on the bedroom carpet, goes on to “squeegee” the glass shower doors after she bathes, towels out the kitchen sink when she runs water and swipes up dust particles with her T-shirt as she passes through the living room.

She canceled her newspaper subscription five years ago because of the smudges left by the ink. It had been frustrating for her husband, who had to read the paper out on the sun deck and wash his hands before entering the house.

But with the inexplicable peculiarity of the innately neat, a pristine home can mask a work space that’s nothing to brag about. And by her standards, Hall’s studio is pandemonium.

Her brushes are stuck in jars--some colleagues keep them in slots or hang them on individual hooks, she notes--equipment is paint-splattered and tubes of oils are in a jumble.

“That doesn’t seem to bother me that much,” she says nonchalantly.

Both neatniks and doctors say the imposition of order comes from a need to control “everything and everyone around them,” as Penzel puts it. “This is what leads to the problems.”

To get through his morning grooming routine, Steve Smith, a Los Angeles photographer, counts the steps, one through six.

Could he actually forget, say, to brush his teeth?

“I might,” he admits.

Mark Krenzien, a Hollywood scriptwriter/director whose wife, Donnie, is compulsively neat, attributes exaggerated orderliness to the “nesting” syndrome--and a reaction to urban Angst.

“You try to make a cocoon within the city, a little Fortress L.A.,” he explains. “This is one of the few things you can control in your life. You can’t do anything about the traffic; you can’t beat the smog.”

But you can spend weekends washing windows, as Krenzien has learned.

“The President of the United States could walk in at any moment, and we wouldn’t be ashamed,” he says of their home.

Krenzien, whose childhood was spent in domestic chaos,believes that the advantages of order outweigh the drawbacks.

He points out philosophically, however, that “there are different ways of perceiving the world.” Krenzien will drop a towel on the bedroom floor for 10 minutes while he dresses, but he notes, “As far as my wife is concerned, it’s going to be there for eternity.”

When she comes home from work as a student counselor in a private high school, “she says there are crumbs on the table before she says, ‘Hello, darling,’ ” Krenzien laments.

His advice to spouses of neatness fanatics is not to struggle: “There is no compromise. You can’t have it half-neat. That’s messy.”

But behavioral psychiatrists and psychologists like Bystritsky and Penzel hold out hope for spouses on the thin edge of nervous collapse. Many of even the most desperately obsessive-compulsive cleaner-uppers can be helped, they state.

Mildly variant neatniks can be corrected by a little cogent reasoning--for example: If you keep straightening up like this, your wife’s going to leave you and your friends won’t come to see you anymore.

Treatment for full-blown obsessive-compulsive disorders obliges neat freaks to do the unthinkable: spend their time in a messy house.

Penzel gives patients such “homework” as requiring them to shove their clothes to one side of the closet and to mix up the silverware.

“They feel a great deal of anxiety,” he says, but gradually they become habituated to the mess.

DR, MATT WUERKER / For The Times