Sybil Exposed

by Nathan, Debbie

  Then, as Shirley would remember decades later, she was gripped by an idea for impressing Dr. Wilbur that was half conscious, half unconscious. One day in late 1945, before going to her psychotherapy appointment, she busied herself making block prints, holding a sharp knife to etch the lineoleum tiles used in the process. While cutting she found herself “dwelling morbidly” on Dr. Wilbur’s imminent departure. Suddenly the knife slipped. It cut Shirley’s hand so deeply that it hit an artery, and a geyser of blood shot out. She pressed hard on her hand, improvising a tourniquet as she ran to her mother’s doctor’s office, which was a few blocks from her house. He stanched the wound and wrapped it with gauze. It started to throb something fierce. Looking and feeling like a war casualty, Shirley proceeded to Dr. Wilbur’s office, in the same building.

  There she had what doctors today would call a panic attack, and a rather theatrical one at that. She flew off her chair, rushed blindly to the office window, and pounded on the unbreakable glass with her bloody, bandaged hand. Amazed, Connie grabbed Shirley and sat her down. She thought her patient had just suffered a seizure, though in this case it didn’t have an organic cause, the way epilepsy did. Connie believed it was psychogenic—brought on by emotional disturbance, and that Shirley needed psychiatric hospitalization. Connie worked on the locked mental ward of Clarkson Hospital, and she suggested Shirley check herself in for several weeks. That way, the doctor and the patient could do therapy daily.

  Shirley was delighted. As though preparing for a stay at an art colony instead of Omaha’s equivalent of an insane asylum, she started planning which sort of colored pencils and paper to take with her.

  Her parents were aghast. Walter worried about mind-bending drugs and lobotomies. The Masons told Shirley they would send her to an Adventist psychiatric facility instead. But Shirley wanted only Dr. Wilbur, and they hit an impasse as summer turned to fall and winter. The Masons argued and argued. Shirley did not go to the hospital.23

  Instead, she continued seeing Connie once a month. Connie made useful suggestions: get out of the house more, do some teaching—maybe not full time, because too many hours might be overly tiring, but at least part time. Shirley followed her advice, teaching high school at the local Adventist academy, and doing a fine job of it.

  But, just as she had developed a transference toward Connie, Connie apparently developed a countertransference—unconsciously projecting onto Shirley the deep-seated feelings she had for key people in her life.

  Psychiatrists nowadays constantly warn each other about the dangers of unexamined, uncontrolled countertransference. A married male doctor develops erotic feelings toward a female patient who seems to worship him. Her behavior reflects the babyish way she acted toward her father to get attention from him when she was a child in a family of many siblings who competed for his time. As for the therapist, his patient reminds him of his younger sister, who worshipped him when he was sickly little boy and made him feel strong. As a psychiatrist, he ought to be helping the patient analyze her transference so she can stop feeling compelled to act like a baby. But the doctor’s need to keep a baby girl in his psychic life impedes his therapeutic work.

  Connie seems to have been swamped by the transference/countertransference dynamic between herself and Shirley. Instead of recognizing the patient’s feelings toward her and staying emotionally neutral, she encouraged what Shirley later called her “crush” on Dr. Wilbur. Years after their first meeting, Connie would admit that she felt as though Shirley was her daughter.24 To sustain that feeling, she apparently set out to depose Mattie Mason from Shirley’s affections.

  Connie started giving Shirley reading assignments, and much of the material was about nasty, devouring mothers. One recommendation was the popular play The Silver Cord, about a young woman scientist and her new husband, who is dominated by an absurdly smothering mother. Connie also began confiding in Shirley about her life, stretching back to years long preceding the start of Shirley’s therapy. She talked about her mentor from medical school days, Robert Dieterle—the doctor who made the film of the teenaged hysterics acting like babies.25

  Connie probably also discussed Dieterle’s young woman patient with the dual selves, because she told Shirley to read psychologist Morton Prince’s Dissociation of a Personality. First published in 1905, it described a prim, quiet young Boston woman whose pseudonym was Miss Christine Beauchamp. She had a childlike, troublemaker alter self, Sally, who loved to wander to other cities without Miss Beauchamp’s knowledge. Shirley also read about Miss Beauchamp’s memories being altered, and the way that she “lost time.”

  Shirley hadn’t gotten far in the 569 pages of Dissociation of a Personality when the book started to trouble her. Dr. Prince always did his therapy with Miss Beauchamp by hypnotizing her, and hypnosis was strongly forbidden among Seventh-Day Adventists. Ellen G. White had outlawed it years ago, back when critics were dismissing her as a charlatan who was going into trances due to hypnosis rather than because she was receiving inspired messages from God. Shirley was repulsed. For her, allowing oneself to be hypnotized was as sinful as masturbating. At the same time she may have felt titillated, especially when she read about the undivided attention Dr. Prince paid his patient’s multiple personalities.

  Shirley never went to the hospital’s psychiatric ward. In November 1945, she came down with a bronchial infection and was too sick to keep her therapy appointment. Mattie picked up the phone and pretended to call Connie’s office to reschedule, but in fact she was furtively pressing the disconnect button at the same time she was dialing. As a result, Shirley missed her appointment without canceling in advance, though she thought she had canceled.

  But the faux pas barely registered with Connie, who was manically trying to keep her position in Omaha. She was also talking to divorce lawyers. And she was strategizing about how to send her things—and herself—out of Nebraska. By Christmas it was clear she would be laid off, and when Shirley and her mother visited the office on December 26 to refill Shirley’s sleeping pill prescription, Connie brushed past with barely a hello.26

  Shirley understood then that her beloved doctor really was leaving. She would have to carry on in life by herself. And she did, with great success. Nine years would pass before she went into therapy again. The second time around would also involve Connie’s treatment. It would prove to be disastrous.

  CHAPTER 6

  PROFESSOR SCHREIBER

  FOR FLORA AND HER CONTEMPORARIES in the 1940s, Madison Avenue was the Wall Street of advertising, material plenty, and the hot media, radio. A generation earlier, back when radio had been a brand new technology, the government had vowed to turn it into a public utility to inform and educate the nation. Instead, within the next two decades the air waves were almost wholly privatized and commercialized, by NBC, CBS, and other networks. Radio had saturated American homes by the time Flora was in college, Connie Wilbur was in medical school, and a teenage Shirley Mason was moping around in Dodge Center. Audiences heard newscasts, roundtable political discussions, and the president’s fireside chats. But they were also inundated with pop music, comedians, quiz shows, and soap operas.

  The importance of the role that advertising agencies played in these programs is hard to imagine today. Not only did Madison Avenue buy air time for clients’ commercials, it created and produced the programs that hosted those commercials, including torrents of theatrical dramas. One big ad agency, BBDO—short for Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn—produced the hugely popular Cavalcade Theater. It was sponsored by the politically right-wing Dupont Corporation, and the show featured patriotic plays about American heroes such as Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln. Another large firm created most of America’s radio soap operas. By the late 1930s half the women in America were listening to them and their nonstop advertisements for laundry detergent. Everything and everyone was drowning in ads. More people in the United States had a radio in their home than a telephone.1

  Not everyone was happy with this comm
ercialism. Here and there could be found a surviving university or municipal station. One of the latter was WNYC, named for its owner, New York City.

  In the late 1930s and early 1940s, WNYC broadcast plays performed by college students, poetry read by high school pupils, and free science and liberal arts courses on the air. WNYC’s annual American Music Festival highlighted new works by American composers. There was even an hour hosted by the black folk musician Leadbelly, wailing songs such as “The Boll Weevil.”

  WNYC’s avant garde sheen was burnished by the government. The Works Progress Administration—WPA, as the New Deal agency was known—created the Federal Theatre Project, which hired out-of-work writers and actors to put on plays nationwide. The theater project’s director in New York City, a former Broadway producer named George Kondolf, brought his WPA plays to WNYC.

  Flora, in her early twenties at the time, volunteered there, writing scripts for music education programs. That’s probably where she met Kondolf. After the government shut down the Federal Theatre Project, he accepted a job as “story editor” for The Cavalcade Theater at the prestigious ad agency BBDO. He took Flora with him.2

  Once at BBDO, Kondolf hired all kinds of people to produce stories. Many of his writers were avowed leftists. They included Carl Sandburg, Orson Welles, Sinclair Lewis, Arthur Miller, and folksinger Woodie Guthrie, who had once written for the newspaper of the American Communist Party. Kondolf didn’t care about these people’s politics. If they were talented, famous, and willing to help the right-wing Dupont Corporation promote “better things for better living through chemistry,” they were welcome to work at the ad agency.3

  For Flora, a young woman raised partly conservative in a leftist world, Cavalcade must have been heaven. She loved walking into BBDO’s offices in a tailored suit, swinging a purse in one hand and a briefcase in the other. She was thrilled to hobnob with writers like Arthur Miller, and with the show’s superstar actors and actresses: Edward G. Robinson, Helen Hayes, Basil Rathbone, Humphrey Bogart, and others.

  Flora may have done some editing at BBDO, and she probably showed George Kondolf some of her own radio scripts. She’d written one about Haym Solomon, a Jewish resident of colonial Philadelphia who helped finance the American Revolution. Cavalcade didn’t want it, and in fact, no one seemed interested in her dramas. Were they not good enough? Or was it that the author was a woman? She shopped around an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis, about a man who wakes up one morning to find he’s turned into a giant cockroach. Instead of revealing her gender with a full name, Flora bylined herself “F. R. Scheiber.” She still couldn’t sell it.4

  There was one kind of job in commercial media that was easy to get, however: audience research. Flora did some work at NBC, the network that aired Cavalcade. NBC wanted to know more about the people who listened to its soap operas, and Flora was assigned to review the mail. Millions of letters poured in each year, and researchers sorted them by the sex, age, geographical location, marital status, and education of the writers, as well as by their opinions about the shows. The data was tabulated for advertisers, and comments about program content were forwarded to higher-ups. A well-crafted letter might convince a producer to tweak a plot and change a story. Flora learned that radio theater was not art for art’s sake. It was art for the sake of selling things, to millions of people.

  By the end of World War II, Flora had spent several years, as she worded it on her resume, “in direct contact with the key men in the advertising agencies and [radio] networks.”5 From these men she’d learned that radio was the new machina of national life. But its deus wasn’t God. It was Money.

  Flora worried about this, and as the 1940s wore on she struggled to do serious writing about the mass media, in tiny publications specializing in analysis of the theater, radio, and the revolutionary new technology, television. For Film and Radio Discussion Guide, she likened the melodramatic plots of soap operas to the great plays of Shakespeare. For the scholarly Hollywood Quarterly she described how old plays such as Macbeth changed when they were produced for television instead of Broadway.6

  But her passion became teaching. Toward the end of World War II she was hired to substitute in the Speech and Theater Department of Brooklyn College for a male professor who had gone to war.7 The school was a branch of New York City’s public university system, and the Speech and Theater Department was run by gentile men from the Midwest. They seemed antiSemitic to Flora, and she was sure they looked down on women. She responded by acting proud, witty, and outrageous. She wore lipstick so thick and red that it almost seemed purple, and she delighted in shocking her superiors with clever retorts.

  At an event in front of an audience, a Brooklyn College colleague once jokingly introduced Flora and her department chairman with: “This is Professor O’Neill, the front of the organization. And this is Miss Schreiber, the brains.”

  “Professor Maloney,” retorted the large-breasted Flora, “that’s unfair to Professor O’Neill’s brains and my front.”8

  After the war ended and she was laid off from Brooklyn College, she went on to teach at nearby Adelphi College, where her students wrote and broadcast radio plays. Flora’s taste in the genre was rarified. She favored what she called “poetic documentary,” with wispy recitations of work by Emily Dickinson and Goethe. Such fare was a far cry from Cavalcade Theater. It established Flora as an intellectual—as her father’s daughter.9

  She was starting to feel like an aging, anonymous scholar. Her squarish face was getting squarer. Her hooked nose hooked lower. Her cigarette habit had evolved to the chain-smoker level. Her tendency to walk around with food stains on her dress—and now, ashes—was growing more pronounced. The 1940s ended and she’d never in her life had a boyfriend, much less a famous one.

  When she was thirty-four, she got one. His very name evoked stardom—Eugene O’Neill, Jr. His father was the author of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, whose work won him Pulitzer prizes and a Nobel. But Eugene Sr. suffered all his life with crippling depression and alcoholism. Other O’Neill family members did, too, and some drank themselves to death or committed suicide.

  It was 1950 when Flora first took up with Eugene Jr.—whom everyone called Gene. He was forty years old and a man of the world, six-feet-three inches tall, broad shouldered, and handsome. A Yale University–trained scholar of Greek and classical literature who did book reviews for the New York Times, Gene did radio broadcasting work as well, and his on-air voice was often compared to Orson Welles’.

  Gene also lectured at small colleges, and in early 1950 he gave a talk he called “Shakespeare and Soap Operas,” in which he favorably compared potboiler radio dramas to the works of The Bard.10 This was one of Flora’s pet topics, and she probably met Gene because of their shared interests. In the summer he invited her to visit him in Woodstock, an artists and writers colony two hours north of New York City, where Gene had a cottage. Flora planned to stay at a local inn but ended up spending the night with Gene. Almost immediately he asked her to marry him.

  She spent the rest of the summer in an erotic haze. Gene didn’t seem to mind that she spilled food and cigarette ash on her clothes. Nor was he bothered that she was overweight. He told her he adored big, floppy breasts. “My fat wench,” he called her, and she was overwhelmed by the strength of her emotions.

  By September, however, she was worried. Gene had a terribly conflicted relationship with his father, and by the time Flora met him he had been married and divorced three times. He had a stormy relationship with his past lovers, and rumor had it that he sometimes beat them. He was also a longtime alcoholic who suffered from bouts of depression. By the time Flora entered the picture he was in grave decline.

  Completely inexperienced with men, she had little idea of how to take Gene’s measure. He noticed her ignorance and didn’t like it. Too “girlish,” he called Flora, particularly when it came to sex. In a sheaf of notes she later wrote to herself, she described feeling pain at having
his finger inside her, let alone his penis. “Be an animal,” Gene would urge her, and he blamed her reticence on the fact that she had a profession. “You bring Adelphi College into the bedroom. It is not that career women don’t want to go to bed—it is that they don’t know how,” he scolded Flora.11

  Flora blamed herself for their incompatibility. She concluded that she could not say “I love you” in bed because she had spent her entire life as a person or a daughter, and not, as she ruefully wrote, “a woman.” Gene accused her of rejecting him.12

  In mid-September, after Flora’s customary weekend visit, Gene drove her to the train station so she could return to New York City. They planned to skip the next weekend rendezvous, but Gene promised to travel on the Monday after that to see her.

  As soon as Flora was gone, Gene looked up an old lover and spent days begging her to marry him. At the end of the week she agreed, but Gene was acting so strangely that on Saturday she broke off the engagement. Gene spent all day and night on Sunday drinking, and on Monday morning a neighbor found him dead—he had slashed himself with a straight razor. Papers nationwide reported that the great playwright Eugene O’Neill’s son had killed himself because a woman refused to marry him. That woman was not Flora Schreiber. Not a word was published about her.13

  She went into deep mourning and took to calling Gene “My almost husband.” She thought about all the other almosts: being a daughter-inlaw of the greatest dramatist in America, and sister-in-law to Charlie Chaplin, husband of Gene’s half sister, Oona. “I hate to mention his name,” she wrote a friend about the suicide, “because it is a famous one.” But she could not restrain herself: “Eugene O’Neill, Jr.” she added a few lines later, and bragged about her “brief membership in that tragic family.”14