No matter that people injected with Pentothal recall little or nothing afterwards. No matter that Shirley’s recantation letter, far from renouncing therapy, desperately pleaded for more. Sitting across from her doctor on this warm afternoon in May, Shirley understood that she could continue being a multiple personality and keep Connie in her life, or she could reject the diagnosis and lose her beloved doctor’s therapy sessions, not to mention her friendship. The choice was hers, Connie implied.
Shirley went home, sat at her typewriter, and composed a new communication. This one blamed her earlier missive on a pesky, unnamed alter. “One Friday,” Shirley wrote to Connie, “someone stalked into your office, imitated me [and] had a paper written about how she had now become well and was confessing … that it had all been put on. Well, you knew better.”16
Connie instructed her secretary to schedule five sessions a week with Miss Mason. She started the Pentothal again.
Soon Shirley had two additional multiple personalities, and her “memories” about Mattie’s torture were flowing. Each recollection was more chilling than the last. One had to do with Mattie marching Shirley to her father’s carpentry workshop in a small garage next to the house, where Mattie bound her with rope, hung her upside down from the ceiling, and administered enemas. There also, she led little Shirley upstairs to a loft, stuffed her in a crib—a big storage container—full of grain, and left her there. Shirley was suffocating in the grain when, by chance, her father walked into the workshop and freed her. He assumed an adolescent boy, the town bully, had done the mischief. No one realized that schizophrenic Mattie had tried to kill her little girl.17
Connie didn’t know that in Minnosota in the 1920s and 1930s, “cribs” were the size of silos, much too big to fit into Walter’s tiny workshop. There was no corn or wheat crib anywhere near the place. Instead, Connie took Shirley’s horrific tale as truth and fixated on it. She rummaged through her patient’s mind for more horrendous abuse, doing most of the talking during the Pentothal sessions, and continually cuing Shirley and her “personalities” about what she wanted to hear.
Connie tape-recorded a session that occurred in late 1958. The patient was not Shirley but her alter Clara, and Clara was complaining that Shirley still was doing poorly in chemistry. She couldn’t study because “her back hurts so.”18
“I think her mother hit her on the back,” Connie suggested. “Do you remember?”
“Stand up by the wall,” Clara answered groggily. When Connie responded with an encouraging “Yes,” Clara continued this train of thought.
“Like when you kick?” she queried Connie.
Connie eagerly put two and two together: Mattie plus assault. “When did mother kick her?” she asked. “When did mother kick her? When she was going down the stairs?”
“Big girl,” murmured Clara.
“Oh, when she was a big girl … And what else?”
“Throw the shoe at her.”
“Yes,” Connie reinforced the answer. “Throw the shoe at her. What else?”
“Throw the book.”
“Throw the book. And what else?”
“She hit her and knocked her out and she fell down.”
“Oh dear. What else? Standing up by the wall made her back hurt. Did her mother ever bump her or push her when she was standing against the wall, and bang that door in her back?”
The weapon was a broom with a “big handle,” Clara answered.
“Yes! … That’s it then,” Connie responded excitedly. “When you whack … right across the back and hit … it hurts like the dickens for a long time afterward … Yes, yes it hurts. That’s it. That’s it.”
With the “memory” of assault finally recovered, Connie told Clara, her back pain would disappear and Shirley would learn her chemistry.
But the back pain wasn’t disappearing, Clara complained. Shirley still hurt.
Connie renewed her search for memories.
“What else?” she demanded.
When Clara kept silent, Connie switched from words to the one thing Shirley craved from her as much as Pentothal: her touch. “Here, turn over. Now, we’ll make the broom handle, the book and the shoe all go away and instead we’ll feel nice, soft hands.” Connie stroked Shirley’s body. “There. Doesn’t that feel good?”
“You’re so nice,” Clara swooned. She recovered a memory of Mattie threatening to chop up her hands in a meat grinder.19
The pain did not go away, and neither did Shirley’s problems with chemistry. She studied her textbooks, went to lectures, and promptly forgot everything she heard and read. The obvious explanation was drugs. Sitting in class, she was under the influence of far more mind-and-body-altering medications than were most patients in the intensive-care unit at a hospital. She told Connie she felt “weak all the time.” And her back hurt.
“Did mother hurt your back in the carpenter shop, too?” Connie asked.
“Yes,” Shirley answered. And now she introduced a shocking element: her father had pulled the rope she hung from when her mother raped her with enemas. Walter was a new character in the horror story, and Connie was surprised. She knew Shirley loved her father. So she ignored this new accusation and refocused on Mattie.
“Where did she hurt your back? Besides with the broom stick.”
“In the attic.”
“What did she do in the attic? … How did she hurt your back in the attic?”
“She put me in a trunk.”
“Oh, and she slammed the trunk lid on your back? Were you afraid when you were shut up in the trunk?”
“It was dark in there … I was afraid I couldn’t breathe … afraid …” Shirley’s speech halted, became garbled. The very word “afraid” triggered loud sobbing. Suddenly another voice took over.
Water, water everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink.
Startled, Connie realized Shirley was performing Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” just as she had recited it as a child with her mother in the sunroom in Minnesota. Connie chimed in:
Water, water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.
Shirley next took up “Invictus”:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
Eventually Shirley ended up in a hospital in Harlem, not for multiple personality disorder treatment but to break her of her barbiturates addiction.20 She lay in bed thinking about her current situation. All her life, she realized, she had put her troubles into divine hands, but lately she had turned to a psychiatrist and her drug. Now God had taken the drug away and was punishing her, even as her roommate, Willie, was urging her to terminate therapy because Connie was manipulating her.
Instead of heeding the warnings of God and Willie, however, Shirley left the West Side and found a tiny place across town where she could live alone, just a few blocks from Seventy-seventh and Park Avenue. Connie helped with the move. She paid the deposit on the new apartment and showered Shirley with gifts: old rugs and drapes from her office, a seven-foot Christmas tree, a fur-trimmed winter coat, an electric frying pan—even a cat.21 And once, when the rent was overdue, Connie fronted Shirley the money. “You can pay me back,” she said, “as soon as your father’s check comes.”22
Shirley knew she could give up Pentothal. She could give up her roommate, too, and even something of Adventism. But she could not give up Dr. Wilbur.
CHAPTER 10
CLINICAL TALES
WHILE SHIRLEY SLOGGED THROUGH ENDLESS therapy with Connie on the Upper East Side, Flora was busy freelancing across town for women’s magazines, at first churning out pieces such as “Vitamins Can Help You Live Longer.”1 By the late 1950s she was tired of this apprentice fare and eager to write articles that would connect her with the famous and the powerful. In late 1959, she contacted the office of Vice President Richard Nixon, and asked if she could spend a
week with Nixon’s mother.
The Republican Party was planning to run Nixon for president, and the article Flora proposed was “My Son: Richard Nixon.” It would use seventy-five-year-old Hannah Nixon to characterize her son to women in a “very warm” and “persuasive” way. Nixon’s people approved and Flora went to Hannah’s stucco house in California. Hannah was a quiet Quaker woman who prayed in front of Flora and drove her 1946 Chevrolet to the store for groceries. All the while she talked about her son Richard while Flora took notes.2 Then Flora wrote the piece for Good Housekeeping.
“Many days I had nothing to serve but cornmeal,”3 Hannah told Flora, describing a period when the Nixon family was financially strapped. She added that one of Richard’s brothers had died of encephalitis when Richard was young, and another succumbed to tuberculosis. Richard’s character had been forged by these adversities. As a teenager he attended church four times a week. He was always close to his mother. She never heard him swear. Though he was vice president and could eat all the fancy food he wanted, Hannah served him cherry pie and rump roast, his favorite foods, when he came home to visit.
Did this sweet, all-American mom think her good boy should be President? “If that’s what he wants—and I think he does—I hope he gets it,”4 she answered humbly. On that campaign note Flora ended her article. It came out in June 1960, a few weeks before the Republican convention, and it was chock full of the “overtly favorable corn” Nixon had told advisors his campaign needed from “a good article on my mother.”5
Soon Flora got an assignment from Family Weekly for an article about the wife of John F. Kennedy’s running mate. “Lady Bird Johnson: What Kind of Second Lady?” the resulting piece was titled. After Kennedy defeated Nixon, she wrote, for Good Housekeeping again, a piece called “What Jackie Kennedy Has Learned from Her Mother.” (Answer: How to be tactful and elegant. How to compete in horse shows.) Then Kennedy was shot and Lyndon Johnson became President. Flora followed with “Mrs. LBJ: Our 32nd First Lady” in Cosmopolitan, and “Ladybird’s Secrets of Successful Outdoor Entertaining.” (Those secrets were barbecues and garden parties. “And what Lady Bird can do at the White House or the L.B.J. ranch for 400 to 500 guests, you can do for 10 to 20.”)6
The Johnsons loved these apolitical articles and Flora loved that they loved them. She basked in the glow of the famous, political loyalties be damned. One day she was in Congress gathering prized dessert recipes from the wives of liberal men in power, while the next day she ghost wrote “What Women Should Know about Conservatism, by Senator Barry Goldwater.” (“Heartfelt advice to his daughter—and to every woman—on right thinking and right living in a world she must help to manage.”) She didn’t get much money for that piece, but she got a chance to have lunch with Goldwater. That was pay enough.7
At age thirty-seven Flora lived in Manhattan with her parents. She was single and childless—a spinster. She hardly fit the profile of a Ladies’ Home Journal reader but no matter. In the 1950s all kinds of writers freelanced for the women’s magazines. The pay rates in those days were breathtaking by today’s standards. Redbook offered $1,750 for an article. At Cosmopolitan, $2,000 was not unusual. A cover story for McCall’s could fetch $4,000.8 In today’s dollars that equals $32,000. With only three or four pieces a year, a women’s magazine freelancer could live it up in Manhattan or buy a house in the suburbs and comfortably raise a family.
For writers who didn’t mind hustling, freelancing was great fun. Reams of carefully thought-out story proposals were often turned down before one was accepted, but the preliminary wheeling and dealing with an editor—usually a male—often happened at elegant bars and restaurants. Lunches on the magazine’s expense account at the Algonquin, drinks at ‘21’—these were the perks for a freelancer in New York. Travel was often required for a story, and the magazine footed the bill. Writers of both sexes were eager to pen articles, even for female readers. In fact, most freelancers for the women’s magazines were men.9
The magazines were filled with pictures and articles that reinforced the gender divide between men and women during the Cold War. Ads showed housewives in high heels and white gloves stroking washing machines. In one typical piece, a male obstetrician described a typical work day with the “girls”—his word for his patients. One, a mother of three small children, was accidentally pregnant again. She didn’t know how she would cope with a fourth baby, and her pregnancy was causing her to vomit nonstop. The obstetrician told the woman’s husband her illness was all in her head, but he seemed confused by the diagnosis. The doctor shrugged. “Will men,” he asked himself rhetorically, “ever really understand how different women are from men?” He prescribed a day in the hospital for the vomiting woman, “away from house chores and children.” He was sure she would recover “miraculously.”10
Willy Schreiber was proud of his daughter for making herself into the writer he’d never dared become. He helped when she worked on articles, editing her grammar and taking pages of notes for her at the New York Public Library. Then, in 1958, Willy checked into the hospital for minor surgery. In a freak outcome, he expired on the operating table.
His death made Flora feel dead.11 At age forty-two she began mourning as deeply for Willy as she had eight years earlier for her “almost husband,” Gene. O’Neill had been her lover, but Willy, Flora wrote shortly after he died, was her brother, her companion, and her audience. He had realized himself through her, and she struggled to keep him alive by realizing more. She moved herself and her newly widowed mother into a smaller apartment, installing twin beds in the single bedroom. And she went back to full-time teaching. That would have been job enough for most people, but Flora’s mind and body were running on nerves and a desperate urge to tend her father’s memory. In addition to the teaching, she dove deeper into freelancing.
It was getting harder, however. American magazines still looked shiny and lively, but by the early 1960s writers like Flora were sensing trouble. With television’s exploding popularity, more and more people were staring at screens instead of turning pages. Big corporations like car manufacturers were pulling their advertising dollars out of print and spending them on the airwaves. Magazines were bleeding ad pages and readers, and editors scrambled to balance budgets by retooling audiences. Their efforts were creating “upheaval,” according to the Society of Magazine Writers in 1961.12
At meetings of the Society, Flora heard colleagues fret that inflation was rising but freelance rates were flat. Worse, publications were folding, and the staffs of those that survived were writing articles themselves instead of hiring outsiders like Flora. “There is a shrinking market for the freelance magazine writer,” Society member Alvin Toffler warned at an early-1960s meeting.13
The changes were severe. Editors at Good Housekeeping were asking for celebrity profiles. Cosmopolitan had once featured articles such as “Why Keep Paroling Sex Offenders?” Now it preferred “unusual first-person pieces.” Coronet had concentrated on modestly informative pieces like the health-and-science article “Goodbye to Rabies.” By 1960 the magazine was in trouble and its editors wanted “warmth of style rather than reporting.”14
While these changes were taking place, a speaker at a Society for Magazine Writers meeting cautioned members to “expect a decline in editorial integrity over the next year or two as editors and publishers, hungry for the advertising dollar, sell their souls for space.”15 Despite the warning, some writers sold their own souls. They started injecting fiction into their work and passing it off as fact.
The pioneer of this Faustian development was a Manhattan woman named Terry Morris, whose son, Dick, would later serve as a Republican Party strategist, then flip to advising Bill Clinton when he was president, and flip again to become a conservative television pundit. Terry Morris had started her career in the 1940s as a novelist and short story writer, then switched in the early 1950s to doing freelance journalism for women’s magazines. Her specialty was “as-told-to” articles, including “I Was a Cro
oked Tax Official,” “We Bought a Black Market Baby,” and “I Gave My Son Away.” By 1960 she was vice president of the Society for Magazine Writers.16
“I have never permitted myself to become too fettered by the ‘facts’!” Morris cheerfully wrote in Prose by Professionals, a guidebook to magazine writing that she edited in 1961. “Frequently, I take considerable license with the facts that are given me and manipulate them, as a writer of fiction does.”17 Morris notified her interviewees in advance that she was making things up about them. Most approved, and when they heard Morris’s falsehoods from naïve fact checkers who phoned them to review the copy, they claimed everything was correct. No editor was the wiser.
Morris spun whole stories from her imagination and populated them with pretend men and women. She called the results nonfiction. For “We Bought a Black Market Baby,” she lolled on a deck one summer in a bathing suit, keeping one eye on her son and the other on law journals about people prosecuted for selling infants. From this legalistic material, Morris later confessed, she “conjured up a married couple who had vainly tried to have a baby, bearing much in mind that their ages, education, place of residence and occupations suited that phantom which every magazine creates for itself—their own unique readership.”18 The fictional story was touted by McCall’s as true.
Betty Friedan was a freelancer and a member of the Society for Magazine Writers; she was also finishing a book that would soon be published as The Feminine Mystique. In the same year that Morris was pushing prevarication, Friedan was advising fellow writers “never to make up a quote or case history,” because “[r]eal people and their own words are much more powerful.”19 That Friedan issued this warning suggests that lying was already widespread in the industry.
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