Sybil Exposed

by Nathan, Debbie

  Flora Schreiber and Terry Morris had a collegial relationship—Morris once invited the actress Helen Hayes to her home, for instance, where Flora interviewed her for a freelance article she was working on.20 Flora had a chapter in Prose by Professionals, with tips on how to win article assignments from editors. In 1961, she decided that she would do “as-told-to” pieces about attractive, well-spoken people with emotional problems. To find them Flora contacted Mel Herman, a former ad man who was now secretary of the National Association of Private Psychiatric Hospitals. The organization’s members ran luxury institutions with big trees, lush lawns, and good meals for their mentally ill occupants—places with gentle names like Charter Oak Lodge, Northside Manor, and The Brattleboro Retreat. Many of their directors were eager to talk to the media. They knew publicity was good for their reputations, and it was scot-free advertising for their exclusive sanitariums. Herman’s job was to introduce these medical directors to journalists.21

  To help Flora’s foray into mental health writing, Herman lined up meetings with psychiatrists like Holocaust refugee Dr. Lorant Forizs, head of a private hospital on the Gulf Coast of Florida. While New York shivered in winter slush, Flora luxuriated under palm trees, interviewing a beautiful young schizophrenic woman and her mother whom she called “Norma” and “Claudia.” The resulting article was perfectly titled for a women’s magazine suffering from marketing angst: “I Committed My Daughter.” It came out in early 1962 in Cosmopolitan. Much of the dialogue in the story was cheesy and obviously made up. But Norma and Claudia really did exist—Flora conducted careful correspondence with them to make sure she got her facts right when she wrote her piece, and she felt that her work was well within the bounds of journalism ethics22—at least on this assignment.

  Then Mel Herman introduced her to Dr. Murray Bowen, a psychiatrist at Georgetown University and a pioneer in family therapy. Dr. Bowen served as the male authority for another psychiatry article Flora wrote for Cosmopolitan.

  In this piece, the troubled characters were a public relations executive named Henrietta; her husband, Stephen; and their daughter Ellen, who had repeatedly been hospitalized for her paranoid fears that, for instance, the family’s phone was tapped. In family therapy, according to Flora’s article, Henrietta learned she was “overadequate” as a wife and mother. Stephen realized he was “passive.” As for Ellen, she suffered from “overattachment to her mother.” These problems had rendered her insane. The family’s therapist summed things up by asking, rhetorically, “Is the patient schizophrenic, or is the family schizophrenic?”23

  That therapist was supposedly Dr. Murray Bowen. But Henrietta, Stephen, and Ellen probably never existed. Among Flora’s papers at John Jay College is correspondence with Bowen about his theories of family therapy, and some letters talking about the Cosmopolitan story. But none mention any family in therapy. Nor is there an iota of discussion about how a particular mother, father, and daughter might have felt about appearing in a magazine, or what they thought of the work in progress.24

  The Henrietta-Stephen-Ellen trio appears to have been invented by Bowen. They were characters in what psychiatrists call a “clinical tale”—a fiction pieced together from dribs and drabs of various bona fide cases. Ever since Freud’s day, clinical tales have been a popular way for psychiatrists to tell each other stories about patients and treatment. The result is often metaphorically true, yet factually as false as a fable by Aesop.

  But Flora was a journalist, not a psychiatrist. She was supposed to interview people in order to tell their stories—or at least make it clear that she was getting her information indirectly. She failed to warn her readers that she had spoken only with Dr. Bowen and could not verify that Helen and her parents existed. Meanwhile, Mel Herman, her liaison to the psychiatrists, assured clinicians that if they worked with Flora they wouldn’t have to tell her about actual people.25

  The pop psychology articles she wrote with Herman’s help were big hits with the editors at Cosmopolitan, and Herman decided to direct Flora to another psychiatrist, one who was not a man but a woman. Her name was Dr. Cornelia Wilbur.26

  Before Flora called Connie for details, it’s possible she put out feelers among her psychiatrist contacts in Manhattan to learn who this woman doctor was. She might have heard that Dr. Wilbur enjoyed a tad of celebrity among her colleagues. Everyone knew that one of her patients was the actor Roddy McDowall.27 On television he was a regular on the sci-fi thriller The Twilight Zone, and in 1960 he starred in the Broadway musical Camelot, where he belted out pieces like “The Seven Deadly Virtues.” “I find humility means to be hurt,” McDowall sang lustily onstage. “It’s not the earth the meek inherit—it’s the dirt!” Connie adored that line. McDowall adored her. He enjoyed telling friends Dr. Wilbur was his psychoanalyst. She told people, too.

  Flora was forty-four years old when she met Connie, with a voice like a loudspeaker, dark painted lips, and a body beyond zaftig—her waist was disappearing and she’d taken to adorning her boxy shape with big capes. Connie, meanwhile, was fifty-four, tall, still regally built, and had begun dying her graying hair as red as Lucille Ball’s. But she sounded nothing like the I Love Lucy star. Connie’s voice was soft, weighty, and flinty all at once—a voice for the couch but also for radio and TV.

  When the two first talked, Connie said nothing about Shirley. Instead, she told Flora about a new book she’d co-authored with several other therapists. Its title was Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study,28 and it was nine years in the making by the time it was published in 1962. In over three hundred pages it expounded the authors’ theory that male homosexuality was an illness generated during childhood, in the home. The data showed that the cause was boys’ parents—usually their mothers.

  The most dramatic finding was that men could be “cured” of their homosexuality. After therapy with psychoanalysts like Connie, the book boasted, 27 percent of patients became “exclusively heterosexual.”29 This was an amazingly large “cure” rate, and Connie aimed to gain some laurels.

  Of course, Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study was grotesquely unscientific—“a joke,” as a former president of the American Psychiatric Association would call it years later. Though they were in Manhattan and could easily have found men who were happy as homosexuals, the investigators studied only people who were seeing psychiatrists. Of the 106 gay research subjects, twenty-eight were schizophrenic, thirty-one were diagnossed as neurotic, and forty-two were said to have character disorders. Using this very limited sample, Connie and the other researchers had concluded that all gay men were emotionally disturbed. To make things worse, some could be identified in the book. One was Roddy McDowall. From a series of details in the text, it was clear he was “Case 129.”

  Case 129, according to Homosexuality, had a father who did maritime work and a mentally ill mother who pushed her young son into voice lessons and show business. As the son got older, he told his mother he was gay, and in response she brought men to the house and invited them to bed down with her boy. Eventually he moved far away, found success in show business, and fell in love with a promiscuous older man who was a raging alcoholic. When this man called off the homosexual affair, Case 129 “collapsed,” emotionally. He consulted a woman psychiatrist. 30

  The public knew that Roddy McDowall’s father had worked on ships. They know his mother had pushed him into voice lessons and Hollywood, and that he’d later moved to New York and found success in show business. What McDowall never talked about openly was that he was gay and that after arriving in New York he’d begun an affair with the charismatic, bisexual actor Montogmery Clift, who was eight years his senior and a raging alcoholic. When Clift called off the affair, McDowall tried to kill himself. These facts did not become widely known until after McDowall died in 1998.

  But to anyone paying attention in 1962, when Homosexuality hit the stands, it was easy to see that McDowall had been outed as gay by Connie and her coauthors.

  Flora may not have noticed
. Regardless, she unquestioningly accepted the book’s claims about curing homosexuality, and she pitched a story to some magazines. Cosmopolitan assigned an “as-told-to” piece about a mother with a young homosexual son who was eager to help him go straight. Flora asked Connie for a clinical tale from her practice.

  The best Connie could offer was Case 129, and Flora was flummoxed. The hero of that story was an adult; she needed an adolescent. In addition, she wanted a mother who was flawed but not a moral and psychological basket case. Case 129 was no good.

  So flora made up her own clinical tale. First she turned Case 129 back into a teenager. Then she christened him Don. Next she had Don sobbingly confess one night to his mother, “Eve,” that he had a boyfriend. Don didn’t want to be gay. “Mother, I’m afraid,” he implored. “Help me.”31

  The make-believe Eve obligingly sent Don to see Dr. Wilbur, then Eve found her own therapist to help with her problem. The psychiatrist told her Don was afraid of girls because she smothered him. She agreed that she’d been a bad mother because she refused Don a bicycle when he was young, and she’d taken him with her to the beauty salon. She confessed they’d shared a bed when they traveled for his performances.

  According to Flora, Dr. Wilbur said Don might recover from homosexuality. “He is very young,” she reassured Eve. “He wants to change.” Don did improve. He started visiting the home of a girl named Ellen. One night they listened to symphonies by Wagner, and Don later told his parents that “Ellen was coming closer and closer. I drifted as one floats on a wave.”32

  He was still gay, but Eve swooned with hope.

  A Cosmopolitan staff editor was disgusted by the obvious artifice and penciled derisive comments on Flora’s draft: “Oh come on!” “Ugh!” “I still don’t understand why he was homosexual. I can’t believe boys become fairies just because they have possessive mothers.”33 Despite the silliness of the piece, Cosmopolitan scheduled it for a special, upcoming “Women and Immorality” issue. Among other articles were “Why VD Is on the Increase,” “The Life of a Kept Woman,” and “Case History of a Demoralized Town,” about prostitution in Texas.

  One afternoon just before press time, Flora was summoned to Cosmopolitan’s offices on Fifty-seventh Street. When she got there she was informed that her piece was not acceptable. Eve, the homosexual boy’s mother, was overly intelligent, and her son, Don, seemed too sophisticated. The editors and printers ordered Flora to do an immediate rewrite. She sat down and worked as fast as she could.34

  The “Women and Immorality” issue was on the newsstands by January 1963, featuring “I Was Raising a Homosexual Child, as told to Flora Rheta Schrieber.”35 The piece had undergone radical surgery. As a result of Flora’s rewrite, Don’s awful secret was revealed not while he sobbed to his mother one night, but after police arrested him in Central Park for hugging another male. As in the earlier version, Don revealed he had a boyfriend, and he did therapy with Dr. Wilbur. Eve, however, now realized she’d dominated Don because she got no attention from her husband, Arthur. At the end of the piece, Don and his boyfriend broke up and Don turned definitively straight.

  “I think it’s going to be all right now,” he assured his mother.

  “Bunch of guys’re going to the movies tonight,” his heterosexual brother said. “Wanna go?”

  “Sure,” said Don. “I might bring a date. Being with girls is a lot more comfortable than the other thing. I never really wanted to be that way.”

  Finis, except for two photos accompanying the article. Each showed the same limp-wristed youth in a man’s shirt and jacket, with slicked-back hair, gleaming lips, and deep, sulking eyes. Each was the same model, a young woman in drag.

  Connie was delighted with the article. Years later she would tell people that before she worked with Flora, she’d had difficulty with reporters “leaving things out or changing the meaning.” But Flora “had gotten things right” Connie said.36 In Cosmopolitan she’d “written everything absolutely correct.” Connie was so pleased that she contacted Flora about working together again. The new project she proposed was a huge one, a book. It would be about an astounding patient Connie had been treating for years, a woman with sixteen multiple personalities. If Flora wanted to, she could speak with her.37

  A few weeks later, the three women met for dinner in an Upper East Side restaurant that Shirley thought was “swanky.” She couldn’t stop worrying as she ate her meal. Was she placing her elbows in the right place at the table? Holding her fork correctly? Using the proper spoon? This was Manhattan, where everyone had fun and made deals in nice restaurants. But Shirley hadn’t been in one in years. It had been so long that she feared she’d forgotten her manners.38

  She needn’t have worried. Flora was struck by Shirley’s shyness, fragility, and extensive knowledge of poetry. She was a dead ringer for Emily Dickinson, Flora told herself, charmed.39

  She would consider writing a book, Flora said. But even if she opted to do so, she would not be able to start until a cure was effected—until Shirley’s sixteen alters were all “integrated” back into one. Flora needed to wait because a book about a woman with multiple personality disorder would never sell unless it had a happy ending. Connie guaranteed a happy ending sometime in the future. Good, Flora replied, because currently she was very busy. On top of all her freelance magazine writing, she was about to start a new teaching job at a city college, and she needed time to settle in. She couldn’t begin a book now. She would be ready in 1965.

  Shirley would also be ready in 1965, Connie predicted.

  Shirley went back to her apartment to wait.

  There was nothing else for her to do. She had started graduate school with thousands of dollars in savings. Now her money was depleted and she was too ill to work except occasionally, when she picked up pin money by stitching doll clothes in a sweatshop run by a toy company. Her main “job,” however, was the fifteen to seventeen hours she spent being psychoanalyzed each week, and the fourteen to sixteen she slept each day as a result of the treatment. Her health seesawed. Some days her sinus trouble disappeared and she felt relaxed. Her appetite got so good that her weight waxed—from barely ninety pounds to a hundred and eight, she wrote her father and stepmother, complaining cheerfully that her face was getting round.40 Other times she had such severe anxiety attacks that she had to pop pills and go to bed. “I have a way to go with Dr. Wilbur,” she wrote to her father and stepmother in early 1962.41 She was entering her eighth year of analysis with no end in sight.

  She had a baby doll in the new apartment to keep her company, a little girl with red hair whom Connie had encouraged her to buy. Brenda, Shirley named the doll, and she busied herself with sewing Brenda’s clothes—fancy dresses, cozy pajamas, and coveralls to wear in Central Park. She took Brenda there and put her on a bench to watch “the other children” play. At home, she held her in her lap to enjoy the kiddie shows on television. She sat Brenda at the kitchen table and spoon fed her while eating her own breakfast. She put the doll near her while she painted with oils and water colors, explaining her technique as she went along. At night she fluffed the bed covers and read to Brenda from books of her favorite children’s stories. One followed the life of “Lonely Lottie,” an only child who passed her time in solitary contemplation of nature. But another hero was happy and going places: “The Little Engine That Could” was his name. Shirley read that story over and over, and sometimes, after Brenda’s eyes were closed, she shut the book and penned greeting cards to Dr. Wilbur.42

  “Shirley, Inc.,” she signed the cards, poking gentle fun at her multiple personalities, yet hoping against hope for their literary and marketing success.

  CHAPTER 11

  CONVALESCENCE

  BY 1962 SHIRLEY HAD RUN up over $30,000 in psychoanalysis bills.1 If she’d been working as a teacher at the time, that amount would have equaled six years of salary. Yet Connie expected no payment until the book about Shirley and her multiple personalities came out—the book Shirley had a
greed to collaborate on seven years earlier in exchange for the therapy.

  Nearly four decades after this period in the two women’s relationship, in the early 1990s, the American Psychiatric Association would publish a long list of ethics rules. Among them: psychiatrists should never “make exceptions” for a patient by altering treatment costs, creating unusual treatment schedules, or engaging in extensive gift exchange. Nor should they engage in business deals. Nowadays, such misbehavior can trigger disciplinary hearings and the yanking of medical licenses.2

  Ethics rules were not so clearly codified for psychiatrists when Connie was treating Shirley. Even so, Connie most likely would have been disciplined if her colleagues had known she was giving a patient free treatment, clothes, a house pet, rent money, and even furnishings from the apartment where the patient’s analysis was taking place. The psychiatry community would also have been shocked to know that part of Connie’s treatment of Shirley involved having the patient work for her.

  The job involved secretarial duties, dog walking, and care for a family member. To do this work Shirley went into Connie’s home at all hours, unannounced—she even had her own key. “Spent Sunday at Dr. W’s office helping her sort out and file papers and typing letters from the Dictaphone,” she proudly wrote home in 1962.3 In another letter she described working “mornings from about 9 to 2 in Doctor’s office … I was supposed to make new files for the new patients and put her notes and case histories in them.” While doing the job, she read the records of psychiatric patients such as Roddy McDowall.4

  Connie even employed Shirley as a companion for her husband’s elderly mother. “I was of course very, very busy,” Connie would recall years later about a day when she had no time to go with her mother-in-law to a flower show. She asked Shirley to take Mrs. Brown. “She said she would love to,” Connie continued. “And Mrs. Brown found her absolutely enchanting. Later she said to me, ‘You don’t mean to tell me that that girl needs a psychiatrist!’”5