Sybil Exposed

by Nathan, Debbie

  Connie finally had her breakthrough.

  Shirley’s $90-a-month home was in Manhattan’s Yorkville section, a few minutes’ walk from luxurious Park Avenue and Connie’s office. The apartment was a garret. A fourth-floor walkup, it had only one room, though it was slightly indented in the middle to suggest separate rooms. The whole thing was two hundred and fifty square feet, about the size of a foyer in Connie’s apartment. A bed and bookcase took up half the room; a kitchenette and table filled the rest.42

  Shirley found solace in letter writing. She spent hours with stationery, greeting cards, and postage stamps, penning missives not just to Florence, her stepmother, but also to her art teacher from childhood and many former classmates from college in Minnesota—Alice in Albert Lea, Neva in Vernon Center, and Merlaine in Cokato were just a few. The letters talked at length about the weather but were cryptic when it came to exactly what Shirley was doing with her life. Some mentioned her “dear friend,” a doctor she’d met back in Omaha and run into years later in New York. Others alluded to her dreams of being a child psychiatrist.43 Many letters said she was sick but left the details vague. She was close-mouthed with Florence, as well, though the women mailed each other one or two letters a week.

  She wrote every day but Sabbath, when writing was forbidden to Adventists. Her boredom and loneliness on Saturdays were unbearable, and in May 1963, after Connie flew to the Far East to lecture Filipino psychiatry students about how to cure homosexuality, Shirley called Dr. Spiegel and threatened to commit suicide. Spiegel called Connie’s mother-in-law, and she took Shirley to Park Avenue to live there for several days until Connie came back. Shirley passed the time by kneeling and praying: “Let not thy heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”44

  When Connie returned she decided it was time that Shirley start thinking seriously about getting well, and she arranged another restaurant date with Flora. Not long after, she summoned Flora to her office to show her Shirley’s panoply of personalities. As Flora looked on, the doctor chanted to the patient to relax, relax, relax. Shirley’s face loosened, her eyes fluttered, and Peggy Ann came forth, then Peggy Lou, Vicky, Sam, Mike, Helen, Ruthie, Shirley Ann, Mary, Clara, Nancy, Lou Ann, Marcia, Vanessa, and Marjorie. Each emerged for a few seconds before being replaced by someone else, while Flora stared at their shape-shifting postures and listened to a theater of voices, astounded.45

  She felt as though she’d fallen into Shakespeare’s play The Tempest—the scene where Miranda declaims, “O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world / That has such people in’t!”

  Then and there, she vowed to write the book.

  CHAPTER 12

  CURE

  THE SUN HAD JUST COME up one Sunday in November 1964 when Robert Moulton, of southeast Minneapolis, heard a knock at his front door. He opened it to a redheaded woman with steely eyes and a younger, shy brunette. Moulton recognized neither, but the younger one introduced herself as Shirley Mason, from Dodge Center. Astounded and delighted, Moulton waved her and her companion inside. Almost thirty-five years had passed since he had sat in the Mason family’s home crafting Elizabethan stages from scraps, and sewing costumes for the members of Shirley’s doll collection who would play Puck, Romeo, and Hamlet.

  Everyone called him Bobby back then, but he had long since abandoned his childhood nickname. He had gone on to become a professional dancer, actor, play director, and choreographer, and now he was a professor of theater at the University of Minnesota. To people who didn’t know him well he was Dr. Moulton.

  To Shirley he was just Bobby, and the two old friends settled over breakfast to gossip and reminisce. They remembered Bobby’s visits to Shirley’s Seventh-Day Adventist church, her reciprocal attendance at his Methodist congregation, and the way the two children, inspired by their friendship, each kept two Sabbaths: Saturday and Sunday.1

  Bobby glanced curiously at the woman with the bright red hair, asking with his eyes who she was. “Dr. Wilbur,” he was told, Shirley’s psychiatrist. Bobby was amazed; he had always considered Shirley to be a typical Dodge Center girl and had never imagined she had emotional problems. No one in the room that Sunday morning mentioned multiple personality disorder, and Bobby tried to make light of the fact that his old friend was in therapy. After all, he chuckled, Shirley’s mother always had been strange. Connie’s ears perked up; she waited for more. But Bobby changed the subject, the reunion wound down, everyone said goodbye, and Connie and Shirley got back in their rented car. The morning had been delightful for Shirley, but it had not taught Connie anything.

  The women were on a weekend jaunt—they’d flown to Minneapolis the day before and were doing a quick trip through Shirley’s childhood haunts before returning home. In a café in Dodge Center they ran into Hattie Halmbrecht, Shirley’s eighth grade teacher from twenty-nine years ago. Hattie was delighted to see Shirley all grown up. But who was the woman with her? A doctor friend, Shirley said. Connie again listened intently as the elderly teacher reprised old times with her student. Not a word was mentioned about a schizophrenic mother.

  Nor was anything revealed in the modest home of Dessie Blood Eng-bard, the woman who had worked as the Masons’ maid and lived in their household when Shirley was a child. Dessie, a plump, uneducated woman, fussed over her prodigal guest, hugging her, calling her “daughter,” and pointing to drawings by Shirley that hung on the walls. Clearly, Connie could see, Dessie adored Shirley and had been in a position to see and hear Mattie mistreating her when she was young. Yet she seemed to have witnessed nothing remarkable. For Shirley’s mother Dessie had only sterling words.2

  Connie had thought about talking with Dr. Otoniel Flores, the cigar-smoking family physician who’d cared for Shirley when she lived in Dodge Center. Under Pentothal and hypnosis, Shirley had recalled Dr. Flores treating the fractured larynx, bruised ribs, and other injuries she said Mattie inflicted on her in the 1920s and 1930s. Dr. Flores could corroborate Shirley’s memories of abuse and open her medical records.

  And there was Shirley’s home, ground zero for Mattie’s tortures, including her attempts to suffocate her daughter in the corn and wheat crib. The property was close by, just a few feet from Main Street. But Shirley refused to go near the house. Her memories were too awful, she said. Besides, she wanted to visit a public park she’d frequented during summers when she was a child. Connie drove her there, and by the time they finished looking around, night was falling and it was time to get to the airport for their return flight. The women left Dodge Center without looking for Dr. Flores or viewing Shirley’s old house.

  Back in New York City a few days later they mentioned their Minnesota visit to Flora but gave few details.3 That was fine with Flora: she was much too busy to pay attention. The popular magazine Science Digest had started a psychiatry section and appointed her co-editor.

  But she sometimes saw more than she wanted to of Shirley, who was desperate as ever for mothering. She was as anxious as always about money, too, because shortly after meeting Flora, Connie had decided to quit her director’s job at Falkirk and buy her own mental hospital.4 Left in the lurch without a ride from New York City, Shirley soon resigned from her art therapy position. She was blithe about leaving at first; Connie had her eye on a private sanitarium upstate on the Hudson River, and she promised that as soon as the sale was clinched she would hire Shirley as a therapist and pay her well.5

  But the hospital deal fell through, and by fall Shirley was frantic. She made endless rounds of employment agencies, hunting for work teaching English or art to normal children. She proved unemployable despite her earlier years of experience. Due to modifications in New York’s teacher education requirements, she was a few college credits short of a certificate.6 The change had been announced long ago, but during her time on the couch she had completely lost touch with the world. Her time in psychoanalysis now comprised more than a quarter of the years she had been alive.

  It had finally b
ecome obvious to Connie that Shirley would never make it into medical school, and she might never get well. Connie started wondering what to do with this perpetual patient, who might be mentally ill—and materially dependent on Connie—for the rest of both of their lives. Money from a book by Flora was Shirley’s only hope for financial independence. But as Flora had earlier demanded, the book needed a happy ending.

  Connie had already predicted Shirley would be cured by 1965, yet here it was, already the end of 1964. She tried to get the wheels turning by telling Shirley to get a job—any job. Shirley obeyed, first sewing doll clothes again, then working as a desk clerk at a hotel.

  The work filled her weekdays, but the loneliness of her free time still tormented her. She telephoned Connie and Flora in the early morning hours of Saturday and Sunday, and in the too-late hours as well. Flora accepted these intrusions with major help from her mother. Esther Schreiber, now seventy-eight, had been a widow for six years, and her life’s work had always been to attend to Flora’s every need so her daughter could concentrate one hundred percent on her career. Now that work included entertaining the subject of her daughter’s potential book. It was Esther who stayed on the phone when Shirley made her Sabbath phone calls. Esther chatted patiently for hours and invited Shirley for dinner. She answered the door when Shirley dropped by unannounced.7

  Connie, meanwhile, spent much of her free time looking for a way to leave New York, which in 1964 seemed anarchic and threatening. In Queens early that year, a middle-aged woman, Kitty Genovese, had been stabbed to death by a stranger outside her apartment building, and the newspapers reported that thirty-eight neighbors witnessed the homicide in progress but did nothing to stop it. Months after that, just blocks from Park Avenue and close to Shirley’s apartment, a disturbance broke out after a policeman confronted a fifteen-year-old black student engaged in horseplay with friends and fatally shot the boy. Harlem and other black neighborhoods erupted in riots and ominous graffiti such as “Burn Baby, Burn!”

  The last straw came when Connie hired a teenager to care for the dogs after Shirley became unable to do so because of her new jobs. Out on a walk one day, the girl was mugged at knifepoint for the sum of a dollar and thirty cents.8 It was too much for Connie. Again she looked around for a mental hospital, if not to buy then at least to work in. This time she found one a world away from New York, in rural West Virginia.

  Weston State Hospital was not for sale in 1965, but it desperately needed a new superintendent. Opened during the Civil War, it boasted nineteenth-century asylum architecture in the grand style. Inside its lovely buildings, though, Weston was a hellhole. It housed over two thousand residents, more than twice the recommended capacity. This enormous population was served by only two psychiatrists. Patients seldom got treatment. Mentally ill men spent their waking hours, as a journalist reported, “milling in a narrow hallway.” In another hallway women moaned and huddled. At night in the crowded wards, the beds were jammed so close that they looked like one gigantic mattress.9

  Still, Connie was frantic to move. If she took the job it would start in October 1965. Her husband, Keith, would remain in New York as a lawyer for Lloyds of London, and visit on occasional weekends.

  But if she went to West Virginia, what would Shirley do? Over the years she had made some progress managing her sixteen multiple personalities and their disordered behavior. Coming out of hypnosis sessions with Connie now, she often remembered what Peggy and the others had said during the trance. Before, she had been completely amnesiac, so remembering seemed an improvement. And her body did not ache so much as before. Still, she continued to split into Peggy, Mary, and the others when she was with Connie. And she often felt paralyzed with anxiety. How, Connie wondered, could she possibly leave this patient on her own?

  For a year Shirley had been waiting for Connie to set her up with a full-time job at a mental hospital. Meanwhile she’d taken menial jobs, including the desk clerk position at the St. Regis, a five-star hotel on Fifth Avenue. There, a Brazilian accountant named Mario started flirting with her. Soon they were dating, something she hadn’t done for ten years. Mario was on temporary assignment at the hotel. He was not an Adventist, but he was a gentleman, never demanding sex from Shirley.10

  The two got along well and Mario knew nothing about Shirley’s diagnosis of multiple personality. But why should he? She’d never split into different identities in front of anyone unless she had first talked about the illness, with Flora, for instance. To Mario, Shirley seemed perfectly normal. After several dates he announced he would soon be moving to California for his work, and he wanted her to go as his wife. He presented Shirley with a diamond and ruby engagement ring.

  Shirley was thrown into a quandary. She felt love for Mario, and she had accepted that she would never go to medical school. Still, she wanted to do a book with Connie about her illness. Besides, she wanted to work with mentally ill children, and if she stayed put she was sure that with Dr. Wilbur’s help she could land a job at a hospital. That would not happen if she went to the West Coast with Mario.

  Connie was away when he proposed. Shirley did not wait for Connie’s return to make her decision. She broke up with Mario, and from that time on, she would never have another boyfriend. For years afterward she would miss Mario and deeply regret her decision not to marry him.11

  With Mario gone, no choices remained. After 1964 ended, more months passed, and Connie began searching for a way to take Shirley to West Virginia with her. She found a means by telling the head of West Virginia’s mental health department that, as a condition of her employment, a second person would also have to be hired—Shirley—to do art therapy with children.

  The health department accepted the package deal but could not place Shirley at Weston. Instead, she was assigned to another facility: Lakin State, just across the border from Ohio. Formerly the West Virginia Hospital for the Colored Insane, Lakin was an egregiously substandard institution. The previous year, a grand jury had decried the hospital’s “filth,” “stench,” “sex problems”—probably referring to rapes—and general neglect of patients.

  But Lakin had its good side. A unit for juveniles had recently been opened, and the hospital had a long tradition of providing arts and crafts activities to patients. Shirley was given a job working with children. She was to begin in late October, the same time Connie moved to Weston.12

  It was now early summer, three months before the women were scheduled to leave New York, and Connie knew things had to change between Shirley and herself. After all, she would not just be running a very large and troubled hospital; she would also be teaching psychiatry part time at a nearby university. Lakin and Weston were a three-hour drive from each other through the mountains. Weekend visits would only occasionally be possible.

  She told Shirley she would simply have to get well. For over a decade, being a mental patient had been the reason Connie paid attention to her. Now, the only way to get more of that attention was to move to West Virginia and work full time at a state mental hospital. But that would be possible only if she “integrated” her multiple personalities—and soon.

  So she did. In addition to the tranquilizers she was taking, Shirley upped her ingestion of antidepressants, past the recommended dose. This caused a medical crisis, and on a Wednesday in early July, Flora got a call from Shirley begging her to come to her apartment immediately. She was lying on the floor when Flora arrived, weak, trembling, and bruised. She gave a strange explanation. She’d been in her tiny living room, she said, when suddenly she felt a spasm, jumped several inches off the floor, slipped on a rug, and pitched ten feet forward.13 As she was describing this seizure to Flora, Shirley’s face suddenly went blank and her voice became unrecognizable. “I’m the girl Shirley would like to be,” she intoned. “My hair is blonde and my heart is light.” Then, as suddenly as the voice emerged, it disappeared. Shirley got up off the floor and Flora hurried to call Connie and tell her about this new identity, whom Flora christened “The
Blonde.” But The Blonde made no more appearances.14 Shirley never again dissociated into an alter personality.

  Four weeks later, Connie wrote a final notation in Shirley’s file: “All personalities one.” The date was September 2, 1965, almost eleven years after their first psychotherapy session on Park Avenue. Having been declared cured, Shirley packed her things. She gave up her apartment at the end of the month and spent several days at Flora’s, waiting for the Lakin job to start. Then she left New York.

  Flora had her happy ending, exactly when she wanted it. Now she could do the book—and not just a potboiler, but a work of moral and literary heft. Writing about multiple personality disorder would free her from the surface, she told herself. It would take her to the deeps, to that place in her writing where she’d always yearned to go. She felt terrific about the whole thing.

  It’s harder to know Connie’s reaction. A photograph from the period shows her face strangely smooth, waxy, and devoid of emotion even though she is smiling. She was fifty-seven years old the autumn Shirley was cured, and she would later confide to a relative that she availed herself of plastic surgery to refresh her appearance.15 It’s not clear when Connie went under the knife, but perhaps she felt she needed a pick-me-up before departing for Appalachia with Shirley in tow.

  CHAPTER 13

  IMPATIENCE

  SHIRLEY AND CONNIE WERE STILL in town when Flora started writing her proposal, christening the book Who Is Sylvia? and strategizing about finding a publisher. As she talked about “Sylvia’s” case to friends, she found that many were skeptical about whether multiple personality disorder really existed, and suspicious that the patient was faking it. Others had read The Three Faces of Eve or seen the movie almost a decade earlier. They weren’t interested in sequels.