Sybil Exposed

by Nathan, Debbie

  And after learning she had multiple personalities, Flora added, Sylvia exploded, toggling crazily from alter to alter: She really blew … one moment she was a ranting child, walking on the furniture, leaving her fingerprints on the ceiling. The next moment she was a self-possessed and knowing woman … then … quaking … lying inert on the bed.42

  Then, to assure readers that this outrageous behavior was caused by real abuse, perpetrated by an actual maniac, Flora wrote a scene in which Connie got Walter Mason to confess that his wife was, in fact, psychotic. Nothing of the sort had ever happened. But the passage was narrated in the third person as an interrogation, with Connie relentlessly grilling Walter, whom Flora called Willard Dorsett:

  Had he been aware that Hattie’s behavior was peculiar?

  He moved jerkily in his chair and became defensive … “At times she was difficult … nervous … she had some spells … Hattie was odd.”

  “It was more than odd, Mr. Dorsett …” Was he aware that as a child Sybil sustained an unusual number of injuries, the doctor wanted to know …

  “Why yes,” he replied, screwing up his thin lips …

  Did he remember the burns on his daughter’s hands, her black eyes?

  “Yes,” he replied slowly …

  The wheat crib over his carpenter’s shop? …

  “Oh, merciful Father, not Hattie!” … Then he told Dr. Wilbur about his having taken Hattie to a psychiatrist at the Mayo Clinic … The doctor there had diagnosed Hattie as a schizophrenic.43

  Shirley probably knew her mother had never been diagnosed as a schizophrenic. And she certainly must have remembered that her home had no grain crib. Yet she rarely objected to Flora’s falsifications. Only two of them seemed to bother her. One involved an erotic scene with Mario, the Brazilian man she had dated in the 1960s. For the book Flora changed his name to Ramon.

  Ramon caressed her. Her head moved against his chest. He embraced her tightly. “When I have an erection,” he told her, “I measure. It’s seven inches. Good?” … He moved back toward her and began gingerly to unzip her dress.44

  When Shirley read this passage in Flora’s draft chapters, she swore she’d never acted sexually with Mario, and she asked to have the material deleted. She also objected strenuously to paragraphs about the “primal scene”—her parents having sex in front of her—though she had once described something similar to Connie while she was high on Pentothal. “Nothing like that went on!” she insisted now. “Oh, no, no, no, no, no!” She recorded herself demanding the passage be removed and sent the tape to Connie and Flora.45

  For her part, Connie was thrilled by the work Flora mailed her, and she provided sneak previews to several women who did office work at the University of Kentucky medical school. “Gave [the manuscript] to my secretary who gave it to Linda (other secretary) to read then returned it—came to borrow it back to give to Judy … (another secretary), who wanted to read it after Marcia told her about it—and Judy gave it to Dotty who got excited about it … and Flora, there are lots of secretaries! They loved it.” 46

  So did the book’s new publisher. Cowles, the company that had bought Sylvia, had folded in 1971 and been bought by Regnery, a Chicago-based company. Regnery for years had been known as a publisher of weighty, politically right-wing books: its biggest seller was William Buckley’s 1951 denunciation of liberalism in universities, God and Man at Yale. But in the late 1960s, owner Henry Regnery handed executive control to Harvey Plotnick, his young son-in-law, who was much less interested in politics than in making money, as he would later tell the Chicago Tribune. When Plotnick first looked at the Sylvia contract he’d just inherited, he’d decided to scrap the book. But he changed his mind after Flora’s agent sent Regnery some chapters and Plotnick’s wife started reading them. She couldn’t put them down, and in the middle of the night she woke her husband up and told him he had to publish the book. After reading it himself, Plotnick assigned an editor to Who Is Sylvia? and told Flora to finish the manuscript.47

  By late 1972 she was writing nonstop. For several weeks she shuttered herself in her apartment, where she commenced work early in the morning, broke only for meals, and picked up again until midnight. She wrote by hand, so intensely that she could barely bend her fingers. Finally she completed her last chapters, mystical accounts of the sixteen alter personalities, under hypnosis, gradually progressing in age to adulthood.

  “In ten minutes I’m going to say it is five minutes of seven,” Dr. Wilbur commented in one age progression scene to Ruthie, the baby personality. “Between now and that time, you are going to grow up one whole year … and later all the others are going to grow up too … in ten minutes you will be six … now you are six years old” … “Will I have to go to church?” Peggy Ann wanted to know. “No, you won’t have to go to church,” the doctor replied reassuringly… . “Would you still be my friend?” Mary asked apprehensively. “You bet your life,” the doctor replied emphatically… . “I won’t leave you.”48

  One by one thereafter, Mary and the others relinquished their identities and melded into Syvia’s consciousness. In a neat stylistic counterpoint to her own brunette looks, the last alter to yield was “The Blonde.” “Do you know what it means to have a whole day ahead of you, a day you can call your own?” Flora had Sylvia asking excitedly. “It’s still a marvel to me how much a well person can accomplish; I’m so lucky.”49

  Putting the finishing touches on the manuscript, Flora decided to keep the juicy material about Mario, as well as the section about Sylvia’s parents having sex in front of her. “I have already written the primal scene,” she wrote Connie. “To revise its essential meaning would distort the truth.”50

  At Regnery, Harvey Plotnick had some ideas of his own about how the book should read. He demanded that the heroine’s name be revised.51 Sylvia sounded improper to him, possibly because most women in the United States named Sylvia were Jewish. Flora objected vehemently, but Connie and Shirley christened the book Sybil because it sounded more mythic yet more American, and more saleable.

  Regnery had one more request: that Connie agree to have her real name appear in Sybil52 in order to increase sales by gracing the book with realism. Connie was pleased; she had never been happy with the idea of concealing her identity. She agreed to reveal it, and by now Sybil was so close to fruition that everyone involved was feverish, unable to think about the risk that using Dr. Cornelia Wilbur’s name would pose to her patient’s anonymity.53

  With the final edits done, Plotnick decided to put serious resources into promoting the book. He ordered a first printing of 40,000 copies—the largest Regnery had ever done. He also arranged for an advertising and promotion budget of $60,000. Today that would be well over a quarter of a million dollars. Plotnick even managed to interest the big publishing company Warner Books in Sybil. Surmising that it would be a hit, Warner paid $300,000 to publish the paperback edition a year after Regnery’s hardcover came out. Warner’s plans were lavish—they included promoting Flora and Connie for appearances on television shows such as To Tell the Truth.54

  By early spring Sybil was typeset and bound, with a shiny cover featuring an image of a young woman’s face in jigsaw-puzzle pieces. The book was scheduled for publication in late May. Flora activated prior connections with the New York Times syndication department, which sold work for reprinting in other newspapers.55

  The Times decided to syndicate not just excerpts of Sybil, but the whole book, abridged, before it was published. Twenty-eight daily installments were scheduled to begin in late April, in cities such as Miami, San Antonio, and Springfield, Massachusetts. For a month, newspaper readers would be able to settle in with Vicky, Peggy, Mary, Mike, and Sam—and with scenes of Sybil’s demented mother defecating on lawns, conducting lesbian orgies, and raping her daughter with kitchen utensils. This kind of sex and perversion had never before been published on the “Women’s” pages.

  Flora, Connie, and Shirley waited excitedly for public reaction. They
hoped that the newspaper series would pave the way for positive reviews as soon as the book came out. They also hoped to garner interest from major television programs, and even from Hollywood. After almost twenty years of suffering and therapy and toil, they hoped that the fame they had dreamed about was on its way.

  It was. And when fame struck, none of them would be immune to its lure—or its complications.

  CHAPTER 15

  THE BOOK

  SYBIL WENT ON SALE ON May 22, 1973, and soon became one of the year’s two top nonfiction books that weren’t how-to guides or cookbooks—its sole competition was Alistair Cooke’s America. Within a decade it would sell almost seven million copies in the United States and overseas, and be adapted as a television drama that would go on to be regarded as a classic. All this success created an intense buzz around the book’s creators. Shirley strenuously avoided the limelight, but her collaborators embraced it, scheduling countless media appearances. Thanks to early interest created by the book’s syndication to newspapers, Flora and Connie began making these appearances in mid-May, days prior to Sybil’s publication. Their debut was on the Dick Cavett Show.1

  Cavett led off with jokes about the Watergate scandal, which had just gone into televised Senate hearings. He joshed with comedians Bob and Ray, and sang “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans” with Pearl Bailey. Then his voice grew solemn. His next two guests, he announced, would be talking about “one of the most incredible case histories in psychiatric history.”

  Flora was fifty-seven years old. Connie was sixty-four. Each walked onto the set in satin pumps and a full-length, low-cut evening gown. Flora’s coiffure was sprayed to impossibly high bouffant, and the diaphanous sleeves of her snow-white gown trailed boas of ermine. The getup was her idea of glamour, but more than anything her appearance revealed the toll that writing Sybil had exacted on her health. She had developed deep bags under her eyes in the last three years, and her body had ballooned to at least two hundred pounds of avoirdupois—each one accentuated by her scoop-necked bodice and its feathery fluff.

  Cavett grimly summarized the book. When the woman known as Sybil was young, her psychotic mother assaulted her with enemas and “penetrated her hymen with a button hook.” Flora chimed in, adding that this violence wrought such a burden of anger—or “buhhhhhden of annnguh,” as she put it in her “voice beautiful”—that Sybil had split into multiple personalities.

  Cavett noted how bizarre the concept of multiple personality was and asked if anyone had suggested the story was a hoax. Most publishers had turned up their noses at the book, Flora said. “But true it is!” she insisted.

  Connie told the story of how she had first noticed her patient’s illness. It happened, she said, when Sybil charged into the window in New York City, cut her hand on the glass, and announced that she was Peggy.

  Flora never smiled on the Cavett show, and neither did Connie. There was friction between the women, though they were trying to conceal it before the public. Flora was angry that she had to go on television with Connie. She wanted the stage to herself. But Flora’s agent had advised her that TV audiences would want to see Dr. Cornelia Wilbur because her psychiatry credentials lent Sybil credibility. Still, the agent advised, there were ways to deal with Connie. “[S]he will try to hog the camera,” the agent wrote. “But you’ve simply got to get in there and fight and interrupt her.”2 Flora’s frown on Cavett reflected how hard she was working to cut Connie off—butting in with abstruse medical terminology, for instance, and launching into longwinded explanations of the nature of hysteria. Connie’s frown evidenced her distress at Flora’s behavior.

  The critics weighed in several weeks later, and many panned Sybil. A New York Times reviewer wrote that the book made him “uncomfortable from beginning to end,” giving him feelings of “nagging embarrassment and ultimately of anger.” Author Flora Schreiber was “prurient,” “voyeuristic,” and displayed the main character’s sixteen personalities like “freaks at a circus.” Psychoanalyst Cornelia Wilbur seemed “both one-dimensionally patient” in the book, “and—with her barbiturates and her hypnosis—peculiarly intrusive.”3

  Time magazine wondered if Sybil was real.4 The tweedy New York Review of Books was put off by the story.5 But lesser publications loved it and found it perfectly believable. The Omaha World-Herald titled its review “ ‘Sybil’ Bizarre but Still True.”6 Flora subscribed to a clipping service so she would not miss the favorable reviews, like this one, from smaller cities and towns.

  Bookstores sold out quickly and reordered immediately. The Literary Guild and Psychology Today book clubs began featuring Sybil as selections. The hardcover climbed the best-seller list and settled in, alongside Dr. Atkins Diet Revolution, I’m OK You’re OK, The Joy of Sex—and America. Foreign publishers bought the rights in various languages.

  Flora responded in two ways to this heady success. For one, she started doing behind-the-scenes paperwork to nominate herself and Sybil for a Nobel prize in literature. (She did not win.) In addition, she began “spending like a drunken sailor,” according to her cousin Stan Aronson—pulling out $20 bills for $3 taxi trips, for instance, and telling the driver to keep the change.7 She upgraded her wardrobe with designer dresses, capes, and a full-length mink coat, and she began having her hair done at Saks Fifth Avenue. She bought an annual subscription, costing hundreds of dollars, for orchestra seats at the opera.8

  Connie was already so well-heeled that the money she earned from the book’s success had little effect on her life. But Shirley used her royalties to cancel her therapy debt. For years after she got a steady job, she’d been paying Connie $100 a month, but now she paid off the balance of the thousands of dollars she still owed.9

  Sybil’s astonishing triumph followed a savvy promotion campaign, to be sure. But Flora quickly became aware of other forces pushing it. By summer 1973 she was receiving bags of letters each week, and they weren’t typical fan mail. They came from readers who had stayed up all night to reach the last page, and had been haunted by the story ever since.

  “I was that young lady (and the rest of her selves) through the entire book,” wrote Ruth, from upstate New York. “Never have I been so moved.”

  “Tears came to my eyes,” confessed Patsy, an Avis Rent-a-Car clerk in Fort Lauderdale.

  From Lynch Station, Virginia, Vicky gushed: “It was almost as though I was living her struggle.”

  And Sarina, with no return address, wrote, “I, too, dream about Sybil … although she is old enough to be my mother.”10

  Flora had worried that Sybil’s multiple personality disorder would make her seem too alien for readers to identify with, and now she was ecstatic to find that the opposite was true. “There is a little of all of us in Sybil, and a little of Sybil in us!” she began exclaiming to audiences at events.11

  At least one esteemed publication agreed. Sybil was a hit, wrote the Washington Post’s Sonya Rudikoff, because her multiple personality disorder mirrored “the contemporary stereotypes that people often apply to themselves: The poorly assimilated psychological and sociological notions of the day have led many to think of themselves not as persons but as disparate assemblages of roles, without any reigning self.”12

  Rudikoff was on the mark except for one thing. She referred to “people” and “persons,” yet Flora’s torrents of mail came almost entirely from women. And they weren’t just thinking of themselves as “disparate assemblages of roles”—they were confronting new roles, barrages of them. Profound social changes had recently opened up new spheres, at home, school, and work. It was hard for people to get used to those spheres, and they led to conflicting feelings. Searching for a sense of integration, women took up multiple personality disorder as a metaphor, thanks entirely to Sybil.

  “I always had times when I wanted to be someone else,” an unmarried young woman from Massachusetts named Delphine wrote to Flora. Inside, she explained, she had other selves, “struggling to escape.”

  Delphine said she c
ared for nothing except “being loved.” But for women, to be both loved and unmarried required constant sexual willingness, lest a “chick” be labeled a cockteaser, a bitch, or even worse, “uptight.” Many young women eagerly embraced the new, erotic zeitgeist. Many others felt pressured by men, who were still calling the shots: demanding sex on their own terms, paying little attention to their partners’ desires or needs.

  “As I was reading Sybil,” Delphine wrote to Flora, “the question … “What is a whole person?” came to my mind. Another did also: “Am I a whole person?” She felt “torn in all directions,” Delphine added, but she told Flora how “grateful I am for a book like Sybil, for it made me realize that I have to get myself together, learn to be me.”13

  Millions of women felt similarly—as though they harbored buried identities crying for discovery, expression, and integration via extraordinary and heroic ministrations such as the kind Dr. Wilbur had given to Sybil. And indeed, new psychotherapies claiming special qualities were springing up in the 1970s. Many aimed to help patients find their inner selves by thinking and talking about their relationships with their parents—often in aggressive and disturbing ways.

  Primal therapy, for instance, theorized that unremembered psychic pain from early life caused illness in adults. Children were thought to be deeply traumatized by the experience of being conceived and born, and after that it just got worse, because parents rarely showed enough love.

  Primal therapy encouraged people to sob, roll on the floor, and scream blood curdling accusations against their parents. “Daddy hates me. Stop, Daddy, stop!” “Mommy! You promised you wouldn’t!”14 The screaming was said to bring back repressed memories of trauma during childhood, birth, and even conception. These recollections freed the self.