Years down the road, primal therapy was dismissed by many psychiatrists and psychologists as quackery, but meanwhile, people flocked for treatment, including celebrities like ex-Beatle John Lennon. He incorporated his experience into the 1970 rock album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. One song led off with a lyrical rendering of primal therapy’s founding principle: “As soon as you’re born, they make you feel small / By giving you no time instead of it all.” Another song wailed “Mama, don’t go!” over and over and over. It’s title: “Mother.”15
Lennon could just as well have been singing about the hateful Hattie Dorsett.
Sybil, with its depiction of a psychotic, violent mother, became a poster book for national concerns about child abuse—which were skyrocketing during 1973, if media coverage is evidence. Americans were flooded that year with stories about infants and preschoolers whose parents assaulted them with weapons and—as Senator Walter Mondale put it—by “kicking, torturing, strangling, stabbing, scalding, burning, poisoning, dismemberment, starvation, imprisonment, freezing and crushing.” Flora sent a copy of Sybil to Mondale; he wrote back that he looked forward to reading it.16
Meanwhile, many of the letters Flora received dwelled on abuse in families. A California woman named Karen wrote that the book “greatly facilitated the understanding of the most complex and horrifying results of wounds that can be inflicted on children in the name of love.”
The letters kept coming, from readers moved by various aspects of the story. Some saw Sybil as a heroine and an inspiration. As one woman wrote:
I admire her courage against the seemingly insurmountable problems that she faced as I’ve never respected or admired anything or anyone before. When I am faced with my day-to-day problems, I hope I will always remember Sybil and realize how small my troubles really are.
Younger women, high school and college-age girls, focused more on Sybil’s multiple personalities than on her suffering. Some wondered if they, too, sometimes split into different people, then reunited with no memory of the alternate selves.
Countless others took multiple personality more metaphorically and more seriously. Ellen, from northern Virginia, had just gotten a bachelors degree in math and had started looking resignedly for a “strictly math related” job that would mean “abandoning a part of me that was more concerned with people.” But reading Sybil had made her realize she didn’t have to be “just one person at a time for all my life.” After all, “if Sybil can live with all her selves, I shouldn’t have to give up any part of me just because of a job.” Ellen changed her career plans, and her joy at her new “multiplicity” was visceral: “My body teems with excitement,” she wrote Flora, “at having many different parts of its own. You have revived in me the feeling that each day is a new beginning.”
Lois, from Los Angeles, felt mystical about her encounter with the book. “I find it utterly amazing that not everyone who has read Sybil sees the … fantastic probabilities of understanding not only themselves but the entire universe.”
Others wrote Flora simply to thank her for a fantastic read. Janna, in Washington state, thought Sybil was “sensational.” Lori admitted she’d cried while reading it. Suzanne, from rural Pennsylvania, was especially absorbed when Sybil’s mother sexually tortured her: “When I read that part, I got deeply involved like I was there watching.” Lori was eleven years old going on twelve, and so was Janna. Suzanne was in eighth grade.17
With letters like these pouring in, Warner Books knew it had a hit in its forthcoming paperback edition. The company scheduled two million copies for release in early 1974, each with a cover featuring a long-haired young woman’s face in jagged slats, like an image in a smashed mirror.18
Flora, Connie, and Shirley decided to cash in on the book’s success even further. They contacted a lawyer in Kentucky, drew up papers, and emerged with an enterprise for marketing Sybil-related products: Sybil tee shirts, Sybil lapel buttons, Sybil board games, Sybil dolls. Shirley started contacting manufacturers, and when she made calls and wrote letters, she always mentioned the new company. Its name was Sybil, Inc.19
CHAPTER 16
THE FILM
IN EARLY 1974 FLORA LEARNED that Lorimar, a made-for-television film company in southern California, wanted to produce Sybil. Contracts were signed and work on the project began. The first task was to recruit a writer to do the screenplay.
Stewart Stern took the job. He was the perfect Hollywood writer for Sybil, having spent years trying every therapy under the sun.1 He also was one of the film industry’s most highly regarded screenwriters; his most famous work was Rebel Without a Cause. Stern was a stickler for understanding his characters completely and for communicating, as he put it, “the deepest psychological motivation” for any action he portrayed.2
In early 1974 he started work on Sybil the television script, but after weeks of reading and taking notes, he realized there were major roadblocks. The characters made little sense—and in many ways neither did the story.3 Flora was furious when she heard these criticisms. She had wanted to author the script, and she’d heard that Stern was writing his teleplay from scratch because he thought her book lacked dramatic conflict. She wrote him an incredulous letter. “No conflict in Sybil? Man against man,” she suggested. Also “man against society … man against the elements … man against himself.”4
Stern politely ignored her.
But he was so puzzled by the book that he typed out over two hundred questions5 for Flora and Connie, including No. 24:
When Sybil had a “fugue” in Dr. W’s office in Omaha and tried to jump out of the window, Dr. W said “I wasn’t really disturbed.” … Really? Seems to me Dr. W. would have been gravely disturbed.
As a maven of psychotherapy, Stern was also bothered that Dr. Wilbur socialized with her patient, even traveled with her. “Where did Dr. W. and Sybil go on their ‘frequent out of town visits’?” he asked in Question No. 225:
If they stayed places overnight, did they share a room? Did this present problems for either of them? Was it very hard for Sybil to accept Dr. W. in the role of a friend … a woman who had nightgowns, possibly creamed her face, brushed her teeth, went to the bathroom? In the light of Hattie’s bathroom excesses, did the knowledge that Dr. W went to the bathroom on occasion present problems for Sybil?
Stern’s biggest problem with the book was that he didn’t believe its claims about Sybil’s crazy mother hurting her. “Hattie’s shrill rising laughter when she tortures Sybil,” he wrote, “must have been heard by Grandma upstairs and the live-in maid, Jessie. How could it go on in the way described?”
Further, given that Sybil came from “a town whose hobby was to keep an eye on everyone,” how could her mother possibly have gotten away “with such excesses as public lesbian play, fooling around sexually with small children … public defecation, and torture?”
Stern’s years of therapy had sensitized him to the fantasy life of children. In a string of additional queries, he asked if Sybil’s horrific memories might, in fact, be “the elaborate creation of a child warned constantly that if she didn’t behave … some awful and unnamed punishment would be meted out to her.” Furthermore, “Has Dr. Wilbur ever had second thoughts … ? Has she ever thought, as I did, that perhaps the tortures were invented by Sybil … ? Isn’t it possible that a badly given enema, even if given therapeutically, can be seized upon as the form of the torture to come when threats are made?”
Looking for answers, he flew to New York and spent several days with Flora, asking her question after question from his list. Flora had never spoken at such length with a screenwriter, much less one as brilliant as Stern. After several conversations, she forgot her hostility and warmed up to him, admitting that she, too, worried that the torture memories were false. She confessed that she once considered scrapping the project.6
But she also played Stern some audiotapes of Shirley’s old therapy sessions with Connie. Though he could barely make out the words, he was bowled over by t
he screams of terror in high-pitched, little girl voices. Sobbing and furniture crashing—that was Peggy trying to escape, Flora explained. Garbled pleas to some mysterious tormenter to “Stop! Stop!” Abject weeping. It made Stern want to weep, too.7
Stern didn’t know that Peggy and the other child voices had never appeared except when Connie had “Sybil” in bed with a syringe full of Pentothal in her arm, or on a couch in a hypnotic trance. Still unsure of what to believe after his visit with Flora, Stern went to Lexington to talk to Connie.
She had reserved a room for him at a motel, and she showed up for their first meeting, as Stern remembered over thirty years later, driving “the longest convertible Lincoln Continental I’d ever seen. It was pink. Pink! And in [the] front … was this apricot colored hair on top of a face.” Though it was only 10:00 a.m., she “was in full evening make up. Beyond evening—it was theatrical makeup. She had blue eye shadow on and she had these enormous false eyelashes.”8
The visit lasted many days, during which Stern spent lots of time at Connie’s house, going over his questions. Connie brushed aside his doubts. Of course Sybil had been tortured by her mother, she insisted. Hadn’t Sybil’s own father admitted he’d once found her suffocating in the wheat crib of his backyard workshop?
It never seemed to have occurred to Stern that Connie might be lying. She had “an incredible self assurance” when she talked about Sybil, he recalled years later, and her persuasiveness was buttressed by his impression of her as one of the foremost psychiatrists in the world.9 Sybil’s psychoanalysis constituted “one of the outstanding cases of all time,” Connie proclaimed. Stern believed her, especially when he heard more therapy tapes, which were as indecipherable yet riveting as the ones he’d heard at Flora’s.10
By the time Stern left Lexington he was enamored of Connie. Sometimes she used her flat, hard, professional voice with him. Other times he heard the tender, intimate voice usually reserved for people on her couch. “I found myself wishing more and more that I too could have been—could be—your patient,” he wrote Connie after he returned to California. If he’d had that good fortune, he added wistfully, “there might have been ultimate discovery and final resolution” of his psychological problems.11
He begged her to let him listen to more of the therapy tapes. She complied by packing them in a footlocker and catching a plane west. She and Stern spent three weeks at his home on the ocean, working tirelessly on an outline for the script.12
During breaks they took walks on the beach, where Connie talked and talked about everything—from the seaweed drifting through the water to the way she’d saved suicidal schizophrenics by putting them into overnight trances with Penthothal, rescuing them from death. Stern took her to one of his own therapy sessions, then asked for her professional opinion about his problems.
They hobnobbed with Hollywood celebrities, and Connie was star struck. Returning to Lexington, she dropped celebrity names nonstop. When she corresponded with Stern she called him “Stewart Dear.”13
When Stern finally hunkered down to write his teleplay, he inserted fiction after fiction to smooth out the parts of Flora’s book that seemed poorly motivated or downright illogical. Stern had his Sybil character dissociate and slog fully clothed through a pond in front of a group of shocked children in Central Park. He put her into raging, suicidal “Peggy” and “Marcia” modes while on dates with her horrified boyfriend. He made up a visit by Dr. Wilbur to the family doctor who treated Sybil as a child, inventing a shame-faced confession by the doctor that he had seen hideous genital trauma on little Sybil, but had done nothing about it.14
Stern was creating perfect sense through perfect fantasy. He added a spellbindingly creepy scene that had not appeared in Flora’s book. It showed Sybil bound and immobilized with dishrags, suspended on ropes and hooks as her deranged mother cranked a pulley to raise the little girl into the suffocating “wheat crib.”15
Stern had gotten this idea from one of the therapy audiotapes. “What did she do to Shirley that made Shirley’s arms and legs so weak?” Connie could be heard asking on the tape, referring to the evil Mrs. Mason.
“Pumped ’em up and down,” Stern heard the patient answer.
“Pumped ’em up and down how, Sweetie? …”
“Put the rope on her arms like this and pull her up on Daddy’s pulley and she’d pull like this and make her go up and down and then up so—high—…”16
Connie was extremely skeptical of this story, but by the time she worked with Stern she had forgotten it was on one of the tapes she’d given him. She expressed her annoyance to Stern when she spotted this scene in his first draft.17
Stern stuck to his guns. “I really didn’t invent this,” he corrected Connie, and sent proof: a transcript of the tape.18 Reading it, she was alarmed that she’d almost admitted that certain things Shirley said were not to be believed. She told Stern she’d forgotten the carpentry shop torture because it was too awful for her, Connie, to remember. “You are so right about the pulley session in the garage and I had completely repressed that,” she wrote.19
Flora criticized the script,20 calling it “frantic,” “overwritten,” “lurid,” and suffering from “cheap stereotypes” and “lesbian overtone.”21 She did not object to most of the fictions Stern had inserted—the rope and pulley scene, for instance, or Sybil dissociating before the school children. But oddly, she was angered by a scene which Stern wrote that portrayed Dr. Wilbur addressing a group of male psychiatrists about her multiple personality case and being laughed at because she was a female doctor.
During all the years Flora and Connie had discussed the case, Connie had never described any such experience. Perhaps it had happened, perhaps not. Either way, Stern seemed to understand that Connie and her patient were the victims and heroines of a prefeminist era—and that this fact evoked great enthusiasm from women readers of the book. Still, Flora complained to Stern that his characterization of Dr. Wilbur “as a women’s lib character fighting the male psychiatry fraternity” was “outrageous” and “invented.”22 Stern removed the scene.
With the script completed, Joanne Woodward—who two decades earlier had portrayed the multiple-personality-disordered patient in The Three Faces of Eve—was chosen for the role of Dr. Wilbur. Sally Field, twenty-nine years old and famous as a television sitcom comedienne, gave an impassioned dramatic performance at her audition and got the Sybil role. She started listening to therapy tapes from Connie’s collection, provided by Stewart Stern.23
Sybil aired as an NBC miniseries on two evenings in November 1976. It was seen by forty million people—almost a fifth of the country’s population.24 It won four Emmys, including one awarded to Field for her acting. Frequent reruns followed, and countless more viewers recoiled at scenes of a child being battered, hanged, and raped by her demented mother. They cringed as the victim, grown into an adult and a mental patient, keened and shuddered under furniture. And they wept as Joanne Woodward cradled Sally Field in her lap, murmuring “It’s all right, Sweetie. It’s all right.”
The telemovie became so iconic that Scholastic, a company that produces educational magazines for students, developed a “Sybil” lesson plan for use in high schools. Teenagers were instructed to “Write a discussion in dialogue form between two or more sides of your personality. Name them as Sybil named her Selves. Try to indicate why you are more ‘together’ than Sybil.”25 Conclusive proof that Sybil had become a cultural obsession was a parody on Saturday Night Live, featuring a red-wigged Jill Clayburgh as Dr. Wilbur and Gilda Radner—beloved for her Roseanne Rosannadanna persona—playing a daft-faced Sybil. “We all have many people inside of us,” Clayburgh lectured Radner. “I myself am a psychiatrist, a married woman … an Unmarried Woman! I’m a dancer. As a matter of fact I’m two dancers: I’m jazz and modern… . I’m four artists: an impressionist, an abstract expressionist and a primitive, and I’m a lot of gym teachers, and I’m at least one dental technician.”26
No one in Holl
ywood, on Saturday Night Live, or at the Scholastic offices could ask Shirley what she thought of their efforts. They didn’t know her real name, much less her phone number. Connie and Flora bent over backwards to conceal her identity, and not merely to respect her wish for anonymity. Even if Shirley had changed her mind and opted to go public, they would not have allowed it. As far as they were concerned, she had no choice. In order to maintain their claim that Sybil was nonfiction, she had to remain in the shadows. They struggled to make sure that she did.
PART V
RELAPSE
CHAPTER 17
COMMITMENT
THREATS TO SHIRLEY’S ANONYMITY BEGAN almost immediately after publication of Sybil. To Flora, at least, this should have been no surprise; after all, she had written the book in a way that practically advertised Shirley’s identity to anyone who knew her well. Perhaps out of laziness or maybe because of journalists’ innate discomfort with disguising facts, Flora had barely changed the name of anyone or anyplace in the book.
Over and over, people contacted the three women saying they knew who Sybil was. Some were mistaken, including a handful of patients in mental hospitals who claimed they were Sybil. But others made the correct identification. “Oh Shirley,” wrote a childhood friend from Dodge Center in a letter she asked Flora to forward. “I never dreamed of the torment and unhappiness in your past.”1
Shirley had known before the book came out that she would need to give up some of her former life. Connie had instructed her that as soon as Sybil went on sale, she would have to cut off communication with people from her past. They included Dessie Blood Engbard, the Mason family’s maid when Shirley was young and whom the book called “Jessie Flood.” Dessie was an old, sick woman in 1973, and for years Shirley had been sending her affectionate letters, as well as photographs, paintings, and gifts of inexpensive clothing. But Shirley and Connie had visited Dessie less than a decade earlier, and even more recently Flora had asked her endless questions about the Mason family. If she got letters from Shirley after Sybil became widely read, there was a good chance she would put two and two together—and reveal Sybil’s identity. So Shirley stopped sending letters to Dessie.
Sybil Exposed Page 23