She also stopped writing to Florence Mason, her stepmother in Michigan. For eleven years, ever since her father’s death in 1962, Shirley had been corresponding regularly with Florence, usually once or twice a week. Their letters to each other were unfailingly warm, even loving.
Connie had always loathed Florence, however, and despite Shirley’s affection for her stepmother, under Connie’s influence she denounced Florence as vain, cold, and stingy. Flora elaborated on these character defects in the book. “Frieda Dorsett,” as she called Florence, wore trashy spike heels, chased men, had a nose like “the large horny bill of a predatory fowl,” and “disliked women”—including her husband’s daughter.2
Shirley read Flora’s draft chapters of Sybil, so she must have seen these vindictive passages. Even so, she seems to have assumed that Florence, a devout Seventh-Day Adventist, would never pick up a book about a woman who went into trance states and allowed herself to be hypnotized—for Adventists such literature was evil if not downright Satanic. Still, Shirley couldn’t help bragging about Sybil. Writing to Florence a week before publication, she told her that a book about her psychiatric treatment was about to reach the stores and was headed for the best-seller list. “I’m so glad my name is in no way connected with anything,” she wrote, adding that her main hope was that the book would help children in danger of becoming mentally ill. “This letter is just between you and me,” she concluded. “But you have always known about my connection to Connie and years of treatment.”3
Then she stopped writing, and Florence had no idea why. She would find out three years later, when she was at a grocery store and saw a TV Guide advertisement for the television movie. The ad mentioned Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, whom Florence recognized as her stepdaughter’s psychiatrist. She got a copy of Sybil and was shocked to see herself insulted in it. Except for talking to her son and his wife, however, she kept quiet about her discovery.4
The rest of Shirley’s long-distance friends were also mystified when her correspondence stopped. Her old college dorm mate Luella Odden, and Luella’s daughter, Muriel, had been receiving letters for twenty-two years, beginning the week Muriel was born. Shirley’s old art teacher, Wylene Frederickson, who had given her private art lessons in high school and helped her get into college, also stopped hearing from her.5
Many of these people sent mail to West Virginia and didn’t hear back. They mailed again and still got nothing. Shirley Mason, inveterate letter writer week after week and year after year, had dropped off the face of the earth.
If going underground was traumatic for Shirley, it also came with a benefit: not having to write all those letters gave her more time to enjoy the people and places around her. She felt deeply fulfilled at Rio Grande Community College, where she taught art education, art history, art appreciation, and oil painting. She had recently gotten tenure and become very busy on academic planning committees and as a student advisor.6
And she loved her house. She delighted in painting the exterior a barn-red color with white trim; in laying new, sapphire-blue carpet; and planting young rosebushes in her yard. She planned to donate most of her Sybil royalties to charity rather than spend them on herself, and to keep her house and teach.7 With her job, her students, her colleagues, and her home, she thought she could be happy.
But within weeks, these pleasures would be obliterated.
The first threat to Shirley’s identity was fifty-seven-year-old Willie Price, who had shared an apartment while Shirley was addicted to Pentothal injections, and had warned her roommate about the dangers of therapy with Connie.
“Teddy Reeves” was the pseudonym Flora used for Willie in the book, and in it she wrote that Teddy “had one abiding remedy” when her emotionally disturbed friend felt ill: “To get into bed with Sybil.” Teddy was a lesbian, the book explained, and Sybil always rejected her homosexual advances.8
Reading these passages a few weeks after Sybil was published, Willie Price was irate, not to mention terrified. She had a doctorate in early childhood education and a job as a professor at a teachers college in Manhattan. Whether or not she was actually a lesbian, Willie risked losing her employment and her reputation if she were publicly exposed as one. She wrote to Flora, threatening to sue her, Regnery, Connie, and Shirley for libel or invasion of privacy. Taking her case to court would uncover Sybil’s true identity.9
Rushing to do damage control, Flora contacted attorneys. “Teddy Reeves” was not Willie Price, she told them and her editor. Instead, “Teddy” was a composite of several women Shirley had lived with over decades of sharing dorm rooms and apartments.10 Composite characters, of course are fictions, and Flora’s demurral was her first admission that, contrary to the marketing claims for Sybil, the book was not entirely a “true story.” But to make sure Willie didn’t sue, Flora excised the lesbian scenes with Teddy from the book so that readers of the second, corrected printing would never know they’d existed. Everyone involved with Sybil held their breath, hoping that Shirley’s old roommate would be the last of their problems.
She wasn’t. At the same time Flora was trying to keep a lid on Willie Price in New York City, a crisis was brewing ninety miles south—another one about lesbians. It started in late June 1973, when hundreds of thousands of people in Philadelphia picked up the city’s biggest-circulation newspaper, The Bulletin, and began reading the syndicated version of Sybil, which was still running in some papers even after publication of the book. The first installment included Sybil finding herself in a hotel in Philadelphia with a pair of “loud and gay” pajamas “with bright orange and green stripes.” She also found the receipt from the Mayflower Shop. The store’s address and phone number appeared in both Sybil the book and Sybil the syndicated series.11
At the Mayflower Shop, calls started coming in nonstop. They came from customers and from strangers, all of them excited that the owners, a middle-aged couple named Joe and Marguerite Paris, had met Sybil. They even came from pranksters calling to ask, “Do you sell pajamas?”12
They did not sell pajamas—the Mayflower Shop was a neighborhood mom-and-pop florist that sold flowers and nothing else. There was no way “Sybil” ever could have found a receipt from that store for a purchase of clothing.
No matter. As the Parises’ son Al remembered years later, his parents were struck by Flora’s use of the word “gay” to describe the style of the pajamas, and Mrs. Paris hated the idea that people would think she’d sold bedroom apparel to some “sick”—i.e., lesbian—“girl.” The respectable Mayflower Shop had been libeled and defamed by intimations of homosexual hanky panky, and the owners smelled money. The Parises decided to sue.
A civil complaint was drawn up. The defendants were The Bulletin, Regnery, Flora, Connie, and an unknown individual the lawsuit called “Jane Doe a/k/a Sybil.” All were accused of maliciously portraying the Mayflower as a place “where sexually deviant and perverse women would congregate.” The Parises demanded $280,000 in damages. There was talk of calling all the parties in to give depositions and testimony—including Jane Doe a/k/a Sybil.13
By late summer Shirley was in serious trouble, even as Connie and Flora toured the country telling talk show hosts and newspaper reporters that “Sybil” was “doing extremely well”—so well that her college had to “put a ceiling on her advisees” because “so many students wanted her as an adviser that she couldn’t handle them.” In one such interview, Connie went on to describe “Sybil” as a favorite with her colleagues.14
In fact, Shirley’s colleagues were unwittingly terrorizing her. Decades later, Jean Lane, Shirley’s old art-student friend from Mankato State Teachers College, would recall the gossip during the summer of 1973. “The book had just come out and everyone was reading it,” she remembered. “People were going to National Art Education Association and other professional events. They were talking to each other about how ‘Sybil’ was really Shirley Mason.”15
Some colleagues were shocked, Jean remembered. Many were not surprised, pa
rticularly those who had known Shirley in college. Some called the school nurse who had cared for Shirley when she was a student in Mankato. The nurse said she knew about Shirley’s multiple personalities and that she’d been in treatment with Dr. Wilbur. She told the callers not to talk about this with Shirley, to leave her in peace. But other people would come up to Shirley and ask about her condition and the book. As word spread from close friends to not-so-close ones, even people at Rio Grande College began asking questions. Shirley became terribly upset, and Jean recalled hearing that she’d decided to leave town.
By fall she had resigned from the teaching position she adored, put her beloved house on the market, and fled from Mt. Pleasant with her toy poodle, Mimbe, in tow. She went to stay with Connie in Lexington.
Christmas was approaching and life seemed unbearably difficult, so Connie engineered a sun-and-fun-escape; she bought airplane tickets and the two women flew to Mexico City. Shirley tried to forget her troubles by climbing pyramids and exploring ruins, and in January she and Connie proceeded to Guatemala.16 But Shirley struggled to accept that when the trip was over, she would have to settle for good in Lexington, refrain from teaching in schools, and otherwise take pains to hide from her friends and the public.
Back in the United States in late winter, Shirley tried to make a new life in Kentucky. She bought a cute Cape Cod-style house within walking distance of Connie’s home. From early in the morning until late in the evening, she hung out at Connie’s, cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner, assembling jigsaw puzzles at the dining room table, and painting canvases with watercolors and oils. Connie fixed up a bedroom so Shirley could stay overnight. She often did.17
The two women spent a lot of time bickering long distance with Flora, who was trying to contain the “gay pajamas” lawsuit. As the old saying goes, truth is the best defense against libel, and Flora told her lawyer that years ago, she’d been shown the receipt she mentioned in Sybil, the one listing the purchase of children’s pajamas along with the store’s name, the Mayflower Shop. She couldn’t find the receipt now, of course, and neither could Shirley. Eventually, Flora was forced to admit she’d never seen it and that Shirley might never have been at the Mayflower.
Flora was furious and scolded Shirley for fantasizing about the store. Shirley and Connie scolded back. Flora should have done fact checking, they said, for if she had she would have realized that the Mayflower was in part of Philadelphia that Shirley could never have gotten to on the subway.18
Besides Flora’s records of her arguments with her collaborators, there aren’t many records of Shirley’s life during this time. She was basically in hiding, after all. Deborah Kovac, a niece of Connie’s husband, Keith, remembered seeing her when she traveled with Keith and Connie to rural Illinois for days-long visits with Keith’s kin. Deborah was a teenager then, and she recalled Connie sitting in living rooms and kitchens talking endlessly about her work with multiple personality patients—while Shirley said hardly a word.19
Another girl, Dianne Morrow, got to know Shirley a little better.20 Dianne’s mother, Jan Morrow, was married to a Lexington physician and had three children and a large, lovely home. Like many upper-middle-class women in the early 1970s, Jan had grown bored and frustrated with being a housewife, and unhappy that her husband failed to understand her discontent. Jan thought a psychiatrist might help, and she went into therapy with Connie, who taught at the University of Kentucky medical school but also had a private practice.
Dianne was in grade school then, and almost forty years later she remembered her mother as being “pretty normal” when she started seeing Connie. Their sessions together motivated Jan to study guidance counseling in graduate school, though she was in her late thirties when she enrolled. She tried hard to fit in with her classmates, who were ten to fifteen years younger. But the threats these new pursuits posed to her domestic existence made her “pretty crazy,” Dianne recalled. “My dad just couldn’t figure it out. She had a nice life. Why couldn’t she just shut up and enjoy it?”
She couldn’t do that, and in therapy with Connie, Jan lost the last vestiges of her equilibrium. “I don’t know if she truly had a nervous breakdown, if she was on some kind of drugs or if she was ill with something else,” Dianne said. “But she was hospitalized once. Another time she was bedridden and hysterical and crying and screaming.”
When Jan got on her feet again, Connie offered her free therapy—on one condition. In the backyard of Connie’s home was a swimming pool, roofed with a plastic bubble so it could be used even in bad weather. Over the years, Connie had become a fanatic about swimming. She calculated how much a lap in her pool measured, and rain or shine, she logged over two miles a week. But she liked company, and the therapy deal she offered to Jan, according to Dianne, was that “my mom had to go to Connie’s every weekend and swim with her.”
Dianne was nine or ten years old when this routine began. Her mother started taking her to Connie’s, and there she saw that Shirley was “always around.” She was rail thin, Dianne remembered, “and very nice but very shy.” The quiet woman and the little girl rarely used the pool themselves. Instead, they lounged nearby and discussed subjects such as dogs and art while Shirley waited with barely disguised impatience for the swimming to end.
Jan’s husband—Dianne’s father—became jealous of his wife’s social time with Connie. He protested that “If you paid as much attention to me as you pay to her we would be happier!”
“You don’t understand!” Jan would reply. According to Dianne, her mother “could never say no to Connie. She felt as though she owed her tens of thousands of dollars.”
Dianne felt confused and anxious by what she saw at Connie’s house. Everyone said she was married to a man named Keith, yet Dianne never saw Keith and wondered if he existed. When she asked her mother, she got a lecture “about how these were modern times, and Connie loves her husband very much, and they don’t have to live together to be married.” The explanation worried Dianne. Connie was fond of the 1970s-era feminist quip “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” Dianne had the constant sense that Connie’s answer to her mother’s problems was “to get rid of my dad.”
The Morrows did divorce. Dianne’s father soon remarried. As for Jan, she “was miserable for the next many years,” said Dianne—during which time she faithfully continued her weekend swims with Connie.
Dianne was even more confused about Sybil. “Oh Dianne, look,” Connie would exclaim, pointing to a new edition printed in a foreign alphabet. “It’s been translated into Greek!” Dianne asked what the book was about, and Jan said merely that “Sybil’s mother had treated her very poorly and she developed different personalities to deal with the stress. And I’m like, ‘Well what did she do to her?’ And she said, ‘Well, it would be the equivalent of if you walked by the coat rack and your scarf fell on the floor completely by accident and your mother blamed you and maybe beat you up.’ And I’m, ‘Oh. OK.’”
Shirley never mentioned Sybil to Dianne, not even during their long waits by the pool. And no one told her Shirley was the book’s heroine. Still, Dianne just knew.
Oddly, Dianne noticed, Shirley talked affectionately about Mattie. “My mother used to play the piano,” she would comment casually. “My mother used to cook such and such food.” “Wow!” Dianne thought to herself about these offhand remarks. “Wouldn’t you have blocked all this out if she’d done these terrible things? Or never, ever mention your mother’s name again?”
She watched Shirley and Connie assemble jigsaw puzzles, play Scrabble, and putter with ideas for a “Sybil” board game. Sometimes they bickered about things such as whose turn it was to load the dishwasher. To Dianne they seemed like an old married couple. She wondered about this, too. But by now she knew not to ask questions.
Shirley occasionally spent time in her own home, and sometimes the phone rang—it was usually Flora calling. One day, however, the voice on the other end was not Flora. It was an unfamiliar
man, asking “Is this Shirley A. Mason?”
“Yes,” she replied, and his next question made her reel.
“Are you Sybil?”21
CHAPTER 18
EXPOSURE
THE MAN ON THE PHONE was Monty Norris,1 a reporter at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. It was summer 1975, and for weeks a young intern at the paper named Steve had been telling a fascinating story. Steve had just married a woman named Janice, from the tiny town of Dodge Center, eighty miles south of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Janice’s father had moved to Dodge Center to serve as the town’s new physician shortly after the death of Dr. Otoniel Flores, the community’s longtime general practitioner. Janice had spent her life in Dodge Center until coming to the Twin Cities with Steve. In July she told him she’d been hearing gossip from back home. People were talking about Sybil, the girl whose mind had split because of her mother’s sexual tortures.
The Dodge Centerites were certain this girl was their former neighbor, an artistic, moody Seventh-Day Adventist named Shirley Mason, Janice told Steve. And the townspeople were in an uproar, some believing Shirley’s terrible tales of abuse, others dismissing them as lies. Steve told his city editor, whose interest was piqued. He assigned Monty Norris to visit Dodge Center and come back with a story.
Sybil Exposed Page 24