By 1986 she realized that The Shoemaker had put her $100,000 in debt. Sybil had sold millions of copies in America by then and been published in nineteen foreign editions, yet Flora was utterly broke. Desperate to make money, she tried to sell The Shoemaker to Hollywood or television. There were no takers. She pitched spinoffs of the TV version of Sybil: a soap opera; a Broadway musical she proposed should be choreographed by Twyla Tharp, with songs including “The Peggy Part of Me,” “Nobody Likes Girls,” and “I Want to Be the Man I Marry.” These efforts also bombed.15
She began a new book, a “psychobiography” about German Nazi leader Rudolf Hess. As well, she planned to launch her own talk show. She was seventy-one years old, though most people thought she was still in her sixties because she almost always lied about her birth year. Sometimes she lied because of her identification with the venerable Broadway habit of never revealing how old one was. Other times, she may have worried that she would not get work if her true age were known.16
She still could barely stand her old Sybil, Inc. partners, and she seldom communicated with them. But in early 1987, illness, and a need for sympathy, overrode her hostility toward Shirley and Connie. “I was suffering from dehydration, starvation, total potassium deficiency, and electrolytes gone wacky,” she explained in a letter she sent to Lexington.17 Soon doctors discovered the cause of these symptoms: colon cancer. She had a tumor that was bigger than a grapefruit. Laser treatments over the next few months had virtually no effect on it.
By August she was in terrible pain but still traveling to Pennsylvania to see Joe. “I cannot tell you, Boomy Bum Boo, how much it meant to me to be with you,” she wrote him after one such visit.18
In late September 1988, she was again hospitalized, for almost two weeks.19 Joe wrote her telling her she had to get well because she was all he had. “I do think about our love,” she wrote back, “which gives me the will to fight and become well again. … You, too, are all I have left in my life.”20 Days after returning home she collapsed.21 This time she knew she was dying.
Her cousin Stan visited her and was surprised to see her hair askew, her face devoid of its usual fire-engine lipstick, and her voice gone slow and thoughtful.22 Illness and painkilling drugs were no doubt partly responsible. But Flora may also have been reflecting on the riddle of her life: How had a serious young woman—one who had taken unpopular stands and wanted her writing to change the world—turned into an older woman obsessed with telling silly and salacious stories whose main purpose was to garner her as much fame and attention as possible?
On November 3 she died of a stroke and a heart attack.
Her will offered her voluminous, coffee-and-tobacco-stained personal papers to the New York Public Library,23 where her father had worked for so many years. But the library did not want the papers. They eventually wound up where Flora had spent her own many years, at John Jay College.
Though the Public Library slighted Flora, another grand city institution honored her. The day after she died, the New York Times ran her obituary. It talked of the success of Sybil and the legal controversy around The Shoemaker. It mentioned her long teaching career. It alluded to her feisty independence and bucking of convention by noting that she left no husband or children.
This obituary from America’s newspaper of record was accurate in all respects except for one: it stated her age incorrectly, saying that she had died at seventy when she was actually seventy-two.24
No one ever asked for a correction.
CHAPTER 20
CONTAGION
BY THE LATE 1970S, CONNIE herself was in her seventies and had retired from the University of Kentucky. She had not slowed down, though. On the contrary, she was busier than ever, on a crusade to promote multiple personality as an illness that was much more common than previously believed, and which required intensive treatment. She did this promotion by continuing her Sybil-related media appearances. In addition, she started her own psychiatric facility, which she hoped would provide cutting-edge, humane treatment to multiples while keeping them out of large, dreary institutions. She named her new treatment center the Open Hospital. It was unsupervised by anyone but her, and it was unlicensed, chaotically managed, and possibly illegal. Yet the Open Hospital helped spread Connie’s ideas around Lexington and eventually throughout the world.
The facility consisted of two rundown old houses not far from downtown Lexington. One contained offices for Connie and three young psychiatrists, who were each paid $40,000 a year to work for her. The other house was a dorm for patients who came from out of town for treatment—mainly for multiple personality.1
There were many such patients by 1978, shortly after the “hospital” opened. Typically they had been mentally ill for years before they heard of multiple personalities and Dr. Wilbur. They had seen psychiatrist after psychiatrist and been diagnosed with schizophrenia, hysteria, manic depression, and borderline personality. They’d popped prescription pills, spent time in institutions, and taken electroshock. They were still very sick.
Then they read or watched Sybil and learned that a brilliant doctor in Kentucky could explain the voices nattering within them, the black moods, the blank spells. Not only did this doctor know what was wrong, she knew how to make it right.
Letters poured into Connie’s mailbox from people—almost all women—begging for treatment, and she invited them to Lexington. Arriving with backpacks and suitcases, each was assigned a room and a therapist. In a bizarre turn, Connie even gave some of these patients jobs.
One woman had a degree in nursing when she came from the Southwest to the Open Hospital. Connie appointed her as the facility’s nursing supervisor, even though she had more than thirty alter personalities, and some of them got the urge to run off. Once she bolted from Lexington with no money or identification and did not return for weeks. While she was gone Connie had no nurse—though her other patients were smashing themselves with hammers, mutilating themselves with knives, and overdosing on drugs.2
A chronically suicidal patient, Marcy, became the Open Hospital’s janitor. Marcy routinely tried to kill herself with pills, and she sliced up her arms with sharp objects. When Connie left town for a seminar or a conference, Marcy would starve herself, sometimes wasting to eighty pounds and ending up on feeding tubes in a nearby hospital. Meanwhile, the dorm’s basement would flood and the “janitor” was not there to drain it.3
Marcy’s numerous crises served as models for her roommates. There wasn’t much entertainment in the old house: no television, radio, or record player; very few books or magazines, and no supervisory staff to talk to.4 So, just as in Dr. Charcot’s asylum in nineteenth-century Paris, and just like at Ann Arbor’s Psychopathic Hospital in the 1930s, with its teenaged girls fighting over baby bottles, the women of the Open Hospital spent a lot of time hanging out together. They learned how to be ill by imitating each other.
After observing one of Marcy’s alters cutting herself with knives, other patients developed alters who cut themselves. One of Marcy’s personalities wouldn’t eat; soon, everyone had anorexia. The patients even taught each other how to be sick outside of the facility. A woman walked downtown, smashed the windows of businesses like McDonald’s, and told managers and police that it was OK because she was a patient of Dr. Wilbur’s (the managers nodded sympathetically and the police drove her back to the Open Hospital). Observing how risk-free it was to let a destructive personality emerge in public, other patients discovered that they, too, had alters who were vandals. “I have the frightening feeling I’m getting worse,” a patient from California wrote in a letter she sent back home. She had come to Lexington with a handful of personalities, but instead of “integrating” them, she developed additional ones.5
The Open Hospital’s therapeutic focus, of course, was on identifying childhood abuse, and Marcy recovered memories of her mother tying her ankles to a stick and hanging her on a meat hook—exactly as Sybil’s mother had done in the movie. The nurse remembered her parent
s raping her.
Heather, an aspiring writer and poet from the Midwest, had been diagnosed since late childhood with all kinds of psychiatric disorders, including paranoid schizophrenia.6 It was not until the 1970s Sybil craze erupted that she started showing signs of having multiple personalities. After reading about Connie in a magazine, she wrote to her requesting treatment. In Lexington she was repeatedly asked if she remembered her parents abusing her. She didn’t remember, but her Open Hospital therapist refused to take “no” for an answer—and Connie said she could help Heather get her writing published as part of her therapy. Heather was encouraged by this promise, and finally she recalled a mundane detail of family history: that both of her parents were only children. This, Connie decided, was the reason Heather was ill. Her mother and father had grown up without siblings, so they didn’t know how to raise their own child.7
Under treatment Heather eventually came up with much more blameworthy accounts of trauma. One of her alter personalities remembered her father offering her to a business associate to be raped at his pleasure. That story competed strongly with the other Open Hospital patients’ tales of parental rape.8
The three young psychiatrists on Connie’s staff had deeply respected her when they studied with her at the University of Kentucky. But they were not happy at the Open Hospital, according to one of them, Rosa K. Riggs. She had been excited about multiples in the early 1970s, after learning about Jonah, the black man with the four alter personalities and the different EEG readings. But when Riggs joined Connie’s staff, her excitement swiftly faded.9
The main problem was that Connie insisted that her employees act just as selfless as she had when she’d treated Shirley. Interviewed for this book thirty years after working at the Open Hospital, Riggs remembered how her boss demanded that staff take patients out to eat and accompany them to the movies. They were also supposed to give out their home phones, and answer day and night when patients (and their many alters) called to report a “crisis.”10
If her staff neglected to do as she did, Connie would grow cold, disapproving, and distant. “You didn’t argue with her,” Riggs said, even though she and the other employees knew that Connie’s treatment methods violated psychiatric ethics. Riggs would see patients who she didn’t believe had alters, but Connie would insist that they did and order Riggs to do more hypnosis. Riggs did not disobey her.
Connie’s facility folded in 1980, after the staff quit. By then, however, other psychiatrists and psychologists all over town were diagnosing people as suffering from multiple personalities. Thanks to Connie’s influence, Lexington had become like one of those nineteenth-century European villages whose primary business was offering “rest cures” to neurasthenics and hysterics. For her part, Dr. Cornelia B. Wilbur now had dozens of new clinical tales about alter personalities—more stories, with more amazing details, than any other doctor in the field.
Using these stories, she worked with other psychiatrists to popularize multiple personality. She hoped her efforts would get the condition listed for the first time in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It was popularly known as the DSM, and it was due for a revision soon. Politicking to list a new diagnosis typically begins a few years before a new edition goes to press, and to make sure the American Psychiatric Association—the APA—got on board to add multiple personality to the DSM, Connie began giving workshops about the diagnosis at the APA’s national conventions.
One workshop was offered in Chicago in 1979. There, Connie mounted an exhibit of paintings by “Sybil,” and she raved about how brilliant and talented Sybil’s multiples had been, not just as artists but as writers, too. Virtually all her multiples were women with high IQs and tremendous creativity, Connie added. As a matter of fact, she was acting as a literary agent for many of them, sending their manuscripts to New York in search of publishers. The workshop was covered by the media, and an article about Connie’s talented multiples was printed in newspapers throughout the country.11
Multiple personality became an official psychiatric diagnosis the next year. It was defined as “the existence within the individual of two or more distinct personalities” each of them “complex and integrated,” with “its own unique behavioral patterns and social relationships.”12 As with every other diagnosis in the DSM, multiple personality received its own multidigit number. Therapists could now use it to bill insurance companies for their treatment of the newly recognized condition. Because multiple personality patients typically remained in treatment for years, their illness was worth good money.
Connie once again did a spate of media interviews, and she brought her patients with her. In 1980 she appeared on a New York City television news show with Marcy, the “janitor” who had always been trying to kill herself at the Open Hospital.13 Marcy curled on the floor of the news studio, assumed the voice of a three-year-old, and recited the details of rope-and-meat-hook torture which she said her mother had perpetrated on her. Not only that, but both of her parents, as well as her brothers, her neighbors, and a dog had inserted toothpaste tubes into her vagina for sixteen years, beginning when she was six months old, and kicked the tubes farther inside her with combat boots. Marcy had not remembered any of this until therapy, when Dr. Wilbur managed to communicate with her alters. There were eighty-nine of them.
All of Marcy’s claims were presented as fact. The reporter who narrated the program noted that she had not contacted Marcy’s mother for her side of the story because Marcy had asked her not to. The show won a local Emmy award. Not long afterward, Connie went on Good Morning America and 20/20.
With the Open Hospital closed back in Lexington, Connie asked Dr. Robert Kraus, chairman of the University of Kentucky Medical School’s psychiatry department, if she could treat her patients at the University hospital. No problem, Kraus responded. But soon there were problems galore.
“She would sweep in” to the hospital to make rounds, Kraus remembered.14 She would gather all the psychiatry residents and medical students around a patient she was treating for multiple personality. Then she would question everyone about the case. She seldom thought they got it right. “You’re stupid!” she would scream, and “Thank God I’m here! I’ll straighten you out!” Turning to the multiple, she would explain that “You’ve got to be patient with these people—they don’t know anything.” Pandemonium would erupt on the ward, with residents cursing, nurses trembling, and patients refusing to follow hospital protocol. “Dr. Wilbur said I can do this and I can do that,” Kraus remembered them insisting. When the staff disagreed, the patients ordered them to “Go to hell!”
Kraus intervened, telling Connie that from now on he, rather than she, would call the shots about her patients’ medications, privileges, and passes to leave the hospital. She agreed but soon afterward stopped making admissions to the hospital.
Connie’s home was also a battleground. Years after the book Sybil had first appeared, she was still struggling to keep Shirley under wraps and under control. Shirley had grown furious that she had been forced to go into hiding, and Connie tried to keep her mind off the situation. She helped Shirley launch another business, “Mason Arts, Inc.,” by “buying stock” in it—in other words, giving Shirley money with no payback date. Shirley tried to develop and sell her “Sybil” board game, but she had no luck.15
She exacted vengeance by throwing tantrums when Connie tried to socialize with others.
Connie’s older brother Oliver was still alive in Canada. One of his daughters had gone through a divorce after Connie moved to Lexington and needed help putting her life back together. Ever eager to help a woman fulfill her dreams, Connie offered assistance if her niece would move to Lexington. She did, with her three teenaged daughters, Connie’s grandnieces. They all started coming to Connie’s home to socialize with her. But Shirley wanted Connie to herself. She tattled that one of the grandnieces was having boys in the house when Connie wasn’t there. The grandniece said t
hat was a lie. She and her sisters and mother stopped visiting.16
Things got worse when eighteen-year-old Brenda Burwell, another grandniece, moved from Canada to live with Connie and finish high school. Brenda was having discipline problems in her own home and Connie offered to take her in. Brenda loved her aunt, and though Connie almost never talked about her past, she did confide certain things—that she’d had plastic surgery to rejuvenate her buttocks, for instance, and a touch-up on her facelift, no doubt to impress Hollywood. Connie also told Brenda that Shirley was Sybil. And Brenda learned about late-night calls from patients. Connie told her never to answer the phone when she was out of town, but Brenda did anyway, and found the experience mind bogglingly entertaining. She would chat for hours with women who switched into an array of voices.
Shirley hated having Brenda around. The first thing she’d told her when she arrived was that she, Shirley, “could get rid of anyone she wanted to, get them out of Connie’s life,” Brenda remembered years later.
Brenda tried to keep her distance but found it difficult. Shirley spent so much time at Connie’s that she’d never bothered to furnish her own place with care. Only one room there reflected her personality: it was graced with natural light and filled with vintage dolls from her youth—all those Peggys and Peggy Anns. Otherwise, Shirley’s home was bare inside, and she mostly stayed away from it. She showed up first thing every morning at Connie’s to cook her breakfast. Later, she would cook dinner and wait for Connie’s return from work. Brenda was usually there, too, and she never saw Shirley displaying any alter personalities. What she did see was a skittery, trembling woman, not just thin and anxious but shakingly, palpably angry.
One afternoon when Brenda came home from school she made the mistake of throwing her coat and books on a chair. Shirley scolded her. Minutes later Brenda went into the kitchen and started fixing herself a grilled-cheese sandwich in a pan on the stove. Shirley walked in and became enraged that Brenda had not first lined the pan with aluminum foil. She “flipped out,” according to Brenda, and physically attacked her. Connie’s housekeeper, an older black woman, witnessed the violence.
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