Sybil Exposed (14 page)

The importance of the role that advertising agencies played in these programs is hard to imagine today. Not only did Madison Avenue buy air time for clients’ commercials, it created and produced the programs that hosted those commercials, including torrents of theatrical dramas. One big ad agency, BBDO—short for Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn—produced the hugely popular
Cavalcade Theater.
It was sponsored by the politically right-wing Dupont Corporation, and the show featured patriotic plays about American heroes such as Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln. Another large firm created most of America’s radio soap operas. By the late 1930s half the women in America were listening to them and their nonstop advertisements for laundry detergent. Everything and everyone
was drowning in ads. More people in the United States had a radio in their home than a telephone.
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Not everyone was happy with this commercialism. Here and there could be found a surviving university or municipal station. One of the latter was WNYC, named for its owner, New York City.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, WNYC broadcast plays performed by college students, poetry read by high school pupils, and free science and liberal arts courses on the air. WNYC’s annual American Music Festival highlighted new works by American composers. There was even an hour hosted by the black folk musician Leadbelly, wailing songs such as “The Boll Weevil.”

WNYC’s avant garde sheen was burnished by the government. The Works Progress Administration—WPA, as the New Deal agency was known—created the Federal Theatre Project, which hired out-of-work writers and actors to put on plays nationwide. The theater project’s director in New York City, a former Broadway producer named George Kondolf, brought his WPA plays to WNYC.

Flora, in her early twenties at the time, volunteered there, writing scripts for music education programs. That’s probably where she met Kondolf. After the government shut down the Federal Theatre Project, he accepted a job as “story editor” for
The Cavalcade Theater
at the prestigious ad agency BBDO. He took Flora with him.
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Once at BBDO, Kondolf hired all kinds of people to produce stories. Many of his writers were avowed leftists. They included Carl Sandburg, Orson Welles, Sinclair Lewis, Arthur Miller, and folksinger Woodie Guthrie, who had once written for the newspaper of the American Communist Party. Kondolf didn’t care about these people’s politics. If they were talented, famous, and willing to help the right-wing Dupont Corporation promote “better things for better living through chemistry,” they were welcome to work at the ad agency.
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For Flora, a young woman raised partly conservative in a leftist world,
Cavalcade
must have been heaven. She loved walking into BBDO’s offices in a tailored suit, swinging a purse in one hand and a briefcase in the other. She was thrilled to hobnob with writers like Arthur Miller, and with the show’s superstar actors and actresses: Edward G. Robinson, Helen Hayes, Basil Rathbone, Humphrey Bogart, and others.

Flora may have done some editing at BBDO, and she probably showed George Kondolf some of her own radio scripts. She’d written one about Haym Solomon, a Jewish resident of colonial Philadelphia who helped finance the American Revolution.
Cavalcade
didn’t want it, and in fact, no one seemed interested in her dramas. Were they not good enough? Or was it that the author was a woman? She shopped around an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s novella
The Metamorphosis
, about a man who wakes up one morning to find he’s turned into a giant cockroach. Instead of revealing her gender with a full name, Flora bylined herself “F. R. Scheiber.” She still couldn’t sell it.
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There was one kind of job in commercial media that was easy to get, however: audience research. Flora did some work at NBC, the network that aired
Cavalcade.
NBC wanted to know more about the people who listened to its soap operas, and Flora was assigned to review the mail. Millions of letters poured in each year, and researchers sorted them by the sex, age, geographical location, marital status, and education of the writers, as well as by their opinions about the shows. The data was tabulated for advertisers, and comments about program content were forwarded to higher-ups. A well-crafted letter might convince a producer to tweak a plot and change a story. Flora learned that radio theater was not art for art’s sake. It was art for the sake of selling things, to millions of people.

By the end of World War II, Flora had spent several years, as she worded it on her resume, “in direct contact with the key men in the advertising agencies and [radio] networks.”
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From these men she’d learned that radio was the new
machina
of national life. But its
deus
wasn’t God. It was Money.

Flora worried about this, and as the 1940s wore on she struggled to do serious writing about the mass media, in tiny publications specializing in analysis of the theater, radio, and the revolutionary new technology, television. For
Film and Radio Discussion Guide
, she likened the melodramatic plots of soap operas to the great plays of Shakespeare. For the scholarly
Hollywood Quarterly
she described how old plays such as
Macbeth
changed when they were produced for television instead of Broadway.
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But her passion became teaching. Toward the end of World War II she was hired to substitute in the Speech and Theater Department of Brooklyn College for a male professor who had gone to war.
7
The school was a branch
of New York City’s public university system, and the Speech and Theater Department was run by gentile men from the Midwest. They seemed antiSemitic to Flora, and she was sure they looked down on women. She responded by acting proud, witty, and outrageous. She wore lipstick so thick and red that it almost seemed purple, and she delighted in shocking her superiors with clever retorts.

At an event in front of an audience, a Brooklyn College colleague once jokingly introduced Flora and her department chairman with: “This is Professor O’Neill, the front of the organization. And this is Miss Schreiber, the brains.”

“Professor Maloney,” retorted the large-breasted Flora, “that’s unfair to Professor O’Neill’s brains and my front.”
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After the war ended and she was laid off from Brooklyn College, she went on to teach at nearby Adelphi College, where her students wrote and broadcast radio plays. Flora’s taste in the genre was rarified. She favored what she called “poetic documentary,” with wispy recitations of work by Emily Dickinson and Goethe. Such fare was a far cry from
Cavalcade Theater.
It established Flora as an intellectual—as her father’s daughter.
9

She was starting to feel like an aging, anonymous scholar. Her squarish face was getting squarer. Her hooked nose hooked lower. Her cigarette habit had evolved to the chain-smoker level. Her tendency to walk around with food stains on her dress—and now, ashes—was growing more pronounced. The 1940s ended and she’d never in her life had a boyfriend, much less a famous one.

When she was thirty-four, she got one. His very name evoked stardom—Eugene O’Neill, Jr. His father was the author of
Long Day’s Journey Into Night,
whose work won him Pulitzer prizes and a Nobel. But Eugene Sr. suffered all his life with crippling depression and alcoholism. Other O’Neill family members did, too, and some drank themselves to death or committed suicide.

It was 1950 when Flora first took up with Eugene Jr.—whom everyone called Gene. He was forty years old and a man of the world, six-feet-three inches tall, broad shouldered, and handsome. A Yale University–trained
scholar of Greek and classical literature who did book reviews for the
New York Times,
Gene did radio broadcasting work as well, and his on-air voice was often compared to Orson Welles’.

Gene also lectured at small colleges, and in early 1950 he gave a talk he called “Shakespeare and Soap Operas,” in which he favorably compared potboiler radio dramas to the works of The Bard.
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This was one of Flora’s pet topics, and she probably met Gene because of their shared interests. In the summer he invited her to visit him in Woodstock, an artists and writers colony two hours north of New York City, where Gene had a cottage. Flora planned to stay at a local inn but ended up spending the night with Gene. Almost immediately he asked her to marry him.

She spent the rest of the summer in an erotic haze. Gene didn’t seem to mind that she spilled food and cigarette ash on her clothes. Nor was he bothered that she was overweight. He told her he adored big, floppy breasts. “My fat wench,” he called her, and she was overwhelmed by the strength of her emotions.

By September, however, she was worried. Gene had a terribly conflicted relationship with his father, and by the time Flora met him he had been married and divorced three times. He had a stormy relationship with his past lovers, and rumor had it that he sometimes beat them. He was also a longtime alcoholic who suffered from bouts of depression. By the time Flora entered the picture he was in grave decline.

Completely inexperienced with men, she had little idea of how to take Gene’s measure. He noticed her ignorance and didn’t like it. Too “girlish,” he called Flora, particularly when it came to sex. In a sheaf of notes she later wrote to herself, she described feeling pain at having his finger inside her, let alone his penis. “Be an animal,” Gene would urge her, and he blamed her reticence on the fact that she had a profession. “You bring Adelphi College into the bedroom. It is not that career women don’t want to go to bed—it is that they don’t know how,” he scolded Flora.
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Flora blamed herself for their incompatibility. She concluded that she could not say “I love you” in bed because she had spent her entire life as a person or a daughter, and not, as she ruefully wrote, “a woman.” Gene accused her of rejecting him.
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In mid-September, after Flora’s customary weekend visit, Gene drove her to the train station so she could return to New York City. They planned
to skip the next weekend rendezvous, but Gene promised to travel on the Monday after that to see her.

As soon as Flora was gone, Gene looked up an old lover and spent days begging her to marry him. At the end of the week she agreed, but Gene was acting so strangely that on Saturday she broke off the engagement. Gene spent all day and night on Sunday drinking, and on Monday morning a neighbor found him dead—he had slashed himself with a straight razor. Papers nationwide reported that the great playwright Eugene O’Neill’s son had killed himself because a woman refused to marry him. That woman was not Flora Schreiber. Not a word was published about her.
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She went into deep mourning and took to calling Gene “My almost husband.” She thought about all the other almosts: being a daughter-inlaw of the greatest dramatist in America, and sister-in-law to Charlie Chaplin, husband of Gene’s half sister, Oona. “I hate to mention his name,” she wrote a friend about the suicide, “because it is a famous one.” But she could not restrain herself: “Eugene O’Neill, Jr.” she added a few lines later, and bragged about her “brief membership in that tragic family.”
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A year later Flora was still brooding over Gene’s indictment of her as a “career woman” divorced from her feminine nature. She had lost her taste for full-time college teaching and cast about for a more exciting way to make her mark on the world. Soon she found it. She took what she’d learned about salesmanship at the advertising agency. She reinvented herself as a writer for women’s magazines.

W
HEN SHIRLEY AND CONNIE MET
again, it was a new decade and a new world for both. Shirley was a graduate student at Teachers College of the world-famous Columbia University, in New York City—the same school Flora Schreiber had attended years earlier. Connie had become a psychoanalyst, and she now saw patients, some of them Broadway stars, in her posh home-office complex on Park Avenue. When she and Shirley reunited there, nine years had passed since Nebraska, and in many ways each had changed dramatically. But when it came to their relationship, things picked up exactly where they had left off. On the Upper East Side of Manhattan in 1954, the two women were as smitten with each other as they had been in 1945.

How, they asked, had they ended up a second time in the same city? What had brought each of them to Manhattan? Seated at a small table in Connie’s office, Shirley poured out her story.

She had gotten no more psychotherapy after Connie left Omaha. But thanks to their work in that city, she had done fairly well in the years that followed. Thinking positive, peaceful thoughts when she was nervous, and popping an occasional sleeping pill at night, Shirley generally controlled herself so well that she was able to teach part time.
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Her Adventism seemed like less of a problem, too. She had started to openly read novels after her father bought her a subscription to the Book of the Month Club and she ordered
Jane Eyre
and other classic novels. Adventism was changing: fiction reading was no longer the automatic sin it
had once been. Shirley basked nervously but excitedly in the new freedom. She decided to finish her degree with a double major in English and art.
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Deep down, though, she still wanted to be a psychiatrist. Her secret vice was no longer literature. Now it was Freud.