Sybil Exposed (15 page)

Amid days filled with lesson plans and classes full of noisy teenagers, Shirley studied at the University of Omaha, taking several psychology courses and making good grades. In the fall of 1946 she returned to Mankato, only a few courses short of earning a bachelors degree. But she dropped out of school again—this time because Mattie, who was only sixty-three, was sick with stomach cancer, an unusual disease in a woman that young. Doctors had diagnosed her cancer as terminal, and Mattie begged Shirley to stay home and nurse her.
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During her final days Mattie made some deathbed confessions, including about the time she’d pretended to cancel Shirley’s appointment with Dr. Wilbur. And she apologized for being “so cross” and “so nervous” when Shirley was young. Shirley forgave her mother’s transgressions.
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Mattie died in 1948. Shirley was devastated—her contempt and irritation with her mother was hopelessly tangled with love—but she returned to Mankato to finish her final courses. Her old friend Jean Lane was there, a teacher now, too, and the women ended up in the same rooming house. Shirley tried again to latch onto Jean as a surrogate mother, but again Jean backed off.

Mattie’s corpse was hardly cold before Walter got a girlfriend, whom he would marry a decade later. Florence Eichman was a widow whose first husband had been a prominent Adventist leader before he died in middle age.
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Florence curled her hair, wore low-cut blouses, and exuded a churchy sensuality. She had a grown son and no interest in mothering Walter’s adult daughter. She could not understand why Shirley needed so much attention. Walter kept silent about Shirley’s psychiatric past, but Florence felt something was odd. Shirley was too thin and she never dressed up. Worse, she still needed Walter to support her even though she was twenty-six years old.

Influenced by Florence, Walter stopped sending Shirley money, and there were times at Mankato when she was reduced to eating nothing but oranges for every meal. She complained bitterly to Jean. But not to Walter, and she had nothing but smiles for him when he came to her graduation. She was proud of her senior project: an exhibit of three dozen of her paintings
and drawings, hung in the college’s art studio and lounge.
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While in school she had held exhibits in small-town galleries, but she seldom sold anything. She knew she would have to find another way to make a living besides marketing her paintings.

The first job Shirley got after graduating was as an art therapist for the mentally ill. Porter Hospital and Sanitarium, in Denver, was an Adventist institution, and in 1949 Walter Mason moved to Colorado to build an addition to the facility. Florence’s son worked there, too, and Shirley was probably hired because of these connections.
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Soon she was teaching painting, drawing, and ceramics to mental patients. Immersed in real-life abnormal psychology, she had ample time to observe how schizophrenics, melancholics, and hysterics acted. Sometimes her own behavior mirrored the pathological doings of her patients. She started to feel ill again, with aches, pains, extreme weight loss—she wasted to seventy-six pounds—and “nerves.” Still she tried to be a good art therapist, and she loved the work.

Then Walter moved to Michigan to build more churches. Shirley followed, but within weeks Florence showed up and decamped in the house next door. Shirley was now a third wheel. She moved on her own to Memphis, a tiny town north of Detroit. She became a teacher again.
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Her new school was not Adventist. For the first time in her life, she was cut loose from family connections and propelled into the secular world. Her workload was daunting: each week she taught four hundred grade-schoolers—and not just art courses, but English and public speaking as well. Even so, in Michigan she was able to stay calm and energetic enough to juggle lesson plans, grade mountains of student work, and hang that work on walls or send it to contests. She could even grab the disruptive students—the backtalkers and spit wadders—and give them a shake or kick them out of class. The thickest-skinned teacher might have been unnerved by these challenges. Shirley wasn’t. Heretofore a timid person, she learned to help children stand before a crowd and voice an opinion.
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But she remained physically and mentally fragile. Her nose often got stopped up, her throat hurt, every month she suffered from excruciating menstrual cramps, and she remained seriously underweight. She sometimes got nervous and did the old, odd things in private—lying on the bed at home and moving her hands, for instance, in what she called “tracing” patterns.
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She was thirty years old and her life was taken up with piety, construction paper, and pinch-pot ash trays. At home by herself, she felt lost in a black hole of loneliness. To soothe herself she fell into her lifelong fantasies. What would it be like to win a big art contest? To be a famous psychiatrist? To spy on Nazis and other bad people? For hours she spun scenarios as she sat in a chair or lay down, her eyes rolled upward like those of a saint or a prophetess. Ruminating and talking with people later, she sometimes had difficulty telling which of her thoughts were true and which were fantasy. She once told a news reporter in Memphis that she had taken all the ribbons for art at a county fair in southern Minnesota when she was a young child. The paper printed the false claim.
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Shirley may have been consciously lying about it, but more likely, she believed she was telling the truth.

In 1953 she applied to graduate school. It was an ambitious but somewhat rote plan; for unmarried women who taught art in the 1950s, the next step to advance one’s career after college was to earn a masters or doctorate degree in art education. The brightest people in Shirley’s world were doing this. Jean Lane was still single, and she was going for her Ph.D. So was Julia Schwartz, the professor at Mankato whose spinsterhood allowed her to garden in the summer and read eight magazines on Friday night.

The very best program was in New York City, at Columbia Teachers College, where Jean and Professor Schwartz were studying.
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Shirley was accepted and excitedly made plans to matriculate in September 1954. Not only did she pack her belongings, she attended to some of her health problems, particularly the menstrual cramps. A few months before classes started, she flew to the West Coast to be treated at an Adventist hospital where a family friend worked as a physician. Doctors there operated on her and discovered an enlarged, malfunctioning ovary. In addition, she was suffering from endometriosis, a common condition in which, for reasons unknown, tissue from the uterus migrates outside of that organ and causes pain and bleeding. Shirley got hormone pills for the ovary, and her surgeons removed much of the endometrial tissue. When she started Teachers College her pelvic pains and menstrual problems were gone.

So were many of her other maladies, to her amazement and delight.
New York City seemed a tonic for whatever had bothered her for so many years. Within four weeks of arriving, she wrote her father that “I have not had a bit of sinus trouble nor any cold nor any sore throat” and “I eat and sleep well and really feel tops.” She was gaining weight, so much that she worried she would have to buy larger clothes. “It is perfectly wonderful to me to be able to feel good day in and day out,” she wrote happily.
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And she was making friends. One, Willie Price, was a tall, square-shaped woman in her late thirties who had come to New York from Arkansas to study early childhood education. Another, Maureen Maxwell, was a fellow Adventist. Shirley explored the city with these two and basked in their company. “Sunday night,” she wrote, “Willie and Maureen and I went to a Chinese restaurant and had vegetable chow mein—was it ever good—never had any like that before and really enjoyed it. And we had the best time.” She added that she could “really relax and laugh.”

The new friends rode subways and buses through the city. They rubbernecked and window-shopped. (“We stood in front of the Empire State Building the other day and looked up—did it ever sway!”) They savored grand art museums, shopped at famous department stores, and laughed at the New York accents of the clerks at “Lawd and Tayla (they just don’t pronounce the R’s around here).”

While walking around the moneyed Upper East Side one day, Shirley noticed the area’s parade of “black Cadillacs, with chauffer and one lone occupant in the back seat.”

Bemused, she bet Willie that the passengers “were rich ladies on their way to keep an appointment with a Fifth Avenue psychiatrist to find out why they were so unhappy!”
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Just two blocks east of where Shirley spied the traffic parade, black Cadillacs were rolling up to a luxury apartment building at the corner of Seventy-seventh Street and Park Avenue. In its spacious lobby a liveried doorman directed patients toward the elevator. They pressed the button for the fourth floor, then proceeded to 4D. Entering a stylishly decorated foyer, they were greeted by their psychoanalyst, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur.

Arriving in Manhattan in early 1946, Connie had first rented a modest apartment and was not sure how she would achieve fame and fortune in
New York. It turned out she had little to worry about—the city offered a wealth of opportunity for mind healers like her.

Less than a year had passed since the war ended, and damaged soldiers were still streaming into Veterans Administration treatment centers. Pilgrim Hospital, out on Long Island, housed thousands of the wounded and shell-shocked, so many that a documentary movie about their sufferings was being filmed on site, by famed director John Huston. Halloran, on Staten Island, was also filled to capacity. Connie was hired for part-time work at Halloran and at a handful of VA outpatient clinics.

Her experience with narcosynthesis and electricity was a plus at these facilities, where most of the patients were psychiatric cases. They often walked into the VA clinics, got shock treatment, and walked out without having to be hospitalized. Others received Pentothal injections for their shell-shock symptoms, then went right back out on the street. These quick fixes were unorthodox and innovative—traditionally, patients back home from war had been hospitalized for days, weeks, or months after these treatments. Now the VA psychiatrists prided themselves on keeping veterans in the community, where they could work and care for their families even if they were mentally ill. Connie’s first years in New York were spent in this treatment milieu.
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But what she really wanted was to learn psychoanalysis. Throughout America after the war, creative people fluttered around therapy like moths to light, and the buzz had nothing to do with grim, biological treatments like pills and shock. What beckoned now was the talking cure: the fifty-minute hour and the patient on the couch spinning dense threads of free association and dreams, digging deep into childhood, down to the dank taproot of conflict, dragging it to the light of consciousness and comprehension. When practiced critically and compassionately—when therapists treated patients as individuals and helped them express themselves as such—talk treatment was often felt extremely helpful, even liberating. Good therapy inspired the whole society.

And for those who had enough money and lived in big cities, there were plenty of doctors to provide the treatment. Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Washington, and New York were stocked with practitioners, in a country that had long considered itself the world capital of optimistic self-improvement—including, now, via psychoanalysis. It became particularly
fashionable after it was proudly embraced by the nation’s most glamorous. Lee Strasberg, master of “method acting” at the Actors Studio in Manhattan, told his students to enter therapy: getting psychoanalyzed, he advised stars like Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe, would bring them success in Hollywood and on Broadway.
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Freud had always despised this sunny Yankee attitude. To him, psychoanalysis was a scientific and subversive theory. It dealt with bodies and their desires being driven underground by social demands. Civilized people needed repression to survive. Life was cruel and could not be otherwise unless the whole world became kinder. Freud was a stoic. He believed his ideas could illuminate the deep meaning of literature and “life in general.” But those ideas could not wreak miracle transformations in individuals.

So what was therapy good for? Hypnosis or drugs could quickly make a shell-shocked soldier feel better. People with the most florid neurotic behaviors, such as compulsive hand washing or hysterically paralyzed limbs, might improve on the couch. But no one should expect joy or fulfillment. For most patients, “ordinary unhappiness,” as Freud dubbed it, was the most that treatment could offer. The difference “between a person who has not been analyzed and the behavior of a person after he has been analyzed,” Freud suspected, was “not so thoroughgoing as we aim at making it and as we expect and maintain it to be.”
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With their extreme pragmatism, Horatio Algerism, and lust for a buck, Freud opined, Americans were the nationality most likely to misunderstand and degrade psychoanalysis.

The going rate in New York City for a psychoanalytic treatment hour on Park Avenue in the late 1940s was $50
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—about $550 in today’s money. Lillian Hellman’s therapist, a Russian immigrant named Gregory Zilboorg, charged twice that.
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People like him were grossing the contemporary equivalent of over a million dollars annually. Not surprisingly, more and more psychiatrists flocked to the city’s new psychoanalytic training programs.

Each new insitute had a different theory, but most called themselves neo-Freudians, meaning that they departed radically from many of the master’s basic teachings. In an orthodox psychoanalytic session, the therapist is a blank slate. He or she stays silent except to occasionally interpret a patient’s free associations. Eye contact rarely happens and touching is strictly forbidden.