Sybil Exposed (18 page)

“It’s like love and love hurts,” Vicki answered. “When people love you they hit you this way and this way with the knuckles and they slap you.”

Trauma. Finally. But Vicky had more. Her voice began chugging like a locomotive, clacking faster and faster down a track of terrible injury.

“And they put flashlights in you and bottles out of little silver boxes and they put a blanket over your face and hold a light over. You can’t breathe and it hurts and you kick and you can’t move.”

Connie was unaware that when Shirley was seven years old she had been terribly frightened by a tonsillectomy. She’d gotten the surgery in the home office of family doctor Otoniel Flores, and she’d been tricked into it. Walter and Mattie had lured her into the surgery room by telling her she was going to the Floreses’ to visit their daughter Virginia. When Shirley arrived, Mrs. Flores, who was a registered nurse, beckoned her upstairs and told her to put on what she called “Dr. Flores’s white shirt” so she could play. This strange demand made Shirley uneasy. Before she had time to think, she was grabbed and forced onto a table. She screamed.
Bottles of liquids lay nearby, and an old man, the town pharmacist, loomed over her. Other people held her down and looked in her throat with a light. The pharmacist slapped a cloth over her nose and mouth. She kicked and flailed, then she couldn’t breathe—the cloth was soaked in ether. She thought she was dying. When she awoke her throat ached and she was still terrified, as well as enraged. She never forgot the experience.
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It would take years after the Pentothal session before Shirley, in her right mind and not dosed with mind-bending drugs, would tell Connie about her tonsillectomy. Now, when Connie heard about the flashlight, the silver bottles, the overpowering people, and the suffocating cloth, she assumed her patient had been raped as a child.

Who had done it? Probably Mattie Mason—after all, people with emotional problems had almost always been hurt by their mothers. But why would this mother commit such extreme horrors? Connie began to suspect that Mattie Mason was a paranoid schizophrenic.
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Connie tried to get more information from Vicky. But suddenly Vicky was gone and Peggy was lying on the couch with the Pentothal coursing through her veins. She screamed so loudly that Connie could not understand what she was saying, except for some repetitive phrases:

“The people! The people! The people! The door! The door right here!”

Peggy sprang up and lurched through the office, crashing into furniture and walls. She ran to the window and pounded. The glass broke. Her hand trickled blood.

“Wake up!” yelled Connie. “Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!”

Peggy kept screaming.

“Come on … wake up. Wake up.”

She finally did. “Oh, oh, oh, what did I do?” she whimpered. “I was over by your window, wasn’t I? Oh, I’m sorry. Did I do that?” Still high from the Pentothal, Shirley had bizarre sensations. The walls were laughing and moving. She sobbed hysterically.

Connie reassured her. Then she probed for additional crimes committed by the lunatic Mattie Mason. She told Shirley she wanted to speak with Vicky.

“Hi,” Vicky said. Connie asked what Mattie had done to little Shirley. Vicky tried to help but was incoherent. “First it’s one thing, then another. All the old feelings she used to crow about before.”

And that garble was the end of the Pentothal session, at least as recorded in the transcript.

Connie was not discouraged. To get to the bottom of the atrocities committed against her patient, she would just have to do more work.

By summer 1955 Shirley had earned her masters degree despite being heavily drugged most of the year. Now, feeling both very sick and very ambitious, she dropped her earlier plans to get an art education doctorate and decided to work on becoming a psychoanalyst. She moved from her dormitory to a rooming house. To gain a foundation for medical school, she enrolled in a chemistry class at Teachers College. She was unemployed but picked up odd jobs painting posters for university events.
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Otherwise she was a full-time “analysand,” as patients in psychoanalysis are called by their doctors.

She confided to her friend Willie Price that she was in therapy, and Willie didn’t laugh when she learned Shirley had multiple personality disorder. Not only did she accept the claim, but she asked if she, too, could see Dr. Wilbur as a patient. Soon she was in therapy, and she and Connie often discussed Shirley’s amazing case. Willie moved into Shirley’s rooming house and volunteered to observe Shirley and report on her alter personalities. She encouraged Shirley to eat, take her medicines, and dress warmly in cold weather.
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When the Peggys appeared, Willie took notes.
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“Oh, the noise and the pain,”
read one of Willie’s transcriptions of a day when “Peggy” lay on Shirley’s bed, quaking and screaming for hours.

Take the pain away … the pain in my head and the music and the hands … Can’t tell anyone about the music just remember and remember and remember … The people—all the people. I’m afraid … Take the knife and put it away! … All the people are dancing in the hall—all white—and the music … all the black boxes and all the white boxes—Take them away … my head hurts, it hurts, it hurts … I’ll read what I want to read, I’ll paint the way I want to paint … Got to find Dr. Wilbur. Mother won’t let me … Don’t want to get shot … the guns … I’m afraid of white—I’m afraid of nurses … All the nurses, all in white, stood around the table.

Amid the raving, “Peggy” jumped out of bed and crawled under the furniture. Once she cowered under a dresser for two days. Willie tried to coax her out but couldn’t. She called Connie, who came to the apartment and got Peggy to come out.
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Shirley never acted like Peggy or the other alter personalities in front of anyone but her analyst and her roommate. Both doted on her. She loved only one, though: Connie.

Connie loved her back, without reservation. Besides the office therapy, she made regular house calls, even during evenings and weekends. Her colleagues probably did not know about her unorthodox visits. And they almost certainly were unaware she was injecting Shirley with Pentothal. She continued to give the shots in Shirley’s own bedroom, with no medical backup if Shirley were to suffer a reaction from this potent barbiturate—if she stopped breathing, for instance.
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As rogue as all this treatment was, Connie felt justified. Shirley’s disorder was so serious, and so little studied, that radical approaches were called for. The alternate personalities each required therapy, so Shirley needed many more hours on the couch than other patients did. And she needed to remember the horrors inflicted on her by her terrible mother. Pentothal and other barbiturates would relax her, softening the resistance. Benzadrine and amphetamines would also lift her spirits, bucking her up to recall Mattie’s crimes.

Shirley did not argue with this regimen. Connie spent hours every week listening raptly to her problems, doling out encouragement, and offering to pay Shirley’s tuition for pre-med courses. She asked Shirley for childhood photographs, and when she looked at them she saw Peggy’s face in some and Mike’s in others.
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She read Shirley’s teenage diaries, and she suggested that Shirley write daily, even hourly accounts of her feelings between therapy sessions.

Shirley had other reasons for doing as Connie said. For one, she burned with desire for her doctor to pat and hug her, and every time Connie did so, Shirley happily reported on it in her diary. “[C]ame up behind me and put hands on my shoulders with a little shake, and drew me close,” she reported on November 4. And on November 18: “Reached over. ‘Let me have your hand.’”
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Connie was also encouraging Shirley’s artistic endeavors by acting as a dealer for her work. The walls in her Park Avenue home were hung with her patient’s paintings. A visiting friend liked one and wondered if Shirley could do another. Connie negotiated the price: $85. She relayed the order to Shirley.
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Shirley was terribly grateful, and within a few days after the painting deal was executed, she walked into therapy as yet another alter personality. This one said she was tall and had brown eyes. Her name was Helen.
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Connie recorded Helen on reel-to-reel tape. The next day, when Shirley showed up, Connie had a proposition:

“Would you like to earn some money?”

“That’s a question?” Shirley joked rhetorically.

“I would like to have you collaborate with me on something,” Connie answered. “I want to write a book about your difficulties and I would like you to help with it.”
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Shirley was skittish at first. But Connie encouraged her by telling her she was talking to other psychoanalysts about her special patient.

One of these other doctors, Dr. Sandor Lorand, was an international leader in psychoanalysis and ran the psychoanalysis program at the State University of New York’s medical school in Brooklyn. Connie had told him she was treating a brilliant young woman with multiple personalities who wanted to be a psychoanalyst. Dr. Lorand said the patient could attend his medical school. Connie told Shirley, adding that after she got her MD degree, Dr. William V. Silverberg—Connie’s probable former analyst—would do Shirley’s training analysis.
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In exchange for agreeing to do a book about her case, Connie said, she would pay for Shirley’s medical school tuition and living expenses.
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Shirley agreed to the deal; now she was a professional multiple personality patient. Later, she figured, she would get well and have new work, as a medical student, then a psychoanalyst. She was ecstatic.

She lay on her back and Connie pushed a needle into a glass vial of Pentathol. She pulled the plunger up. Shirley held out her arm.

By late winter 1956 Shirley had been in therapy for a year and a half. But instead of getting better, she was as sick as she’d ever been. She felt so
depressed that she often couldn’t finish her chemistry homework or make it to class. She told Connie about more fugue states. Once, after taking Willie to the bus station to go back to Arkansas for Christmas, she walked all night in the cold. Other times she traveled by herself to Altoona, Pennsylvania; White Plains, New York; and again to Philadelphia.
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It is hard to know how much these disturbing feelings and behaviors were Shirley’s way of seeking more attention from Connie, and how much they resulted from the confusion she must have been suffering from being dosed with an ever burgeoning variety of medicines—apparently as part of Connie’s research into the effects of new drugs on mental illness. Connie had recently added Dexamyl, another barbiturate-amphetamine combination, to Shirley’s pharmacopeia.
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As well, she gave her Equanil, an anti-anxiety pill more popularly known as Miltown. It had been put on the market in 1955, accompanied by great fanfare from pop media like
Newsweek, Time
, and even
Cosmopolitan
, which suggested that the decade’s new crop of psychotropic pills could even cure female “frigidity,” and help career women who were nervous about matrimony to make the decision to marry.
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When Shirley felt particularly depressed or anxious, she frequently doubled, even quintupled, her prescribed dosages of Daprisal, Demerol, Dexamyl, Edrisal, Equanil, and Seconal. And Connie added Serpatilin, a combination of a tranquilizer and the stimulant Ritalin, as well as Thorazine, a medicine originally prescribed to relieve nausea and the kind of pain Shirley experienced with her periods. Thorazine would later be recognized as a potent antipsychotic whose side effects, particularly at high doses, include restlessness, confusion, blackouts, and unusual thoughts and behavior.
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With this powerful drug and all the uppers and downers, Connie also gave Shirley phenobarbital, another barbiturate, on top of her regular, intravenous doses of Pentothal.
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Connie’s colleagues probably never learned of her extravagant medicating. Nor did they hear about another irregular treatment she gave Shirley. For house calls she carried a machine of the kind that many psychiatrists had used back in the 1940s. It came in a sturdy box the shape and size of a briefcase, with snaps and a handle. On the front were dials, meters, and on-off buttons, and one side had a hole for attaching a wire connected to two paddles. Connie would carry her apparatus to Shirley’s apartment and
climb in bed with her. She would clamp the paddles to Shirley’s temples, twirl the dials, and press the buttons. Shirley’s body would arch and crash with convulsions. Connie’s gadget was an old electro-convulsive therapy machine she had retired years earlier. But she felt Shirley was becoming suicidally depressed, and Connie thought electroshock would help.
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It is quite likely that all the drugs and electricity addled Shirley, erasing her short-term memory, generating frightening phantasms, and causing blackouts. They also may have provoked new alter personalities.

Even so, Connie was relentless, administering Pentothal round the clock. Shirley complained she was getting these injections when she didn’t need them. During a confrontation about this issue one morning in Connie’s office, she went into a rage, ran to the window, and started pounding it—behavior typical of Peggy. Next thing she knew, she was sitting on the couch with Connie’s arms around her. She wept as Connie held tight and told her, “You’re just marvelous.”
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She felt better.

Her diary records one impromptu Pentothal treatment. She had taken a chemistry class in the early evening, and she described what happened afterward:
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