Sybil Exposed (20 page)

To do that, Shirley wrote, she and Connie needed to stop demonizing
Mattie Mason. There was no denying her mother had been anxious and overly protective. It was true Shirley had started acting “funny” at age seven or eight, and her parents scolded her to try to cure her. Even so, the “extreme things” Shirley told Connie about Mattie—the rapes with the flashlights and bottles—were fictions. “I did not exactly make them up ahead of time,” she explained about her invented accusations. Somehow, probably from working in a mental hospital and reading psychology books, she had known the symptoms of schizophrenia and retrofitted them to her mother in a way that sounded convincing. Too, Shirley wrote, her descriptions of gothic tortures “just sort of rolled out from somewhere, and once I had started and found you were interested, I continued.” The details “made a good story,” and the embellishments were lubricated with Connie’s intravenous barbiturates. “Under Pentothal,” Shirley noted, “I am much more original.”

Having admitted she’d spent years lying to her therapist, Shirley had no idea how her beloved Dr. Wilbur would react. Would she curse her and refuse to ever see her again? Or would she forgive, and start the treatment and the friendship anew?

“I don’t know what next … I guess that is up to you,” Shirley concluded. With great trepidation, she handed the letter to Connie.

Connie read the letter without blinking. There was no way she was going to accept a recantation of her diagnosis of multiple personality disorder. Shirley was the most important patient in her entire professional career, not to mention in the history of psychiatry. Connie was discussing the case with psychiatry students and with world-famous doctors like Sandor Lo-rand. She was preserving the tape-recorded narcosynthesis interviews she was doing with Shirley, and speaking about the case at conferences. She had no wish to give all this up.
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“A major defensive maneuver,” Connie told herself about the recantation.
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Shirley’s denial was simply a metaphor. What her letter really showed was that she was progressing in her treatment and, paradoxically, trying to avoid the harder work that lay ahead. She was ready to go deeper. But first she needed a good talking to.

Connie sat her patient down and launched into an argument that mixed
psychoanalytic talk with mistaken, if common, ideas about the workings of Pentothal.

Mattie Mason, Connie insisted, was undoubtedly schizophrenic. She howled when she laughed. Her constant attempts to protect Shirley showed she actually meant her harm. Further, the Peggys hated Mattie. Connie knew this because they told her so while Shirley was under Pentothal. In fact, the Peggys and the other personalities spoke about many things which Shirley never remembered when the barbiturate wore off. So how could she claim it was she, Shirley, who’d done the talking? In point of fact, Connie insisted, it was Vicky, Peggy, and the other alters who came out under Pentothal.

Further, Connie said, Shirley’s recantation letter was merely a form of “resistance.” Resistance, she explained, was the ego’s attempt to trick itself into thinking it didn’t need therapy. But Shirley did need it, badly. She was denying now that she’d been tortured by her mother. This showed she really
had
been tortured.
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No matter that people injected with Pentothal recall little or nothing afterwards. No matter that Shirley’s recantation letter, far from renouncing therapy, desperately pleaded for more. Sitting across from her doctor on this warm afternoon in May, Shirley understood that she could continue being a multiple personality and keep Connie in her life, or she could reject the diagnosis and lose her beloved doctor’s therapy sessions, not to mention her friendship. The choice was hers, Connie implied.

Shirley went home, sat at her typewriter, and composed a new communication. This one blamed her earlier missive on a pesky, unnamed alter. “One Friday,” Shirley wrote to Connie, “someone stalked into your office, imitated me [and] had a paper written about how she had now become well and was confessing … that it had all been put on. Well, you knew better.”
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Connie instructed her secretary to schedule five sessions a week with Miss Mason. She started the Pentothal again.

Soon Shirley had two additional multiple personalities, and her “memories” about Mattie’s torture were flowing. Each recollection was more chilling than the last. One had to do with Mattie marching Shirley to her father’s carpentry workshop in a small garage next to the house, where Mattie bound her with rope, hung her upside down from the ceiling, and administered
enemas. There also, she led little Shirley upstairs to a loft, stuffed her in a crib—a big storage container—full of grain, and left her there. Shirley was suffocating in the grain when, by chance, her father walked into the workshop and freed her. He assumed an adolescent boy, the town bully, had done the mischief. No one realized that schizophrenic Mattie had tried to kill her little girl.
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Connie didn’t know that in Minnosota in the 1920s and 1930s, “cribs” were the size of silos, much too big to fit into Walter’s tiny workshop. There was no corn or wheat crib anywhere near the place. Instead, Connie took Shirley’s horrific tale as truth and fixated on it. She rummaged through her patient’s mind for more horrendous abuse, doing most of the talking during the Pentothal sessions, and continually cuing Shirley and her “personalities” about what she wanted to hear.

Connie tape-recorded a session that occurred in late 1958. The patient was not Shirley but her alter Clara, and Clara was complaining that Shirley still was doing poorly in chemistry. She couldn’t study because “her back hurts so.”
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“I think her mother hit her on the back,”
Connie suggested.
“Do you remember?”

“Stand up by the wall,”
Clara answered groggily. When Connie responded with an encouraging
“Yes,”
Clara continued this train of thought.

“Like when you kick?”
she queried Connie.

Connie eagerly put two and two together: Mattie plus assault.
“When did mother kick her?”
she asked.
“When did mother kick her? When she was going down the stairs?”

“Big girl,”
murmured Clara.

“Oh, when she was a big girl … And what else?”

“Throw the shoe at her.”

“Yes,”
Connie reinforced the answer.
“Throw the shoe at her. What else?”

“Throw the book.”

“Throw the book. And what else?”

“She hit her and knocked her out and she fell down.”

“Oh dear. What else? Standing up by the wall made her back hurt. Did her mother ever bump her or push her when she was standing against the wall, and bang that door in her back?”

The weapon was a broom with a
“big handle,”
Clara answered.

“Yes! … That’s it then,”
Connie responded excitedly.
“When you whack … right across the back and hit … it hurts like the dickens for a long time afterward … Yes, yes it hurts. That’s it. That’s it.”

With the “memory” of assault finally recovered, Connie told Clara, her back pain would disappear and Shirley would learn her chemistry.

But the back pain wasn’t disappearing, Clara complained. Shirley still hurt.

Connie renewed her search for memories.

“What else?” she demanded.

When Clara kept silent, Connie switched from words to the one thing Shirley craved from her as much as Pentothal: her touch. “Here, turn over. Now, we’ll make the broom handle, the book and the shoe all go away and instead we’ll feel nice, soft hands.” Connie stroked Shirley’s body. “There. Doesn’t that feel good?”

“You’re so nice,” Clara swooned. She recovered a memory of Mattie threatening to chop up her hands in a meat grinder.
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The pain did not go away, and neither did Shirley’s problems with chemistry. She studied her textbooks, went to lectures, and promptly forgot everything she heard and read. The obvious explanation was drugs. Sitting in class, she was under the influence of far more mind-and-body-altering medications than were most patients in the intensive-care unit at a hospital. She told Connie she felt “weak all the time.” And her back hurt.

“Did mother hurt your back in the carpenter shop, too?”
Connie asked.

“Yes,”
Shirley answered. And now she introduced a shocking element: her father had pulled the rope she hung from when her mother raped her with enemas. Walter was a new character in the horror story, and Connie was surprised. She knew Shirley loved her father. So she ignored this new accusation and refocused on Mattie.

“Where did she hurt your back? Besides with the broom stick.”

“In the attic.”

“What did she do in the attic? … How did she hurt your back in the attic?”

“She put me in a trunk.”

“Oh, and she slammed the trunk lid on your back? Were you afraid when you were shut up in the trunk?”

“It was dark in there … I was afraid I couldn’t breathe … afraid …”
Shirley’s speech halted, became garbled. The very word “afraid” triggered loud sobbing. Suddenly another voice took over.

Water, water everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink.

Startled, Connie realized Shirley was performing Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” just as she had recited it as a child with her mother in the sunroom in Minnesota. Connie chimed in:

Water, water everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

Shirley next took up “Invictus”:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

Eventually Shirley ended up in a hospital in Harlem, not for multiple personality disorder treatment but to break her of her barbiturates addiction.
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She lay in bed thinking about her current situation. All her life, she realized, she had put her troubles into divine hands, but lately she had turned to a psychiatrist and her drug. Now God had taken the drug away and was punishing her, even as her roommate, Willie, was urging her to terminate therapy because Connie was manipulating her.

Instead of heeding the warnings of God and Willie, however, Shirley left the West Side and found a tiny place across town where she could live alone, just a few blocks from Seventy-seventh and Park Avenue. Connie helped with the move. She paid the deposit on the new apartment and showered Shirley with gifts: old rugs and drapes from her office, a seven-foot Christmas tree, a fur-trimmed winter coat, an electric frying pan—even a cat.
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And once, when the rent was overdue, Connie fronted Shirley the money. “You can pay me back,” she said, “as soon as your father’s check comes.”
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Shirley knew she could give up Pentothal. She could give up her roommate, too, and even something of Adventism. But she could not give up Dr. Wilbur.

W
HILE SHIRLEY SLOGGED THROUGH ENDLESS
therapy with Connie on the Upper East Side, Flora was busy freelancing across town for women’s magazines, at first churning out pieces such as “Vitamins Can Help You Live Longer.”
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By the late 1950s she was tired of this apprentice fare and eager to write articles that would connect her with the famous and the powerful. In late 1959, she contacted the office of Vice President Richard Nixon, and asked if she could spend a week with Nixon’s mother.

The Republican Party was planning to run Nixon for president, and the article Flora proposed was “My Son: Richard Nixon.” It would use seventy-five-year-old Hannah Nixon to characterize her son to women in a “very warm” and “persuasive” way. Nixon’s people approved and Flora went to Hannah’s stucco house in California. Hannah was a quiet Quaker woman who prayed in front of Flora and drove her 1946 Chevrolet to the store for groceries. All the while she talked about her son Richard while Flora took notes.
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Then Flora wrote the piece for
Good Housekeeping.

“Many days I had nothing to serve but cornmeal,”
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Hannah told Flora, describing a period when the Nixon family was financially strapped. She added that one of Richard’s brothers had died of encephalitis when Richard was young, and another succumbed to tuberculosis. Richard’s character had been forged by these adversities. As a teenager he attended church four times a week. He was always close to his mother. She never heard him swear. Though he was vice president and could eat all the fancy food he
wanted, Hannah served him cherry pie and rump roast, his favorite foods, when he came home to visit.

Did this sweet, all-American mom think her good boy should be President? “If that’s what he wants—and I think he does—I hope he gets it,”
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she answered humbly. On that campaign note Flora ended her article. It came out in June 1960, a few weeks before the Republican convention, and it was chock full of the “overtly favorable corn” Nixon had told advisors his campaign needed from “a good article on my mother.”
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Soon Flora got an assignment from
Family Weekly
for an article about the wife of John F. Kennedy’s running mate. “Lady Bird Johnson: What Kind of Second Lady?” the resulting piece was titled. After Kennedy defeated Nixon, she wrote, for
Good Housekeeping
again, a piece called “What Jackie Kennedy Has Learned from Her Mother.” (Answer: How to be tactful and elegant. How to compete in horse shows.) Then Kennedy was shot and Lyndon Johnson became President. Flora followed with “Mrs. LBJ: Our 32nd First Lady” in
Cosmopolitan
, and “Ladybird’s Secrets of Successful Outdoor Entertaining.” (Those secrets were barbecues and garden parties. “And what Lady Bird can do at the White House or the L.B.J. ranch for 400 to 500 guests,
you
can do for 10 to 20.”)
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