Sybil Exposed (23 page)

Shirley didn’t complain. “It is good to feel needed and worthwhile,” she wrote. “When I am not busy and am alone I feel so worthless.”
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In a note to Connie, she told her that “I love you, I’d do anything for you.”
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She took to staying overnight at Connie’s when she and her husband went out of town. In a letter to her stepmother, Shirley described how she once “took my pajamas, a sheet and pillow slip and light weight white cotton blanket” to Connie’s “and slept on her couch.” “I left a note on her living room door, where she’d come in about midnight,” Shirley added, “telling her I was in the office.” Shirley needn’t have worried that Connie would disapprove of this Freudian slumber party; the next morning she found “a note slipped under the door.” “By all means okay,” it said. It was signed, “Dr. Connie.”
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The two women went for weekend jaunts. Connie often drove to Brooklyn to get her hair done, and she would take Shirley along. “We ride in the convertible with the top down,” Shirley wrote to her stepmother. “Nutty? Some of the things Doctor Wilbur and I do, you would not believe … I hardly do.” The women even went out of town together. For Labor Day weekend in 1962 they took Connie’s car from New York to Michigan and
back. When she returned, Shirley excitedly described how they’d “stopped at a roadside table and had tomatoes, cookies, cake, rolls (we’d bought for sandwiches) and peaches.” They slept in a motel room with twin beds, she added. “Doctor is fun to travel with.”
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Connie knew she was violating the rules of her profession. According to a transcript of one of their recorded therapy sessions, she told Shirley that their socializing was “not good analytic technique.” But she didn’t care: “I’m willing to violate the rules for you,” she said.
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She did so, apparently, because her relationship to Shirley and her multiple personalities felt so beautiful, so much like those days in the 1930s at the mental hospital in Michigan, when she helped heal her hysterical girl patient by walking hand in hand amid tall trees, dissolving the walls of their souls. Now, a generation later, Connie was equally smitten, with maternal feelings so strong that they bordered on the erotic. “[Y]ou know what I have been through in not having children,” she told Shirley during a therapy session, adding that she wished she could have been her real mother. Too, Shirley was beautiful. She had “a nice, trim little figure … nice hands,” and “the cutest nose” Connie had ever seen. Her lips were full and “open to some kind of contact.” Her face was “well shaped”—a face, Connie said, “that I like having around. This is the face that I like to be with.”
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Her colleagues were not privy to these declarations. All they heard were generalities which echoed a controversial theory about how to conduct therapy, one which fascinated Connie. Chicago psychoanalyst Franz Alexander was already renowned for his theories about psychosomatic illness: the idea, for instance, that asthma, arthritis, and even diabetes were manifestations of neurosis caused by bad mothering. Alexander promoted what he called “corrective emotional experience,” recommending that therapists socialize with their patients, including outside of the office, in order to take the place of inadequate parents and encourage psychological healing. Alexander urged that the corrective experience be completed quickly, in just a few sessions.
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But Shirley’s therapy stretched on, and Connie seemed intent on making their “correctives” permanent.

“God sent you to me,”
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she told Shirley, and Shirley, too, thought God was involved. She was convinced that her psychoanalysis was part of a divine plan to convert Connie to Seventh-Day Adventism. Shirley took
her Bible to therapy sessions and did exegeses on the Book of Revelation. “My! Things are moving fast these days, just as Mrs. White prophesized,” she remarked after astronaut John Glenn orbited the earth three times in early 1962. “It certainly cannot now be far from the end of time.”
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Connie would later recount that she was repelled by the fundamentalist ideas her patient expounded, and she had no interest in the evangelical camp meetings Shirley invited her to when she made plans to visit her father and stepmother in the Midwest. But Shirley had a different understanding of Connie’s response to Adventism. “She has now acknowledged the seventh day as Sabbath,” she wrote to her stepmother. “Dr. W. has come to the place where she says she believes Sister White was a prophet and really did have visions from God.”
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During this proselytizing phase of her psychoanalysis, Shirley often walked the streets of Manhattan “praying silently for guidance.”
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The praying seemed to fill her up. She gained weight and felt calm and optimistic.

Those good feelings were quashed, however, by Shirley’s obsessive efforts—abetted by Connie—to go to medical school and become a psychoanalyst. In 1960, after Shirley had taken various noncredit chemistry classes at institutions like Columbia Teachers College, Connie decided she was ready to matriculate as a premed student at Columbia University proper. Shirley registered for summer courses in subjects such as zoology and inorganic chemistry.
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But Shirley was a terrible student now, and by the next year she had missed so many classes, failed so many tests, and made such bad grades that she was expelled. Connie was indignant and wrote to Columbia’s dean, demanding Shirley be reinstated. The dean refused, politely but firmly assessing as nil Shirley’s chances of ever becoming a doctor. Shirley was sick to her stomach and paralyzed with misery.
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Connie got another idea about how to help Shirley. She had just taken a part-time administrative job at Falkirk, a private mental hospital in the Catskill Mountains, upstate from New York City. Falkirk was a luxury facility. Its clientele were well to do, and they received their treatment on a veritable estate, whose mansions sat amid hills and pine forests. Connie used her influence to get Shirley hired at Falkirk to give private art therapy classes to depressed and schizophrenic patients.
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Shirley was thrilled to have a regular income. She earned $30 to $40 a week which, added to her father’s stipend, gave her enough to buy toiletries, art books, clothing, and even an occasional milkshake at the fountain of the drugstore where she got her Librium and Thorazine.

Her favorite pupil was a society woman and longtime schizophrenic named Margaret. Thirty years had passed since she had last spoken, and she usually shuffled around Falkirk in a daze or stayed in her room screaming. But she seemed to connect with Shirley, who talked to her in soft, gentle tones. On art therapy days Margaret came to the crafts room early and grabbed the paintbrushes. Once she even uttered a few words. Delighted, the staff predicted she would soon speak normally again, thanks to her new teacher. Shirley nearly burst with pride.
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Walter Mason was in ill health during this period, and in spring 1962 he died. Despite this unquestionably traumatic event, Shirley grieved normally—she wrote letters to friends talking about how sad she felt, she continued to teach Margaret, and she did not split into alter personalities. Soon, though, she was facing a real crisis: penury. For years Walter had been sending her $100 a month, in a time when Shirley’s apartment rented for $90. Now her father’s stipend was gone, and she desperately needed to make it up.

Hoping to raise money by selling her paintings, she took several to a vanity gallery on the Upper East Side where artists paid to display their work to audiences who sometimes commissioned artwork to match the colors of their dining room and kitchen walls. The gallery owner said Shirley could get up to $400 for an oil or watercolor of her favorite themes: nature, skyscrapers, and boats.
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But she hardly sold anything. To help, Connie bought some paintings for herself and continued to take orders from friends. She hired Shirley to decorate her kitchen with hand-painted wallpaper.
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By the Christmas season after her father’s death seven months earlier, Shirley was so indigent that she could not afford to send gifts to her closest friends. She suggested exchanging long letters instead. One, from her old Mankato classmate Luella, made her especially happy, for it contained cash. A thank-you letter Shirley wrote makes clear how financially bad off she was. “Used your $1 for nylons,” she told Luella, and “$1 for milk, food, butter.”
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Connie again swooped in. One of her former psychiatric patients, a woman named Karen, wanted to open elite gift shops on Madison Avenue and in East Hampton, a resort area of Long Island. Eager to go the extra mile with another emotionally needy but ambitious woman, Connie bankrolled Karen’s venture. She did so with the proviso that Karen hire Shirley to work in the Manhattan shop. Shirley knew of the arrangement, but in her mind the job “came through God.”
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Karen paid Shirley $1.50 an hour plus commissions for items she sold. In addition, Shirley was to create inventory by purchasing baby dolls wholesale and outfitting them with hand-sewn clothes. Connie gave her $100 to buy the raw materials,
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and Shirley was excited about the chance to play with dolls once again. She visited a neighborhood dressmaker’s shop and begged scraps: silks, crepes, and satin. She spent hours in the shop, her apartment, and Connie’s car en route to Falkirk, stitching tiny “slips, panties, housecoats, nighties, [and] coats with hoods trimmed in imitation white fur.”
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Life became a cross between Santa’s Village and a sweatshop—complete with sweatshop money. Karen never got the shop off the ground, and within a few months she had dropped Shirley’s wage to $1.25. She shuttered the business soon after. Shirley was as poverty stricken as ever, and just as dependent on Connie.
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“You may hear [from me] a little less often,” Shirley wrote her stepmother in early 1963, after the price of an airmail postage stamp rose from seven to eight cents. It sounded like a joke but she was serious. “I am counting pennies, literally,” she wrote. She could afford to eat only two meals a day, and one was toast and milk.
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Florence Mason, now a widow, maintained a regular and very affectionate correspondence with Shirley—in letters the two discussed Seventh-Day Adventism, prayer, and their respective problems with loneliness. Now Florence was horrified to hear of Shirley’s hunger. “I am sending you $5,” she wrote, “and I want you to get some food with it.”
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These alms did not keep Shirley from looking eccentric when she stepped out of her apartment wearing overshoes even on dry, sunny days. The shoes gave her a bag-lady air but she had to wear them, she wrote Florence, because she couldn’t afford new nylons and didn’t want people to see the runs in her tattered old stockings.
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She still had her part-time work at Falkirk, but it was becoming less
and less satisfying, and more and more unreliable. For every session that Margaret spent painting peacefully, there was another time that she vomited on the art table.
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Shirley’s miracle therapy had not turned out to be so miraculous: After months of art instruction, Margaret was as mute and deranged as ever, and one day in spring 1963, she failed to show up for her lesson. It was the first time she had ever skipped class, and Shirley was terrified about being laid off from Falkirk. She was “worried half sick” Margaret would never paint again. “I prayed,” she wrote to Florence.
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It was all she could do.

Oddly during these days of destitution, Shirley was taking taxicabs.
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They were paid for by Dr. Herbert Spiegel, a New York psychiatrist known for his dapper bow ties and his stellar ability as a hypnotherapist. During years of research, Spiegel had discovered that 5 percent of Americans are so highly hypnotizable that they often go into trances on their own, without even knowing it. “Hypnotic virtuosos,” Spiegel called these exceptional people. Their tendency to enter trances spontaneously is so marked that sometimes they temporarily lose their sense of identity. The last thing Spiegel thought therapists should do was reinforce these people’s sense of splitting. Instead, he recommended techniques to quickly help them regain the sense that they are one person. As far as Spiegel was concerned, Shirley was this type of patient.
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He had learned about her special abilities in 1959, when Connie asked him to check Shirley’s capacity to be put into a trance. When he hypnotically regressed her to earlier ages, she sometimes said her mother hurt her, but Spiegel knew that people often fantasize during age regression therapy. What he did not know was that during her hypnosis sessions with Shirley, Connie was asking extremely leading questions, the kind that are notorious for causing false memories.

Spiegel had encountered Vicky, Clara, and Marsha when he hypnotized Shirley. But he did not consider them alter personalities. He always called them Shirley’s “roles.” He thought of them as enactments by a woman who expressed anxiety by behaving as though she had other people inside her.

During his hypnosis testing with Shirley, Spiegel found her to be such a virtuoso that he recruited her to serve as a model in classes where he
taught other doctors how to do hypnosis. She would ride in cabs to medical schools like Columbia University, and there audiences would watch as she sat onstage in a chair—exactly as Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot’s patients had sat before audiences at the Salpetriere hospital in Paris almost a century earlier—and went into her trances.