Sybil Exposed (31 page)

Rudikoff was on the mark except for one thing. She referred to “people” and “persons,” yet Flora’s torrents of mail came almost entirely from women. And they weren’t just
thinking
of themselves as “disparate assemblages of roles”—they
were
confronting new roles, barrages of them. Profound social changes had recently opened up new spheres, at home, school, and work. It was hard for people to get used to those spheres, and they led to conflicting feelings. Searching for a sense of integration, women took up multiple personality disorder as a metaphor, thanks entirely to
Sybil.

“I always had times when I wanted to be someone else,” an unmarried young woman from Massachusetts named Delphine wrote to Flora. Inside, she explained, she had other selves, “struggling to escape.”

Delphine said she cared for nothing except “being loved.” But for women, to be both loved and unmarried required constant sexual willingness, lest a “chick” be labeled a cockteaser, a bitch, or even worse, “uptight.” Many young women eagerly embraced the new, erotic zeitgeist. Many others felt pressured by men, who were still calling the shots: demanding sex on their own terms, paying little attention to their partners’ desires or needs.

“As I was reading
Sybil,
” Delphine wrote to Flora, “the question … “What is a whole person?” came to my mind. Another did also: “Am
I
a whole person?” She felt “torn in all directions,” Delphine added, but she told Flora how “grateful I am for a book like
Sybil
, for it made me realize that I have to get myself together, learn to be me.”
13

Millions of women felt similarly—as though they harbored buried
identities crying for discovery, expression, and integration via extraordinary and heroic ministrations such as the kind Dr. Wilbur had given to Sybil. And indeed, new psychotherapies claiming special qualities were springing up in the 1970s. Many aimed to help patients find their inner selves by thinking and talking about their relationships with their parents—often in aggressive and disturbing ways.

Primal therapy, for instance, theorized that unremembered psychic pain from early life caused illness in adults. Children were thought to be deeply traumatized by the experience of being conceived and born, and after that it just got worse, because parents rarely showed enough love.

Primal therapy encouraged people to sob, roll on the floor, and scream blood curdling accusations against their parents. “Daddy hates me. Stop, Daddy, stop!” “Mommy! You promised you wouldn’t!”
14
The screaming was said to bring back repressed memories of trauma during childhood, birth, and even conception. These recollections freed the self.

Years down the road, primal therapy was dismissed by many psychiatrists and psychologists as quackery, but meanwhile, people flocked for treatment, including celebrities like ex-Beatle John Lennon. He incorporated his experience into the 1970 rock album
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band.
One song led off with a lyrical rendering of primal therapy’s founding principle: “As soon as you’re born, they make you feel small / By giving you no time instead of it all.” Another song wailed “Mama, don’t go!” over and over and over. It’s title: “Mother.”
15

Lennon could just as well have been singing about the hateful Hattie Dorsett.

Sybil
, with its depiction of a psychotic, violent mother, became a poster book for national concerns about child abuse—which were skyrocketing during 1973, if media coverage is evidence. Americans were flooded that year with stories about infants and preschoolers whose parents assaulted them with weapons and—as Senator Walter Mondale put it—by “kicking, torturing, strangling, stabbing, scalding, burning, poisoning, dismemberment, starvation, imprisonment, freezing and crushing.” Flora sent a copy of
Sybil
to Mondale; he wrote back that he looked forward to reading it.
16

Meanwhile, many of the letters Flora received dwelled on abuse in
families. A California woman named Karen wrote that the book “greatly facilitated the understanding of the most complex and horrifying results of wounds that can be inflicted on children in the name of love.”

The letters kept coming, from readers moved by various aspects of the story. Some saw Sybil as a heroine and an inspiration. As one woman wrote:

I admire her courage against the seemingly insurmountable problems that she faced as I’ve never respected or admired anything or anyone before. When I am faced with my day-to-day problems, I hope I will always remember Sybil and realize how small my troubles really are.

Younger women, high school and college-age girls, focused more on Sybil’s multiple personalities than on her suffering. Some wondered if they, too, sometimes split into different people, then reunited with no memory of the alternate selves.

Countless others took multiple personality more metaphorically and more seriously. Ellen, from northern Virginia, had just gotten a bachelors degree in math and had started looking resignedly for a “strictly math related” job that would mean “abandoning a part of me that was more concerned with people.” But reading
Sybil
had made her realize she didn’t have to be “just one person at a time for all my life.” After all, “if Sybil can live with all her selves, I shouldn’t have to give up any part of me just because of a job.” Ellen changed her career plans, and her joy at her new “multiplicity” was visceral: “My body teems with excitement,” she wrote Flora, “at having many different parts of its own. You have revived in me the feeling that each day is a new beginning.”

Lois, from Los Angeles, felt mystical about her encounter with the book. “I find it utterly amazing that not everyone who has read
Sybil
sees the … fantastic probabilities of understanding not only themselves but the entire universe.”

Others wrote Flora simply to thank her for a fantastic read. Janna, in Washington state, thought
Sybil
was “sensational.” Lori admitted she’d cried while reading it. Suzanne, from rural Pennsylvania, was especially absorbed when Sybil’s mother sexually tortured her: “When I read that part, I got deeply involved like I was there watching.” Lori was eleven years old going on twelve, and so was Janna. Suzanne was in eighth grade.
17

With letters like these pouring in, Warner Books knew it had a hit in its forthcoming paperback edition. The company scheduled two million copies for release in early 1974, each with a cover featuring a long-haired young woman’s face in jagged slats, like an image in a smashed mirror.
18

Flora, Connie, and Shirley decided to cash in on the book’s success even further. They contacted a lawyer in Kentucky, drew up papers, and emerged with an enterprise for marketing
Sybil
-related products:
Sybil
tee shirts,
Sybil
lapel buttons,
Sybil
board games,
Sybil
dolls. Shirley started contacting manufacturers, and when she made calls and wrote letters, she always mentioned the new company. Its name was Sybil, Inc.
19

I
N EARLY 1974 FLORA LEARNED
that Lorimar, a made-for-television film company in southern California, wanted to produce
Sybil.
Contracts were signed and work on the project began. The first task was to recruit a writer to do the screenplay.

Stewart Stern took the job. He was the perfect Hollywood writer for
Sybil
, having spent years trying every therapy under the sun.
1
He also was one of the film industry’s most highly regarded screenwriters; his most famous work was
Rebel Without a Cause.
Stern was a stickler for understanding his characters completely and for communicating, as he put it, “the deepest psychological motivation” for any action he portrayed.
2

In early 1974 he started work on
Sybil
the television script, but after weeks of reading and taking notes, he realized there were major roadblocks. The characters made little sense—and in many ways neither did the story.
3
Flora was furious when she heard these criticisms. She had wanted to author the script, and she’d heard that Stern was writing his teleplay from scratch because he thought her book lacked dramatic conflict. She wrote him an incredulous letter. “No conflict in
Sybil
? Man against man,” she suggested. Also “man against society … man against the elements … man against himself.”
4

Stern politely ignored her.

But he was so puzzled by the book that he typed out over two hundred questions
5
for Flora and Connie, including No. 24:

When Sybil had a “fugue” in Dr. W’s office in Omaha and tried to jump out of the window, Dr. W said “I wasn’t really disturbed.” … Really? Seems to me Dr. W. would have been gravely disturbed.

As a maven of psychotherapy, Stern was also bothered that Dr. Wilbur socialized with her patient, even traveled with her. “
Where did Dr. W. and Sybil go on their ‘frequent out of town visits’?”
he asked in Question No. 225:

If they stayed places overnight, did they share a room? Did this present problems for either of them? Was it very hard for Sybil to accept Dr. W. in the role of a friend … a woman who had nightgowns, possibly creamed her face, brushed her teeth, went to the bathroom? In the light of Hattie’s bathroom excesses, did the knowledge that Dr. W went to the bathroom on occasion present problems for Sybil?

Stern’s biggest problem with the book was that he didn’t believe its claims about Sybil’s crazy mother hurting her.
“Hattie’s shrill rising laughter when she tortures Sybil,”
he wrote, “
must have been heard by Grandma upstairs and the live-in maid, Jessie. How could it go on in the way described?”

Further, given that Sybil came from
“a town whose hobby was to keep an eye on everyone,”
how could her mother possibly have gotten away
“with such excesses as public lesbian play, fooling around sexually with small children … public defecation, and torture?”

Stern’s years of therapy had sensitized him to the fantasy life of children. In a string of additional queries, he asked if Sybil’s horrific memories might, in fact, be
“the elaborate creation of a child warned constantly that if she didn’t behave … some awful and unnamed punishment would be meted out to her.”
Furthermore,
“Has Dr. Wilbur ever had second thoughts … ? Has she ever thought, as I did, that perhaps the tortures were invented by Sybil … ? Isn’t it possible that a badly given enema, even if given therapeutically, can be seized upon as the form of the torture to come when threats are made?”

Looking for answers, he flew to New York and spent several days with Flora, asking her question after question from his list. Flora had never spoken at such length with a screenwriter, much less one as brilliant as Stern. After several conversations, she forgot her hostility and warmed up to him, admitting that she, too, worried that the torture memories were false. She confessed that she once considered scrapping the project.
6

But she also played Stern some audiotapes of Shirley’s old therapy sessions with Connie. Though he could barely make out the words, he was bowled over by the screams of terror in high-pitched, little girl voices. Sobbing and furniture crashing—that was Peggy trying to escape, Flora explained. Garbled pleas to some mysterious tormenter to “Stop! Stop!” Abject weeping. It made Stern want to weep, too.
7

Stern didn’t know that Peggy and the other child voices had never appeared except when Connie had “Sybil” in bed with a syringe full of Pentothal in her arm, or on a couch in a hypnotic trance. Still unsure of what to believe after his visit with Flora, Stern went to Lexington to talk to Connie.

She had reserved a room for him at a motel, and she showed up for their first meeting, as Stern remembered over thirty years later, driving “the longest convertible Lincoln Continental I’d ever seen. It was pink. Pink! And in [the] front … was this apricot colored hair on top of a face.” Though it was only 10:00 a.m., she “was in full evening make up. Beyond evening—it was theatrical makeup. She had blue eye shadow on and she had these enormous false eyelashes.”
8

The visit lasted many days, during which Stern spent lots of time at Connie’s house, going over his questions. Connie brushed aside his doubts. Of course Sybil had been tortured by her mother, she insisted. Hadn’t Sybil’s own father admitted he’d once found her suffocating in the wheat crib of his backyard workshop?

It never seemed to have occurred to Stern that Connie might be lying. She had “an incredible self assurance” when she talked about Sybil, he recalled years later, and her persuasiveness was buttressed by his impression of her as one of the foremost psychiatrists in the world.
9
Sybil’s psychoanalysis constituted “one of the outstanding cases of all time,” Connie proclaimed. Stern believed her, especially when he heard more therapy tapes, which were as indecipherable yet riveting as the ones he’d heard at Flora’s.
10

By the time Stern left Lexington he was enamored of Connie. Sometimes she used her flat, hard, professional voice with him. Other times he heard the tender, intimate voice usually reserved for people on her couch.
“I found myself wishing more and more that I too could have been—could be—your patient,” he wrote Connie after he returned to California. If he’d had that good fortune, he added wistfully, “there might have been ultimate discovery and final resolution” of his psychological problems.
11