Sybil Exposed (35 page)

The relationship alarmed Flora’s friends. Ben Termine, who ran the Theater Department at John Jay, warned her that she was dangerously overinvolved with Kallinger. She wouldn’t listen, and continued to talk about “Joe, Joe, Joe,” Termine remembered. “She felt people didn’t understand he was a sweet guy who’d been abused.”
8

Yet almost three years after beginning her long talks with Joe Kallinger, Flora still had not found the Rosetta Stone of child abuse she was looking for. By then she was paying a staff to help with the search for trauma. Finally, in 1979, one of her investigators talked to a woman who’d lived near Joe when he was a child. The woman recalled a time when Joe was eight years old and and wanted to go on a school field trip. His mother insisted that he stay home, and when Joe protested, she beat him on the head with a hammer.
9

Flora took this dramatic revelation back to Joe. At first he did not remember it, but eventually he added details and came up with yet another awful story, about a hernia operation he’d had almost forty years earlier, at age six. After he came home from the hospital, he remembered, his mother and father had told him the doctor did something to his penis with a knife so that it would never get hard for the rest of this life.
10

Flora interpreted this strange conversation as the Kallinger parents’ cruel attempt to frighten their son into avoiding innocent sex play with other children. She considered it a definitive clinical tale, with all the Freudian elements: a knife as phallic symbol, the Oedipal complex from hell, and castration anxiety. The story was sure to send goosebumps through—as Flora’s agent put it—“major markets: women and all those frightened suburbanites.”
11

Simon & Schuster titled Flora’s book
The Shoemaker: Anatomy of a Psy-chotic.
It came out in 1983 and made the best-seller list, but unlike
Sybil
, it remained there for only a few weeks. It never earned the publisher a profit and was deemed a commercial flop. Nor did
The Shoemaker
impress
the critics. It was one thing to promote the mental illness of “Sybil,” a tiny, anonymous woman who could not have harmed a flea. It was quite another to make a victim-hero of the infamous Joe Kallinger, who forced women at gunpoint and knifepoint to perform fellatio on him, who was a murderer.

One reviewer called
The Shoemaker
“pulpy.” The
Los Angeles Times
joked that Flora had been fooled by Kallinger because she was an English teacher, not a psychiatrist, and probably “an easy grader.”
Psychology Today
sniffed at her “mechanistic” castration-threat explanation for Kallinger’s mental problems and her knee-jerk acceptance of his childhood abuse stories.
12

Flora felt hurt and betrayed. But bad reviews were nothing compared with the next problem she faced. Flurries of civil actions were filed against her by the State of New Jersey and by Joe’s robbery and rape victims, as well as by the survivors of people he had murdered. New Jersey was invoking its “Son of Sam” law, prohibiting criminals from making money by publishing descriptions of their wrongdoing. By extension, the state claimed Flora could not profit, either, from
The Shoemaker.
Using the same argument, the victims and families demanded Flora’s profits. Some sued her for libel and invasion of privacy.
13

Flora vowed to fight as a matter of pride, because even if the plaintiffs had won their lawsuits, she would not have had the money to pay them. Her $475,000 advance from
The Shoemaker
had vanished—spent long ago on investigators, book-related travel, and calls to Joe that had been running over $1500 a month for years. And now there were more lawyers sending invoices. Flora had quietly settled the “gay pajamas” lawsuit out of court in 1980, splitting the $10,000 settlement and the attorney costs with Connie and Shirley. Now, with the Kallinger litigation, she was amassing bills of up to $50,000 a year, with no three-way partnership to dilute the pain.
14

By 1986 she realized that
The Shoemaker
had put her $100,000 in debt.
Sybil
had sold millions of copies in America by then and been published in nineteen foreign editions, yet Flora was utterly broke. Desperate to make money, she tried to sell
The Shoemaker
to Hollywood or television. There were no takers. She pitched spinoffs of the TV version of
Sybil
: a soap opera; a Broadway musical she proposed should be choreographed by Twyla Tharp, with songs including “The Peggy Part of Me,” “Nobody Likes Girls,” and “I Want to Be the Man I Marry.” These efforts also bombed.
15

She began a new book, a “psychobiography” about German Nazi leader
Rudolf Hess. As well, she planned to launch her own talk show. She was seventy-one years old, though most people thought she was still in her sixties because she almost always lied about her birth year. Sometimes she lied because of her identification with the venerable Broadway habit of never revealing how old one was. Other times, she may have worried that she would not get work if her true age were known.
16

She still could barely stand her old Sybil, Inc. partners, and she seldom communicated with them. But in early 1987, illness, and a need for sympathy, overrode her hostility toward Shirley and Connie. “I was suffering from dehydration, starvation, total potassium deficiency, and electrolytes gone wacky,” she explained in a letter she sent to Lexington.
17
Soon doctors discovered the cause of these symptoms: colon cancer. She had a tumor that was bigger than a grapefruit. Laser treatments over the next few months had virtually no effect on it.

By August she was in terrible pain but still traveling to Pennsylvania to see Joe. “I cannot tell you, Boomy Bum Boo, how much it meant to me to be with you,” she wrote him after one such visit.
18

In late September 1988, she was again hospitalized, for almost two weeks.
19
Joe wrote her telling her she had to get well because she was all he had. “I do think about our love,” she wrote back, “which gives me the will to fight and become well again. … You, too, are all I have left in my life.”
20
Days after returning home she collapsed.
21
This time she knew she was dying.

Her cousin Stan visited her and was surprised to see her hair askew, her face devoid of its usual fire-engine lipstick, and her voice gone slow and thoughtful.
22
Illness and painkilling drugs were no doubt partly responsible. But Flora may also have been reflecting on the riddle of her life: How had a serious young woman—one who had taken unpopular stands and wanted her writing to change the world—turned into an older woman obsessed with telling silly and salacious stories whose main purpose was to garner her as much fame and attention as possible?

On November 3 she died of a stroke and a heart attack.

Her will offered her voluminous, coffee-and-tobacco-stained personal papers to the New York Public Library,
23
where her father had worked for so many years. But the library did not want the papers. They eventually wound up where Flora had spent her own many years, at John Jay College.

Though the Public Library slighted Flora, another grand city institution honored her. The day after she died, the
New York Times
ran her obituary. It talked of the success of
Sybil
and the legal controversy around
The Shoemaker.
It mentioned her long teaching career. It alluded to her feisty independence and bucking of convention by noting that she left no husband or children.

This obituary from America’s newspaper of record was accurate in all respects except for one: it stated her age incorrectly, saying that she had died at seventy when she was actually seventy-two.
24

No one ever asked for a correction.

B
Y THE LATE 1970S, CONNIE
herself was in her seventies and had retired from the University of Kentucky. She had not slowed down, though. On the contrary, she was busier than ever, on a crusade to promote multiple personality as an illness that was much more common than previously believed, and which required intensive treatment. She did this promotion by continuing her
Sybil
-related media appearances. In addition, she started her own psychiatric facility, which she hoped would provide cutting-edge, humane treatment to multiples while keeping them out of large, dreary institutions. She named her new treatment center the Open Hospital. It was unsupervised by anyone but her, and it was unlicensed, chaotically managed, and possibly illegal. Yet the Open Hospital helped spread Connie’s ideas around Lexington and eventually throughout the world.

The facility consisted of two rundown old houses not far from downtown Lexington. One contained offices for Connie and three young psychiatrists, who were each paid $40,000 a year to work for her. The other house was a dorm for patients who came from out of town for treatment—mainly for multiple personality.
1

There were many such patients by 1978, shortly after the “hospital” opened. Typically they had been mentally ill for years before they heard of multiple personalities and Dr. Wilbur. They had seen psychiatrist after psychiatrist and been diagnosed with schizophrenia, hysteria, manic depression, and borderline personality. They’d popped prescription pills, spent time in institutions, and taken electroshock. They were still very sick.

Then they read or watched
Sybil
and learned that a brilliant doctor in Kentucky could explain the voices nattering within them, the black moods, the blank spells. Not only did this doctor know what was wrong, she knew how to make it right.

Letters poured into Connie’s mailbox from people—almost all women—begging for treatment, and she invited them to Lexington. Arriving with backpacks and suitcases, each was assigned a room and a therapist. In a bizarre turn, Connie even gave some of these patients jobs.

One woman had a degree in nursing when she came from the Southwest to the Open Hospital. Connie appointed her as the facility’s nursing supervisor, even though she had more than thirty alter personalities, and some of them got the urge to run off. Once she bolted from Lexington with no money or identification and did not return for weeks. While she was gone Connie had no nurse—though her other patients were smashing themselves with hammers, mutilating themselves with knives, and overdosing on drugs.
2

A chronically suicidal patient, Marcy, became the Open Hospital’s janitor. Marcy routinely tried to kill herself with pills, and she sliced up her arms with sharp objects. When Connie left town for a seminar or a conference, Marcy would starve herself, sometimes wasting to eighty pounds and ending up on feeding tubes in a nearby hospital. Meanwhile, the dorm’s basement would flood and the “janitor” was not there to drain it.
3

Marcy’s numerous crises served as models for her roommates. There wasn’t much entertainment in the old house: no television, radio, or record player; very few books or magazines, and no supervisory staff to talk to.
4
So, just as in Dr. Charcot’s asylum in nineteenth-century Paris, and just like at Ann Arbor’s Psychopathic Hospital in the 1930s, with its teenaged girls fighting over baby bottles, the women of the Open Hospital spent a lot of time hanging out together. They learned how to be ill by imitating each other.

After observing one of Marcy’s alters cutting herself with knives, other patients developed alters who cut themselves. One of Marcy’s personalities wouldn’t eat; soon, everyone had anorexia. The patients even taught each other how to be sick outside of the facility. A woman walked downtown, smashed the windows of businesses like McDonald’s, and told managers and police that it was OK because she was a patient of Dr. Wilbur’s
(the managers nodded sympathetically and the police drove her back to the Open Hospital). Observing how risk-free it was to let a destructive personality emerge in public, other patients discovered that they, too, had alters who were vandals. “I have the frightening feeling I’m getting worse,” a patient from California wrote in a letter she sent back home. She had come to Lexington with a handful of personalities, but instead of “integrating” them, she developed additional ones.
5

The Open Hospital’s therapeutic focus, of course, was on identifying childhood abuse, and Marcy recovered memories of her mother tying her ankles to a stick and hanging her on a meat hook—exactly as Sybil’s mother had done in the movie. The nurse remembered her parents raping her.

Heather, an aspiring writer and poet from the Midwest, had been diagnosed since late childhood with all kinds of psychiatric disorders, including paranoid schizophrenia.
6
It was not until the 1970s
Sybil
craze erupted that she started showing signs of having multiple personalities. After reading about Connie in a magazine, she wrote to her requesting treatment. In Lexington she was repeatedly asked if she remembered her parents abusing her. She didn’t remember, but her Open Hospital therapist refused to take “no” for an answer—and Connie said she could help Heather get her writing published as part of her therapy. Heather was encouraged by this promise, and finally she recalled a mundane detail of family history: that both of her parents were only children. This, Connie decided, was the reason Heather was ill. Her mother and father had grown up without siblings, so they didn’t know how to raise their own child.
7