Sybil Exposed (39 page)

S
HIRLEY WAS PROBABLY UNAWARE THAT
Sybil
’s veracity was being questioned and that someone was tracking her down. But with Connie gone, her life was getting harder. She could barely force herself to step out onto her own front lawn, much less visit libraries to read magazines and newspapers. And though ISSMP&D conferences were a mecca for laypeople diagnosed with MPD—one regular attendee was Chris Sizemore, the real “Eve” of
The Three Faces of Eve
—Shirley had never showed her face at meetings and didn’t intend to start.
1

She had very little money to live on, much less to enjoy herself. Her royalties from
Sybil
had dropped steadily as the years passed, and by the early 1990s she was receiving only about $5,000 a year. That was virtually her only steady income, apart from Social Security payments that must have been miniscule given that during four decades after entering therapy with Connie in New York City, she had managed to work full time for only eight years. Connie had supported Shirley for most of her life, but her will gave most of her money to her nieces and to a university fund to encourage women to study medicine. To Shirley Connie bequeathed only $25,000, plus her own dwindling share of royalties.
2

By the mid-1990s Shirley was scrambling to pay the taxes on her house and to buy the basic necessities. She kept trying to market her doll products with help from a nurse named Roberta Guy, who had cared for Connie during her final days.
3
Shirley had confided to Guy then that she was Sybil, and after Connie’s death had hired Guy to be her companion.

Guy treated the dolls like an Avon business, hawking the merchandise to friends and family. Her efforts didn’t go very far, so Shirley also tried to sell her artwork. Guy had a friend whose brother was an antiques dealer, and she told him she knew an elderly, indigent artist who needed help making ends meet. Wishing to be a good Samaritan, the dealer bought a few pieces and put them in his shop.
4

After a couple of the paintings sold and Guy came back with more, the dealer and his partner threw a party where they announced that a reclusive local artist named Shirley Mason was starving—which was almost literally the case—and asked their guests to buy her paintings. Looking at them, people could see that she was trained; still, the work was uneven. Some of it was passably professional, done in a cubist style popular in the 1950s and early 1960s. But much was amateurish, especially her paintings that included people; she could barely render the human figure. A few more pieces were sold, thanks mainly to the impulse of charity.

Regardless of her artistic ability, of course, all of Shirley’s paintings would have been snatched up if her dealers had known she was Sybil and advertised that connection. They didn’t know, but she constantly worried that they would find out. She never went to the antiques shop and instead had Guy handle business. Guy tried to reassure her. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “I’m with you and I’ll never let anyone come close to you.” That calmed Shirley some.

But Shirley’s major comfort was her religious devotion. From Friday at sundown until Saturday twenty-four hours later, she listened to Seventh-Day Adventist inspirational tapes and read from the Bible. Sundays she enjoyed an Adventist television program,
It Is Written,
with dramatizations of Gospel stories and the lives of Christ’s Apostles. For years she’d had to downplay her faith in front of the irreligious woman who had defined her life for her. Now that woman was gone. On her living room mantel she kept a large, black-and-white photograph of Connie in a buttoned-down suit jacket. But on weekends the portrait did not matter. On those days her living room was her church.

Then she discovered she was sick again. Tests revealed her cancer was back, and it had spread past her breasts into her liver and pancreas. Left untreated, she would not have long to live. What did she want, the doctors asked. Radiation? Chemo?

Neither, Shirley told them. No more of what she’d had in 1990: the hospitals, the drugs, the pain. At least Connie had helped doctor her then. That had made things bearable, but Connie was gone now, and no one could replace her. Nature would take its course this time. She was ready for death.
5

Psychoanalysis sleuth Peter Swales never did speak with Shirley. It took him until the fall of 1998 to discover her name—which was several months too late. She died quietly in her home, surrounded by nurses, on February 26 of that year. She was seventy-five years old. It was early evening when she died.

Most of her house had always been gloomy at dusk, requiring that lamps be turned on. But the sunroom was different. Light poured in even late in the day, warming things in winter just as, seven decades earlier, it had warmed a Minnesota room built for just the same purpose. In childhood Shirley’s sunroom had housed her dolls—dozens of them, bedecked in hand-stitched clothes, their hair curled and plaited, gazing into the brightness as though beckoning their owner to make up secret tales about them. Now, in 1998, the same dolls, worn and cracked with age, stared from toy cribs and high chairs in their special room in Kentucky.

After Shirley’s body was taken away the nurses packed their things and left. Only the dolls remained.

I
F THE STORY OF SYBIL
shows us anything, it’s that our collective fears and yearnings sometimes push us toward progress but impel us to reactionary behavior as well—behavior we might manage to avoid if only we knew ourselves better. The Sybil craze erupted during a fractured moment in history, when women pushed to go forward, even as the culture pulled back in fear. Sybil, with her brilliant and traumatized multiplicity, became a language of our conflict, our idiom of distress.

In some ways that idiom was silenced at the end of the twentieth century. Shirley Mason’s identity and the name of her hometown had been unearthed in late 1998, after investigators Borch-Jacobsen and Swales discovered a letter to her from her childhood friend Anita that had been misfiled in the section of Flora’s archive that was open to the public.
1
It was too late then to talk to Shirley, but the media found plenty of debunkers from Minnesota who dismissed her claims that Mattie had abused her, and skepticism reached as far as
Newsweek
and
The New York Times.
2
Shirley’s diagnosis was generally dismissed, and Connie’s and Flora’s names were besmirched.

The idea of multiple personalities went into hibernation, at least among psychiatrists. One of them, a professor at Harvard University’s school of medicine, surveyed a sample of his American colleagues in 1999, asking what they thought of dissociative identity disorder. Most responded that there was insufficient scientific evidence to justify listing it in the
DSM,
and many suggested that it be deleted.
3
The controversy persists today, even as
Sybil
remains in print. In fact, a new edition came out in 2009 with a
three-page advisory for readers; it warns that questions exist about Shirley Mason’s diagnosis and the truthfulness of her life story.
4

Nonetheless,
Sybil
still has readers, many of them high school students assigned the book in their English and psychology classes. The first thing they see is the cover, still blaring in bright letters that the following pages tell “The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities.”
5
After that they hit the caveat. The takeaway message is that Sybil is beautiful and spooky in the same way that angels and ESP are beautiful and spooky. When it comes to science, she is not to be taken seriously. Still, the takeaway continues, maybe we
could
take her seriously if the scientists would only come up with better research.

New books and films for the lay public have also appeared with a similar message, featuring multiple-personality-disordered women, and men, too.
6
There is a television remake of
Sybil
, with Jessica Lange as Dr. Wilbur, and featuring a warning similar to the book’s. The series
United States of Tara
—which was billed as a comedy about MPD—won Emmy awards. A 2010 Hollywood film,
Frankie and Alice
, starred Halle Berry as a dancer split into two alter personalities: an African American and a white racist. Berry was helped to prepare for her roles by a psychiatrist who early on worked with Connie Wilbur to get MPD recognized by psychiatry. And scriptwriters for
United States of Tara
were advised by Dr. Richard Kluft, another pioneer and a founder of what is today the ISSTD, or International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation.
7

I attended the ISSTD’s 2009 annual convention and spoke with leaders a few minutes after they had wrapped up their luncheon to recognize outstanding researchers and clinicians in the field of dissociation. Plaques had been presented to people who were still trying to objectively prove that DID/MPD exists. Others were diagnosing new cases, including in distant countries which had barely heard of these disorders until the ISSTD doctors set up shop. One woman I talked with had just received the Cornelia B. Wilbur Award.

I told her and the others about the extensive evidence of Connie’s ignorance, arrogance, and ethical misconduct that I had discovered during my research for this book. Her work with the patient who became Sybil might
have started out as well intentioned, I pointed out. But its end product was largely a performance based on fiction.

“So what?” replied psychotherapist and ISSTD president Kathy Steele. “I don’t know what difference it makes.” She urged me to look at recent studies conducted to scientifically demonstrate the existence of dissociative identity disorder and its relationship to child abuse. That research, Steele insisted, “has got nothing to do with Sybil.” I looked at the studies and they turned out to suffer from the same limitations as the older work.

Down the hall from my meeting with ISSTD’s directors, Dr. Kluft was conducting a very stale workshop about Margaret, a patient he’d been seeing for years. Margaret’s parents, Kluft said, were secret Ku Klux Klan members who routinely slaughtered infants and delivered electric shocks to Margaret’s vagina until she escaped by joining the U.S. military, but then she got kidnapped and tortured by high-ranking generals and she only remembered all this during years of therapy for multiple personality disorder. Kluft expressed no doubt that her story was true. Not a hint of audience skepticism surfaced during the question and answer period.

Perhaps no one had questions because Margaret was described as being as pretty as the late Grace Kelly and just as rich—implying that she was paying out of her own pocket for Kluft’s work on her. During the rise of managed health care in the 1990s, insurance companies stopped reimbursing therapists for the years, even decades, of treatment deemed necessary to cure a multiple. That policy change relegated MPD and DID to the medical sidelines, along with stem-cell facelifts and high colonics. As a result, the ISSTD had become so marginalized that its members could say anything they wanted to and few outside the organization would care, because few were listening anymore. In the desiccated little world of dissociation studies and treatment, Sybil was a dead issue.

But beyond that world she survives, at least in spirit.

As psychologist Antonio Martinez-Taboas has noted, people in modern Western culture are socialized to nurture complex selves, rich interior lives, and individualistic experiences apart from their communities. In times of crisis, Martinez-Taboas speculates, the idea of having multiple selves, complete with lavish role playing and feelings of separation from the world—dissociation—may be the perfect psychic container for people’s troubles.
8

And they do have troubles, the vast majority of which are not invented but sincerely experienced—in ways strictly predetermined by culture. Shirley’s vitamin B12 deficiency made her sick in the 1930s and early 1940s, with very real neurological and physical symptoms. Sadly, medical ignorance was also very real; doctors knew little about vitamins. But they did know about Freud, and they gave a name to Shirley’s aches, numbness, lurching, weight loss, sadness, moodiness, and faints: hysteria. And later another, more heroic name, MPD.

With each new diagnosis came rules about how to feel and speak her suffering. She did as she was told and then some—and within a few years, a girl who’d started out with low blood counts became a woman with countless selves. It was Dr. Wilbur’s fault that this happened, and it was not her fault. All of her professional life she had made extraordinary efforts to assist women in healing and fulfilling their dreams. She wanted to help and she did the best she knew how, all the while lauding her work as “pure science.”

Being MPD made Shirley Mason an invalid and a recluse, but it also made her feel important. University of Pennsylvania social work professor Lina Hartocollis has thought about what a person like Shirley could gain from adopting and enacting MPD. For some people in our modern, secular culture, Hartocollis speculates, forgetting one’s identity and playing with another may replace religious experience as an escape from the problems of everyday life.
9
If that’s how it was for Shirley, perhaps she really did have the happy ending that Flora wanted for her, and which we can assume Connie did, too, if we give her even the slightest benefit of the doubt.

Still, Shirley’s happy ending came freighted with terrible contradictions, and not just for her. The book that resulted from her having been diagnosed with MPD tapped into the public’s fears of danger, threat, and insidiousness under the surface of American life. The millions and millions of Sybil fans who came to think of themselves as empowered to do great things also felt so damaged by the cruelties of traditional family life that they could not trust their own mothers, much less their memories. As in the case of Jeanette Bartha, the college athlete and activist who ended up in bed all day, women and their social struggles were reduced to a bizarre illness. The cure was not critical inquiry or protest marches or efforts at the polls. Instead, the cure was drugs, hypnosis, and pajamas.