Authors: Debbie Nathan
The work filled her weekdays, but the loneliness of her free time still tormented her. She telephoned Connie and Flora in the early morning hours of Saturday and Sunday, and in the too-late hours as well. Flora accepted these intrusions with major help from her mother. Esther Schreiber, now seventy-eight, had been a widow for six years, and her life’s work had always been to attend to Flora’s every need so her daughter could concentrate one hundred percent on her career. Now that work included entertaining the subject of her daughter’s potential book. It was Esther who stayed on the phone when Shirley made her Sabbath phone calls. Esther chatted patiently for hours and invited Shirley for dinner. She answered the door when Shirley dropped by unannounced.
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Connie, meanwhile, spent much of her free time looking for a way to leave New York, which in 1964 seemed anarchic and threatening. In Queens early that year, a middle-aged woman, Kitty Genovese, had been stabbed to death by a stranger outside her apartment building, and the newspapers reported that thirty-eight neighbors witnessed the homicide in progress but did nothing to stop it. Months after that, just blocks from Park Avenue and close to Shirley’s apartment, a disturbance broke out after a policeman confronted a fifteen-year-old black student engaged in horseplay with friends and fatally shot the boy. Harlem and other black neighborhoods erupted in riots and ominous graffiti such as “Burn Baby, Burn!”
The last straw came when Connie hired a teenager to care for the dogs after Shirley became unable to do so because of her new jobs. Out on a walk one day, the girl was mugged at knifepoint for the sum of a dollar and thirty cents.
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It was too much for Connie. Again she looked around for a mental hospital, if not to buy then at least to work in. This time she found one a world away from New York, in rural West Virginia.
Weston State Hospital was not for sale in 1965, but it desperately needed a new superintendent. Opened during the Civil War, it boasted nineteenth-century asylum architecture in the grand style. Inside its lovely buildings, though, Weston was a hellhole. It housed over two thousand residents, more than twice the recommended capacity. This enormous population was served by only two psychiatrists. Patients seldom got treatment. Mentally ill men spent their waking hours, as a journalist reported, “milling in a narrow hallway.” In another hallway women moaned and
huddled. At night in the crowded wards, the beds were jammed so close that they looked like one gigantic mattress.
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Still, Connie was frantic to move. If she took the job it would start in October 1965. Her husband, Keith, would remain in New York as a lawyer for Lloyds of London, and visit on occasional weekends.
But if she went to West Virginia, what would Shirley do? Over the years she had made some progress managing her sixteen multiple personalities and their disordered behavior. Coming out of hypnosis sessions with Connie now, she often remembered what Peggy and the others had said during the trance. Before, she had been completely amnesiac, so remembering seemed an improvement. And her body did not ache so much as before. Still, she continued to split into Peggy, Mary, and the others when she was with Connie. And she often felt paralyzed with anxiety. How, Connie wondered, could she possibly leave this patient on her own?
For a year Shirley had been waiting for Connie to set her up with a full-time job at a mental hospital. Meanwhile she’d taken menial jobs, including the desk clerk position at the St. Regis, a five-star hotel on Fifth Avenue. There, a Brazilian accountant named Mario started flirting with her. Soon they were dating, something she hadn’t done for ten years. Mario was on temporary assignment at the hotel. He was not an Adventist, but he was a gentleman, never demanding sex from Shirley.
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The two got along well and Mario knew nothing about Shirley’s diagnosis of multiple personality. But why should he? She’d never split into different identities in front of anyone unless she had first talked about the illness, with Flora, for instance. To Mario, Shirley seemed perfectly normal. After several dates he announced he would soon be moving to California for his work, and he wanted her to go as his wife. He presented Shirley with a diamond and ruby engagement ring.
Shirley was thrown into a quandary. She felt love for Mario, and she had accepted that she would never go to medical school. Still, she wanted to do a book with Connie about her illness. Besides, she wanted to work with mentally ill children, and if she stayed put she was sure that with Dr. Wilbur’s help she could land a job at a hospital. That would not happen if she went to the West Coast with Mario.
Connie was away when he proposed. Shirley did not wait for Connie’s return to make her decision. She broke up with Mario, and from that time
on, she would never have another boyfriend. For years afterward she would miss Mario and deeply regret her decision not to marry him.
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With Mario gone, no choices remained. After 1964 ended, more months passed, and Connie began searching for a way to take Shirley to West Virginia with her. She found a means by telling the head of West Virginia’s mental health department that, as a condition of her employment, a second person would also have to be hired—Shirley—to do art therapy with children.
The health department accepted the package deal but could not place Shirley at Weston. Instead, she was assigned to another facility: Lakin State, just across the border from Ohio. Formerly the West Virginia Hospital for the Colored Insane, Lakin was an egregiously substandard institution. The previous year, a grand jury had decried the hospital’s “filth,” “stench,” “sex problems”—probably referring to rapes—and general neglect of patients.
But Lakin had its good side. A unit for juveniles had recently been opened, and the hospital had a long tradition of providing arts and crafts activities to patients. Shirley was given a job working with children. She was to begin in late October, the same time Connie moved to Weston.
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It was now early summer, three months before the women were scheduled to leave New York, and Connie knew things had to change between Shirley and herself. After all, she would not just be running a very large and troubled hospital; she would also be teaching psychiatry part time at a nearby university. Lakin and Weston were a three-hour drive from each other through the mountains. Weekend visits would only occasionally be possible.
She told Shirley she would simply have to get well. For over a decade, being a mental patient had been the reason Connie paid attention to her. Now, the only way to get more of that attention was to move to West Virginia and work full time at a state mental hospital. But that would be possible only if she “integrated” her multiple personalities—and soon.
So she did. In addition to the tranquilizers she was taking, Shirley upped her ingestion of antidepressants, past the recommended dose. This caused a medical crisis, and on a Wednesday in early July, Flora got a call from Shirley begging her to come to her apartment immediately. She was lying on the floor when Flora arrived, weak, trembling, and bruised. She gave a strange explanation. She’d been in her tiny living room, she said,
when suddenly she felt a spasm, jumped several inches off the floor, slipped on a rug, and pitched ten feet forward.
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As she was describing this seizure to Flora, Shirley’s face suddenly went blank and her voice became unrecognizable. “I’m the girl Shirley would like to be,” she intoned. “My hair is blonde and my heart is light.” Then, as suddenly as the voice emerged, it disappeared. Shirley got up off the floor and Flora hurried to call Connie and tell her about this new identity, whom Flora christened “The Blonde.” But The Blonde made no more appearances.
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Shirley never again dissociated into an alter personality.
Four weeks later, Connie wrote a final notation in Shirley’s file: “All personalities one.” The date was September 2, 1965, almost eleven years after their first psychotherapy session on Park Avenue. Having been declared cured, Shirley packed her things. She gave up her apartment at the end of the month and spent several days at Flora’s, waiting for the Lakin job to start. Then she left New York.
Flora had her happy ending, exactly when she wanted it. Now she could do the book—and not just a potboiler, but a work of moral and literary heft. Writing about multiple personality disorder would free her from the surface, she told herself. It would take her to the deeps, to that place in her writing where she’d always yearned to go. She felt terrific about the whole thing.
It’s harder to know Connie’s reaction. A photograph from the period shows her face strangely smooth, waxy, and devoid of emotion even though she is smiling. She was fifty-seven years old the autumn Shirley was cured, and she would later confide to a relative that she availed herself of plastic surgery to refresh her appearance.
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It’s not clear when Connie went under the knife, but perhaps she felt she needed a pick-me-up before departing for Appalachia with Shirley in tow.
S
HIRLEY AND CONNIE WERE STILL
in town when Flora started writing her proposal, christening the book
Who Is Sylvia?
and strategizing about finding a publisher. As she talked about “Sylvia’s” case to friends, she found that many were skeptical about whether multiple personality disorder really existed, and suspicious that the patient was faking it. Others had read
The Three Faces of Eve
or seen the movie almost a decade earlier. They weren’t interested in sequels.
Flora herself wasn’t sure why “Sylvia’s” story was different from Eve’s, or if it could be made as exciting. Eve’s three personalities had strikingly defined characters. “Sylvia,” on the other hand, had sixteen personalities who were mostly the same age—preteens—and who hardly seemed to have bodies: they only occasionally talked about what they looked like. Even Connie had trouble telling them apart.
Flora realized she had too many people and not enough characters. This was a dilemma for a writer attempting to create sharply etched heroes and villains, with a powerful supporting cast. She tried to flesh out “Sylvia’s” alters by grilling Connie about them:
Which are the strongest of the personalities? Vicky? Peggy? Mary? … Are any of them ugly? Can you describe the body image of each? … Are some brighter than others, kinder than others, more impetuous than others; do they agree on religion, books, music, painting; do they like the same people, hate the same people, have the same politics, enjoy the same things? If S. goes to the theater do they all
see the play? … When S. paints, do they all cooperate, or do they obstruct the process?
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Connie had not thought about these questions and neither had Shirley. Over the years, it had become clear that some personalities seemed angrier, calmer, or more depressed than others—but not always, and in other respects they rarely distinguished themselves, except for “The Blonde,” who may have emphasized her hair color simply because, by the time Shirley had the “seizure” preceding her personalities’ final integration, Flora had already told her what information she needed about the alters in order to write a book.
Still, it was hard to imagine people as young as Shirley’s alters having enough “personality” to interest adult readers. This problem was “a very serious commercial point,” Flora warned. She didn’t really think of the alters as selves anyway. She told Connie she imagined them more as “extensions of moods, personality traits, family connections, periods of life, repressed desires, fantasies, abilities, character traits, et al.—but not as physical entities.”
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“NO, NO, NO,” Connie insisted, “We cannot think of them as fantasy selves.”
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She told Shirley to come up with physical descriptions and Shirley complied. Two personalities were blonde, she said. One was a redhead and the rest had brown hair. All were blue-eyed and thin. And some were adults after all.
In ensuing months, Connie and Shirley prepared a document describing each alter by age, height, weight, hair color, coiffure, and favorite clothes. An enormous
dramatis personae
was being created, over five times the number as in
The Three Faces of Eve.
The cast was in the making when Connie and Shirley started packing to leave Manhattan. A few days before they departed, in late September 1965,
The New Yorker
ran Part One of
In Cold Blood
, Truman Capote’s book about the stabbing and shooting murders of a Kansas farm family by two nihilistic, psychopathic punks. In an unprecedented publishing move, the magazine used four installments to print the book-length account of the killers and the plainspoken, rural community affected by their crimes.
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Capote’s work eerily reflected the national sense of giddiness and doom, idealism versus malevolence, that haunted the country after the
Kennedy assassination and during the years when the Civil Rights Movement rumbled, the sexual revolution revved up, and the Vietnam war spun out of control. Bus riders hunched over the magazine, glued to its pages and missing their stops. Married couples with subscriptions fought over who went first. Reviewers praised the author’s ability to turn journalism into something that read like a novel.
In Cold Blood
was a new genre. Like the novel, it used narrative tools such as plotting, foreshadowing, and scene juxtaposition to give fictional heft to reality. The details, however, were all true, even if they fit together so elegantly that readers suspected they were made up. In one scene a mangy dog trots by a Kansas road. In the next scene one of the punks swerves his car to kill the dog: he’s always enjoyed killing dogs. The twinning of these scenes seemed too perfect, too fortunate, and an interviewer for the
New York Times
asked Capote if he hadn’t really taken two distant events, each involving a separate dog, and mashed them into one. “Absolutely not,” answered a piqued Capote. “One doesn’t spend almost six years on a book, the point of which is factual accuracy, and then give way to minor distortions.”
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