Authors: Debbie Nathan
He called his book a “nonfiction novel.” Novelists couldn’t pull it off because they didn’t care enough about journalism, journalists were unable because they didn’t know how to write novels. Possibly, Truman Capote implied, the only person who could successfully tackle a nonfiction novel was Truman Capote.
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Flora had never written a novel, but she had tried her hand at radio and television plays. Though none had ever been produced on major stations, she understood plot, character development, and the other elements of drama. And as a journalist, she knew how to gather facts. Reading Capote, she became convinced that Shirley’s story could be turned into a nonfiction novel.
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She had barely started working on
Who Is Sylvia?
when she was overwhelmed by a death almost as random as the ones Capote described. In October, she and her mother attended the bar mitzvah of a nephew. A festive dinner followed, within hours of which the guests were doubled over with food poisoning. Esther was stricken, and though everyone else soon recovered, she died in a hospital on November 1. Flora was five months short of her fiftieth birthday. For forty-eight years she had lived with her
mother, including continuously over the past three decades, and for seven years the two had shared a bedroom. Thanks to Esther’s fanatic caretaking, Flora knew nothing about cooking, cleaning, or mending the holes burned in her clothing by cigarette ashes. She was so devastated that she was unable to think much about
Who Is Sylvia?
Instead, she did what she always did when she grieved: She threw herself into busy work, including more journalism from the nation’s capital. “The Johnson Girls: A Study in Contrasts,” was typical of her writing from this period.
“Luci has strong maternal feelings. She wants a large family … While Luci’s bathroom contains an infinite variety of lipsticks, Lynda’s has no such display… . It took her father to persuade her to include fashion magazines on her reading list.”
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It was typical Flora celebrity mongering and puffery. But stars and fluff took her mind away from death.
Things were much cheerier down south. When Shirley arrived at Lakin State Hospital, Connie took her to the nearest town, Point Pleasant, a picturesque riverfront hamlet of seven thousand people. The women looked at houses and when Shirley found a red-and-white-trimmed cottage she liked, Connie supplied the down payment. Shirley was overjoyed to finally have her own home.
Her new job made her equally happy. Under a federal grant, she worked with Lakin’s forty child residents, doing art therapy and planning their school studies, play time, and visits with social workers and psychiatrists. To do this she scrutinized the children’s medical and psychiatric records, a task laden with responsibility. She delighted in staying late at the hospital and running an evening story hour. She had the children make masks, puppets, and a puppet stage. And of course, she set up a dollhouse.
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She stayed just as busy at home. In Point Pleasant she organized private art classes for children and adults. She was invited into the local chapter of the American Association of University Women and asked to give talks on subjects such as Chinese art.
Point Pleasant’s coziness reminded her of Dodge Center, Minnesota, except that there she’d been a sullen adolescent who locked herself in her room and felt snakes crawling up her arms. Now, her doctor had diagnosed her as having gotten well, so she suddenly
was
well—no snakes, no more
alter personalities. People in Point Pleasant noticed that she was twitchy in a birdlike, nervous way. Other than that, she was so functional, so normal, that her eleven years as a psychiatric invalid seemed like little more than a bad dream.
She didn’t even have a psychoanalyst anymore, and sometimes she forgot to call her former one “Doctor.” She switched to “Connie,” who after all was just her friend now. Their connection was still strong; Shirley got a car and made the three-hour trip to Weston on holidays and weekends. Connie’s husband was seldom there, so the two women took road trips, sometimes as far as Florida. Or they stayed home and passed the time styling each other’s hair and playing with their dogs. Connie still had her toy black poodle. Shirley had a silver one to match.
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And they talked about
Who Is Sylvia?
which—a year after Shirley’s cure—was bobbing aimlessly in the mire of Flora’s inertia. In early summer 1966 she sent a draft chapter to West Virginia.
Connie fumed when she read it, and so did Shirley. The chapter was “lousy,” they complained in a joint letter sent to New York on the Fourth of July. Not only that, they couldn’t fathom why she had written that Shirley’s alter “Peggy” liked to listen to TV with the volume too loud. That description was all wrong and “out of character.” Flora had better get things right and do some more work immediately. Otherwise, they would find a new writer.
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Flora answered that she was trying to sell
Who Is Sylvia?
to the prestigious publishing house Knopf.
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Connie was only partly mollified. She needed cheering up, for things were not good at work. When she’d first arrived at Weston State Hospital she’d been welcomed as a star from the big city, an expert who would change a dark, backwards hole into a clean, well-lighted place. Connie was blamed for a series of misfortunes, some of which she was involved in and some she was not—a tuberculosis outbreak, a mass escape from the hospital by violent patients, rumors that others were having sex on the hospital lawn. By late 1967 she was out of a job, and irate about it.
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Then the University of Kentucky offered her a post in the psychiatry department of its medical school. She accepted, left West Virginia, and soon became a popular if controversial professor in Lexington. Young women at the medical school appreciated her passion for recruiting and
mentoring female psychiatrists at a time when there still were very few of them. Young men, too, felt appreciative. Connie was respectful to medical students, always addressing them as “Doctor” when few other professors bothered. She tried to build up confidence.
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She was also admired for her passion for treating patients. “She would take on anyone, no matter how complex their problem,” one colleague remembered years later. “She didn’t think about money or about the time it would take to treat them.” And she listened.
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Other psychiatrists might give patients fifty-minute hours and drug prescriptions. Connie talked with them for hours, abandoning her hard-charged, abrasive persona and shifting to her deep, gentle self.
As usual, her warmth got out of hand. That became apparent as she developed strange relationships with some of the medical residents. “Connie’s children,” is how they are remembered today by old-timers in the psychiatry department. “The lame and the halt,” a faculty member called some of them,
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because everyone could see they had emotional problems. Connie should have encouraged these troubled residents to seek treatment with therapists who weren’t on the faculty. Instead, she took them on as patients—a clear violation of boundaries in psychiatry, since she was also working with them daily as their superior.
The lame, the halt, and even some better-adjusted residents clustered around her. There were about eight of them, mostly men, and all became practicing psychiatrists. In the coming decades, half would be accused of having sex with their patients. Most of these would lose their licenses, temporarily or permanently. One, charged with having sex with teenaged boys, would shoot himself to death. Lexington psychiatrists who had not been “Connie’s children” would follow these shocking events and speculate about the extent to which they’d flowed from Dr. Wilbur’s bad behavior. Had her boundary violations with the young residents encouraged their own violations against patients? People chewed over the question, which had no firm answer.
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One thing was certain, however. During Connie’s tenure at the university, Lexington, Kentucky, became as efficient at manufacturing multiple personalities as it did at producing race horses.
The process started soon after she arrived at the university, when she showed residents how to test for the condition. She recommended that a
patient be hypnotized, then encouraged to look into a mirror until someone different appeared. The patient was then asked if the person in the mirror had a name and an age. If the answer was yes, the diagnosis was multiple personality. Connie did not seem to realize what recent studies have shown: many people, even normal ones, will see different faces in a mirror within minutes of gazing.
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Lexington’s first case of multiple personality was diagnosed in early 1968, after a woman came to the campus hospital appearing to be a paranoid schizophrenic. But when she was hypnotized she sucked her thumb and produced a parade of alter personalities she called “Allison,” “Baby,” “Bitch,” “Bethany,” “Pam,” and “Clod.” Under further hypnosis she recovered “memories” of severe childhood abuse. In short order Connie hypnotized four additional female patients and decided that they, too, had alters.
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But a man named Jonah would become Lexington’s star multiple. He came into the hospital complaining of violent spells that he could not remember later. Connie hypnotized him and evoked a personality Jonah called Usoffa Abdulla, an angry “god.” Two additional alters followed, and Connie turned Jonah over to Dr. Arnold Ludwig, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry.
Ludwig already had a history of aggressive experimentation, including with LSD, and he was known as quite the showman. Once, after a patient said she was “demon possessed,” he dressed up as a priest, gathered the residents around, and went through the motions of a Catholic exorcism. He taped Jonah going in and out of his personalities. He decided to scientifically measure the alters’ existence.
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Ludwig gave Jonah some word-memorization tests, hypnotized him, and tested the alter personalities to see whether information taken in by each had “leaked” into the others’ consciousness. It seemed there was no leakage; each alter really appeared to have amnesia for the others’ learning. They seemed like separate people.
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Ludwig hooked Jonah up to an electro-encephalograph—an EEG—to measure each personality’s brainwaves. The readings all came out different. Ludwig gave Dr. Cornelia B. Wilbur a byline, and the study was published in 1972 in a prestigious journal.
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Jonah joined
The Three Faces of Eve
as a famous case, and Connie became a recognized expert in the field of multiple personality.
Shirley, meanwhile, was thriving by herself in West Virginia. She had gotten a new job after Connie left the state, as an art professor at Rio Grande, a small college just over the border, in Ohio. She’d found the position on her own, without drawing on any of Connie’s clout or connections. Fourteen years had passed since she’d lived independently, and now here she was, back on her own and teaching art again, just as she had been before going into therapy so very long ago. Not only was she self-sufficient, she loved her new work. Today, former Rio Grande students still remember “Miss Mason” as shy and austere but warm in her teaching, supportive of everyone’s efforts with canvas and paint.
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She got tenure and reactivated her membership in the National Art Education Association, which she’d let drop for years while immobilized in therapy. Her old fantasy of becoming a psychoanalyst faded. She was forty-three years old and it looked as though she would be a college art professor—a very contented one—for the rest of her working life.
She probably would have been if not for
Who Is Sylvia?
The book was still on Flora’s back burner in late 1968, rejected by Knopf and several other publishers, who—as Flora would later recall to reporters—dismissed it as “trash.” But with Shirley and Connie busy acclimating to new jobs, no one was thinking much about
Who Is Sylvia?
—Flora least of all. Her life was more frenetic than ever, piled not just with work but with something she’d forgone for over a decade: a lover.
He was forty-six-year-old Leonard Reiser,
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president of John Jay, the New York City public college where Flora had gotten work in 1965, first teaching speech and English, and later also becoming the director of public relations. A Columbia Law School graduate and former deputy police commissioner, Reisman cut an elegant figure, with deep-set, soulful eyes and wide, soft lips. He was considered an adroit and self-confident man, but he was haunted by a lack of self-confidence, and he was not getting along with his wife. Soon he was meeting weekly with Flora for two hours.
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They were supposed to be discussing ways to promote the college, but more often they talked about Reisman’s problems. He and Flora began an affair.
They sneaked around, according to Ben Termine, Flora’s best friend at the time and head of the Speech Department. “They would meet for
dinner away from the college. Reisman’s wife suspected, and once things almost came to a head when Flora choked on a chicken bone at a restaurant and he had to take her to the emergency room. That almost gave the whole thing away.”
Very early in the morning on the first Friday of December 1967, Reisman was hailing a taxicab on the Upper East Side when he suffered a massive heart attack. He died before the ambulance could get him to the hospital.
Flora was in Washington, D.C., that day, attending the weekend wedding celebration of President Johnson’s daughter Lynda Bird. She was in the bathtub at her hotel when the news of Reisman’s death reached her by phone. She rushed back to New York, ostensibly to handle the press but really to mourn her lover.