Authors: Debbie Nathan
She would always regret missing what she called “the wedding of the year,”
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for she adored First Family parties. “I went to Richard Nixon’s inaugural balls with her,” Termine remembered. “She was so attracted to the lights of Washington that when she got there she was suddenly brighter, faster—everything seemed heightened. And her diction! She talked more theatrically in Washington than she did in New York!”
“Politics?” Termine added rhetorically. “Flora wasn’t out for politics or political change. She was out for Flora.”
Accordingly, after Nixon’s 1968 electoral victory, she informed his staff she’d voted for him, then submitted an application for a job in the presidential cabinet (she never heard back from Nixon’s people).
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After she realized she wouldn’t be relocating to Washington, she took on more work: doing public relations for her college and working on a nationally syndicated newspaper column with Stuart Long, a liberal Texas journalist who looked like a cross between Abraham Lincoln and Buddy Holly. Cavern-faced, bespectacled Long traveled the country writing about politics, and Flora added a psychology slant: they called their joint effort “Syndrome USA.”
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Soon the two were sleeping together and Long was writing Flora notes filled with sexy double entendres and paeans to her nipples. As college president Reisman had been, Long was married with children. His family lived in Austin, though, so Long’s wife was fuzzy about what her husband was up to in Manhattan.
Shirley and Connie were also in the dark about Flora’s pecadillos. As
long as she reported regularly to them about her attempts to sell
Who Is Sylvia?
, they felt sufficiently informed.
Finally, in late October 1969, an editor bit. Gladys Carr worked at a small publishing company, Cowles. She was intrigued by multiple personality, and she already had heard of Dr. Wilbur. A friend with emotional problems had received psychotherapy from her, and as far as Carr was concerned, Connie had saved the woman’s life.
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But when Carr asked if she could meet the real “Sylvia,” Shirley got cold feet. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to do the book anymore; she said she was worried her identity as a mental patient would be revealed. Flora and Connie swore they would keep her identity secret, and to reinforce that vow, Connie offered to make a huge sacrifice. Though it meant she would achieve no fame from
Sylvia
, she, too, would appear in the book under a pseudonym. Shirley finally relented.
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Flora signed a contract with Cowles.
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The advance was $12,000, as much as she was making each year doing full-time teaching and public relations work. She got a third of the money immediately. Another third would come halfway through the writing, and the final third on completion of the manuscript, which was due in only eleven months.
The book’s title morphed slightly, to
Sylvia: The Many Multiples of One.
Flora started working on it in earnest. Very quickly, however, she discovered problems with the story, problems so profound that she would wonder if she could write a book about Shirley.
F
LORA’S MAIN DILEMMA, THE FLATNESS
of the multiple personalities, had seemingly been taken care of with Shirley’s and Connie’s list of sixteen sets of likes, dislikes, and hairdos. But as she more closely examined that inventory, Flora saw that she still had problems. She was preparing to write an action-packed, “nonfiction novel,” yet the personalities didn’t
do
much of anything. Even when rebellious little Peggy first appeared in Connie’s office, she didn’t run or yell or bug her eyes out—she simply knocked on the office door and matter-of-factly announced herself as an alter personality. Connie had acted equally ho-hum during this introduction. And when Shirley was first told she had multiple personalities, she’d barely blinked an eye.
For years Connie had made tape recordings of her therapy sessions, and now she gave them to Flora. Listening, Flora heard sobbing, screaming, and confusion:
“Let me out! Let me out! The people, the people, the people! It hurts. It hurts. My head hurts. My throat hurts. The people and the music. The people and the music. I want to get out! Please, please!”
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The reel-to-reel mayhem dragged on for hours. The distress it conveyed was incoherent, monotonous, and for all its horror rather boring.
But during conversations Flora had with Connie and Shirley as she prepared to write the book, they told her about the many childhood atrocities Shirley had remembered after Connie helped her dissociate into Peggy, Vicky, and the other alters during drug and hypnosis sessions. Flora was amazed by Mattie Mason’s assaults. Describing them, she realized, would
boost
Sylvia
’s appeal to readers, especially because Americans were growing increasingly concerned about a newly recognized phenomenon: the battered-child syndrome.
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That’s what pediatricians were calling the recent discovery, by radiologists in the 1960s, that, when x-rayed, many children showed evidence in their bones of having been severely beaten by their parents. Experts were trying to figure out why in the world people would deliberately injure their offspring. Some thought poverty was the underlying problem: when fathers and mothers led mean lives marked by too much work, too much stress, and not enough money for a babysitter, they got frustrated and swung their fists, including at babies.
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Other experts focused on individual rather than socioeconomic causes. They thought people who assaulted their children were mentally ill. By the early 1970s, policy makers had become interested in this possibility, including Senator Walter Mondale, who a few years later would serve as vice president under President Jimmy Carter. Mondale was working on a package of child-protection legislation that would fund abuse prevention and treatment programs, and require teachers, doctors, and others to notify authorities if they suspected maltreatment in children they worked with. Mondale soon realized that his colleagues in Congress would be friendlier to those reforms if they believed child abuse was caused not just by minority parents who were poor, but also by white mothers and fathers who were middle class but emotionally disturbed.
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Policy makers who were trying to solve the child maltreatment problem also realized that sexual abuse was even more compelling a public issue than was physical abuse. That fact was even reflected in the literary world, in a book by an outspoken woman lawyer. Lisa Richette was a former Philadelphia assistant district attorney who had gone on to specialize in defending children accused of crimes. Her book
The Throwaway Children
was first published in 1969 and promoted as a critique of the country’s juvenile justice system. True to marketing strategy, it contained many anecdotes about children unfairly sentenced in the courts and inappropriately locked up in detention centers. But the real draw for readers was the book’s titillating bizarreness, which was based on actual cases Richette had dealt with as a prosecutor. One chapter told of a group of children coaxed by a neighbor man and woman to copulate with the couple’s pet German
Shepherds. In another chapter, a paranoid schizophrenic woman made her young son fondle her breasts and genitals. A third case history featured a thirteen-year-old who murdered his parents after seeing them having sex and discovering his mother’s collection of hard-core pornography.
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This salacious material could have competed with the sleazy offerings of Times Square; it certainly had never appeared in mainstream media. Now, with
The Throwaway Children
available in bookstores and public libraries, even women could read about mind-boggling lewdness perpetrated against boys and girls. Such reading was not only legal, it was noble, a kind of obscene civic duty. Richette’s book sold briskly and was soon reprinted as a mass-market paperback. That happened in 1970—the year Flora began writing her own book.
She decided that
Sylvia
would be a “whodunnit” about severe child abuse—especially sex abuse. The heroine’s psyche would be fractured by her lunatic mother’s mistreatment, as severely as a child’s bones would be split if they were hit on the street by a truck. But thanks to Dr. Cornelia Wilbur’s dedication and brilliance, Shirley-aka-Sylvia would be healed. Her sixteen alters would knit together, making her whole again. She would accomplish this feat by remembering Mattie Mason’s hideous crimes, as catalogued in Flora’s nonfiction novel.
Flora began planning the book’s abuse scenes. Connie had told her that while Shirley was under Pentothal, she had remembered Walter and Mattie Mason keeping her in a crib in their bedroom until she was nine years old. There they often staged what Connie called “primal scenes”—the Freudian term for having sex in front of one’s young sons and daughters. According to Freud, primal scenes invariably traumatized small children.
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In addition, Connie said, Shirley had recovered memories of Mattie engaged in lesbian sex with young women in Dodge Center. Shirley remembered witnessing these acts when she walked in the woods near Dodge Center with Mattie and Mattie’s “three teenage friends,” spying on them as they sneaked behind bushes. Flora had also heard about Shirley being dragged around the neighborhood at night while her mother defecated on lawns. Worst of all were Peggy’s accounts, preserved on audiotape, of Mattie hanging Shirley with ropes, splaying her legs apart, and raping her with utensils and enemas.
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Flora began having doubts about these stories, however, after she read
autobiographical entries in Shirley’s old therapy journals that diverged radically from what she was being told. Homosexual orgies in the woods with three teenagers, for instance: In a 1956 journal, Shirley had described her mother babysitting girls who were not teenagers but only eight or nine years old. Mattie had taken these children into the woods to play, Shirley wrote, but Shirley, herself, never saw anything improper. She’d only began to visualize images of gyrating bodies when injections of Pentothal, coupled with questioning by Connie, got her to thinking about Mattie’s sick mind. She had realized then that it was Peggy who’d seen Mattie having illicit sex in the bushes.
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Flora knew nothing about forensic research into Pentothal and other supposed “truth serums.” Nor was she aware that, far from eliciting truth, barbiturate injections commonly provoked wild fantasies. She did understand that hypnosis was risky. For an article she’d done four years earlier for
Science Digest,
she’d interviewed psychiatrists talking about innocent men who had falsely confessed to murders they had nothing to do with when hypnotized during interrogations at police stations. And she’d found a doctor who once hypnotized a man to cure him of asthma. While in a trance state the patient said he had killed his sister, and everyone believed him until it was revealed he never had a sister.
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But when Flora expressed skepticism about Mattie’s perfidy, Connie pooh-poohed her doubts: “You are being naïve about this,” she wrote in a letter, “if you can’t imagine what an intelligent, intellectual, talented sadistic schizophrenic might dream up to torture her daughter.”
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Shirley reinforced Connie’s position. She complained to Connie when Flora questioned her about the abuse. Flora backed off.
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Focusing on other motifs in Shirley’s history besides abuse, she was especially eager to write scenes in which the Peggys, Vicky, Vanessa, and the rest of the alters left home and interacted with the public. After all, the book required glances, handshakes, and conversations with other people: in school, in stores, on the street. What had Shirley’s friends done and said when they saw her acting like an eight-year-old, a baby, or a boy? Once, as Peggy in Trenton, New Jersey, she’d tried to break into a car she thought was her father’s. Hadn’t anyone noticed? Had she been arrested? She talked of marching many times into gift shops as Peggy and smashing goblets. Could any saleswoman remember a diminutive, staidly
dressed woman acting deranged? Did anybody ever call the police, or an ambulance?
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No, Connie said, and she added that, oddly, no one in public had ever noticed Shirley dissociating into alter personalities. Her friends didn’t notice, either, except for her former roommate Willie, who herself had been in psychoanalysis with Connie and was prepped about Shirley’s multiple personalities before she started seeing them.
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Flora decided to write a fugue scene about a trip to Philadelphia. But as she researched Shirley’s trips there, she discovered that most sounded less like amnesiac fugues than like the pleasant, out-of-town jaunts any artist might make for a quick change of scenery. Often Shirley returned to New York with a notebook full of charcoal and pencil studies, fully aware of everything she’d done all weekend.
Of course, the one trip that really did sound like a fugue was murky in detail because Shirley really didn’t remember what had gone on in Philadelphia. She recalled catching the train from Manhattan and later calling Connie from a pay phone, confused and anxious. She had found children’s pajamas in her hotel room in Philadelphia, she said, and didn’t know how they got there until she found a receipt showing they’d been purchased from a store called The Mayflower Shop. She couldn’t remember being in the store, which was frightening. But she’d always known she was in Philadelphia, and she returned to New York without incident. It was not a very interesting story.