Authors: Debbie Nathan
He begged her to let him listen to more of the therapy tapes. She complied by packing them in a footlocker and catching a plane west. She and Stern spent three weeks at his home on the ocean, working tirelessly on an outline for the script.
12
During breaks they took walks on the beach, where Connie talked and talked about everything—from the seaweed drifting through the water to the way she’d saved suicidal schizophrenics by putting them into overnight trances with Penthothal, rescuing them from death. Stern took her to one of his own therapy sessions, then asked for her professional opinion about his problems.
They hobnobbed with Hollywood celebrities, and Connie was star struck. Returning to Lexington, she dropped celebrity names nonstop. When she corresponded with Stern she called him “Stewart Dear.”
13
When Stern finally hunkered down to write his teleplay, he inserted fiction after fiction to smooth out the parts of Flora’s book that seemed poorly motivated or downright illogical. Stern had his Sybil character dissociate and slog fully clothed through a pond in front of a group of shocked children in Central Park. He put her into raging, suicidal “Peggy” and “Marcia” modes while on dates with her horrified boyfriend. He made up a visit by Dr. Wilbur to the family doctor who treated Sybil as a child, inventing a shame-faced confession by the doctor that he had seen hideous genital trauma on little Sybil, but had done nothing about it.
14
Stern was creating perfect sense through perfect fantasy. He added a spellbindingly creepy scene that had not appeared in Flora’s book. It showed Sybil bound and immobilized with dishrags, suspended on ropes and hooks as her deranged mother cranked a pulley to raise the little girl into the suffocating “wheat crib.”
15
Stern had gotten this idea from one of the therapy audiotapes. “What did she do to Shirley that made Shirley’s arms and legs so weak?” Connie could be heard asking on the tape, referring to the evil Mrs. Mason.
“Pumped ’em up and down,” Stern heard the patient answer.
“Pumped ’em up and down how, Sweetie? …”
“Put the rope on her arms like this and pull her up on Daddy’s pulley and she’d pull like this and make her go up and down and then up so—high—…”
16
Connie was extremely skeptical of this story, but by the time she worked with Stern she had forgotten it was on one of the tapes she’d given him. She expressed her annoyance to Stern when she spotted this scene in his first draft.
17
Stern stuck to his guns. “I really didn’t invent this,” he corrected Connie, and sent proof: a transcript of the tape.
18
Reading it, she was alarmed that she’d almost admitted that certain things Shirley said were not to be believed. She told Stern she’d forgotten the carpentry shop torture because it was too awful for
her
, Connie, to remember. “You are so right about the pulley session in the garage and I had completely repressed that,” she wrote.
19
Flora criticized the script,
20
calling it “frantic,” “overwritten,” “lurid,” and suffering from “cheap stereotypes” and “lesbian overtone.”
21
She did not object to most of the fictions Stern had inserted—the rope and pulley scene, for instance, or Sybil dissociating before the school children. But oddly, she was angered by a scene which Stern wrote that portrayed Dr. Wilbur addressing a group of male psychiatrists about her multiple personality case and being laughed at because she was a female doctor.
During all the years Flora and Connie had discussed the case, Connie had never described any such experience. Perhaps it had happened, perhaps not. Either way, Stern seemed to understand that Connie and her patient were the victims and heroines of a prefeminist era—and that this fact evoked great enthusiasm from women readers of the book. Still, Flora complained to Stern that his characterization of Dr. Wilbur “as a women’s lib character fighting the male psychiatry fraternity” was “outrageous” and “invented.”
22
Stern removed the scene.
With the script completed, Joanne Woodward—who two decades earlier had portrayed the multiple-personality-disordered patient in
The Three Faces of Eve
—was chosen for the role of Dr. Wilbur. Sally Field, twenty-nine years old and famous as a television sitcom comedienne, gave an impassioned dramatic performance at her audition and got the Sybil role.
She started listening to therapy tapes from Connie’s collection, provided by Stewart Stern.
23
Sybil
aired as an NBC miniseries on two evenings in November 1976. It was seen by forty million people—almost a fifth of the country’s population.
24
It won four Emmys, including one awarded to Field for her acting. Frequent reruns followed, and countless more viewers recoiled at scenes of a child being battered, hanged, and raped by her demented mother. They cringed as the victim, grown into an adult and a mental patient, keened and shuddered under furniture. And they wept as Joanne Woodward cradled Sally Field in her lap, murmuring “It’s all right, Sweetie. It’s all right.”
The telemovie became so iconic that Scholastic, a company that produces educational magazines for students, developed a “Sybil” lesson plan for use in high schools. Teenagers were instructed to “Write a discussion in dialogue form between two or more sides of your personality. Name them as Sybil named her Selves. Try to indicate why you are more ‘together’ than Sybil.”
25
Conclusive proof that
Sybil
had become a cultural obsession was a parody on
Saturday Night Live,
featuring a red-wigged Jill Clayburgh as Dr. Wilbur and Gilda Radner—beloved for her Roseanne Rosannadanna persona—playing a daft-faced Sybil. “We all have many people inside of us,” Clayburgh lectured Radner. “I myself am a psychiatrist, a married woman … an
Unmarried Woman
! I’m a dancer. As a matter of fact I’m two dancers: I’m jazz and modern… . I’m four artists: an impressionist, an abstract expressionist and a primitive, and I’m a lot of gym teachers, and I’m at least one dental technician.”
26
No one in Hollywood, on
Saturday Night Live
, or at the Scholastic offices could ask Shirley what she thought of their efforts. They didn’t know her real name, much less her phone number. Connie and Flora bent over backwards to conceal her identity, and not merely to respect her wish for anonymity. Even if Shirley had changed her mind and opted to go public, they would not have allowed it. As far as they were concerned, she had no choice. In order to maintain their claim that
Sybil
was nonfiction, she had to remain in the shadows. They struggled to make sure that she did.
T
HREATS TO SHIRLEY’S ANONYMITY BEGAN
almost immediately after publication of
Sybil.
To Flora, at least, this should have been no surprise; after all, she had written the book in a way that practically advertised Shirley’s identity to anyone who knew her well. Perhaps out of laziness or maybe because of journalists’ innate discomfort with disguising facts, Flora had barely changed the name of anyone or anyplace in the book.
Over and over, people contacted the three women saying they knew who Sybil was. Some were mistaken, including a handful of patients in mental hospitals who claimed
they
were Sybil. But others made the correct identification. “Oh Shirley,” wrote a childhood friend from Dodge Center in a letter she asked Flora to forward. “I never dreamed of the torment and unhappiness in your past.”
1
Shirley had known before the book came out that she would need to give up some of her former life. Connie had instructed her that as soon as
Sybil
went on sale, she would have to cut off communication with people from her past. They included Dessie Blood Engbard, the Mason family’s maid when Shirley was young and whom the book called “Jessie Flood.” Dessie was an old, sick woman in 1973, and for years Shirley had been sending her affectionate letters, as well as photographs, paintings, and gifts of inexpensive clothing. But Shirley and Connie had visited Dessie less than a decade earlier, and even more recently Flora had asked her endless questions about the Mason family. If she got letters from Shirley after
Sybil
became widely read, there was a good chance she would put two and two together—and reveal Sybil’s identity. So Shirley stopped sending letters to Dessie.
She also stopped writing to Florence Mason, her stepmother in Michigan. For eleven years, ever since her father’s death in 1962, Shirley had been corresponding regularly with Florence, usually once or twice a week. Their letters to each other were unfailingly warm, even loving.
Connie had always loathed Florence, however, and despite Shirley’s affection for her stepmother, under Connie’s influence she denounced Florence as vain, cold, and stingy. Flora elaborated on these character defects in the book. “Frieda Dorsett,” as she called Florence, wore trashy spike heels, chased men, had a nose like “the large horny bill of a predatory fowl,” and “disliked women”—including her husband’s daughter.
2
Shirley read Flora’s draft chapters of
Sybil
, so she must have seen these vindictive passages. Even so, she seems to have assumed that Florence, a devout Seventh-Day Adventist, would never pick up a book about a woman who went into trance states and allowed herself to be hypnotized—for Adventists such literature was evil if not downright Satanic. Still, Shirley couldn’t help bragging about
Sybil.
Writing to Florence a week before publication, she told her that a book about her psychiatric treatment was about to reach the stores and was headed for the best-seller list. “I’m so glad my name is in no way connected with anything,” she wrote, adding that her main hope was that the book would help children in danger of becoming mentally ill. “This letter is just between you and me,” she concluded. “But you have always known about my connection to Connie and years of treatment.”
3
Then she stopped writing, and Florence had no idea why. She would find out three years later, when she was at a grocery store and saw a
TV Guide
advertisement for the television movie. The ad mentioned Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, whom Florence recognized as her stepdaughter’s psychiatrist. She got a copy of
Sybil
and was shocked to see herself insulted in it. Except for talking to her son and his wife, however, she kept quiet about her discovery.
4
The rest of Shirley’s long-distance friends were also mystified when her correspondence stopped. Her old college dorm mate Luella Odden, and Luella’s daughter, Muriel, had been receiving letters for twenty-two years,
beginning the week Muriel was born. Shirley’s old art teacher, Wylene Frederickson, who had given her private art lessons in high school and helped her get into college, also stopped hearing from her.
5
Many of these people sent mail to West Virginia and didn’t hear back. They mailed again and still got nothing. Shirley Mason, inveterate letter writer week after week and year after year, had dropped off the face of the earth.
If going underground was traumatic for Shirley, it also came with a benefit: not having to write all those letters gave her more time to enjoy the people and places around her. She felt deeply fulfilled at Rio Grande Community College, where she taught art education, art history, art appreciation, and oil painting. She had recently gotten tenure and become very busy on academic planning committees and as a student advisor.
6
And she loved her house. She delighted in painting the exterior a barn-red color with white trim; in laying new, sapphire-blue carpet; and planting young rosebushes in her yard. She planned to donate most of her
Sybil
royalties to charity rather than spend them on herself, and to keep her house and teach.
7
With her job, her students, her colleagues, and her home, she thought she could be happy.
But within weeks, these pleasures would be obliterated.
The first threat to Shirley’s identity was fifty-seven-year-old Willie Price, who had shared an apartment while Shirley was addicted to Pentothal injections, and had warned her roommate about the dangers of therapy with Connie.
“Teddy Reeves” was the pseudonym Flora used for Willie in the book, and in it she wrote that Teddy “had one abiding remedy” when her emotionally disturbed friend felt ill: “To get into bed with Sybil.” Teddy was a lesbian, the book explained, and Sybil always rejected her homosexual advances.
8
Reading these passages a few weeks after
Sybil
was published, Willie Price was irate, not to mention terrified. She had a doctorate in early childhood education and a job as a professor at a teachers college in Manhattan.
Whether or not she was actually a lesbian, Willie risked losing her employment and her reputation if she were publicly exposed as one. She wrote to Flora, threatening to sue her, Regnery, Connie, and Shirley for libel or invasion of privacy. Taking her case to court would uncover Sybil’s true identity.
9
Rushing to do damage control, Flora contacted attorneys. “Teddy Reeves” was not Willie Price, she told them and her editor. Instead, “Teddy” was a composite of several women Shirley had lived with over decades of sharing dorm rooms and apartments.
10
Composite characters, of course are fictions, and Flora’s demurral was her first admission that, contrary to the marketing claims for
Sybil
, the book was not entirely a “true story.” But to make sure Willie didn’t sue, Flora excised the lesbian scenes with Teddy from the book so that readers of the second, corrected printing would never know they’d existed. Everyone involved with
Sybil
held their breath, hoping that Shirley’s old roommate would be the last of their problems.