Authors: Debbie Nathan
She wasn’t. At the same time Flora was trying to keep a lid on Willie Price in New York City, a crisis was brewing ninety miles south—another one about lesbians. It started in late June 1973, when hundreds of thousands of people in Philadelphia picked up the city’s biggest-circulation newspaper,
The Bulletin
, and began reading the syndicated version of
Sybil,
which was still running in some papers even after publication of the book. The first installment included Sybil finding herself in a hotel in Philadelphia with a pair of “loud and gay” pajamas “with bright orange and green stripes.” She also found the receipt from the Mayflower Shop. The store’s address and phone number appeared in both
Sybil
the book and
Sybil
the syndicated series.
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At the Mayflower Shop, calls started coming in nonstop. They came from customers and from strangers, all of them excited that the owners, a middle-aged couple named Joe and Marguerite Paris, had met Sybil. They even came from pranksters calling to ask, “Do you sell pajamas?”
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They did not sell pajamas—the Mayflower Shop was a neighborhood mom-and-pop florist that sold flowers and nothing else. There was no way “Sybil” ever could have found a receipt from that store for a purchase of clothing.
No matter. As the Parises’ son Al remembered years later, his parents were struck by Flora’s use of the word “gay” to describe the style of the
pajamas, and Mrs. Paris hated the idea that people would think she’d sold bedroom apparel to some “sick”—i.e., lesbian—“girl.” The respectable Mayflower Shop had been libeled and defamed by intimations of homosexual hanky panky, and the owners smelled money. The Parises decided to sue.
A civil complaint was drawn up. The defendants were
The Bulletin
, Regnery, Flora, Connie, and an unknown individual the lawsuit called “Jane Doe a/k/a Sybil.” All were accused of maliciously portraying the Mayflower as a place “where sexually deviant and perverse women would congregate.” The Parises demanded $280,000 in damages. There was talk of calling all the parties in to give depositions and testimony—including Jane Doe a/k/a Sybil.
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By late summer Shirley was in serious trouble, even as Connie and Flora toured the country telling talk show hosts and newspaper reporters that “Sybil” was “doing extremely well”—so well that her college had to “put a ceiling on her advisees” because “so many students wanted her as an adviser that she couldn’t handle them.” In one such interview, Connie went on to describe “Sybil” as a favorite with her colleagues.
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In fact, Shirley’s colleagues were unwittingly terrorizing her. Decades later, Jean Lane, Shirley’s old art-student friend from Mankato State Teachers College, would recall the gossip during the summer of 1973. “The book had just come out and everyone was reading it,” she remembered. “People were going to National Art Education Association and other professional events. They were talking to each other about how ‘Sybil’ was really Shirley Mason.”
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Some colleagues were shocked, Jean remembered. Many were not surprised, particularly those who had known Shirley in college. Some called the school nurse who had cared for Shirley when she was a student in Mankato. The nurse said she knew about Shirley’s multiple personalities and that she’d been in treatment with Dr. Wilbur. She told the callers not to talk about this with Shirley, to leave her in peace. But other people would come up to Shirley and ask about her condition and the book. As word spread from close friends to not-so-close ones, even people at Rio Grande College began asking questions. Shirley became terribly upset, and Jean recalled hearing that she’d decided to leave town.
By fall she had resigned from the teaching position she adored, put her beloved house on the market, and fled from Mt. Pleasant with her toy poodle, Mimbe, in tow. She went to stay with Connie in Lexington.
Christmas was approaching and life seemed unbearably difficult, so Connie engineered a sun-and-fun-escape; she bought airplane tickets and the two women flew to Mexico City. Shirley tried to forget her troubles by climbing pyramids and exploring ruins, and in January she and Connie proceeded to Guatemala.
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But Shirley struggled to accept that when the trip was over, she would have to settle for good in Lexington, refrain from teaching in schools, and otherwise take pains to hide from her friends and the public.
Back in the United States in late winter, Shirley tried to make a new life in Kentucky. She bought a cute Cape Cod-style house within walking distance of Connie’s home. From early in the morning until late in the evening, she hung out at Connie’s, cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner, assembling jigsaw puzzles at the dining room table, and painting canvases with watercolors and oils. Connie fixed up a bedroom so Shirley could stay overnight. She often did.
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The two women spent a lot of time bickering long distance with Flora, who was trying to contain the “gay pajamas” lawsuit. As the old saying goes, truth is the best defense against libel, and Flora told her lawyer that years ago, she’d been shown the receipt she mentioned in
Sybil
, the one listing the purchase of children’s pajamas along with the store’s name, the Mayflower Shop. She couldn’t find the receipt now, of course, and neither could Shirley. Eventually, Flora was forced to admit she’d never seen it and that Shirley might never have been at the Mayflower.
Flora was furious and scolded Shirley for fantasizing about the store. Shirley and Connie scolded back. Flora should have done fact checking, they said, for if she had she would have realized that the Mayflower was in part of Philadelphia that Shirley could never have gotten to on the subway.
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Besides Flora’s records of her arguments with her collaborators, there aren’t many records of Shirley’s life during this time. She was basically in hiding, after all. Deborah Kovac, a niece of Connie’s husband, Keith, remembered seeing her when she traveled with Keith and Connie to rural Illinois for days-long visits with Keith’s kin. Deborah was a teenager then,
and she recalled Connie sitting in living rooms and kitchens talking endlessly about her work with multiple personality patients—while Shirley said hardly a word.
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Another girl, Dianne Morrow, got to know Shirley a little better.
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Dianne’s mother, Jan Morrow, was married to a Lexington physician and had three children and a large, lovely home. Like many upper-middle-class women in the early 1970s, Jan had grown bored and frustrated with being a housewife, and unhappy that her husband failed to understand her discontent. Jan thought a psychiatrist might help, and she went into therapy with Connie, who taught at the University of Kentucky medical school but also had a private practice.
Dianne was in grade school then, and almost forty years later she remembered her mother as being “pretty normal” when she started seeing Connie. Their sessions together motivated Jan to study guidance counseling in graduate school, though she was in her late thirties when she enrolled. She tried hard to fit in with her classmates, who were ten to fifteen years younger. But the threats these new pursuits posed to her domestic existence made her “pretty crazy,” Dianne recalled. “My dad just couldn’t figure it out. She had a nice life. Why couldn’t she just shut up and enjoy it?”
She couldn’t do that, and in therapy with Connie, Jan lost the last vestiges of her equilibrium. “I don’t know if she truly had a nervous breakdown, if she was on some kind of drugs or if she was ill with something else,” Dianne said. “But she was hospitalized once. Another time she was bedridden and hysterical and crying and screaming.”
When Jan got on her feet again, Connie offered her free therapy—on one condition. In the backyard of Connie’s home was a swimming pool, roofed with a plastic bubble so it could be used even in bad weather. Over the years, Connie had become a fanatic about swimming. She calculated how much a lap in her pool measured, and rain or shine, she logged over two miles a week. But she liked company, and the therapy deal she offered to Jan, according to Dianne, was that “my mom had to go to Connie’s every weekend and swim with her.”
Dianne was nine or ten years old when this routine began. Her mother started taking her to Connie’s, and there she saw that Shirley was “always around.” She was rail thin, Dianne remembered, “and very nice but very
shy.” The quiet woman and the little girl rarely used the pool themselves. Instead, they lounged nearby and discussed subjects such as dogs and art while Shirley waited with barely disguised impatience for the swimming to end.
Jan’s husband—Dianne’s father—became jealous of his wife’s social time with Connie. He protested that “If you paid as much attention to me as you pay to her we would be happier!”
“You don’t understand!” Jan would reply. According to Dianne, her mother “could never say no to Connie. She felt as though she owed her tens of thousands of dollars.”
Dianne felt confused and anxious by what she saw at Connie’s house. Everyone said she was married to a man named Keith, yet Dianne never saw Keith and wondered if he existed. When she asked her mother, she got a lecture “about how these were modern times, and Connie loves her husband very much, and they don’t have to live together to be married.” The explanation worried Dianne. Connie was fond of the 1970s-era feminist quip “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” Dianne had the constant sense that Connie’s answer to her mother’s problems was “to get rid of my dad.”
The Morrows did divorce. Dianne’s father soon remarried. As for Jan, she “was miserable for the next many years,” said Dianne—during which time she faithfully continued her weekend swims with Connie.
Dianne was even more confused about
Sybil.
“Oh Dianne, look,” Connie would exclaim, pointing to a new edition printed in a foreign alphabet. “It’s been translated into Greek!” Dianne asked what the book was about, and Jan said merely that “Sybil’s mother had treated her very poorly and she developed different personalities to deal with the stress. And I’m like, ‘Well what did she
do
to her?’ And she said, ‘Well, it would be the equivalent of if you walked by the coat rack and your scarf fell on the floor completely by accident and your mother blamed you and maybe beat you up.’ And I’m, ‘Oh. OK.’”
Shirley never mentioned
Sybil
to Dianne, not even during their long waits by the pool. And no one told her Shirley was the book’s heroine. Still, Dianne just
knew.
Oddly, Dianne noticed, Shirley talked affectionately about Mattie. “My mother used to play the piano,” she would comment casually. “My mother
used to cook such and such food.” “Wow!” Dianne thought to herself about these offhand remarks. “Wouldn’t you have blocked all this out if she’d done these terrible things? Or never,
ever
mention your mother’s name again?”
She watched Shirley and Connie assemble jigsaw puzzles, play Scrabble, and putter with ideas for a “Sybil” board game. Sometimes they bickered about things such as whose turn it was to load the dishwasher. To Dianne they seemed like an old married couple. She wondered about this, too. But by now she knew not to ask questions.
Shirley occasionally spent time in her own home, and sometimes the phone rang—it was usually Flora calling. One day, however, the voice on the other end was not Flora. It was an unfamiliar man, asking “Is this Shirley A. Mason?”
“Yes,” she replied, and his next question made her reel.
“Are you Sybil?”
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T
HE MAN ON THE PHONE
was Monty Norris,
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a reporter at the Minneapolis
Star-Tribune.
It was summer 1975, and for weeks a young intern at the paper named Steve had been telling a fascinating story. Steve had just married a woman named Janice, from the tiny town of Dodge Center, eighty miles south of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Janice’s father had moved to Dodge Center to serve as the town’s new physician shortly after the death of Dr. Otoniel Flores, the community’s longtime general practitioner. Janice had spent her life in Dodge Center until coming to the Twin Cities with Steve. In July she told him she’d been hearing gossip from back home. People were talking about Sybil, the girl whose mind had split because of her mother’s sexual tortures.
The Dodge Centerites were certain this girl was their former neighbor, an artistic, moody Seventh-Day Adventist named Shirley Mason, Janice told Steve. And the townspeople were in an uproar, some believing Shirley’s terrible tales of abuse, others dismissing them as lies. Steve told his city editor, whose interest was piqued. He assigned Monty Norris to visit Dodge Center and come back with a story.
Norris drove down and poked around. The Dodge Center residents verified that in the 1930s their town had had a telephone operator with a facial tic, a mentally retarded iceman, and a retired doctor who made violins. These facts exactly tracked the book. Everyone recalled Walter Mason’s work as a builder and a member of a religion that celebrated the Sabbath on Saturday—also mentioned in
Sybil.
They remembered Shirley’s art. Norris got chills when he arrived at the Masons’ old house and saw the
porch where Sybil had moped as a girl, and the sunroom, with its wooden bench and bank of windows—all exactly as the book described.
Norris was further convinced when he talked to Dessie Engbard, the Masons’ former live-in maid. She told him that years earlier Flora Schreiber had visited Dodge Center, interviewed her about Shirley, and instructed her to remain mum about a book that was in the works. Engbard told Norris of her worry at not having heard from Shirley for over two years. “Lord, I’d love to see her again,” she said. “I love that girl like my own.”
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