Sybil Exposed (34 page)

Some townspeople remembered Shirley’s mother as “flighty” and “a little odd.” The fact that she’d walked Shirley less than half a block to school every day, even in high school, seemed peculiar. But no one remembered Mattie acting hostile, psychotic, or violent. Engbard categorically denied Mattie had mistreated her daughter, much less defecated on lawns or conducted lesbian orgies. “I just can’t believe all that stuff about her,” she said. “No sir, it just doesn’t sound possible.”
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Another old timer added her skeptical two cents’ worth. Pearl Peterson Lohrbach had been Shirley’s teacher in fifth grade. That was the same year when, according to
Sybil
, the little girl had awakened in school one day, utterly disoriented. The book said she didn’t know where she was because she had just emerged from a two-year blackout, and that during that whole time her body was controlled by alter personality Peggy.

According to the book, Sybil’s grades dropped drastically after she “came to” in fifth grade. This happened because it wasn’t she who had learned things during the third and fourth grades. It was Peggy who had, then Peggy left, along with the multiplication tables and other knowledge she’d acquired in Sybil’s place.

Nonsense, Lohrbach told Norris. She’d often seen Shirley Ardell Mason daydreaming, and sometimes she talked about her imaginary friend Sam, whose name she concocted from her initials. But Shirley had never exhibited sudden behavior changes, much less alternate personalities. Nor had her schoolwork varied. Term after term, her grades stayed just the same.
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In fact, everyone scoffed at
Sybil
while speaking with Norris. But privately, some were extremely unsettled. What
had
happened to their neighbor when she was a girl? People like Pearl Lohrbach and Dessie Engbard were haunted by the possibility that the story was true and they had been too ignorant or insensitive to notice Shirley’s suffering.

Monty Norris didn’t know what to think either, but he wasn’t supposed to report on whether “Sybil” had really been tortured by her mother—his assignment was simply to determine if the woman in the book was Shirley Mason. He thought she was, and after finishing up in Dodge Center he made a series of long-distance phone calls. The first was to Flora Schreiber.

He was amazed by her reaction; it was good-humored and collegial, as befitted one journalist talking with another. “I guess you know why I never went to Minneapolis when I was on my book tour!” she told him with a chuckle. Still, she never directly admitted that Sybil was Shirley. She insisted she’d only been in Dodge Center to do the “Tiny Towns in America” story.

Connie’s response was completely different. “People like you are doing irreparable harm to my patient!” she snarled at Norris. “Wait a minute!” he shot back. “Didn’t you just write a book about her and make it perfectly obvious who she is? Do you think I’m the only person in the Twin Cities who knows?” He felt defensive about outing Shirley.

After calling her, he wasn’t so sure of his ethics, either. Shirley was too polite to hang up, and though she never said she was Sybil, it was obvious she was by the way she answered Norris’s questions about the book. Still, he felt sorry for her. She was painfully shy, with a timid voice. He worried his work could hurt her. Sitting down to write his article, he felt a little protective, even meditative.

Back in New York and Kentucky, the mood was anything but meditative. As soon as she’d finished talking with Norris, Flora realized this was no chuckling matter—if Sybil’s identity hit the press, the book could be fact-checked and completely discredited. Flora typed a press release defending her right to protect her sources, and trotting out “Tiny Towns” as the reason she’d visited Dodge Center.
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She may also have pulled strings to pressure the national media to keep quiet. Norris’s Minneapolis
Star-Tribune
article about the ruckus in Dodge Center came out on August 27 and filled two pages. Soon he heard from editors at the Associated Press and United Press International that their offices in New York thought the
Sybil
story was hot and they wanted to distribute it. Yet the editors soon cooled without explaining why. Norris knew Flora was well connected, and he wondered if she was rattling her sabers. He didn’t press the issue. He still felt a bit guilty about exposing a psychiatric patient.

Lies and string pulling weren’t the only tactics Connie and Flora employed to squelch the talk in Minnesota. They also used intimidation. Dessie Engbard got a call from a lawyer, possibly Connie’s husband, warning that if she talked publicly about the Sybil–Shirley Mason connection, she could be sued. Engbard was terrified and promptly suffered three strokes. (She died less than four years later.) She never again spoke to the press. Others in Dodge Center also received threatening calls. They, too, kept their mouths shut.
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With no AP or UPI coverage, the story did not leave Minnesota. Hardly anyone in New York read the Minneapolis
Star-Tribune.
Shirley’s secret seemed secure.

Still, in her anxiety about being discovered, she became ill, and she was so afraid of being recognized as Sybil that she hesitated to leave her house. She had always been somewhat reclusive, and now she got worse. Connie tried to soothe her, and Flora sent messages of reassurance. “We’ve been very lucky that the story has remained local,” she wrote days after the Minneapolis exposé came out.
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While in the thick of trying to control the situation in Minnesota, Flora traveled to England to promote the British edition of
Sybil.
The English version of
Psychology Today
had asked to interview her, and Flora met with a twenty-seven-year-old assistant editor named Charlotte Gray.
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Years later, when Gray was in her sixties, living in Canada and one of that country’s most prominent historians and nonfiction book writers, she laughed about her youth and her cluelessness when she met Flora. She had no background in psychology or psychiatry, and she was wide eyed at this world-famous author. At the same time, she was skeptical about the existence of multiple personalities.

At the interview, which took place in an elegant restaurant, Gray mentioned that she had some doubts about the idea of alternate selves. Flora nodded. She was “obviously tired and stressed,” Gray remembered. She said her feet hurt, and she asked Gray to come with her to her hotel room. It was a hot day, and Gray stared in growing amazement as Flora removed her shoes, then her dress and stockings. Walking around in her underwear, she picked up a newspaper article and handed it to Gray. It was the Minneapolis
Star-Tribune
piece revealing Sybil’s real name.

Gray said goodbye to Flora and took the exposé back to her office.

If she had sent the article to her colleagues at
Psychology Today
in America, she might have launched an investigation into
Sybil
and changed the history of psychiatry. But she didn’t think Monty Norris’s piece was important. A few days later she sent it back to Flora with a letter thanking her for lunch and promising she would “not quote the name of the person whom they say is Sybil.”
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“I am grateful,” Flora wrote back.
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Why had she shown Gray the article in the first place? It was as though she wanted—consciously or unconsciously—to expose not just Shirley but herself. As Gray had noticed during their lunch, all was not well with Flora by late 1975. During media interviews she seemed self-confident, upbeat, even glamorous in the $1500-dollar dresses she now wore thanks to the enormous royalties she was earning. In private, however, Flora was worn out, anxious, and angry with most things related to
Sybil.

She hated being upstaged by Connie, and she resented having to share book and movie money with her. She toyed with the idea of exposing Shirley, writing her agent that she was “fed up” with protecting her and tired of acting as Connie’s “patsy.” No longer, Flora vowed, would she be “the fall guy in relation to both these despicable women.” The agent tried to calm her. Friends at John Jay College, and her cousin Stan Aronson—the one she had hit in the head as a child, and who was now a neurologist—became concerned about the stress she was under.
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Whenever she started thinking about the conflicts with her collaborators, Flora’s mind turned to thoughts of sexual perversity. Just weeks after Connie’s husband, Keith Brown, died in 1976, Connie and Shirley breezed into New York City and unceremoniously dumped Brown’s belongings in the trash. Flora was struggling with the fact that her long time paramour, Stuart Long, was dying at the time of cancer, and the indifference that Connie and Shirley showed toward Keith Brown’s death convinced her that the two women were lovers. She got it into her head that this had been true even back in the 1960s, when Connie had first approached her about writing a book. If she’d known they were together back then, Flora complained to friends, she would have proposed a fifty-fifty royalty split instead of one-third and two-thirds.
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She decided to find another big project, one that she alone would control.

F
LORA KNEW SHE NEEDED TO
do another book after
Sybil.
Her friends urged her to fulfill her lifelong dream of writing something serious—a conventionally structured novel, perhaps, or a play—even though such work might not fly off the shelves. But she felt driven to produce another blockbuster: “You’re only as good as your next best seller,” she said.
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In early 1975 she chose her subject: a recent, bizarre crime spree on the East Coast. Joe Kallinger, a shoe repairman from Philadelphia, and his son Michael, were accused of breaking into suburban houses together and violently assaulting the people they found inside. Most were women, and the Kallingers were said to have gagged their victims, taped their eyes, and bound their bodies, often in grotesquely sexual positions. According to the charges, teenager Michael ransacked the homes while middle-aged Joe forced the women to fellate him. When one of them in New Jersey refused, he fatally stabbed her.

Flora believed that a book about a father-son murder team could be both serious and popular. She told her agent she intended to use feminist theory to analyze the crimes: “ ‘We are men,’ the father seems to be saying. ‘We are potent in both senses of the word—potent in sex, but also in subduing women’… Kallinger is a pathological representative of male chauvinism.”
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She contacted Joe’s defense attorney and offered a deal: if his client would allow her to tell his and his son’s story, she would give him twelve and a half percent of whatever she earned by publishing it, including from her book advance. Joe Kallinger agreed.

But the book rapidly turned into an echo of
Sybil
, as the feminist angle fell through—and as Flora, obviously influenced by Connie Wilbur’s improper practices as a psychoanalyst, began violating the ethics of her own profession with the subject of her new work.

She broke the rules as soon as she heard from Joe Kallinger, by posing as his friend and confidant rather than as a reporter. In August 1975, he wrote his first letter to her. “My name is
REV. JOSEPH KALLINGER
,” it began. “I am trying to develop
THE HOLY SPIRIT
in me its starting to get like the wind … God Bless You is my Prayer.”
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“Dear Rev. Kallinger,” Flora responded—though Kallinger was not a reverend. “I feel God wants my thoughts to be shared with you”—though for her entire life she’d been an atheist. “May the Lord bless you and keep you and make his light shine on you.”
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Kallinger’s lawyer was crafting an insanity defense for his client, who did have a history of mental disturbance. In court he once had testified that he talked directly to God and used to be a butterfly. But many psychiatrists who examined him thought he was a sociopath who was faking insanity.

Meanwhile, fourteen-year-old Michael Kallinger was a mystery to the public because his lawyer forbade him to speak with the press, Flora included. Unable to contact Michael, she realized she would have to scrap her “father-son male chauvinism” angle. The only saleable theme remaining was Joe Kallinger’s craziness. As she waited for an offer from a publisher, she began thinking of herself as the next Dr. Cornelia Wilbur. She was determined to find extreme psychopathology in Joe—and horrific abuse from childhood which had caused his illness.

In July 1976 Flora got a book contract from the publisher Simon & Schuster, with an advance of almost a half million dollars. Soon afterward, Joe’s lawyer went to court and cited Flora’s work on
Sybil
to get her approved as a forensic mental health expert. This would make her eligible to interview Joe as a member of his defense team. She got the approval.
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Day after day thereafter, Flora visited Joe in jail, asking him to tell stories about his life that would explain why he was so violent. By summer 1977 she had spent hundreds of hours with him, and listened excitedly as his revelations became increasingly perverse and sadistic. Flora became convinced that Joe was, indeed, psychotic. She also believed he needed help—her help. She was eager to give it, and not just to acquire material
for her book. She was becoming enchanted with Joe. Like Connie with Shirley, Flora felt the boundaries dissolving between herself and her “patient.” He impressed her as “extraordinarily sensitive,” as well as “verbal and analytical, charming, intelligent, and poetic.”
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Rather than a heartless rapist and murderer, he seemed like “a lost child.” She let Joe call her Mama, Mom, and Mommy. In return, she called him Boomy Bum Boo.
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