Sybil Exposed (40 page)

Could a mistake like this happen again? If so, it might voice itself through a new psychological idiom of distress, something more attuned to the times than multiple personality disorder, yet equally garbled and unable to clearly express people’s true needs. That would be a tragic replay, but perhaps it could be avoided. Connie Wilbur called herself a scientist, but science warns against professing certainty, especially about something as subjective as the study of human behavior. If Sybil teaches us anything, it is that we should never accept easy answers or quick explanations. Knowledge in medicine changes constantly, and anyone unprepared to welcome the changes and test them is not to be trusted.

Psychotherapy can do enormous good when it is cautious about delving into the mind, skeptical of anyone offering definitive answers, wary of the overly confident, critical about the political and social milieu in which it operates, and accepting of the enormity of what we do not know. When healers and the public ignore these tenets, however, what emerges—on the couch and in the culture—can be as powerful yet pernicious as Sybil unexposed.

D
OZENS OF PEOPLE HELPED ME
to create this book, but without the pioneering efforts of two of them, I could never have started my work. Beginning in the early 1990s, scholar Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and historian Peter Swales spent years trying to uncover the identity of the woman with the pseudonym “Sybil.” During the time this sleuthing was going on, records of Shirley Mason’s life languished in a library archive, tightly sealed from researchers. Mikkel and Peter eventually were successful in naming Shirley, and as a result, the archives were opened to people like me.

When I got hold of Mikkel and told him that I, too, was investigating Shirley’s life, he shared a trove of knowledge and even mailed me an audiotape. It was a long interview that he and Peter had done years earlier with Virginia Flores Cravens, a childhood neighbor of Shirley’s. Cravens possessed firsthand knowledge of Shirley’s early emotional problems, but by the time I started my research she was suffering from dementia and could no longer remember or talk. Mikkel’s generosity resurrected Craven’s memories.

Mikkel and Peter also led me to David Eichman, a grandson of Shirley’s stepmother, Florence Eichman Mason. David had inherited and saved piles of old correspondence between Shirley and her father and Shirley and Florence, as well as many pieces of Shirley’s artwork, and photographs of her as a young woman. David and his wife, Bonnie, made this material available, and helped me to organize and interpret it.

I also found Dan Houlihan. A psychology professor at the University of Minnesota at Mankato—the same school Shirley attended as an undergraduate—Dan
had heard the local gossip for years, so he knew who she really was even back in the 1970s. He, himself, was a student at Mankato then, and spent his spare time poking around to learn more. Dan was unstintingly helpful to me, donating old correspondence he’d collected between Shirley and her former teachers, legal documents about her father’s business affairs, old college yearbooks and registrar’s office material, and even the names and whereabouts of Shirley’s dorm mates from the 1940s.

Dan directed me to Muriel Odden Coulter, the daughter of one of those dorm mates. Muriel, too, shared an enormous collection of letters that Shirley had written to her mother and her when she was a child.

Stanley Giesel, Vadah Purtell, Frank Weeks, Vivian Beaver, Roy Langworthy, and Joan Larson grew up in or around Dodge Center, Shirley’s little hometown in Minnesota. Most knew Shirley, and they supplied me with reminiscences and photographs. Dennae Ness Wilson was living in the Mason’s old house when I knocked on her door in in 2009 and asked for a tour. She graciously waved me in.

Janet Kolstadt Johnson, Roger Langworthy, and Melanie Wheeler Lang-worthy spoke to me by phone about growing up in Dodge Center decades ago. Miranda Marland, daughter of Shirley’s best childhood friend, Robert Moulton, recalled what Robert had told his own children about his pal. Shirley’s cousins Patricia Alcott, Lorna Gilbert, Arlene Christensen, and Marcia Schmidt sorted through family keepsakes and found beautiful pictures of their relative, some of which you see in this book.

Shirley’s life-long experience as a Seventh-Day Adventist was crucial to making her the person she was, and I want to thank several people for helping me to understand this fascinating American religion. In Dodge Center, Adventist church pastor Thomas Bentley and his wife, Julie, welcomed me to Sabbath services when I visited in 2009, then showed me yellowing, leather-bound church records from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I got goose bumps viewing Shirley’s parents’ handwriting on the fragile pages, and the penciled-in baptism date of their daughter.

I also got help from Dr. Ronald Numbers, a historian at the University of Wisconsin and an expert on Seventh-Day Adventism who, himself, was raised in the faith. Ron introduced me to fellow scholar T. Joe Willey. T. Joe also had an Adventist childhood, like Shirley’s in the rural Midwest, and he plied me with conversation and his own writings.

Jean Lane also comes from Adventist stock. She was Shirley’s best friend during
college, and I first visited her in 2008 she was in her late eighties, still producing beautiful art and possessed of a fine memory for events from seven decades earlier. Jean has since chatted with me for hours and always responded quickly when I’ve written or called with more questions about her old friend. Her energy and intelligence are inspiring.

Robert Rieber, an emeritus psychology professor at John Jay College in New York City, taught at John Jay along with Flora Schreiber. He once received a gift from her: a set of audiotapes that—as he discovered years later when he finally listened to them—included one of Shirley undergoing a therapy session with her psychoanalyst. Professor Rieber donated this material to the college’s library, where I was able to listen to it as part of my research. In addition, he introduced me to Dr. Herbert Spiegel, a preeminent psychiatrist and hypnotherapist who briefly worked with Shirley in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

When I met Herb Spiegel, in 2008, he was ninety-four years old and still walking to his office every day to see patients. I interviewed him several times; he was unfailingly enthusiastic, patient, and thorough in explaining his treatment of Shirley and his views about the nature of her problems. His wife, the psychologist Marcia Greenleaf, assisted with the interviews. Herb died in his sleep in 2009. I feel very lucky to have been able to work with him and Marcia, and to have seen his treatment records of Shirley.

Other elderly New Yorkers or former New Yorkers—many of them psychiatrists and most still working—spoke with me about what it was like to be a therapist or mental health researcher in Manhattan in the 1950s and 1960s, when Sybil’s full-time psychoanalyst, Dr. Connie Wilbur, was working there. Thanks to Dr. Ann Ruth Turkel, Dr. Sylvia Brecher Marer in Rhode Island, Dr. Nathaniel Lehrman, and Dr. Arthur Zitrin for their reminiscences.

Several people helped me trace Connie Wilbur’s life to her formative years. Her cousin on her mother’s side, Robert Schade, recounted family lore and sent me a photograph of Connie and her brother. Deborah Brown Kovac, a niece of Connie’s second husband, reminisced about her aunt’s and Shirley’s family visits in the 1960s and 1970s. In Canada, Connie’s nephew Neil Burwell and her great-nephews Warner and Douglas Burwell provided photographs and rich anecdotes, as did great-niece Brenda Burwell Canning, who lived with Connie in the 1970s. A cousin well into her nineties, Ruth Barstow Dixon, also shared memories and hand-me-down family stories, some dating to the 1800s.

I was especially fortunate to find Dr. Richard Dieterle in Ann Arbor, Michigan,
and his sister, Caroline Dieterle, in Iowa City. Their psychiatrist father, Dr. Robert Dieterle, was Connie’s professor and mentor when she was in medical school in the 1930s. Richard was kind enough to root around in a cold, drafty barn, where he dug out an extraordinary film about multiple personalities that his father made during the years he was teaching Connie. Until Richard found the film for me, no one had laid eyes on it for almost seventy years.

My brilliant assistant Annie Slemrod helped locate and digitize the Dieterle film, and she ferreted out records about Connie in Michigan that I never imagined existed. Other young people also made my work easier. Michael Galvin helped with translation. Merryl Reichbach did records gathering in New York City. My daughter, Sophy Naess, helped organize my files as they burgeoned out of control.

Documentary filmmaker Deborah S. Esquinazi taught me how to make quality audio and video recording of my interviews. Suzan Kern, in Silver Spring, Maryland, hosted me at her home when I came to that area to do research. Kathy Eubanks helped in Texas. My sister Miriam Lerner and cousin Annette Pinder traveled to Canada with me to see Connie’s family.

Exposing Sybil
became even more of a family affair as my husband, Morten Naess, explored rural Minnesota with me while I did interviews there. Morten is a physician, and he also helped interpret medical records pertaining to Shirley and her kin. My son Willy Naess, who was in college in Minnesota majoring in history, helped with archival research at the State Historical Society in St. Paul. My father-in-law, Harald Naess, did similar work years ago in the Upper Midwest as a historian of Scandinavian immigration, and he was a constant inspiration as I studied the same population. Willy accompanied me on a road trip to West Virginia and Lexington, Kentucky, to research Shirley’s and Connie Wilbur’s long-time tenure in that region.

Many people with ties to that area gave me invaluable assistance.

Dr. Arnold Ludwig, now living in Rhode Island, described his work with Connie when he was chairman of the University of Kentucky medical school’s psychiatry department in the early 1970s. Dr. Lon Hays, who held the same position when I was working on this book, organized a meeting between me and several psychiatrists who once worked with Connie or studied under her. One, Dr. Robert Aug, hosted me for lunch at his country house, and psychologist Billie Ables not only had me over, she followed up with phone calls and letters. Dr. Rosa K. Riggs told me about working with Connie at her short-lived private hospital.
Dr. German Gutierrez described being a resident and learning from her how to use hypnosis to evoke multiple personalities.

Others gave me time in person and on the phone. John and Gerry McGee, and Patsy Gibson, who live on the same street that Connie did, recalled what she was like as a neighbor. Home-care nurse Roberta Guy spoke about caring for Connie and Shirley when each was terminally ill. Mark Boultinghouse recounted what it was like to serve as Shirley’s art dealer without having any idea she was Sybil. And Dianne Morrow, whose mother was Connie’s psychiatric patient and her friend, was stunningly generous with memories, thoughtful musings, and photographs.

Flora’s last surviving first cousin, Dr. Stanley Aronson, the former president of Brown University’s medical school, invited me to his home in Providence to share memories and his trenchant observations about the world in general—while his wife, Gale, made me and my husband feel at home with a delicious Sunday brunch. Georgiana Peacher and Mildred Rumack told about working in academia with Flora during the World War II era and beyond. Mary Anne Guitar, Norman Lobsenz, Harriet LaBarre, and Harrison Kinney reminisced about freelance magazine writing and editing in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s.

Flora’s housekeeper during the 1970s and 1980s, Flossie Simmons, spoke about her boss, and Flossie’s daughter, Inez, added details. Ben Termine, Emma Long (since deceased), Tom Davis, Charlotte Gray, Christina Winsey-Rudd, Dominick Abel, James McClain, Monty Norris, and Jeff Long filled in many blanks about Flora’s life. Al Paris gave me the back story about a lawsuit his parents filed against her and her collaborators on the book
Sybil.

And course there were librarians. At the New York Academy of Medicine, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, staff were always ready to find old medical journal articles for me and to make copies. Nearby, Alexandra Owens, director of the American Society for Journalists and Authors, made available that organization’s archives from back when it was called the Society for Magazine Writers and Flora was active with the group.

Farther afield, staff at the University of Iowa Library’s special collections department hosted me for a week in 2009 as I examined screenwriter Stewart Stern’s papers about the making of the telemovie
Sybil.
In Dodge County, Minnesota, Earlene King, then director of the local historical society, schmoozed with area old timers to find some I could interview. In western New York, Dr. Joseph Bieron, a chemist and archivist of historical records pertaining to that occupation, found information about Connie Wilbur’s tenure in Niagara Falls as a young chemist during
the Great Depression. Bert Haloviak, librarian for the Seventh-Day Adventist Church’s General Conference, in Maryland, taught me how to do research with the church’s extensive, digitized records. Staff at the National Library of Medicine, also in Maryland, helped me locate, view, and copy teaching films from the 1940s that featured Connie.

The admirable cheer and industry of these librarians only highlighted the extraordinary enthusiasm of another group of archivists, on Manhattan’s far west side. Beginning on a cold, February day in 2008 and continuing for the next three years, I spent hundreds of hours looking at the Flora Rheta Schreiber papers, in the Special Collections Department of the library at John Jay College. I started feeling as though I’d moved in, and head archivist Ellen Belcher—my “roommate”—always bent over backwards to make my tenure productive and pleasant. Assistant archivist Tania Colmant-Donabedian did the same when she filled in for Ellen. Larry Sullivan, the library’s director, made himself available when I needed administrative assistance.

One of my most exciting days working at John Jay occurred after I started to suspect that Shirley’s high school and college diaries were hoaxes. I needed what’s known as a “questioned document examiner,” but I couldn’t afford to pay the thousands of dollars that these experts charge for their work. My problem was solved when Peter Tytell, one of the field’s most respected members, agreed to look at the diaries for free. I am infinitely grateful to Peter, and also to Gerry LaPorte, an equally prominent examiner, who donated a follow-up analysis after archivist Belcher offered up her fancy, digital camera-microscope to photograph diary samples and email them to Gerry.