Wilbur gave Shirley the diagnosis and by the end of 1955 had won Shirley’s permission to inject her with sodium pentothal (mislabeled truth serum). She recorded whatever Shirley said, much of it, because of the drug, incomprehensible, and what many experts called “false-memory garble.” Stories of child abuse, injury, and orgies poured out from the alters. Other medicines — anti-psychotics, tranquilizers, and barbiturates — were proffered for Shirley’s depression, anxiety, and sense of isolation. In no time, she fell victim to addiction. By 1956 she had agreed to collaborate with Wilbur on what Connie called “a book about your difficulties.” Violating all norms, in return Connie would pay Shirley’s medical school tuition and living expenses.
Despite the attention, Shirley’s illness and addition increased. Four years after she began therapy Shirley was spending most of her time in bed or walking the city’s sidewalks, muttering to herself. Wilbur withdrew use of the pentothal. Desperate, Shirley composed a letter in which she admitted that she had made up the multiple personalities. Coolly, Connie responded by telling Shirley that the letter was “a major defensive maneuver,” an attempt to avoid the harder work that lay ahead. She made it clear to Shirley that if she did not recant the letter, she would lose all opportunity to be with Connie, and to be her friend. Shirley made her choice: she answered Connie’s challenge by revealing more alters, ultimately sixteen.
Connie was thrilled but it remained for her reputation to be fully established with a book describing Shirley’s case, and Wilbur’s success working with a MPD patient. New York journalist and college professor Flora Rheta Schreiber said she would consider authoring the book. Schreiber demanded, however, that the story have a happy ending. A cure had to be effected, all sixteen alters had to be “integrated” back into one personality. Flora argued that a book about a woman with MPD would never sell unless it had this good ending. Connie guaranteed Schreiber that a year or more of therapy would bring that result. Shirley, too sick for medical school, was told that her proceeds from the prospective book would repay the thirty thousand dollars she owed in therapy fees.
In August 1965, after ten years of therapy, Wilbur told Shirley “she would simply have to get well.” The book and their friendship depended upon it. Shirley faked a seizure after which the alters never reappeared.
Happy ending in hand, as well as a publishing contract and a twelve thousand dollar advance (a year’s salary), in 1969 Flora Schreiber began researching Shirley’s life and case history. Nathan writes that “very quickly … she discovered problems with the story, problems so profound that she would wonder if she could write a book about Shirley.” Schreiber found that autobiographical entries in Shirley’s old therapy journals diverged radically from what Connie and Shirley told her. A trip to Shirley’s home town raised further questions about the facts and alleged traumas of Shirley’s early life, traumas that were supposed to have triggered her MPD. When approached by Schreiber experts questioned Connie’s MPD diagnosis. When she reported these facts to Connie and Shirley, the pair faked a diary that would quell her doubts and cement Flora’s commitment to the project. The deceit worked and Schreiber wrote the book. arguing that the story as a whole was “emotionally true,” regardless of confusing and even “patently false” case history details.
Sybil appeared in 1973. Nathan argues that it was, at best, a case of gross negligence on the part of Shirley Mason, Connie Wilbur, and Flora Schreiber or, perhaps, frank fraud. In addition to the diary, Wilbur withheld knowledge that Shirley suffered from pernicious anemia, a condition that may cause hallucinations, depression, anxiety, aching, weight loss, and confusion about identity –many of Shirley’s lifelong symptoms. Nathan handles these materials with great care watchful not to force conclusions, such as Connie and Shirley’s possible sexual relationship, where the evidence is not available.
In an interview, Nathan has said that each woman was “in her own way brilliant, ambitious, damaged by the sexism of her time –and ruthless. Each was fractured.” She is clearly fascinated by the three women and what they did, but she also asks why the public “acceded so easily, so effervescently….What was going on in the 1970s that made us so grossly negligent of our common sense? Why did we want to believe a story as over the top as Sybil?” She answers in the Epilogue. “The Sybil craze erupted during a fractured moment in history, when women pushed to go forward, even as the culture pulled back in fear. Sybil, with her brilliant and traumatized multiplicity, became a language of our conflict, our idiom of distress.” There was the “headiness and equality of women’s liberation” but also the weight and pull of tradition. Women, who bought the book far more than men, resonated to the idea that stress could fracture the mind. All this made it possible for Mason, Wilbur, and Schreiber to pull off one of the largest, most shocking cases of publishing deceit in the twentieth century.
©2012 Jill Norgren for SeniorWomen.com
Photo: DVD cover of movie, Sybil, starring Sally Field; Wikipedia
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