Sybil Exposed (21 page)

The Johnsons loved these apolitical articles and Flora loved that they loved them. She basked in the glow of the famous, political loyalties be damned. One day she was in Congress gathering prized dessert recipes from the wives of liberal men in power, while the next day she ghost wrote “What Women Should Know about Conservatism, by Senator Barry Goldwater.” (“Heartfelt advice to his daughter—and to every woman—on right thinking and right living in a world she must help to manage.”) She didn’t get much money for that piece, but she got a chance to have lunch with Goldwater. That was pay enough.
7

At age thirty-seven Flora lived in Manhattan with her parents. She was single and childless—a spinster. She hardly fit the profile of a
Ladies’ Home Journal
reader but no matter. In the 1950s all kinds of writers freelanced for the women’s magazines. The pay rates in those days were breathtaking by today’s standards.
Redbook
offered $1,750 for an article. At
Cosmopolitan
, $2,000 was not unusual. A cover story for
McCall’s
could fetch $4,000.
8
In
today’s dollars that equals $32,000. With only three or four pieces a year, a women’s magazine freelancer could live it up in Manhattan or buy a house in the suburbs and comfortably raise a family.

For writers who didn’t mind hustling, freelancing was great fun. Reams of carefully thought-out story proposals were often turned down before one was accepted, but the preliminary wheeling and dealing with an editor—usually a male—often happened at elegant bars and restaurants. Lunches on the magazine’s expense account at the Algonquin, drinks at ‘21’—these were the perks for a freelancer in New York. Travel was often required for a story, and the magazine footed the bill. Writers of both sexes were eager to pen articles, even for female readers. In fact, most freelancers for the women’s magazines were men.
9

The magazines were filled with pictures and articles that reinforced the gender divide between men and women during the Cold War. Ads showed housewives in high heels and white gloves stroking washing machines. In one typical piece, a male obstetrician described a typical work day with the “girls”—his word for his patients. One, a mother of three small children, was accidentally pregnant again. She didn’t know how she would cope with a fourth baby, and her pregnancy was causing her to vomit nonstop. The obstetrician told the woman’s husband her illness was all in her head, but he seemed confused by the diagnosis. The doctor shrugged. “Will men,” he asked himself rhetorically, “ever really understand how different women are from men?” He prescribed a day in the hospital for the vomiting woman, “away from house chores and children.” He was sure she would recover “miraculously.”
10

Willy Schreiber was proud of his daughter for making herself into the writer he’d never dared become. He helped when she worked on articles, editing her grammar and taking pages of notes for her at the New York Public Library. Then, in 1958, Willy checked into the hospital for minor surgery. In a freak outcome, he expired on the operating table.

His death made Flora feel dead.
11
At age forty-two she began mourning as deeply for Willy as she had eight years earlier for her “almost husband,” Gene. O’Neill had been her lover, but Willy, Flora wrote shortly after he died, was her brother, her companion, and her audience. He had realized himself through her, and she struggled to keep him alive by realizing more. She moved herself and her newly widowed mother into a smaller
apartment, installing twin beds in the single bedroom. And she went back to full-time teaching. That would have been job enough for most people, but Flora’s mind and body were running on nerves and a desperate urge to tend her father’s memory. In addition to the teaching, she dove deeper into freelancing.

It was getting harder, however. American magazines still looked shiny and lively, but by the early 1960s writers like Flora were sensing trouble. With television’s exploding popularity, more and more people were staring at screens instead of turning pages. Big corporations like car manufacturers were pulling their advertising dollars out of print and spending them on the airwaves. Magazines were bleeding ad pages and readers, and editors scrambled to balance budgets by retooling audiences. Their efforts were creating “upheaval,” according to the Society of Magazine Writers in 1961.
12

At meetings of the Society, Flora heard colleagues fret that inflation was rising but freelance rates were flat. Worse, publications were folding, and the staffs of those that survived were writing articles themselves instead of hiring outsiders like Flora. “There is a shrinking market for the freelance magazine writer,” Society member Alvin Toffler warned at an early-1960s meeting.
13

The changes were severe. Editors at
Good Housekeeping
were asking for celebrity profiles.
Cosmopolitan
had once featured articles such as “Why Keep Paroling Sex Offenders?” Now it preferred “unusual first-person pieces.”
Coronet
had concentrated on modestly informative pieces like the health-and-science article “Goodbye to Rabies.” By 1960 the magazine was in trouble and its editors wanted “warmth of style rather than reporting.”
14

While these changes were taking place, a speaker at a Society for Magazine Writers meeting cautioned members to “expect a decline in editorial integrity over the next year or two as editors and publishers, hungry for the advertising dollar, sell their souls for space.”
15
Despite the warning, some writers sold their own souls. They started injecting fiction into their work and passing it off as fact.

The pioneer of this Faustian development was a Manhattan woman named Terry Morris, whose son, Dick, would later serve as a Republican Party strategist, then flip to advising Bill Clinton when he was president,
and flip again to become a conservative television pundit. Terry Morris had started her career in the 1940s as a novelist and short story writer, then switched in the early 1950s to doing freelance journalism for women’s magazines. Her specialty was “as-told-to” articles, including “I Was a Crooked Tax Official,” “We Bought a Black Market Baby,” and “I Gave My Son Away.” By 1960 she was vice president of the Society for Magazine Writers.
16

“I have never permitted myself to become too fettered by the ‘facts’!” Morris cheerfully wrote in
Prose by Professionals
, a guidebook to magazine writing that she edited in 1961. “Frequently, I take considerable license with the facts that are given me and manipulate them, as a writer of fiction does.”
17
Morris notified her interviewees in advance that she was making things up about them. Most approved, and when they heard Morris’s falsehoods from naïve fact checkers who phoned them to review the copy, they claimed everything was correct. No editor was the wiser.

Morris spun whole stories from her imagination and populated them with pretend men and women. She called the results nonfiction. For “We Bought a Black Market Baby,” she lolled on a deck one summer in a bathing suit, keeping one eye on her son and the other on law journals about people prosecuted for selling infants. From this legalistic material, Morris later confessed, she “conjured up a married couple who had vainly tried to have a baby, bearing much in mind that their ages, education, place of residence and occupations suited that phantom which every magazine creates for itself—their own unique readership.”
18
The fictional story was touted by
McCall’s
as true.

Betty Friedan was a freelancer and a member of the Society for Magazine Writers; she was also finishing a book that would soon be published as
The Feminine Mystique.
In the same year that Morris was pushing prevarication, Friedan was advising fellow writers “never to make up a quote or case history,” because “[r]eal people and their own words are much more powerful.”
19
That Friedan issued this warning suggests that lying was already widespread in the industry.

Flora Schreiber and Terry Morris had a collegial relationship—Morris once invited the actress Helen Hayes to her home, for instance, where
Flora interviewed her for a freelance article she was working on.
20
Flora had a chapter in
Prose by Professionals
, with tips on how to win article assignments from editors. In 1961, she decided that she would do “as-told-to” pieces about attractive, well-spoken people with emotional problems. To find them Flora contacted Mel Herman, a former ad man who was now secretary of the National Association of Private Psychiatric Hospitals. The organization’s members ran luxury institutions with big trees, lush lawns, and good meals for their mentally ill occupants—places with gentle names like Charter Oak Lodge, Northside Manor, and The Brattleboro Retreat. Many of their directors were eager to talk to the media. They knew publicity was good for their reputations, and it was scot-free advertising for their exclusive sanitariums. Herman’s job was to introduce these medical directors to journalists.
21

To help Flora’s foray into mental health writing, Herman lined up meetings with psychiatrists like Holocaust refugee Dr. Lorant Forizs, head of a private hospital on the Gulf Coast of Florida. While New York shivered in winter slush, Flora luxuriated under palm trees, interviewing a beautiful young schizophrenic woman and her mother whom she called “Norma” and “Claudia.” The resulting article was perfectly titled for a women’s magazine suffering from marketing angst: “I Committed My Daughter.” It came out in early 1962 in
Cosmopolitan.
Much of the dialogue in the story was cheesy and obviously made up. But Norma and Claudia really did exist—Flora conducted careful correspondence with them to make sure she got her facts right when she wrote her piece, and she felt that her work was well within the bounds of journalism ethics
22
—at least on this assignment.

Then Mel Herman introduced her to Dr. Murray Bowen, a psychiatrist at Georgetown University and a pioneer in family therapy. Dr. Bowen served as the male authority for another psychiatry article Flora wrote for
Cosmopolitan.

In this piece, the troubled characters were a public relations executive named Henrietta; her husband, Stephen; and their daughter Ellen, who had repeatedly been hospitalized for her paranoid fears that, for instance, the family’s phone was tapped. In family therapy, according to Flora’s article, Henrietta learned she was “overadequate” as a wife and mother. Stephen realized he was “passive.” As for Ellen, she suffered from “overattachment
to her mother.” These problems had rendered her insane. The family’s therapist summed things up by asking, rhetorically, “Is the patient schizophrenic, or is the family schizophrenic?”
23

That therapist was supposedly Dr. Murray Bowen. But Henrietta, Stephen, and Ellen probably never existed. Among Flora’s papers at John Jay College is correspondence with Bowen about his theories of family therapy, and some letters talking about the
Cosmopolitan
story. But none mention any family in therapy. Nor is there an iota of discussion about how a particular mother, father, and daughter might have felt about appearing in a magazine, or what they thought of the work in progress.
24

The Henrietta-Stephen-Ellen trio appears to have been invented by Bowen. They were characters in what psychiatrists call a “clinical tale”—a fiction pieced together from dribs and drabs of various bona fide cases. Ever since Freud’s day, clinical tales have been a popular way for psychiatrists to tell each other stories about patients and treatment. The result is often metaphorically true, yet factually as false as a fable by Aesop.

But Flora was a journalist, not a psychiatrist. She was supposed to interview people in order to tell their stories—or at least make it clear that she was getting her information indirectly. She failed to warn her readers that she had spoken only with Dr. Bowen and could not verify that Helen and her parents existed. Meanwhile, Mel Herman, her liaison to the psychiatrists, assured clinicians that if they worked with Flora they wouldn’t have to tell her about actual people.
25

The pop psychology articles she wrote with Herman’s help were big hits with the editors at
Cosmopolitan
, and Herman decided to direct Flora to another psychiatrist, one who was not a man but a woman. Her name was Dr. Cornelia Wilbur.
26

Before Flora called Connie for details, it’s possible she put out feelers among her psychiatrist contacts in Manhattan to learn who this woman doctor was. She might have heard that Dr. Wilbur enjoyed a tad of celebrity among her colleagues. Everyone knew that one of her patients was the actor Roddy McDowall.
27
On television he was a regular on the sci-fi thriller
The Twilight Zone,
and in 1960 he starred in the Broadway musical
Camelot,
where he belted out pieces like “The Seven Deadly Virtues.”
“I find humility means to be hurt,” McDowall sang lustily onstage. “It’s not the earth the meek inherit—it’s the dirt!” Connie adored that line. McDowall adored her. He enjoyed telling friends Dr. Wilbur was his psychoanalyst. She told people, too.

Flora was forty-four years old when she met Connie, with a voice like a loudspeaker, dark painted lips, and a body beyond zaftig—her waist was disappearing and she’d taken to adorning her boxy shape with big capes. Connie, meanwhile, was fifty-four, tall, still regally built, and had begun dying her graying hair as red as Lucille Ball’s. But she sounded nothing like the
I Love Lucy
star. Connie’s voice was soft, weighty, and flinty all at once—a voice for the couch but also for radio and TV.