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1974—Seasoned Hollywood screenwriter most known for Rebel Without a Cause, STEWART STERN is offered the task by Lorimar Productions, Inc. to pen the teleplay to the best-selling book Sybil by PROF. FLORA RHETA SCHREIBER. The book claims to be a true story detailing the unique psychiatric case of SYBIL ISABEL DORSETT, a pseudonym for a woman that experienced such unspeakable abuse at the hands of her mother as a child that her personality split into sixteen other selves.
While a harrowing tale, Stern has a psychiatric background and questions the voracity of the story’s claims. Traveling to New York City, he meets the outlandish character of Flora where he grills her on the glaring inconsistencies present in her book. Insulted by his honest criticisms, Flora stands by that the story is not a hoax and presents him with authentic tapes of Sybil’s therapy sessions given to her by DR. CORNELIA “CONNIE” BURWELL WILBUR. However, Stern is only given access under the oath that he not publicly reveal the patient’s true identity: SHIRLEY ARDELL MASON. He agrees and is stricken by what he hears on the tapes, though he is reasonably skeptical. Unable to talk to Shirley herself who wishes to remain hidden from the public eye, he decides to speak to Connie, the woman who treated Shirley for more than two decades.
Meeting Stern in the heart of Los Angeles and unlike her writing partner Flora, Connie is grounded, clinical, self-assured—and highly persuasive. According to her, Shirley merely showed up one day to her office as the childish, angry personality named “Peggy Lou.”
1954—Shirley, a graduate art student at New York City’s Columbia University is a troubled woman. Her childhood under a suffocating Seventh-Day Adventist household in the idyllic small-town of Dodge Center, Minnesota was indeed a lonely one. Neither of her elderly parents, WALTER WINGFIELD MASON and MARTHA ALICE “MATTIE” ATKINSON understood her odd obsession with “losing time” or her compulsive handwashing whenever she touched ink as she feared she would contract cancers or diseases. Nor did they approve of her rich imagination for inventing stories with her dolls Peggy Lou and Peggy Ann or speaking to fabricated companions named Vicky and Sam—all works of the Devil.
With her mother now deceased and living away from her father, Shirley’s episodes grow stranger still: she often “comes to” in unfamiliar locations she has no memory of ever traveling to. When she takes up therapy with her psychoanalyst Dr. Wilbur, an old friend from her time spent in Omaha, Nebraska, she is diagnosed with amnesia.
Then, Connie introduces Shirley to hypnosis, barbiturates and the famous case of Eve White, the pseudonym of Southern housewife CHRISTINE “CHRIS” COSTNER SIZEMORE, treated by DR. CORBETT H. THIGPEN and DR. HERVEY M. CLECKLEY for a rare disorder then known as “multiple personality.” Under the influence of “truth serums” and hypnosis, Shirley begins to present what Connie names “alternate, independent selves” and due to Connie’s suggestions, she recalls horrific scenes of sexual torture her mother Mattie inflicted upon her, events she has allegedly repressed.
Connie realizes that Shirley is no ordinary patient. Convinced Shirley’s tales of horrendous trauma can very likely be real and the root of her fragmented multiple selves she believes Shirley has, Connie entertains the idea that Shirley, like Eve, can make medical history through a mass-marketed book. In the process, she sacrifices her patient’s privacy and ultimately her freedom to live without scrutiny for public consumption. Although, Connie presumes Shirley can surpass Eve in the realm of iconography when she claims to meet not three alternate personalities, but sixteen—a phenomena which until then has never been recorded.
Thus, unravels the curious case of Shirley Mason.
