‘Three Faces of Eve’ subject became mental health advocate
Chris Costner Sizemore became one of the most famous Americans of the 1950s but under a disguised name, after the Georgia psychiatrists who had treated her multiple personality disorder published her life story as the startling and bestselling The Three Faces of Eve.
The book, which paints Sizemore as an anguished southern wife and mother who battles for control of her own mind, sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It inspired the1957 film that earned Joanne Woodward an Oscar for playing the title role, a woman who veers from mousy housewife (Eve White) to reckless barfly (Eve Black) until a sympathetic psychiatrist helps her find her “true” self (Jane) through hypnosis.
Because of the stigma attached to mental illness, Sizemore retreated from publicity and lived anonymously for much of her life in northern Virginia while raising a family. “We accepted no invitations and extended none,” she later said. In 1977, she announced herself to the world with her memoir, I’m Eve, which she saw as a corrective to the hit film. To start with, she had 22 distinct personalities, not three.
Sizemore, who widely lectured on how those with mental illness could serve as functional members of families and communities, died on July 24 at a hospice centre in Ocala, Fla. She was 89.
In the popular imagination, multiple personality disorder — now known as dissociative identity disorder — was largely the stuff of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde sensationalism.
Serious medical literature on the disorder was relatively sparse when doctors Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley published a clinical article about Sizemore followed by a series for lay readers in the American Weekly.
The 1957 book and film — which probed at the role of the unconscious mind — were blockbusters. At the centre of the story was a demure young wife and mother, Sizemore — identified as Eve White — whose headaches signalled a stark, sometimes terrifying change in personality.
She would lash out in epithet-filled rages and claim to hear a voice who urged her to taunt her husband: “Why don’t you knock his block off?” and “He’s a bore.” They soon divorced.
Dainty and proper Eve White sometimes was startled to wake up in a sleazy nightclub; Eve Black did the partying, but Eve White was left with the hangover.
The book and the film left readers and viewers with the impression that Sizemore had largely won the struggle over her neuroses. She embraced what seemed to be her dominant personality, Jane; she remarried; and psychiatry and hypnosis had restored her to sanity and wholeness. It was premature. Jane, like Eve White and Eve Black, soon died. More personalities manifested themselves — each time in sets of three. She endured suicide attempts, and she struggled to keep jobs in the retail industry. At one time, she ballooned to 175 pounds as she fed three people, each with her own tastes.
There was the Strawberry Lady, who was 21 and ate strawberries to the exclusion of all else. The Banana Split Girl was a temperamental child who would con- sume only that dessert. There was the Purple Lady, an arthritic 58-year-old who wore white wigs and purple dresses. The Virgin wore no makeup and could not stand to be touched by her husband.
She saw therapist after therapist but attributed her greatest progress to Tony Tsitos, her eighth doctor, whom she began seeing in 1970. Over a four-year treatment period, she said, he began the process of “integrating” the divergent personalities she had developed over a lifetime as a defence mechanism against intensely felt fears and insecurities.
“They were all searching for something,” Sizemore told the St. Louis PostDispatch in 1993. The breakthrough, she added, was “accepting the fact that it was all right to be myself and I didn’t need these personalities to function, that there would be some people who dislike me and that that’s OK.”
A few years later, she said, she dreamed that “the personalities were in a kind of Greek arena. They all joined hands and then walked behind a screen and then everything disappeared. They have never come back.”