[Guest Review by Jonathan Poletti] (Manitou Communications)
Is there a weirder story than The Three Faces
of Eve? — and not just because of the movie, which was fake. That no doubt
helped it become a movie, from which lurid "multiple personality"
sagas like Sibyl derive. And, too, powerful cinema about the
merging & disintegration of personality, like Ingmar Bergman's Persona,
and Donald Cammell’s Performance, and songs like Siouxie Sioux's
"Christine."
But none of it went near the real story.
Christine or 'Chris' Sizemore told her side a few times, notably in a 1977
book, I’m Eve. Another was hiding in plain sight, like in a 1989 New
York Times story when she's suing to get the rights to her life back, and
her old doctor is asked by the New York Times how much he made off it?
"Dr. Thigpen said he did not know..." After his death it became clear
he made a lot of her story up, and kept her suppressed while he picked up the
checks & awards.
Colin A. Ross, a psychiatrist, starts the clean-up
with The Rape of Eve, which reads like a prosecutor’s indictment.
As a teenager Thigpen buys the book Joe Strong, The Boy Magician &
his course is set. From supporting his family with a magic act, he graduates to
psychiatry, then a free-for-all of experiments with everything from shock
treatments to frontal lobotomies. But his showman instincts roar to life when a
young woman diagnosed with schizophrenia is brought to him, having just tried
to strangle her kid.
She comes off as magical too, as dangerous to herself,
therefore, as others. I’m Eve includes descriptions of her psychic
abilities, premonitions that comes true, distance healing, etc. “They were
simply another confusing facet of her already inexplicable existence…” Ross
notes her father was known across town for energy medicine. “He could heal
diseases and could cause wounds to stop bleeding with the pass of a hand.” One
begins to imagine, at least, a competing narrative of a girl from a shamanistic
clan scooped up by a trickster who has no ability, or interest, in making her
well.
If she was even sick? In I’m Eve, the psychotherapist she credits
with her 1974 ‘integration’ appears to think her a victim less of mental
illness than cultural repression of feeling. “She escaped reality by utilizing
a very complicated and distorted lifestyle, classified by society as an
emotional disturbance,” he writes. In a later book, she comes to her own
realization that her personalities "were entities, whole unto their own
rights, who coexisted with my birth personality before I was born.” She read
Thigpen's book about her, and was dismayed. "The whole thing was wrong.
None of them seemed like real people."
The indecency of Thigpen's use of
her is laid out for inspection, with contracts & letters comprising a chunk
of Ross' book. The treatment with Chris was a little less than three years,
less time (Ross thinks) than an "integration" could've taken, but
Thigpen had little interest in therapy. If vaguely enamored, he also sniffed a
product he could sell, and under the guise of writing a "medical
monograph" gets her to sign away her life rights for $3. The movie earns
her $5000 more, and that was it, with the studio trying to enforce its
ownership of her for the rest of her life.
Even in his book, Thigpen is
creepy. Eve Black's legs were "attractive," though Jane was his
favorite: “her smile was fresh and lovely…perfectly feminine…naturally sensuous.”
In a documentary film he made of her, she's made to try on dresses, as he
critiques, i.e. “You look mighty cute.” In the letters, he seems to feed off
control of her as he navigates media & film to promote his version of her
life. He writes her marriage counsel in 1955: “Perhaps by now you have
learned that a wife cannot manifest any fierce independence. Whether she likes
it or not a wife’s first consideration should be her husband’s welfare and
desires.” Ross alleges Thigpen fondled her sexually, as well as facilitated an
unwanted abortion & hysterectomy, while he watched.
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
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