A Survivor Savors Living Just One Life

One thing is immediately apparent about Chris Costner Sizemore: she notices everything.

From the Beverly Hills palm trees with the naked, ostrich-like trunks, to a reporter leaving wide margins on a pad for notations, to an old, wooden, curved-top radio in a radio station lobby, nothing unusual escapes her comment.

That is because Sizemore, 62, considers herself 15 and believes she is seeing many things for the first time since she recovered from Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) in 1974.

“I think I’m like a growing child when they first begin to observe,” Sizemore said. “I’m a middle-aged woman, but I think some of my personality development is that of a teen-ager.”

Sizemore’s defense mechanisms formed the first of 22 alternative personalities at age 2 after she witnessed a trio of gruesome incidents. Within three months, she saw one man who appeared to have drowned in a ditch, another who had been sawed in half at her father’s lumber mill and her mother badly cut by an exploding jar. She lived with Jane, the Turtle Lady, the Retrace Lady and 19 other personalities until psychiatrists cured her 45 years later.

After one supposed cure, she became the basis for Joanne Woodward’s Oscar-winning performance in the 1957 film “The Three Faces of Eve.” She continued slipping into other personalities, however, and recovered years later only after extensive work with new therapists on the little-understood neurosis.

Her new book “A Mind of My Own (William Morrow and Co., Inc.) details her life after recovery and “the peace this wellness has brought to my family.”

But during a recent trip to Los Angeles to publicize her book, she said the road to wellness was full of potholes. As she grew healthy, new relationships developed slowly and painfully with family and friends.

“I was so excited about being whole and being me. Everything was real. It was permanent,” Sizemore said. “My family just did not seem to celebrate that.”

Her husband Don, her daughter Taffy, now a 40-year-old Fredericksburg, Va., homemaker and her son Bobby, now a 30-year-old high school counselor in Ft. Myers, Fla., had after all endured numerous failed cures.

Before they accepted her recovery, they had to know she had ended the changes that could transform her IQ, skills, appetite, handwriting and facial expressions between the time they left home in the morning and returned at night. Until they were sure of that, her embarrassed family would keep her neurosis a secret and refuse to appear with her if she discussed her illness with audiences.

Her quiet, hard-working electrician husband once told friends: “It’s just hard to forget that, for years, Chris could change at any minute. Whether doctors said she was cured or not. So being told again that she’s well doesn’t make my fears go away. Not overnight, anyway. . . . “And I couldn’t tell a soul. Not for 23 years. That’s what made it so hard. . . . No man at work had problems like mine. Over lunch . . . guys would talk about their wives running up bills on three or four credit cards. Or kids getting into trouble.

“But how was I going to slip into talk such as that with a line like, ‘Yeah, I know troubles, too. My wife is three people right now.’ ”

The recovery also troubled Don, who married an alternate named “Jane” in 1953 and had to get to know Chris 20 years later.

Don told Chris he thought that once she recovered, she would function as a wife and mother without medical help and without heavy doctor bills. He also hoped that for a change, she would be able to help him.

Those hopes were not realized for years because Chris’ fragile, new personality still needed expensive treatment and medication.

“I was unwittingly vacillating back and forth,” Chris recalled, between multiple personalities and health. “Some days (my doctor’s) counsel and my daughter’s encouragements beckoned me toward deeper commitment to the realm of normalcy; but most days I was living with, or by, memories that beckoned from that other world.”

Amid the tensions of his hopes and her reality, the couple lived silent lives, neither disturbing the other, for many months. He worked days and stayed to himself at night. She did housework and took preliminary steps on a book during the day and spent weekends with other family members.

When Don raised the possibility of divorce, saying he had taken care of her during her illness and had the right to live his own life, she took an overdose of sleeping pills. Her son, 14 at the time, came home from school to find her crawling on the floor slipping in and out of consciousness. He called a cab and rushed her to a doctor who saved her life.

In the following therapy, she wondered whether her abnormalities would ever cease and realized some startling things about her sex life.

“Don never had a monogamous marriage; because of the disorder he could sleep around without ever leaving his bedroom. And I made that bizarre circumstance possible. . . . Even though I was 47 and a mother, I had never been in love and had never made love. Romantic feelings, and the periods of my life when they were felt, had belonged to my alters.”

Eventually the couple learned to communicate with each other and Don decided to stay. “I figured if your wife had cancer you wouldn’t leave,” he said. “I figured I fell in love with her, and even though the personality would change, she still needed help.”

Gradually she developed confidence and full, happy relationships with her family.

In 1975, a few months after the unification of her personalities, her son, Bobby, brought four friends home from school.

“My son acted casual to his friends,” she recalled later, “but I knew the importance of this surprise visit. I served the boys cookies and milk. We chatted, the boys joked, then they left.

“But when Bobby reached the door, he stopped and winked at me. It was a secret gift. Though a sophomore in high school, he had never brought friends home before. The wall of secrecy around my mental illness had forced us to invite no one into our home. This was the first time, and in so doing, he was reaching out, as if to say, ‘Everything’s fine.’ ”

As family members moved closer, she spoke to audiences about her disease, and the sincere, intelligent questions convinced her that she was welcome. She described her illness in a successful 1977 autobiography, “I’m Eve,” and lectured 100 times a year for six years, advocating the cause of the mentally ill.

Five years after her unification, however, her sister, Becky, remained polite but distant. Sizemore confronted her and discovered that she had loved one of Sizemore’s alternate personalities and had been wounded by her disappearance.

“She thought I had killed the alternate so I could live,” Sizemore explained. “We had to have serious discussions so she could see the (qualities of) the alternate were still present in me. That is how real these personalities were--that my sister could like one so much better than the others.”

The sisters drew closer and Sizemore recognized by the summer of 1980 that she had survived the aftermath of mental illness.

“I could relax in the security of knowing that my family relationships were restored,” she wrote. “My self-confidence and talents had been raised to levels where I could earn a living and attain respect for the work that I did.”

Her family noticed the change. In April, 1981, her daughter accompanied her to a presentation at the Georgia Mental Health Assn.

“It was a moment I had waited for,” she wrote. “Although I had always had my daughter’s love and support in private, her hesitancy to appear with me in public had created an emptiness in my life.”

On her visit to Georgia and in other speeches, she fought for the rights of MPD and other mental health patients.

“I think I can be an example to other people that they can get help and have a better quality of life,” she said.

“I think proper care is not there for everybody. So many street people are mentally ill and have been deinstitutionalized. They do not know where to go for help so they freeze to death or starve to death. That should not happen in America.”

In 1982, the National Mental Health Assn. presented her with the annual Clifford W. Beers Award as the person who did the most to dispel the stigma of mental illness. In 1983, she accepted psychiatrists’ invitations to consult on treatment of MPD patients.

She still consults, but in recent years has cut her appearances from 100 to 25 a year so she can spend more time home.

In a curious irony, her 66-year-old husband, who stayed with her during decades of illness, has developed an incurable degenerative disease of the nervous system (Parkinson’s) now that she is well.

The couple recently took the recommendation of his physician and moved from North Carolina to the warmer Bradenton, Fla. There Sizemore accompanies him on therapeutic walks along the Gulf Coast.

“In North Carolina, when it began to get cold, he would get rigid,” she said. “It was so bad last winter that he couldn’t turn his head. In Bradenton, that doesn’t happen. He has total movement.

“His doctors say on a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 would be a wheel chair, he’s about a 2,” she said. “I want to keep him that way.”

Sizemore also faces another dilemma. She recently changed attorneys and withdrew the suit she had filed to wrest control over the rights to her life story after her recovery. She says her new attorney will file again, taking a different approach.

Fox, the studio that released “The Three Faces of Eve,” claims it owns those rights under a contract Sizemore signed in 1956 for $7,000.

“I do not think they would do this to me if I were Lee Iacocca,” she said. “I think it’s because I’m a former consumer of mental health services.”

Sizemore vowed to continue the suit even if it takes the last penny she earns on her book. She said she doesn’t need the money as long as she has what’s important in life.

“The warmth and closeness of my family,” she said. “There is nothing in the world like love, and we’ve got it. You see, I was afraid I was going to lose that.”