Laguna ‘Spider Lady’ Finds Her Way Back : Mental illness: Vanessa Ettinger can face life again after schizophrenia kept her on streets for years.

She was a spindly apparition draped in black, a mask painted around her eyes. Some people called her the Spider Lady, others the Raccoon Lady. Frightened children shied away.

For 15 years, the bizarre, toothless character was a familiar figure roaming the streets of Laguna Beach, sleeping in church breezeways or in somebody’s yard. Even in a town known for having its share of eccentrics, she drew wide-eyed stares.

Police Chief Neil J. Purcell Jr. remembers her sitting on a downtown bench for hours, with her matted hair and “Lone Ranger” mascara mask--scratching herself, mumbling and drinking coffee. It seemed, he said, “a hopeless situation.”

But something amazing has happened to the mystery woman--actually a literate former model from an upper-middle-class background whose flair for creativity was pushed off the scales by schizophrenia.

Through the caring and devotion of an Episcopal priest, an Orange County mental health-care worker and Friendship Shelter, Vanessa Ettinger has come back to reality.

“Her circumstance is pretty incredible,” said Sandy Todd, the mental health-care worker who helped Ettinger’s transformation. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a drastic change . . . with any other client.”

On an overcast morning recently, Ettinger, 48, reflected on her past while she knitted and smoked cigarettes in the comfortable, cluttered Dana Point apartment she moved into when she left the shelter 18 months ago. She looks robust compared to the gaunt, outlandish waif who once wandered the streets.

She speaks of her life with a certain dispassion and seems to accept the peculiar version of herself that evolved with her illness--the self who wore fake braids dragging to the ground or a hair net dripping with earrings. She does not see herself as others saw her, frightening and strange, barely clinging to the fringes of society.

Always, she said, she cared about her appearance, and even carried a travel iron in her shopping cart. She said she reveled in being creative, both with her makeup and her wardrobe. While favoring “basic black,” on a good day she sometimes appeared on the streets all in purple.

“It may not appear (so) to people, but (street people) worry about their appearance a lot,” she said. “I always tried to keep up a ‘model living at a resort’ sort of appearance, that was my thing.”

The painted face made her feel more attractive, she said. And more secure.

“It was,” she dismisses the subject, “just a phase I went through.”

Ettinger’s been through many phases, driven by the paranoid schizophrenia that was diagnosed when she entered adulthood.

She said she’s been married once and has two children living in Vancouver. Her professional name is Vanessa but she now goes by her actual first name, Abbey.

Born in Missouri and raised in Toronto, Ettinger is the eldest of six siblings, including two half-sisters and a half-brother. Her father, “Red Dog” Ettinger, a former football player for the New York Giants in the late 1940s, is dead; her mother is in a Toronto convalescent home.

Her brother, Jim Ettinger, who lives in Arizona, remembers her as “the most beautiful, athletic, creative, intelligent young lady. And very loving to me, being my big sister.”

But when she came to his college campus to visit in the late 1960s, he noticed a change. She seemed “confused, searching.”

Not long afterward, in 1970, feeling depressed and restless, Ettinger hit the streets, leaving behind a 13-room house in Kansas City and a job with an advertising agency.

“She was absolutely gorgeous, I mean knockout gorgeous,” recalled Bernie Papin, president of the advertising agency where Ettinger once worked as a model and receptionist. “Her hair was always perfect, her makeup. She always looked like she stepped out of a Vogue magazine. . . . “

She hitchhiked across America on a trek that would eventually lead to Orange County.

Jim Ettinger said his family didn’t hear from her for 21 years and it seemed as though she had simply dropped off the planet. He consoled himself by imagining her living a happy life somewhere.

“All those years I just tried to picture her sitting . . . in a little place with a teacup full of tea and someone that would care about her and someone she could care about,” he said.

But his sister’s reality contrasted sharply with that gentle fantasy.

“I got raped and robbed a lot,” she said, “but a lot of people were very nice to me too.”

Then, in about 1976, Ettinger came to Laguna Beach, a quaint town that to her so resembled her hometown near Toronto that she felt like she belonged. As Ettinger remembers the following years, she kept mostly to herself and relied on the kindness of strangers, many of whom gave her the cash that helped her survive.

“I’d get up and sing for a while so I could get money,” she said. “It’s not a very honest way to live your life, but once you’re on the streets . . . it’s hard to get off. There aren’t many opportunities.”

Occasionally, Ettinger disappeared for a while, but always returned to Laguna Beach.

During one hiatus, in about 1978, Ettinger visited Papin at the advertising agency where she used to work years before. She appeared one day in his reception room, Papin said: bone thin, in tattered clothing, her front teeth missing.

“I had no idea who she was,” he said. “It was an incredible thing. She was so frail. She looked like she was starving to death.”

Papin said he ushered her into his office and gave her $50, and still did not know who she was when she left.

“Two or three days later it dawned on me,” he said. “It was her voice. For some reason, her voice flashed back.” Papin never saw Ettinger again and, like her family, figured she was dead.

But about 10 years ago, Ettinger met Father Colin Henderson when he welcomed her into St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Laguna Beach so she could sleep on a pew. “He was a very kind person and a very understanding person,” she said.

It was a defining moment in Ettinger’s life, although she didn’t know it.

Later, Henderson became director of Friendship Shelter and opened its doors to Ettinger. When Henderson told her she could stay there for two months, Ettinger remembers feeling “flabbergasted.”

“Most places for the homeless aren’t like that,” she said. “You’re lucky if you can stay two days. This place was a real opportunity. It was clean and neat and it was fun to be there. And the people were very, very nice.”

It was difficult at first, in 1991, when a filthy, frightened and hostile Ettinger entered the shelter three times, shelter program manager Barbara Clippinger said, the first two times refusing to follow rules or to take her medication consistently.

Finally, late one night in 1992, she appeared at the shelter in particularly miserable condition after another detour back to Kansas City, Clippinger said, with lice in her hair and cockroaches in her clothes.

Meanwhile, Todd, Ettinger’s case worker, said she had taken on the “personal challenge” of getting her “on medication and into the system.” Eventually, she succeeded.

Clippinger and Todd recall their surprise as Ettinger slowly began to emerge from her illness.

“She came in (to the shelter) . . . very primitive in her behavior, clothing and attitude,” Clippinger said. “And then, all of a sudden, in her room I would find books on Degas and Monet from the library.”

Added Todd: “Over the months, she would just blossom more and more.”

Ettinger finally called her brother, and about 18 months ago they were reunited when he came to Orange County to help her move into her Dana Point apartment.

It was both thrilling and shocking to again see his sister after 21 years, he said.

“I was glad she was alive but I just couldn’t imagine that was the same person.” He is now his sister’s “payee,” accepting the Social Security checks that support her and forwarding the money to pay her bills.

Finally, last year, Ettinger took another leap by offering to speak at a Friendship Shelter fund-raiser. Clippinger wasn’t sure what to expect. “I thought we would have the lady with the braids and the bags and the layered look,” she said.

But Ettinger arrived looking elegant and understated, wearing a flattering green sheath and just a whisper of makeup. She walked through the room, chatting with the guests, thanking them for having her and commenting on the hors d’oeuvres.

Today, Ettinger’s life is decidedly unglamorous. The apartment building where she lives is home to a collection of mental health patients who have become her friends. And there are reminders of her former life even in the new surroundings, including two long, black hairpieces spread smoothly on her dresser.

She lives normally, but within limitations. Her doctor said she will probably never work. Ettinger knows she must always take medication.

“I’m very happy now that I have my own apartment and my own furniture,” she said. “I guess I’ll just stay here and live out my life as a schizophrenic.”

And while she is generally optimistic, Ettinger admits to a nagging foreboding that, someday, she could slip back into that darker world. “I still have a fear something will happen to me and I’ll end up back there,” she said.

But she has embarked on a new beginning. Her life has taken on a relatively predictable rhythm. She watches television, goes to the movies and visits with friends.

“It’s so much better than being on the street,” she said. “It’s like day and night. It was so depressing on the streets and it’s not depressing in my apartment or my new life.”

Recently, Ettinger even talked on the phone to her daughter in Canada, their first conversation in 24 years.

“It was really nice to hear her voice again, but she kept saying, ‘You don’t sound like my mother,’ ” Ettinger recalled. “She said, ‘I haven’t seen you since I was 7. Where have you been?’ I told her the truth.”

The truth, as Clippinger sees it, is nothing short of a miracle. “She is just a miracle that it took a whole community to support.”