The sad disintegration of Britney Spears in recent weeks reminds me of my own family's experience with a mentally ill young woman in Los Angeles, almost 40 years ago. It touches on Dr. Phil and the Hollywood cure. Of course the origins of how we treat those we deem crazy goes back to 18th century Bedlam, where the London madhouse keepers charged a few shillings to those who wanted to gape at the local lunatics rending their garments and screaming obscenities in their madness. But this isn't a history lesson; it's a personal story.
We had been living in Santa Monica for six months while I worked on the television projects that paid for my family's living expenses and my insatiably unprofitable theatre habit. Our household consisted of my wife Joan, my three-year-old son Nick, and a 17-year-old baby sitter, Karen, whom we had taken with us from New York during her summer vacation to help us survive the demands of a very boisterous boy child, a great kid who hated to nap during the day, and regarded bedtime as an assault upon his civil rights. This was after all, the '60s, and even toddlers asserted their rights those days. Karen had made friends with Sally, an au pair with some young charges of her own, and together they watched their toddlers careening down the slides and riding the swings at the nearby Uplifters Ranch in the hills of Santa Monica. Sally seemed a shy, sweet girl, somewhat distant, but the few times we had met her gave us no hint of the events that were to follow.
On the evening before we were to return home to New York Sally appeared at our doorstep, weeping and disconsolate. When my wife calmed her down with a cup of tea and sympathetic questions, she told us a remarkable story. Sally claimed that she had been working as an au pair for G. David Schine, the Ambassador Hotel heir who had been the cohort of Roy Cohen, one of the evil twins in the Army McCarthy hearings. The girl claimed that she had been kept a prisoner at night behind locked gates, and that she feared for her life. She advised us that it was so bad that she contemplated suicide. She had no money since she worked for this wealthy family without a salary, taking care of their progeny in exchange for room and board. Since I thought Mr. Schine capable of any malfeasance, and incarcerating an innocent young girl seemed reasonable for such a man who might well keep a girl in unpaid servitude, I accepted her story. She filled in such telling details as watching the Schine children trade with each other at the dinner table for food and money, the dinner hour being training for a life in finance, living in a household where mammon was all. That seemed to paint the right picture. Having escaped from Schine's castle in Hancock Park, slipping out a delivery door when someone was bringing in a food delivery, she came to us for refuge. She informed us that we were the only people she knew in LA. She told us that if we turned her away she would kill herself, indeed, she planned to take her own life in any event. I called the UCLA suicide clinic and asked them for help. They instructed me to ask Sally the day of the week, the month, and other facts like her birthday, and when she responded with the right information they assured me that she probably wouldn't kill herself, at least not that night, but if I would care to do so, I should take her in to UCLA to be examined by a clinician at their facility the following day. Now remember, we were leaving LA the following evening, packed and unpacked baggage was strewn about the rented house, and our lives were in the normal disarray, now the abnormal disarray was introduced into the mix.
The night promised to be an uneasy one for me. We gave Sally an aspirin for her headache; my wife provided her with a pair of pajamas, and we put her to sleep on the sofa in the living room. I was advised by Joan to sit up the night, keeping guard over our child's bedroom door, while she, Joan, would make regular trips to the kitchen to check on the gas fearing that Sally might try to take us all down with her in some early morning suicide attempt. So I stayed up that night, keeping sentry duty over Nicholas and Karen, and the following morning we drove Sally to UCLA where she was interviewed by a psychologist. We were invited inside the consulting room by Sally and the therapist in order to help fill in the blanks. As we watched it was clear to us that Sally was practiced in her handling of the therapist, she knew the questions and the right answers. She would give them no reason to call the cops and have her institutionalized. She was a battered but seasoned veteran of the psychological wars. It was like watching a tennis match at Wimbledon between two accomplished players. The facts of her life tumbled out. Sexually abused at 11, placed in a foster home, abused again, then drifting towards Los Angeles where she made her home with various wealthy Angelinos by offering to work as a nursemaid for their children in exchange for room and board, this had been her modus operandi. Among her former employers were several film stars, one of whom was the handsome light comedy actor Gig Young who would later kill himself and his wife. The common pattern seemed to be that these well-heeled people couldn't resist the bargain of a free nursemaid, and hadn't bothered to check her references. We learned that she had recently turned 21, and had been institutionalized off and on since she was 12 in various mental hospitals throughout the country, but unless she voluntarily agreed to go to Camarillo, the local state institution, they could do nothing for her given the fact that she was an adult and had not actually made an attempt on her own life or anyone else's.
"But what do I do? Leave her to the mercy of the Los Angeles streets? I've got to get back to New York tonight!" I explained/complained. "I hardly know the girl. All I know is that she is very ill and you don't abandon people like this!"
"Mr. Yellen," the psychologist replied. "Think about it this way. You've just been in an accident and Sally is that accident." With this we were dismissed with a goodbye and good luck.
Putting aside my fierce political distaste for G. David Shine, I called him, and to my surprise he agreed to meet with us at his mansion where he had his cook pack Sally's suitcase waiting for her to collect it at the door. When I explained the situation on the telephone, he replied that the house gates were indeed locked at night, not to keep Sally in but to keep potential kidnappers and robbers out. He suddenly appeared quite reasonable, almost human; perhaps here was a man who had learned from the grave errors of his misspent youth. Better yet, he told me that he would take responsibility for her treatment, and that I could leave Sally with him if she wished. It was with great relief that we arrived at Hancock Park, meeting the zealous right-wing millionaire and his beautiful Scandinavian bride, and we were now given the details of his plan for Sally's recovery, plans he had already put into action. He had contacted a psychologist friend of his who had a local television show that dealt with troubled people, an advice show, and this TV psychologist had agreed to examine Sally on air that very afternoon. My wife and I were horrified. We asked if he had any understanding of how sick this woman was, that she was a potential suicide with a lifelong history of abuse, and how inappropriate, and possibly harmful putting her on television might be, exposing her to further humiliation, only now it would be public shame. He regarded me as a foolish, finicky and uppity human being (all of which I can be and have been but that was not the case then) and he advised me that this was the limit of his contribution to "helping Sally." He would not subsidize a private physician. After all, the girl had only been working for him for a few weeks. Sally, of course, refused to make her TV debut that afternoon, and I took her small suitcase, put it into my rented car and we drove around Los Angeles, trying to find a solution. I offered to drive her to the hospital in Camarillo but she adamantly refused. She told me it was worse for her being there than dealing with her troubles alone.
"Then what am I to do with you?" I asked her, assuming that she intended to stick to us like flypaper for life.
"If you'll drive me to a motel and pay for a week's room there, I'll be all right," she assured us. "This has happened before. It takes a week for me to get through it. But when I do, I always get another job and keep going." And reader, that's what I did.
Reluctantly, ashamedly, but inevitably, I put a hundred dollars into her hands for food, and paid up front for her room at that Hollywood motel, and left her there alone, waving to us in the doorway of her motel room.
We returned to New York, hoping for the best and thinking that we had heard the last of Sally. A month later we received a call from a stranger who left a message in our answering machine. The woman's name was that of a well known tobacco company heiress. It seems she had taken on Sally as a housekeeper and had been developing some doubts about her. The girl seemed rather strange, she reported. Sally had innocently given her our telephone number in New York. When I called the new employer I learned that there were no children in the house, and that Sally's duties were confined to the making of beds and light dusting. I said I did not employ Sally in that capacity and I could not give her any information, since I did not know of her housekeeping abilities. I said nothing more. I guess I figured that the woman was exploiting this poor girl, and it was her lookout. No tragic headlines ensued. So I assume Sally remained with this woman awhile, only to go on working in the households of the greedy/mighty of which Los Angeles provided an inexhaustible resource, finding new employment when her welcome or her mental health gave out.
And so we come to Dr. Phil and Britney. Despite his protests that he only wanted to help that distraught girl, Dr. Phil disgraced himself in a way that not only damaged him, but pointed up the problem so many have in dealing with mental illness. We think there is a quick fix and that the village scold can shake a finger, wag a tongue, and voila, the troubled, the damaged, and the lost will be made whole again. Forty years has changed nothing. In fact, the idea that everything can be transformed into a form of money-making entertainment, that mental illness is not comparable to physical illness, requiring discretion, care, and privacy, indicates that we have never really left the days of the Bedlam Madhouse, where the mentally ill were put on display for the paid amusement of the many, only now we call it Entertainment Tonight. Shame on our mass media, or should I call it our mad media.