OCALA, Fla. — Little more than 50 years have passed since the story of a Georgia housewife hit the big screen and introduced America to Eve White. And Eve Black. And Jane.
"The Three Faces of Eve," by two Augusta psychiatrists, told of a woman whose life seemed split between a timid, religious Eve; a sassy, sexy Eve; and later under treatment, a self-centered intellectual survivor named Jane.
The film version of the book, released in 1957, earned Georgia-born actress Joanne Woodward an Oscar. But unlike Woodward's character, who appeared cured when the credits rolled, the real Eve said she endured years more turmoil before finally becoming "unified" or "integrated" as a whole person.
In April another Georgia story of multiple personalities emerged. Former University of Georgia and NFL football star Herschel Walker stunned his fans and teammates when he divulged in his autobiography, "Breaking Free," that he, too, has suffered the "Eve" syndrome of various personalities.
Walker says he has had 12 personalities, or "alters." He blames the disorder for angry outbursts he says are contrary to his character.
His revelation renewed interest in what many people mistakenly believe is an extremely rare occurrence.
"Even at the most conservative estimate, there are hundreds of thousands of cases in the U.S.," Atlanta psychologist Lynn Mary Karjala said. The condition is officially now known as dissociative identity disorder.
"My understanding for the reason in the shift in personalities is that we now understand that people don't have multiple personalities," said Karjala, author of "Undertanding Trauma and Dissociation." "They only have one that can become fractured under some special circumstances."
Fight for acceptance
In diaries and notes later donated to Duke University, Chris Sizemore, the woman who inspired "The Three Faces of Eve," reveals her fractured self in her accounts written by what seemed to be distinct personalities. They had different tastes, different talents and even different intellectual abilities. One liked purple. One collected bells. They bought different clothes and ate different foods. Sometimes they sabotaged one another. Even the handwriting styles were completely different.
There were 21 in all — existing in sets of three.
"I'm the 22nd," says Sizemore, now an 81-year-old Florida great-grandmother. "I know I'm the sum total of all those personalities. I'm all of them together."
Her advice to Walker, she said, is to "stay in therapy" and "to know he can be a well person."
She is sitting on a pastel-printed sectional sofa in a house on a shady lot outside Ocala. Around her are collections of Buddha figures, snowmen and unicorns. Her own artwork decorates the walls.
She spends most of her time painting, visiting with friends, attending church, taking in an occasional movie and doing housework and yardwork.
Few people in her circle of friends know her background, or if they do, they make little of it. "I've fought all my life to be like other people," she says. "To be accepted in that manner is quite fulfilling."
Not that she shies away from her identity. She has told the story of her battle with dissociative identity disorder in lectures, television appearances and a series of books. Writing under the pseudonym Evelyn Lancaster, she began with "The Final Face of Eve." That was followed by "I'm Eve," written with her cousin under her own name as she was at last overcoming her disorder. Later came "A Mind of My Own."
A traumatic beginning
The chronicle of what Sizemore calls her "lives" begins when she was a toddler, traumatized by three sights — a drunk man appearing to be dead floating in an irrigation ditch, the body of a man who had been cut in half in a sawmill accident, and her mother's arm, pouring blood, after a canning jar exploded.
Sizemore saw a little red-haired girl watching as men dragged the man from the ditch and running for help after her mother's injury.
No one else could see the girl, who later wreaked havoc — from stealing apples to biting the toes of Sizemore's twin baby sisters — for which Sizemore was punished.
In school, she says, one child might study, but another might take the test and miss the answers.
As she grew up, the potential consequences became much more serious.
One personality became entangled with a man who beat and raped her. More than one attempted suicide.
Sizemore began therapy while married to her first husband — a tumultuous relationship that later ended in divorce. She was living in South Carolina, just across the state line from Augusta. A family physician recommended Dr. Corbett Thigpen, an associate professor at the Medical College of Georgia.
Seeing a therapist
"Eve White" saw him for the first time in the summer of 1951, when she was in her mid-20s. Thigpen described her in a paper, later recorded in "The Final Face of Eve," as "an attractive brunette with a figure that did honor to her sex," who sat "slightly slumped, with an air of fatigue, but with dignity."
The psychiatrist made his diagnosis after "Eve Black" made herself known to him.
"He and Eve Black didn't get along at all," Sizemore says. "She wanted to flirt with him. Fortunately, he was a moral doctor."
Jane seemed to be born as a result of Thigpen's therapy.
"Out of chaos," Sizemore says, "he created this other personality."
Her late husband, Don Sizemore, married Jane. In "The Three Faces of Eve," Thigpen and his colleague, Hervey Cleckley, presented the world with a happily-ever-after ending.
If only, Sizemore said, it had been so.
A welcoming return
It wouldn't be until 1974, under the care of another doctor while living in Virginia, that the real Chris Sizemore would finally triumph.
For years, Sizemore resented what she saw as Thigpen's financial exploitation of her story, although he never charged for therapy. In 1989, she sued 20th Century Fox to claim rights to her post-"Three Faces" life when Sissy Spacek expressed an interest in starring in a follow-up film. Although Sizemore won the suit, the movie never materialized.
She has pondered many times what her life would have been without Thigpen, whom she sees as courageous for his willingness to make and pursue an unusual diagnosis.
"Either one personality would have become so dominant she would have refused to let any of the other personalities out," she says, "or I would have become so confused I would have been institutionalized."
Sizemore says her greatest sorrow is the turmoil her mental disorder caused her husband, Don, who died 16 years ago, and children. Both of them — Taffy and Bobby — grew up remarkably unscathed, she says.
Last fall, Sizemore returned triumphantly to Augusta for the 50th anniversary of the film based on her life. She was accorded the celebrity she missed when the movie premiered and she was still an anonymous patient discouraged from attending the festivities.
"I left there a very sick person," she says. "To have the whole city turn out welcoming me home was really quite wonderful."
She's writing a murder mystery with two of her sisters. They want to include "a multiple," she says, but she's resisting the idea. "I don't think it belongs in fiction," she says.
Sizemore's paintings sell from $500 to $5,000. Many are of "the attic child," a dark-haired little girl in a playroom she remembers from her childhood.
From that room, she watched the world through a stained-glass window that seems symbolic in retrospect.
"I could look out different panes and see the outside world in a different color," she says. "If I looked out a blue one, it was blue. If I looked out a yellow one, everything was gold."
The woman who struggled for so long to integrate the facets of her life finds comfort in the memory of that magical transformation.
IN THEIR OWN WORDS
• Chris Sizemore in "I'm Eve" (1977)
"A freckle girl, a singing girl, a big-eyed girl! They came and they went. I remember them. It's all kind of vague, but I distinctly remember them. It was the first time that any of them were aware that there were others like them. That ugly freckled girl came most of the time, and she didn't know about the others; but she always got the blame for all the bad things they did. And I'm not so sure they knew about each other, but they knew her. She was such a timid, backward little soul, what did I need her for?"
• Herschel Walker in "Breaking Free" (2008)
"My hands were crushing the steering wheel, and when I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror, I saw the veins and sinews in my face and neck standing out like rivers and streams on a relief map. My face was contorted and it was difficult for me to believe that the person I saw in that mirror, eyes darting furiously from the mirror to the road ahead, was really me.
"Do it.
"Stop it.
"Do it.
"You can't.
"Do it.
"Like the pulsing rhythm of a chorus, the two voices kept up a relentless beat. Simultaneously, I felt frightened, exhilarated, disgusted, at peace, and resigned."
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