Chris Costner Sizemore, 89, patient behind 'The Three Faces of Eve' .
By Bruce Weber New York Times . NEW YORK - At the start of the 1957
movie "The Three Faces of Eve," the British journalist Alistair Cooke,
who narrates the film, appears on camera to tell viewers that the
incredible tale they are about to see is a true story - a facsimile of
actual events. Adapted from a book by two psychiatrists, Corbett H.
Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley, the movie starred Joanne Woodward, who
won an Academy Award for portraying an unassuming housewife who suffers
from what is now called dissociative identity disorder, the
psychological malady that manifests itself in the display of multiple
personalities. At the end of the book, and of the film, the title
character, whose three distinct personalities were known as Eve White,
Eve Black, and Jane, was cured; the Eve personalities had dissolved.
She was living as Jane, happily married and reunited with a daughter
from a previous marriage. Despite Cooke's assurances, however, the
happy ending was premature. The patient whose story the book and movie
purported to tell, Chris Costner Sizemore, had a much grimmer time of
it. She endured a fragmented identity until the mid-1970s, seeing
several psychiatrists after Thigpen and Cleckley, until, in the care of
a Virginia doctor, Tony Tsitos, her personalities - more than 20, it
turned out - were unified. "You don't know how wonderful it is to go to
bed at night and know that it will be you that wakes up the next day,"
Ms. Sizemore told The New York Post in 1975. By most accounts, for the
last four decades or so, she lived a productive and relatively serene
life as a mental health advocate and painter. She died July 24 in
Ocala, Fla., at 89. Her son, Bobby Sizemore, said she had a heart
attack. She was born in Edgefield, S.C. Her father was Doctor Acie
Costner, a farmer who later worked in a lumber mill; her mother, the
former Zuline Hastings. Psychiatrists believe that dissociation is a
defense mechanism: a reaction to severe childhood trauma or prolonged
physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. In Ms. Sizemore's case, the
fragmentation began when she was as young as 2, after she had witnessed
a series of gruesome incidents, including her mother being bloodily
injured in a kitchen accident, the funeral of an infant, the dragging
of a corpse from a ditch, and a man being "cut in half by a saw at a
lumber mill," she told the Post. As she grew older, she would be
punished for acts of disobedience or cruelty that she could not
remember committing, she said. She would be baffled by a test in school
that a different personality had prepared for. She never finished high
school. According to her 1977 memoir, "I'm Eve," written with a
relative, Elen Sain Pittillo, she was scarred further by an early
romance with a sadistic man. A severe headache would announce the
emergence of a different personality. She began seeing Thigpen in
Augusta, Ga., after her first marriage, when she began alternating
between the demure and depressed Eve White and the self-indulgent party
girl Eve Black. In one episode depicted in the film, she wrapped the
cord of a venetian blind around the neck of her daughter when the child
would not stop crying. The personality Jane, a pleasant and sensible
young woman, became manifest during her therapy. Her marriage ended.
The second, to Don Sizemore, an electrician, began. The two Eves and
Jane proved evanescent, but as those personalities faded, others
appeared, usually in groups of three. As doctors learned more about
dissociation, the presumption that its main manifestation was multiple
personalities with vastly different traits gave way to an understanding
that the divides in a person's identity could be far more subtle. Some
of her personalities knew how to drive but others did not. In the Post
interview, Ms. Sizemore said her personalities dressed differently,
talked differently, ate differently. "I once weighed 175 pounds because
I was feeding three different people in the same body different meals,"
she said. Tsitos began treating her in 1970, and by 1974 she was no
longer dissociating. Don Sizemore died in 1992. In addition to her son,
Sizemore leaves two sisters, Louise Edwards, and Becky Walton; her
daughter, Taffy Fecteau; two grandchildren; and three
great-grandchildren. Sizemore wrote a follow-up to her memoir, "A Mind
of My Own" (1989), in which she recounted the integration of her
personalities and her life afterward. In later years she was a frequent
speaker on behalf of people with mental illness and an accomplished
figurative painter.
