Medicine: Profound Sulks

Vexed because the rich Los Angeles broker who had furtively married her took his mother, instead of her, to a party last New Year’s Eve, emotional Helen Wills Love, 31, went to the party anyway, shot Mr. Love dead. Mrs. Love’s arrest, indictment and trial turned out to be the midwinter sensation of Southern California. She was amply photographed kissing her late husband in his coffin, and during the trial one of the women jurors was removed for habitually getting drunk on liquor which she hid in the women’s toilet. Fortnight ago, the other jurors found Helen Wills Love guilty of murder in the second degree. Cried the prisoner: “That’s not fair!”

As the judge prepared to sentence Helen Love to from seven years to life in prison, she returned to her cell, told a jail matron: “I can sit in this chair, or lie down on this bed and kill myself by strength of will power.” So saying, she selected the bed, went into a fit of sulks so profound that half a dozen solemn psychiatrists could not even agree on a name for it, variously calling it “hysterical fugue,” “split personality,” “dementia praecox,” “triumph of the subconscious,” “self-imposed hypnosis,” “voluntary stupor.”

Physicians stuck pins into Helen Love and slapped her face without getting response. A practical prosecutor suggested dousing her with cold water, but the doctors forbade that on the ground that the shock might kill her. Helen Love’s brother helpfully recalled that soft, classical music had once brought her out of a similar fit. But none was available in the Los Angeles jail. Then a dapper psychiatrist named Dr. Samuel Morris Marcus took a hand. He rubbed the woman’s eyelids, tickled her behind the ears. That caused her to twitch, to murmur: “Don’t, Harry [the dead man], don’t.” But Mrs. Love did not wake up and doctors continued to nourish her through a vein with a solution of salt and sugar.

Some 15 years ago one Harvey W. Church, Chicago murderer, threw himself into a similar state. After three months of fretting, Illinois justice hanged the sulker. In California, however, a convict must be sentenced within five days of the jury’s verdict and must be fully aware of the sentence. So Judge Frank M. Smith went to the jail’s hospital to see if he could pass sentence there. The woman lay on her back, arms folded over her chest, breathing slowly, her lips twitching. Apparently Helen Love was not only unaware of Judge Smith, but of a score of doctors, lawyers, jailers, reporters, photographers gathered in her cell. Dr. Benjamin Blank, jail physician, told the judge that Mrs. Love’s condition was “mental,” but that she was not “insane.” Nevertheless, Judge Smith took a look at the sleeping prisoner, declared: “The court doubts the sanity of the defendant.” Therewith he postponed sentence until three more psychiatrists could pass on Helen Love’s state.

In spite of the fact that Mrs. Love’s case was now in the hands of a medical commission, in the seventh day of her self-induced stupor four newsreel cameras were set up in the jail hospital and one of the original psychiatrists had another try at awakening the prisoner. Psychiatrist Marcus stroked her forehead, tickled her mastoids, then murmured into her ear: “I’m coming in. Here I come. I’m knocking. Here I come.” He turned to the cameramen. “She will awaken in less than a minute. . . . She is awake! Come, come, Helen! Speak up! Do you recognize me?”

To the amazement of probably everyone in California except Dr. Marcus and the busy sound camera crews, Mrs. Love opened her eyes and said: “Yes, Dr. Marcus.”

“You’re going to stay awake now, Helen,” said the doctor. And sure enough she was soon sitting up in bed, eating heartily.

The psychiatrists who had unsuccessfully tried to rouse the sleeping prisoner had nothing to say. Commented one of the jailers: “This is all foolishness.”