Case History: Candy Jones
…public disclosure of some aspects of MKULTRA activity could induce serious adverse reaction in U.S. public opinion… – CIA Inspector General (Scheflin & Opton, p. 132)
A small box sat on the table. Wires ran from it to her wrist and to her shoulder. They shocked her. It hurt terribly. They shocked her, over and over, and asked question after question about the story of her life and her CIA link. She did not know about any CIA link. The torturers would not believe her. They shocked her again. They asked, “What about Dr. Jensen. Do you know a Dr. Jensen?”
“You’ve asked me enough. You should know,” she groaned. “Why don’t you just kill me? Why do you keep me here like this?”
To somebody in Washington, D.C., what those interrogators were doing to Candy Jones was just an experiment to see if the programming of a hypnocourier held up under torture.
Childhood, Youth, and Career
Candy was born in 1925 (two years after barbiturates first came on the drug market). Her birth name was Jessica Wilcox. Her mother was a homemaker. Her father was a good-looking Polish Catholic who advanced from being a ticket taker (when he met her mother) to being a car salesman in Atlantic City (when he left her mother). Candy was three when Daddy stopped coming home. The mother and her child then went to live with Grandmama in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The year was 1928. Grandmama was wealthy, well educated, pleasant natured, and an osteopathic physician.
Mother taught Jessica to sew, draw, swim, and ride, and use good manners. Dinner was always at five, an occasion for which to dress. During the meal, the little girl could speak only if spoken to. She had books, a cat, a dog, and playmates at their summer home on a lake. In winter, however, only her pets—and sometimes the cook’s little girl, Snowflake—played with her. Mother did not allow her to bring friends home from school. They would “mess up the house.”
The child loved to play in Grandmama’s room, dress up in her clothes, sit in front of her big dressing table. She did that almost every day. The dressing table had pullout mirrors that could surround her on three sides, displaying seven images of little Jessica. One day she played tea party on the dressing table top and invited imaginary friends, the images in the mirror.
She was innocently performing a kind of self-hypnosis. Bright, imaginative children often do. Staring into a mirror invites trance at any age; children and teenagers are most susceptible to induction. You focus. Your mind becomes blank, and there’s something about staring closely into eyes. Especially your own.
Jessica’s tea party mirror playmates developed into an imaginary “club”—Doty (pronounced Dot-tee, a child’s pronunciation of Dorothy), Arlene, Willy, and Pansy. As time went by, she did not need the mirror any more to play with them. Pansy was a good girl, quiet and nice. Willy was a boy who stomped his feet if he could not get his way. Doty tended to fight with Arlene. Arlene was the fastest runner, the highest climber, the strongest swimmer in the club. She had a domineering personality and was always trying to run things.
Grandmama died in 1936. Jessica was eleven. Mother and daughter then moved back to Atlantic City. For the next five years, the young girl’s life was uneventful– sheltered, protected, and closely supervised by her mother.
In the wider world, there was war in Europe. Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and we were in the war too.
In 1941, Jessica graduated from high school. She wanted to be a doctor like Grandmama, but mother would not pay for her to attend college. Mother told her to go to secretarial school instead. Jessica was not interested.
Candy Jones: Model – In June of 1941, Jessica Wilcox entered the Miss Atlantic City contest. She was the Girl Scouts’ candidate. She won. Atlantic City hosted the Miss America pageant at that time. Jessica was not a contestant in the big show, but she marched in the parade and had many hostess duties because she was Miss Atlantic City.
Her long blonde hair, perfect features, tall, long-legged frame, bosomy contour, and sweet disposition attracted attention among the mob of newspaper and media people there to watch Miss America be chosen. The attention turned into an astonishing rush of enthusiastic press attention. By the close of the pageant, Jessica was surrounded by reporters and radio personalities begging for an interview or a photo. One of the contest judges was John Powers, founder of the famous Powers Modeling Agency. He invited her to come to New York and work for his agency.
To her mother’s distress, Jessica accepted. She hung around the Powers stable for two weeks, but received only two photo jobs. (The pay was $5 each.) One day, on her off time, while waiting for a friend at the other big modeling agency in town, Harry Conover’s, her big break came. Conover was a top male model who had founded his own agency and soared from model to modeling mogul. A photographer walked in, saw her, and spoke of her to Harry. Harry walked out, took a look at the blonde sitting in his reception area, and the magic began.
Conover bought the blonde’s contract from Powers. He transformed Jessica Wilcox into Candy Jones, bankrolling a media blitz based on a red-and-white candy-stripe theme. Candy had red and white striped clothing, accessories, jewelry, matchbook covers, and bicycle. Conover showered Manhattan with 10,000 red and white striped business cards which said “Candy Jones Was Here.”
It worked. Warner Brothers Studio signed her up. She started getting calls to pose for magazine covers and to appear in glitzy ads for products with big budgets. Her mother gave up on secretarial school for her and moved to New York to live with, and chaperone, Candy.
In 1943, Candy was voted Model of the Year. Loretta Young was a judge on the panel. She said Candy looked like “a real girl.” The guys in the trenches also thought so. Photos of the tall blonde in a polka-dot bikini were pinned-up wherever there were GIs. A photo of her in a formal dress stitched from transparent parachute nylon was equally well received.
Candy took acting and voice lessons and won a leading role in the smash Broadway play, “Mexican Hayride,” produced by Mike Todd. It ran for eight months. She was the model used on recruiting posters for the new branches of the military in which women could serve–WACS and WAVES. In one month of that amazing year of 1943, her picture was on the cover of eleven magazines. (Estabrooks published Hypnotism in 1943, a book which urged government use of unknowing hypnoprogrammed agents.)
Lieutenant Candy Jones – The USO offered Candy an opportunity to tour through the Southwest Pacific in a show written around her. She accepted the task of bringing evenings of happiness to weary and homesick GIs fighting in Pacific operations. She became Lieutenant Candy Jones. She began the USO shows in 1944, with a six-month contract, then signed on for another year–a total of eighteen months. While on tour, the beautiful model, performer, stage show manager, and patriot briefly met General Donovan. (He was head of the OSS, a new agency which President Roosevelt had authorized at the beginning of the war for the dual tasks of gathering intelligence and of doing secret scientific research with military applications.)
In April, 1945, Candy was presented with a quart of fresh milk brought by airplane from Australia—a rare luxury in the cowless Southwest Pacific area. She drank it. But the cow had been sick. The milk had not been pasteurized. Candy got undulant fever. With her resistance down from the fever, she also developed active malaria. They put her in a Philippines military hospital. There, from unclean sheets, she caught a third disease: the “jungle rot.” The rot was a fungus that made her beautiful blonde hair fall out in clumps. The malaria had given her a greenish-yellow skin tone. She looked terrible, but the New York photographers were far away. The medics right then were worried about keeping her alive.
While sick on Leyte, she encountered a military psychiatrist, “Gilbert Jensen.” In August, 1945, after four months of treatment and recuperation, she was well enough to go home. Before she left, Jensen gave her a photo of himself with his APO address written on the back. He asked her to write. She did not.
Back in the States, Candy starred in another Broadway musical, a wig and heavy makeup hiding the ravages of illness. It took eight months more healing before she could pose for photographers again. She married her employer, Harry Conover, on July 4, 1946. Marrying Candy was a good career move for Harry. He did not reveal to her his homosexuality. It took five months to consummate their marriage, but Candy—who was a virgin and not sophisticated—did not understand the problem until years later.
A Telephone Induction – Candy’s busy career included many invitations to guest on the big time talk shows of that radio-dominated era. Technology could not yet provide phone interviews with quality sound. Therefore, even for a radio interview, she would have to fly to the broadcast station. In 1946, she accepted an invitation to appear on “Don McNeil’s Breakfast Club” in Chicago. (That year, the OSS was reorganized as the CIA with the same two missions: secret intelligence gathering and secret scientific research.) There, Candy met another person who would be important in her hypnoprogrammed future.
Candy flew in the night before the show, registered at the Drake Hotel, and unpacked. Then the chills hit. The Leyte doctor had assured her there would be no more malaria attacks, but this felt like the old nightmare had come back. She went to bed, but the chills got worse. Under a mound of blankets, she was still shivering.
She called a staff employee at the Don McNeil Breakfast Club. He visited her, viewed the situation, and promised a doctor would call. Soon after he left, a doctor, “Dr. Marshall Burger,” did call her on the telephone.
This doctor, like “Jensen,” is known only by a pseudonym. Burger was a psychiatrist who hobnobbed with big names from both the political and entertainment worlds, especially movie stars. He was “a dynamic, craggy-faced egotist.” And he was a hypnotist, “a pioneer and leading authority in the field of medical hypnosis.” (Bain, p. 137) There were
…government-sponsored experimental programs with which he was closely identified. He’d begun working on such programs during World War II, and was one of the first doctors to probe the potentials of hypnosis as a tool of war. His sponsor for that project was the Central Intelligence Agency. (Bain, p. 137)
As Candy Jones lay alone in her hotel room, shivering under the covers, desperate for relief, Burger talked to her on the telephone. He said he was not able to come see her that night, but that he would drop by the next morning. He told her to count backwards. He said he was trying to relax her. He assured her that, if she would just count backwards, she would stop shaking and fall sleep.
Burger never told Candy that his “relaxation” was a hypnotic induction. At the beginning of his induction routine, Burger did not know whether or not Candy was a naturally good hypnotic subject. A hypnotist never knows for sure until he tries.
Now, he tried. He told her to place the phone on the pillow next to her ear and count down with him. He combined the counting-down induction routine with suggestions that her shaking was stopping, her chills going away, her fever dropping. And sleep, sleep, sleep.
As she counted backwards with Dr. Burger, Candy’s chills did diminish. She did feel sleepier, and sleepier, and sleepier. She fell asleep. In the morning, she felt okay. Whatever had caused the problem was now completely gone. She appeared on the Breakfast Club, then flew back to New York. She did not know she had been hypnotized. Burger, however, now knew that Candy Jones was susceptible to hypnosis. (Maybe he told Donovan.)
Marriage Breakup, Money Problems – In 1947, there was trouble inside the Harry Conover Modeling Agency. Other models were complaining that Conover showed favoritism to his wife in assigning jobs. Candy solved that one by opening her own agency right next door to Conover’s office in the skyscraper called 52 Vanderbilt Avenue. Soon Candy’s agency landed the lucrative Colgate-Palmolive account. She let Harry bill for her agency as well as his, and bank the payments.
Candy was always working. She toured overseas again, managing a USO show for U.S. soldiers fighting in Korea. She continued her modeling career until time took its natural toll, and the photographers did not call for her any more. She published books about glamour, dress, and fashion—and one about her experiences while touring for the USO during World War II. She gave birth to three sons: Harry, Chris, and Cari.
In 1958, she found out that her husband was bisexual (or maybe homosexual). That explained why he almost never reached out to love her. Soon after that, he disappeared completely. Candy took responsibility for all debts, including the rent on his office and hers. Then, she found out that he had withdrawn all the money from their joint bank accounts. Before he took off, there had been over $100,000 in there. Now there was only $36.
Candy struggled on. She found new sources of income. She began working on the radio, becoming a regular on the popular NBC weekend news program, “Monitor.” Through her Monitor news interviews, she met people in the entertainment business, politics, and the military. Though naturally of a quiet nature, Candy maintained a socialite’s life-style, going to Broadway openings and working for charities. She traveled a lot in her business, jetting coast to coast to watch fashion shows and give speeches.
Candy wanted her sons to have the best possible education and a stable environment. Since she was working and on the road so much, she enrolled all three of them in an expensive boarding school. She was also supporting her elderly mother, and the woman who looked after her. Without her husband’s income, however, all those expenses were soon more than she could afford. After a year of desperate financial struggle, Candy finally took her lawyer’s advice and sued Harry Conover for repayment of the money he had absconded with—and for alimony, child support, and divorce.
Her legal case against him made juicy headlines for the New York daily papers. In the end, she won. The judge gave Harry a choice of paying or going to jail. But Harry had been giving lavish parties every night for the past year, and now he had no money left. He went to jail for two years. Candy now also owed her lawyer a big bill for the court case.
CIA Recruits a Courier
Dr. Burger had moved from the Chicago suburb to southern California. The clientele for his private practice was now the Hollywood crowd, shapely bodies–and opinion shapers to the world. California and New York were centers for CIA mind-control experiments in the 1960s, and Burger was part of that program. (Bain called him the research “project’s messiah.”)
Part of Burger’s job was training other doctors to be mind-control experts for the Company. One of his trainees was Gilbert Jensen. The CIA was then researching a new type of hypnoprogrammed courier, one with a more unbreachable amnesia than mere hypnotic suggestion could achieve: an artificially split personality. Gilbert Jensen would be creating and managing a unit of these unknowing agents.
Candy was a celebrity, a patriot, single, traveled in her business, and badly needed money. She must have seemed a good prospect for recruitment.
In 1960, strange things began to happen at 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, where Candy now ran her modeling school, agency, and what was left of the Conover agency, from Room 808. The events seemed unimportant at the time. Maybe some of them were truly irrelevant. But, looking back, there was an obvious pattern of deceit and manipulation, a sinister web of entrapment starting to weave about Candy Jones.
An Odd Burglary – Heavyweight boxing champ, Gene Tunney, had been Candy’s neighbor across the hall for years. One day, Candy noticed a “cleaning lady” standing outside Tunney’s door. She appeared to be trying to figure out which one, of a set of keys, fit his door. The next day, Gene told Candy that his office had been broken into the night before. He said no harm had been done.
A few days later, Candy ran into General Donovan, now “retired,” in the building lobby. Although they were barely acquainted, Donovan acted quite familiar. He told Candy he was meeting Tunney for lunch. Since he was quite early, Candy invited the General to tour her school while he was waiting. Then she took him over to Tunney’s office.
Several days later, a man visited Candy’s office, claiming to be an FBI agent who was investigating the burglary of Tunney’s office. He walked over to a microphone lying on Candy’s window ledge, picked it up, and looked it over. “What do you use this for?” he asked.
Candy told him that Allan Funt (of “Candid Camera” fame) had given her that mike, a very advanced type in its technology. Her models recorded public speaking assignments using it, so they could learn how they sounded to other people.
“It’s just what we need for a stakeout over on fifty-seventh,” the FBI man said. “Can we borrow it?”
Candy gave her permission.
Mail Service – The FBI man showed up at her office a month later, along with an associate. The two men asked Candy if they could use her office address to receive some of their mail. If any mail came for them, she was to call a certain phone number and report that fact. Candy consented. After that, mail did come once in a while for them. She always called the designated phone number when it did so.
A Favor for Donovan – Once in a while, Donovan now invited her to a party. In November, 1960, the General called to ask a favor. In some way (which he did not divulge to her), he had found out that Candy was scheduled to soon fly out to Denver and speak, then fly on to San Francisco to view a big fashion show. The General asked her to carry an “important” letter on that trip to an unnamed person who would come to her hotel room in San Francisco to claim it.
Candy asked Donovan to what governmental agency this anonymous person belonged. The General would not answer that question. He said that the visitor himself would explain. Candy agreed to carry the letter. Her last exit was about to be sealed off. After she received the mysterious letter at her office, Candy stuffed it into her handbag and flew to Denver. She gave her speech there, then proceeded San Francisco, where she attended the fashion show. Then, she waited in her hotel room for the promised visitor who was to come and take it from her. It was November 16, 1960.
The man who knocked at her hotel room door turned out to be Gil Jensen, the military psychiatrist she had met on Leyte. She offered him the letter, but he refused to take it. First, he wanted Candy to dine with him at a nice restaurant. She graciously accepted his invitation.
That evening, Jensen seemed to her much less at ease, less happy, than he had been back in the Philippines. Nevertheless, he was obviously trying hard, and he managed to make pleasant conversation. (It greatly helps the first hypnotic induction if the subject likes the hypnotist and trusts him.) He told Candy about his private practice over in Oakland. In turn, she told him about her divorce, her sons, the modeling business, the terrible financial pressures. Once he got Candy started talking, Jensen listened attentively, speaking only to encourage her whenever she seemed about to stop.
The Proposition – It was getting late. Again, Candy tried to give him the letter. Again, Jensen would not take it. He said that tomorrow at his office would be a better time to talk about the letter. Candy objected. She needed to get home to New York. Finally, when it was clear that she was not going to stay another day for any reason he had given her so far, Jensen came out with the big persuader. He said: “There’s some interesting work you could do for the Central Intelligence Agency, Candy, without interfering with your business. It could be lucrative.” (Bain, p. 60)
That was different. Candy was always looking for a way to earn money. She agreed to come to Jensen’s office the next day.
The next morning, a car and driver picked her up at the hotel. It drove her across the Bay Bridge to Jensen’s “office” in Oakland, the place where Candy would be hypnotized, drugged, and hypnoprogrammed, far from friends, family, or employees back in New York. The chauffeur helped her out of the limousine, then departed.
Candy stood alone on the sidewalk, looking around her. She was outside a two-story brick building in a rundown neighborhood. Adjacent was a green three-story one. Candy was surprised that the psychiatrist’s office had no sign to inform passers-by that a doctor worked therein. The house did not even have an identifying street number.
She climbed the three wooden steps leading to the front door, opened it, and stepped inside. She was now in a small reception room. The only furniture was two straight-backed chairs and a table. She sat down in one chair. Magazines were stacked on the tabletop, some more than a year old. The light in the room was almost too dim for reading, but she could see that all the magazine address labels had been torn off.
Jensen came in. He greeted her cordially, and led her from the reception room into his office. That room had only one window, shielded from street observation by heavy drapes. A gooseneck lamp with an unshaded, brightly-burning bulb was its only source of light. “Does the light bother you?” Gilbert asked.
“Yes,” Candy said.
He twisted the gooseneck’s flexible shaft a bit, which made no real difference. There were shaded lamps in the room, but none of them were turned on, and he did not offer to switch to one of them.
“Would you like a tour of the office?” he asked. She politely accepted his offer. He led her into her a small adjacent room. It had a raised examination table in the center, a white medical cabinet against the wall, and one straight-backed chair. Candy did not think much of it, but she kept those thoughts to herself. He then led her back to the room where the single bare light bulb burned, seated himself behind the desk, and began to ask her personal questions.
Candy did not feel comfortable. She wanted this conversation to stop. She wanted to get out of there. What she had expected to happen today was a job interview, not just a conversation between acquaintances. She was not bold enough, however, to ask him to get to the point. She kept answering his questions. He asked about her childhood.
Candy said, “It was lonely.” When she told him about the club and her imaginary playmates, Dr. Jensen suddenly showed eager interest. He wanted her to tell him more, and yet more, about each member of the club. So she told him all about quiet, nice Doty, and Willy who stomped, and Arlene who was strong and domineered.
Candy desperately wanted to get the interview over with, head home, and be back in New York by that night. She had delayed her return only because Jensen had offered a “lucrative” job, and she needed money. She asked , “What sort of work am I being hired to do, and with whom will I be working?”
“The unit?” Jensen asked.
“I don’t know,” Candy said. “The general told me that you would fill me in.” (Bain, p. 86)
Jensen ignored her question. He went back to asking about her imaginary friends in childhood.
Candy Signs Up – Candy had arrived at Jensen’s office in the mid-morning. Now it was 1 p.m. She said, “I really must go.”
Jensen ignored her request. He began a new series of questions, this time about her social life: “Do you date? Do you go to cocktail parties? Do you travel.”
Candy said that she seldom attended parties. She did travel a great deal for her business, but did not socialize much at home or elsewhere.
He finally offered her the job: “We could work something out with you from time to time, Candy, if you performed services for us during your travels.”
“What sort of services?”
“Carry a message now and then. That’s all.” (Bain, p. 87)
Jensen assured Candy that she would be paid to carry those messages. He said that she could go back to New York now. He would ask any other questions that he had the next time she happened to come to San Francisco. But, first, he wanted her to fill out a form. He pulled a paper and pen out of his drawer and pushed them toward her. Candy then signed a
…security oath which officially made her an employee of the government, and as such she forfeited her right to legal compensation for the harm done her by the ruthless mind-control operation. (Scheflin & Opton, p. 121)
Mind-Splitting Use for Imaginary Childhood Playmate
The government was pursuing exactly that line of research: creating an artificially-split personality out of an imaginary childhood playmate. Josephine Hilgard’s 1970 book, Personality and Hypnosis, states that a person with an imaginary childhood playmate tends to have significant hypnotic susceptibility (research supported by grants from NIMH, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, etc.). An imaginary childhood playmate is a marker for hypnotic susceptibility. It can also be a point of fracture for artificial personality-splitting.
A CIA memo said that the candidate must be in the top 20% of hypnotic susceptibility, and must have
…a disassociative tendency to separate part of his personality from the main body of his consciousness. The hope was to take an existing ego state—such as an imaginary childhood playmate—and build it into a separate personality, unknown to the first. The hypnotist would communicate directly with this schizophrenic offshoot and command it to carry out specific deeds about which the main personality would know nothing. (quoted in Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, p. 184)
The concept was that the hypnotist would transform that childhood nucleus of rejected, blocked traits and impulses into the core of a subconscious isolate. When there was a choice of more than one childhood playmate, the split would be built into the toughest, meanest one. Bowart told Scheflin and Opton that all the military hypnoprogrammed persons that he had located and interviewed “have been beaten or abused by one of their parents when they were young. To escape, they created imaginary personalities which a clever hypnotist then used against them.” (Scheflin and Opton, 1978, p. 445)
“R.J.”, a former Ranger and Viet Nam Special Forces retiree told me, in 1991, “Everyone who is going into any branch of the military takes the Military Aptitude Test, the MAT. It asks several questions along those lines: ‘Did you have imaginary playmates?’ ‘How old were you when you quit playing with your imaginary friend?’ After you have decided on your military occupational status, you take another test. People going into Special Forces are asked the same questions—‘Did you have imaginary playmates?’—plus additional ones along the same line. ‘Was that imaginary friend more or less aggressive than you?’ And there are questions about discipline: ‘Did your parents spank you?’ ‘Did you feel resentment when your parents spanked you?’ Almost every person who goes into a Special Forces unit has had a childhood imaginary friend. I did. He was a mean guy. He did things I couldn’t do.”
R.J. was a completely nice guy in his friendship with me, but he had that mean guy tucked away in his unconscious memories, which embodied parental (authoritarian) aggression and violence combined with repressed childhood rage and resentment. Arlene was Candy’s equivalent of R.J.’s “mean guy.” The CIA was not looking for a neurotic. For best programming results, the imaginary playmate must be part of a strong, normal personality, not a disordered, weak one. Brainwashing experts have learned that normal people reprogram easier and shape into a better product than neurotics. Candy had a strong, normal personality.
By signing that document, Candy had joined Jensen’s “unit.” She had become one of thousands of part-time CIA employees. (Such employees were not listed in headquarters’ records.) Jensen became her control agent, her only CIA contact. His unit was the people he controlled. The CIA would thereafter be referred to only as the Company.
Then Jensen had a few more things Candy must do before she could go. He traced her silhouette on a length of brown paper with a black pen as she stood against the wall with the paper behind her. He said that it would sometimes be necessary for her to travel using a passport with a false name. He asked her to choose the name, to choose something that felt comfortable, natural. For the first name, she chose Arlene, which was a variant spelling of her middle name (Arline), and the name of one of her imaginary playmates. For the last name, she chose Grant, which was a part of her grandmother’s name (Rosengrant).
Jensen said that a photographer would come to her hotel room and take photos for her passport. Then the doctor asked, “What did Arlene look like?”
Candy said that Arlene had looked just like her, except darker, brunette rather than blonde, when she saw her in the mirror as a little girl.
The Hypnosis Begins
Disguised Induction – Jensen next asked about her health.
Candy said, “I’m fine.”
The psychiatrist said, “You look like you need vitamins.”
Candy said, “My doctor back in New York gives me B12.”
Gilbert said, “I know better vitamins than B12.” He urged Candy to get into top condition to endure her coming rigors of world travel.
Candy agreed to do that. Then she pulled out a cigarette and lit it.
Jensen said, “That is not a healthy habit. Why haven’t you quit?”
Candy said, “I’ve tried, but I can’t.”
(Bain does not mention Candy sipping a beverage while smoking that cigarette, but it seems likely, from what follows, that Jensen applied some chemical persuasion – a narcohypnotic drug dropped into her drink – before his coming disguised induction. For Candy seems unusually susceptible to what follows, even for a natural somnambulist. She had been there all day. It was past lunchtime. She must have been both hungry and thirsty. If Jensen gave her a beverage about this time which contained an oral dose of barbiturate, then, after about half an hour she would have been thoroughly under its influence, extra susceptible to hypnotic induction.)
Jensen then discoursed, at length, on methods to quit smoking, including hypnosis. Candy said she could not be hypnotized. Jensen asked if she had ever tried. “No,” Candy said, but she was sure she was not susceptible. Jensen knew, because of those imaginary friends, that she was wrong, but he did not tell her so.
[He]…sat back in his chair and clasped his hands on his chest. “You’re probably right about that,” he said. “There are lots of people who can’t be hypnotized.” He then launched into a quiet lecture on the evils of hypnosis as practiced by charlatans and quacks, coming down especially hard on the stage hypnotists. “I’m really dedicated to putting a stop to the misuse of hypnosis, Candy. Dedicated to it. By the way, would you like to see how some people practice hypnosis?” (Bain, p. 91)
Candy nodded. Jensen stood up and led her on another tour of his office.
He was taking a long time, and being very patient, with this first induction. He could have ordered three strong men to hold her down, while he shoved a needleful of barbiturate into her vein which would send her straight down to a deep trance. Hypnoprogramming resting on a foundation like that, however, would be on an more unstable base. For his preferred outcome, Jensen needed to seduce Candy into the first induction in an atmosphere of friendship. If a hypnotist can get a few sincere “yeses” from a prospective mind-control victim before they begin to apply the harsher aspects of programming, a more effective unconscious basis for long-term control has been established.
Therefore, Jensen acted very pleasant as he took her on this second tour, chatting all the while about his plans to help with a crackdown on “people who try to hypnotize people, entertainers and all that.” (Bain, p. 92)
Induction Hardware – Jensen had now led Candy into a section of the building which he had not shown her before. As the two walked around, the psychiatrist demonstrated item after item of a truly remarkable collection of hypnotic induction gadgets–some simple, some very sophisticated. He patiently showed her how a hypnotist would use each one in order to induce a trance in somebody, if they were hypnotizable, “although I know you can’t be.” He demonstrated pendulum, candle, and metronome inductions. He showed a mechanical sound maker (which he later used to create her telephone induction cue).
Last of all, Gilbert brought her to the big mirror. He knew that whatever–or whoever–has hypnotized a person before tends to keep that ability. He had learned, that morning, that Candy Jones hypnotized herself, as a child, by staring into a big mirror. He now suggested that she sit down on the chair in front of his mirror. She obediently sat, looking at her reflected image. As she stared into the mirror, he led the conversation back to Arlene. They were talking again about Arlene. (At that time, she was merely talking about Arlene; she was not yet being Arlene.) As Candy looked in the mirror and talked about Arlene, she slipped down to a trance level of consciousness.
Drug Inductions – After the mirror induction, Dr. Jensen told Candy to lie down on his “examining room” table. There, he gave the blonde celebrity her first dose of “vitamins.” Years later, her second husband, John Nebel, found himself playing Jensen’s role in her spontaneous self-inductions and regressions to this era of her life. John did not question the “vitamins” she repeatedly mentioned until he realized that Jensen had given them to Candy by IV into the big vein inside the elbow rather than by injection into the muscle of an arm or buttock. Then, John became suspicious. One day he discovered what Candy was really given:
JOHN: The bottle is hanging on the stand?
CANDY: Uh-huh. Like they used to have.
JOHN: Like intravenous feeding.
CANDY: Uh-huh.
JOHN: The bottle’s upside down, isn’t it?…(Candy looks up and squints.)…Isn’t it upside down?…
CANDY: (surprised) Yeah.
JOHN: What’s it say on the label?
CANDY: (after a long pause) I’m reading it backwards.
JOHN: Yeah, I know. What’s it say?
CANDY: (haltingly, as though trying to make out the word) “Am…i…tol…”
JOHN: What’s the first word?
CANDY: …Must be sodium.
JOHN: Sodium? Does it say the name of the pharmaceutical company on the label?
CANDY: I think it says Warner. (Bain, p. 97)
Too long to list here.
Please read the rest in Carla Emery’s “Secret, Don’t Tell”.
For purchasing details:
