MISS AMERICANA & THE HEARTBREAK PRINCE
The Control of Candy Jones – Donald Bain
Outlandish accounts of hypnotic regressions are fast becoming my favourite genre of book (any book; not just hypnosis ones). We’ve covered past lives, alien abductions, and an anonymous Hollywood star thus far; and, oh, what a hoot it’s been!
So when I discovered there’s a book about the regression of a 1940s/50s American pin-up ‘girl’ who, so it goes, secretly worked as an Estabrooks-style CIA hypno-mule in the 60s, I was psyched. Maybe I’m biased, but an unstable middle-aged lady hypno-spy with a badass split-on-purpose hidden personality is precisely the hero we need right now.
HOW is this not a film, I wondered?! [A film produced by, directed by, and starring Taylor Swift and filmed over the coming years til she’s 50 and co-written and -created by MOI!] Yep, I couldn’t wait to bring you the fun, salacious, phoney, bonkers story of Candy Jones!
And nor could Playboy Press, who published her fantastical story in 1976. This is a feat I can only attribute to Operation Mindfuuk* and the counterculture’s infiltration into porn. Because, while the book’s marketing sheen promises us a CIA-BDSM romp with Miss America(ish) herself, what we get is a complex woman with a complex past daring to be aged between 35-45 during all the best bits (and 50 when the book came out).
The overarching story of Candy’s semi-conscious entanglement with the CIA was extracted by writer Donald Bain** from Candy and her husband, a wildly popular talk-radio host named Long John Nebel. Bain penned Long John’s biography two years prior to Candy’s book, in 1974, and the men became friends (before or because of the biography, I don’t know). Long John’s all-night radio show – broadcast to millions of listeners from New York, six hours a night, six nights a week – was fuelled by conspiracy theories and the weird and wonderous. He married Candy – broke and approaching 50 – in 1972, and she became the ‘Judy’ to his ‘Richard’, co-hosting the show. The couple’s hefty content creation needs had, I’m sure, no bearing on the extraction of Candy’s concealed past – and alter ego: ‘Arlene’.
We learn through Bain’s book that Candy Jones (1925-1990) was born Jessica Arline Wilcox and was raised in Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA, by an abusive mother. Jessica’s glamourous, kindly maternal grandmother – plus an imaginary friend named ‘Arlene’ – got her through a nightmarish childhood, before her statuesque beauty enabled her escape to a life of pageantry and pin-up modelling. In 1945, aged just 18, she appeared on 11 magazine covers in one month, such was her wartime success. But this success was no fluke: in 1946 she married Harry Conover, a Svengali of fashion and modelling who first turned Jessica into ‘Candy’ and then created the ‘cover girl’ sensation. They had three sons together, and Candy continued her modelling career while turning a blind eye to Conover’s increasingly wild drink/drug benders and bisexual philandering.
Their marriage ended in 1959, after Conover went awol for a year and Candy got landed with his astronomical business debts. With just $36 to her name, she knuckled down, becoming a radio show hostess and opening a modelling school... Oh, aaand starting a “patriotic” side-hustle when first she allowed an ‘FBI man’ to use her office as a mail-drop.
Things rather escalated from there. I won’t get into the weeds of Candy’s decade of apparent CIA hypno-muling whilst an un/witting victim of MK-Ultra. Not because it isn’t believable – we’ve previously satisfied ourselves that the CIA were fucking lunatics – but because I find some of the grim, disturbing psychological nuances as to how she was manipulated too ‘evil genius’ to scatter to the cosmic-hypno-winds, be they fact or fiction. Should you share my nefarious interests in Vitamin B12 deficiencies, splitting personalities and such like, you can read the book – or you’ll find a summary here.
What instead interests me most about these hypnotic regressions is, I think, the bare, howling, horrible truths that lurk behind the grand conspiratorial/paranormal ‘truths’ they purport to reveal. Real-life protagonists (mostly all women) shed narratives and masks to a ‘hypnotist’ (invariably a man), who shapes what’s left beneath these raw, peeling, messy layers into something coherent; something that suits his agenda; something that ideally generates some cash – something that fits the current consensus reality.
But we see through a glass darker still with Candy and Long John. They met and married within a month, and this CIA iceberg hit after Long John blundered into what I suspect was a perimenopausal Pandora’s Box (no pun intended) on his wedding night. Much emphasis is placed by Bain and Long John on Candy’s sweet, passive, and agreeably girlish persona in the book. Hence Long John, then aged 60, was shook to the core when his then-47-year-old bride came out the bathroom in her bestest negligee... only to snap “NOTHING’S WRONG!” in a “deep”, “bitter, biting” ‘new’ voice in answer to pre-consummation chit-chat.
Indeed, so shook was Long John that he began a relentless hypnotic investigation into Candy’s insomnia, emerging mood swings, and befuddled memories. He recorded hundreds of hours of bedtime ‘hypnosis’ sessions, where Candy conveys her piecemeal past as – gasp! – a CIA puppet controlled by the sinister ‘Dr Gilbert Jensen’ aka William S Kroger. Candy’s mounting rage and volatility is finally given acceptable form via the manifestation of ‘Arlene’, an alter ego (supposedly) created by ‘Jensen’ using narco-hypnosis and her childhood PTSD. Bain – who waded through all these recordings to create the book, lol – alludes that the ‘hypnotic’ ‘interviews’ between Long John and ‘Arlene’ are worryingly violent and hateful, with murder threatened on both sides. But Candy and Long John push through this psychonautical clusterfuck by recasting ‘Arlene’ as a grouchy spinster aunt who occasionally visits from Candy’s otherwise lovely lady-mind so as to avoid divorce or death. And they lived happily ever after!
Bain’s book was largely received as a hoax created by Long John, who – unsurprisingly, given the topics of his show – had a reputation for such things. The discovery, in 1977, that the CIA had been conducting mind-control experiments via Project MK-Ultra gave Candy’s story more notice and credibility. But the search for a binary ‘truth’ leaves Candy (or should that really be Jessica?) in the shadows: a ‘shadow self’ hiding behind a pageant queen, a pin-up dream, an idealised wife, a radio-hostess-with-the-mostest; even a vengeful Arlene – anything (anything!) but simply an evanescent woman.
I’ve pondered before whether hypnotism is just a socially acceptable, and accepted, form of male mental illness. But these hypnotist-muse accounts seem to constitute a uniquely collaborative madness..? Two souls, mismatched in societal and individual power dynamics, roving for a shared language and context, playing intimate, treacherous, surreal games in a bid to connect and be real. Much of Candy’s validated CIA work was, by her own admission, done without the aid of hypnosis. So, whether or not ‘Arlene’ was ever real, you have to wonder who was hypnotising whom when a man who represented financial stability and a broadcasting platform baulked at a grown woman’s liminal bathroom secrets.
To hypnotise is, to draw on this post’s titular song lyrics, to roll fake dice. And if you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes. But better that than to see what truly lurks deep within the depressed damsels and dearth of the wise men.
* See Adam Curtis’s Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World (six-part BBC documentary TV series, 2021).
** Best known for writing the Murder, She Wrote spin-off book series on behalf of the late, great Jessica Fletcher. See Bain’s Murder HE Wrote: A Successful Writer’s Life (2006).
