It was a breakdown unlike any the soaps had seen. A housewife named Mary Hartman had accepted an invitation to appear on The David Susskind Show, a decision that she likely did not anticipate would end in disaster. A resident of the fictional town of Fernwood, Ohio, Mary—who wore her auburn hair in two cascading, braided pigtails; dressed in frocks that resembled picnic blankets; and sat with her hands underneath her thighs, like a kindergartener—was out of her depth.Article continues after advertisement
A panel of esteemed scholars had just seen a portion of her bizarro suburban life condensed into film form, a greatest-hits montage that documented her growing fixation on a waxy yellow buildup congealing on her floor, a mass murderer who’d killed a neighboring family (plus their pet chickens and goats), and the drowning of a local sports coach in a vat of chicken soup. The intellectual heavyweights beside her grilled her with sociological concern. Was she aware that she was being manipulated by everyone around her, one asked. Another inquired about the quality of her orgasms.
Mary, face frozen with incredulity, felt invaded and exposed, though she did not have the vocabulary to express her unease. She answered with garbled soliloquies about feminine hygiene sprays, vitamin E, and Del Monte fruit cups. Her voice, a cool and smoky baritone, made her seem rooted in reality’s soil, even if her expressions suggested a mind that was far removed from this planet. As the segment went on, she fidgeted. She put her hands to the sides of her head as if battling a migraine, stumbling and stuttering. “I am not a victim!” Mary screamed in one of her rare points of lucidity. She mentioned her factory worker husband’s infidelity, and suddenly her performance of suburban docility began to feel unsustainable. “Everything…is…too…much!” she said, each word like toothpaste from a wrung-out tube. “It’s just too much. It’s just television. Cameras. People. And the sponsors.”
