Marilyn Van Derbur – Miss America Incest Survivor

Miss America By Day

How Incest Survivor Marilyn Van Derbur's Story Helped Me Understand My Husband's Infidelity

If you are a baby boomer, like I am, you remember what a big deal the Miss America Pageant was when we were young. And you also very likely remember what a shock it was when the beautiful, former Miss America, Marilyn Van Derbur went public about being an incest survivor. Yes, this beautiful and incredibly accomplished woman who looked as clean and pure as the Rocky Mountain city she hailed from had been sexually molested by her natural father from age 5 until she left for college at 18.

How she found the courage to go on living and try to have a normal life is amazing, but in addition, she came forward and went public, confessing her terrible secret.

Like millions of other people who have suffered one way or another the heartbreaking consequences of child abuse, I owe Marilyn Van Derbur more gratitude than I can ever express for her courage in standing up publicly and telling the truth about the incest she endured from her father, Denver millionaire, socialite successful businessman, in her seemingly perfect family. She was a hugely successful student, champion swimmer, accomplished singer, who grew into a beautiful woman and then became Miss America.

I’m writing about her because she’s helped me so much in understanding my husband’s life. He also was an adult survivor of childhood physical abuse and neglect. Tragically, he never recognized or sought treatment for his condition. This may have been the result of growing up not only abused but poverty stricken due to his mother finally leaving his violent father to try to raise three growing boys on her own with her aging parents, without ever receiving any alimony or help from their father. Tom, my husband and her firstborn, was never able to escape a deep-seated feeling of complete worthlessness.

What specifically draws me to Ms. Van Derbur’s story is her account of how she as a child split herself into two children: the daytime Marilyn and the nighttime Marilyn. This is called dissociation and is also what my husband did for his entire life, never comprehending what was the matter with him. My husband, actor Tom O’Rourke, also had two personalities, one he used at home and with close personal friends, and one he used at work that was a sexually promiscuous personality, which was a complete secret to his family and friends.

As I wrote in my book, Bedeviled, it has been almost impossible to make emotional sense of my 35-year marriage, now that I know about Tom’s secret life. Marilyn Van Derbur’s life story of coming to terms with her two personalities has helped me find some happiness in my otherwise very confusing and upsetting memories.

So many of the symptoms she describes I recognize as also true of Tom. She states that she had no understanding of why she was sabotaging her life and trying to destroy herself. As I wrote in the book, Tom was also a talented overachiever, who mysteriously could never get anywhere. Now I that I know of his problems, it’s obvious that, like Marilyn, he constantly sabotaged his career. Ms. Van Derbur says that her suppressed nighttime child was always ruining things for her, like an angry two-year-old trying to get attention by smashing crystal. Tom did exactly the same thing, time after time, which mystified me and all those who knew and loved him. And like Ms. Van Derbur, his problems got worse with age. She was subject to prolonged bouts of actual physical paralysis and excruciating anxiety. For the last fifteen years of his life, Tom could not get out of bed before two pm, unless he had something to do. He became a chain smoker and drank excessively at night, while his family slept. And every time he left the house, he chased any woman who was responsive to him, especially at his job.

I recognize so many of the problems Ms. Van Derbur describes as being similar to Tom’s problems. She tells how isolated she felt because she couldn’t have relationships with anybody or make connections with anybody due to her shame and fear that no one would like her if they knew the truth. In life, Tom vigilantly concealed his secret life from everyone who tried to be close to him, also from a mixed bag of shame: shame that he broke his marriage vows and shame that his sexual promiscuity didn’t bring him career success. She states that she sought a career as a spokesperson, where she could continue to be isolated. Acting is also a very isolating profession; you’re all alone on the stage and must take care of yourself. She didn’t go into therapy until she was 47, even though by then she had confessed to her husband how her father had raped her every night from age five to age 18. Tom never went into therapy, believing his marriage and career were failures and blaming himself.

I don’t know the details of Tom’s childhood, other than his father was a wife and child beater and both his parents became alcoholics. It’s possible that in addition to being physically and emotionally abused and neglected he was also sexually abused by his mother, possibly in an emotional way using him as a surrogate for her husband. I am also fairly certain that the physical beatings by his father probably inflicted sexual humiliation either overtly or as a consequence.

Poor broken Tom. He never was able to confront and conquer his nighttime child, the one who ruined his life and put him in his grave far too early. He enjoyed so little of his life, becoming ever more distant from his wife and son as he grew older and more despairing. I have had to go on alone as a widow with a son who still suffers from his father’s increasing neglect and indifference to our love in his later years. It’s just tragic. Childhood abuse goes on and on, generation after generation. Tom was world’s better as a father than his own father. He never did any of the horrible things his father did. He was a supportive, if largely emotionally absent, father. He loved his son and was proud of him, but in later life, Tom grew more and more distant from us, until he got cancer and left us forever.

Naturally, I am a supporter in every way I can of mental health and people seeking therapy for their problems. My psychiatrist, a holocaust survivor and medical doctor, believed that psychiatric drugs were dangerous. I’m not sure why, but I think she might have felt that they treat the symptoms of mental illness, but leave the deeper emotional wounds still festering. Tom tried many anti-depressant drugs with no success. He thought he was depressed because his marriage ruined his career. He never understood that he, like Marilyn Van Derbur, had disassociated into two people as a child in order to survive the horrors of adult violence. I have seen his divided soul in the afterlife. Thanks to the courage of Ms. Van Derbur, I can accept who my husband was and understand why he did the things he did a lot better.