Being hypnotized by a scary man

JOSEPH N. BELL

The 21st annual American Board of Hypnotherapy Convention, underway

at the Radisson Hotel in Newport Beach as I write this, and the

recent publication of a book called “Nemesis” that connects hypnosis

with the assassination of Robert Kennedy has sent me to a 30-year-old

file about the man accused in the book of committing that crime in

absentia, a medical doctor named William J. Bryan.

In 50 years of magazine journalism, I’ve dealt nose-to-nose with

the Indians on Alcatraz, opium poppy farmers in Mexico, Jane Roe,

Billy Martin and assorted evangelists -- among several hundred others

-- but I’ve never met up with anyone half as outrageous or one-tenth

as genially scary as Bryan, who is accused in “Nemesis” of taking

control of Sirhan Sirhan through hypnosis and programming him to

shoot Robert Kennedy.

Such a fictional agenda was once dramatized in a movie called “The

Manchurian Candidate.” I’m not much for conspiracy theories, but if

this is possible, I’m ready to believe that Bryan could have brought

it off. Why he might want to is another matter, ignored in “Nemesis.”

Armed with a magazine assignment, I met Bryan in the summer of

1967. He had attracted a lot of attention two years earlier by

hypnotizing a serial killer known as the Boston Strangler and so

angering him in a search for motives that the Strangler leaped across

a desk and tried to perform his specialty on Bryan. (He played a tape

recording of the attack for me.) This so impressed attorney F. Lee

Bailey that he hired Bryan to help him select a jury to decide if

Cleveland dentist Sam Shepard, for whom Bailey had won a second

trial, had murdered his wife.

Shepard’s defense was that he had fallen asleep watching TV at

home, heard an altercation in his wife’s bedroom, ran upstairs and

was knocked senseless. When he recovered consciousness on the beach

in front of his home, he had no recollection of what had happened.

His first jury didn’t believe this story and convicted him on

circumstantial evidence.

Bryan, after sizing up the second trial jurors for Bailey,

hypnotized Shepard, with his permission, and regressed him to the

night of the murder. The amnesia, Bryan told me, was broken, and for

several frightening hours, Shepard relived the events leading up to

the murder -- including an identification of the real killers, which

I really didn’t want to know since I could never use it. The court

refused to accept the hypnotic evidence, but the jury -- as predicted

by Bryan -- acquitted Shepard.

Not surprisingly, Bryan was much in demand after this performance.

But the association with Bailey was only one aspect of Bryan’s

business life. By the time I caught up with him, he was running two

medical hypnosis clinics, had a law degree, was a lay minister and

had once played drums for Tommy Dorsey’s band. During the week I

spent with him, he came across variously as an amalgam of Sigmund

Freud, Gene Krupa, Billy Graham and P.T. Barnum -- with a large dash

of Svengali thrown in.

I first met him in his Beverly Hills clinic, in a surrealistic

office, where he was surrounded by television monitors on which he

could keep track of a half-dozen mechanical hypnosis sessions taking

place in adjacent rooms. From the beginning, he was adroit at

switching from pontifical medical-legal pronouncements to a show-biz

sort of flamboyance.

Whichever hat he wore, he came on very strong. He claimed to have

taught hypnotic techniques to more than 10,000 physicians, dentists

and laymen, and he said that his American Institute of Hypnosis

treated more than 2,000 patients a year. When I later checked him out

with his peers, about half of his professional associates regarded

him as a charismatic pioneer in the practice of medical hypnosis and

the other half with deep suspicion.

I ended up somewhere in between -- symbolized by my last encounter

with him. I felt strongly that no one who didn’t want to could be

hypnotized. He scoffed at this, and we argued about it periodically.

We were in his rambling Spanish-style home in West Los Angeles,

wrapping up odds-and-ends, when I became aware that he was

rhythmically swinging a pendant around his neck. I knew what he was

up to and was curious enough to go along. He told me to shut my eyes

and recall a forest I had once walked through, which he described in

detail as he told me to relax.

Then he had me extend an arm, which he pinched as he repeated that

it was rigid as a steel bar. When he told me to open my eyes, I was

horrified to find a long needle pushed entirely through the fleshy

part of my forearm. It scared hell out of me, even though I hadn’t

felt it go in. He had told me when my eyes were still shut that there

would be no bleeding or pain, and when my eyes were open, I reminded

him of that and said I was concerned that bleeding and pain were

negative messages, and I wanted the needle out quickly.

This seemed to upset him, but when he removed the needle, I felt

nothing and there was just a tiny red spot where it was inserted. I

think I had complete recall of everything he said during that period,

so I have no idea whether or not I was hypnotized. I just remember

that I wanted out of that house and out of his life as soon as

possible.

As I left his home, I remembered a story he had told me about the

escape of the Boston Strangler from a Massachusetts mental hospital.

The whole state panicked, and jittery lawmen phoned Bryan in Los

Angeles and asked him for advice. Bryan said there was no problem if

women in the Boston area were told simply to shout “Sleep” if they

were accosted, because the Strangler was programmed to instantly drop

asleep and stay that way until awakened.

I worried for awhile that I might have been programmed without

knowing it. I probably would have worried a lot more if I had known

that less than a year later, Robert Kennedy would be shot by an

assassin who might have been hypnotically set up, that 10 years

later, Bryan would be found dead under mysterious circumstances in a

Las Vegas hotel room, and that 37 years later a book would turn up

with new evidence that Bryan might have done the programming.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.