The Multi-Talented Marsha Addis

By Cypress Cove Resident Robert Runck

Marsha Addis is a busy woman, and always has been. Here at Cypress Cove, she is a member of the Staff Scholarship Committee, Vice-Chair of the Technology Committee, Chair of the Opera Society, and occasional member of the Cove Currents staff. She is also secretary for the DEF-3 district. In addition to these committees, her enthusiasm for Cypress Cove activities is evident throughout the community.

Born in Los Angeles, she grew up in Oklahoma City. She won membership in the National Honor Society in high school, though her preference was for the arts. She performed in plays and musicals as a student, competed in speech contests, and was twice selected as a member of the state-wide choir. Clearly, these activities foreshadowed her current interest in opera.

Marsha’s college studies in English and Communications were cut short when she got married and had two children. After her children were grown, she completed the Executive Program at UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management. Her children both received bachelor’s degrees from UC Berkeley. Her daughter, Alicia, is a stylist for cabi, a high-quality women’s fashion company; her son, Michael, is a professor of psychology at Clark University, where his professional focus is on men’s mental health. Her granddaughter, Chloe, is a senior at UMass Amherst majoring in psychology.

Marsha began her career by helping her husband, a documentary and educational filmmaker, collect information on every mental health-related film available at that time. She then typed the camera-ready copy for their publication, Films in the Behavioral Sciences: An Annotated Catalogue. Noticing her work, her husband’s colleagues asked her to edit and type grant proposals.

When Marsha’s husband was recruited to UCLA’s Department of Psychiatry and Bio-behavioral Sciences/Neuropsychiatric Institute (UCLA NPI), Marsha was hired to be chief of the administrative staff in the office of Dr. Jolly West, chairman and director. The work in position was “like a personalized college education.”

A major bequest to the UCLA NPI came from the family of Della Martin (Lockheed-Martin aerospace company) who had decided that she was mentally ill when she was a child and committed her to a sanitarium for life. More than 50 years later, she was declared sane and released from the institution. Della inherited about $10 million from her brother’s estate, and when she died, at age 90, her will included several hundred thousand dollars for the UCLA NPI, without specifying its use.

After reviewing Martin’s will and researching her life, Marsha wrote a proposal to establish the Della Martin Chair in Psychiatry, the first endowed chair at the UCLA School of Medicine. Now there are about 250 endowed chairs in the school.

Another challenge came when the American Assembly asked Dr. West to chair a national conference about alcohol abuse and alcoholism. Marsha helped with conference planning, drafting the conference report, and editing the resulting book, “Alcoholism and Related Problems: Issues for the American Public.”

Marsha also organized the administrative components and budgets for a new alcohol research center at UCLA, and she created grant proposals for the State of California and for the Federal Government, both of which provided initial funding for the center.

During the latter part of her professional career, as the administrator of the cancer centers at UCLA and City of Hope (COH), Marsha crested five successful grant applications, garnering more than $100 million of support for cancer research, treatment and prevention programs.

When Marsha left UCLA and joined City of Hope, she created a comprehensive research and educational infrastructure to support and enhance COH’s programs. She also created an Office of Professional Education to manage research-related educational programs, including a nascent graduate school. By the time she retired from COH, its Graduate School of Biological Sciences was well on its way to receiving formal national accreditation.

Marsha’s most intense involvement was her 13 years educating people about, and helping victims of, dangerous cults, and it all began with the kidnapping of Patty Hearst.

When Patty Hearst was found, Dr. West was asked by the federal judge in San Francisco to examine Hearst to see if she was able to stand trial for the bank robbery in which she appeared to participate. Jolly asked Marsha to provide staff support. And so began Marsha’s education about what was then known as brainwashing.

Over the next few weeks Marsha prepared the transcripts of Jolly’s ten interviews with Patty, read the professional literature on brainwashing, and helped produce the 135-page report for the court.

Marsha recalls, “I remember one night sitting by myself listening to Patty’s voice, in halting words, tell about being held in a closet for eight weeks during which she was raped by Cinque, the leader of her kidnappers. Tears streamed down my face as I silently cried for her.”

Back in her office, Marsha was fielding phone calls from parents who were calling for help because their young adult children were disappearing and subsequently telling their families that they did not want to see them again. Meanwhile, F. Lee Bailey, Patty’s attorney, asked Jolly to help prepare Patty’s defense for her trial that was starting in January 1976. Once again, Jolly asked Marsha to staff the effort.

During the first weeks of the trial, Marsha learned a lot from the three additional experts called to testify: Dr. Margaret Thaler Singer, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley who, at that time, had professionally tested and treated many victims of cults; Dr. Robert J. Lifton, a Yale professor of psychiatry and author of the seminal “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism” and Dr. Martin T. Orne, professor of psychiatry at UPenn who specialized in hypnosis and how a person can have two simultaneous trains of thought in order to survive under stress. Marsha finally understood how Patty Hearst, a well-educated young woman from a very wealthy family, could apparently turn her back on her family and all her values and become a criminal on the run.

Shortly after Marsha’s return from San Francisco, Dr. Singer was invited by Jewish Family Service LA to give a talk about “cults.” Marsha went along and, during that speech and the discussion afterward that included questions from distressed parents, she understood what had happened to the young people whose families were calling her office. At the end of the meeting, when volunteers were solicited, Marsha’s hand went up.

During the 13 years that ensued, Marsha helped Jewish Family Service LA found a clinic for families of cult members and served as one of the resources at the clinic’s support group meetings. She attended and spoke at numerous local and national conferences and was one of the creators of a conference, “Cultism: A Conference for Scholars and Policy Makers.”

She was chair of the Los Angeles Jewish Federation’s Commission on Cults and Missionaries. And she was co-author of the paper “The Cult Clinic Helps Families in Crisis,” which was the lead article in the November 1984 issue of the professional journal for social workers. She also co-authored, with Dr. Singer, a book chapter titled “Cults, Coercion, and Contumely.”

When asked about her strongest memories from those years, Marsha says, “Certainly many from the Hearst case, but also I also remember one year missing the first night of Passover with my family because I was in my office for hours with a distraught young woman who had just walked out of a cult and needed assurance that she and her baby (fathered and abused by the violent cult leader) would be OK.”

Immediately prior to coming to Cypress Cove, Marsha lived in Holden, Massachusetts, a suburb of Worcester. There, she indulged her passion for lifelong learning by becoming involved with the Worcester Institute for Senior Education (WISE) for which she served as chair of the communications committee, vice president and strategic planning chair, and president.

Oh yes, in her spare time, Marsha enjoys playing bridge and mahjong, attending theater and classical music performances, reading, and, when safe again, cruising through Europe and South America.

Would you not agree that Marsha has been and is a very productively busy woman?