Candy Jones (born Jessica Mae Wilcox) is the central figure of a conspiracy theory surrounding the MK-ULTRA mind control experiments conducted by select psychiatrists and hypnotists on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1950s through the 1970s. Candy was a WW II pin-up girl whose unfaltering patriotism made her a (literal) poster child for the Women’s Auxiliary Corps. She was a high-profile entertainer with the United Services Organization and toured with them to entertain the troops in the South Pacific.
While in service in Leyte, she met General William Donovan, head of the Organization of Strategic Services (which later became the CIA) and a military psychiatrist named Dr. “Gilbert Jensen” (a pseudonym used by Candy’s biographer) who would figure prominently in her future.
In 1960, after a failed marriage to her employer–owner of the largest modeling agency in New York, Harry Conover–Candy fell upon financially hard times. Harry had disappeared with their savings and bills from the modeling school she had opened were piling up. At age 38, the modeling jobs were no longer coming in and Candy was desperate. When an old acquaintance, General Donovan, asked her to deliver a letter to another old acquaintance, “Gilbert Jensen” on a business trip to San Francisco, she agreed. It was Dr. Jensen who approached her about doing minor courier work for the CIA.
Jensen told Candy would just have to deliver a letter now and then and would be well paid. She signed up, not knowing that what Jensen and his cohorts allegedly had in mind was not just any courier job. It would make her an unwitting subject of an experiment which had been proposed by George H. Estabrooks in the early 1950s: the use of a combination of drugs and hypnosis to create a schizoid splitting of the subject’s psyche into two separate personalities for the purpose of espionage. This “hypno-courier” could be given suggestions to carry politically sensitive material without any knowledge of it. This made for a super-spy who could never accidentally reveal his or her loyalties and information. Candy, whose medical records indicated her personality type as one which is highly conducive to hypnosis, claimed to have been given various barbiturates, and scopolamine to achieve a “sealed amnesiac suggestion” which could be triggered by an induction cue over the telephone.
The other personality Jensen had allegedly “split-off” from Candy was based on an aggressive imaginary friend she had as a lonely and abused child. Her name was Arlene Grant. Candy Jones testified that she shared her body with Arlene, who was trained in espionage and assassination techniques by the CIA in Langley, Virginia. She traveled to Taiwan, where she allegedly withstood torture by electric shock, without any knowledge of it in conscious, waking life.
It wasn’t until the alleged programming began to break down in 1972, that Candy’s story and her double life finally came to light. After finally becoming suspicious and overcoming denial of the disjointed events of the last 12 years, Candy was seized by the sudden need to initiate a relationship and marry an old friend, radio talk show host John Nebel. She and Nebel shared a late-night radio talk show in New York City. A guest on the show, hypnotist Herbert Spiegel, sparked an amateur interest in hypnosis for Nebel. According to his memoirs, one evening when Candy was suffering from insomnia, John suggested they count backwards together to help relax her to sleep. He was shocked what happened next: Candy, Nebel claims, began to regress and re-live her past in conversations with John, conversations in which she believed to be talking to Gilbert Jensen. John Nebel recorded them. Hundreds of hours of audio tape were transcribed in an attempt to reconstruct the events making up Candy’s alleged double life and exploitation by the CIA. The tapes were used by Donald Bain to create the book The Control of Candy Jones (later published as The Mind Control of Candy Jones) in 1976. Where the tapes are is unknown, and whether or not they even exist is the most challenged piece of information leveled by critics who claim the the entire affair was a hoax.
Candy Jones continued doing the late-night radio show in New York after Nebel died in 1978, but refused to ever speak of the past events of her life again (some conspiracy theorists believe that threats had been made on her life), until a short telephone interview she gave to Martin Cannon, for his book about MK-ULTRA. Candy Jones died of cancer in 1990.
This film, Manchurian Candy, is a hallucinatory interpretation of this bizarre and controversial story. Its experimental, rather than straightforwardly theatrical, approach uses reenactments of the taped regressions to serve as the backbone of the film. Manchurian Candy reflects the netherworld between truth and fiction in its use of narrative ambiguity, ellipses and titles to piece together, not a complete case history, but a collection of fragmentary impressions about Candy’s allegations and her perceived role in society as a sex-symbol and patriot.