Sarah Morlok Cotton, quadruplet who knew fame and suffering, dies at 95

Boston Globe

4 days ago

Newspapers held naming contests, and the winning entry suggested names that derived from the first letters of the hospital: Edna, Wilma, Sarah, and Helen. The quadruplets' middle names were simply initials denoting their birth order. (Sarah, the third born, was C.)
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Donations poured in almost immediately. The city of Lansing provided the family with a rent-free home. The Massachusetts Carriage Co. sent a custom-made baby carriage with four seats. Businesspeople opened bank accounts for each child.
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'Lansing's Morlok quadruplets,' the Associated Press wrote, 'are the most famous group of babies on the American continent.'
The Morloks charged visitors 25 cents to visit their home and see the babies. Carl Morlok, who ran for constable of Lansing in 1931, used photos of his daughters on his campaign ads with the slogan, 'We will appreciate your support.' He won in a landslide.
Amid the commotion, Sadie Morlok tried to provide her daughters with a sense of normalcy. 'Our mother used to dress us in pretty little identical crocheted sweaters and bonnets in spring and summer, or snow pant outfits in winter,' Ms. Cotton wrote in her autobiography, 'The Morlok Quadruplets: The Alphabet Sisters' (2015). 'Then, she would carefully seat two of us facing the other two in the carriage and go for a nice stroll around the block to give us sunshine and a breath.'
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In an era when children like Shirley Temple were big stars, the public's interest in the Morlok sisters endured.
Newspapers reported on their birthdays and Christmas gifts. Their pictures were featured in newsreels at movie theaters. Sensing a source of income during the lean days of the Great Depression, Sadie Morlok enrolled her daughters in singing and dancing classes, turning them into performers.
Their first time onstage was at a boat show in Lowell, a nearby city, when they were 6 years old. Soon, they were traveling by train to perform in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and other states. Their trademark song was 'Alice Blue Gown,' by Joseph McCarthy and Harry Tierney. They didn't make much money, but Morlok delighted in the attention her daughters received.
Asked later in life about when she first realized that she was famous, Ms. Cotton replied: 'Well, I think it was in our dancing chorus rehearsal when I glanced to the right, then to the left, and saw three other people who looked just like me, danced just like me, and sang like me. I think then I realized I was one part of a famous team.'
Offstage, their lives were no song and dance.
In 'Girls and Their Monsters,' Audrey Clare Farley's 2023 book about the sisters, Ms. Cotton described a bleaker version of her childhood than the uplifting story she told in her autobiography.
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Though the newspapers called her father 'Jolly Carl, Daddy 4-of-a-kind,' he was actually a tyrant, she said.
He banged the sisters' heads together when they wouldn't go to sleep. A germophobe, he forbade them from going to the library because he worried that germs were on the books. Worst of all, Farley noted, he sexually abused all of the girls when they were teenagers.
'The story of the Morlok sisters is the story of darkness coursing through the world,' she wrote. 'It's the story of malevolence masquerading as innocence and thereby hiding in plain sight.'
It got worse.
In their early 20s, the Morlok quadruplets began showing signs of serious mental illness. They had delusions, stared catatonically for hours, and cycled in and out of psychiatric institutions. Edna, Wilma, and Helen all underwent electroconvulsive therapy.
Eventually, a doctor who had been treating the sisters in Michigan referred them to the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland. Intrigued by the connections between the genetic and environmental causes of mental illness, a team of researchers there studied the quadruplets from 1955 to 1958. Each woman had her own psychiatrist, though only Sarah was able to engage in meaningful psychotherapy.
The researchers, led by Dr. David Rosenthal, suspected that both parents were mentally ill and that Carl's mother was borderline schizophrenic. In 1963, using the pseudonym Genain to protect the family's privacy, the institute produced a 636-page report, 'The Genain Quadruplets: a Case Study and Theoretical Analysis of Heredity and Environment in Schizophrenia.'
In the report, Rosenthal concluded that the Morlok quadruplets had been the victims of an 'unhappy collusion of nature and nurture.'
Only Sarah recovered enough to live on her own. Farley attributed that to two factors: She had endured less abuse from her father than her sisters had, and she had benefited from exceptionally good psychotherapy during the study in Maryland.
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'She knew quite clearly that she got better at NIMH and her sisters didn't,' Farley said in an interview. 'And she always had survivor's guilt about that.'
She met George Cotton, an Air Force officer, at Luther Place Memorial Church in Washington, D.C. They married in 1961, and for many years she worked as a legal secretary and typist.
George Cotton died in 2023. In addition to their son David, Ms. Cotton leaves four grandsons. Another son, William, died in 1994. As for the other Morlok sisters, Wilma died in 2002, Helen in 2003, and Edna in 2015.
Farley, who tracked down Ms. Cotton in 2021, found her eager to speak about her childhood.
'She had really faded out of public view,' Farley said. 'I think the fact that somebody was interested in her brought back fond memories of her performing as a child and being a public figure.'
After their first phone conversation, Ms. Cotton called back immediately. She had forgotten to tell Farley how many songs she could play on the piano by memory -- 266, it turned out.
'She was still very proud of those days,' Farley said.
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