by Lois Banner
Greenson was considered daring to take on Marilyn. Many psychiatrists wouldn’t have treated her because of her suicide attempts. The suicide of a patient—particularly of so famous a patient—could destroy a psychiatrist’s career. Greenson liked treating celebrities, and at one time or another he treated many famous performers, including Frank Sinatra and Vivien Leigh. He was well known among psychoanalyists for his theories about the relationship between therapist and patient. He published those theories in articles in academic journals and in his 1978 book Explorations in Psychoanalysis, which for a time was considered to be the definitive work on the subject.34
Sigmund Freud had described transference and counter-transference through his own psychoanalytic practice. These two states were considered to be the key elements in the patient-therapist connection. Transference refers to the emotional reaction of the patient to the therapist; counter-transference refers to the therapist’s response to the patient’s transference. By the 1950s, fifty years after Freud’s initial formulation of these states, psychoanalysts were debating the analyst’s proper stance. Should the analyst encourage a personal involvement with the patient or remain aloof? Greenson’s answers to this question are relevant to his treatment of Marilyn, especially since he worked out much of his theory while she was his patient.
Greenson divided analytic categories into the “transference neurosis” and the “working alliance.” The “transference neurosis” referred to the patient’s emotional attachment to the therapist and the patient’s comprehension of his own neurosis. Through the attachment, it was thought, the patient would come to terms with his neurosis, by projecting his fears and lusts onto the therapist and working them out through their converstation. The “working alliance” involved the rational connection between the patient and the therapist, their joint mental endeavor to understand the patient’s neurosis and their own relationship.
Recent authors have charged that Greenson had sex with Marilyn. Yet both his theoretical stance and his reactions to her contradict that assertion. In analytic papers Greenson condemned sex between patient and therapist. In a paper on empathy, he criticized “uncontrolled” therapists who acted out their counter-transference. The therapist, he maintained, must be both detached and involved, oscillating between these two positions. In a paper about the “working alliance,” he wrote that it was a “rationalized, desexualized, and de-aggressivized transfer phenomenon.” He criticized what he called “corrective emotional experience” therapy and stated that the proper way to generate the necessary “transference neurosis” was by thwarting a client’s desires. Marilyn may have attempted to seduce him, but he rejected her. That’s what he stated in his paper on the use of drugs in psychotherapy.35
Marilyn’s strong transference burdened him throughout 1961 and 1962. If he upset her, she obsessed about it—which meant threats of suicide and late-night telephone calls. And he easily upset her, especially when he focused on her neurotic reactions to others. She ranted not only against the people she claimed were persecuting her but also against anyone who acted in a way she considered to be against her interests. On the other hand, she idolized some individuals and wouldn’t allow Greenson to criticize them. These individuals included Wayne Bolender, her first foster father, and Ana Lower, Grace Goddard’s aunt, who had been a powerful force in her childhood.
Greenson decided at this point that Marilyn, who was sixteen years younger than he, was at base an adolescent waif who acted irresponsibly, sulking or throwing tantrums when crossed. In his paper on drugs he referred to his patient (obviously Marilyn) as having exposed herself to venereal disease, an act that was flagrantly self-destructive. In a radio lecture he gave on November 16, 1961, he criticized all his patients who suffered from insomnia. That blanket condemnation included Marilyn. Such patients, he said, were “infantile.” “The more infantile people are,” he said, “the more regressed, the more deadly, the more self-destructive they are.”36
Greenson was overworked when he took on Marilyn as a patient. He’d already had a heart attack. He’d cut down on the number of his analytic patients, but he still taught classes at UCLA, supervised psychiatrists in training, and served on the board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Marilyn’s insatiable needs threatened to overtake his life. His letters to Marianne Kris and others about Marilyn are filled with frustration. She called him at all hours, threatened suicide, and then improved, only to break down again. “I had become a prisoner now of a form of treatment which I thought was correct for her but almost impossible for me,” he told Kris.37
Marilyn had brought the nation’s most famous acting teachers to heel; she had done the same to the nation’s most famous athlete and its most famous playwright. Now she was facing a famous psychoanalyst. He was brilliant, as was she. I suspect they enjoyed the intellectual fencing during their sessions, since Marilyn entered the “working alliance” while fighting against it, trying to maintain—perhaps unconsciously—a neurotic interdependence between the two of them that she could manipulate. Joshua Hoffs, a student of Greenson’s and later his colleague, told me that they probably engaged in meta-conversations about their process, talking about literature and psychoanalytic theory during their long therapy sessions.38
In December 1961 Greenson called her a borderline paranoid schizophrenic in a letter to Anna Freud. Judging from his treatment for her, however, he had difficulty pinning her down under one category. Her nightmares and monsters could be viewed as symptoms of a number of psychic syndromes. In fact, the “borderline” designation still could mean someone whose symptoms swung between categories; it hadn’t yet been fully distinguished as a separate category with its own dangerous effects, a special personality disorder replete with manipulative behavior. Besides, both Ralph Roberts and Rupert Allan, hostile to psychoanalysis, claimed that Marilyn told them she made up stories for Greenson.39
During her time with Greenson she had a recurring dream in which she was running through a cemetery in the early dawn frantically looking for a way to escape. She graphically described the tall headstones and the feel of the dewy grass on her feet, but she never got out of the cemetery. It sounds like an attempt to escape from the death she often regarded as a welcome relief from a painful life, or a warning to Greenson that his therapy wasn’t working. On one occasion when he was trying to persuade her to give up drugs, he told her that it was either “Mr. Nembutal or me.” She replied to him that the drugs made her feel “womby and tomby.”
In fact, Greenson contended that her ego was so weak that he couldn’t analyze her and that he was only trying to help her attain a strong enough sense of self to undergo analysis, which would involve deep penetration into her past. Thus he had her sit up during their sessions; she didn’t lie down on his analytic couch and free associate. He needed to have eye contact with her to keep her focused. But his discussions of his interactions with her in the papers he wrote indicate that he was, in fact, applying his analytic categories to her.40
Greenson was known as an innovator in psychoanalysis. On one level the personalized treatment he gave Marilyn attests to his creativity, as he held analytic sessions with her in his home, had her stay for dinner, encouraged her to become friends with his family, and invited her to his evening musicales. He has been severely criticized for overstepping the bounds of anonymity on the part of the therapist toward a patient, a credo in the field, but by 1962 the popularity of psychoanalysis was decreasing with the appearance of new behaviorist therapies and new drugs. Greenson experimented with innovative psychoanalytic approaches in order to maintain the method’s position as a primary treatment for mental disorders. In his paper “The Origin and Fate of New Ideas in Psychoanalysis,” he saw himself as a strict Freudian, even as he tried out new approaches. “During my analytic sessions,” he stated, “I had consciously to discipline my thinking and imagination or I would have forsaken the welfare of my patients for the allure of the new ideas.” Anna Freud saw him as “a
hard-living man of passionate enthusiasm and even flamboyance, a man for whom psychoanalysis was … a way of life.”41
Yet in taking Marilyn into his home, he didn’t seem to realize that he was repeating what others had done: the Kargers, Chekhovs, Rostens, and Strasbergs all had taken Marilyn into their families. His technique was not, in fact, unique. Becoming a member of families may have been part of her pathology, a way of endlessly re-creating the foster families of her childhood, trying to lessen their effect on her by finding better variations of them. And she did believe that everyone around her was manipulating her, just as drug addicts often perceive everyone around them to be part of a conspiracy against them. Realizing that she was a drug addict, Greenson may have tried to remove her from negative friendships, a common method of withdrawal therapy. He stated that she masochistically provoked people “to mistreat her and take advantage of her.”
He tried to end her relationship with Sinatra, who had been his patient and whose neuroses he knew well. He also dismissed Ralph Roberts in November 1961, for he may have decided that Roberts, a vodka drinker, was enabling Marilyn. Greenson also wanted to get rid of the Strasbergs. That may not have been a bad idea; even the gentle Norman Rosten didn’t trust them and thought they were trying to take over Greenson’s role in her life.42
Marilyn’s paranoia, however, was grounded in a certain reality. Many people were manipulating her. Her New York lawyer, Aaron Frosch, was embezzling funds from her, and Marjorie Stengel was so incompetent that she had to be fired. The FBI was still following her, and she knew it. Joe DiMaggio usually had detectives around, watching her. Greenson was aware that her complaints about being manipulated weren’t all paranoid. He told film star Janice Rule, another patient of his, that “even if [a] star … is strongly motivated to change, the parasites and exploiters living off the mysteriously successful creature prefer the status quo.” He was referring to Marilyn.43
Marilyn further believed that some of the homosexuals around her were trying to take her over. This belief had become evident in 1955, when she charged her hairdresser Peter Leonardi with trying to do so, in what may have been a projection of her own fears about her lesbian tendencies. Many individuals around her were gay: George Cukor, Rupert Allan, George Masters, Sidney Guilaroff, possibly Ralph Roberts. Marilyn had no animus against Allan, Guilaroff, or Roberts, but she was savage about Cukor. She also had problems with Patricia Newcomb, who she was constantly with and who controlled her so much on the set of Something’s Got to Give that Fox executives wanted Marilyn to fire her.44 In a therapy session, Marilyn accused Pat of trying to rob her of a valuable possession. By that “possession” Marilyn meant either her femininity or her sexuality. She worried that Pat was trying to take her over.
According to Greenson, Marilyn couldn’t bear even the hint of anything homosexual, and yet she fell into situations that had homosexual coloring. She recognized her tendency in those situations, but she then projected it onto the other person involved, who became her enemy. Greenson did what he could: “Once I said to Marilyn deliberately, casually, of course, you know that all of us have both hetero and some homosexual components. Marilyn acted as though this was a catastrophe. I finally had to say that the relative percentage of those components varied in each individual and that she was more than 100 percent heterosexual.” She was so paranoid about Pat Newcomb that she made Pat dye her blonde hair darker. She made hairdresser George Masters dye his hair a darker blonde after someone called them twins. Masters claimed that he dyed Marilyn’s hair white blonde to stop her from complaining about the color of his hair, although she had already had Pearl Porterfield do this.45
In My Story, Marilyn stated she had thought she was a lesbian before she had an affair with Fred Karger. As the greatest sex symbol of her age, protecting her femininity was important to her. If anyone outed her, her career could be destroyed and she would be humiliated. With his statement about universal bisexuality, Greenson threw her into a homosexual panic. Before she left New York, an actress at the Actors Studio had kissed her lasciviously on the mouth in a restaurant, deeply upsetting her. Moreover, rumors were circulating that Natasha Lytess was planning to expose her affair with Marilyn in European tabloids.46
Greenson’s position as Marilyn’s therapist put him in a bind. In his letters he refers to individuals who were hurting Marilyn, but his professional ethics wouldn’t allow him to identify them. In those letters Greenson identified Marilyn as being so alone that if he didn’t see her she would have nothing to do. Either Marilyn falsely represented herself as living a lonely life—or she complained about having only a few friends to Greenson. Such claims to being friendless are typical of drug addicts, although in one of her guises she did regard herself as friendless, as an orphan who was always alone.
Throughout Marilyn’s adult life the claim was made that she was sexually frigid. Now that she was in therapy with Greenson, some observers contended that he cured her. The cultural context is important in evaluating these claims. American society in the 1950s was fascinated by “nymphomania,” while it was axiomatic that “nymphomaniacs” were frigid: they demanded ever more sex because they were in-orgasmic. By definition a sex queen like Marilyn, ever ready for a sexual encounter, had to be frigid. In an era deeply influenced by Freud, frigidity meant the lack of a vaginal orgasm, a point Greenson made in a 1955 paper. In 1972, influenced by second wave feminism, with its argument (based on the Kinsey studies) that all orgasms originate in the clitoris, he revised that stance somewhat, but he still held that “the inability to feel the vagina as a sexual organ indicates an inhibition of psychosexual development.”47
My research on Marilyn suggests a more regular sexual response on her part, given the testimony of Hal Schaefer, Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, and others I have cited, always taking into consideration the effects that the endometriosis and the scar tissue in her internal organs may have had on her sexual response. When I interviewed Hal Schaefer, he asked me rhetorically, “Why would Joe DiMaggio, known for his sexual drive and prowess, have kept coming back to Marilyn if she were in-orgasmic?” Marilyn called him “my slugger,” said he could hit the ball out of the park, and stated that if sex were all there were to marriage, they would have been married forever.
According to Lucy Freeman, a writer on psychiatry who based her 1992 book on Marilyn on interviews with Ralph Greenson, Marilyn’s issue with sex was not a lack of sexual response but that she usually lost sexual interest in a man after a period of time. I’m also not convinced by John Miner’s transcript of a tape that Marilyn supposedly made for Ralph Greenson, in which she stated that she was frigid and that Greenson had cured her. Miner told me that Greenson did so through hypnotism and that he himself had used that technique to cure women of frigidity. Given my relationship with John Miner over the course of several years, that statement sounds dubious. In fact, I don’t trust the validity of the Miner transcript. No record exists that Greenson played a tape for Miner, aside from Miner’s claim. Still, rumors of Marilyn’s frigidity—and her lesbianism—circulated in her own day. Alvah Bessie, one of the Hollywood Ten, wrote a 1967 novel based on Marilyn’s life in which his female protagonist experiences orgasm only through sex with women.48
After the detox treatment in Marilyn’s apartment in December 1961, Greenson brought Eunice Murray, a friend of his with some practical nursing experience, into Marilyn’s life. He felt Marilyn needed a companion, both to keep her company and to watch over her for him. Many have suggested, on the basis of no evidence, that she was a Greenson toady, who spied on Marilyn for him. Eunice had served as a caretaker for some of Greenson’s patients; she knew how to handle unstable personalities. She was a quiet, unflappable woman who had never seen a Marilyn movie when she met her and knew nothing of her fame. Marilyn had fought the nurses that Greenson brought in to care for her when she was undergoing the detoxification in December, and they all had quit. Marilyn was insulting to Eunice, but Eunice absorbed the abuse and remained calm no
matter what Marilyn said.49
Soon after Eunice arrived in early January, Marilyn discovered Eunice was an excellent seamstress. Marilyn was delighted. She had lost a lot of weight after the gallbladder surgery, and her clothes needed to be taken in. Eunice did the alterations. Moreover, she was a Swedenborgian, a practitioner of the mystical religion based on the doctrines of the eighteenth-century mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. That involvement appealed to Marilyn, who was still exploring alternative spiritualities. She did so especially when she consulted skin specialist G. W. Campbell at Madame Renna’s salon in Beverly Hills. Campbell (who was married to Renna) worked on the fat in Marilyn’s chin with an electrical device his wife had invented. He was also versed in philosophy and religion, which he and Marilyn discussed. When she needed speedy expertise in them, she called him. He recommended books to her, which she read.50
By February 1962 Eunice was looking for a house for Marilyn to buy. The previous summer Marilyn had told Joe DiMaggio she wanted to own a home, and he’d encouraged her to look in Los Angeles, where homes were less expensive than in New York. Eunice found a house on Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood, and Marilyn liked it. Medium-size, it was designed in a Mediterranean Spanish style similar to that of Ralph Greenson’s home. The style had been characteristic of homes in Los Angeles since the city’s early days, including those in the Whitley tract; it evoked the spirit of the city, and Marilyn also liked it for that reason.51 Buying the house in Los Angeles, however, didn’t mean that she was permanently leaving New York. She loved her apartment there, with its sophisticated art deco look. Her Brentwood house was folk Mexican, warm and earthy. She had decided to become bicoastal, living alternately in both cities. For years she had frequently flown across the country, apparently with little jet lag. With two places to live, she was joining the sophisticated “jet set” that descended from the avant-garde society featured in Flair magazine.
