Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Marilyn (1926–62)

  In October 1959, towards the end of her time in America, Sylvia Plath dreamt of Marilyn Monroe. She appeared to her as a kind of ‘fairy godmother’. Sylvia tells her how much she and Arthur Miller meant to her and Ted. Marilyn, the woman who understands the body and the ways of desire, gives her an expert manicure. Sylvia asks her about hairdressers. The good fairy ‘Marilyn’ invites her to visit during the Christmas holidays and promises her a new, flowering life.

  Marilyn Monroe was appearing in many dreams at that time, perhaps because her own life at the end of the fifties had the structure of a tinseltown wish-fulfilment. She was everyone’s figure of fantasy–from Moji, Japan, where her famous nude image had been hung in the municipal assembly building in an effort ‘to rejuvenate the assemblymen’, to the radiation control lab of the world’s first atomic submarine, where she featured amongst the table of elements. So Time had asserted in a cover story of 14 May 1956, hailing her ‘frolicsomely sensual figure’ and the path she had taken from ‘slithering vamp’ to ‘good-natured tramp’–a journey that had, over five pictures, grossed more than $50 million. And now, everyone’s favourite ‘dumb blonde’ had been to Lee Strasberg’s famous Actors’ Studio in New York, and had become the darling of the intellectuals. She was also, on 29 June that year, to be married to America’s premier dramatist, Arthur Miller–the man who announced their wedding at the same press conference in which he refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, pleading the First Amendment, and thereby standing up to Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch trials. The union of Monroe with Miller, whose name was synonymous with the death of the American dream–hollowed out by the fate of the world’s most famous salesman, Willy Lomax–seemed in popular mythology to indicate the dream might have one more chance. On top of this, Miller had testified to Marilyn’s talent, her ‘terrific instinct for the basic reality of a character or a situation. She gets to the core.’

  It was no wonder that the iconic duo had invaded Plath’s dreams. Like Marilyn, Sylvia had transformed herself into a blonde, though only for a summer. The scholarship girl and the blue-collar ‘orphan’ whose mother was regularly institutionalized, may have come from backgrounds miles apart, but both were trying, within the strictures of the times, to invent themselves, forge some kind of working alliance between the feminine, the sexual and the thinking parts of their identity. Like Sylvia, Marilyn had also worked hard to get where she was. She had worked at her body, her carriage, her way with the cameras, yes, her unschooled intellect–despite the jeers at her pretentiousness–and above all, her acting.

  According to Miller’s rendition of her in After the Fall, she was a perfectionist, like Plath. She was also touchy, and resentfully insecure about her place in the world and her husband’s love. If her skin was thin, her temper volatile, her ambition was great. The ‘dumb blonde’ was no one’s fool, as Truman Capote makes clear in his memoir and others echo. Given the gossip mills, Sylvia may also have known that Marilyn, like her, had recourse to an analyst: in the media it was recurrently signalled that she had been deeply affected by the absence of her father. Not only did she do a heartfelt, if comic, rendition of ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’, but that was what she called all three of her husbands. When she died, apparently from an overdose of Nembutal, a common barbiturate used to counter insomnia and relieve anxiety–though as with much in the Marilyn narrative, including her Cinderella-like childhood, this too is disputed–the story of celebrity, female sexuality and its price took on its full mythical arc.

  Born Norma Jeane Mortenson, but known as Baker, her mother’s maiden name, Marilyn was ‘illegitimate’. Her father, who worked as her mother did in the blue-collar side of the film industry, had abandoned his wife during the pregnancy, taking his two other children with him. Twelve days after Marilyn’s birth, her mother broke down and was institutionalized. Marilyn was boarded out to a family of religious zealots somewhere on the dirt-poor borderlands of LA. They talked of little but sin and hellfire and had her working in the house by the age of five. She took to hiding in the woodshed, the site of fantasies and escape from pervasive guilt. When she was six, a friend of the family raped her. Side by side with the sermons and the praying, this unsettled her enough to produce hallucinations. The family sent her away, worried that she would repeat her mother’s madness. She was shunted off to another foster home.

  When Norma Jeane was eight, her mother broke down a second time. She couldn’t meet the costs of fostering and Norma Jeane was sent to an orphanage, which had all the qualities of a Victorian workhouse. She loathed it and developed a stutter. From the age of eleven, when a friend of her mother’s took her in, until the age of sixteen when she first got married, there was a series of twelve families, each one poorer than the next. Norma Jeane’s education suffered. At school she was an unhappy stringbean of a child, much maligned. But as her ‘own’ narrative would have it, a sweater transformed her from being the despised orphan girl to the budding sex goddess. She had borrowed the blue garment from a friend. It metamorphosed her. The boys who had teased were now rapt, attentive, her slaves. ‘For the first time in my life people paid attention to me…I prayed that they wouldn’t go away.’

  The early marriage, on the advice of her guardian, to Jim Dougherty, then an aircraft worker, soon failed. But while she was working at a defence plant, some publicity stills were taken by a photographer who recognized her possibilities and marched her off to the Blue Book School of Charm and Modelling. The Hollywood make-over included the bleach-blonde hair, a deeper voice and a new smile. By the spring of 1947, Norma Jeane was a covergirl, smiling from the front of five magazines. The film studios beckoned. When she went to Fox, the casting director took her straight on and gave her a new name, taking the Monroe from her mother’s maiden name.

  The rest is Hollywood history, inevitably mingled with myth, gossip and press releases. There was fame and drugs and too much (or too little) sex, alongside a series of glorious performances in films that still matter. There was the damaged, insecure waif within the beautiful woman, the angel of sex–all warmth, goodness, vulnerability and innocent responsiveness–who was by all accounts so terrified of filming, so eager for perfection, that she was perennially late, or absent or heavily sedated, or vomiting on the studio stairs before coming in. There was the rapacious ‘nymphomaniac’, the ‘castrator’–terms that inevitably embody the male’s fear of his own hated and rapacious sexuality projected on to the woman–who seduced and seduced and abandoned. There was the unsatisfiable and dissatisfied ‘frigid’ woman, the woman’s own response to the male’s rapacity, compounded by her loathing of her own sexuality. There was also the addict, the heavy drinker and the suicidally depressive madwoman. There were a disputed dozen abortions, ‘hysterical pregnancies’ and miscarriages, perhaps one after the fraught filming of her final movie, The Misfits. Arthur Miller was apparently not the father, though he had fathered the script of the film. They had already more or less separated. But it was on the set of the doomed film–in which, according to Clark Gable’s wife, Marilyn’s tantrums killed Clark, who died a week after the end of filming–that Arthur Miller met his next wife, the film’s photographer.

  Part of this story belongs to the annals of psychoanalysis. Indeed, for all the stumbling, childlike innocence with which her own ‘intellectual’ statements seem to be made, Marilyn had by the late fifties learned a sophisticated version of the patter of psychoanalysis quite as well as Woody Allen enacted it later on. ‘I’m always running into people’s unconscious,’ she once told a reporter in an interview, underscoring in a Freudian way the whole history of what it means to be a celebrity, an object of desire to millions, each of whom has a pre-emptive persona for you.

  Marilyn’s stories of her life seem to move easily from analyst’s couch to casting couch: sometimes the sexuality is troubled, (de)formative; at others, triumphal. Her own structuring, with a little help from the studio, of the key moments
of her history–from abandonment, rape, guilt, to burgeoning pubescent sexuality–all play into a couch narrative, a case history of Freudian screen memories, though this time enabling a screen image. Even the childhood dream she remembers, from some unspecified date, has the feel of a rehearsed and interpreted couch dream, which is also a Hollywood extravaganza: ‘I dreamed that I was standing up in church without any clothes on, and all the people there were lying at my feet on the floor of the church, and I walked naked, with a sense of freedom, over their prostrate forms, being careful not to step on anyone.’

  Marilyn’s training in psychoanalytic meanings and her attempt to deal both with her baggage and with the demands of her celebrity status formally began in 1955 after she had ended her nine-month marriage to the baseball legend Joe DiMaggio, had left Hollywood and Fox for New York and started training at the Actors’ Studio. This famous ‘method’ called on actors to look into themselves to find the truth of a character. Lee Strasberg, the studio’s director, more or less demanded psychoanalysis of his actors. It was perhaps on his recommendation that Marilyn started analysis with Dr Margaret Hohenberg, at 155 East 83rd Street. Hohenberg had arrived as a refugee in America in 1940. Her medical degree from the University of Vienna had been obtained in 1925, the same year as Marilyn’s second analyst, Marianne Kris. Hohenberg had become a full member of the New York Psychoanalytic Society in 1950. She was part of New York’s European cultural elite, an appropriate figure for a star in search of self-improvement.

  Monroe’s biographer Donald Spoto, whose narrative posits a waif of a Marilyn of little brain, done down by the analysts, would have it that ‘Excessive introspection exacerbated her lack of self-confidence. Intuition suffered at the expense of a forced, conscious intellectualism that paralysed her and pushed her further back into herself.’ Suicide has retrospectively made Marilyn into a victim. But the world-famous star Marilyn was neither stupid nor stable before she went to the analysts, whose aura at the time–and aura in the therapeutic and medical professions has always been part of the placebo effect so essential to feeling better–was rather more potent than it is now. She seemed both to need and to want the bolstering and confidence the cultural sphere could bring. Arthur Miller was part of the same picture. So, too, were Lee and his wife Paula Strasberg, who served not only as teachers but as surrogate parents. Paula accompanied her on all her films from 1955 on, as her acting coach. Marilyn also stayed with them in New York on Central Park West.

  In the summer of 1956, when she and Arthur Miller were in London and she was filming The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier, Marilyn had a crisis. Whether one believes the dramatic versions of her biographers or Miller’s own earlier dramatization in The Misfits, it is clear that Marilyn had found something that Miller had written just two months into their marriage that showed he didn’t love her in the way she had thought and wanted. In the play, Maggie, the Marilyn character, says, ‘You know when I wanted to die? When I read what you wrote, judgey. Two months after we were married, judgey.’ What the Miller character, Quentin, had written was: ‘The only one I will ever love is my daughter.’ Miller explains he had written it when confronted by his own sexual jealousy, her enraged response that it made her feel she didn’t exist, and his fear, in turn, that he didn’t know how to love.

  In the version of the daughter of Paula Strasberg who was with Marilyn in London and on the set, Miller’s diary passage that sent Marilyn into a spin expressed his disappointment in her, ‘how he thought I was some kind of angel but now he guessed he was wrong’. Paula’s reassurance that diaries were for talking to oneself about everything you think, good and bad (not unlike free association, perhaps), met with Marilyn’s: ‘Yeah, but I wouldn’t leave my head wide open for the person I was thinking about to see. That’s a little too Freudian.’

  The event tumbled Marilyn into depression. Olivier, who was directing, demanded an end to her show of temperament. Dr Hohenberg was flown over to see her patient through. When she could no longer stay, Marilyn was apparently sent to see her fellow Viennese, Anna Freud. The maid Paula Fichtl, who had been with the Freuds since the Vienna days, notes triumphantly–though her account is not always to be trusted–that Marilyn arrived in a black Rolls at the Freud house in Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead. Whether it was due to the exemplary care of the joint analysts or not, the film was duly finished in November. During her stay, Marilyn had been presented to the Queen, and had been asked to perform the title role in Lysistrata for the BBC. Apparently on Anna Freud’s recommendation, Marilyn on her return to New York took up analysis with Anna’s old childhood friend, Marianne Kris.

  Dr Kris had the advantage of living in the same building as the Strasbergs. She was the daughter of Oskar Rie, who had been a close friend of the Freuds in Vienna and the family paediatrician. Marianne, something of a favourite, had been briefly analysed by Freud. Her husband, the famous art historian and psychoanalyst Ernst Kris, had trained alongside Anna, and was one of her collaborators on the journal The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. On Marianne Kris’s couch, Marilyn Monroe was in regular contact with the Viennese ‘aristocracy’ of the profession and its high culture.

  Eric R. Kandel, who trained and practised as a psychoanalyst before moving on to neurology and the study of the storage of memory in the Californian sea slug, aplysia, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 2000, knew the Krises in the fifties through their daughter Anna, named after Anna Freud. The family was influential in shaping his early interest in psychoanalysis. In his Nobel Prize speech, he writes:

  It is difficult to recapture now the extraordinary fascination that psychoanalysis held for young people in 1950. During the first half of the 20th century psychoanalysis provided a remarkable set of insights into the mind–insights about unconscious mental processes, psychic determinism, and perhaps most interesting, the irrationality of human motivation. As a result, in 1950, psychoanalysis outlined by far the most coherent, interesting, and nuanced view of the human mind than did any other school of psychology. In addition, Anna’s parents, who represented academic psychoanalysis in its most intellectual and interesting form, were extraordinary people–intelligent, cultured, and filled with enthusiasm…By frequent interactions with them and their colleagues, I was converted to their view that psychoanalysis offered a fascinating new approach, perhaps the only approach, to understanding the mind, including the irrational nature of motivation and unconscious and conscious memory.

  Marilyn’s analysis with Marianne Kris, it can be assumed, was an education as well as a therapy, private tuition after the correspondence course in literature she had taken from UCLA. In practice, the analysis was far more like one of Freud’s early and irregular ones than what America had come to expect in terms of standardized technique. Over the four years she saw Marianne Kris, Marilyn was often away filming. Her perennial lateness swallowed up the hour, though it was in part that persistent lateness that had brought her to analysis. From Brenda Webster’s account of her mother, the painter Ethel Schwabacher’s, analysis with Kris, which began after Webster’s father had died, was warm and casual. She used her patient’s first name in a companionate way, was maternal and caring rather than distant and neutral. Indeed, Schwabacher’s ‘happy’ analytic relationship, in which the analyst urged her patient to paint her ‘grief and rage’, lasted for thirty years until Kris’s death.

  There is no record of what was discussed in Marilyn’s analysis or what effects it had. Her acting improved, but her marriage to Arthur Miller didn’t: it was effectively over in 1959. Celebrity was stressful. The insomnia medication–Demerol, sodium pentothal, amytal–had the side-effect of impairing judgement. The strains of filming had got worse over the years with the demands of her own perfectionism. The unhappy termination of her brief affair with her co-star in Let’s Make Love, Yves Montand, in the midst of the shoot in 1960 may well have precipitated Marilyn’s collapse. He told reporters he had only taken up with her to make the
screen love affair more plausible. Marilyn was so severely affected she stopped coming in to work altogether. From New York, Marianne Kris arranged help. She called Los Angeles analyst Dr Ralph Greenson, a well established Californian doctor, to Marilyn’s side. Greenson had experience in the hothouse world of stardom. He was the analyst to celebrity which, given its pattern of extremes under media spotlight, created its very own psychic ills. Frank Sinatra, Peter Lorre and Vivien Leigh, amongst many others, had had recourse to Greenson. Since he was also a friend of Anna Freud’s, Marianne Kris trusted him.

  The referral has been read by some as a conspiracy of shrinks intent on profiting from Monroe, particularly since Greenson’s brother-in-law was Marilyn’s lawyer and her will left a bequest to Marianne Kris. She in turn bequeathed it to the Anna Freud Centre in London, which also received funding from the West Coast research foundation Greenson had set up. Kris died in London in 1980 in Anna Freud’s house in Maresfield Gardens, now the Freud Museum. But there is little real evidence that Kris was particularly mercenary. It is probably more accurate to see in her contacting of Greenson the usual medical system of referral at play.