Marilyn's Last Sessions

by Michel Schneider

  He became her lover, then her friend, then her enemy under McCarthyism, and then her friend again. ‘When I met her,’ he said later, ‘she was a simple, decent-hearted kid whom Hollywood brought down, legs parted.’ She was thin-skinned and had a hunger to be accepted by people she could respect. Like many other girls who’d had her sort of life, she measured her self-esteem by the number of men she was able to attract.

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street

  February 1960

  Marilyn continued to arrive late at her psychoanalyst’s.

  ‘Why such hostility towards people who want to help and understand you?’ Greenson asked. ‘We’re allies, you and I, not enemies.’

  ‘That’s how it’s always been. On A Ticket To Tomahawk, in the early days, the assistant director threatened, “You know, you can be replaced.” “You can too,” I said. The idiot! He didn’t understand that being late guarantees you can’t be replaced and that everyone else is waiting for you, only you and no one else . . . Anyway, when I’m late, it’s not as if I’m not doing anything, you know. I check my clothes and make-up, I work on my image, I take notes on what I’m going to say, topics of conversation—’

  ‘You’re not on set or at some fancy party here,’ the analyst interrupted. ‘Do you know what it means to me when you come late? It means “I don’t like you, Dr Greenson. I don’t want to come and see you.”’

  ‘Oh, no, I do like to come and see you. I do,’ Marilyn exclaimed. ‘I like talking to you, even if I have to look away so as not to feel your eyes on me.’

  ‘Your words say that. Your actions say: “I don’t like you.”’

  Marilyn was silent. She’d thought her being late meant only one thing: ‘You are waiting for me. You love me. You are waiting just for me. Love me, Doctor. You know it’s always the one who loves who waits.’ But she stopped coming late after that – started coming early, too early. In the end she still couldn’t be on time.

  ‘You see, you don’t know what you want,’ the analyst told her. ‘You don’t know what time it is.’ He thought her coming early now meant: ‘He’s there. Who knows about time, but he’s there for me. He’s there.’

  The following summer, during a very emotional session, she told her analyst about filming a scene in The Misfits in which she’d rejected her screen husband’s attempts at reconciliation.

  ‘I kept getting stuck on the little sentence, “You’re not there.” Huston got mad, but Clark Gable stood up for me. “When she’s there, she’s there. All of her is there! She’s there to work.” Ever since then that’s been my favourite expression when I talk about my experiences with men: mostly they’re never there.’

  The first time she sat in the leather chair in the consulting room at her analyst’s house, she noticed there were no papers on his large wooden desk. He must write his articles upstairs, she supposed. It was odd not seeing any pictures of Freud on the walls; there had been several in Greenson’s Beverly Hills office, as there had in her previous analysts’ offices. She was particularly taken by a large picture of a woman sitting with her back to the viewer, gazing at a garden. Her face was obscured, but the gentle light and her clothes suggested it bore a serene expression. She immediately liked the calm, quiet beauty of this huge room, which was shielded from the setting sun by linen drapes with a green and brown geometric pattern.

  After a few sessions at his office in Beverly Hills, Greenson had suggested to Marilyn he see her regularly at his home so as not to attract public attention. His children, Joan and Daniel, knew their father had famous clients, but it came as a complete surprise to them when he changed his usual routine and started cancelling appointments at his office to be able to see Marilyn Monroe at their home. Joan immediately wanted to become friends with his new, famous patient and soon her father was telling her to look after Marilyn if he was late and suggesting they go out for walks together. Joan couldn’t help feeling awkward, though, when he sent her to pick up medication from the pharmacy and take it to Marilyn at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  In addition to five or six weekly meetings, the analyst encouraged Marilyn to telephone each day. ‘Mainly she was lonely and had no one to see her, nothing to do if I didn’t see her,’ Greenson explained apologetically, in a letter to Marianne Kris. One evening, she took a taxi home from Santa Monica after a session, invited the driver in and then spent the night with him. Greenson was furious at this ‘pathological’ behaviour; his wife advised her to stay with them if her sessions ran on late, which she did after that from time to time.

  Greenson justified his approach to Wexler by saying it was a deliberate emergency strategy to ensure her physical health and enable her to appear on set for Let’s Make Love. ‘Although she may seem a hard-core drug addict, she isn’t in any usual sense of the word,’ he explained. It was true that Marilyn could stop taking drugs without showing any of the customary symptoms of withdrawal, but it wasn’t by any means a rare occurrence for her to ring, begging him to come to the Beverly Hills Hotel to give her an intravenous injection of Pentothal or Amytal. Distraught after one such summons, he said to Wexler, ‘I told her that she’d already received so much medication that it would put five other people to sleep, but the reason she wasn’t sleeping was because she was afraid of sleeping. I promised she would sleep with less medication if she would recognise she’s fighting sleep as well as searching for some oblivion, which is not sleep.’

  Fort Logan, Colorado, Army Air Force Convalescent Hospital

  1944

  Enrolling in the US Army in 1942, Ralph Greenson was assigned to a psychiatric ward where he specialised in traumatic neuroses. In addition to treating combat casualties, he also started giving regular seminars to medical personnel, military chaplains and social workers trying to help soldiers readapt to civilian life. His experiences as an army psychiatrist inspired a hugely popular novel by Leo Rosten, Captain Newman, M.D., whose heroic protagonist was based on him. The book came out in 1963, and was made into a movie that year.

  Greenson used to tell one story in particular from that time. He had had to give an intravenous injection of Sodium Pentothal to a waist gunner of a B-17 bomber on his return from a mission. The man was displaying symptoms of extreme shock: insomnia, nightmares, trembling, sweats. He had flown fifty combat missions but, although he was noticeably reluctant to talk about his sorties, he insisted he wasn’t aware of any particular source of anxiety. He had agreed to take Pentothal partly because he’d heard it got you high, ‘swacked’, so he wanted to see what that was like, but mainly because it meant he wouldn’t have to report to his superiors. As soon as Greenson had injected the hypnotic drug, the man sat bolt upright in his bed, tore the needle out of his arm and started screaming, ‘Four o’clock! Oh, Jeez, coming at us from four! Get a bead on them or they’ll get us, those bastards! Omigod! Oh, Jeez – three more – one o’clock, one o’clock! Get a bead on them, get a bead on them! Omigod, I’m hurt! I can’t move! Get a bead on those bastards!’

  The patient carried on screaming and yelling like this for more than twenty minutes, his eyes filled with terror, sweat pouring down his face, his whole body trembling as he gripped his right arm, which hung limply by his side. Greenson finally said to him, ‘OK, boy, we got them.’ Hearing this, the patient collapsed back onto the bed and fell into a deep sleep. The next morning the doctor asked him if he remembered the effects of the Pentothal. He gave a timid smile and said he remembered yelling but it was all very confused. When Greenson told him he’d talked about a mission on which he’d been wounded in his right hand, and hadn’t stopped yelling ‘Get a bead on them’, the patient said, ‘Oh, yes, I remember. We were coming back from Schweinfurt and they jumped us. They came in at four o’clock, then one o’clock, and then we were hit . . .’ Under the effects of Pentothal, the patient had managed to bypass all his resistances and defences and recall without difficulty what had happened to him.

  For some time after this, Greenson continued to search for the secret of forg
otten experiences with ‘the truth serum’, as Pentothal was called in the movies of the day. It wasn’t until his analysis with Frances Deri that the injection of memories lost its fascination for him and he turned to another method for excavating his patients’ buried truths: transference, the psychoanalytic procedure whereby love is the only medication, and words are what allow repressed experiences to emerge. But his use of drugs left him with the sense that the therapist must always play an active part in treatment, offering aspects of his psychological and physical self for the patient to draw on.

  Beverly Hills, Roxbury Drive

  November 1979

  ‘Hello, Mr Wexler?’ the voice on the phone said. ‘I was wondering if there’s any chance we could meet. I’m a journalist and I’m writing a book about Marilyn – well, mainly about Greenson, actually, and the part he may have played in her death. You knew them both intimately, so I was hoping you could talk to me about what they were like and your relationship with them.’

  Wexler declined this request, one of an infinite number he had been bombarded with over the years. He put off the journalist, just as he had all the other conspiracy- and scandal-seekers, and tried to forget the whole thing. But memories kept welling up, so he called the journalist back the next day and suggested instead that he help him write his memoirs. A psychoanalyst in the Golden Age of the studios . . . he already had the title: A Look Through the Rear-view Mirror.

  ‘Where to begin? It’s all such a long time ago, all this,’ Wexler said. ‘It goes back to the year after Marilyn died, but you’d have to start with the Greenson I knew just after the war. I can’t resist telling you about that. Captain Newman, M.D. was the story of a heroic army medical officer in the Second World War. A joke, really . . . not Romi, or Gregory Peck, he was no worse than usual. No, the film. I remember it coming out in 1963. It was a big hit, unlike John Huston’s Freud, which was put out at the same time with that ridiculous subtitle, The Secret Passion. You know, the picture Marilyn was meant to be in until Ralph Greenson did everything he could to stop her.’

  ‘No – what happened?’ the journalist asked.

  ‘Don’t you know about that? I’ll tell you another day . . . Oh, well, what the heck? I haven’t got time to stand on ceremony with the dead any more. Get this: while he was doing his utmost to make it impossible for a film to be made about Freud, Greenson was busy casting himself as the saviour psychiatrist. He had no problem with being portrayed as a courageous analyst himself, but he did with his patient playing one of Freud’s hysterics. I’m not saying Newman the shock psychiatrist wasn’t an accurate portrait of Romi’s time in the army when he treated soldiers who’d fought in the Pacific, mind you. Ever dynamic, ever the handsome lead, that was Romi. Wherever he went, something larger than life would happen, like in the movies. Ralph was a dramatic guy, but light with it, very humorous. The movie portrayed a valiant psychiatrist struggling to repair the shattered psyches of three battle-weary soldiers. His sidekick, the orderly Jake Leibowitz, played by one of Greenson’s patients, Tony Curtis, provided some light relief, but basically it was about the tragic dilemma faced by a conscientious doctor in wartime: why should he help traumatised soldiers back on their feet if it was just so they could go off and fight? Is curing someone effectively sending him out to get killed or live a miserable life? Sometimes in our humbler endeavours we ask ourselves the same thing.

  ‘Greenson wrote the Captain Newman script but his friend, the writer Leo Rosten, advised him he’d better not put his name on the credits in case his former patients tried to sue. He agreed, not that he was exactly thrilled about keeping a low profile. He’d met Rosten when they were both at the beginning of their careers, and the two of them immediately hit it off: Romi took the writer to meetings of the psychoanalytic study group and Leo reciprocated by taking him to Hollywood dinner parties. A remarkable storyteller, Romi would launch into vivid descriptions of his sessions. Rosten once said, “As an analyst he had to keep quiet all day, and that frustrated him. Soon he was telling his stories all over Hollywood.” I think he always regretted not having been an actor. He didn’t give his lectures, he acted them out. He put on a real show.

  ‘Romi loved power or, rather, he loved playing with the idea of it. “If I wanted, I could dominate all this, everyone would be in my debt” – that sort of thing. He craved the limelight . . . But I’ll stop there. You’re going to think I didn’t like my colleague. And, anyway, all this is tiring. Will you leave now?’

  Moments later, Milton Wexler caught up with the journalist on the doorstep.

  ‘The kicker, you know, is that, without telling him, Romi’s patient was living her life as if she were in a movie just when Romi was making his into one. Everyone’s got one in them, I guess.’

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street

  March 1960

  The filming of Let’s Make Love was chaotic from start to finish. On 26 January, Marilyn broke off a take of ‘My Heart Belongs To Daddy’. She arrived on set at seven in the morning and had her make-up done, then left the studio and disappeared for three days.

  ‘You’re going to see what it means to shoot with the worst actress in the world,’ she told Montand, when they finally had to do their first scene together. ‘I want to vanish. Into the picture or out of it, I don’t care, just vanish.’

  ‘So you’re scared,’ Montand replied. ‘Think of me a little bit. I’m lost.’

  His compassion struck a chord.

  In March, Marilyn caught a chill. She shut herself away in her bungalow. One evening Montand pushed open the door, sat next to her on the bed, took her hand. She drew him down and kissed him with a sort of despairing gaiety. She quickly realised that the Frenchman was just another extra in the love story she had been telling herself since childhood. ‘It’s always the same,’ she told her analyst. ‘The man goes to sleep with Marilyn Monroe and wakes up with me. But I want Montand to love me. Play it again, Yves. Cue the record.’ Greenson immediately advised her to break off her relationship with Montand.

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street

  Spring 1960

  The Greensons hosted glittering parties for celebrities and analysts at their beautiful, sprawling, Mexican-style house. Attendance was compulsory for members of the Los Angeles élite, who’d gather to listen to chamber music and nibble canapés off paper plates. Greenson spent money freely to show he didn’t think of it as a means to acquire power or recognition. One of his patients, the painter Tony Berlant, who was penniless at the time, related that Greenson didn’t charge him. Berlant spoke of a schism in his former analyst’s personality: there was the arrogant, seductive, brutally candid talker at the Santa Monica parties and then there was the person underneath, who was generous and open in the therapeutic situation.

  Everything was simple and extremely chic at Romi’s. Conversation was the main attraction at his parties. As one guest later said, ‘It was the only analytic salon where you could have fun. You knew you’d always meet a cross-section of people – Anna Freud, Margaret Mead, Masters and Johnson, plus lots of Hollywood people.’ If you lived in Los Angeles, a visit to the Greensons’ in Santa Monica was like chancing upon an intellectual and artistic oasis in a desert of money.

  A regular at the musical soirées in the picturesque hacienda, Marilyn would run into people from the film business: the scriptwriters Lillian Hellman and Leo Rosten, patients and former patients of Greenson, such as the producer Dore Schary, and Celeste Holm. Analysts would be there in numbers: Hanna Fenichel, Otto Fenichel’s widow, Lewis Fielding, Milton Wexler. The host’s mother, Katherine Greenschpoon, would have the place of honour in the middle of the room. Everyone would be surprised to see Marilyn sitting off in a corner, curled up in a blue velvet chair, gracefully swinging her hand to the music. ‘If you want to get closer to the music, you need to move further away from the musicians,’ she once told Hildi. ‘That’s the thing about music: there’s nothing to see.’

  Marilyn was very much among family at t
hese events. She heard her analyst’s twin sister, Juliet, and his younger sister, Elisabeth, play. Elisabeth, the wife of Milton ‘Mickey’ Rudin – Marilyn and Frank Sinatra’s lawyer – was another concert pianist, who wasn’t averse to sitting in with jazz bands. On Sunday afternoons, she would accompany her brother’s hesitant violin in chamber pieces. An unrequited aesthete, Romi didn’t work hard at his instrument, not that that prevented him launching self-importantly into erratic solos from the Brandenburg Concertos.

  On these evenings, Romi would see a childlike sadness in his patient’s eyes, the loneliness children can feel when grown-ups are playing music and they feel more excluded than if they were hearing them talking or even making love. Everyone is so bent on conveying the emptiness inside themselves, their terror, that they become invisible to one another and communicate through sound in a way they could never touch each other with their words or hands.

  The first time Marilyn entered the Greensons’ spacious living room she was struck by their piano, a Bechstein concert grand. She thought of her mother’s white piano, a Franklin baby grand. According to family legend, it had once belonged to the actor Frederic March, and her mother Gladys Baker had bought it when she and Marilyn had briefly lived together in Los Angeles in a house on Arbol Street, near Mount Washington, Then, when Marilyn was living with one of her foster mothers, Ida Bollender, her mother had paid a woman called Marion Miller to give her lessons on it for a year. Gladys could pick out a few light classics and was always secretly proud of her ability to play ‘Für Elise’. But Marilyn’s chaotic life, shunted from home to home, soon put an end to her playing. Baby grand – she always laughed when she said the name. That was her: grand, in a way, and yet so little, really. The old white piano had been sold when her mother was committed to a mental hospital. Marilyn had never really known how to extract music from it and she regretted her repertoire didn’t extend beyond the plonky, vaguely comical polka she and Tom Ewell play four-handed in Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch. But, at the first chance she got, she bought it back and would return to it like a lost friend, running her fingers over the keyboard whenever people became deaf and life unlivable.