Perhaps the side of Greenson’s character Marilyn loved most was that of the pathetic, ridiculous musician. Like his voice, there was something that captivated her about his violin playing. Music seemed even more important to him than words or ideas. It afforded him respite from the incessant need to see or be seen. Once, after playing a Mozart trio, he put a hand on her shoulder and led her to the bay window looking out to sea. ‘This is one of those skies, like that piece of music, that makes you want to die,’ he said, ‘that fills you with the desperate pleasure aroused by anything perfect.’ She wondered if he was quoting something and, without understanding it completely, felt it play on her mind.
Hollywood, Santa Monica Boulevard
1946
Marilyn was twenty years old with an emptiness in her heart that she tried to staunch with men and women. She’d go out walking until dawn. She roamed all over Los Angeles and hung around the studios, her eyes full of hazy images, her blonde hair framed against the white sky like the halos that gild actresses on the over-exposed screens of old movies. A thought kept running through her mind, like a chant: she was going to become somebody strong, a great, enigmatic figure whom people could avoid as little as they could avoid their destiny.
Out on a drive one afternoon, André de Dienes and Marilyn stopped at the Hollywood Memorial Cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard, where they wandered through the grand marble halls of the mausoleum in search of Rudolph Valentino’s grave.
André remarked to Marilyn that she was born the same year, 1926, that Valentino had died – maybe she had been born to replace him and continue his legendary career! And maybe she, too, would become famous!
‘It’s not worth it if you die so young,’ Marilyn answered.
‘What more can you ask?’ André said. ‘He became immortal!’
She responded that she would prefer a long, happy life. Then she lifted a rose out from one of the urns on both sides of his bronze plaque.
‘You don’t steal flowers from the dead!’ exclaimed André.
‘I’m sure he would be very pleased to know that a lonesome girl took the flower home to keep it next to her bed. What about Jean Harlow? Do you know where she’s buried?’
‘No. I don’t care either.’
‘I do. I go to Forest Lawn Memorial Park a lot, where she’s laid to rest in a private chapel. She died when she was twenty-six because her mother was a member of a sect and wouldn’t let doctors treat her.’
When they left the mausoleum, he asked her to forget her appointment at the studio and stay with him so he could read to her from a large quotation book that was always with him in the trunk of his car. They sat on the lawn and read about life, love, happiness, fame, vanity, women, death and other things, but it was the word ‘fame’ that caught her attention the most . . . Then she suddenly decided she’d had enough poetry and philosophy and should go to her appointment, even if she was already very late. A pang of jealousy gripped him.
‘Are you going to lay that producer?’ he shouted.
‘Yes! Why not?’ she angrily answered.
He dropped her on the corner of Melrose Avenue and Gower Street.
A few days later, André read her a poem entitled ‘Lines on the Death of Mary’. She said it was written for her, but the lady who wrote it forgot to put the ‘lyn’ after ‘Mary’. He remarked that in the cemetery she’d told him she preferred a long, happy life and now she was saying she wouldn’t live long—
‘OK, that’s enough, pose for me,’ André interrupted himself. ‘Let your face do the talking.’
The reading ended and he began taking pictures of her, one by one, depicting the moods she interpreted for him. An entire spectrum of life, happiness, pensiveness, introspection, serenity, sadness, torment, distress – he even asked her to show him what ‘death’ looked like in her imagination. She threw a blanket over her head; that was how she interpreted it.
The photo that followed was her own idea. She told André to get ready with his camera because she was going to show him what her own death would look like – some day. She looked down with a very sordid expression, pointing out to him that the photo’s meaning would be ‘THE END OF EVERYTHING’.
‘André, do not publish these photos now. Wait until I die!’
‘How do you know you’re going to die before me? After all, I am twelve years older than you.’
‘I just know,’ she said, in a sad, low-toned voice.
But the mood passed: soon she was gay and cheerful again, looking forward to her dinner date, and she urged him to hurry, hurry, pack everything into the car and leave.
De Dienes often went to Marilyn’s grave during the twenty-three years he outlived her, and always visited on 1 June, her birthday, and 4 August, the anniversary of her death. Each time he’d steal some flowers and put them in a glass next to his bed. He’d think about her when he went to the Westwood Village movie theatre, knowing her coffin was behind the screen, only fifty feet away. She had said to him one day, ‘You want me to become a cloud? Take pictures of it. That way I’ll never completely die.’
Each time he pictured her on the phone, he remembered how she had put a false number on the dial of her home phone to protect her privacy and throw the prurient off the scent. If they called the number, they got through to the Los Angeles morgue.
Los Angeles–New York
March 1960
Angeleno by birth, Marilyn became passionately attached to New York the moment she went there in late 1954. Even as a young starlet, studying at LA’s Actors Laboratory, she had pictured the metropolis to the east as a magical place, ‘where actors and directors would do very different things with their time than stand around all day arguing about a close-up or a camera angle’. She dreamed of becoming part of that life, a more thoughtful, articulate world, less in thrall to images.
With its unchanging skies and temperature, Los Angeles seemed to her permanently to be sunk in a tepid stupor. She left her home town the way, in bed, you move away from a body that’s too close and hot, and suddenly feel you can only be yourself by being alone. Cities are like bodies: some are skin, some bone, and Marilyn wanted to feel part of a skeleton. After her first visit, she always loved going back to New York, the upright city. Its verticality, its buildings straining towards the sky were an exhilarating break from her home town, with its supine, virtually flat expanses punctuated solely by the Hollywood Hills to the north and the skyscrapers of the port district to the south. Los Angeles remained the city where you shone, you blazed, where the sun overwhelmed everything with its terrible perpendicular glare, reducing the streets and houses to a flat, shimmering mirage. Just as the idea of eternity, once it takes hold of someone’s mind, makes sleep impossible, so the Californian skies always seemed to her to afford its streetscapes too much light, and the souls wandering them too little shade.
The moment she landed in Manhattan, it became her city. The city. The place where she could think. She never felt disoriented in New York. If anything, it gave her her bearings, the chance to find herself among its shadows and greys. Surrendering to the dizzying but lucid feeling that she was falling into herself, that she was yielding to an indefinable impulse, she immersed herself in its beauty. The changing seasons, the force of the elements – everything in New York made her feel vital. She found herself thinking about the city, through it. She thought the best photographs of her were in black and white, like New York, or like a chessboard.
Marilyn went back to New York for the first time after going into analysis with Greenson in March 1960, just after she’d won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in Some Like It Hot. She returned for a longer stay after an extended period of analysis with him culminated in the completion of Let’s Make Love. At her last session before leaving, she told him about a recurring dream: ‘I am buried in sand and I’m lying there, waiting for someone to come and dig me out. I can’t do it on my own.’
She associated it with a memory. ‘Ana . . . I called her Aunt Ana, but
she wasn’t really my aunt, just the best of all my foster mothers, who I lived with for four or five years . . . Ana died when I was twenty-two. I went and lay down in her bed the day after she died . . . just lay there for a couple of hours on her pillow. Then I went to the cemetery and these men were digging a grave and they had a ladder into it, and I asked if I could get down there and they said, “Sure,” and I went down and lay on the ground and looked up at the sky from there. It’s quite a view, and the ground is cold under your back.’
‘Did you love her?’ asked Greenson, troubled by certain aspects of the story that seemed too gruesome to be true.
‘Sure. If that word means anything, it’s not what happens between a man and a woman. I never found love before or after Ana, the love that picks out other children when they’re growing up like the mysterious light on an actor’s face in a movie. I compromised by dreaming of attracting someone’s attention, of having people look at me and say my name. That’s what love is for me now.’
In the burning heat of a New York July, on Greenson’s advice, Marilyn returned to her husband Arthur Miller and her analyst Marianne Kris. But she would soon part company with both more or less simultaneously. She had been seeing Kris for three years and Margaret Hohenberg for two years before that, but now there was Romi, whom she rang every day. In a state of wild elation, she told her maid, Lena Pepitone, ‘Lena, Lena, I’ve finally found him. He’s my saviour. He’s called Romeo. Can you believe that? I call him Jesus. My saviour. He’s doing wonderful things for me. He listens to me. He’s a doctor and a genius. He gives me courage. He makes me feel smart, makes me think. I can face anything with him. I’m not scared any more.’
Then she rang Greenson: ‘I’ve fallen in love with Brooklyn. I’m going to buy a little house in Brooklyn and live there. I’ll go to the coast only when I have to make a picture.’
The next day, on the C Train to Broadway, she sat opposite an ageless woman wearing a frilly pink doll’s dress, pink pumps, white lace socks and a paste tiara, and sucking a dummy. Terrified, she called her saviour that night.
Vienna, 19 Berggasse
1933
Greenson was close to finishing his analysis with Wilhelm Stekel in Vienna when he was invited with several other aspiring young analysts to attend one of Freud’s monthly talks on psychoanalytic technique. He was trying to make sense of the stage he’d reached in his analysis. What did finishing mean? He had discussed it at length with Stekel, but hoped the Master would be able to elucidate it fully before he started treating patients himself.
Freud’s office was entered by the right-hand door on the first-floor landing of 19 Berggasse. There was a simple foyer with bars on the inside of the door as protection against burglary, not an unusual feature in middle-class Viennese homes, and two doors opening off it: one to the waiting room on the right, its walls hung with pictures and awards that Greenson did not recognise (he later found out that only one was of a colleague of Freud’s, Sándor Ferenczi), and another, covered with the same dark wallpaper as the foyer’s walls, for those who wanted to leave discreetly without having to walk past the patients waiting their turn. Ill-lit and thick with cigar smoke, with an armless sofa and a small table with chairs around it as its only furniture, the waiting room was where the Master held his gatherings. He would greet the faithful coldly, without a smile. Only a dozen practising analysts were invited, with a permanent core of six, while a constantly changing selection of débutants, Freud’s ‘disciples from afar’, made up the numbers. That evening the subject was the handling of transference – ‘transference-love’, as Freud termed it, the sort of euphemistic name one might give an illness to rob it of its terror.
‘I have no great fondness for the expression “handling of transference”,’ Freud began. ‘Transference is not a tool we manipulate. If it resembles anything, it is a hand that seizes hold of us and either caresses us or spins us round.’ He spoke of the force of this attachment, its similarity to actual love, its duration, the extreme difficulty of unravelling it, and the dangers of revoking it, like a contract, by reminding the patient that neither of them was the real object of the other’s feelings. He quoted Montaigne’s line, ‘I loved him because it was he, because it was I.’
‘You see,’ Freud said, ‘it serves no purpose telling a patient, “You love me because it is not you, because it is not I.” No purpose whatsoever.’
Beverly Hills Hotel
Late April 1960
A pink cloud draws across the evening sky around the bungalow. Georges Belmont, a French journalist, has come to interview Marilyn, who is back in Los Angeles for a few days. Their conversation ranges widely before eventually turning to death. Lapsing into long silences, Marilyn seems at once constrained and impulsive, as she says in her tired young girl’s voice, ‘Of course I think about it . . . quite a lot, actually. Sometimes I find myself thinking I’d rather think about death than life. It’s so much simpler in a way. You push open a door and you know there most likely won’t be anyone on the other side. Whereas in life, there always is. At least one other person’s always in the room. In you go, and it’s never your fault. As for getting out . . . Do you know how to get out of people?’
‘Tell me about your childhood,’ Belmont asks, avoiding the question.
‘I never lived with my mother. That’s the truth, no matter what some people have said. As far back as I can remember I’ve always lived with other people. My mother was mentally ill. She’s dead now.’
That made two untruths in as many sentences, not that the interviewer was to know. Norma Jeane had lived with her mother for several months when she was about eight years old, in a little apartment on Afton Place near the studios, before her mother was admitted to a mental hospital for a long period. Then she had her to stay for a few weeks in a small place she had on Nebraska Avenue when she was twenty and starting out in the film business. Gladys Baker was also still alive at the time of the interview. Mentally ill, but in good health, she would outlive her daughter by twenty-two years. In 1951, when the studios put out the story of Marilyn being an orphan for publicity purposes, she received a letter from Gladys: ‘Please dear child, I’d like to receive a letter from you. Things are very annoying around here and I’d like to move away as soon as possible. I’d like to have my child’s love instead of hatred.’ The letter was signed, ‘Love, Mother’. Not ‘Your Mother’ or ‘Mom’, just ‘Mother’, which Gladys had not been able to be, and which Marilyn in her turn wouldn’t be either.
Marilyn thanked Belmont after the interview and said she’d been glad to be able to talk. Answering journalists’ questions still terrified her, so she’d appreciated being treated as a human being rather than as a star. That evening she went to a party in Beverly Hills given by the influential Hollywood literary agent Irving Lazar. She ran into Greenson and his wife, who greeted her affectionately, spotted the familiar faces of John Huston and David O. Selznick, then spent a long time talking to a sixty-year-old man she had never met who had just moved to Brentwood Heights in Hollywood. He told her his favourite Californian pastimes – going walking in the north-east, past San Fernando, in the green and blue jacaranda-covered hills bordering the Mojave Desert, where he hunted rare butterflies for his book on Californian Lepidoptera, driving around the Los Angeles freeways in his Ford Impala, and visiting supermarkets, ‘especially at night, for the neon’. He said he’d written a novel called Lolita that Stanley Kubrick was making into a film for Universal. Vladimir Nabokov was trying to adapt to screenwriting as a form.
‘What about you? What do you do?’ he asked the blonde, who was drinking constantly to get up her courage to talk or remain silent or whatever was needed to make it through the party.
‘I’m in pictures,’ she replied.
Amused by the expression, he joked, ‘Me too, but I’m just a double.’
A few weeks later, in Let’s Make Love, Marilyn persuaded Cukor to let her preface her rendition of ‘My Heart Belongs To Daddy’ with the word
s, ‘My name is Lolita and I’m not supposed to play with boys!’
New York, Manhattan
Late 1954
After divorcing her second husband, Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn moved to New York to study with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. She lived at the Gladstone Hotel on East 52nd Street before decamping to the Waldorf Astoria in April 1955. She never had many belongings at her various Manhattan addresses – just her library of four hundred books and, her prize possession, the white piano from when she was seven, which she kept among some imitation French furniture in the tiny space she used as a living room. After years of searching, she had found the piano at an auction in West Los Angeles in 1951. She’d bought it on instalments and moved it into the minuscule studio flat she was living in at the time in the Beverly Carlton Hotel. Two years later it had followed her to a three-room apartment on Doheny Drive. She kept it through all her moves, and, in either 1956 or 1957, she installed it in the thirtieth-floor apartment she shared with Arthur Miller on East 57th Street.
Landing at Idlewild airport, she posed for a barrage of photographers on the steps of the plane for forty minutes. The crew cheered and whistled, but all she could think of was the prospect of meeting up with Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the most intellectual of directors, who used to say of himself, ‘I am an author who makes films, not a director. I make films to stop people ruining what I’ve written.’ He had cast her in one of her first Hollywood movies, All About Eve, and now she wanted him to pick her for his musical comedy, Guys and Dolls, so she could prove to him how much she had changed in the intervening four years. But by the time she had driven into Manhattan, Mankiewicz had set off in the opposite direction to Los Angeles. She called him instead: ‘Guess what? I’ve become a star. Now I’m making a picture with Billy Wilder. It’s called The Seven Year Itch.’
Marilyn's Last Sessions Page 5
