Greenson started a reply but didn’t send it, thinking it better to persuade Kris to get her out of the clinic first and interpret later. This note was found in his archives.
Dear Marilyn,
You mustn’t expect me to criticise or condemn the people treating you or trying to do so, and certainly not my colleague and friend Marianne Kris. You are not mentally ill but there’s every chance you might become so if you stay in hospital. Hospital is the place where you lose children when you miscarry, the place you’re reduced to a child when you’re treated for your depressions or suicidal states.
After this trauma, Marilyn wanted never to see Marianne Kris again, but, whether inadvertently or intentionally, she retained her as one the beneficiaries of her last will, which she had drawn up three weeks before going into Payne Whitney. Kris acknowledged afterwards that she had done ‘a terrible thing, a terrible, terrible thing. Oh, God, I didn’t mean to, but I did.’ She continued corresponding with Greenson and Anna Freud about Marilyn for the rest of her former patient’s life.
At the start of spring Marilyn, now back in California, begged a very hesitant Greenson to take her on ‘full-time’. Their sessions resumed. In May, after she had gone back to New York for a spell, from where she’d called him every day, Greenson described his therapeutic method to Marianne Kris:
Above all, I try to help her not to be lonely, and therefore to escape into drugs or get involved with very destructive people, who will engage in some sort of sadomasochistic relationship with her . . . This is the kind of planning you do with an adolescent girl who needs guidance, friendliness, and firmness, and she seems to take it very well . . . She said for the first time she looked forward to coming to Los Angeles, because she could speak to me. Of course, this does not prevent her from cancelling several hours to go to Palm Springs with Mr F.S. She is unfaithful to me as one is to a parent . . .
A few days later Marilyn rang from New York to tell her Californian analyst she’d decided to return to Los Angeles for good – Los Angeles, the place of her birth; the last place in the world where she would have wanted to die; the city that would become her final resting place.
Los Angeles, Beverly Hills Hotel
1 June 1961
André de Dienes was working in his garden when he suddenly remembered it was Marilyn’s birthday. Without the slightest knowledge of where she was, he went inside his house, picked up the telephone and asked Information to give him the number of the Beverly Hills Hotel. When he asked the hotel operator to put him through to Marilyn Monroe’s suite, she connected him immediately. He started singing ‘Happy Birthday’ into the phone. Marilyn recognised his voice and jubilantly asked him to come over right away. She was alone in Bungalow Ten. He was thrilled, like a child who has been given a present they have been promised for a long time. Hooray, the weekend is coming and maybe I can persuade her to stay with me for a few days! he thought.
Marilyn was very cheerful when he arrived. She took out a small jar of caviar and two bottles of champagne from the small refrigerator. They had a long discussion about many things, but the conversation became sombre. She felt unhappy, exploited by Fox, and wanted to go back to New York.
De Dienes asked, ‘Why did you let, so often, a big crew of hundreds of people wait for you to appear on the set? Didn’t you realise that every hour of delay was costing the studio thousands of dollars? When we were travelling together in 1945, you were always up early in the morning, at daybreak, putting on your make-up, doing your hair . . . so why the hell did you let an entire crew wait and wait for you to appear on the set day after day? What the hell got into you, acting difficult when you were never like that before with me?’
‘André,’ Marilyn replied, in a small, distraught voice, ‘many times I could not help it! I was too tired, too exhausted to get up so early in the day. You remember how I used to get car sick during those long rides when we were touring the West? You were driving endlessly, all day and night, and I just slumped over and went to sleep because I felt so tired . . . So during all the filming at Fox, I was feeling the same way, just tired and needing rest! Sometimes I was drinking a little, with men I liked, and the nights were far too short, far too delightful, to go to work so early in the morning. Isn’t that all very human? I was simply too exhausted and it became almost impossible to cope with all that hard work. And now the studio is mocking me, saying openly that I am going insane!’
As they were talking, she became more and more downcast, bitter and crushed. She looked so lovely, but so sad also, as she stood near the usual large pile of trunks and suitcases. During the short hours they were conversing, she smiled very little and could not withhold her tears. André saw the bed in the adjoining room, uncovered, so he began hugging her.
‘Making love will make you feel better,’ he said.
‘I’ve just had an operation. Behave yourself! You want to kill me! I need rest, André, please forgive me!’
She handed him his jacket, walked him to the door of her bungalow, and bade him good night. André walked away a hundred feet, then removed his shoes and tiptoed back to her veranda, about twenty feet from her bedroom window, and sat for a long while in the balmy, deliciously cool dark of the evening. He wanted to see what she was going to do. Would she get up and leave, or would someone come to visit her? Instead, she turned out the lights in the bedroom. Through the open windows, the nylon curtains were blowing in the breeze, looking, in the darkness, like some kind of ghosts. Unnerved, he left the scene.
The next day, he rushed to Beverly Hills and bought her flowers and a beautiful Italian ceramic fruit bowl. He filled it with oranges and wrote a letter to her to apologise for wanting to make love with her. At the hotel, he gave a generous tip to the bellboy and instructed him to be sure to hand the things to Marilyn personally.
He knew she received it, because a day later, he found one of the flowers at the front door of his house, and she had slipped an envelope full of studio stills of herself under his door. She must have passed by before going to the airport.
A year later, de Dienes was looking at a set of unpublished photos of Marilyn without make-up from 1946. One was of her gazing at the sun, with a macabre expression on her face. When he had taken it, she had said, ‘André, I’m looking at my own grave.’ Another was of her lying on her back, eyes shut, pretending she was dead. While he was preparing this set of photos and finding the negatives dealing with death, André had no idea Marilyn was going through the darkest period in her life. He was so involved in his work that he didn’t have time to read any newspapers or follow the vicissitudes of Something’s Got to Give.
A few weeks later, while still working with the photos, he had a series of nightmares. He saw his mother’s coffin underneath his bed; Marilyn often featured. They brought back old memories, of a time when he wasn’t André de Dienes – or at least not to her. She had nicknamed him WW, Worry Wart, because he worried about everything. She laughed whenever she called him WW instead of André – same initials as her, MM, but upside down. He called her ‘Turkey Foot’, because when he photographed her in the mountains, her hands often turned purple from the cold.
After he woke up one July morning from one of these bizarre dreams, he had the strong urge to go to the nearest post office, on Sunset Boulevard. He didn’t know where Marilyn was living, so he addressed a telegram to the studio where she was filming. The telegram said: ‘TURKEY FOOT, I HAD VERY BAD DREAMS ABOUT YOU LAST NIGHT. PLEASE CALL ME. LOVE WW.’ He didn’t receive a letter or phone call in response.
On 4 August 1962, in the evening, de Dienes went to the movies. When he came home, he heard the phone ringing while he was trying to find the key at the entrance door. He rushed in but he was too late. For many years he thought she might have called, maybe unwittingly, randomly dialling under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Nobody knows how many telephone calls she might have made during that night, or to whom. The next day, André was shaving when it came on the radio that Marilyn h
ad died during the night. He was in complete shock at first, but after a while, looking at her photos all laid out on his long worktable, he took it quite calmly. He looked at the first photo of Norma Jeane smiling, then at the next photos in which she was more serious, and then at the last series of photos where she was ‘dead’. He had worked for several weeks preparing those photos. It was as if he’d known.
Twenty years later, leading a reclusive life in a little house on Boca de Canon Lane, André de Dienes spent much of his time sifting through memories. He remembered once making a scene with Marilyn. She’d ruined his life, he burst out; if he hadn’t been stupid enough to fall in love with her, he’d still be a successful photographer. She had lost her temper. ‘Who asked you to fall in love with me?’ she shouted. ‘I wanted to become an actress. Not your maid or whore!’ It had degenerated into a terrible fight. She’d got dressed and walked out, and by the time he’d fetched his car and gone to look for her, she had disappeared.
It was thirty-six years since their affair had ended, the length of her entire life; she’d have been fifty-six if she were alive today. Ended – in a way, the affair had either never really ended or just been one ending after another. He was thinking about the last time, obviously, but whenever they’d met in the seventeen years during which they had never really lost touch, he had always had a sense they were saying goodbye.
André de Dienes hadn’t taken any pictures for almost a decade when he died in 1985 in his house in the hills above Sunset Boulevard. He shut himself away in his darkroom, printing and reprinting old negatives. Very few of his photos of Marilyn were included in the inventory of his possessions after his death. He was buried a few feet from her crypt in Westwood Village Mortuary on Wilshire Boulevard.
Santa Monica, Franklin Street
Summer 1961
In May, Marilyn had moved to another part of Los Angeles, near Rancho Park, not far from Fox Studios. She left her apartment at 882 North Doheny Drive empty, apart from a trunk of books, her clothes and make-up – nothing that recalled the movie business. Hollywood, the city of images, was reclaiming her from New York, the city of words. She just wanted a place to sleep, knocked out on Nembutal, between her daily visit at four to Greenson, for talking and silence, and the weekly one to Hyman Engelberg for pills and injections. She asked Ralph Roberts, her masseur and driver, to install blackout curtains on the apartment’s picture windows to kill all the light.
It was Roberts who had picked up Marilyn a few months earlier when she was discharged from Payne Whitney.
One evening she borrowed his beaten-up Pontiac Firebird and went to a fast-food drive-in on Wilshire. She ordered her food, and when it arrived, moments later, she realised they’d given her a children’s meal by mistake. She opened the brightly wrapped toy that came with it and found a model of a blonde ballerina tirelessly revolving on a merry-go-round, a prisoner of its perpetual motion. She heard the attendant’s voice crackling in the loudspeaker: ‘Next customer. Hi, what can I get you?’ At two in the morning, lying on her pristine bed searching for sleep, she repeated a chant over and over in her mind, almost as if she could see the words, ‘The merry-go-round went round. The merry-go-round went round. I didn’t have the words to say anything I wanted. The merry-go-round went round and I lost my chance.’
On 1 June, she sent her analyst a telegram telling him that it’s her birthday, the way someone who’s afraid of the big day being forgotten might give herself a present: ‘DEAR DOCTOR GREENSON IN THIS WORLD OF PEOPLE I AM GLAD THERE’S YOU. I HAVE A FEELING OF HOPE ALTHOUGH TODAY I AM THREE FIVE.’
She rekindled her romance with Frank Sinatra when they saw each other at Dean Martin’s birthday party a week later in Las Vegas. Their affair would last until the start of 1962.
At the end of June she returned to New York to have her gall bladder removed, her second hospital admission in as many months. She wrote to Greenson, ‘On the balcony of my room, talking to the doctor who operated on me, I looked at the stars and said, “Look at them. They are all up there shining so brightly but each one must be so very alone. It’s a make-believe world, isn’t it?”’
When she left the clinic on West 50th Street a fortnight later, she was surrounded by a crush of fans and photographers desperate to see the most famous woman in the world. They bombarded her with questions and requests for autographs, trying to touch her, tugging at her sweater. She was terrified: it felt as if they were going to tear her to pieces. Their shouts – ‘wolf calls’, in photographers’ parlance – lacerated her. She was glad when people showed their appreciation, but this time it was different: she felt as if she was being devoured. She instinctively asked to be taken to Dr Kris’s but then remembered the madhouse. She would never be able to talk to her again.
Summer passed without Greenson bringing himself to take a vacation. He was seeing Marilyn seven days a week now, charging her a preferential rate of fifty dollars per session. He wrote to Kris:
I am appalled at the emptiness of her life in terms of object relations. Essentially, it is such a narcissistic way of life. All in all, there’s been some improvement, but I do not vouch for how deep it is, or how lasting. On the clinical level I have identified two problem areas: her obsessive fear of homosexuality and her inability to cope with any sort of hurt. She cannot bear the slightest hint of anything homosexual. Pat Newcomb dyed her hair with a streak roughly the same colour as her hair. She instantly jumped to the conclusion that the girl was trying to take possession of her and turned with a fury against her.
He was terrified by her increasing trend towards random promiscuity. One day she told him she was sleeping with one of the builders working on her house; another day that she had taken a taxi driver home, or that she was caught having sex in a dark hallway at a party. In a letter to Anna Freud, Greenson said she was suffering from ‘a fear of men masked by a need to seduce, which makes her literally give herself to the first man who comes along’.
From then on he worried that Marilyn was lost to psychoanalysis, whereas in fact she was lost in it. Like a drowning person who drags their rescuer under, she was increasingly miring her therapist in empty despair. He was one of the idealised figures in her life, and she couldn’t abide the notion of any imperfection in him. ‘I’m improvising now,’ Greenson wrote to Anna Freud. ‘She is really very sick. I can’t see any solution that will bring her the perfect peace she seeks.’
‘Her inability to handle anything she perceived as hurtfulness, along with her abnormal fear of homosexuality’ – Greenson would later write – ‘were ultimately the decisive factors that led to her death.’
Meanwhile Marilyn’s friends – Allan Snyder, Ralph Roberts, Paula Strasberg and Pat Newcomb – were starting to say the psychoanalyst was exerting too great a hold over her life. ‘He is not your guardian angel,’ Pat told her. ‘He has become your shadow, or rather you’ve become his.’
‘I never liked Greenson,’ Snyder said years later, ‘and never thought he was good for Marilyn. He gave her anything she wanted, just fed her with anything.’ There was something unhealthy about Greenson’s relationship with his patient, Snyder felt, something to do with money. He was very insistent about that, and his suspicions seemed confirmed when he discovered that Greenson was on Fox’s payroll.
Yet each of Marilyn’s four analysts had had to intervene on one of her films and give her supportive therapy to get her back on her feet: Margaret Hohenberg on Bus Stop, Anna Freud on The Prince and the Showgirl, Marianne Kris on Some Like It Hot, and Greenson on Let’s Make Love, The Misfits and Something’s Got to Give. Marilyn told her friends she was happy to obey – to have someone give her guidance, tell her what to do. She said she would even have let her analyst tell her who to be.
Los Angeles, Wilshire Boulevard
Autumn 1961
Cars had lost their thrill: she didn’t want to drive one of her own any more. The black Cadillac convertible with the red leather upholstery had been sold, the black Thunderbird passed
on to Strasberg; she’d given back the white Cadillac she’d used during location shooting for The Misfits.
She told her driver, Ralph Roberts, to head for the sea. On Wilshire she looked out at the scattering of low houses either side of the interminable boulevard. It seemed fake somehow, this transient neighbourhood, these characterless buildings. She remembered the first time she’d gone to Fox’s studios for a screen test. She had toured the back lot with its streets and squares from all over the world, representing every historical period. They had seemed so solid; it was hard to remind herself they were just façades held up by wooden struts, a make-believe maze of time and dreams. Here on the boulevard the illusion was the opposite. Marilyn thought you had to have a lot of imagination to think of these pasteboard sets as real houses in which real people were struggling with love and cruelty and money. The sidewalks were empty. No one walks anywhere in this town except me, she thought.
She got Roberts to stop the car and continued on foot, aimlessly. Taking a left towards Pico, she stood for a while on a bridge over the Santa Monica Freeway, looking down at the cars converging in the sunset, like a procession of weary animals. She watched the lines of white headlights, like images in a dream, empty eyes staring at nothing. When it grew dark, she saw a man stopped in front of a garage. She walked past his car. He was very young, and recognised her, despite her black wig. So much about Marilyn Monroe was inconceivable to him: her conversations with the poet and writer Carl Sandburg, her literature course at UCLA. She was insanely beautiful and filled him with desire and terror. All he saw was her body. A body he had to have, and hope he could escape the soul animating it.
The man held the door of his brown Oldsmobile open for her, then drove to a green one-storey house with flaking paint, two blocks from the beach on a street in Venice Beach. Superba Avenue. Or was it Santa Clara? Milkwood? San Juan? Did it matter? She had to remember so she could tell the doctor tomorrow. ‘The details,’ he always said. ‘That’s what counts.’ Names, names . . . Venice Beach, that’s where her grandmother Delia was buried. Her mother’s mother, the madwoman who had tried to smother her with a pillow when she was a baby. She had told her saviour about it. He had played on the words ‘mother’ and ‘smother’.
Marilyn's Last Sessions Page 12
