Marilyn's Last Sessions

by Michel Schneider

  She asked the man to take her from behind. ‘You know what I mean,’ she added. Caught by surprise, he felt she was giving him a gift, offering up the most intimate, the oldest part of her being. She lay down on her stomach, passed him some lubricant and then he penetrated her, not for very long, but forcefully, almost spitefully. Lifting the hair from her face, he saw she was clasping the rumpled sheet in her right fist like a child’s blanket, something tender and warm and familiar-smelling. She was rubbing it gently against her chin.

  ‘Is that good? Can you feel me?’ he asked. Then: ‘I’m not hurting you, am I? Do you want me to stop?’

  She didn’t answer his questions, just kept rubbing the sheet against her mouth without saying anything. Saddened by her sadness, he stopped, and they quickly said goodbye, thanking one another awkwardly.

  She told Greenson about it the following day.

  ‘I sense something dreamlike about your story,’ he said, ‘as if you didn’t fully experience it. You were present, but not really as yourself any more. In effect, you were trying to free yourself from this man’s embrace. The sheet is what we call “a transitional object”. We all have our versions of them. The most striking detail is how yours allowed you to form a closed circuit. It’s as if you were telling the man, “You won’t have my mouth, you won’t hear my voice. You can have my anus as much as you want, it isn’t part of me any more.” You know, unlike the mouth, which is associated with one’s voice and identity, the anus is linked to shame, dispossession, waste and vulnerability.’

  She didn’t say anything. She felt a few tears run down her cheeks, but didn’t wipe them away.

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street

  July 1961

  As her analysis progressed and the transference accompanying it grew steadily more chaotic and intense, Marilyn’s relations with the Greenson family grew increasingly intimate. She kept a bottle of Dom Pérignon in their fridge and sometimes stayed to supper, cheerfully helping Hildi with the washing-up in their Mexican kitchen. Joan Greenson, who was studying art at the Otis Art Institute, had learned from childhood to keep out of sight of her father’s patients, so her role in Marilyn’s treatment was thrilling, although she didn’t really understand the reasons for it. When the star arrived, Joan would be waiting for her at the door, and they’d often take a turn round the reservoir by the house while they waited for Greenson; sometimes Marilyn would teach her a dance or give her tips on how to make herself up to look glamorous. The Greensons’ twenty-four-year-old son Danny, a medical student at UCLA, who was also still living at home, became close to Marilyn as well. Passionately opposed to the Vietnam War, he’d talk politics with their guest. The Greensons’ children knew their father’s behaviour was strange for a strict Freudian, but he convinced them that traditional therapy would not be effective in Marilyn’s case.

  One evening in July, the Greensons threw a birthday party for their daughter. Having helped with the preparations, Marilyn came along too. Once they got over their nervousness, the boys were soon queuing up to dance with her. As Greenson later related, ‘It didn’t look too promising for the local girls. And no one was dancing any more with an especially attractive black girl who, until Marilyn had arrived, had been the most popular on the floor. Marilyn noticed this, and went over to her. “You know,” she said, “you do a step I’d love to do, but don’t think I know how. Would you teach it to me?” Then she turned to the others and called out, “Everybody stop for a few minutes! I’m going to learn a new step.” Now, the point is, Marilyn knew the step, but she let this girl teach it to her. She understood the loneliness of others.’

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street

  Late July 1961

  After eighteen months of seeing her, Marilyn’s analyst felt she was entering a critical phase. He asked her why she had such difficulty saying her lines. She told him she had been troubled by something a critic had said about her, that she was ‘really a silent actress who’s wandered into the talkies by mistake’. She thought this was true, that her face expressed things that couldn’t be put into words.

  ‘Why do you stutter on set but not in the day-to-day . . . not here, for example?’ asked Greenson.

  ‘I get afraid.’

  ‘Of what? Of not being heard, or of being heard?’

  ‘You make everything so complicated. I get afraid of words. It’s as if my lips didn’t want to let them go.’

  ‘Speaking implies separation, absolutely. Once you say a word, it’s lost. So you stutter, you clamp your mouth shut over the first syllable. Language is another thing you cannot bear to be separated from.’

  ‘That reminds me of something. When I stuttered as a child, I’d always get stuck on the letter m. I was so shy. After a time I didn’t mind being looked at – I even used to dream about people seeing me completely naked – but I always thought it was best if I kept quiet. At least then I couldn’t be blamed for saying anything wrong. I remember when I was made class secretary at my school, Emerson Junior High in Van Nuys, when I was about thirteen. I’d stutter like crazy when I had to start meetings, “The m-m-minutes of the last m-m-meeting . . .”. So after that I became Miss Mmmm at school. When Ben Lyon chose Marilyn Monroe as my stage name, he hit on the letter I found hardest to say for both my initials. And you know what? The first time I appeared in front of a camera in Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay!, my first line on celluloid was meant to be “Mmmm.” But it got cut, so I didn’t have a speaking part in that film.’ She was silent for a moment, before saying, ‘I’ve always had trouble with words. Learning lines, saying lines. The stuttering lasted for a long time, but now I’ve worked out how to get over it. I murmur instead. I’ve turned my nervousness into a weapon, a trap for men.’

  ‘M is also the first letter of “mother”,’ Greenson remarked. ‘In most European languages that I know, the word for “mother” begins with the letter m. The child psychoanalysts Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham have established that children raised apart from their mothers tend to be slower acquiring language—’

  ‘I know Anna Freud,’ Marilyn exclaimed. ‘She analysed me before you. You knew that, didn’t you?’

  ‘The sound “mmm” is autoerotic,’ Greenson continued, annoyed at the interruption, ‘which is probably why the word “me” also begins with an m.’

  Marilyn turned away to prevent her analyst seeing her face, and folded her arms across her chest.

  In December 1953, seven years before meeting Marilyn, Ralph Greenson had attended the midwinter meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in New York, where he gave a paper entitled, ‘About the Sound “Mm” . . .’:

  The utterance Mm . . ., as produced with a humming or musical intonation derives from the memory or fantasy of being at the mother’s breast. The musical quality of this Mm . . . sound is probably related to the fact that the contented mother hums cheerfully as she feeds her baby or rocks him to sleep . . . The fact that the sound Mm . . . is made with the lips closed and continuously so throughout the utterance seems to indicate that this is the only sound one can make and still keep something safely within the mouth. Apparently it is the sound produced with the nipple in the mouth or with the pleasant memory of expectation of its being in the mouth.

  The year before Marilyn’s death, Greenson edited an article he wrote in 1949, ‘The Mother Tongue and the Mother’. He emphasised that there were particular cases where analysts had to be able to talk to their patients in their first languages, and added in a footnote, ‘Whenever stalemated situations occur regularly in psychoanalysis, one should consider the possibility that the patient and the analyst are not communicating on the same wavelength. For example, I would not refer a Brooklyn-bred girl who is now a Hollywood starlet to a prim, cultured, central European analyst. They would not speak the same language.’ But was the stalemate in Marilyn’s analysis due to the lack of a common language, or to their having in a sense swapped mother tongues? As he drew her increasingly into the language of analysis, she in tur
n was drowning him in the movies and their inexhaustible sea of images.

  As well as going to her sessions, Marilyn made sure Engelberg kept her constantly supplied with sedatives. Greenson had other patients in the business with similar dependencies, but he failed to gauge either how longstanding or how severe the addiction was in this case. Marilyn had started taking drugs when she was eighteen, at the time of her first screen tests, then steadily upped the doses and types of drugs: barbiturates, depressants, amphetamines. Neither Greenson, nor Engelberg, nor Wexler had any success in weaning her off them. ‘Marilyn wasn’t killed by Hollywood,’ John Huston would say when she died. ‘It was the goddam doctors who killed her. If she was a pill addict, they made her so.’

  Greenson never ventured a final diagnosis in Marilyn’s case, which he handled for thirty months. Initially he merely observed symptoms of paranoia and ‘depressive reaction’. His colleagues in the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society were nonplussed. ‘He doesn’t seem to understand,’ said one, ‘that the adoption therapy he’s proposing will only remind her of what she’s never had – a home – and what she’ll never be – a daughter loved by her parents, a sister and a mother in her own right.’

  Greenson betrayed his anxiety when he discussed Marilyn with Wexler. ‘Aren’t I breaking the rules, overstepping the boundaries here?’ he asked. ‘You should see her, I think. I’ve found indications of schizophrenia. She had a terrible childhood and, whether fantasy or not, talks of having been sexually abused.’ The only thing of which Greenson was entirely certain was that he was dealing with a terribly fragile individual. ‘I’ve taken our line on schizophrenics: put the patient’s needs and psychic work first, and one’s personal therapeutic aims second. I’ve tried to let her words and feelings enter into me. But I should be more transparent in my methods, don’t you think?’

  ‘No, the opposite if anything,’ Wexler replied. ‘You should continue down the unorthodox route. To think that the analyst who sits behind the patient is a nonentity on whom everything is projected is ridiculous. I don’t think it’s very long before the patient knows whether I’m bright or stupid. If the patient says,“You’re a stupid son-of-a-bitch,” you can’t say, “That’s obviously what he thought about his father.” Maybe you are a stupid son-of-a-bitch. If I write scripts with my patients, if I have dinner with my patients, all they know is that I’m some kind of person. The idea that you can’t have any relationship with your patients outside the office seems to me unreasonable, unfair, and just plain silly.’

  ‘And what about a patient’s body? Is it crossing a line to touch it?’ asked Greenson, running a finger over his moustache.

  Soon after the death of their patient, Milton Wexler and Ralph Greenson planned a research project for Beverly Hills’s Foundation for Research in Psychoanalysis on ‘Failures in Psychoanalysis’, which they would then turn into a book. It remained unwritten.

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street

  October 1961

  Greenson often spent his leisure hours sitting in a rowing boat in his swimming pool. He found it restful, gently rocking back and forth. At nearly fifty, he had begun to feel as though he needed to spend more time on his own work, and had therefore decided to resign as dean of the training school and limit his professional activities. He even planned not to attend that year’s meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

  In truth, he would have liked to put some more distance between himself and Marilyn as well, but he could see how alone she was in the world, and he still hoped he might be able to defeat the forces of death at work in her and learn something from the destructive processes that had her in their grip.

  At the start of October, Marilyn was invited to a dinner with the president’s younger brother and attorney general, Bobby Kennedy, who was in Los Angeles on government business. She went in a long black sheath dress that set off the whiteness of her skin. The bodice was the strategic component: she wanted to reveal as much of her breasts as possible, which was precisely the sort of self-destructive behaviour Greenson was trying to stop. The dinner was held at Peter Lawford’s, the Kennedys’ brother-in-law. Marilyn drank heavily, and eventually Bobby Kennedy and his press aide offered to take her home to her little apartment on Doheny Drive.

  Ten days later, Fox informed her that she would have to make Something’s Got to Give. Convinced that Cukor despised her, and that at any moment the side of herself that hated the movie business would resurface and force her to pull out of filming, she threatened to take her own life. Greenson decided she needed to be detoxified again but, in light of the Payne Whitney episode, at home this time. Marilyn’s living room, with its heavy blue triple-lined curtains, became her hospital, and her analyst, in return for a substantial retainer from Fox, became the technical consultant and special counsellor to Marilyn Monroe.

  ‘You know,’ she told Greenson, when he came to see her one evening, ‘I think I’ve worked out my definition of death. Death is the body you’ve got to shake off. When people survive an illness or an accident, they feel they’ve escaped from their body. Sex can be like that too. When a man follows me in the street, I can feel him wanting to escape his body by taking mine. I made a will in New York when I was in analysis for the first time with the Hungarian. For my epitaph, I came up with: “Marilyn Monroe, Blonde, 37–23–36”.’ Stifling a laugh, she added, ‘I think I’ll go with that, maybe with a few changes to the measurements.’

  When he got back to Santa Monica, the analyst tried to understand the reaction Marilyn’s stories and sexual poses provoked in him. He felt vaguely disgusted, sad almost. He could smell her peroxided hair when he sat opposite her, and felt no urge to touch it with his hands or lips – but he couldn’t stop smelling that smell. She wasn’t his type: he preferred thin women, brunettes, and found Marilyn too childlike, too American. Looking at her, he would find himself suspended in a state of platonic admiration of her beauty – sexy but not sexual.

  He tried to understand why he barely looked at her any more. What gives a word its form are the consonants, not the vowels, he thought. What gives a sentence form and line are the ways it fits together, its syntax, not its words. A body is a little like a sentence. Curves and flesh are not enough to make one want to possess it. One must be able to discern a structure: bones, joints. A form. Marilyn seemed all voluptuous flesh. He saw her bring in her body and set it down in a chair with the implied question, ‘Do you like what you see?’, and instead of his fear transforming into desire, the abundance somehow repelled him.

  Berkeley, California

  5 and 27 October 1961

  In October, Greenson was asked by KPFA-FM radio station to give a talk in two parts on the ‘Varieties of Love’. He described America and Americans as a society that neglected love, that was driven instead by the search for success, money, fame and power. Everyone wanted to be loved, but few people could love, or wanted to love, he argued. ‘Love is confused, in many people’s minds, with sexual satisfaction, and they equate enjoying somebody sexually, having a pleasant time physically, with love. Or they confuse it with peacefulness. “I live with her and she doesn’t bother me and I don’t bother her and we love each other.” And this is not love. It is a question if this is living!’

  Television was a screen that isolated people and prevented them either loving or hating one another. For the most part, they thought of love as a foreign notion, or at least a perverse one, because it was not innate. Babies are not born with the ability to love; they simply survive and breathe and eat. Their life is a polarity between pain, craving and longing, on the one hand, and satisfaction and oblivion on the other, and many adults never progress beyond this state: alcoholics, addicts, bulimics, people hooked on the sensation of danger. No one else exists for them; other people’s individuality is utterly unimportant. The only function another person performs is that of provider, giving them something that assuages their pain or satisfies their needs.

  Driving home after the second broadcas
t, he thought of Marilyn and of the phrase that always came into his mind when he tried to review her case: a loveless love.

  In the final months of her life Marilyn’s relationship with her analyst became more emotional, the professional boundaries fainter. Greenson longed to fulfil Marilyn’s fantasy of finding her way back home, to shield her from anything that might hurt her. She spent more and more time at the Greensons’ home, and began to telephone him at all hours to talk – about her work, her relationships, everything.

  Hollywood insiders had begun to think of Ralph and Marilyn in terms of a script. John Huston burst out laughing when he heard of the tragi-comic set-up. ‘We’ve moved on from The Prince and the Showgirl,’ he said. ‘Now it’s The Analyst and His Double.’ If it weren’t for an ingrained lethargy on his part, he would have liked to make a movie about it. Good premise, he thought. They’re directing one another without realising it. Each is playing the role they can’t have in real life: him the actor, her the intellectual. They’ve become the other’s fantasy. Neither of them was mad before they met, and they still aren’t when they’re apart, but being together is driving them out of their minds. Years later, in 1983, Huston was able to exact revenge on the Freud family for the way they’d rebuffed his Freud, the Secret Passion. To his inordinate pleasure, he was given the part of a seasoned analyst in Marshall Brickman’s film Lovesick, who not only supervises but also restores to the straight and narrow a colleague who’s fallen madly in love with a patient.