One Saturday afternoon in late November, Greenson asked Marilyn to come to his house for her second session of the day. As soon as she arrived, he sent her out to tell Ralph Roberts, who was waiting for her in the car, that he should go back to New York: her analyst had chosen someone else to be her companion. Two Ralphs in her life were one too many. When she’d done what he asked, Greenson congratulated her on her ability in general to get rid of those in her entourage who were taking advantage of her. Freeing herself from hangers-on who were exploiting her was a sure sign of clinical progress.
But Greenson could not free Marilyn from her need to work, and without the alternately desired and loathed compensations of acting, her depression grew. During this sad winter, she sent a short poem to her friend, the poet Norman Rosten:
Help Help
Help I feel life coming closer
When all I want is to die.
At one session, after much intense crying and noisy sobbing, she slowly began to quieten down, consoling herself with the belief that her analysis was helping her pull herself back together into one piece. As she said this, Greenson noticed her gently and rhythmically stroking the burlap wallpaper alongside the couch with her fingertips, her eyes half closed. There was a pause, and then she said, ‘You’re good to me, you really try to help.’ She continued to stroke the wall in silence. Greenson, too, remained silent. After a few minutes, now dry-eyed, she stopped stroking the wall, straightened her somewhat rumpled dress, and said, ‘I feel better now. I don’t know why, I just do. Maybe it was your silence. I felt it as warm and comforting, not cold as I sometimes do. I did not feel alone.’
At first Greenson did not realise that for her, at that moment, his office was a ‘transitional transference object’. The stroking of the wall seemed to have many other meanings. On the one hand, she was stroking the wall as she wanted to stroke and be stroked by her lover and him. The stroking of the wall was also, Greenson eventually discovered, a re-enactment of something of a more infantile nature. The rhythmic movements, the half-closed eyes and the soothing effect of his non-interference should have indicated to him that it might be a transitional transference experience for her.
He began to speak but she quickly interrupted him to say that his words seemed like an intrusion. He waited and then said in a quiet voice that he had the impression that, as she wept, she let herself slip into the past; the stroking of the wall might have brought back an old sense of comfort from childhood?
Marilyn replied, ‘I was only dimly aware of the stroking – above all, I loved the tweedy quality of the wallpaper. It has little hairs like fur. Strange, I felt the wallpaper was responding to me in a vague way.’
‘So you felt in your misery,’ the analyst said, ‘that being on the couch, stroking the wallpaper in my silent presence was like being comforted by a kind of mothering person.’
After a pause Marilyn replied, ‘You know, I don’t quite agree with you. This may sound strange to you, but it was stroking the wallpaper that helped – and also, I suppose, your letting me do it. It reminds me of crying myself to sleep as a child by petting my favourite panda bear. I kept that panda for years; in fact I have baby pictures with it. Of course, then it was quite furry and later it became smooth, but I always felt it as furry.’
Later she had dreams of her analyst with black and white spots, some of which were traceable both to her panda and to Greenson’s beard, which she called furry. Recently – almost unconsciously – he had let it grow, which had provoked considerable hilarity when Wexler saw the results. ‘I’ve never really understood why men grow beards,’ Wexler had said. ‘If it’s to make them more virile, forget it. They don’t seem to realise the lower half of their face now resembles their mother’s genitalia.’ Greenson had looked at him as if he were mad, and said nothing.
Santa Monica, Franklin Street
Autumn 1961
While collaborating on the screenplay of Captain Newman, M.D., Greenson wrote to Leo Rosten, the book’s author: ‘Milton Rudin has got me 12.5% of the gross receipts from Universal. It’s the least they can do: as you know, the psychiatrist in the film is 100% me, and 90% of the characters are my old patients.’ He also took charge of the pre-production of Something’s Got to Give. In November the producer, David Brown, found out he was being replaced by Henry Weinstein, whose career as a producer only extended to one film, Tender Is the Night. Shocked to be sidelined like that, he was told it was a condition of Marilyn’s deal. Greenson had given his assurances that, if Brown were replaced by Weinstein, he could guarantee his star would be punctual and the production completed on time. ‘Don’t worry,’ he had said. ‘I can get her to do whatever I want.’
Filming was supposed to start in April, and Cukor expected the worst: ‘So you think you can get Marilyn to the set on time? Let me tell you something, if you placed Marilyn’s bed on set with her in it, and the set was fully lighted, she still wouldn’t be on time for the first shot!’
As the end of the year approached, Marilyn’s analysis grew increasingly confused. Marilyn, who had entered analysis in character, as ‘Marilyn’, was becoming less wedded to her image as a way of winning over others. She was beginning to accept that words could keep her warm, covering and enfolding her, like clothing. Whereas Greenson, the highly articulate product of the world of words, who had chosen to go into psychiatry in order to distance himself from other people’s bodies, was beginning to lay siege to Hollywood’s image factory. Closely connected to a variety of film studios through his patient list of directors and producers, he became particularly associated with Fox, as a note in the studio’s archives made clear: ‘Although Dr Greenson did not want us to deem his relationship as Svengali-like, he said in fact he could persuade her to do anything reasonable that he wanted. He would determine what scenes she would and wouldn’t do, what rushes were favourable and all the other creative decisions that had to be made.’
Beverly Hills, Roxbury Drive
Autumn 1976
Ralph Greenson probably started his unpublished article ‘The Screen of Transference: Roles and True Identity’ in 1976. This was when he had come across some troubling material in the Freud archives concerning the boundaries between analysis and love, a discovery he couldn’t wait to share with Milton Wexler.
‘Now I see why Anna Freud didn’t want anyone to make a film about her father,’ he began. ‘Marilyn wasn’t the issue. The real issue was love, which is what every movie is about.’
‘No kidding,’ Wexler replied, with a shrug. ‘Has it taken you this long to realise that passion is primarily a matter of representation, of acting?’
‘I love the film business,’ Greenson said. ‘Actors move me; the screen fascinates me. You think I’d like to have been an actor, don’t you? In fact it’s worse than that: I’d have liked to be a director and do the very thing you must never do in analysis. Write the dialogue, invent the story, run through the scenes.’
‘You’re too narcissistic for that. The director doesn’t appear on screen . . .’
‘I’d like to write an article about it,’ Greenson continued. ‘Something from a historical and theoretical point of view about why Freud, who was so enamoured of images, didn’t like the movies—’
‘For God’s sake!’ Wexler snapped. ‘All you ever talk about is the movies. What about the passion between lovers? What about love? What movie were you directing Marilyn in? A romance?’
‘There was never anything sexual between us, you know that. She took possession of me and, it’s true, in a way I did of her too. But the idiots who suspect me of having sexual relations with her will never get it. Her body didn’t make any impression on me. I admired it, of course, but I almost didn’t see it after a while. I heard a child imprisoned inside it, not even a young girl, a child who had always been afraid of talking because she didn’t want to be in the wrong. I don’t sleep with children.’
‘Lack of desire or lack of love – what enabled you to resist her? Her therapy, an
d the self-alienation she was looking for it to provide, might have been less destructive if you had slept with her. You probably wouldn’t have damaged each other the way you did. And maybe she’d still be alive. I don’t get it. What allowed you to escape virtually unscathed from your grand passion – because that’s what it was, wasn’t it? Your major motion picture.’
‘Some other time, if you don’t mind. I’ve got things to do,’ Greenson barked, then left the room, slamming the door behind him.
Santa Monica, Franklin Street
December 1961–January 1962
Marilyn cast a circumspect glance around the consulting room before sitting down.
‘This’ll be the third picture we’ve worked on together,’ Greenson announced cheerfully. ‘Now, I don’t want any regrets from you about Cecily. I much prefer you as a real patient than one of the Master’s in a film. I’m not sure I really understand why you’re finding this movie so hard, though.’
‘It’s not as if it’s anything new. I’ve always had to drag myself on set; the last three pictures I’ve made have been a nightmare. This one, though . . . this one’s the limit. Something’s Got to Give . . . it almost makes me want to laugh. So now we know.’ She lapsed into a deep silence, her eyes lowered, wringing her hands, until finally she said, ‘I didn’t tell you what I did in the clinic in New York before I threw the chair at the window. They wouldn’t let me out, so I stripped naked and pressed myself against the glass.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing. I just stood there without saying anything. You know I have trouble with words, Doctor. Words leave us at the mercy of other people; they strip us far more naked than anyone’s hands. Yesterday evening I went to a party at Cecil Beaton’s and danced naked in front of fifty people, but I wouldn’t have been able to tell any of them the simple thing I find so hard to say now, even to you: my mother . . . Who’s that? The woman with the red hair, that’s all.’
It was stifling hot when Marilyn left at the end of her hour, and Greenson went to sit by the pool. He unfolded a sheet of yellow paper she had left on the arm of her chair. It was a poem, or rather a sequence of short poems:
Night of the Nile – soothing –
darkness – refreshes –
Air Seems different – Night has
No eyes nor no one – silence
except to the Night itself
Life –
I am of both your directions
Somehow remaining,
Hanging downward the most,
Strong as a cobweb in the wind,
Existing more with the cold frost
than those beaded rays
I’ve seen in paintings
To the Weeping Willow
I stood beneath your limbs
And you flowered and finally
clung to me
and when the wind struck with the earth
and sand – you clung to me
On 4 December 1961, Greenson wrote to Anna Freud about Marilyn without mentioning the brief course of therapy she had given her five years earlier.
I have resumed treating the patient who Marianne Kris saw for several years. She has become a borderline paranoid addict and is very sick. You can imagine how difficult it is treating a Hollywood actress, who has so many serious problems and is completely alone in the world, and yet at the same time is extremely famous. Psychoanalysis is still out of the question and I am improvising constantly, often surprised at where it’s leading me. I have no other options. If I succeed, I’ll certainly have learned something, but this case is requiring me to expend an impossible amount of time and emotion.
Strangely enough Anna didn’t mention her work with the actress either. ‘Marianne keeps me informed of your patient’s progress, as well as her struggles with her. The question is whether someone can provide her with the impetus to be well that should really come from herself.’ Both seemed to have agreed they should gloss over any role Anna might have played in Marilyn’s mental state, presumably so that, if anything went wrong, the question of her responsibility wouldn’t come up.
That month Greenson wrote to another correspondent about Marilyn: ‘She went through a severe depressive and paranoid reaction. She talked about retiring from the movie industry, killing herself, etc. I had to place nurses in her apartment day and night and keep strict control over the medication, since I felt she was potentially suicidal. Marilyn fought with these nurses, so that after a few weeks it was impossible to keep any of them.’
Three weeks after J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, informed Robert Kennedy that the Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana was planning to use Frank Sinatra to intercede with the Kennedys on his behalf, Marilyn was invited to dinner at the Lawfords’ place with Bobby Kennedy. This was going to be her second dinner with the president’s brother and she didn’t want it to end like the first, with her falling out of her dress, in tears, about to pass out. Over at the Greensons’ a few days before the dinner, she and Danny talked politics, while she took notes. Danny – a medical student – was campaigning against American support for the South Vietnamese regime, and they went over all the important issues of the day – the House Un-American Activities Committee, civil rights and so on.
At first she impressed Bobby, but then he saw her studying the list of talking points hidden in her handbag, and gently made fun of her. It wasn’t the first time she’d tried to prepare like that – if you think it was a mistake that you were born in the first place, you can’t bear being even remotely at fault.
A month later, thinking her intense involvement with the Kennedys was damaging – and hoping to have some time away from her himself – Greenson urged Marilyn to take a holiday in Mexico before starting Something’s Got to Give. She felt an indefinable change in her analyst, and began to see him as an object of passion rather than as a loving saviour. Imperceptibly the nature of their relationship had changed. Now there was a single self between them, a shared unconscious – love, but not love for each other, only self-love.
Marilyn, like everyone, had her version of true love. Some have more than one version, others an infinite variety. To each their own. ‘I love you’; ‘I don’t love you any more’ – those words people say when they’re no longer true, or to make them true. But one never says, ‘I love you,’ without it also meaning ‘Love me!’ Sometimes that’s all it means. As the intimacy between Marilyn and Ralph grew fiercer, a sort of feverish romance developed, fuelled not by love but by passion – passion with its breakdowns and recoveries, its stalemates, its bitter tears and black delights. If love is always reciprocal – each loves to be loved – passion is always asymmetrical.
Brentwood, Fifth Helena Drive
February 1962
The Los Angeles Marilyn returned to from New York was no longer the city of her youth. Under the pressure of six million inhabitants, it had mutated into a flat, amorphous organism, pumping thick clots of traffic round its endless, smog-ridden freeways. Every block glowed with the neon tubes of twenty-four-hour supermarkets. Overshadowed by the Mediterranean-style villas of silent film stars, which had remained secluded behind high stands of palm and eucalyptus for the last thirty years, Marilyn’s first address on her return was 882 Doheny Drive, near Greystone Park, north of Beverly Hills – an unprepossessing studio flat with Stengel, her secretary’s name, on the bell. She’d lost track of all the houses, hotel rooms, apartments she had lived in: from the YMCA to Chateau Marmont, from hookers’ joints like the Biltmore to the Beverly Hills Hotel, from an apartment backing onto the Van Nuys rail track to palatial Manhattan penthouses. She’d stayed in converted garages and the Carlyle’s presidential suite, but never once had she felt like she had her own home. ‘I seem to have a whole superstructure with no foundation,’ she told a journalist.
So Marilyn bought a house in Brentwood, a neighbourhood in West Los Angeles with coastal winds and a village charm, even in the midst of LA’s gangrenous, featureless sprawl. She decided to buy a place af
ter Greenson said, as he walked her to his gate at the end of a session, ‘Take care of yourself. Do you want us to drive you home?’
It sounded weird, home. Instead of answering his question, she had said, ‘The other day I was at a reception and they asked me to sign the guest book. I wrote my name after hesitating a little, as I always do, and then in the column for addresses I put, “Nowhere”.’
After two psychiatric hospitalisations and two major surgeries, she wanted a house of her own or, more specifically, one of her own like the one of his own. That was the ultimate appeal of the place: it was a replica, albeit smaller and less beautiful, of her analyst’s house. A faux-hacienda in a nondescript, peaceful neighbourhood at the end of a cul-de-sac. She would live there barely six months.
It had a small swimming pool at the back, a few trees and a lawn rolling down to a deep valley. At first she hardly decorated it: a few ceramic tiles, some masks on the walls, a grandfather clock given her by Carl Sandburg, a few pieces of coloured pottery, an Aztec calendar. She left the rooms sparsely furnished, as if still slightly uncertain, and made a plan to go to Mexico to buy furniture and art so she could re-create her doctor’s house in detail.
Marilyn felt she could love that house on Fifth Helena Drive, with its hand-hewn beams and cathedral ceilings. On the terrace, she could feel the strength of the trees, like sturdy arms that hold you without imprisoning you. She liked the roughness of the adobe stucco walls, like the hands of a working mother, the way her feet sank into the bedroom’s thick white carpet. ‘It will be the child you lost, the husband you divorced,’ Greenson had said. ‘This house will bring you peace.’ She counted all the places she’d lived in: there had been fifty-seven in thirty-five years. This time, she felt, she’d found the right one. The last one. The one where she’d settle, where she wouldn’t be afraid any longer.
Marilyn's Last Sessions Page 14
