Marilyn's Last Sessions

by Michel Schneider

  ‘Seven years have passed and I am still devastated. I don’t know that I will ever get over it really or completely. I still ask myself what I should have done to save her. Perhaps my decision to take on Marilyn Monroe was too much of a gamble, perhaps the stakes were too high. Perhaps I wanted to go down in history as Marilyn Monroe’s analyst, and perhaps in the end it was a gamble I lost. I approached it as a game of poker, I think, when really I should have been playing chess, or not playing at all. She was a poor creature whom I tried to help and ended up hurting. Perhaps my own longing for omnipotence had clouded my judgement. Of course I knew it was a difficult case, but what should I have done? Turn it over to a beginner? I knew her love was narcissistic, and that she was bound to feel a hatred commensurate with her dependence on me. But I had forgotten my old rule: a recurrent death wish, fully felt and realised in consciousness, obviates the need for a psychoanalyst.’

  Hollywood Heights, Woodrow Wilson Drive

  April 1970

  Accounts of the actress Inger Stevens’s death tend not to mention her psychiatrist’s name. The evening before she died, they report, she was dressed in a greyish-beige trouser suit and black blouse, her tall, slender frame emphasised by her blonde hair worn piled characteristically high. Her face was said to be sad, but no sadder than usual, with just the occasional look of cold despair passing through her washed-out blue eyes. During the night of 30 April 1970, a friend, Lola McNally, found her lying unconscious in her house on Woodrow Wilson Drive, close to the corner of Mulholland Drive. She opened her eyes and said something incomprehensible. An ambulance took her to hospital, where she was pronounced dead on arrival.

  The autopsy was conducted by Marilyn’s coroner, Dr Noguchi, who ruled that Stevens had died of a barbiturate overdose. Three hypotheses circulated as to what might have happened: either she was murdered and the scene was made to look like a suicide, or she suffered a heart attack after consuming too much alcohol and too many pills, or she had wanted to kill herself and had finally succeeded in doing so. Either way, the circumstances of her death remain suspicious. She had just signed a contract to do a TV series – The Most Deadly Game, a title that took on strange resonances when her body was found curled up, face down on her kitchen floor – and had seemed very excited about getting down to work, even going out and buying new clothes for her part. Her bedroom carpet had been pulled up. The telephone wasn’t in its usual place in the living room, but in the bedroom where there wasn’t even a socket. She had bruising on her arm, a cut on her chin and her blood contained traces of asthma medication, which she didn’t need to take. She had cooked dinner at home that night for the actor Burt Reynolds, who wasn’t questioned by the police and went on to star twelve years later in The Man Who Loved Women, which was written by Milton Wexler and directed by Blake Edwards. Wexler, however, was not the only link between the dead actress and Hollywood’s psychoanalytic community. Ralph Greenson had been her analyst for many years.

  Inger Stevens had had a brief movie career in the 1960s. She was born two years before Marilyn and, like her, had started out as a model and chorus girl before studying at the Actors Studio in the hope of becoming ‘a serious actress’, as she put it. It’s not known if she and Marilyn knew one another in New York, or before that, in Hollywood. She’d left her family home in Kansas and stepped off the Greyhound bus at LA’s Union Station alone and without any luggage. No one was waiting for her. Like Marilyn, although she never enjoyed as much of the limelight, she could play comic, dramatic and romantic roles, and when she was offered something sexy, she’d simply say, ‘I hope I don’t get typecast.’ Her most notable role was in an episode of The Twilight Zone in 1960, ‘The Hitchhiker’, where she plays a woman who suffers hallucinations as she drives east across America and thinks she gives her death a lift.

  When he read of Inger Stevens’s death in the Los Angeles Times, Greenson was working on a book about failures in psychoanalysis, a sequel of sorts to The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis, which had been published three years earlier. He remembered the other blonde’s final hours, then decided the only way to stop thinking about either of them was to write an article about the ‘Swinging Chicks of the ’60s’, actresses without roles, dreamers lost in their glittering self-images. That way he could concentrate on their failures, rather than his own failure to cure them.

  He found a letter Inger had written him a few years earlier: ‘I live in a constant state of insecurity and crippling anxiety that I try to hide by appearing cold. People think I am aloof, but really I am just scared. I often feel depressed. I come from a broken home, my marriage was a disaster, and I am constantly lonely.’

  Greenson closed the file containing his notes on Inger’s analysis. He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and saw her beautiful, sad face, her childlike eyes. He heard her low, deceptively assured voice. ‘A career, no matter how successful, can’t put its arms around you,’ she had said once. ‘You end up being like Grand Central Station with people just coming and going. And there you are – left all alone. The thing I miss most is having someone to share things with. I’ve always thrown myself into friendships and love affairs where I’m the one doing all the giving. You can’t live like that.’

  ‘There’s your work as an actress, though. People like seeing you on screen.’

  ‘But that’s not me. I’m very proud of what I do. I want to be a success. I don’t want to die thinking all I’ve been doing is passing time, heading on down the road until I crawl off into my grave. I’d like to leave something behind me, to contribute to my generation’s legacy, and I’ll do that through my work as an actress.’

  When he heard of her death, the analyst couldn’t help thinking she hadn’t been a good actress and, without knowing why, decided not to go to her cremation. He also decided against writing a book about failures in psychoanalysis, or articles about analysts’ patients’ suicides or Hollywood starlets in the 1960s. Too many old wounds. A friend scattered Inger’s ashes over the Pacific from the Santa Monica pier.

  Los Angeles, Pico Boulevard

  May 1962

  On 10 May, Greenson and his wife finally left for Europe for five weeks. His disappearance at this particularly critical time for Marilyn seemed oddly unexplained – he told his associates that he was going on a lecture tour, but he informed Fox that his wife was ill and needed to be treated in a Swiss clinic. And he’d told Marilyn it was his mother-in-law who was sick.

  Four days later, having barely worked for the first three weeks of filming, Marilyn was ready long before the studio limousine came to pick her up to take her through the deserted Los Angeles streets to Pico Boulevard. The black Lincoln Continental rolled over Brentwood’s low hills, raising a cloud of dust that was visible from Century City. To reach the gleaming new bungalow she had been allocated as a dressing room, Marilyn was driven past the steel and glass administrative buildings that towered over the lot. The studio executives’ offices were strategically positioned on the top floor so they could keep tabs on their stars’ comings and goings.

  Among the brief, truncated jottings Marilyn made during the last two years of her life is this entry in a red notebook:

  This is not a diary. I’m not going to pick it up every day and write, ‘Dear Diary’. It’s just a notebook, somewhere for my jumbled moods, as messy as the piles of clothes all over my floor . . .

  Found out that Fox security, some of them old friends, were filing confidential reports listing the times I arrived and left. It made me so mad. Since then, some mornings I get out of the car by the little service gate and send the limo through the main gate with no one in the back . . . Even on days when I stay at home, my car with its tinted windows still shows up and stops in front of my bungalow for all the world to see. What difference would it make if I was in it anyway? Who’s going to care? Why would they? It terrifies me thinking of how short my life is, the eternity before I was born and after I die, and I’m amazed to find I’m here rather than somew
here else. No reason why I should be here rather than there, today rather than any other day. Right: time for a game of chess with those foxes . . .

  Marilyn, who had disappeared again after filming had started on Something’s Got to Give, reported back for work for three and a half days at the start of May. Then, on the seventeenth, she left the studio in mid-filming. She was due to sing two days later at an event at Madison Square Garden celebrating the President of the United States’s forty-fifth – and last – birthday. Fox’s executive committee had begged her not to leave the set to go to New York. Ignoring the incredible publicity such a performance by one of its top stars would bring the film, the studio sent her lawyer Mickey Rudin a two-page letter threatening her with dismissal: ‘In the event that Miss Monroe absents herself, this action will constitute a wilful failure to render services. In the event that Miss Monroe returns and principal photography of the motion picture continues – such re-commencement will not be deemed to constitute a waiver of [Fox’s] right to fire Miss Monroe as stated in her contract.’

  Henry Weinstein, however, realised that Marilyn was determined to go New York, come what may. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘here’s a girl who really did come from the streets, who had a mother who wasn’t there, and a father who had disappeared, a girl who has known all the poverty in the world. And now, she is going to sing “Happy Birthday” to the President of the United States in Madison Square Garden. There’s no way for her to resist that.’ But no one listened to him.

  It was around this time that Norman Rosten sent Marilyn a half-hour tape of him reading his poetry on a local radio station. He knew she’d like the poems, but mainly he wanted her to know he was thinking of her. She was very alone. It was like in chess, she said, it was like what they call Zeitnot: the agony of knowing you’re running out of time to decide your next move. Any moment now, you won’t have any time to think of anything, even your agony. Rosten thought of the poems as his emissaries; perhaps they’d help. When he arrived in Hollywood shortly afterwards, Marilyn’s secretary told him she took the tape with her in her bag everywhere she went, like a good-luck charm, and that she had bought a new tape recorder specially.

  One evening, she invited Norman over to listen to the poems. She’d get everything ready, she said on the phone. He’d arrive early, Eunice would make coffee, then they’d listen to them together. Lying on the bed, she could use the rewind or fast forward as much as she wanted, skip forward or back and, knowing the recorder would stop automatically, she wouldn’t have to worry about falling asleep – but only if he had to leave before the end, of course, she added. When he got there, she was already in her pyjamas. The coffee was made. They drank it and talked about her work and plans, about his projects, his wife and daughter, his work in Hollywood, when he was leaving. She said she hoped her film would go well. She felt nervous but determined. Then she got into bed and Norman sat on the floor by the tape recorder. ‘I took a sleeping pill just before you got here,’ she said, ‘so maybe I’ll fall asleep listening to your voice. Is it OK if I slip away before the end?’

  New York, Madison Square Garden

  May 1962

  A deafening whine announced the arrival of an enormous helicopter on the Fox heliport near Soundstage Fourteen. Peter Lawford leaped from the pride of Howard Hughes’s fleet, hurried to Marilyn’s dressing room and escorted her to the royal blue vision that was going to convey her to Inglewood. Two hours later Marilyn took off from Los Angeles for what was still to be named JFK. The presidential gala was going to be her first appearance on stage in front of a large audience since her legendary performance before thousands of GIs in Korea. Full of nervous energy, she sang her contribution, ‘Happy Birthday’, on the plane. Like the gala’s seventeen thousand spectators, she’d had to pay a thousand dollars for the privilege of attending. ‘That figures,’ she had told Joan Greenson. ‘I’ve been paying to talk to your father for years. So now I have to pay to sing.’ With Joan’s help, she had been rehearsing for days.

  She was going to be reunited with John Kennedy, her occasional lover. Six days earlier, with oppressive symmetry, it was her ex-husband, Arthur Miller, who had been placed on Kennedy’s wife’s right at a banquet for André Malraux. The top table included writers Saul Bellow, Edmund Wilson and Robert Penn Warren, painters Andrew Wyeth and Mark Rothko, the composer Leonard Bernstein, and from the world of the theatre and performing arts, George Balanchine, Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg. Marilyn was conspicuous by her absence, as if the Kennedys were bent on confirming the split marked out by her destiny that her move to New York and marriage to Miller had been attempts to overcome: words and culture on the one hand, the body and images on the other.

  Being back in New York filled Marilyn with the delight of a child let loose in an adult world. She raced all over town in a cab, not asking to go downtown or uptown, just saying, I’m going this way or that way. The city was a carnival and she was its queen, its streets and city blocks a chessboard she could dominate with the strength and beauty of her moves. The white king, the key to the game, was missing. Her mother was the black queen, she the white; Greenson was the white knight – or maybe the black – and the Kennedys were the two black bishops. Manhattan avenged her for everything Hollywood had taken from her.

  Some cities are like special languages: no matter how beautiful they seem, you know you’ll never learn them. The names in Los Angeles had ceased to mean anything to her. She’d see the signs – ‘SUNSET STRIP’, ‘ANAHEIM’, ‘EL PUEBLO’ – and all they’d evoke would be an indeterminate colour or an ethnic marker, a sense of freeways turning back on themselves ad infinitum. They were like names in dreams. She saw them – strange or familiar, beautiful or terrifying – but they made no sense. In Manhattan, it was the opposite. Marilyn became the link between everything she saw, the thread that bound time together. Although she didn’t talk to anyone, she felt a part of everything. New York was the city of connections and it made her forget the city of thin partitions with its boundless distances between people, its virtual equivalence between reality and fiction.

  She returned to her apartment on East 57th Street late in the evening. When she got up the next morning, she found a letter had arrived from Fox terminating her contract. For a minute she thought it wouldn’t have happened if Greenson had been there, but then she was seized by doubt. Wasn’t it the other way round? Hadn’t her psychiatrist, who was so close to Weinstein and Rudin that the studio called them ‘Marilyn’s team’, left the country because he wanted to send Fox a message that her fate was of as little concern to him as the film itself? Deeply disturbed, she laboured through the final day of rehearsals. In the evening, working together at her apartment, the composer Richard Adler had an uphill struggle getting her to go over the words of ‘Happy Birthday’ for the thirtieth time. He was afraid of the pain he heard welling up inside her, her breathy whisper, the halting way she sang the lyrics. As the hours passed, her enunciation gradually softened to an exhalation, a sensual caress. Her rendition steadily became more and more sexually charged until, by the time she finally came on stage, after Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and Maria Callas, Marilyn Monroe had become a parody of herself.

  Bobby Kennedy has come to the Democratic Party fundraiser with his wife but Jackie Kennedy has not seen fit to attend, so JFK is on his own. The compère for the evening, JFK’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford, introduces Marilyn: ‘Mr President, on this occasion of your birthday, this lovely lady is not only pulchritudinous but punctual.’ After a long wait in the wings, she emerges unsteadily from the darkness like a flickering blue flame, a vision of skin and rhinestones. Sewn into her dress, she tiptoes on stage with the tiny steps of a geisha, as if the body she’s parading before the thousands of spectators is a burden to her. ‘The late Marilyn Monroe,’ Lawford puns – or perhaps it’s a Freudian slip – and the audience laughs in the shadows. Marilyn has kept the promise she and Truman Capote had made: to be late for their own funeral. Imprisoned by her d
ress, which glitters like fallen snow, she teeters a little on her high heels, shrugs the white ermine wrap from her shoulders, brushes the microphone with her fingertips, gestures to the president somewhere out there in the dark, and then closes her eyes, runs her tongue over her lips and starts to sing. Drifting out over the crowd, her husky voice seems to say: ‘They’ve all left me because I was bad, Joe, Frank, Arthur, Romeo. Now forty million other Americans will see how bad I really am.’

  At the after-show party at New York theatre magnate Arthur Krim’s apartment, Robert Kennedy dodges around Marilyn, like a moth around a flame. The president and Bobby usher her into a quiet corner at one point, where they have an animated conversation for a quarter of an hour. Marilyn is then seen dancing five times with Bobby as his wife Ethel looks on aghast. In the early hours of Sunday morning, the president and Marilyn leave the party and take a private elevator to the basement of Krim’s building. From there they walk through the tunnel leading to the Carlyle Hotel and go straight up to Kennedy’s suite.

  She never saw John Kennedy again. After that night, the president decided to break off all contact between them and deny the rumours that were starting to circulate about their relationship. Even though a number of photographs were taken of Marilyn with the two brothers, there is only one still in existence. Secret Service agents came the next morning to seize the remaining negatives from Time magazine’s photo lab.