Marilyn's Last Sessions

by Michel Schneider

  When she’d gone to see Marilyn just before she left for New York, Joan Greenson had found her heavily sedated, as floppy and lifeless as a rag doll. She had given her a children’s book, The Little Engine That Could, for the trip – ‘for your ordeal’, as she whispered in her ear. But when the moment had come for the translucent star to go on stage at Madison Square Garden, she had to leave it and the chess piece behind. Fortified by tranquillisers and champagne, she had ventured out into that great black mouth and those blinding lights with a chill in her heart, trailing the shadow of her fear behind her. When she got back to Los Angeles, she described the terrible moment to Joan: ‘Everyone talked about my transparent six-thousand-dollar dress that was so tight Jean Louis had to sew me into it. But they didn’t understand. My dress wasn’t a second skin, it was my skin that was another layer of clothing, my skin that has always kept me from being naked.’

  Beverly Hills, Roxbury Drive

  21 May 1962

  Ralph Greenson’s papers, archived at UCLA, include the rough drafts for a book he was planning called Drugs in the Psychotherapeutic Situation. Chapter 12 contains this passage:

  When I left for a five-week summer vacation, I felt it was indicated to leave her some medication which she might take when she felt depressed and agitated, i.e., rejected and tempted to act out. I prescribed a drug which is a quick-acting anti-depressant in combination with a sedative – Dexamyl. I also hoped she would be benefited by having something from me to depend on. I can condense the situation by saying that, at the time of my vacation, I felt that she would be unable to bear the depressive anxieties of being alone. The administering of the pill was an attempt to give her something of me to swallow, to take in, so that she could overcome the sense of terrible emptiness that would depress and infuriate her.

  Her psychoanalyst had left, and so had she. He hadn’t come back but she had. Racing on amphetamines, Marilyn reported for work at six-fifteen a.m. on Monday, 21 May, thirty-three hours after the New York gala. She had sent word to Cukor that she was prepared to film all the scenes scheduled for the day except for close-ups. She was obviously ill and Whitey Snyder realised no amount of make-up could hide the evidence of fatigue from her weekend. For her body, he used a special preparation of a litre of Max Factor suntan cream, as base, with half a cup of ivory white and a little clown white.

  On Wednesday, she finally shot the nude swimming-pool scene in which her character lures Dean Martin from Cyd Charisse’s bed. Normally, an actress or her body double would wear a body stocking for a scene like this; no one expected her to do it naked. So when they saw her emerge from the water after slipping out of her bathing suit, the reaction was incredible. Everyone wanted to be on set. Weinstein called for security to bar the stage entrance. Dosed up on amphetamines for her fever and Demerol for her headaches, Marilyn was in the water for four hours while the shutters clicked and the cameras rolled. Like Pat Newcomb, Marilyn’s press attaché, Cukor knew no one in their right mind could miss such an incredible publicity opportunity.

  Most of the following day’s filming was sacrificed to another photo-shoot. Cukor invited three photographers, William Woodfield, Lawrence Schiller and Jimmy Mitchell, on set and the pictures they took were immediately flashed all over the world. Fifty-two shots appeared in seventy magazines in thirty-two countries, grossing a total of $150,000. Marilyn had done her fair share of nude scenes as a starlet and subsequently appeared as naked as the censorship laws would allow in Niagara, Bus Stop and The Misfits. So this scene caused her hardly any anxiety. The opposite, if anything: she felt reborn in that pool, and not just because she had lost fifteen pounds in a matter of weeks. She always felt the same: she had no shame about her body, only about having to talk. Unbeknown to her, Natasha Lytess had written a poisonous article after they’d gone their separate ways in 1956, in which she’d described Marilyn’s complete ease with her nudity as a sign of mental instability. ‘Being naked seemed to soothe her,’ Natasha wrote, ‘almost hypnotise her.’ She’d endlessly dissect her reflection sitting or standing in front of a full-length mirror, pouting, half closing her heavy-lidded eyes, totally absorbed by what she saw.

  The obsession with mirrors had started when she was a child. She’d often be found standing stock-still in front of one, captivated by her likeness. As an adult, her friends and colleagues would find her incessantly scrutinising herself in a three-panel mirror, adjusting the fall of her dress, the curve of an eyebrow. It was virtually impossible for her to pass by a mirror without searching for herself in its surface. Truman Capote told of how one day he had seen her sitting for hours in front of her reflection. He had asked her what she was doing and she’d replied, ‘I’m watching her.’

  At the start of the fifties, Billie Holiday was singing one evening in a club in Los Angeles and Marilyn went along with her costume designer Billy Travilla. When he told her a copy of her nude calendar was hanging in the singer’s makeshift dressing room, Marilyn rushed in and, without a glance or a word for Billie, stared, rapt, at the photos of herself. Billie threw the calendar in her face and chased her out, calling her a dumb bitch. And then in 1957, before moving into the apartment she lived in with Arthur Miller and kept as her New York pied-à-terre until her death, Marilyn had a good proportion of the walls covered with floor-to-ceiling mirrors.

  But photographs have a precious advantage over mirrors: there’s always someone behind them, a gaze, just as there’s always someone in front, someone who can look at them besides you. Rather than an inverted image, they give you an image of how other people – or one person – see you. With all the emphasis on photographs being machine-made, it’s easy to forget the singular gaze that orchestrates them, the subjectivity that’s always at work behind the lens. Mirrors divide, photographs unite. A few weeks before meeting Ralph Greenson, Marilyn had said to W. J. Weatherby, ‘Sometimes it would be a big relief to be no longer famous. But we actors and actresses are such worriers, such – what is your word? – Narcissus types. I sit in front of the mirror for hours looking for signs of age. Yet I like old people: they have great qualities younger people don’t have. I want to grow old without face lifts. They take the life out of the face, the character. I want to have the courage to be loyal to the face I’ve made. Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you’d never complete your life, would you? You’d never wholly know yourself.’

  Marilyn didn’t live long enough to be undone by the passage of time, merely marked by its hand. But she tried hormone creams and ‘youth’ injections in the final months of her life. She even took to wearing gloves to hide the liver spots on her hands. By the end, there was something vaguely desperate about the uses to which she put her body in front of a camera. According to Eve Arnold, who had photographed her naked in 1960 and 1961, ‘She had lost the contours of a young woman by then, but refused to acknowledge that her body was becoming mature . . . Her blindness to her physical change was becoming almost tragic.’ Soon after the second shoot, Arnold discovered the negatives of her Marilyn nudes had vanished from her files.

  Hollywood, Pico Boulevard, Fox Studios

  31 May 1962

  Marilyn disappeared for three days. ‘This was perhaps the most mysterious weekend of Marilyn’s life,’ Henry Weinstein said afterwards. ‘It was even more puzzling than the day of her death. Something terrible happened to her that weekend. It was deeply personal, so personal that it shook Marilyn’s psyche. I saw it happen, and I blame myself for not immediately calling Dr Greenson and asking him to return.’

  But after three days she came back. She came to, as one says after someone loses consciousness. She made it to work on 28 May for an eight-minute scene with Dean Martin, Cyd Charisse and Tom Tryon, who thought she looked like a piece of fine crystal about to shatter. She had only two words to say, ‘Nick, darling.’ Again and again she tried to get them right. Finally she began stuttering and Cukor flew into a rage. Marilyn ran off set, locked herself into her studio bung
alow, and wrote on the mirror, in bright red lipstick, ‘Frank, help me! Frank, please help me!’ She had been trying to reach Sinatra all day. But the next day, to everyone’s amazement, she raced through her scenes with a will, and worked all through the week.

  The last images of Marilyn Monroe etched on celluloid on 31 May 1962 are virtually silent. Only thirty-five minutes in total of Something’s Got to Give exist. They show a face of almost cruel beauty whose insomniac eyes bear a surprised, vaguely anxious expression. A woman in dire straits, who wears her floral dress, red on dazzling white, like a cry for help. She has been left for dead and now she has come home, and her sadness has that edge of violence common to all who have been rejected in this hard, mirror-like world. We see Marilyn acting out her life on Stage Fourteen at 20th Century Fox, but doing so as if she were already a ghost. Her hair is sheer white, like a brittle, glossy wig. She is her own double, Marilyn playing ‘Marilyn’, as if she wants to disappear into her image – or even further, into her image’s reflection in the spectators’ eyes, into the Technicolor blue of the swimming pool and the iridescent mists around the spotlights. Off camera, the director shouts, ‘Cut!’ The shot ends and Marilyn, who has been silent until then, listlessly repeats ‘Cut’ with the desolate, uncomplaining air of a child who has been interrupted in a game. She always hated the cry directors used to stop the cameras rolling, the antithesis to ‘Action’, the most common term in the lexicon of the studios and the heart.

  The next day Marilyn would be thirty-six. It would be her last day of filming, the last time a camera would transform her into her image. Two months later, the director of her fate would call out ‘Cut’, and the thread and film of her life would be severed for ever. There would be no assistant director on hand to shout, ‘Let’s go again! One last take!’

  Marilyn died a few hundred yards from 5454 Wilshire Boulevard, where her mother had been living when she was born. At the time, Gladys was working for the studios as an editor at Consolidated Film Industries, one of a host of laboratories that developed and printed the ‘dailies’, the unedited footage shown to producers, directors and company executives every morning of filming. Gladys worked six days a week, wearing white gloves to protect her hands from the negatives. She was a film-cutter, as editors were then known, cutting film where studio heads told her to and passing on the sections to her colleagues, who would recombine them for the final print.

  Twenty-six years after Marilyn’s death, on a beautiful August evening, five original videotapes containing the supposedly lost footage from Marilyn Monroe’s last film were secretly removed from Fox’s archives in Century City. Hidden in the car of a studio employee, they were driven straight to a building in Burbank. There, in front of a handpicked audience of a hundred and seventy people, they were projected onto an immense video screen. Unedited and without music, the footage opened on a clapperboard marked: ‘REEL 17: Something’s Got to Give, 14 May 1962’. Apart from some very brief scenes that had been included in a Fox documentary, every image from this last unfinished film had been shrouded in the utmost secrecy. Total silence fell when Marilyn appeared on the screen, a silence that lasted for the following forty-five minutes.

  The film quality was blurry and, in certain places, faded, but its contents were overwhelming. Marilyn was dazzling. The editor had sequenced the footage with considerable skill, mingling excerpts and snatches of dialogue with comic scenes and ending on the eleven-minute night scene of Marilyn in the swimming pool: wide-eyed, her breasts just hidden under the water, wading to the edge of the pool with cheerfully awkward steps, and then, with a look to camera, pulling herself out and slipping on a blue-grey bathrobe. So many blues: the unreal blue of the water, the tender blue of the night, the fragile blue of her robe, the lost blue of her eyes.

  The moment the last tape ended and the screen dissolved into glittering points of light, the audience burst into applause. The studio employees scooped up the tapes, without waiting to rewind them, and returned them to Fox’s archives. Then they disappeared. Despite constant petitioning by Marilyn’s admirers, the studio steadfastly denied the film’s existence, saying that only ten minutes of it had ever been shot and that the footage had already been shown in a documentary entitled Marilyn, which 20th Century Fox had made in 1963.

  In the spring of 1990, the tapes reappeared under strange circumstances. Henry Schipper, a young Fox news producer in Los Angeles, was combing the archives for material for a tribute to Marilyn when various clues put him on the track of Something’s Got to Give. He was luckier, or more methodical, than previous researchers. Seated at his computer at Fox Entertainment News, ranging at will through one of the world’s largest film cemeteries, he discovered that Fox’s cameras had followed their favourite star everywhere, from her first screen test to her burial in Westwood Cemetery. But for a long time he couldn’t find any trace of her final film. It was only after days of persistent searching that he found out that what he wanted – all the existing footage of Something’s Got to Give – was a hundred metres below ground at the end of a tunnel in a salt mine in the centre of Kansas. At last the celluloid princess could be awakened from her loveless sleep. Realising he had got his hands on a crucial piece of the puzzle of Marilyn Monroe’s life, Schipper took the reels to Fox’s main projection room and stayed in there for two days, captivated by the rushes, amazed to find they were almost entirely intact and included footage of the director at work. The bulk of the material was Marilyn repeating scenes up to twenty times, making only the occasional mistake and never missing a line.

  The heads of Fox had lied when they had declared the film to be untraceable and even erased from the company inventory. They had also claimed Marilyn was in a bad way throughout the shoot, pumped full of medication, so everyone thought her work on her last film couldn’t be anything but a sad footnote to a brilliant career. The reality couldn’t have been more different. Marilyn was on top form, turning in a performance easily on a par with the rest of her career. She was funny and heartbreaking, and every time she appeared, the screen exploded with light.

  Beverly Hills, Roxbury Drive

  31 May 1962

  When the producers viewed the rushes of Something’s Got to Give, they thought Marilyn was acting ‘in a slow motion that was hypnotic’. There was talk of replacing her. Terribly agitated, Marilyn went to see Wexler on the evening of her penultimate day of shooting. Feeling under attack from all sides, she wasn’t sure whether the threat was internal or external any more. George Cukor had been especially odious. Thirty takes for the same scene, and nothing in the can. ‘Cut!’ Marilyn shouted furiously. ‘The same damn words I’ve been hearing for the past fifteen years: “Cut! Action! Take! One last take!” Don’t movie people realise they’re grabbing hold of us, the actors; they set us in motion like wind-up dolls, cut us to pieces, edit us back together . . . Movies are like sex: someone uses your body to act out fantasies that have nothing to do with you. And there isn’t any of the tenderness you can get with sex that at least gives you a vague sense you exist, that you might just be a person, yourself. Neat, orderly cruelty always starts with other people.’

  ‘Compromise!’ said Wexler. ‘Cukor is homosexual and he hates women – that’s all true – but he’s also a great filmmaker. Let him direct you.’

  ‘No. I’m not going to put up with that sort of thing any longer. I’m not having anyone treat me brutally again. I signed my first contract with Fox in 1946 when I was twenty years old. Last winter, they sent me a telegram saying if I didn’t make the last film in my contract, they’d hound me through the courts for the next ten years. I gave way in December. Now all I feel is contempt for the studio and everything it stands for. Just seeing “Fox” on a billboard makes me want to be sick.’

  ‘Try to finish the picture. I understand Cukor: he’s exasperated. I would be too. You have to get a grip.’

  ‘I can’t. Ralph left almost a month ago and nothing’s gone right since. I’m thirty-six today. Cukor flew off
the handle when he found out I was having a birthday party this afternoon. “Not on this set. Not now!” he shouted. But after we finished shooting, they gave me a birthday cake with July Fourth sparklers and two little figures of me, one with no clothes on and one in a bikini, and they tried to make a big show of it, wheeling it out on a trolley. Fox spent more than five thousand dollars on Elizabeth Taylor’s birthday party on the set of Cleopatra in Rome, and this is all they could manage! The crew chipped in for the cake. Dean Martin supplied the champagne. Everyone sang “Happy Birthday”. It’s always the same little ritual, love trying to keep death at bay with endearments and kisses. But this time I was the one in danger. It felt like the cake was me, and I was being carried out on a stretcher.’

  After a pause, she continued, ‘Do you believe numbers mean things sometimes? I was born in 1926 and now it’s 1962. Sixty-two is twenty-six backwards. Twenty-six is the number of years Jean Harlow lived. Thirty-six is the number of years I’ve lived, and the number of films she made. So either this is the last year of my life, or it’s the year I’ll be reunited with Norma Jeane, who was born in Los Angeles General Hospital at nine-thirty in the morning on June first, 1926 – the year Harlow died. Some days I’d like to live my life in reverse, you know, like a film being played backwards. Tell me something, Dr Wexler. What is it that makes the film rewind? Death or life? I’m afraid these might be my last days on set, my last sessions . . . You’re not saying anything. You don’t give a damn. You’re just waiting for my hour to be up so I can pay you!’

  She was silent for a long time. ‘I’ve had no rest, I’m exhausted. Where do I go from here?’ Then she abruptly got to her feet and left the room.

  To hell, Wexler thought, without looking up.