Marilyn's Last Sessions

by Michel Schneider

  Rome

  1 June 1962

  Bored, Ralph Greenson left the meeting with his Roman psychoanalytic colleagues that he had been stuck in all morning, and set off through Trastevere with no particular destination in mind. He stopped at a gift shop on Piazza Santa Maria and looked for a present for Marilyn among the toys. He wanted to send her a sign that would help her wait, a token on her birthday. Judging from what Wexler had told him, the chess piece had not been enough to allay her fears of abandonment. When the saleswoman asked him what he was looking for, he said he didn’t really know.

  ‘What age child?’

  ‘Thirty-six . . . sorry . . . I mean, three to six. Between three and six years old.’

  ‘A cuddly toy might be best,’ the saleswoman suggested. Greenson searched through a mound of toys for a horse, something with a family resemblance to the knight, and ended up settling for a little tiger, which he had wrapped. He asked if it could be sent to the States. ‘I’m in a hurry, I’m afraid, and I’m sure you’re more used to Customs and all the other formalities. I’ll pay for postage, of course.’

  The saleswoman obligingly handed Greenson a notepad so he could give her the address. With an attempt at levity, he wrote:

  MM,

  CURRENT OCCUPANT

  12305 FIFTH HELENA DRIVE

  BRENTWOOD

  90049 3930 CA

  USA

  THE EARTH

  He didn’t give the sender’s name or include a message. She would understand. In the end, Greenson thought, we’re different species, she and I. Like the tiger and the whale, we’re fated never really to meet. But which of us is the tiger and which the whale, I couldn’t really say.

  Marilyn rang her psychoanalyst’s children very early on the morning of her last birthday and invited them over to celebrate. Joan and Danny spent the evening with her, drinking champagne out of plastic cups, sitting on unopened movers’ cardboard boxes. As a present, they gave her a champagne glass with her name engraved inside. ‘Now I’ll know who I am when I’m drinking,’ she said. A chessboard lay on the floor, the pieces in a jumble. The white knight was missing.

  Two days later, Marilyn telephoned them again in tears and begged them to come round. She was in bed, naked, surrounded by pill bottles, wearing a black sleeping mask, with just a sheet over her. The Rodin statue was near her bed. It was the least erotic sight imaginable. She was desperate. She couldn’t sleep – it was the middle of the afternoon. She was a waif, she said, she was ugly; people were only nice to her for what they could get from her. She had no one, she was no one. She talked about not having children. She said, ‘It isn’t worth living any more.’ Joan and Daniel called Dr Engelberg, who arrived and swept the pill bottles into his black leather bag. Wexler was also summoned.

  The next night, Marilyn went out in a black wig.

  Hollywood, Pico Boulevard, Fox Studios

  1 June 1962

  Marilyn had met George Barris, the photographer, in New York in September 1954, when he was photographing The Seven Year Itch. In his first sight of her, she was leaning out of the window of a brownstone on East 61st, posing for a scene. He snapped a few photos of her, of that now-famous backside, before she glanced back at him and smiled.

  ‘What sign are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Gemini. How about you?’

  ‘Same. We should like the same things. What do you say to us doing a book together?’

  ‘Why not? Let’s do it some day. Don’t stop, though. Go on taking my picture . . .’

  Later, Barris was one of the photographers at the famous Seven Year Itch promotional shoot of a laughing Marilyn trying to push down her white dress as warm air billowed up from a subway vent. A clumsy edit of our desires and memories convinces us that this iconic image reveals more than just a flash of white underwear, although it may have been an altogether chaste affair, showing only Marilyn’s thighs. As always, the image is not what we look at, it is what looks at us.

  Marilyn was only too happy to strike up a rapport with the photographer in the hope that he’d dispense some of the magic of his profession, remind her of the way photographs provide a screen onto which one can project one’s dreams. She always liked the similarity between the words magic and image. But they didn’t get around to doing a book during her lifetime. For eight years she was busy making film after film and becoming an international movie star, and she forgot about their project until 1962, when she met up with him again on the set of Something’s Got to Give. He had pitched a story to Cosmopolitan: could Marilyn, at thirty-six, continue to play sexy, beautiful young women? The editor reckoned it would make a cover.

  When he walked onto Stage Fourteen, Barris spotted Marilyn right away and tapped her on the shoulder. ‘Hey, I’m creeping up on you like the first time. Maybe you don’t remember me, though.’

  She turned around, smiled, and gave him a big hug, ‘It’s been a long time,’ she said. ‘What’s the occasion? Have you come to photograph Miss Golden Dreams? What about our book? If we’re going to do one, I’d like it to be more than just a picture book.’

  ‘There can be text, sure. You should write it.’

  ‘I will. I don’t have such trouble with words, these days. They’re almost friends. Something I always used to like about LA is that it’s no names here. It’s the city of the nameless. Getting around LA, numbers are what matter. If you don’t want to be miles out on Wilshire, say, you’d better get the numbers in the address right. But naming things is important – I’ve come round to that. It depends who you tell, of course.’

  ‘Well, talking of numbers,’ he said, ‘since today is June first, I thought I’d fly out from New York to see my ol’ friend – I said ol’, not old.’

  She laughed as he hugged her again, and said, ‘Happy-happy, and may you have only happy ones.’

  Barris was telling her about the Cosmopolitan story when Cukor called her on set. Marilyn asked him to stick around – they could talk about the book and other stuff later. At five-thirty that Friday afternoon, Marilyn finished her scene. Someone shouted, ‘Happy birthday, Marilyn!’ One of the crew produced the cake. The sparklers threw off stars, the Dom Pérignon flowed. Barris thought it looked amazing, the light of the sparklers, the champagne bubbles, the tears running down her face, but he didn’t take a picture.

  Hollywood, Bel Air, Joanne Carson’s house

  August 1976

  One summer day, almost fifteen years after Marilyn’s death, Greenson heard Capote was in town to play an eccentric billionaire in the movie Murder by Death. He asked Joanne Carson, a mutual friend, to set up a meeting between them at her house, although he didn’t tell her he wanted to talk about Marilyn’s death. Carson obliged and, after effecting the introductions, tactfully left the two men alone.

  ‘You knew Marilyn when she was still just an actress, before she became a myth,’ Greenson launched in. ‘I loved her, I’m sure you know that. You’re an intelligent man. You know what love means in analysis, as well as out here, in what’s called real life.’

  ‘Are we talking about the same thing? I’m not so sure,’ Capote said. ‘Love seems to be a cure, as far as you analysts are concerned, whereas to me it’s the actual sickness. There’s something vaguely ludicrous about it, like a children’s game where someone’s playing at being someone else’s mother—’

  ‘Love is a bond,’ Greenson said. ‘Two people form an object relationship. They give, they receive . . .’

  ‘Not two people,’ Capote retorted. ‘Two walking wounds. Two incomplete beings searching for something they’ll never be able to find in another person. You know how to recognise that a relationship has changed from a sexual to a “loving” one? There are two signs, and they both relate to what’s little and en bas, as the French say. The first is an undifferentiated intimacy, a regression to infancy in the Latin sense of infans: the one who does not speak, the vulnerable soul who is deprived of language, not that I should have to tell a psychoanalyst that. Hence lovers
’ private languages, their baby talk, pet names, teeny-weeny voices – cutesy little lovers with their cutesy little languages. The second sign that love has entered the picture is a sense of entitlement to the anal, as I’m sure you know, Mr Analyst: the licence to talk to a person about their digestion, their excretion, their shit.’

  ‘But how do you distinguish between what we call “transference love” and the other sort?’ Greenson asked, as if he hadn’t heard.

  ‘You’re incorrigible, you analysts!’ Capote exclaimed, in his sexless, childlike falsetto. ‘You refuse to admit that love doesn’t justify anything, doesn’t prove anything or anyone right or wrong, that it’s all just a question of language. You’re so busy justifying yourselves: But I loved her. So what? Your love was the murdering kind. That’s all there is to it.’

  As Greenson was leaving the Bel Air mansion, Capote whispered in his ear, ‘It was her death, you know. Like my dumb film says, it was Murder by Death. Death was what killed her. She didn’t kill herself. Neither did anyone else.’

  As Capote turned away, he remembered a conversation he’d had with Marilyn when he’d gone to visit her in her house in Brentwood shortly before she died. He thought her beauty had had a completely different cast to it, and asked whether she’d lost weight.

  ‘A few pounds,’ Marilyn said. ‘Fourteen or fifteen maybe, I don’t know.’

  ‘If you carry on like this,’ Capote said, ‘your soul will start showing through your skin.’

  ‘Don’t make fun of me. Who said that?’

  ‘I did. No one quotes an author better than he does himself. How are you feeling, by the way? How is your soul?’

  ‘It’s out of the country for a while. Romi, my saviour, is at a conference in Europe, sitting at Freud’s right hand.’

  ‘This analysis will be the death of you, Marilyn. You’ve got to stop!’

  Capote didn’t like psychoanalysis and he loathed Hollywood. As for the Hollywood variant of psychoanalysis, he considered it worse than a fad: he thought it was a disease. ‘Everyone in California is either in analysis, or an analyst, or an analyst in analysis,’ he’d joke, whenever anyone tried to convince him to go to Couch Canyon. But he did in the end and, as ambivalent as ever, saw a male and female analyst simultaneously.

  Capote’s got it back to front, Greenson thought, as he drove back to Santa Monica. It’s not analysis that gets everywhere in Hollywood, even the movies, it’s the movies that take over everything, even analysis. People breathe, walk, talk – even shut off from each other in this goldfish bowl as if they’re on set. They’re constantly acting a part. Maybe Marilyn’s analysis was scripted by some studio hack with half an hour to spare. Greenson had just read My Story, which had come out in 1971 as Marilyn’s autobiography under her name, despite its having been compiled in the 1950s by Ben Hecht from conversations with her.

  Maybe she was acting the part of Cecily after we stopped her playing it in the movie. Marilyn as Cecily: the quintessential hysteric with an Electra complex in a 1960s Hollywood version of analysis, complete with healed traumas, disinterred memories and a kindly, bearded, irresistible therapist. What about her death, though? What script did that come from? When he had read in My Story, ‘I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand,’ he’d thought Marilyn had played her part to perfection on the night of 4 August 1962. Besides, hadn’t she called her memoir My Story, rather than My Life or Memoirs of an Actress, as if at the peak of her glory she knew she was just filling in the gaps in someone else’s script? It reminded him of the time on the set of Something’s Got to Give when he had watched Cukor whisper to her her lines as she forgot the entire script.

  That wasn’t all, though, was it? he thought. He had played his part opposite her too. He had acted the role of the impossibly benevolent, far-from-objective analyst with skill and conviction. In the imaginations of Hollywood folk, Marilyn Monroe’s death was a film noir all of its own:

  The End of Miss Golden Dreams, A Motion Picture starring Marilyn Monroe and Romi Greenson

  Synopsis: Hollywood, January 1960–August 1962 Death of a star. Monroe plays the part of Marilyn. The male lead, Romeo, a dark, hard, seductive figure she loves to death, who feeds her her last lines, is played by Ralph Greenson, her last analyst.

  A case of transference love? Of fatal transference?

  She gives love, but doesn’t know who to. She dies, but no one knows of what. And when Romeo is accused of killing her, he does not even stop to wonder if he might have done so by loving her too much.

  Westwood, Fifth Helena Drive

  6 June 1962

  Greenson had already visited Greece, Israel and Italy; now he was heading off to Switzerland. Marilyn didn’t try to ring him directly, but instead wrote down a list of questions and got Eunice Murray to ask them over the phone. Greenson realised they were less important than the unspoken question, ‘When are you coming back?’, but he didn’t ask Murray to put her on. Marilyn immediately embarked on a fervid bout of telephoning, ringing Lee Strasberg, Norman and Hedda Rosten, Ralph Roberts, Whitey Snyder and Pat Newcomb several times a day. They thought she sounded lost, searching for herself.

  When Marilyn didn’t appear on set the Monday after her thirty-sixth birthday, Peter G. Levathes, Fox’s studio head, announced he was going to settle the Monroe problem. Next thing, Marilyn had arrived and declared herself not only ready but impatient to get back to work, even though she had been present on only twelve out of the shoot’s thirty-four days. The following day, when she again didn’t appear on set, Cukor dismissed the cast and crew and resolved to call off filming if she didn’t turn up. Fox again threatened to revoke her contract, and Cukor started considering replacements: Kim Novak, Shirley MacLaine, Doris Day, maybe Lee Remick. Contacted by Mickey Rudin on Marilyn’s behalf, Greenson promised to get back as quickly as possible, leaving his wife to follow him the next day.

  Two days later, even though he had come off a seventeen-hour flight, he drove straight from the airport to Marilyn’s house, where he found her in a coma – but alive. No one knows what they talked about when she came round, but the following day he took her to see a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, Michael Gurdin, who had already done some work on Marilyn thirteen years earlier, to her nose and cheekbones. She was hoarse-voiced, her hair dirty and matted, make-up barely covering the bruising under her eyes. Her analyst said she had slipped in the shower. The doctor could see she was heavily medicated. She seemed especially concerned about a forthcoming photo shoot, asking if her nose was broken and how long it would take to fix if it were. When the X-rays showed no significant damage to the bones or cartilage, she threw her arms round Dr Greenson. Gurdin ruled out a fracture. She might have fallen, he said, but she also might have been hit: bruising to the nose can easily spread to the eyes.

  Greenson rang Mickey Rudin at once and told him to let the studio know he had everything in hand. He was convinced she was emotionally and physically up to finishing the film on deadline.

  He asked Eunice Murray not to mention the incident to the press or anyone from Fox, and informed the studio that, from now on, all artistic decisions involving Marilyn – shots, script alterations, costumes, everything – were to be discussed with him. At lunch at Fox the following day, Phil Feldman, the executive vice president of studio operations, told the analyst they were losing nine thousand dollars every day Marilyn didn’t film, and asked Greenson to drive her to Century City personally.

  ‘If she depends on you so heavily,’ Feldman asked, ‘what’s going to happen to the picture if she chucks you?’

  Greenson didn’t answer, preferring to point out that he had managed to get her back on The Misfits’ set after a week in hospital, and that she had been able to finish Huston’s film. He thought he could do the same again now.

  But that afternoon, a few minutes before the magistrates’ court closed, Fox sued Marilyn for half a million dollars for breach of contract, and t
old the press she was no longer on the project. Greenson heard the news on the car radio on his way back from lunch. He rushed to Marilyn’s house and gave her a tranquilliser shot.

  Later that evening, a statement was put out that Lee Remick was going to replace Marilyn. Next morning, Dean Martin said he was pulling out of the film.

  ‘I have the greatest respect for Miss Lee Remick and her talent, and for all the other actresses put forward for the role, but I signed up to make this film with Marilyn Monroe and I won’t make it with anyone else.’ He hadn’t even wanted to make the film originally, he confessed, and had only agreed because Marilyn had set her heart on him being in it. Levathes’ attempts to make him rethink were in vain.

  Henry Weinstein would later say of Marilyn, ‘Very few people experience terror. We all experience anxiety, unhappiness, heartbreaks, but that was sheer, primal terror.’

  When he got back to Santa Monica that evening, despite the weight of exhaustion that had been building since his return from Europe, Greenson couldn’t sleep. He went to bed, but when Hildi arrived home, two hours later, she found him in his armchair, holding Marilyn’s X-rays up to his orange desk lamp. He started like a naughty child when she came in, then carried on solemnly examining the plates as if he were meditating. He scanned the patches of blurry white and fathomless black, searching not for lesions but for the secret trail of her beauty, winding through the strange densities and degrees of opacity. His mouth was open and shadowy as though he were about to speak.

  Santa Monica, Franklin Street

  11 June 1962

  When he’d got back from Europe, Greenson had found a series of notes left by Marilyn, folded, ink-stained bits of paper, some of which she’d just pushed under the door without an envelope. One was particularly affecting: ‘I keep coming back to the chessboard. I don’t know why, but I keep thinking the game’s down to its last moves. My whole life can be summed up by what those pieces can do. The way my body feels, the way I feel, what my acting’s like, the power of a director I used to admire, sex, the scenes I’ve filmed, take after take after take: to me they’re like moves on the sixty-four squares until it all ends with checkmate . . .’ The note broke off. The psychoanalyst sank into a reverie. Struck by Marilyn’s fascination with glass, mirrors and the chessboard’s black and white squares, the thought came to him that they had never played the game of skill together.