Marilyn's Last Sessions

by Michel Schneider

  ‘Here you go. Gin and tonic.’

  ‘Great. We can go to another bar, though . . .’

  ‘No, no, I like it. I’m not often taken to a real bar. It reminds of the one we drank in in Reno. Everyone’s different in different places, though. I change anyway. I’m different in New York than I am Hollywood. I’m different here at this bar than at the studio. And it’s the same with people. I’m different with Lee than with my secretary, and I’m different again with you. I realise that in interviews. The questions always demand certain answers and make you seem a certain kind of person. Often they tell me more about the interviewer than my answers do about me.’

  ‘You seduce interviewers,’ Weatherby said, with a disarming smile. ‘You don’t want them to get at the real you, but to fall in love with you and write love stories.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Oh, yes. But don’t you try to seduce every man you meet?’ he joked. ‘Don’t you like to feel your power over them?’

  ‘Sometimes I hate the effect I have on people. I get tired of the stupid attention, of working people up. It’s not really a human thing. But it didn’t happen with you. I like it better this way. I don’t respect people who like you just because you’re famous . . . I hope our little drink isn’t going in that notebook.’

  She reminded him of a child whistling or laughing in the dark. The more cheerful she tried to be, the more she felt the night draw in.

  ‘Do you want another drink?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure. Have you read any good books recently?’

  ‘The Deer Park by Norman Mailer. It might interest you. It’s about Hollywood. I’ll get you a copy.’

  ‘Do you ever feel books are beyond you? I mean, that your mind can’t handle them? Almost like they’re in a foreign language, though the words are English. It makes me feel so dumb sometimes.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. You have sharper instincts than many intellectuals. You don’t want to blunt your instincts just for the sake of second-hand knowledge. I’d rather be beautiful than wise.’

  She frowned and looked away. He knew he’d made a mistake.

  Not long after, they left and walked a few blocks up Eighth Avenue against the evening tide rushing towards the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He put her into a cab, then went back to their bar, sat down under a neon light that had been turned on in the meantime, opened his notebook and transcribed their conversation. He wondered if she was using him, if she was just being friendly or whether she thought there was something in their talks. He couldn’t do anything for her career, he wasn’t going to write about her, but still, he thought, the suspicion was there, as it was with everyone.

  Two days later, they met up again as they’d planned. He thought she’d changed. She didn’t look so youthful. Her face was gaunter, the cheekbones more angular, the lines showing through her clumsy make-up, as she probably realised. She was waiting for him this time and jumped up to give him a jaunty peck on the cheek. Weatherby froze involuntarily. She smelt of neglect, the shakes, too many tears.

  ‘I nearly didn’t come,’ she said.

  ‘I’m glad you did. How are you spending your time here?’

  ‘Don’t know. It’s like being at the bottom of the pool, when you kick to try and come up to the surface. I feel like staying inside – away from people.’

  ‘You got the blues?’

  ‘Sort of . . .’

  She carried on talking in a disjointed way. They ordered their drinks. She wanted a White Angel but the waiter didn’t know what that was. They clinked their gin and tonics and wished each other good luck.

  ‘They won’t ever humiliate me,’ she resumed. ‘I know what it’s like to feel a loser, that panic. I saw it in Betty Grable’s eyes when the studio bosses ushered me into her dressing room to show I was taking over from her. I wouldn’t do it. I walked away. They held it against me for a long time. I was very naïve back then. There was a whole period when I felt flattered if a man – any man – even took an interest in me! I believed too easily in people, and then I went on believing in them even after they disappointed me over and over again. I must have been very stupid in those days. I guess I’m capable of doing it again with someone, only he’d have to be someone more outstanding than a heel. I always paid the price, though, for everything I’ve ever done. There were times when I’d be with one of my husbands and I’d run into one of those Hollywood heels at a party and they’d paw me cheaply in front of everybody as if they were saying, Oh, we had her. I guess it’s the classic situation of the ex-whore, though I was never a whore in the real sense. I was never kept; I always kept myself. But there was a period when I responded too much to flattery and slept around too much, thinking it would help my career, though I always liked the guy at the time. They were always so full of self-confidence and I had none at all and they made me feel better. But you don’t get self-confidence that way.’

  ‘Do you have plans after this film?’

  ‘I once read the role of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. I’d like to play that on Broadway when I’m older. I like the last line so much. You remember, Vivien Leigh in Kazan’s film?’

  He remembered. Deathly pale, driven mad by her impossible love.

  ‘At the moment, I can’t see myself saying on stage “Whoever you are, I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers”, but I know what she means. Friends and relatives can let you down. You can depend on them too much. But don’t depend too much on strangers either, honey. Some strangers gave me a hard time when I was a kid.’

  ‘I read once that you were raped as a child.’

  ‘Don’t let’s talk about that. I’m tired of talking about that. I’m sorry I ever mentioned it to anyone.’ Absentmindedly, she wiped the table with a paper napkin and then grinned at herself. ‘The housewife. I enjoy housework. Takes my mind off things.’

  After a series of silences punctuated by the odd remark, often obscure, Weatherby went to the bathroom. When he came back, he found a man standing by their table, trying to pick up the scruffy blonde who, he was convinced, was a prostitute off Eighth Avenue. Weatherby shouted at him and he meekly turned tail and went back to the bar.

  ‘Our masks expose us, our roles kill us,’ she said. ‘I drag Marilyn Monroe around with me like an albatross. You know, I’ve been thinking of writing my will. Can’t tell you why, but it’s been on my mind. It’s made me feel sort of gloomy. Anyway, you’ve got to get the most out of the moment. Let’s make some mischief.’

  ‘Do you want to dance on the bar?’

  ‘We’d only be thrown out,’ she said cheerily. ‘This is a men’s bar. Women have to lie low . . . You won’t write anything of what I say to you, will you? Maybe I’ll get married again myself. Only problem is, he’s married right now. And he’s famous, so we have to meet in secret.’ Her lover was in politics in Washington, she added.

  The following day, she sent a strange telegram to Bobby Kennedy, declining an invitation to dinner in Los Angeles.

  ATTY GENERAL AND MRS ROBERT F. KENNEDY

  1962 JUNE 13 PM

  HICKORY HILL MCLEANVIR DEAR ATTORNEY GENERAL AND MRS ROBERT KENNEDY: I WOULD HAVE BEEN DELIGHTED TO HAVE ACCEPTED YOUR INVITATION HONORING PAT AND PETER LAWFORD. UNFORTUNATELY I AM INVOLVED IN A FREEDOM RIDE PROTESTING THE LOSS OF THE MINORITY RIGHTS BELONGING TO THE FEW REMAINING EARTHBOUND STARS. AFTER ALL, ALL WE DEMANDED WAS OUR RIGHT TO TWINKLE. MARILYN MONROE

  According to Peter Lawford, on Saturday, 4 August, the last day of her life, Marilyn said a terrible thing when she refused to come to a party at his house on the beach: ‘What – so they can pass me round like a piece of meat? No thanks. I’ve had enough of that. I don’t want to be used by anyone any more, Frank, Bobby, your brother-in-law – I can’t even get through to him any more. Everyone uses me.’

  ‘Please come,’ Lawford begged. ‘It will take you out of yourself.’

  ‘No, I’m shattered. I’ve got no more answers for anyone.
Do me a favour, though: tell the president I’ve been trying to call him. Say goodbye to him from me. Tell him I’ve done my bit.’

  Her voice sank to a murmur and Lawford, unable to understand what she was saying, had to shout her name several times as if she was deaf. After a long, exhausted sigh, she said, ‘Say “See you” to Pat and to the president and to you too, because you are a nice guy.’

  Lawford could hear she wasn’t crying wolf; he could feel her sinking. ‘See you’, he realised, doesn’t necessarily mean ‘Goodbye’. Sometimes it means, ‘I’m doing my best. I’m trying to see you.’

  Los Angeles, University of California

  June 1966

  As incompatible as they were inseparable, Marilyn and Ralph were losing one another, but not because they were going their separate ways. They were losing themselves in each other, like reversible figures on face cards, joined at the hip but staring off enigmatically in different directions. A fifty-five-year-old man and a woman trying to escape childhood, who met somewhere between daylight and memories, channelled words and remembered dreams, silence and tears. Love is always the remembrance of past love, desire is always the forgetting of other desires. Parallel worlds such as theirs always collide by accident and result in mutual checkmate.

  In the past, images had reassured and protected her. Being photographed felt like a painless caress, a way of arousing desire so she could hide from the devastation of love. She’d always wanted to be desired so she wouldn’t have to ask whether she was loved, but now passion had devastated love and even desire for her. Passion had made language turn in on itself, and her body had no way of anchoring it. When you love somebody you love their words, you visualise their presence. But Marilyn felt passion for Greenson; she waited for him, he overwhelmed her with his words and images. Susceptible as she was to losing herself, to being overwhelmed by the other, she loved him to the point of hallucination, the moment where the fulfilment of love no longer has anything to do with love, and its object is no longer a person. She didn’t recognise him in his concrete, specific reality; instead he became a collection of signs, a towering abstraction, and this unreal creation was all that existed for her. Passion-fuelled love plays off madness, like co-stars in a movie. People have good reason to speak of amour fou. It homes in very close to madness before veering off at the last moment. When psychosis sets in, the love is bankrupt or dead. So it was inevitable that their parting would also be a question of passion, a confusion between the end of love and death itself.

  After Marilyn’s death, Greenson gave a talk at a symposium at UCLA entitled ‘Sex Without Passion’, in which, by implication, he also discussed its opposite: passion without sex. Convinced by Marilyn’s sex life that desire and love were radically disconnected in her, he began with thoughts about women and sexual desire in general:

  ‘Many women approaching their forties need sex and a sexual relationship to reassure themselves that they are still lovable and physically attractive people. But above all they need a sexual relationship to convince themselves they are lovable. Remember, a woman has one enormous advantage in the sexual act: she can perform it or let it be performed upon her without doing anything. She does not have to do anything in order to be able to give sexual satisfaction to someone. Women are able to use sex in non-sexual ways for non-sexual purposes. You see a great deal in recent years of people who engage in sexual activity without love and without passion. They use it for one or another reason, for conquest, or reassurance, for revenge or something of that order. Some women cannot allow themselves to feel directly, emotionally involved, with fantasies about the man with whom they are doing something as intimate as sex, and that is what sex is, a very intimate act. To be this intimately involved with someone means to them that he could hurt them, he could damage them, he could leave them. So they have to distance themselves from him and block out their fantasies.

  ‘The interesting thing about the married men in their forties is that they admit they have less desire for sexual relations, but if you pursue this problem of frigidity in the male you will find that they are less interested in sex particularly with their wives . . . What is at the root of these special problems? . . . The man of forty-five or fifty can no longer kid himself that he has unlimited horizons for future opportunity for success. At forty-five he knows how close he is to making it or failing . . . At forty- five there does arise in the American male concern about his health, this has to do with the process of ageing . . . At forty-five if there should be some diminution of the erection, or in the capacity to maintain one, there does loom up in a man’s mind the worry over possibly getting impotent.

  ‘This fear of being found impotent might perhaps dissuade him from having intercourse, to avoid finding out about it. He may be using various rationalisations to avoid sex, or may use some kind of instrumentalities to help him with sex. I don’t know how prevalent the use of various gadgets is to help along sexual practices, but I do not think it is localised to Beverly Hills or Hollywood alone. It seems to be quite frequent, at least in my practice, among some of the patients I know.

  ‘Many men have a fear of promiscuity, partly out of the fear of impotence and partly in order to deny that impotence is a real consideration. They are not faithful because of a sense of morality, they remain moral because they are afraid of being a failure as a gadabout. They are true to their wives, or at least they remain unisexual or asexual, because they are afraid of not being able to compete with other men any more for a woman.’

  Greenson’s absence was another step in the process of Marilyn’s destabilisation that his overbearing presence had set in train two years ago. Words like ‘transport’, ‘rapture’, ‘exile’ made her see that her distracted love of him was reducing her to a stray, a displaced person, like the woman in the painting in his Santa Monica office or the little girl she once was, whom Grace McKee had driven across town in her black 1940 American Bantam Hollywood. McKee hadn’t told her where she was taking her until suddenly on El Centro Boulevard she saw a three-storey building. On the red-brick façade, she read ‘LOS ANGELES ORPHANS HOME’.

  To fall out of love is also to fall out of yourself, out of language. If you have been abandoned as a child, the ensuing vertigo, the sense of being pulled out of time, draws you back into the chaos of childhood. So Marilyn felt herself being reunited with the lonely child she once was, the child who wants to die.

  Los Angeles, Hollywood Sign

  June 1962

  When was it? Late one night, Marilyn phoned André de Dienes and told him she couldn’t sleep. She told him to come and take pictures of her, in a dark alley maybe; she said she’d pose sad and lonely. He threw his equipment into his car, and set out into the night. He lit her with the headlights, and took a series of pictures fraught with melodrama. He wondered if she was just acting, whatever that meant. Was she conscious that something tragic was going to happen? She’d grabbed life so firmly, she’d flung her arms round it so passionately, that she couldn’t help embracing death in the process. Passion is a love unto death. Joined by passion, Greenson and Marilyn hadn’t made love, so now all that was left to them was to make death, together or apart.

  The following evening, as the pink haze in the LA sky deepened to crimson, Marilyn phoned Joan Greenson and said she wanted to go out for a drive – did she want to come? Joan picked her up in her convertible. Marilyn had on a maroon turtleneck and beige linen trousers and gave directions, her hair blowing in the wind, as Joan drove. At a set of lights a truck driver pulled up alongside them and asked her if she wanted to go out on a date. When she didn’t answer, he yelled, ‘Who do you think you are, for fuck’s sake – Marilyn Monroe?’

  Leaving Santa Monica Boulevard, they headed north up La Brea Avenue. Overhead, planes began their descent to LAX, like cumbersome birds returning to roost in the vast city, their landing lights flashing, the visceral backthrust of their jet engines merging with the steady roar of the evening traffic. They crossed Sunset by the Chinese The
ater and headed up by Cahuenga, past the Hollywood Reservoir on the edge of the Hills. When they emerged from the maze of curving little streets that led to Griffith Park, Joan realised Marilyn was taking them to the Hollywood Sign. Soon she saw it rising hundreds of feet into the air like a giant subtitle on a shot of a steep, wooded hillside. ‘HOLLYWOOD’. Nine letters, fifty feet high, thirty wide. They got out at its base. The night sky was matt blue and, in front of them, stretching as far as the sea, millions of points of light wavered like galaxies in the sky.

  ‘Look at it pulsing in the night, like something out of the movies,’ Marilyn said, gesturing at the city. ‘Tormented souls wandering in the city of angels, suspended somewhere between Hell and Purgatory.’

  Warning signs indicated a sheer drop that fell away within feet of where they were standing. From time to time a car passed, manoeuvring cautiously on the reddish sandy road. Joan said she felt scared.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Marilyn reassured her. ‘You get some weird characters here, even coyotes sometimes, but nothing’s ever happened when I’ve come here, except maybe I’ve thought of throwing myself into the pit. Romantic, eh? “MARILYN MONROE FOUND WITH HER SKULL SHATTERED AT CITY LANDMARK. The Hollywood Sign, an advertising gimmick put up fifty years ago by the real-estate company Hollywoodland, was yesterday the site of a tragedy. Since the last four letters spelling ‘land’ fell down, the sign has become an icon for the movie industry and the city’s three million inhabitants.” Oh, except you can’t get near it now. It used to be a favourite place for suicides, but now you’ve got to climb a tall fence if you want to end it all off this town’s name.’

  Los Angeles, Pinyon Canyon

  Autumn 1970

  In 1950 Joseph Mankiewicz had given Marilyn one of her first major parts in All About Eve. He was known in Hollywood as the analysts’ filmmaker and the filmmakers’ analyst. A transplanted easterner and son of European emigrants, like Greenson, although German-Jewish rather than Russian-Jewish in his case, he had had a similarly cultivated New York upbringing and thought of California as a sort of exile, a ‘cultural desert’. He spent most of his time with the German-Jewish artists and intellectuals who had fled Nazism. Hollywood was a city of ivory towers and obscene wealth, as far as he was concerned, a waste of sand and stupidity. He never got used to the abrupt way night fell, the lack of transition, the way actions and objects took precedence over thought and fantasy. Freud was the main link between him and Greenson – virtually all Mankiewicz’s films have a silently reproachful portrait or statue lurking in the shadows, undercutting the hero’s life and achievements, and in real life he had a portrait of Freud in his house to remind him of humanity’s irreparable flaws. He had turned to the movie business after giving up his psychiatry studies as a young student.