The autopsy is conducted at Los Angeles County Coroner’s mortuary at ten-thirty a.m., on 5 August. Her body is brought over from the morgue, where the staff have refused huge sums to allow people to photograph the most famous corpse in the world. Bids went up to ten thousand dollars, and Marilyn’s body had to be taken out of the refrigerator and hidden in a broom cupboard. The coroner’s team proves more amenable. On Sunday evening, after the autopsy is over, compartment number thirty-three is opened and Leigh Wiener, a Life photographer, takes pictures of Marilyn’s eviscerated body. Dying is, among other things, a process whereby one is turned into an object, merchandise, a piece of meat like the wild horses. For one last time, Marilyn was reduced to the thing she had desperately wanted not to be any more: an image. Arthur Miller would later write, ‘The encounter between an individual pathology and the insatiable appetite of a capitalist culture of consumption. How is one to understand this mystery? This obscenity?’
Beverly Hills, Roxbury Drive
7 August 1962
Greenson hadn’t even waited to sit in the chair facing Wexler before he asked, ‘Do you want to hear her tapes? Her last sessions. Her last solo.’
Wexler groaned. Greenson was entrusting him with Marilyn’s voice the way you tell a stranger in a bar a secret so you won’t have to think about it any more.
‘When she gave me the tapes to listen to,’ Greenson went on, ‘she said, “I have absolute confidence and trust you will never reveal to a living soul what I say to you.” As she was leaving, she asked me to erase them after I’d listened to them. But I couldn’t. I feel shattered. I don’t know what I’ll do with them, but I’m going to transcribe them at least.’
It was her voice more than what she said that prevented Greenson erasing the tapes. He always liked to think of himself as a provider of meaning, but her voice reduced him to a helpless member of the audience. He gave the tapes to his colleague to listen to in private. He said they could talk about them afterwards, if he wanted.
Wexler played the first tape and started when he heard:
I went to Joan Crawford’s. She asked me to wait while she gave her daughter an enema. The little one yelled she didn’t want one, or at least not the way she gave them. Crawford was so furious she was going to hit her. I offered to do it myself. I gave the little angel an enema so gently it made her burst out laughing. Joan gave me a sour look and said, ‘I do not think one needs to spoil the children.’ I got the impression she could be cruel towards her daughter . . . Doctor, I want you to help me get rid of Murray. While she was giving me an enema last night I was thinking to myself, Lady, even though you’re very good at this, you’ve got to go. I began remembering a little bit about the enemas I had as a child. They were what you and Dr Freud call repressed memories. I’ll work on it and give you another tape.
Marilyn moved on to a different subject on the second tape.
I stood naked in front of my full-length mirrors for a long time yesterday. I was all made-up with my hair done. What did I see? My breasts are beginning to sag a bit . . . My waist isn’t bad. My ass is what it should be, the best there is. Legs, knees and ankles still shapely. And my feet are not too big. OK, Marilyn, you have it all there.
Vienna, 19 Berggasse
1933
One night, as he was trying to get to sleep, Greenson was visited by an unnerving, long-buried memory. It was of one of the Master’s gatherings of his disciples, where Freud had discussed ways to achieve closure in transference. He had used a strange term, ‘dissolution’, and explained that transference could create emotional bonds similar to those that analysts experienced in their private lives. In these cases, the analysts could only detach themselves from the patient by forming another attachment – to another person or to another aspect of the patient. ‘As long as one is alive and experiencing desire,’ Freud had said, ‘all one will ever do is exchange one hold for another, substitute one influence for another.’ To dispel any lingering illusions on the part of his disciples, he had added, ‘To think these are the product of error in any way only leads one to make a succession of further errors.’
For the purposes of illustration Freud, as he often did, had taken an example from literature, in this case the fairy tale Hans in Luck. He had left the room for a second and returned with a book from the shelves in his consulting room. Quickly finding his place, he began reading in a husky voice. The low light in the waiting room, Freud’s tired voice, the painfully slow way he read – all these gave the story a tragic dimension that might, Greenson thought afterwards, have been unwarranted.
The story was straightforward, as simple as fortune itself, a parabola that rose and fell in a swift, pre-ordained curve. After working hard for his master for seven years, Hans finally decided he needed to go home and see his poor mother again, so he asked for his wages. Grateful for his work, his master paid him with a lump of silver as big as his head. The only problem was that the silver was very hard to carry. So, at the first opportunity Hans exchanged it for a horse. But that was problematic too, for different reasons, so he exchanged the horse for a cow, then the cow for a pig, then the pig for a goose, then the goose for a scissor-grinder’s wheel, and finally ended up with a heavy stone. After a while, tired and thirsty, he stopped at a well, rested the stone on the edge and bent down to drink. But, as he did so, his shoulder nudged the stone and it fell down the well. Mightily relieved, Hans then set off with a light heart, his troubles at an end, and walked on till he reached his mother’s house.
‘This is what I wanted you to understand,’ Freud had concluded, shutting the book. ‘As far as sexual drives are concerned, we can only end up with permutations and displacements, never with complete renunciation or an overcoming or resolution of the complex, the ultimate mystery. That is sexuality, a permanent exchange in which every drive and act inevitably provokes a succession of other drives and acts.’ This might not be word for word what Freud had said that evening, but it was the gist Greenson remembered, the moral being: everything has a price in transference, just as it does in love.
That evening in Vienna, Greenson had felt emboldened to ask Freud what he thought the transferential exchange revolved around.
‘Sexuality, always sexuality,’ Freud had replied. ‘After forty years of practice I still find what I did when I started: the scenes our patients introduce us to are invariably sexual. As are the traumatisms they involve us in, or play out before our eyes. If somebody transfers his infantile complexes onto us, it is wrong to assume that means he has shed them. He has retained a part of them, the affect, in a different form, the transference. He has changed dress, or skin. He has sloughed off a layer and given it to the analyst. So it is a delicate matter, the attempt to bring transference to an end, since this could simply mean the end of the subject who speaks to us. God forbid that he should now go forth naked and without a skin. As in Hans in Luck, our therapeutic gains are always the result of an exchange. The last term of the exchange only disappears into the well when the patient dies.’ After saying this, Freud fell silent for a while, then bade the trainee analysts farewell with icily punctilious courtesy.
As he lay there in the dark remembering this conversation, Greenson found himself thinking Freud had been mistaken – that people exchange throughout their lives not only desires and objects, but also identities, whether simultaneous or successive, identities that are not simply sexual but also familial and social. He examined the fairy tale for insights that might help him understand what had happened between Marilyn and him. Was the question of sex less central to analysis and transference than Hans’s constant need to exchange what he has, the quest to free oneself of earthly burdens and return to one’s original state? Greenson was struck by the fact that Hans was going back to his mother’s house. He was returning to where he was born in order to die.
He saw himself and his patient facing one another, talking like awkward actors, ‘dancing in the dark’, as Marilyn would sometimes sing under her breath when she fou
nd it hard to put something into words. All their sessions had been like acts in a play, a comedy of errors in which they were the stars. Transference defined everything on stage: her memories, stories and dreams; the costumes she wore to re-enact her experiences, the costumes she gave him to wear for his part in her inner theatre; the lines she delivered in the tragedy she had written; the time he spent waiting backstage, like a clothes rail on which she hung her discarded costumes at every scene change.
But now the comedy was over, the curtain had fallen, and the enigma of her self was intact. Greenson went over it all. Her identity: the layers she constantly sloughed off in a permanent cycle, revealing herself only to mask herself again. Her theatrical transference, her excessive displays of love towards him. Her passion for being naked. Her tremulous, exiled image that always seemed about to lose its balance on screen. The way, in life as well as in the movies, she seemed to tread an invisible line between the rawest reality and the purest fantasy. He saw it all again and it made no sense. He hadn’t tried to strip her of her identities, to estrange her from the characters she brought with her – it was her choice – and he was right not to have tried to, he thought. Love is a skin. Being loved protects us from the coldness of the world. Identity is the onion you must be careful not to peel. Because when you remove the last layer of skin, what have you got left?
Beverly Hills, Roxbury Drive
8 August 1962
Wexler was becoming increasingly exhausted by his colleague’s anguished, obsessive need to make him watch the film of Marilyn’s last weeks. Greenson spoke in a halting, disjointed way, coughing constantly, as if he were an actor reciting lines from a script he hadn’t really learned.
‘Her last year. I should tell you about her last year. She had come to me because she couldn’t take any more. I put all my effort, all my language, into supporting her. Of course I saw a warning in Something’s Got to Give, but I didn’t want to listen.’
‘I know you didn’t,’ said Wexler. ‘She was in agony when you left for Europe. You underestimated the schizophrenic element of her condition. In the brief time I saw her, I was struck by the fact she often spoke about herself in the third person: “Marilyn would do that . . . She wouldn’t say this . . . She would play that scene like this . . .” I pointed this habit out to her and asked if she heard a voice in her head saying “she”. She looked at me in surprise and said, “Don’t you? I don’t hear just one. It’s more like a crowd.”’
When he returned the tapes to Greenson, Wexler was unsure whether to draw his colleague’s attention to an obvious but seemingly overlooked aspect of his and Marilyn’s folie à deux. Eventually he decided to speak his mind even if it jeopardised their friendship.
‘You know as well as anyone,’ he began, ‘that massive acts of transference are always addressed to the mother and that the couch speeds up regression. In a way, by dying, Marilyn has now rejoined her mother. She has shed the final veil, like a luckless Hans losing his final possession down the well . . .’
‘Well,’ Greenson started to agree, ‘that was precisely why I didn’t let her lie on the couch for most of our analysis – so she wouldn’t regress. She was ready by the end, though. Those tapes were a method we developed for her to talk without seeing who she was talking to. But I don’t think I was playing a maternal role there.’
‘Hence your decision to grow a beard. You wanted to reassure her and yourself that you were a father rather than a mother.’
‘No. I was just copying Freud.’
‘All you ever do is deny things,’ Wexler snapped. ‘You’re constantly saying, no, I wasn’t her mother, no, I didn’t think of myself as her mother. But you know from Freud that when someone says “This is not about my mother”, that’s exactly when you’re dealing with the mother. Do you want me to spell it out for you? You couldn’t take each other any more. You left her physically, but you couldn’t leave her emotionally. She wanted to leave you, but you couldn’t let her go. Let’s face it. The loss you felt was that of an abandoned child.’
Greenson stared at his colleague with a look of hatred, but didn’t say anything. Wexler decided not to push it any further.
Greenson never stopped thinking of himself as a father to Marilyn. On 20 August 1962, he wrote to Marianne Kris: ‘I was her therapist, the good father who would not disappoint her and who would bring her insights, and if not insights, just kindness. I had become the most important person in her life, [but] I also felt guilty that I put a burden on my own family. But there was something very lovable about this girl and we all cared about her and she could be delightful.’ He probably never acknowledged that his approach took him into areas far removed from Freudian theory, where, instead of father, life, love and desire, the signature themes were mother, homosexuality, excrement and death. With the freedom allowed by transference, Marilyn said unthinkable things on her tapes in the voice of someone who can’t pretend to be a nice little girl in love with Daddy any more. Raw things, dark things. Dark like her mother’s hair and death; dark like the clothes of Paula Strasberg, ‘the Black Baroness’, or Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar; dark like Eunice Murray’s uniform; dark like shit or a dirty child. Dirtiness is sexless, like love, and, for Marilyn, these two states coalesced in the pure passivity of the enema.
What if the only way Marilyn could escape Greenson was by dying? Wexler wondered. And if the only way he could possess her was by killing her? When he listened to the tapes, Wexler felt he knew that the truth that had played itself out between them was that you can kill someone by caring about them too much. He couldn’t say this to his colleague, but the piece of music Greenson had wanted to play, a ‘transference in father major’, as it were, had mutated imperceptibly into ‘compassion for suffering in mother minor’. At first Greenson had decided not to give her any injections himself, obviously because it seemed too phallic an act to him, but then he’d changed his mind and, towards the end of her life, had often given her tranquilliser shots. And, at the same time, in leaving Engelberg to take care of the prescriptions and Eunice Murray the enemas, he had also imperceptibly assumed the place of the mother in Marilyn’s love for him, and also in his love for Marilyn.
By the time The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis came out, relations between the two colleagues had cooled. So Wexler smiled indulgently when he read Ralph Greenson, MD, declare, ‘It is the doctor who has the right to explore the naked body and who has no fear or disgust of blood, mucus, vomit, urine, or faeces [Freud, 1926b, p. 206]. He is the rescuer from pain and panic, the establisher of order from chaos; emergency functions performed by the mother in the first years of life. In addition, the physician inflicts pain, cuts and pierces the flesh and intrudes into every opening in the body. He is reminiscent of the mother of bodily intimacy as well as the representative of the sadomasochistic fantasies involving both parents.’
Westwood Memorial Park Cemetery, Glendon Avenue
August 1984 and August 1962
An August morning in 1984. Truman Capote is being laid to rest in the centrepiece of a nondescript cemetery, a decrepit pink mausoleum approached by a tree-lined avenue. A pianist discreetly plays airs from House of Flowers, the Harold Arlen musical for which he wrote the libretto, as cameras roll at the entrance to the funerary chapel. The atmosphere is one of furtive animation, the etiolated bustle of old, ferociously social acquaintances meeting up after a long absence. People hug and whisper stagily amid a rustle of linen suits. Trembling lips air-kiss an array of wrinkled or silicon-smooth cheeks. Feet shift unsteadily on the gravel. Eyes blink behind tinted bifocals as past conquests heave into view. The fading stars of the 1950s and 1960s embrace with frozen smiles; the Californian sun, affairs, stimulants and the passage of time have all taken their toll. And as they semaphore to one another, their slender fingers waving on fragile wrists, the surrounding high-rises plunge the cemetery’s ill-kept lawns into the shade.
The same cemetery, twenty-two years earlier. It is one in the afternoon on
8 August 1962, when the Reverend A. J. Soldan conducts Marilyn Monroe’s remains to the funerary chapel. ‘How beautiful the Creator made her,’ he preaches. Marilyn had asked for Judy Garland’s song ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ from The Wizard of Oz to be played. The tape recording sounds muffled and scratchy, a long way away. The service begins with a halting rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony on the organ, and then psalms. Carl Sandburg has been asked by DiMaggio to give the address but he is too ill to attend, so Lee Strasberg speaks instead. The click and whirr of cameras from every news organisation in the world drowns him out. The occasion doesn’t offer much in the way of a spectacle, though. Only close relations have been invited. Westwood may be nearby, but it is no Hollywood. Joe DiMaggio, who planned everything, insisted that no one from the business could attend: no producers, no studio directors, no actors, no screenwriters. He is determined to play the part of Marilyn’s bodyguard, which she had given him ten years earlier when they met, to the bitter end. She asked him to guard her body so she wouldn’t come to grief on it herself.
Marilyn would have been glad to see Romi there, grim-faced but dry-eyed, supported by Hildi and Joan, who, with their black veils and shining tears, add pathos to the scene. ‘There were hundreds of reporters and photographers,’ Joan Greenson said afterwards. ‘At first, we weren’t allowed to enter the chapel, because the undertaker said “the family” was with the deceased. What family? If she’d had a family, we wouldn’t have been there.’
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