Daniel Greenson is in tears. He had always thought of Marilyn Monroe as a ghost, really. He remembers talking to her about politics three months earlier in Santa Monica, trying to bring her round to his militant position. He remembers how she put on a black wig and went out apartment-hunting with him when he decided to move out of his parents’ place. He remembers seeing her, wearing the same disguise, sitting at the back of the crowded auditorium in Beverly Hills High School, avidly following one of his father’s lectures. He remembers the last time he saw the woman they are now laying to rest. It was an evening in June. He had given Marilyn a goodbye kiss; he was going out, she was peeling potatoes.
This is the day that Daniel Greenson, who is studying medicine, decides to become a psychoanalyst – not in order to follow in his father’s footsteps, but to understand what he had been a witness to: the game of hide-and-seek the actress and her psychoanalyst had seemed to play blindfolded, their verbal hand-to-hand, or soul-to-soul, combat. In time, his life and work would bring home to him that one can never know the truth about a person, whether one is their son or their psychoanalyst. But he now realises that the truth always hides in words, in the brief notes slipped under a door or the remarks whispered in a distracted ear in a cemetery avenue, which, like bodies dying if they are not touched, leave no trace unless they are recorded.
Last take, last scene. The bronze coffin with a champagne-coloured satin lining is open. Marilyn, in a Pucci green dress and a matching green chiffon scarf with a bouquet of pink roses in her arms, is ready for her final role. Her team has been busy: Marjorie Pelcher, her dresser, has worked up her outfit; Agnes Flanagan, her hairdresser, has seen to her hair; Whitey Snyder has plied his magic; even her old hairdresser, Pearl Porterfield, has reported for duty and now casts a knowing eye over the results. When the body was embalmed, cushion ticking was needed to compensate for the damage done to Marilyn’s breasts by the autopsy. Her hair is in terrible condition and Agnes Flanagan ends up using a wig based on her screen image. The credits for this production would have to make special mention of the faithful Whitey (whose nickname came from his skill at mixing whites without the result looking like plaster or snow). Years earlier, he had jokingly promised Marilyn that he would make her up for the last time, make sure nobody else art-designed her final look. More recently, she had given him a jewel from Tiffany’s as a token of her affection: a clip brooch mounted on a gold coin with an inscription, which he never revealed. ‘This is for you, my dear Whitey,’ she had said, ‘while I’m still warm.’ He was Fox’s head of make-up, and had created the look of all the stars of the day: Betty Grable, Gene Tierney, Linda Darnell. Destiny had come full circle when he had done Marilyn’s make-up for Something’s Got to Give. Now he has to drink a whole bottle of gin before he can make her up for the last time.
A short line of men and women dressed in black is silhouetted against an almost white sky. The coffin slowly makes its way past the crypts of two of her transient mothers, Ana Lower and Grace McKee Goddard. Her crypt is sealed. If she could see the footage of her funeral, she would have one last surprise: of all her lovers and husbands, only one has come – Joe DiMaggio. Three times a week for the next twenty years, he will lay flowers at her plaque, just as he had promised her he would. She had made him repeat his promise; she had wanted to know he’d be as faithful as William Powell was after Jean Harlow’s death.
It is a sad, hollow ceremony, thoughtful but futile, like a passer-by picking up a toy that’s fallen out of a pushchair and carefully putting it on a wall, even though he knows nobody will come for it. Everyone tries to give a meaning to it, but it feels like an image that can be neither articulated nor erased. ‘You know where our poor idol is buried?’ George Cukor said later. ‘The cemetery entrance has a car dealership and a bank on either side; she lies between Wilshire Boulevard and Westwood Boulevard, surrounded by traffic.’
Capote is buried in the same cemetery a few feet away. A friend of Marilyn’s murmurs into the distracted ear of one of the mourners, ‘He loved her, you know, as much as he could love any woman. Nineteen fifty-four in New York: that was their time. They used to go dancing in a club that shut down, the El Morocco on East 54th Street.’ There’s a photograph of them: two bodies moving on a narrow, slightly raised dance floor that floats like a black circle in a ring of blinding lights. They were already out of it when they’d got to the club. She kicked off her shoes so as not to tower over him and they danced themselves into exhaustion. A tiny man in a pin-striped suit, dark tie and tortoiseshell glasses clinging to a radiant blonde, as if he’s shifting a grandfather clock. She isn’t looking at her partner but out at the smoke-filled room. He isn’t looking at anything, his whole body rigid either with shame and sadness, or perhaps joy.
The musician Artie Shaw stands to give the address. In a low voice, he says, ‘Truman died of a surfeit of everything, of an excess of life, of living too intensely. Yet in the last few years it seemed as if he were ready to give it all up. And in time, what will remain won’t be his celebrity or his dealings with celebrities, but his work. That is what he wanted us to remember. Truman, your music will play in our ears long after we have forgotten the names of the figures who inspired it. Say hello to your friend Marilyn, who you never took in your arms and who loved you more than most of the men she slept with. Your plaques are now separated by three walls bearing the inscriptions: “TENDERNESS”, “DEVOTION”, “PEACE”. Those are what you gave one another and what life begrudged you so bitterly. Tell her that your friends have come to spend a moment with their beloved vanished stars, that we will remember her, Marilyn, the white queen without a castle, and that we will never remember her so well as in your words. Now, in both your shadows, our memories turn to your splendid account of her. Truman, the truest of writers, you knew better than anyone how to balance reality and truth in your novels. Goodbye, Truman, may you have a long, peaceful death.’
The last of the mourners disperse. Turning away from the headstones of Natalie Wood and Darryl F. Zanuck, they return to their cars by way of the north-east corner of the cemetery so they can pay their respects to the plaque that reads ‘MARILYN MONROE’. So many graves, so many names. Years later, Dean Martin, Jack Lemmon and Billy Wilder will also be buried – if that is the word for a bronze coffin slid into a niche in a breeze-block wall – alongside Marilyn in Westwood Memorial Park.
And in the distance, the overhanging hills with the white letters spelling out ‘HOLLYWOOD’ are already hazy in the smog.
Beverly Hills, Milton ‘Mickey’ Rudin’s law firm
6 August 1962
Mickey Rudin had negotiated Marilyn’s last contract for Something’s Got to Give. When he arrived at the death scene, he accompanied her body to the nearby mortuary, then rang Joe DiMaggio to ask him to help organise the funeral.
Among the invoices Rudin had to pay on the estate’s behalf was a final one from Ralph Greenson for $1,450 for sessions in July and the first four days of August, and another from 20th Century Fox for a coffee pot, which the commissary had provided for her last birthday.
Marilyn Monroe’s estate was estimated at $92,781. Her last will divided the money equally between her mother, her half-sister and friends, and left various objects to a value of $3,200 to Lee Strasberg. As far as licensing rights and royalties were concerned, the principal beneficiary was the Anna Freud Centre in London, an institute ‘dedicated to the emotional well-being of children’. Marilyn had left a sizeable legacy to her former analyst in New York, Marianne Kris, ‘so that she can continue her work in the psychiatric institutions and groups of her choice’. Kris had in turn chosen the Hampstead Clinic in London, a decision that Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud’s biographer, explains by saying, ‘Marilyn Monroe’s bequest came to the Hampstead Clinic while the clinic was adjusting to the tremendously influential work that Anna Freud had undertaken outside it – work in which the plight of children, like the young Marilyn Monroe, who had been bounced from one foster home to anot
her, was central.’ Another patient of Marianne Kris, Jackie Kennedy, also bequeathed ten thousand dollars to Anna Freud’s institute, probably on her analyst’s recommendation.
Marilyn’s financial bequests, her transference onto whoever was the beloved analyst at the time, and her numerous sexual relationships, form a strange nexus around her death and her will. Yet her relations with successive analysts had deteriorated so badly that one is entitled to ask whether she would have left her money to the same people if she had had time to alter her last wishes. She had made it clear in the last months of her life that she was intending to rewrite her will, and had arranged to meet Mickey Rudin to discuss this on Tuesday, 7 August. She died three days before. This meant that every screen appearance of the woman whom the Freudian establishment had refused to let play a patient of Sigmund Freud benefited an institution that bears the name of Freud’s daughter.
Since the actress’s death, the broadcast rights for her films and songs have brought in approximately $1.5 million a year, more than Marilyn earned in her life. Hundreds of brands have paid for the right to use her image for publicity or marketing purposes. Besides posters and T-shirts, Marilyn’s face and body are reproduced everywhere – even on schoolbooks, venetian blinds, tights, billiard cues and cake moulds.
From the day she died, everything she owned became a cult object. Hyman Engelberg said he had hundreds of calls from women claiming that if they had known she was in such dire straits they would have tried to help her. She had not only been an object of desire to men, he realised, but also a lost girl with whom many women empathised profoundly.
In December 1999, the possessions she’d left to Strasberg were sold for $13.4 million at Christie’s in New York. Everything she’d touched had become a fetish. The wool cardigan from Saks, which she wore at the end of June 1962 in Barris’s photographs on Santa Monica beach, went for $167,500; the backless dress from Let’s Make Love for more than $52,900. The designer Tommy Hilfiger paid a fortune for two pairs of jeans from The Misfits. Bidding on the Jean Louis muslin sheath dress encrusted with tiny rhinestones she’d worn for seven minutes at Madison Square Garden went up to almost a million dollars. Her books, many of them with handwritten marginalia, were auctioned as a single lot for six hundred thousand. One lot consisted of a scrap of paper with ‘He doesn’t love me’ scribbled on it – a remark that could have applied to plenty of men in her lifetime but virtually none today. Two other notes were auctioned, one of which read, ‘If I have to commit suicide, I must go through with it.’ The other, folded inside a book, was a poem:
People say I am lucky to be alive.
It’s hard to believe.
Everything hurts so much.
A couple of years after Marilyn’s death, two screenwriters, David L. Wolper and Terry Sanders, began researching a film about her, The Legend of Marilyn Monroe. They got in touch with Doc Goddard, the widowed husband of Grace McKee. He refused to be interviewed on film, but he did tell them the whereabouts of the white piano that had been bought by Gladys Baker for her daughter, sold for $235 to pay for her hospitalisation when Marilyn was nine years old and subsequently bought back as soon as Marilyn could afford it. It was in J. Santini & Bros Fireproof Warehouse somewhere in New Jersey. They shot it from below, like the sledge Rosebud in Citizen Kane, and added a voiceover: ‘This white piano was the child she never had.’ As the camera zoomed in, there was no escaping the fact that the piano wasn’t originally white but had been repainted, probably for a 1930s musical comedy. It was as artificial as Marilyn’s blonde hair, as the screen separating life from the movies, and psychoanalysis from madness in Hollywood. At Christie’s, it found a new buyer, the singer Mariah Carey, and fetched $662,500 this time.
The gift shops along Sunset Boulevard still sell maps of Hollywood with Marilyn’s address included among those of living movie stars. Shots of the outside of her house were used in a biopic in 1980 called Marilyn: The Secret History, with Catherine Hicks playing her. The director David Lynch, who for a long time planned to make a film of the last months of her life, owns a relic of sorts of her: a piece of the fabric on which she is supposed to have posed for the famous nude calendar that To m Kelley shot, possibly the inspiration for his film Blue Velvet.
All these objects sealed off behind glass, the iconic possessions that have become part of collective memory, the images suspended like freeze-frames in a perpetual state of mourning – they are the relics of a myth, these days. Her words are more complicated. Thousands of pages must have been written about her life: novels, essays, biographies, investigations, confessionals of every stripe. Only the people who really loved her – Joe DiMaggio, Ralph Roberts, Whitey Snyder – haven’t put pen to paper. When Joseph Mankiewicz, by then retired, came across W. J. Weatherby’s Conversations with Marilyn, in the mid-1970s, he was shocked that no one had asked Weatherby why he had waited fifteen years to gather together his memories and make them into a book. Why was he only now describing in detail what she had said, her gestures, clothes and facial expressions, using notes he’d made in the last two years of her life? In his preface, Weatherby said he wanted to strip away the ‘mental makeup’ she hid behind and reveal the ‘true Marilyn’. Mankiewicz hated people using psychology to justify self-interest. Saying you’re doing something for love when you’re doing it for money, that’s real prostitution.
The range of motives for people’s public actions tends to be limited to either love, hatred, self-interest, honour, money or revenge . . . Often it’s only a variant of one thing: the need to disguise what one is because one is afraid one might be nothing. Sexual anxiety is nothing compared to status anxiety, the fear of not being recognised by the society in which one lives. Mankiewicz thought this was true of Marilyn. It was also true of her psychoanalyst, of her biographers, of everyone who’s written or made films about her in the hope that a little of the stardust from her comet-like progress through the 1960s would rub off on them. But they shouldn’t talk about love, he thought. They’re selling her just as much as they’re selling themselves.
The truth is that, while there may be hundreds of books about this woman and her death, the documents themselves have disappeared or been buried with her. The recordings of her voice have been lost or erased. Thousands of hours of her speaking were captured by microphones all over her house. The tapes were hidden or destroyed after being processed by the public bodies or private individuals who commissioned the surveillance. The two centres of power, political and psychoanalytical, that dominated the last months of Marilyn’s life tried to erase everything to do with her in their archives. As for Fox, the studio that said her last movie could be a new beginning and offered her a glittering new contract, they gave instructions that everything related to her final film should be buried in the files.
Santa Monica, Franklin Street
August 1962–November 1979
The death of his patient had a devastating effect on Ralph Greenson, although when he talked about love and grief in regard to her, it was open to question whether he was in fact referring to amour-propre and social death. ‘Marilyn’s death was extremely painful to him,’ his widow would later say. ‘Not just that it was so public, which was terrible in itself, but that Marilyn, he felt, was doing much better. He knew he hadn’t quite brought her through, but she was better – and then to lose her, that was quite painful.’ Dr Greenson’s patients were surprised to see him grow a beard again. When a producer asked him why, he said he wanted to be someone else. Showing no inclination to go into therapy himself, he started practising child therapy. His colleagues noticed he wasn’t the fighter he used to be; the beard was his way of turning himself into an elder statesman. ‘He had lost a lot of the old fire,’ a member of the Psychoanalytic Institute said. ‘He still worked after that but he turned in on himself. He became a little strange . . .’ Photographs reveal a palpable physical and emotional decline. ‘He wanted to reinvent himself but ended up becoming a completely different person,’ another of his
colleagues said.
A week after Marilyn died, he went to New York at his wife’s instigation to be analysed by Max Schur. The friendship between the two analysts dated from their medical studies in Bern and Vienna. Their first session lasted hours, but Schur reassured him that he would soon be over the worst.
Initially unable to think or write, Greenson gradually realised that a kind of thin, almost transparent, veil of depression had settled over him. He began a memoir of his life, which he entitled My Father, the Doctor.
Marilyn Monroe was all I knew. She only used her original name, Norma Jeane, twice in our sessions, when we first met and just before I left for Europe. She never used Mortenson, her family name, nor did she say why she had chosen her mother’s maiden name as her stage name. I didn’t make the connection with my need always to be on stage. Don’t I treat my patients and give my talks and write my articles under an assumed name?
Romeo! As if. ‘Romeo the psychoanalyst’. However much he loved Shakespeare, my father didn’t have to call us Romeo and Juliet. I don’t know if Marilyn was thinking of it at the time, but on the last tape she gave me, she said, ‘I’ll take a year of day and night study of Shakespeare with Lee Strasberg. I’ll pay him to work only with me. He said I could do Shakespeare. I’ll make him prove it. That will give me the basics Olivier wanted. Then I’ll go to Olivier for the help he promised. And I’ll pay whatever he wants. Then I’ll produce and act in the Marilyn Monroe Shakespeare Film Festival, which will put his major plays on film. I’ll need you to keep me together for a year or more. I’ll pay you to be your only patient. I’ve read all of Shakespeare and practised a lot of lines. I won’t have to worry about the scripts. I’ll have the greatest scriptwriter who ever lived working for me and I don’t have to pay him. Oh, Monroe will have her hand in. I am going to do Juliet first. Don’t laugh. What with what make-up, costume and camera can do, my acting will create a Juliet who is fourteen, an innocent virgin, but whose budding womanhood is fantastically sexy.’ As for Greenschpoon, that felt too Brooklyn Jewish. But I didn’t renounce my father’s name. Changing it was really to do with giving up medicine. My father remained a general practitioner all his life and I suppose I always tried to show the same concern for my patients as he did. But what’s the good of writing about that?
Marilyn's Last Sessions Page 28
