Miner settled down in an armchair facing the picture window that was golden in the setting sun. Finally there was no possibility of seeing Marilyn. Now he could hear truths about her without complicating them by looking at her beauty, as everyone always did. He decided he was going to play that last tape again; he was never going to stop playing it. He pressed REWIND.
Downtown Los Angeles, West 1st Street
April 2006
Forger Backwright is alone in front of his computer in the Los Angeles Times building. Every light on every floor is on. After listening to John Miner’s recording again, he decides to publish the contents of Marilyn’s last sessions without raising any doubts as to the veracity of the former deputy coroner’s transcriptions. He figures he doesn’t need to explain the real reason Miner had broken his promise to Greenson – that it wasn’t because he wanted to salvage his reputation but because he was in financial trouble. He won’t let on that the old man had struck a hard bargain, or that personally he is sceptical of what Marilyn is reported to have said in her last sessions, especially the light, hopeful note in everything she had confided to her psychoanalyst. He won’t dwell on how uncannily her words echo what Dr Greenson himself had repeatedly said and written. By implying that she was killed, the tapes not only say – between the words, as it were – that she hasn’t committed suicide, but also that he hasn’t killed her. It isn’t the radiantly optimistic portrait of Marilyn that gives Backwright pause so much as the representation of Greenson as wholly indifferent to money: the faithful husband, committed analyst and attentive father to the lost little girl he had helped.
Forger Backwright isn’t convinced about who Marilyn was either. He replays the film he’s managed to download after searching for it for ages on BitTorrent: Marilyn in a black slip doing dirty things in the flickering light of a raddled piece of celluloid. It’s strange, he thinks. If it is her, if this pornographic sequence really shows Marilyn Monroe when she was still only Norma Jeane Mortenson, then she looks older in this piece of film, when she hasn’t turned twenty, than she does naked fifteen years later in the last take of Something’s Got to Give. Film’s skin is like a person’s: it grows slack, overwhelmed by time. Death has already touched these old images, but they are markedly less eloquent about sex and its weight of unhappiness than any words might have been. Staring at them, his mind full of the tapes he has just listened to and the thousands of pages he has read about her final years, Backwright feels like a film editor trying to construct a story with a beginning and an end out of scraps that make no sense. He knows the truth lies only in the contradictions between these different takes, the fragments of dialogue, the punchlines that didn’t make it into the final movie, the jump cuts and jerky camera movements.
The morning edition has been put to bed, and the journalist isn’t working any more, although he’s still here in front of his screen, in the middle of the night. Backwright has decided to keep his questions to himself for now, and to give them the only form that can come close to a semblance of truth. He thinks of the novel he began eight months earlier, after studying the memories and recordings John Miner had either relayed or invented. He’ll finish it now. Replay the whole murky story. He isn’t sure about the title: ‘MARILYN’S LAST SESSIONS’? He’ll see. He brings the first page of the manuscript up on the screen and starts to read:
Los Angeles, Downtown, West 1st Street
August 2005
Rewind the tape. Rerun the story. Replay Marilyn’s last session. The end: that’s always where a story starts.
Forger Backwright adds ‘REWIND’ as the title.
Further Reading
Like most people who have written about Marilyn Monroe, the author has not had access to private sources of letters and documents concerning the two main protagonists of this book.
At the Department of Special Collections at the University of California at Los Angeles, the letters between Ralph Greenson and Marilyn Monroe’s previous analysts are not available to the general public. At the library of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society, everything related to Monroe’s analysis is inaccessible.
The dialogue attributed to Marilyn Monroe is attested by different sources, including biographies and interviews. The contents of the tapes Dr Greenson is alleged to have had in his possession are quoted from their transcripts in Victim, The Secret Tapes of Marilyn Monroe, by Matthew Smith, and the 5 August 2005 edition of the Los Angeles Times.
The clinical and theoretical statements made by Dr Greenson are drawn from his published works and his archives at UCLA. Donald Spoto, Marilyn Monroe’s biographer, was able to consult them and they are quoted from the American edition of his biography. The same is true of the long letter sent by Monroe to Dr Greenson in February 1961.
Billy Wilder’s recollections come from Cameron Crowe’s collection of interviews.
The dialogue, reported speech and letters are either invented or quoted from the articles and books contained in the following bibliography:
Arnold, Eve, Marilyn Monroe, Harry N. Abrams, 1987
Barris, George, Marilyn, Her Life in Her Own Words, Citadel Press, 1995
Berthelsen, Detlev, Alltag bei Familie Freud; Die Erinnerungen der Paula Fichtl, Hoffman & Campe, 1987
Brown, Peter Harry, and Patte B. Barham, Marilyn, The Last Take, Signet, 1992
Capote, Truman, Music for Chameleons, Random House, 1980
Churchwell, Sarah, The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, Granta Books, 2005
Crowe, Cameron, Conversations with Billy Wilder, Faber and Faber, 1995
Dienes, André de, Marilyn mon amour, St Martin’s Press, 1985
—, Marilyn, Taschen, 2004
Farber, Stephen, and Mark Green, Hollywood on the Couch, William Morrow and Company, 1993
Freeman, Lucy, Why Norma Jeane Killed Marilyn Monroe, Hastings House, 1993
Greenson, Ralph, The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis, International Universities Press, 1967
—, Explorations in Psychoanalysis, International Universities Press, 1978
—, On Loving, Hating and Living Well, International Universities Press, 1993
Leaming, Barbara, Marilyn Monroe, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998
Mailer, Norman, Marilyn, Biography of Marilyn Monroe, Coronet, 1974
Mecacci, Luciano, Freudian Slips: The Casualties of Psychoanalysis from the Wolf Man to Marilyn Monroe, Vagabond Voices, 2009
Monroe, Marilyn, My Story, Stein and Day, 1974
Oates, Joyce Carol, Blonde, Fourth Estate, 2000
Rosten, Norman, Marilyn: A Very Personal Story, Usborne, 1974
Sartre, Jean-Paul, The Freud Scenario, Verso, 1985
Schur, Max, Freud: Living and Dying, Chatto & Windus, 1972
Smith, Matthew, Victim, The Secret Tapes of Marilyn Monroe, Century, 2003
Spoto, Donald, Marilyn Monroe, The Biography, Chatto & Windus, 1993
Summers, Anthony, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, Gollancz, 1985
Victor, Adam, The Marilyn Encyclopedia, The Overlook Press, 1999
Vitacco-Robles, Gary, Cursum Perficio, Marilyn Monroe’s Brentwood Hacienda, The Story of Her Final Months, Writers Club Press, 2000
Weatherby, W. J., Conversations with Marilyn, Paragon House, 1976
Wexler, Milton, A Look Through the Rear-view Mirror, Xlibris Corporation, 2002
Wolfe, Donald H., The Assassination of Marilyn Monroe, Sphere, 1999
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, Anna Freud, Summit Books, 1988
Zolotow, Maurice, Marilyn Monroe, W. H. Allen, 1961
Permissions Acknowledgements
The publisher gratefully thanks the following organisations and individuals:
OneWest Publishing/Taschen for the use of excerpts from Marilyn by Andre de Dienes.
The Truman Capote Literary Trust for the use of excerpts from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Music for Chameleons by Truman Capote.
Warner Chappell Music for the use of lyrics from ‘Dancing in the Da
rk’ by Frank Sinatra.
W. W. Norton for the use of lines from ‘Dying is Fine’ by ee cummings.
Dr Daniel Greenson for the use of all published and archival material relating to Dr Ralph Greenson.
All excerpts from My Story in Marilyn’s Last Sessions (pp 53–4, 90–1, 117 and 287) are previously protected and are not included in the copyright of this book. All previous editions of My Story © 1974 Milton H. Greene & © 2006 Joshua Greene. No part of the My Story text in this book can be used in part or in whole without written consent from The Archives, LLC or Joshua Greene (2610 Kingwood Street Suite #3, Florence, Oregon 97439; t: 541-997-5331/f: 541-997-5795; www.archiveimages.com/ [email protected]).
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
Personal Acknowledgements
All my gratitude goes to Martine Saada, without whom this book would never have come to be.
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