Marilyn's Last Sessions (10 page)

‘It’s true, I’m very interested in psychoanalysis,’ Huston said, after a while. ‘Traumas and buried memories were the subject of a documentary I made about soldiers
returning from the front,
Let There Be Light
. Is that how you think of analysis, as something that will let the light into your darkened soul so you can bear the sun coming up, the glare of
a new day? I know it’ll never do that for me. I’ll make do without it. I’m going to set my anxieties in motion, put everything I’ve repressed up on screen, and then face my
demons twenty-four frames a second. I’ll get them out in a movie, not on the couch – a movie about Freud, why not? Play it again, Sigmund.’

‘I don’t understand why you’re so hard on Monty,’ she said.

‘I’m a man’s director. I loathe passivity. Initiative, action: that’s what I like. Filming should hurt. Hurt my actors, my crew, my producers. I’ll tell you a
secret: the movies are made to hurt the spectator. Monty and I have a relationship he likes. He gets off on it. I treat him like the alcoholic, masochistic, drug-addicted fairy he is. Devastated
and lost. That’s why I’m thinking of getting him to play Freud. I’d like my Freud to be like Perce in
The Misfits
in lots of ways. One of those men who’s out of true,
a bit cracked deep down.’

One evening in Reno at the crap tables, Huston asked Marilyn to throw the dice.

‘What should I ask the dice for, John?’

‘Don’t think, honey, just throw,’ Huston told her. ‘That’s the story of your life. Don’t think, do it.’

But she needed to think about her role as much as ever. Once on set, Marilyn stopped talking to her husband and the director. If they wanted to communicate with her, they had to go through Paula
Strasberg, a perennial presence in her black dress and little black veil. Marilyn secretly called her ‘the witch’ or ‘the vulture’, but she made sure Paula was on a higher
salary than she was. The crew nicknamed her ‘the Black Baroness’. ‘How many directors are there on this film?’ Huston occasionally yelled, to no one in particular.

Progress was painfully slow and, in his version of grinning and bearing it, Huston took to losing chunks of the budget in Reno’s casinos. Marilyn started refusing to come out of her
trailer, retreating further and further inside herself. The Method was her sole article of faith. Fox decided to call on Greenson.

On the second to last weekend in August, Marilyn took advantage of a break in filming to fly to Los Angeles. She saw her analyst repeatedly, their sessions sometimes running on
for hours, but also found time to go to Joe Schenck’s bedside. Schenck, a movie mogul and producer, one of the founders of 20th Century Fox, was seriously ill and would die shortly
afterwards.

They had met in 1948 at a party at his lavish mansion on South Carolwood Drive. An extravagant medley of Spanish-Italian renaissance and Moorish architecture, it was an appropriate backdrop for
the gargantuan poker evenings Schenck liked to throw. His friends would roll up with an attractive woman on each arm – models and starlets, hoping for advancement in their careers, and if
that meant providing something a little more personal, well, who were they to refuse an executive’s wishes? Schenck was a well-established producer, and Marilyn, by her own admission, a
willing lamb to the slaughter – but she wasn’t to succumb that first evening.

As she looked at the wretched octogenarian hooked up to every sort of machine on his hospital bed, she could no longer remember when it was she had finally submitted to him. At the time she had
wanted desperately to work, to be a star, and afterwards she spoke openly of her affair with Schenck, who had immediately given her what she was looking for. He had put her in touch with his poker
buddy Harry Cohn, then head of Columbia Studios and the man who had transformed a dancer named Margarita Consino into Rita Hayworth.

Cohn’s offer of a contract came with one condition: after a week of electrolysis, hydrogen peroxide and ammonia treatments, the mirror reflected her new image – like her beloved Jean
Harlow, her dirty-blonde hair had vanished under a haze of platinum.

After approving her new look, Cohn sent her to take classes from Natasha Lytess, who would later say, ‘I made Marilyn. I made everything about her: how she read, her voice, her acting, her
pronunciation of her
t
s and
d
s, her walk, heel to toe, the way she swung those hips like no one had done before.’

Gazing at Los Angeles’ leaden sky through the window of the hospital waiting room, Marilyn thought about coincidences; about the distance between the hospital block where Schenck now lay,
fighting for breath, and his mansion, where they’d first met; about the way his hair looked almost blond against his pillow, as if it had been bleached. She caught sight of her reflection in
a mirror and was startled by her excessive, almost unbearable blondeness, the magnet for
The Misfits’
spots that were intended to bathe every shot in a sphere of ethereal light.
She’d wanted to be a different shade of blonde in every film she appeared in: ash, unbleached dark, golden, silver, amber, honey, smoky, topaz, platinum – anything except natural
blonde. Seven years earlier, she remembered, Howard Hawks had given her a part in his movie opposite Jane Russell, who was playing the brunette and, try as she might, Marilyn hadn’t been able
to get a dressing room. She’d finally had to descend to their level by saying, ‘Look, after all, I am the blonde, and it is
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
’

‘Remember, you’re not a star!’ the production team repeated.

‘Well, whatever I am, I’m the blonde!’

Dyeing hair, dying hair, Marilyn thought, as she turned away from the mirror. How many hours have I spent in waiting rooms, front offices and foyers since starting out? Maybe it’s not men
I’ve been trying to keep waiting by showing up late, maybe it’s Death. OK, mister, you can have the last dance, but not this very moment. She stifled a laugh. I’ll talk about it
to the words doctor. As she went back into Schenck’s room, tears welled at the memory of a Chihuahua he had given her, which she’d called Josepha, after him. She’d been very fond
of Schenck. He had really cared about her in the early, hard days; she had always been able to go to him if she’d needed a meal or a shoulder to cry on. Schenck heard someone approaching his
bedside but couldn’t make out who it was.

During an afternoon session on her break from
The Misfits
, Greenson commented on how rarely she talked about her sex life.

‘You know, Doctor,’ she said, ‘I think of my sex life – my life, period, in fact – as a series of jump cuts. A man comes in, gets all excited, has me, loses me . .
. And then in the next shot you see the same man – or maybe another one – come in again, but this time his smile’s different, he’s got a new set of mannerisms, the
lighting’s changed. He was holding an empty glass a minute ago and now it’s half full. We look at each other through different eyes. Time’s passed but we’re still caught up
in an image we have of ourselves, we still think we’re meeting for the first time. Does that make any sense to you? I don’t know if it does me either, but I wonder whether that’s
what relationships between men and women are really like. We try to touch as we pass each other but we’re not separated just by space, time is against us too.’

By this stage in her analysis, Greenson was starting to think Marilyn’s problems lay not so much in her sexuality as in a confusion in her self-image. He had coined a collective term,
‘screen character patients’, for people who, for defensive reasons, represent their desires as a screen. They may project ‘screen hunger’, for instance, or ‘screen
affect’, but, in general, they manifest a ‘screen identity’. For them, the twin acts of showing oneself and being seen by others constitute a uniquely exciting or terrifying
experience, most often both. ‘In ordinary language,’ he wrote, ‘the word “screen” may mean to conceal, to filter, or to camouflage.’ In Marilyn’s case, he
thought, the word ‘screen’ also referred quite literally to a cinema screen, but it had plenty of other associations. He believed that, in the psychoanalytic sense, it specifically
denoted a process whereby an individual uses a viable self-image – not necessarily wholly invented or false – to mask the pain of existence, some unbearable truth about him- or herself.
He thought of the image that had shown on every TV channel five years before: the still from
The Seven Year Itch
, fifty feet high, covering most of Loew’s State Theater in New York.
Her body and windblown dress had floated over Broadway like a huge white flower for a fortnight in the run-up to the première.

Greenson still knew Marilyn primarily through her film roles, in which she incarnated desirability in its most unattainable form, but he found himself wondering whether icons of desire such as
her actually felt desire themselves. Years later, he would read something Vladimir Nabokov had written about the movie star: ‘It is possible this great comedy actress saw sex purely as
comedy.’

After several months, the psychoanalyst was inclined to think of Marilyn’s various personae – the diligent Actors Studio pupil, Marianne Kris’s diligent patient, the diligent
reader of the writers of her age – as ‘screen images’. She construed herself as an apprentice New York intellectual in order to blank out the fear of being stupid that had haunted
the little girl from Nebraska Avenue, who’d dreamed of shining like a fantastical constellation in Hollywood’s firmament.

At their second session that day, Marilyn looked across at her analyst and said, ‘I think that when you’re famous every weakness is exaggerated. This industry
should behave like a mother whose child has just run out in front of a car. But instead of clasping the child to them, they start punishing the child. All this industry does is take. All those
shots you have to do a hundred times over, all those takes . . . but who’s giving, who’s receiving, who’s loving? If you’ve noticed, in Hollywood, where millions and
billions of dollars have been made, there aren’t really any kind of monuments or museums . . . Gee, nobody left anything behind. They took it, they grabbed it and they ran, the ones who made
the billions of dollars, never the workers. I’m not in this big American rush, you know, you got to go and you got to go fast but for no good reason, and I’m never going to
be.’

‘Fine,’ said Greenson. ‘I think that’s a good place to stop for today.’

‘Oh, you’re the same as all the rest. Cut! Next take! One last one, Marilyn!’

In April 1952 Marilyn had to have an appendectomy at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. When Dr Marcus Rabwin lifted the sheet covering her in order to start the operation, he
found a little handwritten note taped to her stomach:

Her current drama teacher, Michael Chekhov, taught Marilyn a number of things about her acting and the way men looked at her on screen. One day, in the middle of a scene she
was doing from
The Cherry Orchard
, Michael suddenly stopped, put his hands over her eyes for a moment, then looked at her with a gentle grin.

‘May I ask you a personal question?’ he asked.

‘Anything,’ she said.

‘Will you tell me truthfully?’ Michael asked. ‘Were you thinking of sex while we played that scene?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘there’s no sex in this scene. I wasn’t thinking of it at all.’

‘You had no half-thoughts of embraces and kisses in your mind?’ Michael persisted.

‘None,’ she said. ‘I was completely concentrated on the scene.’

‘I believe you,’ said Michael. ‘You always speak the truth.’

‘To you,’ she said.

He walked up and down for a few minutes, then said, ‘It’s very strange. All through our playing of that scene I kept receiving sex vibrations from you. As if you were a woman in the
grip of passion. I stopped because I thought you must be too sexually preoccupied to continue.’

She started to cry. He paid no attention to her tears but went on intently: ‘You are a young woman who gives off sex vibrations – no matter what you are doing or thinking. The whole
world has already responded to those vibrations. They come off the movie screens when you are on them. You can make a fortune just standing still or moving in front of the cameras and doing almost
no acting whatsoever.’

‘I don’t want that,’ she said.

‘Why not?’ he asked gently.

‘Because I want to be an artist,’ she answered, ‘not an erotic freak. I don’t want to be sold to the public as a celluloid aphrodisiac. Look at me and start shaking. It
was all right for the first few years. But now it’s different.’

‘All you have to do is be sexy, dear Marilyn.’ This was the bitterly condescending note Laurence Olivier, resplendent in his Grand Duke of Carpathia’s
uniform, gave Marilyn Monroe when they started filming
The Prince and the Showgirl
at Pinewood Studios in the summer of 1956. A disenchanting fairy tale, with only a terrified prince
awaiting discovery by the showgirl, the film contains a number of scenes that bear out low expectations, not least the one when, as she is preparing to curtsey on first meeting the monocled grand
duke, a strap of her dress snaps, baring her shoulder and almost her entire breast. Marilyn found this scene coming to her mind at a première at the Empire Theatre in London towards the end
of the shoot, when she was presented to the Queen, with Joan Crawford, Brigitte Bardot and Anita Ekberg.

Marilyn had chosen Olivier, the great Shakespearean actor, not only to star in, but also to direct this period comedy, the first and only film produced by Marilyn Monroe Productions
(
Something’s Got to Give
, which she co-produced in 1962 with Fox, never saw the light of day). Olivier had returned the compliment by thinking of her as an uneducated, self-obsessed
idiot. She immediately resorted to her usual displacements and evasions: arriving late on set, taking drugs, going missing.