Marilyn's Last Sessions (16 page)

He was terrified by her increasing trend towards random promiscuity. One day she told him she was sleeping with one of the builders working on her house; another day that she had taken a taxi
driver home, or that she was caught having sex in a dark hallway at a party. In a letter to Anna Freud, Greenson said she was suffering from ‘a fear of men masked by a need to seduce, which
makes her literally give herself to the first man who comes along’.

From then on he worried that Marilyn was lost to psychoanalysis, whereas in fact she was lost in it. Like a drowning person who drags their rescuer under, she was increasingly miring her
therapist in empty despair. He was one of the idealised figures in her life, and she couldn’t abide the notion of any imperfection in him. ‘I’m improvising now,’ Greenson
wrote to Anna Freud. ‘She is really very sick. I can’t see any solution that will bring her the perfect peace she seeks.’

‘Her inability to handle anything she perceived as hurtfulness, along with her abnormal fear of homosexuality’ – Greenson would later write – ‘were ultimately the
decisive factors that led to her death.’

Meanwhile Marilyn’s friends – Allan Snyder, Ralph Roberts, Paula Strasberg and Pat Newcomb – were starting to say the psychoanalyst was exerting too great a hold over her life.
‘He is not your guardian angel,’ Pat told her. ‘He has become your shadow, or rather you’ve become his.’

‘I never liked Greenson,’ Snyder said years later, ‘and never thought he was good for Marilyn. He gave her anything she wanted, just fed her with anything.’ There was
something unhealthy about Greenson’s relationship with his patient, Snyder felt, something to do with money. He was very insistent about that, and his suspicions seemed confirmed when he
discovered that Greenson was on Fox’s payroll.

Yet each of Marilyn’s four analysts had had to intervene on one of her films and give her supportive therapy to get her back on her feet: Margaret Hohenberg on
Bus Stop
, Anna Freud
on
The Prince and the Showgirl
, Marianne Kris on
Some Like It Hot
, and Greenson on
Let’s Make Love
,
The Misfits
and
Something’s Got to Give
. Marilyn
told her friends she was happy to obey – to have someone give her guidance, tell her what to do. She said she would even have let her analyst tell her who to be.

Cars had lost their thrill: she didn’t want to drive one of her own any more. The black Cadillac convertible with the red leather upholstery had been sold, the black
Thunderbird passed on to Strasberg; she’d given back the white Cadillac she’d used during location shooting for
The Misfits
.

She told her driver, Ralph Roberts, to head for the sea. On Wilshire she looked out at the scattering of low houses either side of the interminable boulevard. It seemed fake somehow, this
transient neighbourhood, these characterless buildings. She remembered the first time she’d gone to Fox’s studios for a screen test. She had toured the back lot with its streets and
squares from all over the world, representing every historical period. They had seemed so solid; it was hard to remind herself they were just façades held up by wooden struts, a make-believe
maze of time and dreams. Here on the boulevard the illusion was the opposite. Marilyn thought you had to have a lot of imagination to think of these pasteboard sets as real houses in which real
people were struggling with love and cruelty and money. The sidewalks were empty. No one walks anywhere in this town except me, she thought.

She got Roberts to stop the car and continued on foot, aimlessly. Taking a left towards Pico, she stood for a while on a bridge over the Santa Monica Freeway, looking down at the cars converging
in the sunset, like a procession of weary animals. She watched the lines of white headlights, like images in a dream, empty eyes staring at nothing. When it grew dark, she saw a man stopped in
front of a garage. She walked past his car. He was very young, and recognised her, despite her black wig. So much about Marilyn Monroe was inconceivable to him: her conversations with the poet and
writer Carl Sandburg, her literature course at UCLA. She was insanely beautiful and filled him with desire and terror. All he saw was her body. A body he had to have, and hope he could escape the
soul animating it.

The man held the door of his brown Oldsmobile open for her, then drove to a green one-storey house with flaking paint, two blocks from the beach on a street in Venice Beach. Superba Avenue. Or
was it Santa Clara? Milkwood? San Juan? Did it matter? She had to remember so she could tell the doctor tomorrow. ‘The details,’ he always said. ‘That’s what counts.’
Names, names . . . Venice Beach, that’s where her grandmother Delia was buried. Her mother’s mother, the madwoman who had tried to smother her with a pillow when she was a baby. She had
told her saviour about it. He had played on the words ‘mother’ and ‘smother’
.

She asked the man to take her from behind. ‘You know what I mean,’ she added. Caught by surprise, he felt she was giving him a gift, offering up the most intimate, the oldest part of
her being. She lay down on her stomach, passed him some lubricant and then he penetrated her, not for very long, but forcefully, almost spitefully. Lifting the hair from her face, he saw she was
clasping the rumpled sheet in her right fist like a child’s blanket, something tender and warm and familiar-smelling. She was rubbing it gently against her chin.

‘Is that good? Can you feel me?’ he asked. Then: ‘I’m not hurting you, am I? Do you want me to stop?’

She didn’t answer his questions, just kept rubbing the sheet against her mouth without saying anything. Saddened by her sadness, he stopped, and they quickly said goodbye, thanking one
another awkwardly.

She told Greenson about it the following day.

‘I sense something dreamlike about your story,’ he said, ‘as if you didn’t fully experience it. You were present, but not really as yourself any more. In effect, you were
trying to free yourself from this man’s embrace. The sheet is what we call “a transitional object”. We all have our versions of them. The most striking detail is how yours allowed
you to form a closed circuit. It’s as if you were telling the man, “You won’t have my mouth, you won’t hear my voice. You can have my anus as much as you want, it
isn’t part of me any more.” You know, unlike the mouth, which is associated with one’s voice and identity, the anus is linked to shame, dispossession, waste and
vulnerability.’

She didn’t say anything. She felt a few tears run down her cheeks, but didn’t wipe them away.

As her analysis progressed and the transference accompanying it grew steadily more chaotic and intense, Marilyn’s relations with the Greenson family grew increasingly
intimate. She kept a bottle of Dom Pérignon in their fridge and sometimes stayed to supper, cheerfully helping Hildi with the washing-up in their Mexican kitchen. Joan Greenson, who was
studying art at the Otis Art Institute, had learned from childhood to keep out of sight of her father’s patients, so her role in Marilyn’s treatment was thrilling, although she
didn’t really understand the reasons for it. When the star arrived, Joan would be waiting for her at the door, and they’d often take a turn round the reservoir by the house while they
waited for Greenson; sometimes Marilyn would teach her a dance or give her tips on how to make herself up to look glamorous. The Greensons’ twenty-four-year-old son Danny, a medical student
at UCLA, who was also still living at home, became close to Marilyn as well. Passionately opposed to the Vietnam War, he’d talk politics with their guest. The Greensons’ children knew
their father’s behaviour was strange for a strict Freudian, but he convinced them that traditional therapy would not be effective in Marilyn’s case.

One evening in July, the Greensons threw a birthday party for their daughter. Having helped with the preparations, Marilyn came along too. Once they got over their nervousness, the boys were
soon queuing up to dance with her. As Greenson later related, ‘It didn’t look too promising for the local girls. And no one was dancing any more with an especially attractive black girl
who, until Marilyn had arrived, had been the most popular on the floor. Marilyn noticed this, and went over to her. “You know,” she said, “you do a step I’d love to do, but
don’t think I know how. Would you teach it to me?” Then she turned to the others and called out, “Everybody stop for a few minutes! I’m going to learn a new step.”
Now, the point is, Marilyn knew the step, but she let this girl teach it to her. She understood the loneliness of others.’

After eighteen months of seeing her, Marilyn’s analyst felt she was entering a critical phase. He asked her why she had such difficulty saying her lines. She told him she
had been troubled by something a critic had said about her, that she was ‘really a silent actress who’s wandered into the talkies by mistake’. She thought this was true, that her
face expressed things that couldn’t be put into words.

‘Why do you stutter on set but not in the day-to-day . . . not here, for example?’ asked Greenson.

‘I get afraid.’

‘Of what? Of not being heard, or of being heard?’

‘You make everything so complicated. I get afraid of words. It’s as if my lips didn’t want to let them go.’

‘Speaking implies separation, absolutely. Once you say a word, it’s lost. So you stutter, you clamp your mouth shut over the first syllable. Language is another thing you cannot bear
to be separated from.’

‘That reminds me of something. When I stuttered as a child, I’d always get stuck on the letter
m
. I was so shy. After a time I didn’t mind being looked at – I even
used to dream about people seeing me completely naked – but I always thought it was best if I kept quiet. At least then I couldn’t be blamed for saying anything wrong. I remember when I
was made class secretary at my school, Emerson Junior High in Van Nuys, when I was about thirteen. I’d stutter like crazy when I had to start meetings, “The m-m-minutes of the last
m-m-meeting . . .”. So after that I became Miss Mmmm at school. When Ben Lyon chose Marilyn Monroe as my stage name, he hit on the letter I found hardest to say for both my initials. And you
know what? The first time I appeared in front of a camera in
Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay!
, my first line on celluloid was meant to be “Mmmm.” But it got cut, so I didn’t have a
speaking part in that film.’ She was silent for a moment, before saying, ‘I’ve always had trouble with words. Learning lines, saying lines. The stuttering lasted for a long time,
but now I’ve worked out how to get over it. I murmur instead. I’ve turned my nervousness into a weapon, a trap for men.’

‘
M
is also the first letter of “mother”,’ Greenson remarked. ‘In most European languages that I know, the word for “mother” begins with the
letter
m
. The child psychoanalysts Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham have established that children raised apart from their mothers tend to be slower acquiring language—’

‘I know Anna Freud,’ Marilyn exclaimed. ‘She analysed me before you. You knew that, didn’t you?’

‘The sound “mmm” is autoerotic,’ Greenson continued, annoyed at the interruption, ‘which is probably why the word “me” also begins with an
m
.’

Marilyn turned away to prevent her analyst seeing her face, and folded her arms across her chest.

In December 1953, seven years before meeting Marilyn, Ralph Greenson had attended the midwinter meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in New York, where he gave a
paper entitled, ‘About the Sound “Mm” . . .’:

The year before Marilyn’s death, Greenson edited an article he wrote in 1949, ‘The Mother Tongue and the Mother’. He emphasised that there were particular cases where analysts
had to be able to talk to their patients in their first languages, and added in a footnote, ‘Whenever stalemated situations occur regularly in psychoanalysis, one should consider the
possibility that the patient and the analyst are not communicating on the same wavelength. For example, I would not refer a Brooklyn-bred girl who is now a Hollywood starlet to a prim, cultured,
central European analyst. They would not speak the same language.’ But was the stalemate in Marilyn’s analysis due to the lack of a common language, or to their having in a sense
swapped mother tongues? As he drew her increasingly into the language of analysis, she in turn was drowning him in the movies and their inexhaustible sea of images.

As well as going to her sessions, Marilyn made sure Engelberg kept her constantly supplied with sedatives. Greenson had other patients in the business with similar
dependencies, but he failed to gauge either how longstanding or how severe the addiction was in this case. Marilyn had started taking drugs when she was eighteen, at the time of her first screen
tests, then steadily upped the doses and types of drugs: barbiturates, depressants, amphetamines. Neither Greenson, nor Engelberg, nor Wexler had any success in weaning her off them. ‘Marilyn
wasn’t killed by Hollywood,’ John Huston would say when she died. ‘It was the goddam doctors who killed her. If she was a pill addict, they made her so.’