Marilyn's Last Sessions (17 page)

Greenson never ventured a final diagnosis in Marilyn’s case, which he handled for thirty months. Initially he merely observed symptoms of paranoia and ‘depressive reaction’.
His colleagues in the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society were nonplussed. ‘He doesn’t seem to understand,’ said one, ‘that the adoption therapy he’s proposing will
only remind her of what she’s never had – a home – and what she’ll never be – a daughter loved by her parents, a sister and a mother in her own right.’

Greenson betrayed his anxiety when he discussed Marilyn with Wexler. ‘Aren’t I breaking the rules, overstepping the boundaries here?’ he asked. ‘You should see her, I
think. I’ve found indications of schizophrenia. She had a terrible childhood and, whether fantasy or not, talks of having been sexually abused.’ The only thing of which Greenson was
entirely certain was that he was dealing with a terribly fragile individual. ‘I’ve taken our line on schizophrenics: put the patient’s needs and psychic work first, and
one’s personal therapeutic aims second. I’ve tried to let her words and feelings enter into me. But I should be more transparent in my methods, don’t you think?’

‘No, the opposite if anything,’ Wexler replied. ‘You should continue down the unorthodox route. To think that the analyst who sits behind the patient is a nonentity on whom
everything is projected is ridiculous. I don’t think it’s very long before the patient knows whether I’m bright or stupid. If the patient says,“You’re a stupid
son-of-a-bitch,” you can’t say, “That’s obviously what he thought about his father.” Maybe you
are
a stupid son-of-a-bitch. If I write scripts with my patients,
if I have dinner with my patients, all they know is that I’m some kind of person. The idea that you can’t have any relationship with your patients outside the office seems to me
unreasonable, unfair, and just plain silly.’

‘And what about a patient’s body? Is it crossing a line to touch it?’ asked Greenson, running a finger over his moustache.

Soon after the death of their patient, Milton Wexler and Ralph Greenson planned a research project for Beverly Hills’s Foundation for Research in Psychoanalysis on
‘Failures in Psychoanalysis’, which they would then turn into a book. It remained unwritten.

Greenson often spent his leisure hours sitting in a rowing boat in his swimming pool. He found it restful, gently rocking back and forth. At nearly fifty, he had begun to feel
as though he needed to spend more time on his own work, and had therefore decided to resign as dean of the training school and limit his professional activities. He even planned not to attend that
year’s meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

In truth, he would have liked to put some more distance between himself and Marilyn as well, but he could see how alone she was in the world, and he still hoped he might be able to defeat the
forces of death at work in her and learn something from the destructive processes that had her in their grip.

At the start of October, Marilyn was invited to a dinner with the president’s younger brother and attorney general, Bobby Kennedy, who was in Los Angeles on government
business. She went in a long black sheath dress that set off the whiteness of her skin. The bodice was the strategic component: she wanted to reveal as much of her breasts as possible, which was
precisely the sort of self-destructive behaviour Greenson was trying to stop. The dinner was held at Peter Lawford’s, the Kennedys’ brother-in-law. Marilyn drank heavily, and eventually
Bobby Kennedy and his press aide offered to take her home to her little apartment on Doheny Drive.

Ten days later, Fox informed her that she would have to make
Something’s Got to Give
. Convinced that Cukor despised her, and that at any moment the side of herself that hated the
movie business would resurface and force her to pull out of filming, she threatened to take her own life. Greenson decided she needed to be detoxified again but, in light of the Payne Whitney
episode, at home this time. Marilyn’s living room, with its heavy blue triple-lined curtains, became her hospital, and her analyst, in return for a substantial retainer from Fox, became the
technical consultant and special counsellor to Marilyn Monroe.

‘You know,’ she told Greenson, when he came to see her one evening, ‘I think I’ve worked out my definition of death. Death is the body you’ve got to shake off. When
people survive an illness or an accident, they feel they’ve escaped from their body. Sex can be like that too. When a man follows me in the street, I can feel him wanting to escape his body
by taking mine. I made a will in New York when I was in analysis for the first time with the Hungarian. For my epitaph, I came up with: “Marilyn Monroe, Blonde,
37–23–36”.’ Stifling a laugh, she added, ‘I think I’ll go with that, maybe with a few changes to the measurements.’

When he got back to Santa Monica, the analyst tried to understand the reaction Marilyn’s stories and sexual poses provoked in him. He felt vaguely disgusted, sad almost. He could smell her
peroxided hair when he sat opposite her, and felt no urge to touch it with his hands or lips – but he couldn’t stop smelling that smell. She wasn’t his type: he preferred thin
women, brunettes, and found Marilyn too childlike, too American. Looking at her, he would find himself suspended in a state of platonic admiration of her beauty – sexy but not sexual.

He tried to understand why he barely looked at her any more. What gives a word its form are the consonants, not the vowels, he thought. What gives a sentence form and line are the ways it fits
together, its syntax, not its words. A body is a little like a sentence. Curves and flesh are not enough to make one want to possess it. One must be able to discern a structure: bones, joints. A
form. Marilyn seemed all voluptuous flesh. He saw her bring in her body and set it down in a chair with the implied question, ‘Do you like what you see?’, and instead of his fear
transforming into desire, the abundance somehow repelled him.

In October, Greenson was asked by KPFA-FM radio station to give a talk in two parts on the ‘Varieties of Love’. He described America and Americans as a society that
neglected love, that was driven instead by the search for success, money, fame and power. Everyone wanted to be loved, but few people could love, or wanted to love, he argued. ‘Love is
confused, in many people’s minds, with sexual satisfaction, and they equate enjoying somebody sexually, having a pleasant time physically, with love. Or they confuse it with peacefulness.
“I live with her and she doesn’t bother me and I don’t bother her and we love each other.” And this is not love. It is a question if this is living!’

Television was a screen that isolated people and prevented them either loving or hating one another. For the most part, they thought of love as a foreign notion, or at least a perverse one,
because it was not innate. Babies are not born with the ability to love; they simply survive and breathe and eat. Their life is a polarity between pain, craving and longing, on the one hand, and
satisfaction and oblivion on the other, and many adults never progress beyond this state: alcoholics, addicts, bulimics, people hooked on the sensation of danger. No one else exists for them; other
people’s individuality is utterly unimportant. The only function another person performs is that of provider, giving them something that assuages their pain or satisfies their needs.

Driving home after the second broadcast, he thought of Marilyn and of the phrase that always came into his mind when he tried to review her case: a loveless love.

In the final months of her life Marilyn’s relationship with her analyst became more emotional, the professional boundaries fainter. Greenson longed to fulfil
Marilyn’s fantasy of finding her way back home, to shield her from anything that might hurt her. She spent more and more time at the Greensons’ home, and began to telephone him at all
hours to talk – about her work, her relationships, everything.

Hollywood insiders had begun to think of Ralph and Marilyn in terms of a script. John Huston burst out laughing when he heard of the tragi-comic set-up. ‘We’ve moved on from
The
Prince and the Showgirl
,’ he said. ‘Now it’s
The Analyst and His Double
.’ If it weren’t for an ingrained lethargy on his part, he would have liked to make a
movie about it. Good premise, he thought. They’re directing one another without realising it. Each is playing the role they can’t have in real life: him the actor, her the intellectual.
They’ve become the other’s fantasy. Neither of them was mad before they met, and they still aren’t when they’re apart, but being together is driving them out of their minds.
Years later, in 1983, Huston was able to exact revenge on the Freud family for the way they’d rebuffed his
Freud, the Secret Passion
. To his inordinate pleasure, he was given the part
of a seasoned analyst in Marshall Brickman’s film
Lovesick
, who not only supervises but also restores to the straight and narrow a colleague who’s fallen madly in love with a
patient.

One Saturday afternoon in late November, Greenson asked Marilyn to come to his house for her second session of the day. As soon as she arrived, he sent her out to tell Ralph
Roberts, who was waiting for her in the car, that he should go back to New York: her analyst had chosen someone else to be her companion. Two Ralphs in her life were one too many. When she’d
done what he asked, Greenson congratulated her on her ability in general to get rid of those in her entourage who were taking advantage of her. Freeing herself from hangers-on who were exploiting
her was a sure sign of clinical progress.

But Greenson could not free Marilyn from her need to work, and without the alternately desired and loathed compensations of acting, her depression grew. During this sad winter, she sent a short
poem to her friend, the poet Norman Rosten:

At one session, after much intense crying and noisy sobbing, she slowly began to quieten down, consoling herself with the belief that her analysis was helping her pull herself back together into
one piece. As she said this, Greenson noticed her gently and rhythmically stroking the burlap wallpaper alongside the couch with her fingertips, her eyes half closed. There was a pause, and then
she said, ‘You’re good to me, you really try to help.’ She continued to stroke the wall in silence. Greenson, too, remained silent. After a few minutes, now dry-eyed, she stopped
stroking the wall, straightened her somewhat rumpled dress, and said, ‘I feel better now. I don’t know why, I just do. Maybe it was your silence. I felt it as warm and comforting, not
cold as I sometimes do. I did not feel alone.’

At first Greenson did not realise that for her, at that moment, his office was a ‘transitional transference object’. The stroking of the wall seemed to have many other meanings. On
the one hand, she was stroking the wall as she wanted to stroke and be stroked by her lover and him. The stroking of the wall was also, Greenson eventually discovered, a re-enactment of something
of a more infantile nature. The rhythmic movements, the half-closed eyes and the soothing effect of his non-interference should have indicated to him that it might be a transitional transference
experience for her.

He began to speak but she quickly interrupted him to say that his words seemed like an intrusion. He waited and then said in a quiet voice that he had the impression that, as she wept, she let
herself slip into the past; the stroking of the wall might have brought back an old sense of comfort from childhood?

Marilyn replied, ‘I was only dimly aware of the stroking – above all, I loved the tweedy quality of the wallpaper. It has little hairs like fur. Strange, I felt the wallpaper was
responding to me in a vague way.’

‘So you felt in your misery,’ the analyst said, ‘that being on the couch, stroking the wallpaper in my silent presence was like being comforted by a kind of mothering
person.’

After a pause Marilyn replied, ‘You know, I don’t quite agree with you. This may sound strange to you, but it was stroking the wallpaper that helped – and also, I suppose, your
letting me do it. It reminds me of crying myself to sleep as a child by petting my favourite panda bear. I kept that panda for years; in fact I have baby pictures with it. Of course, then it was
quite furry and later it became smooth, but I always felt it as furry.’

Later she had dreams of her analyst with black and white spots, some of which were traceable both to her panda and to Greenson’s beard, which she called furry. Recently – almost
unconsciously – he had let it grow, which had provoked considerable hilarity when Wexler saw the results. ‘I’ve never really understood why men grow beards,’ Wexler had
said. ‘If it’s to make them more virile, forget it. They don’t seem to realise the lower half of their face now resembles their mother’s genitalia.’ Greenson had
looked at him as if he were mad, and said nothing.

While collaborating on the screenplay of
Captain Newman
,
M.D.
, Greenson wrote to Leo Rosten, the book’s author: ‘Milton Rudin has got me 12.5% of the
gross receipts from Universal. It’s the least they can do: as you know, the psychiatrist in the film is 100% me, and 90% of the characters are my old patients.’ He also took charge of
the pre-production of
Something’s Got to Give
. In November the producer, David Brown, found out he was being replaced by Henry Weinstein, whose career as a producer only extended to
one film,
Tender Is the Night
. Shocked to be sidelined like that, he was told it was a condition of Marilyn’s deal. Greenson had given his assurances that, if Brown were replaced by
Weinstein, he could guarantee his star would be punctual and the production completed on time. ‘Don’t worry,’ he had said. ‘I can get her to do whatever I want.’