Marilyn's Last Sessions (19 page)

‘The main thing, though, is you feel good in your home in Brentwood.’

‘You’re right. It’s not big; it’s nothing, really. But a nothing with a pool, a nothing I like. You know, deep down what I’ve always liked about this city is the
way it’s not really there, it’s sort of nothing. A sprawl of shacks in a desert of messed-up emotions, without any life of its own. But LA doesn’t pretend to be a city, to be
beautiful. It’s how I feel when I’m not acting: as if I’ve unravelled and have no memories – I’m just a body, stretched out. LA’s always changing. It’s one
thing, then that goes, then it’s something else . . . on and on like that. So, yes, on my doctor’s advice, I’ve bought a house. It’s a start; maybe it’ll give me some
security. I do feel at home there. But what does that mean? Home is always where the ghosts are.’

Shortly before she died, Marilyn had to fill in an official form that required her to give her father’s name. Furiously, she wrote: ‘Not Known’.

Greenson quickly understood that Marilyn hadn’t stopped thinking of Manhattan as her real address and intended to return to New York after she’d finished her last
film for Fox. She spent a fortnight there in February on her way to Mexico, attending Strasberg’s classes every day and talking to Greenson every night. Then she went on to visit her
ex-father-in-law, Isadore Miller, in Florida before flying out of Miami. The Mexican trip was a brief respite for Greenson. Chaperoned by her housekeeper, Eunice Murray, Marilyn bought the things
she needed for her house, had a dalliance with a left-wing screenwriter, José Bolaños, met some of the Zona Rosa circle of Communist exiles at Fred Vanderbilt Field’s: nothing
to concern her analyst, who had urged her to take a vacation. Vanderbilt was a long-standing friend of his, which was not something his patient knew but was of great interest to the FBI. A document
dated 6 March and headed ‘MARILYN MONROE – SECURITY MATTER – C (Communist)’ was sent from the Mexico office to J. Edgar Hoover, who was concerned to see the
president’s mistress talking to reds about subjects relating to national security.

Marilyn had been put under surveillance at the end of 1961: DiMaggio spied on her out of jealousy while Paul ‘Skinny’ D’Amato, the gangster in charge of the Cal-Neva Lodge
Casino on Lake Tahoe, bugged her for Sam Giancana, and the FBI, the final member of the triumvirate, put a tap on her phone after J. Edgar Hoover warned President Kennedy of the Mafia’s
attempts to undermine him through his relationship with the movie star. Whether in New York or California, Marilyn used public phones wherever possible.

When she returned home from Mexico in early March, along with her Mexican lover, she kept an appointment with Peter G. Levathes, the executive vice president in charge of
production at Fox, and swore she was ready to start filming.

‘Are you sure?’ Levathes said incredulously. He’d heard the story of her recent, very boozy appearance at the Golden Globes. ‘You seem completely done in. What’s
going on?’

She didn’t answer, so he told her he had hired Nunnally Johnson, the screenwriter on two of her previous films, to rewrite
Something’s Got to Give
.

She went to meet the writer the next day at the Beverly Hills Hotel. ‘I’m here to see Mr Johnson,’ she told the desk. ‘I’ve got an
appointment.’

‘Who should I say it is?’

‘A prostitute.’

They caught up boisterously on what had been going on since they’d last seen each other, polishing off several bottles of champagne in the process. At one point, she told him to keep his
voice down so people wouldn’t hear. ‘That’s a bit paranoid, isn’t it?’ he said jokingly.

‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you, as the analyst said to the patient,’ Marilyn replied. ‘No, no, forget I said that:
let’s talk about the part.’

‘Wait, you’ve given me an idea. You remember
The Three Faces of Eve
I did a while ago? I could see you doing a sort of two faces of Ellen in this
.
Someone very loving
and girlish one moment, who’s a brooding, tough bitch the next, back to get her revenge on the man who took her for dead.’

‘No. I don’t want anything tragic. I’ve had enough of that. Remember, you’ve got Marilyn Monroe. You’ve got to use her. There has to be a scene where I wear a
bikini. And, please, forget any alter-ego riffs. Which reminds me: Cyd Charisse wants to be blonde in the film. The studio assured me her hair’d be light brown. But,’ she concludes
knowingly, ‘her
unconscious
wants it blonde.’

Johnson kept his thoughts to himself, but he learned afterwards that Fox had darkened her rival’s hair just to be on the safe side. Meanwhile, to Johnson’s mounting discouragement,
the studio was demanding constant changes to the script. He realised not only that the film would be crucial to Marilyn’s career, but also that, as in certain chess moves, she couldn’t
win, whether she made it or not. Either the film would be finished and a failure, or it would be abandoned and she would be blamed.

Marilyn had booked into the Beverly Hills Hotel with Bolaños for a few days while work was being done to her house. She arrived for her session on the first Saturday in
March in a state of extreme agitation.

‘Nunnally Johnson’s going to tell Fox to screw themselves because they don’t know what kind of script they want. No one knows what ending to give the picture, whether to go for
comedy or tragedy.’

At the end of her hour, Greenson was adamant she was in no fit state to return to the hotel. He insisted she stay with them until she was feeling better. It wouldn’t be the first time she
had spent several nights in the Greenson family home, and she accepted his invitation to stay as long as she needed to until she could move back into her house.

The analyst put his patient in a room on the first floor. He dismissed the Mexican lover, and all the other rival lovers and ex-husbands. One evening, a few days later, DiMaggio showed up to
take Marilyn back to Fifth Helena Drive. As two trainee doctors looked on, Greenson refused to let her come downstairs.

‘She is under sedation,’ he told DiMaggio. ‘She needs peace and quiet. I’ll let you know when to come back.’

Learning that Joe was waiting for her, she wanted to see him, but her analyst forbade it. She protested, screamed. Joe insisted. Turning to one of the doctors under his supervision for
psycho-therapeutic training, Greenson said, ‘You see, this is a good example of the narcissistic character. See how demanding she is? She has to have things her way. She’s nothing but a
child, poor thing.’

The student didn’t need years of clinical experience to recognise the classic signs of projection. If anyone was the poor thing struggling with his own unanalysed dependency, it was
Greenson: he had become his prisoner’s prisoner.

Greenson’s colleagues, meanwhile, grew increasingly alarmed at his interventionist and authoritarian behaviour. Hollywood’s psychoanalytic community, with Milton Wexler taking the
lead, found the whole set-up bizarre. Whatever apparent legitimacy it laid claim to, Greenson’s approach seemed obviously flawed. Instead of providing the techniques for Marilyn to find
within herself new resources for independence and autonomous judgement, he made her more dependent, ensuring his own dominance. His severest critics spoke of a
folie à deux
. The more
indulgent merely turned a blind eye to a form of treatment that, although unorthodox, did not actually contravene any criminal, moral or professional ethical law. Such was the authority and
intellectual influence Greenson exercised over the profession in Los Angeles, both in its practical and educational guises, that a tacit decision seems to have been taken not to go public with any
criticisms of his methods, which, in private, had become the subject of much snide comment and rumour.

When Nunnally Johnson left California, the script complete, Marilyn got up uncharacteristically early to see him off. She threw her arms round his neck, then drove him to the
airport. Once he was gone, things quickly fell apart.

Greenson told Marilyn he would be leaving for Europe, without mentioning that it was partly so he could see Anna Freud in London. Visibly distressed, Marilyn didn’t speak
at all during the following sessions. Greenson had anticipated this reaction, and saw her emotional crisis as a manifestation of her terrible fear of abandonment. Marilyn found the idea of his
departure devastating. Greenson’s wife, on the other hand, tended to think it was a good idea for her husband to have a break from his patient, who now constituted virtually his entire
clientele. ‘My wife is afraid to leave me alone at home,’ Greenson said to a friend. ‘I should play it safe and put Marilyn in a sanitarium, but that would only be safe for me and
deadly for her.’

But he kept changing his mind about whether he should go, and told Marilyn about his dilemma. One Saturday morning, towards the end of the month, she turned up at his home, far earlier than she
normally woke up.

‘I’m having a water heater installed and the plumber says I won’t have any water for half an hour,’ she told him. ‘I’m going to wash my hair here.’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘But why the rush?’

‘Peter Lawford is coming to pick me up to take me to Palm Springs, where I’m spending the weekend with President Kennedy.’

She washed her hair and went home, happy to leave her saviour in a state of acute anxiety – she knew he didn’t like her relationship with the Kennedys, and disappearing for a weekend
with them was the surest way to make him postpone his trip. Which is exactly what he did.

She spent several hours transforming herself into Marilyn, while Lawford paced up and down her hall. Finally she emerged from her bedroom with a black wig hiding her immaculate coiffure.

A few years later, Greenson would write in his Treatise,

Essentially, he said, the weekend’s effect on the analyst was a problem of countertransference, which he would discuss in the Treatise’s second volume. Volume II, however, remained
unwritten.

Norman Rosten and his wife, Marilyn’s friends from New York, came to Hollywood on a film assignment. Marilyn rang them immediately they arrived and said,
‘It’s Sunday, let’s go to my analyst. I want you and Hedda to meet him. I told him and his wife that we’re coming.’

Rosten hesitated. ‘Is that allowed?’

‘He’s a great person and has a wonderful family. You’ll like them all and vice versa.’

‘What’ll we do – talk about you?’

‘It’s OK. As long as I’m not listening. Phone you right back.’

When she rang back, she told them that he’d invited them all over to listen to an impromptu performance. ‘Chamber music!’ she gaily exclaimed. ‘And it’s not in a
chamber, it’s in a living room!’

Introductions at the analyst’s were slightly affected. ‘My poet friend and his wife, a dear person, and they’re happily married.’

Marilyn went off to curl up in an armchair, as though she were at home, and Greenson, with the other musicians who had arrived, played Mozart with passion, if not precision – whatever he
lacked in technique he made up for in tone and in the energy of his attack.

After the concert, Norman reminded Marilyn of an evening three or four years previously when they’d gone to hear the Russian pianist Emil Gilels play in New York. In her devastating dress,
she had leaned over to her escort. ‘Relax, Norman,’ she’d whispered, with that little laugh of hers, ‘no one knows who you are.’

‘Yes, I remember,’ she said, in a playful yet melancholy voice. ‘It’s like that. No one knows who you are when you’re listening to music. No one’s going to
come looking for you.’

Rosten took the psychoanalyst to one side. ‘Is she going to be all right?’ he asked. ‘Is she making any progress?’

‘It may seem odd to you the method I’m using to treat her,’ Greenson replied, ‘but I firmly believe that the treatment has to suit the patient and not vice versa. Marilyn
is not an analytic patient, she needs psychotherapy, both supportive and analytical. I have permitted her to become friendly with my family and to visit in my home because I felt she needed actual
experiences in her present life to make up for the emotional deprivation she suffered from childhood onward. It may seem to you I have broken rules, but I feel that if I’m fortunate enough,
perhaps some years from now, Marilyn may become a psychoanalytic patient. She is not ready for it now. I feel I can tell you these things because she considers you and Hedda her closest friends and
there must be somebody with whom I can share some of my responsibilities. By the way, I have spoken to Marilyn and she has given me permission to talk to you in general terms about
herself.’

Not long after this, Hedda Rosten left Los Angeles, and came to say goodbye to Marilyn.

‘I’ll miss you. Please take care of yourself. Promise me you’ll rest up before the really hard work begins on the film.’

‘I’m in good shape.’ Marilyn smiled. ‘Well, in body if not in mind. It’s all up here, you know. Or so they say.’

She never liked the day to end. As the light began to fade, she became insecure, prey to oppressive thoughts, as hard on herself as she was on everyone else. Dusk triggered a
fever of manic anxiety and, recoiling from the coming darkness as if it were a naked flame, she stayed on the phone for hours, more to hear another person’s voice than to say anything.