Marilyn's Last Sessions (2 page)

But it is a work of fiction. The forger in me hasn’t hesitated to impute to one person what another has said, seen or experienced, to ascribe to them a diary that hasn’t been found,
articles or notes that have been invented, and dreams and thoughts for which there is no source.

In telling this story, a loveless love story of two characters who became fatally embroiled in each other’s lives, my aim is not to find the truth, or probable truth, about Marilyn Monroe
and her last analyst Ralph Greenson, but to observe a couple in the act of being themselves, and register their uncanniness as if it spoke to me of my own.

REWIND

The title of this unfinished piece of writing was underlined three times. Handwritten and undated, it was found on his death among the papers of Dr Ralph Greenson, Marilyn
Monroe’s last psychoanalyst. His was the voice that Sergeant Jack Clemmons, watch commander at West Los Angeles Police Department, had heard on the night of 4–5 August 1962 when a call
had come in from Brentwood at four twenty-five a.m.

‘Marilyn Monroe has died of an overdose,’ a man’s voice had said dully. And when the stunned policeman had asked, ‘What?’ the same voice had struggled to repeat,
virtually spelling it out syllable by syllable, ‘Marilyn Monroe has died. She has committed suicide.’

REWIND

The city seems to John Miner to sweat even more in August than it used to in spring. Pollution casts a pink veil wherever he looks and, even in the glare of the midday sun, the
streets have a fuzziness to them, like the sepia haze of an old movie. Los Angeles strikes him as even more unreal than it had done forty years earlier. More metallic. More naked. More null and
void. His eyes still smarting from downtown’s murky, oppressive reek, he enters the journalist Forger W. Backwright’s office in the
Los Angeles Times
building at 202 West 1st
Street. Tall and stooped, he looks around constantly, as though he were lost. An old man of eighty-six come to tell an old story.

As head of the medical-legal section at the District Attorney’s Office, Miner had attended the autopsy on Marilyn Monroe’s body conducted by Dr Thomas Noguchi, the coroner who, six
years afterwards, would perform the same procedure for Robert Kennedy, one of the people suspected, by those who believed such things, of organising Monroe’s murder. Miner had observed smears
being taken from the actress’s mouth, genitals and anus. The autopsy’s principal discovery was the mysterious presence in her blood of 4.5 milligrams of a barbiturate, Nembutal, for
which no sign of injection or oral ingestion could be found. It returned a verdict of ‘probable suicide’, an expression Miner has turned over in his mind ever since. They used that
wording in the final report; initial accounts spoke merely of ‘suicide’ or ‘possible suicide’. Of course, you’d say it was probable if you looked at the case from a
purely psychological point of view, Miner has always thought, but that doesn’t mean the star hadn’t spent thirty-six years committing this probable suicide, or that a criminal
hadn’t been employed to do the actual deed. He thinks of other expressions to describe what had happened: ‘foul play’ or, as Dr Litman of the Suicide Prevention Team had put it,
‘a gamble with death’.

REWIND

Given the choice, the long-since-retired Miner would simply play the journalist one of the tapes Marilyn had recorded for her analyst at the end of July or the start of August
1962. Ralph Greenson had labelled them ‘MARILYN: LAST SESSIONS’, and Miner had listened to them and transcribed them forty-three years previously, but never seen or heard of them since.
They had vanished during the analyst’s lifetime – or after his death, who could tell? The only trace left of them is the summaries Miner has made in his meticulous lawyer’s
handwriting, and so, after greeting the journalist, he shakily holds out a sheaf of crumpled pages from a yellow legal pad. Backwright tells him to sit down, and gives him a glass of iced
water.

‘What makes you want to speak to the press after all these years?’ the journalist asks.

‘Ralph Greenson was a good man,’ says Miner. ‘I knew him well, before his patient died. When I studied medicine before taking up criminal law, I attended his psychiatry
lectures and seminars at UCLA. I respected him – I still do. He fascinated me.

‘Two days after Marilyn Monroe’s death, he asked me to interview him because he wanted to go back over his initial statements to the police. He was very worried at being portrayed in
the papers as “the weird psychiatrist” and “the last man to have seen Marilyn alive and the first to have seen her dead”. He insisted I listen to two tapes she had given him
on the last day of her life, Saturday, August fourth 1962. He left them with me to transcribe on condition that I never revealed the contents to anyone, even the district attorney or the coroner. I
had too many unanswered questions after the autopsy not to want to examine any new evidence, however difficult I might find his request to respect its confidentiality.’

‘Where and when did you meet him?’

‘I spent several hours with the psychiatrist on Wednesday, August eighth, after he had attended the actress’s funeral.’

‘And you’ve never discussed your conversation with anyone?’

‘I remember what he said when the rumours started,’ Miner says, his voice trembling. ‘“I can’t explain or defend myself without speaking about things that I
don’t want to reveal. It’s a terrible position to be in, to say I can’t talk about it. I just can’t tell the whole story.” That’s why I didn’t reveal the
content of the tapes, out of respect. It was only when biographers began rehashing old accusations of violence, or even murder, that I decided to speak out. But I didn’t disclose everything,
as I would have liked to. I decided to get his widow Hildi Greenson’s permission before I went back to my notes and showed them to you.’

Forger Backwright reminds him that Hildegarde Greenson had assured the
Los Angeles Times
she’d never heard her husband talk of any tapes and knew nothing of their existence. Miner
replies that Greenson was very strict about medical confidentiality.

‘I have kept this secret for Greenson’s sake. I’m breaking my promise only now because he has been dead for over twenty-five years and because I pledged his widow not to leave
unanswered all those people who have tried to implicate Marilyn Monroe’s last analyst in her death. Some have spoken of criminal negligence. I have decided to make these tapes public to
respond to all the accusations that have sullied the reputation of a man I respected.’

REWIND

In the muggy, sweltering heat of another Californian August, in front of another tape recorder, Miner, with a mixture of hesitancy and vehemence in his voice, tells the
journalist about his visit to Dr Greenson in August 1962. He had found a grief-stricken, unshaven figure in the ground-floor consulting room of his villa overlooking the Pacific. Greenson had
spoken freely, as if he were a trusted confidant. He had asked Miner to sit down and, without preamble, played him a tape lasting forty minutes. Marilyn was talking. It was her voice on the tape.
Nothing else. No hint of anyone listening or any conversation. Just her, alone. Her voice seemed to hover on the edge of her words – out of discretion, rather than fragility, as if she were
leaving them to fend for themselves, to be heard or not, as the case might be. A voice from beyond the grave that entered into one with the incalculable immediacy of voices heard in dreams.

It couldn’t be a therapy session, Miner explains, because the psychiatrist didn’t record his patients. He says Marilyn purchased a tape recorder a few weeks
earlier to record herself free-associating outside her sessions and share the results with her analyst.

Miner had taken very detailed verbatim notes that day. He had come away from Greenson’s office convinced it was highly improbable Marilyn had committed suicide. ‘Among other
things,’ he says, ‘it was clear that she had plans and expectations for her immediate future.’

‘What about Dr Greenson?’ Backwright asks. ‘Did he think she had committed suicide or been murdered?’

‘That is something on which I cannot respond. All I can say is that in the report I subsequently had to make to my superior, I maintained that the doctor did not believe his patient had
killed herself. As far as I remember, I wrote something like: “As requested by you I have been to see Dr Greenson to discuss the death of his late patient Marilyn Monroe. We discussed this
matter for a period of hours, and as a result of what Dr Greenson told me, and from what I heard on tape recordings, I believe I can say definitely that it was not suicide.” Then I sent it
in. It was never acknowledged, and the case was closed ten days later, on August seventeenth. My memorandum disappeared.’

REWIND

After another glass of iced water, Miner goes on.

‘There was one question Dr Greenson didn’t give me a clear answer to the day I saw him: why did he call it suicide at first if he was convinced it wasn’t one? There’s a
simple answer to that, but it’s taken me years to work out: he called it suicide
on the telephone
in the dead woman’s house, because he knew the whole place was
bugged—’

‘Okay, so Greenson probably wasn’t a murderer,’ Backwright interrupts, ‘but couldn’t he have played a part in covering up a murder by making it look like suicide
for reasons we don’t know?’

Miner says nothing.

‘Who killed Marilyn if she didn’t herself?’ persists the journalist.

‘That’s not the question I ask. Not
who
but
what
killed Marilyn. The movies, mental illness, psychoanalysis, money, politics?’ Miner stands up. As he leaves, he
puts two faded, battered manila envelopes on Backwright’s desk.

‘I can’t give you proof of anything. I heard what she said. The voice she said it in has . . . how can I put it? . . . has been lost. Every trace a person leaves erases another trace
or, if they’re lying, covers one up. There is something I can leave you, though. Something that doesn’t prove anything either. Some images.’

Backwright waits until he is alone in front of his computer to open the envelopes. He has to write an article that night about the circumstances in which the tapes have come into his possession:
they are going to run the contents in tomorrow’s edition. The first envelope contains a single photograph of a body on a table in a morgue. A vision of white on white: a naked, bruised
blonde, her face unrecognisable. The second contains six pictures taken a few days before the first photograph, at the Cal-Neva Lodge, a luxurious motel on the border between California and Nevada.
They show Marilyn on all-fours having sex with a man who laughs into the camera as he lifts up the shock of hair covering the left side of her face.

REWIND

Hunched with age, Miner walks down the stairs of the
Los Angeles Times
building and, confused about the way out, finds himself lost in a basement smelling of musty ink.
Forty-three years have passed since Marilyn’s death, and twenty-three since the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office reopened the archives, combed through the evidence all over
again, and then confirmed the verdict of the original investigation. Miner can’t bear to leave the actress’s memory to a cult, to the fans from all over the world who gather every day
at her crypt in Westwood Village Memorial Park. He’s never believed that Marilyn took her own life, but neither has he come out and said the contrary. Years have passed, and he doesn’t
want to die without putting something right, without showing the world the image that the tapes reveal of a woman full of life, of humour, of desire – anything but depressive or suicidal.
Miner knows from experience that people who are full of drive and hope one minute can kill themselves in an efficient, resolute manner the next; that one can want to stop living without wanting to
die; and that a longing for death is sometimes just a desire to put an end to the pain of living rather than life itself. But he refuses to believe these contradictions applied to Marilyn.
Something in the tapes tells him she couldn’t have killed herself.

But there is something he cares about even more. The endless profusion of theories has convinced him that no one will ever know for sure who killed her or why. What he knows
can
be
cleared up, what has made him go public with the recordings, is Greenson’s role on the night of the murder. Miner remains haunted by the psychiatrist’s silence, by his expression of
utter dismay as he stared out of the picture window of his Santa Monica villa at the swimming-pool bathed in the fluorescent purple evening light. He had felt compelled to ask, ‘Forgive me,
but what was she to you? Just a patient? What were you to her?’