Marilyn's Last Sessions (25 page)

Two days later, even though he had come off a seventeen-hour flight, he drove straight from the airport to Marilyn’s house, where he found her in a coma – but alive. No one knows
what they talked about when she came round, but the following day he took her to see a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, Michael Gurdin, who had already done some work on Marilyn thirteen years
earlier, to her nose and cheekbones. She was hoarse-voiced, her hair dirty and matted, make-up barely covering the bruising under her eyes. Her analyst said she had slipped in the shower. The
doctor could see she was heavily medicated. She seemed especially concerned about a forthcoming photo shoot, asking if her nose was broken and how long it would take to fix if it were. When the
X-rays showed no significant damage to the bones or cartilage, she threw her arms round Dr Greenson. Gurdin ruled out a fracture. She might have fallen, he said, but she also might have been hit:
bruising to the nose can easily spread to the eyes.

Greenson rang Mickey Rudin at once and told him to let the studio know he had everything in hand. He was convinced she was emotionally and physically up to finishing the film on deadline.

He asked Eunice Murray not to mention the incident to the press or anyone from Fox, and informed the studio that, from now on, all artistic decisions involving Marilyn – shots, script
alterations, costumes, everything – were to be discussed with him. At lunch at Fox the following day, Phil Feldman, the executive vice president of studio operations, told the analyst they
were losing nine thousand dollars every day Marilyn didn’t film, and asked Greenson to drive her to Century City personally.

‘If she depends on you so heavily,’ Feldman asked, ‘what’s going to happen to the picture if she chucks you?’

Greenson didn’t answer, preferring to point out that he had managed to get her back on
The Misfits
’ set after a week in hospital, and that she had been able to finish
Huston’s film. He thought he could do the same again now.

But that afternoon, a few minutes before the magistrates’ court closed, Fox sued Marilyn for half a million dollars for breach of contract, and told the press she was no longer on the
project. Greenson heard the news on the car radio on his way back from lunch. He rushed to Marilyn’s house and gave her a tranquilliser shot.

Later that evening, a statement was put out that Lee Remick was going to replace Marilyn. Next morning, Dean Martin said he was pulling out of the film.

‘I have the greatest respect for Miss Lee Remick and her talent, and for all the other actresses put forward for the role, but I signed up to make this film with Marilyn Monroe and I
won’t make it with anyone else.’ He hadn’t even wanted to make the film originally, he confessed, and had only agreed because Marilyn had set her heart on him being in it.
Levathes’ attempts to make him rethink were in vain.

Henry Weinstein would later say of Marilyn, ‘Very few people experience terror. We all experience anxiety, unhappiness, heartbreaks, but that was sheer, primal terror.’

When he got back to Santa Monica that evening, despite the weight of exhaustion that had been building since his return from Europe, Greenson couldn’t sleep. He went to bed, but when Hildi
arrived home, two hours later, she found him in his armchair, holding Marilyn’s X-rays up to his orange desk lamp. He started like a naughty child when she came in, then carried on solemnly
examining the plates as if he were meditating. He scanned the patches of blurry white and fathomless black, searching not for lesions but for the secret trail of her beauty, winding through the
strange densities and degrees of opacity. His mouth was open and shadowy as though he were about to speak.

When he’d got back from Europe, Greenson had found a series of notes left by Marilyn, folded, ink-stained bits of paper, some of which she’d just pushed under the
door without an envelope. One was particularly affecting: ‘I keep coming back to the chessboard. I don’t know why, but I keep thinking the game’s down to its last moves. My whole
life can be summed up by what those pieces can do. The way my body feels, the way I feel, what my acting’s like, the power of a director I used to admire, sex, the scenes I’ve filmed,
take after take after take: to me they’re like moves on the sixty-four squares until it all ends with checkmate . . .’ The note broke off. The psychoanalyst sank into a reverie. Struck
by Marilyn’s fascination with glass, mirrors and the chessboard’s black and white squares, the thought came to him that they had never played the game of skill together.

‘I’m devoted to you,’ Greenson said, in a loud voice, almost a shout, as Marilyn sat down for her second session of the day at his practice – he’d insisted they
meet there rather than at her house. ‘I’ll do anything I can to alleviate your suffering, you know that, but you simply have to finish this film. I gave them my word. The studio has
agreed to renegotiate your contract into a million-dollar deal: half a million for this picture, plus a bonus if it’s completed to the new schedule, and another half-million or more for a new
musical. It’s incredible. Fox is agreeing to revert to the Nunnally Johnson script you liked and, for good measure, to replace George Cukor with a director vetted by you. We’ve
won.’

‘I can’t do it. And you can’t help me either. Acting is not a problem I need to solve. It’s the only solution I’ve got to my other problems. Being an actress
isn’t the cause of my panic, it’s the only remedy I’ve got, and, I tell you, all the analysis in the world won’t help now. I’m all the way down a dead end, like that
house you made me buy.’

‘All your life your basic problem has been rejection,’ Greenson protested. ‘But now the studio’s not confirming your fantasy any more. And I want to free you of your fear
of abandonment, or at least allow you to control it.’

‘Every actor struggles with shyness more than anyone can imagine, you know. There is a censor inside us that says, “To what degree do we let go?” Like a child playing. I guess
people think we just go out there and, you know, that’s all we do. Just do it. But it’s a real struggle. I’m one of the world’s most self-conscious people. I really have to
struggle. An actor is not a machine, no matter how much they want to say you are. Creativity has got to start with humanity, and when you’re a human being, you feel, you suffer. You’re
gay, you’re sick, you’re nervous or whatever it is. Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control so that it would be a little easier for me when the director says
“Give me one tear, right now”, to make a tear pop out. Once there were two tears because I thought, How dare he? You need anxiety, but now it’s too much, it’s like I’m
under a black shroud. I can’t break out of it.’

Her voice faded away. After a while, she broke the silence: ‘It reminds me of a couple of films I made ten years ago. I’ve never had so many problems with parts. Michael Chekhov said
when he coached me, ‘Just thinking about the character, analysing it mentally, won’t allow you to play it, to transform yourself into another person. Your rational mind will make you
passive and distant. But if you develop your imaginary body, if you empty yourself and allow yourself to be possessed by the other person, your desires and feelings will allow you to act them
out.’ But that’s just what I was afraid of: becoming another person.

‘The anxiety’s always been there, you know,’ she said more fervently. ‘I suffered agonies on
Clash by Night
, when I was starting out. I almost died of fear at the
thought of dealing with Barbara Stanwyck and Fritz Lang – him most of all. He’d barred Natasha Lytess from the set and I couldn’t act without having her close by. On the next one,
Don’t Bother to Knock
, I threw up before every scene, like now. I had to play another baby-sitter, but she wasn’t like me. She was a straight portrait of my mother, my crazy,
impossible mother. I covered up my mother’s existence back then. I’d tell people she was dead so I wouldn’t have to tell them she was insane. That picture gave me the money to put
her in a clinic. My movies have helped me survive, some of them have at least, and I guess playing a woman who couldn’t look after a little girl helped me look after my mother in a way. It
made me sick, having to relive all that stuff, though. They call it stage fright, but it wasn’t for me, it was stage terror. The director was called Baker, like my mother. But don’t
tell Dr Freud that,’ she said, with a stifled laugh. ‘He’d despise me even more than Fritz Lang did. I was twenty-five and it was my first big part. After I’d read the
script, I ran to Natasha’s in the middle of the night literally shaking with fear. We worked together for two days and nights, optimistic one minute, the next in a total panic. I still
remember what my character Nell said to Richard Widmark: “I’ll be whatever you want me to be. I’ll be yours. Haven’t you ever felt that if you let somebody leave,
you’ll be lost, you won’t know where to go because you haven’t got anyone to put in their place?”’

Marilyn fell silent.

‘Who do you belong to now?’ asked Greenson.

‘Whoever wants to have a piece of me. Men, producers, the public. So many people have taken a part of me and changed it, you know: Grace McKee my hair, Fred Karger my teeth, Johnny Hyde my
nose and my cheeks, Ben Lyon my name . . . I loved it. You can’t imagine how much I loved it. The greatest experience in my life was in the winter of 1954. It was during my Korean
tour—’

‘I’ve seen footage of it,’ Greenson cut in. ‘NBC showed it a few months ago. Can you say who you belong to?’

Marilyn was silent, remembering ‘Marilyn’ singing for seventeen thousand whistling, shouting soldiers without a trace of her usual terror. She’d started by visiting the
wounded, then gone to the 45th Division and put on ten shows in sub-zero temperatures. It had snowed, but she wore only a figure-hugging, sleeveless, sparkling purple silk dress with no underwear.
The GIs hadn’t seen a woman for months. They went crazy, virtually devouring her limb from limb. To prevent a riot, she’d toned down a Gershwin song from ‘do it again’ to
‘kiss me again’. She’d sung ‘Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend’ for those poor saps who were getting shot up for a pittance, then tried to make up for it with a
cute dance. She knew they’d like that. Once she’d had to be whisked off stage in a helicopter. Two soldiers had held her by the legs as she’d hung out of the door, blowing kisses
to the mass of men below, all yelling her name.

‘Who do you belong to now?’ the analyst asked again.

‘Fear.’

‘Fear of what? Being alone?’

‘Alone? Some days I’m suffocated by a crew of forty people shouting the same thing at me over and over: “Take”, “Cut”, “First take, thirteenth take,
twenty-fifth take”… I don’t know, really. That word, “take” – I find it kind of terrifying and re -assuring at the same time. It’s strange. It makes me
feel there’s somebody inside me they’re taking, that at least I’m something. They take
me
, then they stop filming, but at least I was there in the viewfinder for a minute.
At least I existed. Who do I belong to? My audience, the whole world, not because I’m talented or even beautiful, but because I’ve never belonged to anyone or anything. If that’s
the way it is, how can you not say yourself, “I belong to anyone who wants a piece of me”?’

‘And do you belong anywhere?’

‘I felt lost on the filming of
Don’t Bother to Knock
. I had three addresses in as many months, two in West Hollywood, then a suite in the Bel Air Hotel in Stone Canyon, but
nothing that made me feel I was at home. I was trying to become a good actress and a good person. But I didn’t have you then . . . Sometimes I felt strong, but I had to go down very deep to
find that feeling and it was hard bringing it up to the surface. Nothing’s ever been easy. Nothing ever is easy, but it was less easy then than it is now. I couldn’t talk about my past.
It was too painful. I just wanted to forget.’

‘To be able to forget something, you have to revisit it.’

‘Relive it, you mean.’

‘What did you want to relive at Kennedy’s gala?’

‘No, that wasn’t it. I was honoured when they asked me to appear at the president’s birthday celebrations in Madison Square Garden. There was a hush over the whole place when I
came on to sing “Happy Birthday”, like if I had been wearing a slip I would have thought it was showing, or something. I thought, Oh, my gosh, what if no sound comes out? A hush like
that from the people warms me. It’s sort of like an embrace. Then you think, By God, I’ll sing this song if it’s the last thing I ever do. And for all the people. Because I
remember when I turned to the microphone I looked all the way up and back, and I thought, That’s where I’d be, way up there under one of those rafters, close to the ceiling, after I
paid my two dollars to come into the place.’

‘Now you have to forget and start over. Go back to the film.’

‘People have said I’m finished, that this is the end for me. You know, it might be a kind of relief to be finished. It’s sort of like, I don’t know, what kind of a yard dash you’re running, but then you’re at the finish line and you sort of see you’ve made it! But you
never do. Cut! Let’s go again! You always have to start all over again. Fucking Cukor. He can go fuck himself!’

Fox had sunk two million into
Something’s Got to Give
. ‘The poor dear has finally gone round the bend,’ Cukor told a columnist. ‘The sad thing
is, the little work we do have is no good . . . I think she’s finished.’ But Cukor had an idea how to get out of the stalemate – turn the whole débâcle into a
tragicomedy. Marilyn, with her abusive demands and shameless manipulation, would play the deranged actress. It would be a classic Hollywood tale of beleaguered producers, interfering psychoanalysts
and a vampire acting coach who controls every move the fragile star makes, ending in high melodrama. In the last reel Marilyn would succumb to the death and madness she was always in awe of, or at
least gave the impression of being.