Marilyn's Last Sessions (26 page)

Cukor never got the chance to make this film about Marilyn with her as the star, but two years after she died, he returned to the subject of powerful female
leads with portraits of women such as the dancer Isadora Duncan and the silent movie star Tallulah Bankhead. Remembering his travails on
Something’s Got to Give
, he imagined a movie
about an actress losing her grip, in the style of Billy Wilder’s
Sunset Boulevard
or Mankiewicz’s
All About Eve
. Like him, both directors had worked with Marilyn, and, in
an act of sweet revenge on such hated rivals, he liked the idea of shooting a
noir
in Technicolor about Marilyn’s final days. It would be his last, most beautiful film, which other
studios besides Fox might go for, now Marilyn had become a myth. He even had a choice of titles:
Lost In the City of Angels
, or
A Star Dies
, a companion piece to his 1954 movie,
A
Star Is Born,
in which Judy Garland played the troubled actress who was more interested in staying up all night than sweating it out under the lights on set all day. He envisaged it as a movie
about the movie that could never be made. It would not only show the other side of the screen, the stupid, cruel inner workings of the studios, but also what lies behind a movie star’s public
face, the madness of someone desperately searching for an image of something she could actually embody.

He had no qualms in admitting it would also be his way of getting his revenge on her, because he had resented their altercations intensely. She had constantly changed scenes and lines during
filming. Under Greenson’s tireless supervision, the screenwriters had had to insert takes, change the order of scenes, put in new material. Paula Strasberg’s involvement in every take
of every scene drove him especially insane. As far as he was concerned, the Actors Studio’s Method was pretentious nonsense and he firmly believed the director should retain all his
traditional prerogatives. Whenever he had said ‘Cut!’ after a shot, Marilyn would turn to Paula – never him – to ask if it was all right. They’d go off into a corner
and have an unbelievably intense discussion that would sometimes end in a favourable verdict, but more often in Marilyn saying, ‘No, it’s no good! Let’s do another!’ Dean
Martin, meanwhile, would be off in some corner taking out his frustration on his golf clubs. Strasberg, Greenson, Henry Weinstein – how many people exactly did they think should be arguing
over the final cut with him?

But he’d remained courteous throughout. If Marilyn said ‘Let’s do another’ once too often, he’d just say ‘Of course, darling’, call out ‘Last one,
Marilyn’, and do four or five takes without any film in the camera. He and his assistant, Gene Allen, would then watch the rushes in private and come out to find Marilyn waiting anxiously at
the door. ‘How was it?’ she’d ask – Cukor once turned to Allen and whispered, ‘Meaning: how was I?’ – and he’d always reassure her with a charming
smile, ‘Splendid, Marilyn, splendid.’ After the last day of shooting he said publicly, ‘The studio has given in to her on everything. There’s a certain ruthlessness about
all of her actions. She pretended to be nice to me. I’m very sorry to see her this way, fighting ghosts. Even her lawyer, Mickey Rudin, can’t take any more. She’s had enough
herself. I think this is the end of her career.’

Two years after her death, he realised that what he’d actually foreseen was the end of Marilyn rather than of her career. So now he wanted to re-create the incredible, involuntary force of
her performances; her almost unbearable presence on screen in
Something’s Got to Give
, despite her being so absent on set, even when she was physically there. It was completely
hypnotic, the way she seemed to move across the screen in slow-motion, her eyes, which were what made her so beautiful, virtually expressionless. He’d put himself in the movie as the patient,
brilliant director he’d found it so difficult to be in reality. It would be a comedy with tragic overtones. Maybe he should call it
The Only Thing That Counts Is What’s On
Screen
. He kept changing his mind, though, and in the end, when people started accusing Greenson of being in a conspiracy to murder Marilyn, he gave up. ‘It’s all too close to the
bone,’ he told Hedda Hopper, the Hollywood gossip columnist. ‘There’re too many powerful vested interests. And too much love swirling around.’

On the last day of his life, 24 January 1983, when he was talking to a friend, George Cukor mentioned
Something’s Got to Give
: ‘It was a dirty business,’ he said.
‘That was the worst rejection she ever had to take. When it came down to it, you know, she was just too innocent.’

Within weeks of being fired, Marilyn was doing major interviews and photo-shoots with
Life
,
Vogue
and
Cosmopolitan
, counterattacking with the only thing
she had ever known how to exploit: her image. A photo of her naked in the swimming pool appeared on the cover of
Life
on 22 June. Whether you think of her as a glittering star or a faded rag
doll in the last days of her life depends on whose impressions you listen to, the photographers or the journalists. Two decades later, the photographer Bert Stern described her in euphoric terms as
strong and free: ‘She had the power. She was the wind, that comet shape that Blake draws blowing around a sacred figure. She was the light, and the goddess, and the moon. The space and the
dream, the mystery and the danger. But everything else all together too, including Hollywood, and the girl next door that every guy wants to marry.’ The journalist Richard Meryman, however,
who interviewed her for
Life
, was struck ‘by how pasty her skin was – pasty and lifeless-looking. There was not much health in that skin. It wasn’t white and it
wasn’t grey. It was a little bit coarse, lifeless. It looked like skin that had had make-up on it for a long, long time. She looked terrific, but when you really studied that face, it was
kind of cardboardy. Her hair was lifeless, had no body to it, like hair that had been primped and heated and blown a thousand times.’ A permanent, as they say. The only part of her that
couldn’t die because it was already dead.

Discouraged by the turn of events since he’d come back from Europe, Greenson wrote to a friend, Lucille Ostrow, that he felt his failure as a personal affront. To come to Marilyn’s
aid, he said plaintively, he had sacrificed not only his holidays, but also time in New York, when he was supposed to meet Leo Rosten. ‘I’ve given up all my objectives and interests,
and she is thrilled to be free of the film that was boring her. She’s extremely well. Now I’m the one who’s depressed, who feels alone and abandoned.’ Greenson devoted every
working hour to his ‘favourite schizophrenic’. Everyone who’d worked on the movie was scathing, however. The screenwriter Walter Bernstein told anyone who’d listen that
Greenson had wrapped Marilyn up in a cocoon: ‘She has become an investment for him, and not just a financial one. He is not taking care of her; he’s manufacturing her illness.
It’s become vital for him and various others that she be regarded as sick, dependent and at a loss. There is something sinister about this psychoanalyst who exerts an insane influence over
her.’

On the Monday after she was fired, Marilyn left for New York. She saw nobody there, except W. J. Weatherby, whom she’d met up with now and then over the last two years.
They had become close, if that was the word. She always appeared in disguise, wearing a headscarf, baggy blouse, loose trousers and no make-up. The journalist was not particularly susceptible to
the narcissistic aspects of her beauty; he thought of himself as more interested in what lay behind the mask. He was particularly struck by a quality he tried to define by focusing on the word
‘screen’. The image she projected of herself was a screen, he thought, an ecstatic refraction of certain inner qualities that masked a profound confusion.

They used to meet in a bar on Eighth Avenue, a joint filled with silent drinkers who liked a generous measure – not the kind of place you’d expect to run into a Hollywood movie star.
Once, Weatherby chose a booth at the back in the shadows. After half an hour, he had begun to think she wasn’t coming when he heard a woman’s voice behind him, ‘A dollar for your
thoughts.’

‘Not worth it,’ he replied.

Marilyn had a glass in each hand. Her old pallor was overlaid with another layer, which made her more indecipherable.

‘Here you go. Gin and tonic.’

‘Great. We can go to another bar, though . . .’

‘No, no, I like it. I’m not often taken to a
real
bar. It reminds of the one we drank in in Reno. Everyone’s different in different places, though. I change anyway.
I’m different in New York than I am Hollywood. I’m different here at this bar than at the studio. And it’s the same with people. I’m different with Lee than with my
secretary, and I’m different again with you. I realise that in interviews. The questions always demand certain answers and make you seem a certain kind of person. Often they tell me more
about the interviewer than my answers do about me.’

‘You seduce interviewers,’ Weatherby said, with a disarming smile. ‘You don’t want them to get at the real you, but to fall in love with you and write love
stories.’

‘You think so?’

‘Oh, yes. But don’t you try to seduce every man you meet?’ he joked. ‘Don’t you like to feel your power over them?’

‘Sometimes I hate the effect I have on people. I get tired of the stupid attention, of working people up. It’s not really a human thing. But it didn’t happen with you. I like
it better this way. I don’t respect people who like you just because you’re famous . . . I hope our little drink isn’t going in that notebook.’

She reminded him of a child whistling or laughing in the dark. The more cheerful she tried to be, the more she felt the night draw in.

‘Do you want another drink?’ he asked.

‘Sure. Have you read any good books recently?’

‘
The Deer Park
by Norman Mailer. It might interest you. It’s about Hollywood. I’ll get you a copy.’

‘Do you ever feel books are beyond you? I mean, that your mind can’t handle them? Almost like they’re in a foreign language, though the words are English. It makes me feel so
dumb sometimes.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. You have sharper instincts than many intellectuals. You don’t want to blunt your instincts just for the sake of second-hand knowledge.
I’d rather be beautiful than wise.’

She frowned and looked away. He knew he’d made a mistake.

Not long after, they left and walked a few blocks up Eighth Avenue against the evening tide rushing towards the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He put her into a cab, then went back to their bar,
sat down under a neon light that had been turned on in the meantime, opened his notebook and transcribed their conversation. He wondered if she was using him, if she was just being friendly or
whether she thought there was something in their talks. He couldn’t do anything for her career, he wasn’t going to write about her, but still, he thought, the suspicion was there, as it
was with everyone.

Two days later, they met up again as they’d planned. He thought she’d changed. She didn’t look so youthful. Her face was gaunter, the cheekbones more angular, the lines showing
through her clumsy make-up, as she probably realised. She was waiting for him this time and jumped up to give him a jaunty peck on the cheek. Weatherby froze involuntarily. She smelt of neglect,
the shakes, too many tears.

‘I nearly didn’t come,’ she said.

‘I’m glad you did. How are you spending your time here?’

‘Don’t know. It’s like being at the bottom of the pool, when you kick to try and come up to the surface. I feel like staying inside – away from people.’

‘You got the blues?’

‘Sort of . . .’

She carried on talking in a disjointed way. They ordered their drinks. She wanted a White Angel but the waiter didn’t know what that was. They clinked their gin and tonics and wished each
other good luck.

‘They won’t ever humiliate me,’ she resumed. ‘I know what it’s like to feel a loser, that panic. I saw it in Betty Grable’s eyes when the studio bosses
ushered me into her dressing room to show I was taking over from her. I wouldn’t do it. I walked away. They held it against me for a long time. I was very naïve back then. There was a
whole period when I felt flattered if a man – any man – even took an interest in me! I believed too easily in people, and then I went on believing in them even after they disappointed
me over and over again. I must have been very stupid in those days. I guess I’m capable of doing it again with someone, only he’d have to be someone more outstanding than a heel. I
always paid the price, though, for everything I’ve ever done. There were times when I’d be with one of my husbands and I’d run into one of those Hollywood heels at a party and
they’d paw me cheaply in front of everybody as if they were saying,
Oh, we had her
. I guess it’s the classic situation of the ex-whore, though I was never a whore in the real
sense. I was never kept; I always kept myself. But there was a period when I responded too much to flattery and slept around too much, thinking it would help my career, though I always liked the
guy at the time. They were always so full of self-confidence and I had none at all and they made me feel better. But you don’t get self-confidence that way.’

‘Do you have plans after this film?’

‘I once read the role of Blanche DuBois in
A Streetcar Named Desire
. I’d like to play that on Broadway when I’m older. I like the last line so much. You remember, Vivien
Leigh in Kazan’s film?’

He remembered. Deathly pale, driven mad by her impossible love.

‘At the moment, I can’t see myself saying on stage “Whoever you are, I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers”, but I know what she means. Friends and
relatives can let you down. You can depend on them too much. But don’t depend too much on strangers either, honey. Some strangers gave me a hard time when I was a kid.’