Marilyn's Last Sessions (29 page)

The following day, Marilyn was admitted into the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital for a gynaecological operation. People speculated whether it was an abortion or a miscarriage. She gave her name at
Reception as Zelda Zonk.

The day Darryl Zanuck became president of Fox, Greenson saw Marilyn twice, first at his office and then at her house. Engelberg had already given her an injection of sedatives,
and Greenson prescribed Nembutal on top of that. He had seen her every day since he’d got back from Europe. She phoned him constantly, sometimes at two or three or four in the morning, as
well as regularly calling Bobby Kennedy.

Since he had started seeing her again, Greenson had felt Marilyn was getting better, even if she talked constantly about separation, absence and loneliness. His diagnosis might partly have been
motivated by guilt, because he felt responsible for her being sacked by Fox while he was away. He might also have been trying to reassure himself that it would end at some point, that she would
recover and free herself from him and he wouldn’t be at her mercy seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, a ‘life prisoner’, as he put it, of a method of treatment that he
thought necessary for her but was gradually proving impossible for him. He realised that her anguish, her obsessive existential sense of waiting, wasn’t directed at anyone real such as him,
or even a nameless stranger. She was waiting for no one to respond to her waiting.

He sometimes wondered if she was only pretending to be better because she knew how much he wanted her to be better. She was an actress, after all. She could play the happy girl even with her
doctor. Anything, just so long as she didn’t lose him. At one session she said, ‘I don’t mind about dying. I know you’ll call me afterwards.’

Greenson planned to go to New York the following month. His book was going slowly now Marilyn occupied most of his time and emotions. Anguish seemed to be the only way she could ensure another
person would be there. Her distress had a nightmarish quality. However much love, tenderness – greatness, even – it might contain, he knew it also had an inexorably destructive side.
What if he did not want to be destroyed?

In the last thirty-five days of her life, Marilyn saw Greenson twenty-seven times and Engelberg twenty-four. Both gave her a series of sedative injections and ‘youth
shots’, which they refrained from mentioning during the investigation after her death. Richard Meryman, the
Life
journalist who was the last person to interview her at the start of
July, described her going into the kitchen at one point, where Engelberg gave her an injection, then returning in an almost electric state of animation.

She didn’t go to New York again, but she was often out of town, and spent two weekends at the Cal-Neva Lodge, the casino resort reportedly owned jointly by Frank Sinatra and Sam Giancana,
which Paul ‘Skinny’ D’Amato managed. Sinatra organised the first weekend, officially to celebrate her renegotiated contract with Fox – she planned to resume filming
Something’s Got to Give
in the last week of August – with the added suggestion that they talk about a film project of his, which he thought would suit her. According to Ralph
Roberts, she wasn’t keen to go and only changed her mind when she heard Dean Martin was giving a show at the Lodge’s Celebrity Room that weekend. Sinatra flew her up in his private
plane, the
Christina
, a lavish affair with fitted carpets, carved wooden skirting boards, bar, piano and luxurious bathrooms with heated toilet seats, no less. She was given Bungalow
Fifty-two, one of a group reserved for distinguished guests. Disguised in a black scarf and sunglasses, she spent most of the time in her room, and slept with the phone connected to the switchboard
at her ear.

The second time she flew out to the California–Nevada border was the last weekend before her death. People saw her walking around like a ghost, in a kind of daze. She said unspeakable
things to D’Amato. The occasion this time wasn’t a celebration with friends, but a meeting with a cabal of sinister characters who didn’t want her to have anything more to do with
the Kennedys and were determined to make sure she kept her mouth shut. One evening, as fog shrouded the banks of Lake Tahoe, Marilyn was seen standing barefoot by the swimming pool, rocking back
and forth, staring up at the hills. A few hours later she was found in a drug- and alcohol-induced coma. She was driven to Reno airport slumped in the back seat, like an unstrung marionette, and
put on a plane. It was
The Misfits
all over again. She pleaded desperately for the twin-engine plane to land at Santa Monica, but the airport was closed for the night and they had to land at
Los Angeles. She screamed that she wanted to go home. When her doctors and Eunice Murray picked her up, she was trembling with fear. She realised what the trip had been all about. ‘Things
happened that weekend that nobody’s ever talked about,’ Skinny D’Amato commented laconically afterwards.

A few days later, Sinatra is alleged to have brought photographer Billy Woodfield a roll of film to develop. In the darkroom, Woodfield supposedly exposed photographs of a drugged, unconscious
Marilyn being sexually abused while Sinatra and Sam Giancana watched. Dean Martin was the only person to understand that the drugs and alcohol and her little-lost-girl routine were symptoms of a
far worse problem. He told a journalist years afterwards that she had never been able to come to terms with the horror she had blundered into, the dark, seamy world of Sam Giancana, Johnny Rosselli
and ‘those spoilt Kennedy bastards’, which lay beyond the land of dreams she shared with the audiences who paid to see her on screen. She had always desperately wanted to return to some
sort of fairy-tale land, but in this one, there was no way of getting back. She knew things that no one would believe. Dean had realised she wasn’t long for this world. ‘If she
hadn’t kept her mouth shut, she wouldn’t have needed drugs to get where she was going.’ Marilyn had peered through the veil of her corrupted innocence, and the truth she’d
seen had terrified her. But Dean didn’t talk. And he wasn’t the only one who knew the whole story about Monroe, the Kennedys and Sam Giancana, the grey thread of truth that ran through
the glittering lies and fantasies of the city of angels.

One evening years later, when he was very drunk, Dean Martin said, ‘Marilyn was only thirty-six when she died, but it was better that way. She didn’t have to end up like June
Allyson, who’s just a voice on the radio these days. She does ads for Kimberly-Clark diapers for old men. She’s still alive, if you can call it that.’

‘I’ve got to tell you something,’ Marilyn said, as she arrived for her session. ‘I read this line in Joseph Conrad that says more about me than any
amount of analysis could. “It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.” It’s sad, isn’t it? But not all that sad. Beauty’s never sad, but it is
painful. I don’t know why, but I’ve always associated beauty with cruelty.’

Following a train of thought that seemed to require no overt explanation, she moved on to the women in her life.

‘Sometimes my relationships with women have been sexual, Doctor, sure, like with Natasha. But always dark and cruel, in a way. Always cold and distant.’

She fell silent, preferring to watch her memories rather than put them into words. The mould for the women she became close to was set by the first woman to play an important part in her
professional life, Natasha Lytess, the drama teacher who took charge of her career in 1950. Like her, they were all intelligent, cultivated and manipulative. Marilyn would ask them what to do and
who to be, but they’d never tell her. They preferred to be the invisible hands working the puppet’s strings. She remembered a terrible scene in late 1950 at André de
Dienes’s house in the Hills. She and André were lying side by side on his living-room rug, listening transfixed to a version of
La Bohème
’s ‘Mi chiamano
Mimi’ when the phone rang. ‘A furious woman’s asking for you,’ André said. ‘I think it’s Natasha. I said I didn’t know where you were. She’s
calling me a liar, screaming she knows you’re here with me.’ Marilyn began to cry. When André hung up, he told her off for being so stupid. Why had she let Natasha know where she
was spending the afternoon? Marilyn rushed off to Natasha’s in a state of high anxiety.

‘Does this Natasha remind you of anyone?’ Greenson asked.

‘I don’t know. No, wait, I do: you. Don’t look like that . . . She reminds me of you because her parents were Russian, like yours. She was Jewish, like you; she was an
intellectual, like you; she was about fifteen years older than me, like you; she was a failed actor, like you . . . She had just been fired by Columbia when I met her. It’s funny, she taught
me a job she couldn’t do herself. A bit like analysts: you try to cure people of something you suffer from.’

‘Which other women have you slept with?’

‘Gone to bed with, Doctor, gone to bed. And slept with sometimes without doing anything – that’s how it’s usually been. Gee, you know, when I was twenty, my mother and I
slept in the same bed at my aunt Ana’s for a few weeks when she came out of hospital in San Francisco . . . But, yes, I went to bed with Natasha. It always seemed like she had sharp edges. I
felt hatred more than desire from her, and I suppose she did from me too, when I think about it. People said I was a lesbian. They love labels, don’t they? It makes me laugh. Sex is never
wrong if there’s some love involved. But far too often people think it’s like gymnastics, a mechanical exercise. If it was, they could just put machines in drugstores and people could
make love without needing anyone else. That’s what I think everyone’s trying to make me into sometimes, a sex machine.’

‘I was asking about other women. Have they been actresses? Joan Crawford, for instance?’

‘Oh, yes, Crawford . . . Once. Only once. There was a cocktail party at her house, we felt good together. We went to Joan’s bedroom and jumped on each other. Crawford had a gigantic
orgasm and shrieked like a maniac. Next time I saw Crawford she wanted another round. I told her straight out I didn’t much enjoy doing it with a woman. After I turned her down, she became
spiteful. A year later, I was chosen to present one of the Oscars at the Academy’s annual affair. I waited tremblingly for my turn to walk up to the platform and hand over the Oscar in my
keeping. I prayed I wouldn’t trip and fall and that my voice wouldn’t disappear when I had to say my two lines. When my turn came I managed to reach the platform, say my piece, and
return to my table without any mishap. Or so I thought until I read Joan Crawford’s remarks in the morning papers. I haven’t saved the clippings, but I have sort of remembered what she
said. She said that Marilyn Monroe’s vulgar performance at the Academy affair was a disgrace to all of Hollywood. The vulgarity, she said, consisted of my wearing a dress too tight for me and
wriggling my rear when I walked up holding one of the holy Oscars in my hand. Bitch! She didn’t think my rear was vulgar when we were in bed together.’

‘Let’s go back to Natasha. You told me one day she instantly fell in love with you. Since you associate her and me, do you think I’ve fallen in love with my patient?’

‘You know what she told me just after we met? “I want to love you.” I said, “You don’t need to love me, Natasha. Just get me working.” She kept badgering me
with her hopeless passion like something out of Chekhov, all silent suffering and stifled tears. Love isn’t something people are owed. It’s not their due, is it, Doctor?’

‘What was happening in your life when you met?’

‘I needed someone to model myself on, not a lover. She tried to force her love on me when my aunt Ana died soon after we started working together. But there’s always a silver lining
when someone has a crush on you, I suppose, especially if you don’t reciprocate it. We shared an apartment in the Sherry Netherlands Hotel, and all through the summer of 1949, Natasha
introduced me to Proust, Woolf, Dostoyevsky . . . and Freud,
The Interpretation of Dreams
. Well, not all of it, just bits. Afterwards the Chekhov– Freud line, as I call it, was carried
on by Michael Chekhov. I owe him everything. He said he was Chekhov’s nephew. Everyone in Hollywood remembered him playing the old analyst who supervises Ingrid Bergman in Hitchcock’s
film . . . When I began lessons with him, I think it was the autumn of 1951, he said something I’ll never forget, “You must try to think of your body as a musical instrument that
expresses your ideas and your feelings; you must strive for complete harmony between body and psyche.” What do you think, Romi? Isn’t that what we’re trying to do now? He wrote a
book after that called
To the Actor: On the Technique of Acting
. It’s been my bible, along with Freud. Why don’t you write a book called
To the Psychoanalyst: On the Technique
of Psychoanalysis
?’

‘Let’s go on with your relationships with women. Is there any significance in their being brunettes?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe when I’m with them, I can see what I’m not or what I used to be or what I might have been. The reason I dye my hair every two days is not just for my
roles, you know, it’s also so I’ll never have to be the woman with reddish-brown hair I used to be again.’

‘I sense a fear of homosexuality and, at the same time, a tendency to seek out situations where you will encounter it.’

‘What would I know? When I started reading books about psychoanalysis and sexuality, I’d read words like “frigid”, “rejected”, “lesbian”, and
think I was every one of them. Some days I don’t feel I’m anything and other days I wish I was dead. Then there’s that other sad part I have to play: the beautiful
woman.’

Just before Natasha Lytess died, she spoke about Marilyn: ‘She was most definitely not a child. A child is naïve and open and trusting. But Marilyn was shrewd. I
wish I had one-tenth of her ability for business, of her clever knack of promoting what was right for her and discarding what was not. My life and emotional well-being were in her hands entirely. I
was the older one, the teacher, but she knew how deeply I felt, and she took advantage of it as only a young person and a beautiful person can. She said she always needed the other person more than
they needed her. In fact it was the opposite.’