Marilyn's Last Sessions (30 page)

What can I give you? Not money. I know that from me that means nothing to you. Not my body. I know your professional ethics and faithfulness to your wonderful wife make that
impossible. You know what Nunnally Johnson said? ‘For Marilyn, sex is the simplest way to say thank you.’ How I can say thank you to you, since my money isn’t good with you?
You have given me everything. Thanks to you, I am different, with myself and other people. Because of you I can now feel what I never felt before. So now I am a whole woman (pun intended
– like Shakespeare). So now I have control – control of myself – control of my life. What I am going to give you is my idea that will revolutionise psychoanalysis.

Isn’t it true that the key to analysis is free association? Marilyn Monroe associates. You, my doctor, by understanding and interpretation of what goes on in my mind, get to my
unconscious, which makes it possible for you to treat my neuroses and for me to overcome them. But when you tell me to relax and say whatever I am thinking, I blank out and have nothing to say;
that’s what you and Dr Freud call resistance. So we talk about other things and I answer your questions as best I can. You are the only person in the world I have never told a lie to and
never will.

Oh, yes, dreams. I know they are important. But you want me to free-associate about the dream elements. I have the same blanking out. More resistance for you and Dr Freud to complain about.
I read his ‘Introductory Lectures’. God, what a genius. He makes it so understandable. And he is so right. Didn’t he say himself that Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky had a better
understanding of psychology than all the scientists put together? Damn it’s right, they do. Billy Wilder had me say in
Some Like It Hot
, ‘I am no Professor Freud!’ You
remember, the scene where Tony Curtis was pretending that he had a block about sex and couldn’t feel anything when I kissed him. He said he’d tried everything; he’d spent six
months in Vienna with Professor Freud, flat on his back, but nothing doing. I kissed him three times, saying, ‘I may not be Dr Freud, but could I take another crack at it?’
Psychoanalysis is a fine thing, but love, the love you make with your mouth and hands and body, isn’t a bad way of escaping death and the deep freeze either. Billy understood that.

You told me to read Molly Bloom’s mental meanderings (I can use words, can’t I?) to get a feeling for free association. It was when I did that that I got my great idea. As I read
it something bothered me. Here is Joyce writing what a woman thinks to herself. Can he, does he really know her innermost thoughts? But after I read the whole book, I could better understand
that Joyce is an artist who could penetrate the souls of people, male or female. It really doesn’t matter that Joyce doesn’t have breasts or other feminine attributes or never felt
a menstrual cramp. Wait a minute. As you must have guessed, I am free-associating and you are going to hear a lot of bad language. Because of my respect for you, I’ve never been able to
say the words I’m really thinking when we are in session. But now I am going to say whatever I think, no matter what it is. I can do that because of my idea, which, if you’ll be
patient, I’ll tell you about. That’s funny. I ask you to be patient, but I am your patient. Yet to be patient and to be a patient makes a kind of Shakespearean sense, doesn’t
it? Back to Joyce. To me Leopold Bloom is a central character. He is the despised Irish Jew, married to an Irish Catholic woman . . . What is a Jew? . . . I couldn’t tell if you’re
Jewish by looking at you. Same with women, you can’t pick them from the outside. Is there even a woman inside a woman’s body? . . . OK, my idea! To start with there is the doctor
and the patient. I don’t like the word, analysand. It makes it seem like treating a sick mind is different from treating a sick body. However, you and Dr Freud say the mind is part of the
body. . . . Anyway, you are in his office and the doctor says, ‘I want you to say whatever you are thinking, no matter what it is.’ And you can’t think of a damn thing. How
many times after a session I would go home and cry because I thought it was my fault. While reading Molly’s blathering, the IDEA came to me. Get a tape recorder. Put a tape in. Turn it
on. Say whatever you are thinking like I am doing now. It’s really easy. I’m lying on my bed wearing only a brassière. If I want to go to the refrig or the bathroom, push the
stop button and begin again when I want to.

And I just free-associate. No problem. You get the idea, don’t you? Patient can’t do it in Doctor’s office. Patient is at home with tape recorder. Patient free-associates
sans difficulty. Patient sends tape to Doctor. After he listens to it, patient comes in for a session. He asks her questions about it, interprets it. Oh, yes, she can put her dreams on the tape
too – right when she has them. You know how I would forget what I dreamed or even if I dreamed at all.

Dr Freud said dreams are the
via regia
to the unconscious and so I’ll tell you my dreams on tape.

OK, Dr Greenson. You are the greatest psychiatrist in the world. You tell me. Has Marilyn Monroe invented an important way to make psychoanalysis work better? After you listen to my tapes
and use them to treat me, you could publish a paper in a scientific journal. Wouldn’t that be sensational? I don’t want any credit. I don’t want to be identified in your
paper. It’s my present to you. I’ll never tell anybody about it. You will be the first to let your profession know how to lick resistance. Maybe you could patent the idea and
license it to your colleagues. Ask Mickey. . . .

What I told you is true when I first became your patient. I had never had an orgasm. I well remember you said an orgasm happens in the mind, not the genitals.

It doesn’t bother me, but this damn free association could drive somebody crazy. Oh, oh, crazy makes me think about my mother. I am not going to free-associate about her right now. Let
me finish my thoughts about orgasms. You also said that a person in a coma or a paraplegic could not have an orgasm because genital stimulation did not reach the brain and that the contrary was
possible, an orgasm could occur in the brain without any stimulation of the genitals. You said there was an obstacle in my mind that prevented me from having an orgasm; that it was something
that happened early in my life about which I felt so guilty that I did not deserve to have the greatest pleasure there is; that it had to do with something sexual that was very wrong, but my
getting pleasure from it caused my guilt. You said that when I did exactly what you told me to do I would have an orgasm, and that after I did it to myself and felt what it was, I would have
orgasms with lovers. What a difference a word makes. You said I would, not I could.

Bless you, Doctor. What you say is gospel to me. What wasted years. Incidentally, if men weren’t such idiots, and if there was an Oscar for best faker, I would have got it every year .
. .

How can I describe to you, a man, what an orgasm feels like to a woman? I’ll try. Think of a light fixture with a rheostat control. As you slowly turn it on, the bulb begins to get
bright, then brighter and brighter and finally in a blinding flash is fully lit. As you turn it off it gradually becomes dimmer and at last goes out.

. . . I’ll need you to keep me together for a year or more. I’ll pay you to be your only patient.

Oh, I made you another present. I have thrown all my . . . pills in the toilet. Goodnight, Doctor.

Grace McKee – that’s what she was called when she and my mother met, which must have been two or three years before I was born. They were both working in the
movies, so they shared a small two-bed apartment on Hyperion Avenue in what’s now called Silver Lake, a run-down part of town not far from the studios. Grace had got my mother . . . it is
awful the way my throat tightens up when I try to say ‘mother’ . . . my
mother
to dye her hair red. She was an archivist and my mother was a film-cutter. They were what used
to be called ‘good-time girls’. All they cared about was going out and drinking. They had moved to different places by the time I was born, but they still cruised the bars together,
and maybe they slept together, what do I know? I didn’t live with my mother, she put me with the Bollenders when I was still very little. I’ve told you about that already,
haven’t I?: the poor orphan girl looking out the window at the glowing RKO Studios sign, imagining her mother inside, ruining her eyes peering at the stars’ faces . . . On Sundays,
hand in hand like teenage girls, they’d take me to Hollywood’s picture palaces: huge, lavish Pantages Theater on the corner of Vine Street and Hollywood Boulevard, Grauman’s
Egyptian Theater, also on Hollywood Boulevard . . . That’s where they had the première of
Asphalt Jungle
, my first real film. I couldn’t go. I was sick. Oh, God, I was
so sick! . . . The Chinese Theater a bit further west. When they didn’t know what to do with me during the week, they’d send me with my ticket money to sit in those dark auditoria
and stare up at the light and the faces they pored over all day at their editing tables. I loved being a little girl in the front row all alone in front of the big screen.

When I was nine years old – my mother had brought me to live with her about a year earlier – they got in a terrible fight. My mother attacked Grace with a knife. The police were
called and Grace had my mother put in a psychiatric hospital. Grace became my legal guardian. I didn’t live with her straight away, I was put in two more foster homes, but she came and
got me in the end. She took me to the studios and the movies the whole time. She always said I’d be a star when I grew up.

One day, she drove me to an orphanage. I was getting on for ten. She had got married and she didn’t have room for me in her place in Van Nuys. She paid for my board, and on Saturdays,
she’d take me to lunch, then a movie. Sometimes she’d play dress-ups with me, and we’d go to a beauty parlour on Odessa Avenue. That’s how I know so much about make-up.
Grace thought Jean Harlow was the best. She used to tell me my middle name was because of her, but I knew it was spelled Jeane not Jean. But even so, Harlow was my idol as well. Grace dressed
me all in white like her and powdered my face and gave me red lipstick. I was nearly a platinum blonde then, but I was only ten. It would have been odd, a little girl looking like a
femme
fatale
. So I waited until I was twenty before changing my hair colour and my name. A week after my eleventh birthday, Grace took me out of the orphanage. But a few months later, when she
realised her husband Doc – I’m sorry, that’s what they called him – had abused me, she sent me to another ‘mother’, Ana Lower. She had a heart problem and
neglected me, but I was very fond of her. For five years, I went back and forth between the two of them, totally confused, always having to do a double-take at school before I said who my
mother was and where I lived. At Christmas – I think I was thirteen – Grace gave me my first portable gramophone, a Victrola. The wind-up spring was so stiff that the pitch would be
off by the end of the record, but I loved listening to my favourite singers in the dark.

One day, Grace and her husband left California and she married me to the neighbours’ son, James Dougherty. I was sixteen years old and I didn’t want to go back to the orphanage.
You asked me a long time ago what marriage meant to me. Here’s one answer: ‘A kind of painful, crazy friendship, with sexual privileges.’ There, I’ve told you the story
of my life, if that’s the word for it. That will be all for today, as Dr Greenson used to say at the start. Night night, Doc!