Marilyn's Last Sessions (5 page)

The first photographer in the life of the woman still known as Norma Jeane Baker, André de Dienes, was a good-looking thirty-three-year-old, who had been brought over
from Europe in the early 1940s by the producer David O. Selznick. He had hired Norma Jeane for her first modelling job, a five-week road trip through California, Nevada and New Mexico in 1945. She
was nineteen.

At the end of the 1950s,
Life
magazine commissioned him to do a photo shoot of Marilyn and her drama coach, Natasha Lytess, a failed Hollywood actress of Russian extraction who had
emigrated from Berlin. The set-up was straightforward enough, an acting lesson at Lytess’s Beverly Hills house, but things went badly from the start. Lytess and de Dienes argued. De Dienes
didn’t like what Marilyn was wearing: a voluminous blouse that covered her completely, and a long, unattractive skirt almost down to her ankles. He hated her formal hairstyle and wanted to
show her as glamorous, provocative, desirable. He suggested to Marilyn that she take off her clothes and stand there, facing Natasha, wearing only her short, black slip with her hair messed up.
‘Make real dramatic movements,’ he told her. ‘I want action going on for the pictures.’ Natasha had other thoughts. She started shouting that Marilyn was going to be a
dramatic actress, not a ‘sex-bobble’. De Dienes pointed out that Marilyn’s sex appeal was the reason she was becoming famous, then packed up his equipment and stormed out, yelling
he didn’t work with hypocrites.

Throughout her life, photography would represent a haven Marilyn could retreat to whenever she was suffering. The greater her anguish at the prospect of shooting, the more acute her terror at
having to repeat a scene twenty times in front of a hundred people, the more the ballet of a man dancing round her armed with a camera seemed to shelter her from her fears.

Look bad, dirty, not just sexy
. Such, no doubt, were the dismal instructions the unknown cameraman gave Marilyn before he started rolling his camera in some squalid
Willowbrook apartment in downtown Los Angeles. The resulting film lasts three minutes forty-one seconds and is in black and white. Originally silent, it has since been soundtracked with an extract
from a Monroe song, ‘My Heart Belongs To Daddy’.

Provided it’s not a fake, this short film is the first trace of Marilyn on celluloid. To survive in Hollywood, as a twenty-two-year-old, she sold what she had to whoever wanted it: her
body to producers and its image to the anonymous spectators who watched the pornographic shorts with titles like
Apples, Knockers and Cokes
that were shot on the fringes of the studios. This
one,
Porn,
is particularly horrific. The actress enters in a black dress, which she takes off to reveal a black négligée and suspenders. She seems large somehow, her stomach,
her thighs, even her head, her russet-brown hair hanging limply over the left side of her face. Her leaden movements and vague gestures as she takes a tawdrily wrapped box from a man exude
something irredeemably crude and exhausted. If it weren’t for the glimpse of her face in the last shot, when she smokes a cigarette as she looks down at the man she has just had sex with, one
might doubt it was Marilyn Monroe. Only the smile is hers.

This sequence of undressing and desolate intercourse seems like some primeval form of pornography, mesmerisingly ugly in its evocation of how cruel sex can be. The fact it is silent makes it
seem even more like the visual representation of a moan or cry of pain. But its black candour about sex shows the truth about cinema as well: worn and unrestorable, the surviving prints reveal how
images eat away at themselves, how, as the shadows rise to the surface of the celluloid, the canker of oblivion corrodes even the most studied pose and tells the voyeur,
Nothing to see
here
.

One day in January 1951 in Hollywood, a black Lincoln convertible containing the director Elia Kazan and the playwright Arthur Miller eased through the Fox lot, searching for the sound-stage on
which
As Young As You Feel
was being shot. They heard Marilyn’s name being shouted by a hoarse-voiced production assistant before they saw her. The director was cursing the
twenty-four-year-old actress, who kept wandering off set and returning dejected and in tears. She had only a small role, but every scene she was in was taking hours. Eventually she appeared in a
close-fitting black dress. Kazan was speechless. He had come to offer her a part.

He became her lover, then her friend, then her enemy under McCarthyism, and then her friend again. ‘When I met her,’ he said later, ‘she was a simple, decent-hearted kid whom
Hollywood brought down, legs parted.’ She was thin-skinned and had a hunger to be accepted by people she could respect. Like many other girls who’d had her sort of life, she measured
her self-esteem by the number of men she was able to attract.

Marilyn continued to arrive late at her psychoanalyst’s.

‘Why such hostility towards people who want to help and understand you?’ Greenson asked. ‘We’re allies, you and I, not enemies.’

‘That’s how it’s always been. On
A Ticket To Tomahawk
, in the early days, the assistant director threatened, “You know, you can be replaced.” “You can
too,” I said. The idiot! He didn’t understand that being late guarantees you can’t be replaced and that everyone else is waiting for you, only you and no one else . . . Anyway,
when I’m late, it’s not as if I’m not doing anything, you know. I check my clothes and make-up, I work on my image, I take notes on what I’m going to say, topics of
conversation—’

‘You’re not on set or at some fancy party here,’ the analyst interrupted. ‘Do you know what it means to me when you come late? It means “I don’t like you, Dr
Greenson. I don’t want to come and see you.”’

‘Oh, no, I do like to come and see you. I do,’ Marilyn exclaimed. ‘I like talking to you, even if I have to look away so as not to feel your eyes on me.’

‘Your words say that. Your actions say: “I don’t like you.”’

Marilyn was silent. She’d thought her being late meant only one thing: ‘You are waiting for me. You love me. You are waiting just for me. Love me, Doctor. You know it’s always
the one who loves who waits.’ But she stopped coming late after that – started coming early, too early. In the end she still couldn’t be on time.

‘You see, you don’t know what you want,’ the analyst told her. ‘You don’t know what time it is.’ He thought her coming early now meant: ‘He’s
there. Who knows about time, but he’s there for me. He’s there.’

The following summer, during a very emotional session, she told her analyst about filming a scene in
The Misfits
in which she’d rejected her screen husband’s attempts at
reconciliation.

‘I kept getting stuck on the little sentence, “You’re not there.” Huston got mad, but Clark Gable stood up for me. “When she’s there, she’s there. All
of her is there! She’s there to work.” Ever since then that’s been my favourite expression when I talk about my experiences with men: mostly they’re never
there
.’

The first time she sat in the leather chair in the consulting room at her analyst’s house, she noticed there were no papers on his large wooden desk. He must write his
articles upstairs, she supposed. It was odd not seeing any pictures of Freud on the walls; there had been several in Greenson’s Beverly Hills office, as there had in her previous
analysts’ offices. She was particularly taken by a large picture of a woman sitting with her back to the viewer, gazing at a garden. Her face was obscured, but the gentle light and her
clothes suggested it bore a serene expression. She immediately liked the calm, quiet beauty of this huge room, which was shielded from the setting sun by linen drapes with a green and brown
geometric pattern.

After a few sessions at his office in Beverly Hills, Greenson had suggested to Marilyn he see her regularly at his home so as not to attract public attention. His children, Joan and Daniel, knew
their father had famous clients, but it came as a complete surprise to them when he changed his usual routine and started cancelling appointments at his office to be able to see Marilyn Monroe at
their home. Joan immediately wanted to become friends with his new, famous patient and soon her father was telling her to look after Marilyn if he was late and suggesting they go out for walks
together. Joan couldn’t help feeling awkward, though, when he sent her to pick up medication from the pharmacy and take it to Marilyn at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

In addition to five or six weekly meetings, the analyst encouraged Marilyn to telephone each day. ‘Mainly she was lonely and had no one to see her, nothing to do if I didn’t see
her,’ Greenson explained apologetically, in a letter to Marianne Kris. One evening, she took a taxi home from Santa Monica after a session, invited the driver in and then spent the night with
him. Greenson was furious at this ‘pathological’ behaviour; his wife advised her to stay with them if her sessions ran on late, which she did after that from time to time.

Greenson justified his approach to Wexler by saying it was a deliberate emergency strategy to ensure her physical health and enable her to appear on set for
Let’s Make Love
.
‘Although she may seem a hard-core drug addict, she isn’t in any usual sense of the word,’ he explained. It was true that Marilyn could stop taking drugs without showing any of
the customary symptoms of withdrawal, but it wasn’t by any means a rare occurrence for her to ring, begging him to come to the Beverly Hills Hotel to give her an intravenous injection of
Pentothal or Amytal. Distraught after one such summons, he said to Wexler, ‘I told her that she’d already received so much medication that it would put five other people to sleep, but
the reason she wasn’t sleeping was because she was afraid of sleeping. I promised she would sleep with less medication if she would recognise she’s fighting sleep as well as searching
for some oblivion, which is not sleep.’

Enrolling in the US Army in 1942, Ralph Greenson was assigned to a psychiatric ward where he specialised in traumatic neuroses. In addition to treating combat casualties, he
also started giving regular seminars to medical personnel, military chaplains and social workers trying to help soldiers readapt to civilian life. His experiences as an army psychiatrist inspired a
hugely popular novel by Leo Rosten,
Captain Newman
,
M.D.
, whose heroic protagonist was based on him. The book came out in 1963, and was made into a movie that year.

Greenson used to tell one story in particular from that time. He had had to give an intravenous injection of Sodium Pentothal to a waist gunner of a B-17 bomber on his return from a mission. The
man was displaying symptoms of extreme shock: insomnia, nightmares, trembling, sweats. He had flown fifty combat missions but, although he was noticeably reluctant to talk about his sorties, he
insisted he wasn’t aware of any particular source of anxiety. He had agreed to take Pentothal partly because he’d heard it got you high, ‘swacked’, so he wanted to see what
that was like, but mainly because it meant he wouldn’t have to report to his superiors. As soon as Greenson had injected the hypnotic drug, the man sat bolt upright in his bed, tore the
needle out of his arm and started screaming, ‘Four o’clock! Oh, Jeez, coming at us from four! Get a bead on them or they’ll get us, those bastards! Omigod! Oh, Jeez – three
more – one o’clock, one o’clock! Get a bead on them, get a bead on them! Omigod, I’m hurt! I can’t move! Get a bead on those bastards!’

The patient carried on screaming and yelling like this for more than twenty minutes, his eyes filled with terror, sweat pouring down his face, his whole body trembling as he gripped his right
arm, which hung limply by his side. Greenson finally said to him, ‘OK, boy, we got them.’ Hearing this, the patient collapsed back onto the bed and fell into a deep sleep. The next
morning the doctor asked him if he remembered the effects of the Pentothal. He gave a timid smile and said he remembered yelling but it was all very confused. When Greenson told him he’d
talked about a mission on which he’d been wounded in his right hand, and hadn’t stopped yelling ‘Get a bead on them’, the patient said, ‘Oh, yes, I remember. We were
coming back from Schweinfurt and they jumped us. They came in at four o’clock, then one o’clock, and then we were hit . . .’ Under the effects of Pentothal, the patient had
managed to bypass all his resistances and defences and recall without difficulty what had happened to him.

For some time after this, Greenson continued to search for the secret of forgotten experiences with ‘the truth serum’, as Pentothal was called in the movies of the
day. It wasn’t until his analysis with Frances Deri that the injection of memories lost its fascination for him and he turned to another method for excavating his patients’ buried
truths: transference, the psychoanalytic procedure whereby love is the only medication, and words are what allow repressed experiences to emerge. But his use of drugs left him with the sense that
the therapist must always play an active part in treatment, offering aspects of his psychological and physical self for the patient to draw on.

‘Hello, Mr Wexler?’ the voice on the phone said. ‘I was wondering if there’s any chance we could meet. I’m a journalist and I’m writing a
book about Marilyn – well, mainly about Greenson, actually, and the part he may have played in her death. You knew them both intimately, so I was hoping you could talk to me about what they
were like and your relationship with them.’

Wexler declined this request, one of an infinite number he had been bombarded with over the years. He put off the journalist, just as he had all the other conspiracy- and scandal-seekers, and
tried to forget the whole thing. But memories kept welling up, so he called the journalist back the next day and suggested instead that he help him write his memoirs. A psychoanalyst in the Golden
Age of the studios . . . he already had the title:
A Look Through the Rear-view Mirror
.