Marilyn's Last Sessions (7 page)

Each time he pictured her on the phone, he remembered how she had put a false number on the dial of her home phone to protect her privacy and throw the prurient off the scent. If they called the
number, they got through to the Los Angeles morgue.

Angeleno by birth, Marilyn became passionately attached to New York the moment she went there in late 1954. Even as a young starlet, studying at LA’s Actors Laboratory,
she had pictured the metropolis to the east as a magical place, ‘where actors and directors would do very different things with their time than stand around all day arguing about a close-up
or a camera angle’. She dreamed of becoming part of that life, a more thoughtful, articulate world, less in thrall to images.

With its unchanging skies and temperature, Los Angeles seemed to her permanently to be sunk in a tepid stupor. She left her home town the way, in bed, you move away from a body that’s too
close and hot, and suddenly feel you can only be yourself by being alone. Cities are like bodies: some are skin, some bone, and Marilyn wanted to feel part of a skeleton. After her first visit, she
always loved going back to New York, the upright city. Its verticality, its buildings straining towards the sky were an exhilarating break from her home town, with its supine, virtually flat
expanses punctuated solely by the Hollywood Hills to the north and the skyscrapers of the port district to the south. Los Angeles remained the city where you shone, you blazed, where the sun
overwhelmed everything with its terrible perpendicular glare, reducing the streets and houses to a flat, shimmering mirage. Just as the idea of eternity, once it takes hold of someone’s mind,
makes sleep impossible, so the Californian skies always seemed to her to afford its streetscapes too much light, and the souls wandering them too little shade.

The moment she landed in Manhattan, it became her city.
The
city. The place where she could think. She never felt disoriented in New York. If anything, it gave her her bearings, the
chance to find herself among its shadows and greys. Surrendering to the dizzying but lucid feeling that she was falling into herself, that she was yielding to an indefinable impulse, she immersed
herself in its beauty. The changing seasons, the force of the elements – everything in New York made her feel vital. She found herself thinking about the city, through it. She thought the
best photographs of her were in black and white, like New York, or like a chessboard.

Marilyn went back to New York for the first time after going into analysis with Greenson in March 1960, just after she’d won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in
Some
Like It Hot
. She returned for a longer stay after an extended period of analysis with him culminated in the completion of
Let’s Make Love.
At her last session before leaving, she
told him about a recurring dream: ‘I am buried in sand and I’m lying there, waiting for someone to come and dig me out. I can’t do it on my own.’

She associated it with a memory. ‘Ana . . . I called her Aunt Ana, but she wasn’t really my aunt, just the best of all my foster mothers, who I lived with for four or five years . .
. Ana died when I was twenty-two. I went and lay down in her bed the day after she died . . . just lay there for a couple of hours on her pillow. Then I went to the cemetery and these men were
digging a grave and they had a ladder into it, and I asked if I could get down there and they said, “Sure,” and I went down and lay on the ground and looked up at the sky from there.
It’s quite a view, and the ground is cold under your back.’

‘Did you love her?’ asked Greenson, troubled by certain aspects of the story that seemed too gruesome to be true.

‘Sure. If that word means anything, it’s not what happens between a man and a woman. I never found love before or after Ana, the love that picks out other children when they’re
growing up like the mysterious light on an actor’s face in a movie. I compromised by dreaming of attracting someone’s attention, of having people look at me and say my name.
That’s what love is for me now.’

In the burning heat of a New York July, on Greenson’s advice, Marilyn returned to her husband Arthur Miller and her analyst Marianne Kris. But she would soon part
company with both more or less simultaneously. She had been seeing Kris for three years and Margaret Hohenberg for two years before that, but now there was Romi, whom she rang every day. In a state
of wild elation, she told her maid, Lena Pepitone, ‘Lena, Lena, I’ve finally found him. He’s my saviour. He’s called Romeo. Can you believe that? I call him Jesus. My
saviour
.
He’s doing wonderful things for me. He listens to me. He’s a doctor and a genius. He gives me courage. He makes me feel smart, makes me think. I can face anything with
him. I’m not scared any more.’

Then she rang Greenson: ‘I’ve fallen in love with Brooklyn. I’m going to buy a little house in Brooklyn and live there. I’ll go to the coast only when I have to make a
picture.’

The next day, on the C Train to Broadway, she sat opposite an ageless woman wearing a frilly pink doll’s dress, pink pumps, white lace socks and a paste tiara, and sucking a dummy.
Terrified, she called her saviour that night.

Greenson was close to finishing his analysis with Wilhelm Stekel in Vienna when he was invited with several other aspiring young analysts to attend one of Freud’s monthly
talks on psychoanalytic technique. He was trying to make sense of the stage he’d reached in his analysis. What did finishing mean? He had discussed it at length with Stekel, but hoped the
Master would be able to elucidate it fully before he started treating patients himself.

Freud’s office was entered by the right-hand door on the first-floor landing of 19 Berggasse. There was a simple foyer with bars on the inside of the door as protection against burglary,
not an unusual feature in middle-class Viennese homes, and two doors opening off it: one to the waiting room on the right, its walls hung with pictures and awards that Greenson did not recognise
(he later found out that only one was of a colleague of Freud’s, Sándor Ferenczi), and another, covered with the same dark wallpaper as the foyer’s walls, for those who wanted to
leave discreetly without having to walk past the patients waiting their turn. Ill-lit and thick with cigar smoke, with an armless sofa and a small table with chairs around it as its only furniture,
the waiting room was where the Master held his gatherings. He would greet the faithful coldly, without a smile. Only a dozen practising analysts were invited, with a permanent core of six, while a
constantly changing selection of débutants, Freud’s ‘disciples from afar’, made up the numbers. That evening the subject was the handling of transference –
‘transference-love’, as Freud termed it, the sort of euphemistic name one might give an illness to rob it of its terror.

‘I have no great fondness for the expression “handling of transference”,’ Freud began. ‘Transference is not a tool we manipulate. If it resembles anything, it is a
hand that seizes hold of us and either caresses us or spins us round.’ He spoke of the force of this attachment, its similarity to actual love, its duration, the extreme difficulty of
unravelling it, and the dangers of revoking it, like a contract, by reminding the patient that neither of them was the real object of the other’s feelings. He quoted Montaigne’s line,
‘I loved him because it was he, because it was I.’

‘You see,’ Freud said, ‘it serves no purpose telling a patient, “You love me because it is not you, because it is not I.” No purpose whatsoever.’

A pink cloud draws across the evening sky around the bungalow. Georges Belmont, a French journalist, has come to interview Marilyn, who is back in Los Angeles for a few days.
Their conversation ranges widely before eventually turning to death. Lapsing into long silences, Marilyn seems at once constrained and impulsive, as she says in her tired young girl’s voice,
‘Of course I think about it . . . quite a lot, actually. Sometimes I find myself thinking I’d rather think about death than life. It’s so much simpler in a way. You push open a
door and you know there most likely won’t be anyone on the other side. Whereas in life, there always is. At least one other person’s always in the room. In you go, and it’s never
your fault. As for getting out . . . Do you know how to get out of people?’

‘Tell me about your childhood,’ Belmont asks, avoiding the question.

‘I never lived with my mother. That’s the truth, no matter what some people have said. As far back as I can remember I’ve always lived with other people. My mother was mentally
ill. She’s dead now.’

That made two untruths in as many sentences, not that the interviewer was to know. Norma Jeane had lived with her mother for several months when she was about eight years old, in a little
apartment on Afton Place near the studios, before her mother was admitted to a mental hospital for a long period. Then she had her to stay for a few weeks in a small place she had on Nebraska
Avenue when she was twenty and starting out in the film business. Gladys Baker was also still alive at the time of the interview. Mentally ill, but in good health, she would outlive her daughter by
twenty-two years. In 1951, when the studios put out the story of Marilyn being an orphan for publicity purposes, she received a letter from Gladys: ‘Please dear child, I’d like to
receive a letter from you. Things are very annoying around here and I’d like to move away as soon as possible. I’d like to have my child’s love instead of hatred.’ The
letter was signed, ‘Love, Mother’. Not ‘Your Mother’ or ‘Mom’, just ‘Mother’, which Gladys had not been able to be, and which Marilyn in her turn
wouldn’t be either.

Marilyn thanked Belmont after the interview and said she’d been glad to be able to talk. Answering journalists’ questions still terrified her, so she’d appreciated being
treated as a human being rather than as a star. That evening she went to a party in Beverly Hills given by the influential Hollywood literary agent Irving Lazar. She ran into Greenson and his wife,
who greeted her affectionately, spotted the familiar faces of John Huston and David O. Selznick, then spent a long time talking to a sixty-year-old man she had never met who had just moved to
Brentwood Heights in Hollywood. He told her his favourite Californian pastimes – going walking in the north-east, past San Fernando, in the green and blue jacaranda-covered hills bordering
the Mojave Desert, where he hunted rare butterflies for his book on Californian Lepidoptera, driving around the Los Angeles freeways in his Ford Impala, and visiting supermarkets, ‘especially
at night, for the neon’. He said he’d written a novel called
Lolita
that Stanley Kubrick was making into a film for Universal. Vladimir Nabokov was trying to adapt to
screenwriting as a form.

‘What about you? What do you do?’ he asked the blonde, who was drinking constantly to get up her courage to talk or remain silent or whatever was needed to make it through the
party.

‘I’m in pictures,’ she replied.

Amused by the expression, he joked, ‘Me too, but I’m just a double.’

A few weeks later, in
Let’s Make Love
, Marilyn persuaded Cukor to let her preface her rendition of ‘My Heart Belongs To Daddy’ with the words, ‘My name is Lolita
and I’m not supposed to play with boys!’

After divorcing her second husband, Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn moved to New York to study with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. She lived at the Gladstone Hotel on East 52nd
Street before decamping to the Waldorf Astoria in April 1955. She never had many belongings at her various Manhattan addresses – just her library of four hundred books and, her prize
possession, the white piano from when she was seven, which she kept among some imitation French furniture in the tiny space she used as a living room. After years of searching, she had found the
piano at an auction in West Los Angeles in 1951. She’d bought it on instalments and moved it into the minuscule studio flat she was living in at the time in the Beverly Carlton Hotel. Two
years later it had followed her to a three-room apartment on Doheny Drive. She kept it through all her moves, and, in either 1956 or 1957, she installed it in the thirtieth-floor apartment she
shared with Arthur Miller on East 57th Street.

Landing at Idlewild airport, she posed for a barrage of photographers on the steps of the plane for forty minutes. The crew cheered and whistled, but all she could think of was the prospect of
meeting up with Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the most intellectual of directors, who used to say of himself, ‘I am an author who makes films, not a director. I make films to stop people ruining what
I’ve written.’ He had cast her in one of her first Hollywood movies,
All About Eve,
and now she wanted him to pick her for his musical comedy,
Guys and Dolls
, so she could
prove to him how much she had changed in the intervening four years. But by the time she had driven into Manhattan, Mankiewicz had set off in the opposite direction to Los Angeles. She called him
instead: ‘Guess what? I’ve become a star. Now I’m making a picture with Billy Wilder. It’s called
The Seven Year Itch
.’

Mankiewicz was coldly dismissive of the project. She didn’t know whether it was because he simply didn’t like Wilder (among other things, because Wilder never missed the chance to
mock psychoanalysis in his films), or was actually afraid of him. Wilder’s masterpiece
Sunset Boulevard
, a bitter portrait of a washed-up actress that served as a brilliant
exposé of Hollywood mores, had come out at the same time as Mankiewicz’s depiction of an actress’s decline,
All About Eve
. Admittedly, Mankiewicz had won the Oscar for
best film that year, but he still bore Wilder an inexplicable grudge, and perhaps feared that this time his rival’s comedy might be better than his.

Either way, Mankiewicz was very tough on Marilyn: ‘No, no. You’re too Hollywood. Put on some more clothes,’ he said, as if she was worthless, ‘stop shaking your ass so
much and we’ll see.’ It felt like a brutal reminder of her early days in Hollywood, of everything she most hated, as if she was still making pornographic films.