The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe (20 page)

The prolonged postwar Hollywood labor strikes of 1945 and 1946 caused economic hardship for the studios as well as the unions. After over a year of walkouts and litigation, the Conference of Studio Union's strike funds were totally depleted, and many of those who had supported John Murray and Herb Sorrell lost everything when the NLRB reversed its position and ultimately ruled in favor of the IATSE. As Norman Jefferies recalled, the Murrays could no longer meet their mortgage payments and lost the home that had been built on Franklin Street by unemployed studio carpenters. It was ultimately purchased by a man Jefferies had occasionally seen at the meetings held in the Murray home, a man they looked to for party directives—Ralph R. Greenson.

S
igmund Freud was twelve years old when his father told him the story of how an arrogant gentile had knocked his new fur cap into the muddy gutter and shouted, “Jew! Get off the pavement!”…“And what did you do?” asked young Sigmund. “I stepped into the gutter and picked up my cap,” said Jacob Freud.

For centuries after the destruction of Solomon's temple and the Diaspora, the Jews suffered and endured persecution that became ingrained into their culture as a way of life. But when Hitler came to full power with the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, hate and intolerance revealed their demonic face.

Dr. Henry Lowenfeld, a Freudian psychoanalyst working with mental patients in a Berlin asylum, noticed a strange change taking place among the inmates. “As the threat of the Nazis coming to power became greater,” he said, “You could see its effect even on the mental patients. They began to play at being Nazis themselves. Of course, a few really were Nazis. But the others—they would pretend that they were Nazis too. Some of them, when I went to talk to them, even tried to threaten me.”

When insanity became a system of government, the fortunate few fled from the European madhouse that had been taken over by the inmates. Hitler's rise to power brought to America some of its finest scientists, musicians, teachers, and artists.

The Jewish immigrants hoped for assimilation, and while there was, indeed, widespread anti-Semitism in America during the thirties, it wasn't genocidal, and the hope was that if a Jew worked hard and behaved like a good American, his family could at least live in peace. Many of them took innocuous new names, cut off their earlocks and trimmed their noses, listened to Lum and Abner, took off their yarmulkas and put on fedoras and cowboy hats. In West Los Angeles some even tried to join the Bel Air Country Club.

Most of the Freudian psychoanalysts seeking refuge in America were Jewish, and many of them were Marxists. For those who had abandoned their faith in Judaism, Freud and Marx offered a leap of dissent to dogmatic empiricism and a means of interpreting human aggression.

To many Americans in the thirties psychiatry was regarded as esoteric and foreign. Because of its sexual context, practitioners of Freudian analysis were suspect in a culture with Puritan roots. Some immigrant analysts remained in New York, and others went to Boston, Chicago, and Topeka, but the ultimate destination for many of the Freudian exiles was Hollywood, the sun-filled oasis of golden opportunity—with its pools and palms and a plethora of meshugas, who seemed to find safety in numbers in Movieland.

Freud's student Ernst Simmel was one of the first refugee analysts to arrive in Hollywood. Simmel and the highly respected Freudian Otto Fenichel had been among the founders of the prestigious Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. But they were members of the Communist Party, and when Hitler came to power they compounded their sins against the Reich by being Jews who espoused Freudian-Marxism. When Simmel heard that the Nazis were coming to get him, he jumped out of the rear window of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and didn't stop running until he reached Hollywood and Vine.

Otto Fenichel's route was more circuitous. It was his desperate dream that Freudian-Marxism would prevail over Nietzschean facism, and Fenichel first fled to Oslo and then Prague, where he led underground movements against the Nazis and secretly published his
Rundbriefe
—mimeographed circulars that he sent to a select group of intellectuals who endorsed Freudian-Marxist solutions to mankind's problems.

As Hitler's armies overwhelmed Europe, and Fenichel was forced to flee, Ernst Simmel arranged for Fenicher's immigration to Los Angeles in 1938. Though many of Simmel and Fenichel's fellow Freudians held Marxist views and were members of the Communist Party, the situation in America didn't provide a climate for a political concept of psychoanalysis.

The rather pragmatic medicalization of analysis in the United States tended to undermine the zealous cultural and political heritage of the Freudian exiles. Some of the early Los Angeles analysts, such as May Romm and Francis Deri, began making big bucks on Bedford Drive with monied clients from the film industry who were willing to pay plenty to hear themselves talk.

The majority of the immigrant psychoanalysts didn't want to be overtly political. They wanted to get established and make money. The burning intellectualism that had lit the fires of the European Freudian movement became the fifty-minute-cash-and-carry-on hour in the United States. Though Fenichel and Simmel tried to keep the Marxist flame burning, they found that it wasn't politic for them to publicly espouse pro-Soviet sympathies.

Suspecting that he was under surveillance by the FBI, Fenichel elected to be private in his political statements. His thick FBI file reveals that he was correct in his decision. Little of Fenichel's published writing reflects his dedication to the communist cause, but he did continue circulating his
Rundbriefe
in America in an attempt to keep Marxist political psychoanalysis alive. Though he recommended that the recipients burn the
Rundbriefe
after reading them, many crumpled and faded copies have been salvaged for the archives of psychoanalytic history.

Shortly after he arrived in Los Angeles, Fenichel joined Simmer's study group of European exiles who shared Marxist sympathies. The study group included Max Horkeimer, T. W. Adorno, and occasionally Leo Lowenthal—all key figures in exile of the Frankfurt school. The group of intellectual sociologists known as the Frankfurt school devoted themselves to psychoanalysis as part of their larger neo-Marxist “critical theory.”

Meetings of the study group took place at the homes of various members. They were open to analysts and nonanalysts alike. The lecture by a participant was usually followed by heated discussions, which often went on well past midnight and ended in spirited arguments held out on the sidewalk. A wide range of topics was presented—education, the cinema, jazz, radio, literature. The nonanalysts in the group often included Tho
mas Mann, Christopher Isherwood, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Lorre, Bruno Frank,
*
Fritz Lang, Hanns Eisler, Otto Katz, Leon Feuchtwanger, and Leo Rosten. Rosten, who was to become a prominent humorist and the author of
Captain Newman, M.D.,
had journeyed to Hollywood in the late thirties in the hope of becoming a screenwriter.

Another person who attended Simmel's study group and frequently carried the heated discussions out to the curb was a young doctor who had recently arrived in Los Angeles—Ralph Greenson. Greenson became Fenichel's close friend and disciple, and in a brief biography of Fenichel written by Greenson for the
Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis
, Greenson states,

Greenson became his analysand and went through four years of didactic analysis under Fenichel. According to Hildi Greenson, “Otto Fenichel became Romi's inspiration, trusted mentor, colleague, and friend.”

Ralph Greenson's background was quite different from his mentor's. Born on September 20, 1911, in Brooklyn, he was the fraternal twin to Juliet and was named Romeo by his parents Joel O. Greenschpoon and Katharine Greenschpoon (née Goldberg.) It was Papa Greenschpoon who chose to name the twins Romeo and Juliet. “My father liked Shakespeare and was a romantic,” Greenson later explained. “My mother was too weak from delivering twins to argue.” Both parents were Russian Jewish emigrants, having escaped the czarist pogroms of 1903, and when Romeo was born they lived in a tenement on Miller Avenue in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.

The majority of the Russian Jews who fled to America during the mass migrations between 1880 and 1920 settled in Brownsville and on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Though the Jewish communities in New York had a multitude of nationalities, they were closely unified by their
cultural background, their Yiddish language, and the need to protect themselves from widespread bigotry. Many of the Russian Jews who had survived the slaughters of the czarist pogroms took spiritual refuge in Orthodox Judaism. Others found faith and hope in Zionist-Marxism, which they followed with a burning zeal. On the sabbath in Brownsville, residents went either to the Sholem Alechem Temple on Pitkin Avenue or to the Labor Lyceum on Sackman Street. The Greenschpoons attended the Labor Lyceum, where Lenin was revered.

According to family lore, Papa Greenschpoon had seen his father murdered by a Cossack in their
shtetl
outside of Minsk. Young Joel Greenschpoon was a promising chemistry student, and the family raised the money to send him to America, where he opened a pharmacy in Brownsville at 373 Bradford Street. Joel first met his wife, Katharine Greenberg, when she answered his ad for a pharmacist. Kate was a feisty and intelligent woman who had also been educated as a chemist in Russia. Joel and Kate found that they made good chemistry, and they married in 1910. Recognizing her husband's gifts at diagnosing the customers' aches and pains, Kate urged Joel to study medicine while she took over the pharmacy. In 1914, three years after Romeo and Juliet were born, Papa Greenschpoon earned his medical degree.

Romi's younger sister, Elizabeth, was born in 1913; and a younger brother, Washington Irving, was born in 1916. It was the mother, Kate, who was the central figure in the household. A woman of indomitable will and energy, she raised her rather eccentric and volatile family in a warm environment of Yiddish culture with a measure of Tolstoy and Rachmaninoff mixed in a Marxist mortar. An accomplished pianist herself, Kate prompted the children's interest in music. Elizabeth proved to be a gifted pianist and went on to the concert stage, and Romi became a proficient violinist.

Growing up in Brownsville with the name of Romeo was a decided detriment. Brownsville was the home of Louis Lepke Buchalter of Murder, Inc. Former Brownsville resident Al Lewis remembers, “There were plenty of Jewish gangsters—Meyer Lansky, Abe Rellis, Pittsburgh Phil Straus, Banjo Bernstein, the boys in Murder, Inc. They hung out on the streets. We didn't know—or didn't want to know—the infamous acts they were involved in, that they were murderers for hire, would ice-pick a guy to death for two hundred dollars. All we knew was they were not so
oy-oy-oy
!”

The taunting cry of “Wherefor art youse Romeo?” frequently echoed
down Miller Avenue and prompted the young Greenschpoon boy to stay inside and dutifully practice his violin. It was to this trauma that Romi later wryly ascribed his early interest in psychoanalysis. Unknown to his parents, when he was in the fifth grade he changed his name to Ralph, after a hero he had read about in
Ralph of the Roundhouse
. Friends and family, however, always called him Romi. The Greenschpoon children attended P.S. 149, where Romi's school records show that he was an A student. P.S. 149 was renamed the Danny Kaye School in the 1960s after one of its illustrious graduates. A number of artists in the entertainment world were raised in Brownsville: George Gershwin, Steve Lawrence, Shelley Winters, Joey Adams, Phil Silvers, Henny Youngman, Jerry Lewis, Joe Papp, and the impresario Sol Hurok were among those whose ambitions were formed in the crucible of Brownsville's streets.

When Hurok's family moved from Russia to Brownsville in 1905, he became a partner of Kate Greenschpoon's brother, Alex Goldberg, in directing the Brownsville Labor Lyceum at 219 Sackman Street. Hurok's start as a manager of musical artists began at the Labor Lyceum, where he and Alex Goldberg and his sister, Kate Greenschpoon, booked speakers and concert artists. Knocking on Efrem Zimbalist's dressing room door at Carnegie Hall, they persuaded Zimbalist to appear at the Labor Lyceum, and among the speakers that Kate Greenschpoon brought to Brownsville was a young man with a growing voice in the labor movement—Frederick Vanderbilt Field.

In his memoirs Sol Hurok recalled, “Brownsville in those days was a steaming microcosm of culture in the heart of Brooklyn, alive with intellectual striving and artistic hungers. I was becoming more and more active in the labor movement at the Lyceum, and there was never any lack of audience for speakers or concerts. With my partners the Goldbergs, we were busy supplying the artists and organizing the events. Music thrived in Brownsville.”

Marxism also thrived in Brownsville. The waves of immigrants from Eastern Europe seethed with social protest. Socialists, radicals, and communists vied to make the masses cognizant of the deplorable social and economic conditions under which they lived. By 1919 Brownsville, “The Garden District of Brooklyn,” became known as “The Red District,” and many party leaders and activists grew up on its teeming streets. There was no such thing as a Republican in Brownsville, and every Saturday evening before election day an extraordinary event took place at the intersection of Pitkin and Saratoga Avenues. It was called “politics night.” Al Lewis
recalls, “On each of the four corners at Pitkin Avenue, there'd be speakers up on soap boxes, an American flag beside them as they screamed out their party's slogans. On one corner there'd be the Liberal Party, on another corner was the American Labor Party, across from them would be the Socialist Party, and then the Communist Party. That was it!”

Joel and Kate Greenschpoon stood on the corner with the communists, who were screaming the loudest and echoed the pain and frustrations the Russian Jews had endured at the hands of the “ruling class.” It was in this environment of dialectical materialism endemic to the Marxist creed—so carefully taught every Saturday at the Labor Lyceum—that young Romeo Greenschpoon lost his instinctive belief in a Creator and adopted the Marxist atheistic dogma that he expounded until his death.