Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (5 page)

There are no specific medications used to treat borderline personality disorder. Many patients, misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder, depression, or schizophrenia, receive antidepressants or antipsychotics. Sometimes, these medicines can improve symptoms that overlap from one condition to the next, such as mood swings. But they are temporary fixes that cannot touch the complexity of what really needs to be done: reorganizing the way one understands and manages one's life. Only the patient can do that. The ultimate goal, says Neacsiu, is to “replace pills with skills.” With the breakthrough in active therapy, borderline personality disorder has morphed from one of the most untreatable of mental illnesses to one with a high potential for a positive outcome. “There's a lot of good news here,” says Paris.

Marilyn Monroe was, of course, not your typical patient. She was one of the most watched, sexualized, parodied, and idolized celebrities in history. She was the embodiment of beauty despite the pain and despair she felt inside. Is it possible that, with today's treatment, she might have learned to accept her tormented past and moved forward, living a decent, if not, satisfied life? “Absolutely,” says Gunderson.

Arthur Miller wrote that Monroe lived “as though she were a mere passenger in her life.” Had she been taught to seize the wheel, Marilyn Monroe might have had a very different destiny.

O
N
J
UNE 1, 1962,
M
ARILYN
M
ONROE
celebrated her 36th birthday on the set of the romantic comedy
Something's Got to Give
. Photos show her smiling behind the dance of glittering cake candles. One week later, she was fired. Monroe, who played the lead role (a housewife who discovers that she has been declared legally dead after being lost at sea), had consistently arrived late for rehearsals or hadn't shown up at all, claiming that she was sick with fever, headaches, and sinus problems. Her unexcused trip from Hollywood to Madison Square Garden in the middle of filming to serenade President Kennedy caused even more delays and roiled the executives at Twentieth Century–Fox.

Over the next couple of months, Monroe sat for photo shoots and interviews, including her last, with
Life
magazine's Richard Meryman. In his story, published on August 3, Monroe shared her indignation with the way studio execs treat their stars, her desire to give her fans her very best performance, and the capriciousness of fame. “You know,” she told Meryman, “most people really don't know me.” Over the course of several days of interviews, Meryman wrote in a follow-up account, Monroe veered from tired to lively to late. One day, he waited for hours as she had her hair done, made phone calls, and busied herself with errands around the house in her bare feet and curlers. During their numerous conversations, Monroe's jumbled feelings cascaded tellingly as she talked. “Her inflections came as surprising twists and every emotion was in full bravura, acted out with exuberant gestures,”
Meryman wrote. “Across her face flashed anger, wistfulness, bravado, tenderness, ruefulness, high humor and deep sadness.”

On the early morning of August 5, Monroe was found naked and dead in her bedroom in Los Angeles with a telephone in one hand. Empty pill bottles were scattered nearby; sedatives were identified in her blood. The coroner ruled her death a probable suicide, but conspiracy theories—including that the Kennedys did her in—have never stopped swirling. Even in death, Monroe never got the chance to rest.

Over the course of her 16-year career, Monroe acted in 29 movies, including
Some Like It Hot
, for which she won a Golden Globe Award. The stage was where she lived; off it, she struggled to survive. Beauty and fame came big to Marilyn Monroe, but simple contentment did not. “I was never used to being happy,” she said in her interview with Meryman, “so that wasn't something I ever took for granted.”

M
ARTIN
S
CORSESE
'
S FILM
The Aviator
opens with a young Howard Hughes standing naked in front of a crackling fire as he waits to be bathed by his mother, Allene. Scorsese's filming of the scene is deliberately slow and methodical, punctuating the weightiness of every image, every word, every nuance. We see one of Allene's hands reach forward, shot close up in dramatic light. We see her carefully remove soap from a soap dish and plunge her hands into a tub filled with water. We see her begin to gently bathe her young son.

It is somewhere around 1913, a time when contagious illnesses are sickening patients without modern medicine to cure them. “Q-U-A-R-A-N-T-I-N-E,” Allene Hughes says softly to Howard.
“Quarantine,” the boy responds. “Q-U-A-R-A-N-T-I-N-E. Quarantine.” “You know the cholera?” his mother asks. “Yes, Mother,” Howard says. “You've seen the signs on the houses where the coloreds live?” she asks. “Yes, Mother,” he says, his face softly shadowed. “You know the typhus?” she asks, her eyes searching the contours of her son's face. “I do, Mother,” he says. “You know what they can do to you?” she asks, cupping her hands around his cheeks. “Yes, Mother.” Allene Hughes pauses, then shakes her head slowly back and forth. “You are not safe,” she says.

The scene is dramatic, perhaps overly so, but those four words perfectly define Howard Hughes's existence on the big screen and in life. The ambitious billionaire thrived on risky dalliances in romance, business, and his beloved airplanes—barely surviving after he crashed a military reconnaissance jet he had designed into a Beverly Hills neighborhood not far from the Los Angeles Country Club golf course. But it was the turbulence inside Hughes's mind that would ultimately ruin his life.

Throughout Scorsese's Oscar-winning film, in which Hughes is portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio, snippets of Hughes's phobias, fixations, and nonsensical urges appear, recede, then resurface, ever more magnified. There's the moment when Katharine Hepburn, played by Cate Blanchett, asks Hughes what he has wrapped around the steering wheel of his airplane. “Cellophane,” he says matter-of-factly. “If you had any idea of the crap people carry around on their hands.” There's the sink scene, where Hughes scrubs his hands so hard they bleed, and the incident in the public bathroom, where he can't bring himself to pick up a paper towel and pass it to a man on crutches who asks for help. “I, uh, I really can't do that,” Hughes says, looking pained. There's the nonsensical repetition of phrases, as he mutters “show me all the blueprints, show me all the blueprints, show me all the blueprints,” more than 30 times in an increasingly rapid clip.

And then, in the most horrifying scene of all, there's a middle-aged Howard Hughes, holed up in a screening room, unshaven and gaunt, a prisoner of his own internal chaos. At various times, he sits naked in a white leather chair; he paces around the room, bathed in a blinking red light; he obsesses about how to complete the most minute tasks. “That milk is bad,” he says out loud to himself. “I shouldn't pick up the bottle of milk with my right hand, and I shouldn't take the top off with my left hand, put it in my pocket, my left pocket.” Later, he urinates into an empty glass bottle and places it next to dozens of others lined up neatly in a row. Standing naked in front of them, he flashes back to his childhood and spells out the word his mother drilled into his head: “Q-U-A-R-A-N-T-I-N-E.”

A man of enormous achievement—a filmmaker, an engineer, a test pilot, a billionaire—Hughes was a master at controlling the people and circumstances around him, but he could not rein in the tortured meanderings of his mind. We now know that Hughes's bizarre behaviors were features of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, a debilitating condition that affects more than two million American adults, one-third of whom develop symptoms as children. Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, a research psychiatrist and OCD expert at UCLA's School of Medicine, carefully studied Hughes's condition and served as DiCaprio's personal coach to enhance the actor's understanding of the disorder. “There's nothing mild about OCD. It's a serious disease,” says Schwartz. And Hughes had it bad. “He was a walking encyclopedia of severe OCD symptoms.”

H
OWARD
R
OBARD
H
UGHES,
J
R
.,
WAS BORN
on Christmas Eve of 1905 in Houston, Texas. Hughes's father, born in Missouri and
raised in Iowa, was a bit of a rambunctious child who later dropped out of Harvard and then law school at the University of Iowa. But he had a keen intelligence, and great curiosity about mechanics and engineering. After dabbling in law and mining, Hughes Sr. was lured to east Texas by the promise of gushing oil fields. It was there that he met his wife, Allene Gano, the debutante daughter of a Dallas judge, and settled down to make his fortune.

Young Howard inherited attributes from both his parents. Like his father, he was fascinated by mechanical design and spent much of his childhood tinkering with gadgets, once concocting a makeshift radio out of parts from the family doorbell. When his mother said no to a motorcycle, he and his father built a motorized bicycle instead, which Howard rode proudly through the neighborhood streets. It was such a celebrated achievement that a photographer from the local paper showed up to take a picture.

Allene Hughes, tall and dark, doted on her only child, with whom she shared a quiet demeanor. Young Howard—shy, introverted, and socially awkward—had few friends, but he and his mother were exceedingly close. Allene worried about her son incessantly, rarely letting him out of her sight and creating what some remember as a wall of loneliness and alienation. Even after finally consenting to send Howard to summer camp in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, she found it impossible to fully let go and sent notes to the staff imploring them to look after her son and help him through his homesickness, according to Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele's biography
Howard Hughes: His Life and Madness
. The camp director wrote back, telling her that Howard was “an interesting little chap, full of fun and well liked” and showed no signs of missing his family. But nothing quelled her unease. The next summer, in 1917, she wrote another letter asking Howard's counselor to monitor her son's emotional and physical
well-being. He continued to suffer from “supersensitiveness,” as she called it, and a tendency to get his feelings hurt. She even worried about pain in the soles of his feet. While acknowledging that her concerns might be excessive, Hughes's mother wrote that she could not help herself: “I am trying hard to overcome too much anxiety over my one chick, but don't seem to make much headway.”

It is not clear when or why Allene Hughes developed such angst about her child, and such an intense fear of germs and disease. It may have been fueled by the epidemics she grew up with. Although the turn of the 20th century in the United States was a time of great expansion and ingenuity—oil fields burgeoning; steel production booming; highways, railroads, and telephones connecting people nationwide—nobody had figured out how to stop people from contracting infectious diseases and dying. Germ theory—the realization that contagious illnesses were caused by microorganisms invading the body—had prompted improvements in sanitation, tempering epidemics of typhoid, cholera, and tuberculosis, which had killed tens of thousands of Americans in the 1800s. But with few vaccines available, and antibiotics decades from discovery in the early 1900s, the risk of deadly disease hovered like thunder on the horizon. This was the era, after all, of Mary Mallon, the Irish cook who was accused of sickening dozens of people with typhoid fever, at least three of whom died. “Typhoid Mary,” as she was known, admitted to rarely washing her hands. She was quarantined for the first time in 1907, just two years after Allene Hughes gave birth to her baby boy, and again in 1915, when Howard was nine years old.