Marilyn's Last Sessions (12 page)

Marilyn returned to Reno on 5 September. As the plane landed in the hot night, a marching band played, fans cheered and chanted her name, placards blared: WELCOME BACK
MARILYN. ‘Those fucking producers sure know how to milk publicity from a situation,’ Huston exploded. ‘For God’s sake, spare me the outbreak of mass euphoria.’ Marilyn
was on set at the crack of dawn the next morning. But when she stepped in front of the lights again, she felt something unreal inside her and wherever she looked.

Shooting in Nevada finished on 18 October. By the end, Arthur Miller was rewriting constantly and Marilyn would find out about the changes so late she would have to stay up
all night learning her new lines. Clark Gable finally ran out of patience. Enlisting Marilyn’s help, he flatly refused to take on any more pages of new dialogue. At the start of November, the
last of the interior scenes were completed at Paramount’s studios in Hollywood. Ernst Haas, a Magnum photographer who had flown out to cover the final stages of filming, later described the
atmosphere: ‘Everyone involved in that picture was a misfit – Marilyn, Monty, John Huston. All of them had a sense of impending disaster.’ Gable, as ever, hardly said a word
throughout. On the last day of filming, when Huston’s assistant director, Tom Shaw, yelled ‘It’s in the can!’, Marilyn burst out laughing. ‘If only we all were! I bet
it feels good in there. A bit cramped maybe, but at least you’d get some peace.’

Everyone who heard this realised that some actors are like stars whose visibility belies the fact they’ve stopped shining. Their light may still reach us, but only because it has so far to
travel. Acting in a fictional reflection of their own lives, it’s as if they’re attending their own funerals.

At the start of December, Marilyn went to see Frank Sinatra perform at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. Two of President Kennedy’s sisters, Pat Lawford and Jean Kennedy
Smith, were in the audience with her. On her return, Greenson found her terribly lonely, and told Marianne Kris she expressed ‘a feeling of mistreatment, which had paranoid undertones’.
He felt Marilyn was reacting to her current involvement with ‘people who only hurt her’, but didn’t mention any names, even by initials.

Soon afterwards Henry Hathaway, who had directed her in
Niagara
, saw Marilyn in Hollywood. She was standing alone in a darkened soundstage, crying. When he asked her what the matter was,
she sobbed, ‘I’ve played Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Monroe. I’ve tried to do a little better and find myself doing an imitation of myself. I so want to do something
different. That was one of the things that attracted me to Arthur when he said he was attracted to me. When I married him, one of the fantasies in my mind was that I could get away from Marilyn
Monroe through him, and here I find myself back doing the same thing, and I just couldn’t take it, I had to get out of there. I just couldn’t face having to do another scene with
Marilyn Monroe!’

One weekend during the filming of
The Misfits,
Marilyn had gone to San Francisco – presumably to meet somebody, but it is not known who. What is documented is
that she went to a nightclub, Finocchio’s, to watch a transvestite impersonator ‘do’ her. Also documented is that she walked out before the end of the act.

When John Huston flew to Los Angeles to see Greenson, his aim was not simply to check on Marilyn’s mental state, but also to discuss
Freud
, which he was having
trouble getting off the ground. He was only too aware of the psychoanalyst’s aversion towards the project and his influence over Marilyn, and wanted to make a final effort to win him
over.

‘I flew all the way from Reno to LA just to see Greenson,’ the director told Arthur Miller afterwards. ‘Not her. She’ll sort herself out with her pills . . . let’s
hope, anyway . . . but he’s been holding up my
Freud
for two years, that bastard. The only trouble was Marilyn came out right in the middle of our conversation, so I couldn’t
convince him she had to do the picture.’

That was when Huston realised all hope of Marilyn’s appearing in his film was lost. He had been working on the project for years and, several months before, had offered Marilyn the role of
Cecily, the female lead who, in the script he’d written with Sartre, conflated several of Freud’s early patients, from whose wombs psychoanalysis had sprung. Through Freud’s
analysis of Cecily’s sexual pathology, the film would tell the story of the invention of psychoanalysis. As Huston was fond of pointing out, cinema was born in the same year as Freud’s
discovery of the unconscious, 1895.

When Huston told Marilyn he wanted her to play Cecily, with Montgomery Clift as Freud, she was delighted. ‘I’m good at being a patient, though not of a very patient kind . . .’
she joked. She knew Huston couldn’t stand her, but she was fascinated by the part and had no regrets about working with him on her first major film,
Asphalt Jungle
, or even
The
Misfits
. Perhaps she had a slightly superstitious feeling that she was destined never to make more than two films with the same director, but still . . . A few days later, however, everything
had changed. ‘I can’t do it,’ she told the director. ‘Anna Freud doesn’t want a picture made about her father. My analyst told me. Poor old Freud: he would have
enjoyed waiting for me, playing with his antiques.’

Greenson was trying to reconcile the interests of his profession with those of his patient, whose artistic and financial manager he had become. When Huston talked to him about the film, he was
adamant: ‘Freudian imagery is fine. Images of Freud himself, though, are out of the question.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Huston said. ‘Psychoanalysis deals with sex and love and forgotten images, all the things Freud wanted people to put into words.’

‘Freud was visual, of course, but he couldn’t stand having his picture taken. A film about him would be a complete misrepresentation of his work.’

‘I don’t agree at all. He invented that strange arrangement of the couch and chair, which means that, instead of looking at one another, the patient and analyst look at the images
projected by their words. That’s what I want to show in my
Freud
. The basic truth about cinema, that people’s gazes are fixed on a secret behind the screen, something they
can’t see. The spectator tries to hear what images are saying. Anyway, it all started with hypnosis for you analysts, didn’t it? A gaze that makes someone say something they’ve
forgotten. So tell me: is this ban on films about psychoanalysis because they’re fundamentally opposed to each other, as you say, or because they’re too alike?’

‘Neither,’ said Greenson. ‘It is because Anna is still alive and extremely solicitous of her father’s memory.’

Ralph Greenson and Anna Freud maintained a formal relationship, conducted mainly by letters, for a long time. But gradually a more personal note crept into their exchanges. In
1953, he sent her some photos he had taken of her when he was staying in London. She sent a strange reply. ‘Usually,’ she told him, ‘I look like some sort of sick animal, but I
find myself very human in yours.’ In 1959, when Anna visited Los Angeles for the first and only time, she stayed with the Greensons. Ralph took her on long walks, encouraged her to swim in
the pool and gave her a guided tour of Palm Springs once she’d finished her course of lectures at LAPSI. At the party he gave in her honour, none of the guests dared to sit on the sofa next
to Freud’s daughter. Afterwards Anna wrote to thank him and said, ‘I find it very difficult to imagine Los Angeles without me.’

A year later, Ralph and Hildegarde Greenson went to see her in London and stayed for several weeks at Maresfield Gardens. ‘The Greensons had my room,’ reported Paula Fichtl, the
Freud family’s housekeeper. ‘The Herr Doctor even slept in my bed. Miss Freud spent several hours with Herr Doctor and Dr Kris conferring about Miss Monroe.’ The Greensons gave
Anna an Indian-maiden doll in buckskins. ‘I play with the doll sometimes,’ Anna wrote, thanking them, ‘but at other times I only look at her and imagine she is my heathen
goddess.’

In 1956, the year Anna Freud briefly treated the most famous actress in the world, Greenson was devoting all his energies to protecting the interests of the Freudian
establishment. The psychoanalytic community was caught up in preparations for Freud’s centenary. Some hoped to get their hands on various films made of Freud by Mark Brunswick, a former
patient who had decided that he would finance his current psychoanalysis by selling them, ideally to the Sigmund Freud archives. Anna and Ernst Freud, the Master’s children, wouldn’t
hear of it, even though they found Brunswick’s situation pathetic, and they enlisted the community of Viennese analysts in America to back their stance.

The professionals in Hollywood had their plans as well, which it became more and more urgent to stop. John Huston recruited two of his collaborators on
Let There Be Light
, the producer
Julian Blaustein and the screenwriter Charles Kaufmann, to work on
Freud
. ‘Making this film,’ the director announced, ‘is like having a religious experience. I am realising
an obsession based on the firm conviction that very few of man’s great adventures, not even his travels beyond the earth’s horizon, can dwarf Freud’s journey into the uncharted
depths of the human soul.’ But Anna Freud’s resolute opposition was to delay the project for five years. Deeply though he admired Freud and his discoveries throughout his life, Huston
developed a visceral hatred for psychoanalysts, the officiants of his cult.

The daughter of the father of psychoanalysis flew into a fury when she first heard of his project. As the years passed, her sources of frustration varied, but the most galling detail of all was
that Marilyn was being considered for a role. The thought of her father being turned into a matinée idol, listening to Marilyn Monroe stretched out on his couch and speaking dialogue written
by Sartre, was too much for the temple guardian, who chose to be buried in her father’s overcoat and always signed her letters with ‘ANNAFREUD’ as one word.

By the time Huston offered Marilyn the part, Marianne Kris was seeing her only occasionally, when she was in New York, so she was in no position to prevent the calamity of her accepting the
role. Anna couldn’t ban the film outright, so she turned to Greenson to exercise his influence on her former patient. Cecily’s part was given to Susannah York. Filming lasted five
months.
Freud, The Secret Passion
came out in 1962 and was a commercial failure, which Huston attributed to the fact that Marilyn wasn’t playing the sexually troubled lead. At the
première, he declared, ‘We have attempted to accomplish something new in storytelling on the screen – to penetrate through to the unconscious of the audience, to shock and move
the spectator into at least a subliminal recognition or awareness of his own hidden psychic motivations.’

Huston invited Greenson to a screening of the film in Hollywood, but he didn’t go. A few weeks later, however, he called the director to talk about Marilyn. ‘I’ve got nothing
to say to you,’ Huston barked. ‘You’re a coward. In fact, it was a good thing in the end we couldn’t get her to play Freud’s hysteric. No one would have understood why
the old man didn’t just push her back on the couch after a few seconds of the talking cure.’

Marilyn stopped seeing Margaret Hohenberg in early 1957 and, on Anna Freud’s recommendation, went into analysis with Marianne Kris instead. As the daughter of the Freud
family’s paediatrician, Kris was more than simply one of Anna’s American colleagues. They had been childhood friends in Vienna, and went travelling together until Kris went into exile
in America in 1938. Like Anna, she had been analysed by the Master himself, so Marilyn thought that seeing her would take her right to the heart of Freudian analysis.

Kris was fifty-seven years old, a dark-haired, handsome woman who had just lost her husband, an analyst and art historian. Marilyn’s third analysis (counting the one with Anna herself)
lasted four years. In the spring, she began seeing Kris five times a week at her office, 135 Central Park West, in the same building as the Strasbergs’ apartment. Every day, after her
session, she’d take the elevator to the Strasbergs’, where the business of remembering would continue in theatrical mode. Strasberg would set her sense-memory exercises revolving around
childhood and youth: don’t play it, give it a voice, Strasberg said, or, rather, let it speak through you – a lonely waif, a confused schoolgirl, a jilted fiancée.

Marilyn’s psychoanalysis had become a source of conflict in her marriage. Miller thought that, in most cases, psychiatrists couldn’t help people, and he deemed Marilyn’s
analysis a failure, although he acknowledged Kris’s integrity and devotion to her patient.

Lee Strasberg evidently did not agree with Miller. He thought analysis would begin to liberate Marilyn, and treated their work in class at the Actors Studio as ‘an analysis of her
analysis’. When a scene proved difficult because an actor or actress was blocked and unable to get in touch with a past experience, he thought remembering it in analysis could help them get
past it. One day Marilyn, who was slightly scared of Kris, confessed to Susan Strasberg that she often couldn’t remember details from her childhood in sessions. When her psychoanalyst asked
her a question she couldn’t answer, she’d just make up something interesting. She felt she was going round in circles with Kris, as she had with Hohenberg, trying to grasp an
inaccessible past. ‘It was always how did I feel about this, and why did I think my mother did that – not where was I going, but where I had been? But I
knew
where I had been. I
wanted to know if I could use it wherever I was
going
!’

To blot out the suffering caused by this double course of analysis, she upped her intake of barbiturates, which had a more immediate effect, until finally she took an overdose. Miller found her
in time, and afterwards said that it was pointless trying to trace her suicide attempt to anything anyone had said or done. ‘Death, the longing to die, always comes out of nowhere.’
Nowhere: the space inside, her inner life doomed to oblivion, her suffering waiting for an object.