Read Marilyn's Last Sessions Online
Authors: Michel Schneider
Images are a skin, hard and cold. Under hers, Marilyn was coming to pieces again. When she didn’t know who to be any more, she tried to find the answer in a man’s
eyes. It was a trade: with your eyes, hands, penis, tell me I exist, tell me I’ve got a soul, and I’ll let you have my body, in the flesh or in a photograph.
One day in the autumn she again showed up at the house of her on-off lover André de Dienes, dressed in a simple, elegant black suit. André thought she seemed calm, even sad. She
kissed him, and said, ‘André, take pictures of me again! Tonight, and tomorrow too . . . I’ll stay with you.’
Not tempted by the offer, he walked her home, a few blocks away. Her apartment was full of partly packed suitcases and empty movers’ boxes, with two large wardrobe trunks in a corner. She
was using the boxes as tables, one for vodka cocktails, another for a lamp, portable record-player, telephone and a vase of yellow roses. Rough wooden cases with a jumble of books on top of them
lined one wall. André liked the room, its air of a moonlight flit. Holly Golightly’s flat, he thought.
But Marilyn was unhappy – she felt she didn’t belong anywhere any more. As the photographer later remembered, there was ‘the world’s most publicised, most glamorous, most
adulated beauty, in that musty-smelling old lousy apartment; she was alone and had no place to go’. He asked her about the farm she had bought in Connecticut, where she’d lived with
Arthur Miller. ‘Wasn’t that your home?’ he asked.
She answered that she had given it to Arthur.
‘Are you crazy?’ he shouted. ‘Are you crazy? You gave away the only home you ever owned! Having a home is the most important thing in life, and you let yourself be out in
nowhere, due to your stupidity, to your damned kind heart! Oh, Norma Jeane, what are you doing to yourself?’
She looked at him, then poured champagne from a half-empty bottle into two glasses.
The telephone rang, and she let it go for a long time before picking up. As she listened, and answered in a low, monotonous voice, her expression turned sad, and she wiped away tears. De Dienes
went into the bathroom, and when he returned he heard Marilyn’s last few words: ‘Yes, I’m coming! I’ll be there tomorrow.’ Then she hung up the receiver and turned to
him, saying, ‘André, please go home, I have to go back to New York tomorrow.’
Halfway down the street, overcome with regret, he turned round and ran back to her. She was on the phone again, sitting in the same place, crying. He knelt down in front of her. ‘Come
back. Let’s go to my house right now. I’ll take photos like nothing you’ve ever seen. Please, Norma Jeane, don’t go to New York.’
‘No, they’re waiting for me out east.’
When he rang next morning, Marilyn had left.
Marilyn flew to New York, where she met up with W. J. Weatherby, an English journalist she had got to know in Reno while making
The Misfits
. They had arranged to meet in
a bar on Eighth Avenue. It was an icy winter’s day, and Weatherby wasn’t sure she’d come. She was the one who’d wanted to see him, but why should she stick to the plan if
she was in a hole? It wasn’t as though he were a close friend or psychiatrist. He waited for an hour. She didn’t appear. He returned to the YMCA on West 34th Street and had just reached
his room when the phone rang. ‘Apologies, apologies, apologies. I was sleeping. I took some pills. Too many. Will you forgive me?’
The journalist had forgotten he’d told her where he was staying.
‘Can we still meet?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Or are you too tired?’
‘No. Not really.’
During the year they’d known each other, the journalist had come to understand that, for all her love of show, there was only one thing Marilyn really wanted: to hide. She had a unique
ability to disappear even when she was with you, to be whoever people wanted her to be while keeping her real self profoundly hidden.
A quarter of an hour later they met. She had made herself up and was very lively at first. He figured she was putting on a performance to hide her real feelings. He wished she trusted him enough
not to bother, but thought perhaps she was afraid of breaking down.
Somehow Yves Montand and Simone Signoret’s names came up.
‘They certainly seem to have an understanding,’ she said. ‘He can flirt and then go back. When I was interested in my husband, I wasn’t interested in anyone
else.’
The journalist remembered Miller telling him about her affair with Montand, but he still felt she was speaking the truth. Perhaps the marriage was over by then, and she hadn’t felt like
his wife any more.
‘Is it the same with a movie?’
‘The movies are like love, you know. When you’re not looking for it, all kinds of opportunities come your way. If you run after it, you get nothing. That’s the story of my
life. Being an actress has never been as much fun as dreaming of being one, and I’ve never been offered so many star roles as when I was on the verge of giving up. You’ve got a choice:
be a slave of the studios or an untouchable celebrity. I can’t just give up being a screen idol.’
The conversation turned to the Kennedys, whom she vehemently defended against all criticism. The tone grew heated. Weatherby thought it better to return to a calmer subject: books.
‘Have you ever read Scott Fitzgerald’s great novel
Tender Is the Night
?’ he asked.
‘No. I know Fox is working on an adaptation.’
‘There’s something of you in it. A film actress who goes . . .’ Weatherby checked himself, remembering Marilyn’s mother and her own fears.
‘What – crazy?’
‘Yes. Nicole Warren, the female lead, is a vulnerable actress. She marries her analyst but becomes more and more disturbed until she has a breakdown. She only recovers when she leaves her
husband. That’s the proof she’s recovered, he realises, that she’s strong enough to extricate herself from their mutual madness. In the end, he’s the one who cracks
up.’
Weatherby immediately realised he had it wrong. Nicole and the actress were two different characters. But did it matter? He hadn’t read the novel for a long time, but in his memory the
actress in
Tender Is the Night
had a golden Monroe quality. It was as though Fitzgerald had anticipated Marilyn, or at least aspects of her. If you combined the two characters, he thought,
you’d have a portrait of the woman sitting opposite him. Marilyn had left her husband as well, but it hadn’t cured her. She was still seeing her analyst every day.
‘That’s a nice title,’ she said, to say something. ‘The night
is
tender. Sometimes. At any rate, that’s how you’d like it to be.’
‘The doctor drops from sight into the night of obscurity. The wife, for a time, escapes her mental night.’
She didn’t know if that was a quote from the novel or a prediction. ‘That sounds familiar,’ she said jokingly. ‘There are times when it’s been so hard falling
asleep that I hate having to wake up and go through it all again. But that sounds gloomy, I guess.’
The book seemed to have become a dangerous topic. Weatherby steered the conversation to the movie adaptation. ‘I can see you playing Nicole. You know, I suggested to Laurence Olivier that
he should play the doctor’s part.’
‘Fantastic! He’s an expert on madwomen. But I won’t be in it with him; I wouldn’t be treated by him for anything in the world, not even on screen.’
‘How about Montgomery Clift?’
‘Two crazy people together. Great. Besides, Fox haven’t offered me the part.’
When they said goodbye, the journalist noticed how pale she was. She must be tired, he thought. They promised to meet up again. His last view of her was of her back, walking away. She
didn’t have the greatest legs, he decided.
Marilyn bought Fitzgerald’s novel right away. She was fascinated by the story of the rich, famous psychoanalyst Dick Diver, who marries his former patient, a
schizophrenic who has been abused by her father as a child. She’d read other novels of Fitzgerald’s, but none that seemed to speak to her so directly. In a biography of the novelist,
she found out that Nicole was partly based on Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda, whom she knew a lot about. When she had flown to New York in December 1954 to embark, as it were, on her new career as
an analytic patient, she had bought a one-way ticket in the name of Zelda Zonk.
Now she was struck by a metaphor in the novel, ‘Hollywood, “the city of thin partitions”’. That was what she was fleeing by coming to New York. The imperceptible gulf
between people, the futility of everything. She was tired of everything always being reversible; she wanted time to mean something; she wanted there to be a difference between insanity and what she
could only call desire. The opposite of madness is not simply reason.
In September, John Huston had run into Robert Goldstein, the new head of Fox, at the Scala Theater in Hollywood.
‘Where have you got to with your adaptation of
Tender Is the Night
?’ the director asked.
‘Selznick backed out two months ago,’ the producer answered. ‘Henry Weinstein’s in charge now. He’s keeping Jennifer Jones, David’s wife, and Dr
Greenson’s the technical consultant—’
‘What?’ Huston cut in. ‘Greenson? The guy who wanted to stop me making my picture about Freud is giving technical advice on a movie about a psychoanalyst? And it’s
starring Jennifer, who’s a patient of his colleague Wexler’s? What a bastard that guy is.’
Henry King shot
Tender Is the Night
, his last film, for 20th Century Fox in Switzerland and on the Côte d’Azur in the spring of 1961. Greenson didn’t feature on the
screen credits but he played a big part not only in his friend Weinstein’s choice of screenwriter, but also in shaping the script. He was very keen to lighten Diver’s character and make
his attraction for Nicole less fatal, the game they play less deadly, as if the fact that they lose it would deprive his life of the meaning he had tried to give it. He never spoke to Marilyn about
the book or the film.
Marilyn returned to New York once again. This time, as she got on the plane, she didn’t know whether she was travelling into the past or the future. As Billy Wilder had
said, when her divorce from Arthur Miller had come through in January, ‘Marilyn’s marriage to Joe DiMaggio failed because the woman he married was Marilyn Monroe, and the one to Arthur
Miller because she wasn’t.’ After the panning her last film had received, Marilyn thought her career was at a dead end. She retreated to her darkened bedroom on East 57th, listening to
sentimental songs, dosing herself on sleeping pills, not eating or talking, seeing no one except W. J. Weatherby and her analyst.
After forty-seven sessions in two months, overwhelmed and terrified by Marilyn’s deteriorating condition, Marianne Kris finally decided to have her hospitalised. Under the name of Faye
Miller, she was placed in the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic. She was not asked for her consent, but simply given admission papers to sign. She had taken so many pills she was confused and had no
idea what she was signing. Marilyn was thirty-four, the age of her mother, Gladys, when she was sectioned.
Marilyn immediately writes to Paula and Lee Strasberg, her closest friends in New York.
Dear Lee and Paula,
Dr Kris has had me put into the New York hospital – pstikiatric [sic] division under the care of two idiot doctors, they
both should not be my doctors
.
You haven’t heard from me because I’m locked up with all these poor nutty people. I’m sure to end up a nut if I stay in this nightmare. Please help me Lee, this is the
last
place I should be – maybe if you called Dr Kris and assure her of my sensitivity and that I must get back to class . . . Lee, I try to remember what you said once in class,
that ‘art goes far beyond science’.
And the science memories around here I’d like to forget – like screaming women etc.
Please help me – if Dr Kris assured you I am all right I can assure you
I am not
. I do not belong here!
I love you both
Marilyn
She was allowed to make only one phone call. She called Joe DiMaggio, in Florida, whom she hadn’t spoken to for six years. He caught a flight to New York that night and insisted she be let
out of the clinic. After just four days she was discharged, and went to convalesce in a hospital on the Hudson River, on the other side of Manhattan, where she stayed from 10 February to 5 March
1961. While she was there she decided to make Greenson her sole analyst and wrote him a letter, which for a long time was thought to be lost until it was found in 20th Century Fox’s archives
in 1992.
Dear Dr Greenson,
Just now when I looked out the hospital window where the snow had covered everything, suddenly everything is kind of a muted green. There are grass and shabby evergreen bushes, though the
trees give me a little hope – and the desolate bare branches promise maybe there will be spring and maybe they promise hope.
Did you see The Misfits yet? In one sequence you can perhaps see how bare and strange a tree can be for me. I don’t know if it comes across that way for sure on the screen – I
don’t like some of the selections in the takes they used. As I started to write this letter about four quiet tears had fallen. I don’t quite know why.
Last night I was awake all night again. Sometimes I wonder what the night time is for. It almost doesn’t exist for me – it all seems like one long, long, horrible day. Anyway, I
thought I’d try to be constructive about it and started to read the letters of Sigmund Freud. When I first opened the book I saw the picture of Freud inside, opposite the title page and I
burst into tears – he looked very depressed (the picture must have been taken near the end of his life), as if he died a disappointed man. But Dr Kris said he had much physical pain which
I had known from the Jones book. I know this, too, to be so, but still I trust my instincts because I see a sad disappointment in his gentle face. The book reveals (though I am not sure
anyone’s love letters should be published) that he wasn’t a stiff! I mean his gentle, sad humour and even a striving was eternal in him. I haven’t gotten very far yet because
at the same time I’m reading Sean O’Casey’s first autobiography. This book disturbs me very much, and in a way one should be disturbed for these things, after all.
There was no empathy at Payne Whitney – it had a very bad effect on me. They put me in a cell (I mean cement blocks and all) for very disturbed, depressed patients, except I felt I was
in some kind of prison for a crime I hadn’t committed. The inhumanity there I found archaic. They asked me why I wasn’t happy there (everything was under lock and key, things like
electric lights, dresser drawers, bathrooms, closets, bars concealed on the windows – and the doors have windows so patients can be visible all the time. Also, the violence and markings
still remain on the walls from former patients). I answered: ‘Well, I’d have to be nuts if I like it here!’ Then there were screaming women in their cells – I mean, they
screamed out when life was unbearable for them, I guess – and at times like this I felt an available psychiatrist should have talked to them, perhaps to alleviate even temporarily their
misery and pain. I think they (the doctors) might learn something, even – but they are interested only in something they studied in books. Maybe from some life-suffering human being they
could discover more – I had the feeling they looked more for discipline and that they let their patients go after the patients had ‘given up’. They asked me to mingle with the
patients, to go out to O.T. (Occupational Therapy). I said, ‘And do what?’ They said: ‘You could sew or play checkers, even cards, and maybe knit.’ I tried to explain
that the day I did that they would have a nut on their hands. These things were the farthest from my mind. They asked me why I felt I was ‘different’ from the other patients, so I
decided if they were really that stupid I must give them a very simple answer, so I said, ‘I just am.’
The first day I did mingle with a patient. She asked me why I looked so sad and suggested I could call a friend and perhaps not be so lonely. I told her that they had told me that there
wasn’t a phone on that floor. Speaking of floors, they are all locked – no one could go in and no one could go out. She looked shocked and shaken and said, ‘I’ll take
you to the phone’ – and while I waited in line for my turn for the use of the phone, I observed a guard (since he had on a grey knit uniform), and as I approached the phone he
straight-armed the phone and said very sternly, ‘You can’t use the phone.’ By the way, they pride themselves in having a home-like atmosphere there. I asked them (the doctors)
how they figured that. They answered, ‘Well, on the sixth floor we have wall-to-wall carpeting and modern furniture,’ to which I replied, ‘Well, that any good interior
decorator could provide – providing there are funds for it,’ but since they are dealing with human beings, I asked, why couldn’t they perceive the interior of a human
being?
The girl that told me about the phone seemed such a pathetic and vague creature. She told me after the straight-arming, ‘I didn’t know they would do that.’ Then she said,
‘I’m here because of my mental condition – I have cut my throat several times and slashed my wrists,’ she said either three or four times.
Oh, well, men are climbing to the moon but they don’t seem interested in the beating human heart. Still, one can change them but won’t – by the way, that was the original
them of
The Misfits
– no one even caught that part of it. Partly because, I guess, the changes in the script and some of the distortions in the direction.
Later:
I know I will never be happy but I know I can be gay! Remember I told you Kazan said I was the gayest girl he ever knew and, believe me, he has known many. But he loved me for one year and
once rocked me to sleep one night when I was in great anguish. He also suggested that I go into analysis and later wanted me to work with Lee Strasberg. Was it Milton who wrote: ‘The
happy ones were never born’? I know at least two psychiatrists who are looking for a more positive approach.
This morning, 2 March:
I didn’t sleep again last night. I forgot to tell you something yesterday. When they put me into the first room on the sixth floor I was not told it was a psychiatric floor. Dr Kris
said she was coming the next day. The nurse came in after the doctor, a psychiatrist, had given me a physical examination including examining the breast for lumps. I took exception to this but
not violently, only explaining that the medical doctor who had put me there, a stupid man name Dr Lipkin, had already done a complete physical less than thirty days before. But when the nurse
came in, I noticed there was no way of buzzing or reaching for a light to call the nurse. I asked why this was and some other things, and she said this is a psychiatric floor. After she went
out I got dressed and then was when the girl in the hall told me about the phone. I was waiting at the elevator door which looks like all other doors with a doorknob except it doesn’t
have any numbers (you see, they left them all out). After the girl spoke with me and told me what she had done to herself, I went back into my room knowing they had lied to me about the
telephone and I sat on the bed trying to figure that if I was given this situation in an acting improvisation, what would I do? So I figured, it’s a squeaky wheel that gets the grease. I
admit it was a loud squeak, but I got the idea from a movie I made once called
Don’t Bother to Knock
. I picked up a lightweight chair and slammed it against the glass,
intentionally – and it was hard to do because I had never broken anything in my life. I took a lot of banging to get even a small piece of glass, so I went over with the glass concealed
in my hand and sat quietly on the bed waiting for them to come in. They did, and I said to them, ‘If you are going to treat me like a nut, I’ll act like a nut.’ I admit the
next thing is corny, but I really did it in the movie except it was with a razor blade. I indicated if they didn’t let me out I would harm myself – the farthest thing from my mind
at the moment, since you know, Dr Greenson, I’m an actress and I would never intentionally mark or mar myself, I’m just that vain. I didn’t cooperate with them in any way
because I couldn’t believe in what they were doing. They asked me to go quietly and I refused to move, staying on the bed so they picked me up by all fours, two hefty men and two hefty
women, and carried me up to the seventh floor in the elevator. I must say at least they had the decency to carry me face down. I just wept quietly all the way there and then was put in the cell
I told you about and that ox of a woman, one of those hefty ones, said, ‘Take a bath.’ I told her I had just taken one on the sixth floor. She said very sternly, ‘As soon as
you change floors, you have to take another bath.’ The man who runs that place, a high school principal type, although Dr Kris refers to him as an ‘administrator’, he was
actually permitted to talk to me, questioning me somewhat like an analyst. He told me I was a very, very sick girl and had been a very, very sick girl for many years. He looks down on his
patients. He wondered if that interfered with my work. He was being very firm and definite in the way he said it. He actually stated it more than he questioned me, so I replied,
‘Don’t you think that perhaps Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin and Ingrid Bergman had been depressed when they worked sometimes?’ It’s like saying a ball player like
DiMaggio couldn’t hit a ball when he was depressed. Pretty silly.
By the way, I have some good news, sort of, since I guess I helped. He claims I did: Joe said I saved his life by sending him to a psychotherapist. Dr Kris said that he is a very brilliant
man, the doctor. Joe said he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps after the divorce but he told me also that if he had been me he would have divorced him, too. Christmas night he sent a
forest-full of poinsettias. I asked who they were from since it was such a surprise – my friend Pat Newcomb was there and they had just arrived then. She said, ‘I don’t know,
the card just says, “Best, Joe”.’ Then I replied, ‘Well, there’s only one Joe.’ Because it was Christmas night I called him up and asked him why he had sent
me the flowers. He said, ‘First of all, because I thought you would call me to thank me,’ and then he said, ‘Besides, who in the hell else do you have in the world?’ He
asked me to have a drink sometime with him. I said I knew he didn’t drink, but he said occasionally now he takes a drink, to which I replied then it would have to be a very, very dark
place! He asked me what I was doing Christmas night. I said nothing, I’m here with a friend. Then he asked me to come over and I was glad he was coming, though I must say I was bleary and
depressed, but somehow still glad he was coming over.
I think I had better stop because you have other things to do, but thanks for listening for a while.
Marilyn M.