Marilyn's Last Sessions (20 page)

Early one evening in spring, Marilyn called Norman Rosten. ‘Can you come over?’ she asked. ‘I’m going out to dinner, and I want you to meet my date.’

When he got there she whispered through the door, ‘I’ll be a few minutes. Go on into the back room. You’ll recognise him. I told him about you.’

It was Frank Sinatra. The two men sat down, had a drink, talked. A quarter of an hour passed, half an hour, three-quarters of an hour . . . Dressed in a pale green print dress, Marilyn finally
appeared. Sinatra was anxious to leave and dragged her away from her friend. She murmured, ‘He’s a poet. If you need a good writer for a movie, he’s great.’

Early next morning, she rang Rosten. ‘What’d you think of him?’

Her voice sounded impatient, but he didn’t know whether from joy or panic. A few days later, Rosten went back east. They had farewell drinks by the pool at her place.

‘Next time you’ll swim in it,’ she said. ‘I’ll have a poolside party.’

‘I swear I’ll stay in the water until they fish me out.’

‘A final sip of champagne, a light embrace,’ Rosten recalled much later. One of those cursory, stiff embraces people give one another when they have the vague sense they may never
see each other again.

‘Give everybody a kiss at home,’ Marilyn said. ‘I’m going now. I’m off to my doctor.’

As it transpired, they did see each other again, on the last Sunday in March. Marilyn had been at a fundraiser for the Kennedys the previous night. She had danced with Bobby
and the brothers hadn’t left her side all evening. The president had flown back to Washington in the morning and Marilyn woke up at noon in a fragile state. She called Norman and asked him to
come to Fifth Helena Drive – ‘Down a dead-end street. That’s where I am. God, it’s going to be a real dull Sunday.’

Rosten drove her to Beverly Hills, figuring that she needed something to distract her. At an art gallery, she found a Rodin statue, a bronze of a man and a woman in an embrace.

She wrote a cheque for it then and there. As she and Rosten drove away, Marilyn held the statue tenderly, and murmured, ‘Look at them both. How beautiful. He’s hurting her, but he
wants to love her, too.’ A look of terror and excitement in her eyes. She turned to Rosten, and told him she wanted to show her analyst the bronze.

‘Now?’ he asked.

‘Sure. Why not now?’

Greenson welcomed them in, and Marilyn immediately showed him the Rodin. ‘What does it mean?’ she demanded. ‘Is he just screwing her, or is it a fake? I’d like to
know.’ Her voice desperate. ‘What do you think, Doctor? What’s it mean?’

‘What? The gift itself or the fact you’ve given it to me? The gift means that we often use the ties that bind us to someone we’re dependent on to try to bind them closer to
us.’

‘It’s not a gift. I’m keeping it!’

Marilyn had once written to Greenson – and told him a hundred times since in person – that she did not know what nights were for. The answer was simple: for waiting. For saying to
the other person who has been gone so long, ‘Come back!’ But that night she wasn’t waiting for a person. She was waiting for Nembutal, Librium, Miltown, Demerol, chloral hydrate.
When the limousine came for her the next morning, she wasn’t answering the door. Two hours later, Greenson discovered Marilyn, overdosed, sprawled under her satiny white sheets.

Marilyn was to be paid a derisory hundred thousand dollars for
Something’s Got to Give
, a third of what Dean Martin was getting for playing her forgetful remarried
husband. Dean, who had always had a soft spot for Marilyn, now thought her more lost than ever. Sinatra was leaving her – he had got engaged to Juliet Prowse in January. When Peter Lawford
had introduced Marilyn to Bobby Kennedy, Sinatra had enjoyed the prospect of that fearless opponent of the Mafia and upholder of his brother’s honour falling under the spell of one of his
exes. Marilyn, meanwhile, had fallen hard for the Kennedy mystique. The attorney general and the platinum-blonde goddess had furtive, clumsy sex. Although he was Sinatra’s friend, Dean was
too fond of Marilyn to leave her on her own to struggle with the Kennedy entourage of politicians and mafiosi. She broke his heart, really – and, besides, he owed it to her to make this film:
he was only in it because she’d insisted he be given the part.

‘What’s the date tomorrow?’ Marilyn asked, standing in the doorway to Greenson’s consulting room.

‘Ninth of April,’ answered the analyst.

The first day of filming, like the first day back at school: a grim reckoning you could only escape by playing dead or stupid. Marilyn had to get back into the studio’s harness and take
direction from Cukor again, Cukor who had loathed her ever since her problems and disappearances had reduced
Let’s Make Love
to a virtual fiasco.

‘That fucker.’ Marilyn was sitting facing Greenson. ‘It’s not that he doesn’t like women . . . anybody can sleep with who they want, I don’t care. No, he
hates them so much he can’t even point his camera at them. He can’t even try to understand what they think, what they want. He just waits until they collapse into a heap, until their
make-up and tears are all smeared together in a disgusting mush. Did you know he wanted to film
Something’s Got to Give
in his house? That says it all. He’s too busy looking at
himself, his beautiful works of art, his pool, his luxurious mansion. You know what he does with his little boys in the evening round that pool? I do, because I’ve got a friend who’s
one of his crowd. He has fake Marilyn competitions. They get dressed up and imitate my walk, my stupid, kinky little girl’s voice. Oh, don’t worry, Doctor, they don’t like you
either. When he’s asked if I’m up to filming, he says, “I haven’t a clue. Ask her psychiatrist.”’

Greenson wondered if she was objecting to the film and its director or to the fact she was back playing the ditzy blonde after her tragic role in
The Misfits.

‘I’ve met Cukor,’ Greenson pointed out. ‘I didn’t get the impression he disliked me. As a matter of fact, he asked me to help him work on your acting. He
doesn’t hate you either.’

‘Are you kidding? A reporter asked him what he thought of me. He said I was so racked with nerves I couldn’t even match one take with another and, if the journalist wanted to know
why, he should ask my shrink. Well, no, Mr Cukor, I don’t know what or who to be in sync with from one shot to the next. No, I’m not the same from one take to another because I never
feel in sync with myself. I always feel cut off, always wondering who people want me to be.

‘The script’s not too bad, though,’ she continued, when she got her breath back. ‘A woman is shipwrecked with a handsome man on a tropical island. She’s reported
dead, her husband remarries, and then, after being miraculously rescued, she comes to reclaim him. Her children don’t recognise her and she pretends to be a babysitter. Her husband is uneasy
about the whole thing, but his second wife keeps him on a tight rein—’

‘I know the story,’ Greenson interrupted. ‘Why can’t you play the first wife, Ellen, though? Don’t you like the fact your character’s unrecognised? Do you
feel your image has been taken away from you, that you’ve been cut out of the picture?’

‘You don’t get it at all. You were the one who said the men who’ve made the most impression on me have been photographers – André, Milton Greene and now George
Barris, who I’ve started seeing again. Visual people. That’s the point: seeing someone is not the same as knowing them. I want to be seen, constantly, from all angles, by all eyes,
men’s and women’s – and the reason I want that is because then no one will know me.’

‘How can you be afraid of filming and yet want to be photographed so much?’ Greenson asked.

Marilyn fell silent. When she felt utterly alone, like a little girl on her first day at a new school, and was terrified that this was what her death would be like, she had only one recourse: to
have her picture taken, to find herself again in her own image.

‘I meant that as a question,’ the analyst persisted.

‘I’m afraid when I have to talk,’ Marilyn declared, her voice suddenly loud. ‘When I have to do dialogue, when I have to say words somebody has written for me, in front
of the dead eye of the camera. Someone captures me in a photograph, they shoot me – that’s the word, isn’t it? Shoot. You shoot a story like a gun, you do photo shoots, and
it’s all wordless, not like the movies. I prefer men who go about their business in silence and don’t want a commentary afterwards. Hey, you know what gets me on set and allows me to
act? That’s a shot too – the injections Fox’s doctor with the magic syringe, Lee Siegel, has been giving me since
The Seven Year Itch
. Play it again, Lee. Give me a good
youth shot.’

And, with that, Marilyn stood up and left.

Something’s Got to Give
got off to a nightmarish start. The first day of filming had to be postponed until the end of April and Marilyn took the opportunity to
fly to New York, where she attended a dinner for JFK in a penthouse on Park Avenue. She arrived some time after ten looking sublimely pale, like a white ember on the verge of fading out. She
strolled nonchalantly over to Kennedy. ‘Hi, Prez.’

He turned, smiled at her. ‘Hi! Come on, I want you to meet some people.’ Then they disappeared.

On the evening of 22 April, a Sunday, Marilyn left her session with Greenson in a state of intense panic and had herself driven to Hermosa Beach, south of Los Angeles. There
she got her old hairdresser Pearl Porterfield out of bed to dye her hair so she could face the cameras at dawn the following morning. As always, she had her pubic hair dyed as well. But filming
next day had to start without her. For a week, she couldn’t get out of bed, and her only contact with the outside world was her analyst, who made daily visits.

One brief appearance on set on 30 April was as much as she could manage – but not even her collapse at the end of ninety minutes of filming could convince the Fox executives that she was
really ill. Greenson, who had guaranteed her presence, received increasingly frustrated calls from the studio, and fired off a stream of reassuring memos.

Marilyn arrived distraught at her next session. ‘So this is it. You’re really leaving me. Joannie told me.’

‘Yes, as I said, I—’

‘I know,’ Marilyn cut in, ‘but I didn’t believe you. This is really it, is it?’

‘I’m going on a cruise around the Mediterranean with Hildi. She needs to visit her mother, in Switzerland, who had a heart attack recently, then I’ve got to give a lecture in
Jerusalem on transference. On the way back, I have to see my editor in New York to talk about my book on psychoanalytic technique. I’m entitled to a vacation, aren’t I?’

‘Yes . . .’ Marilyn stammered. ‘Oh, shit! Yesterday I made a real effort. I arrived at the studio twenty-five minutes early, at six in the morning, just for a make-up call. I
worked till four then came here for my session. But today, when I knew Hildi was leaving and that you would be too, that this was it, you were really leaving, I fainted half an hour after getting
on set and had to be taken home. I was such a mess when I got out of bed, you’ve no idea. I had to drag my body to the bathroom like it wasn’t even mine. Something’s got to give
. . .
Right. Me.’

‘I’ve had a thought,’ her analyst said. ‘What if I give you something of mine as a token, which you could give back to me on my return? It could act as a physical bond
between us, a talisman. Here, one of these chess pieces, for instance. What do you reckon?’

After walking Marilyn to the door that evening, Greenson returned to his desk and transcribed their conversation. Then he began an article explaining why, with this sort of
patient, he had felt compelled to act as well as talk, to give rather than merely wait or receive. He only managed a first draft, dealing with the significance and role of the transitional object
as an analyst’s substitute, and it wasn’t until twelve years after his patient’s death that he was finally able to go back and finish it. Writing to forget; writing to obscure the
fact he had lost that last game of chess. Even so, he remained hesitant: how could he write about her without naming her? Surely everyone would recognise the anonymous subject of ‘On
Transitional Objects and Transference’, the most neutral title he could think of to avoid any hint of passion. It was Greenson’s only published piece of writing in which he mentioned,
although not by name, his most famous patient: