Marilyn's Last Sessions (21 page)

Marilyn returned home, clutching the chess piece in the palm of her hand. She poured herself a drink and looked through the glass at the distorted golden figure of the knight.
She started to cry, remembering a scene in
The Misfits
where Miller and Huston had wanted her to be almost invisible behind a window as a man tried to look in. The next scene they’d
had her putting on makeup, anxiously scrutinising her reflection in a mirror. ‘Fuck all these windows and mirrors!’ she’d shouted at the director. ‘Show me straight.
Don’t put me behind glass!’ She scribbled a few lines in her notebook:

Greenson knocked on Wexler’s door very late that day.

‘Can I talk to you?’

‘About her?’

‘Of course, who else? I’m entrusting my madwoman to you. Watch out, though. She’s more lovable than you could possibly imagine. She suffered a terrible childhood, you know,
truly terrible – she was raped, abused by her foster fathers . . . I thought it was fantasy at first, but now I believe it all happened, I feel overwhelmed. I’m not going to bring this
off. Two things have been clear since our first session. First: that this wouldn’t be a traditional course of analysis, with well-defined boundaries and the usual staging of the couch with
its back to the chair. Second: that only death, hers or mine, would us part.’

‘No half-measures, then. So what do you want me to do, baby-sit?’

‘I’m going to Europe for five weeks. I can’t leave her on her own and I’m not sure she’ll make it even if you take over from me.’

‘Well, take her with you, then.’

‘Freud used to do that with his favourite patients.’

‘He also didn’t charge in some cases and invited certain patients to lunch at home or in his office. He was very talkative in sessions and analysed his own daughter . . . So what
does that prove? That Freud sometimes wasn’t a Freudian and broke his own rules. That’s all.’

‘You don’t understand. I’ve been trying to wean Marilyn off barbiturates for the last two years, and the whole time I’ve been getting them for her – even last
autumn when she’d stopped filming and was seeing me seven times a week. Meanwhile Hyman’s been giving her Lee Siegel’s miracle injections behind my back. Now her analysis has
become a drug for her. She and I have become co-dependent unbelievably fast. You ought to know that I have given her permission to call my children if she needs anything when I’m
away.’

‘Aren’t you taking this too far?’ Wexler asked. ‘Wait a second, I’m going to read you something.’ He got up, took some stapled papers from a pile on a shelf
and read out,

‘Stop! How can you cure someone without intervening, if necessary by force? And love is the only force we have. I am her analyst. I want to be a positive version of the paternal, a father
who won’t disappoint her, who will awaken her conscious mind, or at least treat her with every possible kindness.’

‘But where’s it supposed to end, this therapy based on love? Our schizophrenic or borderline patients are not always lacking love, you know that. Love can trigger madness in a person
just as much as lack of love.’

‘I don’t think so. Not in this case, at any rate. It’s all a question of degree. I wouldn’t describe love as the driving force in my relationship with Marilyn.’

‘Who’s your Juliet, Romeo?’ Wexler asked, as Greenson, staring into space, turned and left his office without a word. ‘Read the play again. It ends badly!’

Seven years after the actress’s death, Ralph Greenson was invited to give a lecture on psychoanalytic technique. Such intellectual high-wire acts had lost their appeal
for him, but he accepted anyway, out of friendship for a former colleague who had moved from California to teach in Michigan, and also, he thought, out of loyalty to Marilyn’s memory. He
began his talk in an unsteady voice: ‘“Mistakes and Beginnings in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy”: This was the subject I was going to address for the purposes of your clinical
training in this beautiful university of Ann Arbor. I have changed my mind, however. Perhaps because Michigan is a long way from California, perhaps also because Marilyn Monroe is fading from my
memory, as I’m sure she is from yours, young as you are, I would now like to talk about her in a way I have not yet had the chance to publicly.

‘I was by no means a beginner in 1960 and yet, when the actress was sent to me, I immediately had the feeling that I should forget everything I knew and start again from scratch. After her
death, it was awful, but I felt I had to go on. And I went on, and I
was
upset. And my patients saw me upset. Some of them saw no reaction in me, and were furious at me for being so cold and
impersonal. They asked how I could come and work the next day, and how I could have taken such a patient anyway. They were angry at me for having decided to shorten or cancel their sessions so I
could see her every day. Others felt sorry for me. They’d express their condolences in the usual way, “I’m sorry for your loss”, but I’d hear not only,
“I’m sorry for the loss you’ve suffered”, but also, “I’m sorry I’ve lost you. I’m sorry you are not yourself any more.”

‘Seven years have passed and I am still devastated. I don’t know that I will ever get over it really or completely. I still ask myself what I should have done to save her. Perhaps my
decision to take on Marilyn Monroe was too much of a gamble, perhaps the stakes were too high. Perhaps I wanted to go down in history as Marilyn Monroe’s analyst, and perhaps in the end it
was a gamble I lost. I approached it as a game of poker, I think, when really I should have been playing chess, or not playing at all. She was a poor creature whom I tried to help and ended up
hurting. Perhaps my own longing for omnipotence had clouded my judgement. Of course I knew it was a difficult case, but what should I have done? Turn it over to a beginner? I knew her love was
narcissistic, and that she was bound to feel a hatred commensurate with her dependence on me. But I had forgotten my old rule: a recurrent death wish, fully felt and realised in consciousness,
obviates the need for a psychoanalyst.’

Accounts of the actress Inger Stevens’s death tend not to mention her psychiatrist’s name. The evening before she died, they report, she was dressed in a
greyish-beige trouser suit and black blouse, her tall, slender frame emphasised by her blonde hair worn piled characteristically high. Her face was said to be sad, but no sadder than usual, with
just the occasional look of cold despair passing through her washed-out blue eyes. During the night of 30 April 1970, a friend, Lola McNally, found her lying unconscious in her house on Woodrow
Wilson Drive, close to the corner of Mulholland Drive. She opened her eyes and said something incomprehensible. An ambulance took her to hospital, where she was pronounced dead on arrival.

The autopsy was conducted by Marilyn’s coroner, Dr Noguchi, who ruled that Stevens had died of a barbiturate overdose. Three hypotheses circulated as to what might have happened: either
she was murdered and the scene was made to look like a suicide, or she suffered a heart attack after consuming too much alcohol and too many pills, or she had wanted to kill herself and had finally
succeeded in doing so. Either way, the circumstances of her death remain suspicious. She had just signed a contract to do a TV series –
The Most Deadly Game
, a title that took on
strange resonances when her body was found curled up, face down on her kitchen floor – and had seemed very excited about getting down to work, even going out and buying new clothes for her
part. Her bedroom carpet had been pulled up. The telephone wasn’t in its usual place in the living room, but in the bedroom where there wasn’t even a socket. She had bruising on her
arm, a cut on her chin and her blood contained traces of asthma medication, which she didn’t need to take. She had cooked dinner at home that night for the actor Burt Reynolds, who
wasn’t questioned by the police and went on to star twelve years later in
The Man Who Loved Women
, which was written by Milton Wexler and directed by Blake Edwards. Wexler, however,
was not the only link between the dead actress and Hollywood’s psychoanalytic community. Ralph Greenson had been her analyst for many years.

Inger Stevens had had a brief movie career in the 1960s. She was born two years before Marilyn and, like her, had started out as a model and chorus girl before studying at the Actors Studio in the hope of becoming ‘a serious actress’,
as she put it. It’s not known if she and Marilyn knew one another in New York, or before that, in Hollywood. She’d left her family home in Kansas and stepped off the Greyhound bus at
LA’s Union Station alone and without any luggage. No one was waiting for her. Like Marilyn, although she never enjoyed as much of the limelight, she could play comic, dramatic and romantic
roles, and when she was offered something sexy, she’d simply say, ‘I hope I don’t get typecast.’ Her most notable role was in an episode of
The Twilight Zone
in 1960,
‘The Hitchhiker’, where she plays a woman who suffers hallucinations as she drives east across America and thinks she gives her death a lift.

When he read of Inger Stevens’s death in the
Los Angeles Times
, Greenson was working on a book about failures in psychoanalysis, a sequel of sorts to
The
Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis,
which had been published three years earlier. He remembered the other blonde’s final hours, then decided the only way to stop thinking about
either of them was to write an article about the ‘Swinging Chicks of the ’60s’, actresses without roles, dreamers lost in their glittering self-images. That way he could
concentrate on their failures, rather than his own failure to cure them.

He found a letter Inger had written him a few years earlier: ‘I live in a constant state of insecurity and crippling anxiety that I try to hide by appearing cold. People think I am aloof,
but really I am just scared. I often feel depressed. I come from a broken home, my marriage was a disaster, and I am constantly lonely.’

Greenson closed the file containing his notes on Inger’s analysis. He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and saw her beautiful, sad face, her childlike eyes. He heard her low,
deceptively assured voice. ‘A career, no matter how successful, can’t put its arms around you,’ she had said once. ‘You end up being like Grand Central Station with people
just coming and going. And there you are – left all alone. The thing I miss most is having someone to share things with. I’ve always thrown myself into friendships and love affairs
where I’m the one doing all the giving. You can’t live like that.’

‘There’s your work as an actress, though. People like seeing you on screen.’

‘But that’s not me. I’m very proud of what I do. I want to be a success. I don’t want to die thinking all I’ve been doing is passing time, heading on down the road
until I crawl off into my grave. I’d like to leave something behind me, to contribute to my generation’s legacy, and I’ll do that through my work as an actress.’

When he heard of her death, the analyst couldn’t help thinking she hadn’t been a good actress and, without knowing why, decided not to go to her cremation. He also decided against
writing a book about failures in psychoanalysis, or articles about analysts’ patients’ suicides or Hollywood starlets in the 1960s. Too many old wounds. A friend scattered Inger’s
ashes over the Pacific from the Santa Monica pier.

On 10 May, Greenson and his wife finally left for Europe for five weeks. His disappearance at this particularly critical time for Marilyn seemed oddly unexplained – he
told his associates that he was going on a lecture tour, but he informed Fox that his wife was ill and needed to be treated in a Swiss clinic. And he’d told Marilyn it was his mother-in-law
who was sick.

Four days later, having barely worked for the first three weeks of filming, Marilyn was ready long before the studio limousine came to pick her up to take her through the deserted Los Angeles
streets to Pico Boulevard. The black Lincoln Continental rolled over Brentwood’s low hills, raising a cloud of dust that was visible from Century City. To reach the gleaming new bungalow she
had been allocated as a dressing room, Marilyn was driven past the steel and glass administrative buildings that towered over the lot. The studio executives’ offices were strategically
positioned on the top floor so they could keep tabs on their stars’ comings and goings.

Among the brief, truncated jottings Marilyn made during the last two years of her life is this entry in a red notebook: