Marilyn's Last Sessions (24 page)

She was silent for a long time. ‘I’ve had no rest, I’m exhausted. Where do I go from here?’ Then she abruptly got to her feet and left the room.

To hell, Wexler thought, without looking up.

Bored, Ralph Greenson left the meeting with his Roman psychoanalytic colleagues that he had been stuck in all morning, and set off through Trastevere with no particular
destination in mind. He stopped at a gift shop on Piazza Santa Maria and looked for a present for Marilyn among the toys. He wanted to send her a sign that would help her wait, a token on her
birthday. Judging from what Wexler had told him, the chess piece had not been enough to allay her fears of abandonment. When the saleswoman asked him what he was looking for, he said he
didn’t really know.

‘What age child?’

‘Thirty-six . . . sorry . . . I mean,
three
to
six
. Between three and six years old.’

‘A cuddly toy might be best,’ the saleswoman suggested. Greenson searched through a mound of toys for a horse, something with a family resemblance to the knight, and ended up
settling for a little tiger, which he had wrapped. He asked if it could be sent to the States. ‘I’m in a hurry, I’m afraid, and I’m sure you’re more used to Customs
and all the other formalities. I’ll pay for postage, of course.’

The saleswoman obligingly handed Greenson a notepad so he could give her the address. With an attempt at levity, he wrote:

He didn’t give the sender’s name or include a message. She would understand. In the end, Greenson thought, we’re different species, she and I. Like the tiger
and the whale, we’re fated never really to meet. But which of us is the tiger and which the whale, I couldn’t really say.

Marilyn rang her psychoanalyst’s children very early on the morning of her last birthday and invited them over to celebrate. Joan and Danny spent the evening with her,
drinking champagne out of plastic cups, sitting on unopened movers’ cardboard boxes. As a present, they gave her a champagne glass with her name engraved inside. ‘Now I’ll know
who I am when I’m drinking,’ she said. A chessboard lay on the floor, the pieces in a jumble. The white knight was missing.

Two days later, Marilyn telephoned them again in tears and begged them to come round. She was in bed, naked, surrounded by pill bottles, wearing a black sleeping mask, with just a sheet over
her. The Rodin statue was near her bed. It was the least erotic sight imaginable. She was desperate. She couldn’t sleep – it was the middle of the afternoon. She was a waif, she said,
she was ugly; people were only nice to her for what they could get from her. She had no one, she was no one. She talked about not having children. She said, ‘It isn’t worth living any
more.’ Joan and Daniel called Dr Engelberg, who arrived and swept the pill bottles into his black leather bag. Wexler was also summoned.

The next night, Marilyn went out in a black wig.

Marilyn had met George Barris, the photographer, in New York in September 1954, when he was photographing
The Seven Year Itch
. In his first sight of her, she was leaning
out of the window of a brownstone on East 61st, posing for a scene. He snapped a few photos of her, of that now-famous backside, before she glanced back at him and smiled.

‘What sign are you?’ he asked.

‘Gemini. How about you?’

‘Same. We should like the same things. What do you say to us doing a book together?’

‘Why not? Let’s do it some day. Don’t stop, though. Go on taking my picture . . .’

Later, Barris was one of the photographers at the famous
Seven Year Itch
promotional shoot of a laughing Marilyn trying to push down her white dress as warm air billowed up from a subway
vent. A clumsy edit of our desires and memories convinces us that this iconic image reveals more than just a flash of white underwear, although it may have been an altogether chaste affair, showing
only Marilyn’s thighs. As always, the image is not what we look at, it is what looks at us.

Marilyn was only too happy to strike up a rapport with the photographer in the hope that he’d dispense some of the magic of his profession, remind her of the way photographs provide a
screen onto which one can project one’s dreams. She always liked the similarity between the words
magic
and
image
. But they didn’t get around to doing a book during her
lifetime. For eight years she was busy making film after film and becoming an international movie star, and she forgot about their project until 1962, when she met up with him again on the set of
Something’s Got to Give
. He had pitched a story to
Cosmopolitan
: could Marilyn, at thirty-six, continue to play sexy, beautiful young women? The editor reckoned it would make a
cover.

When he walked onto Stage Fourteen, Barris spotted Marilyn right away and tapped her on the shoulder. ‘Hey, I’m creeping up on you like the first time. Maybe you
don’t remember me, though.’

She turned around, smiled, and gave him a big hug, ‘It’s been a long time,’ she said. ‘What’s the occasion? Have you come to photograph Miss Golden Dreams? What
about our book? If we’re going to do one, I’d like it to be more than just a picture book.’

‘There can be text, sure. You should write it.’

‘I will. I don’t have such trouble with words, these days. They’re almost friends. Something I always used to like about LA is that it’s no names here. It’s the
city of the nameless. Getting around LA, numbers are what matter. If you don’t want to be miles out on Wilshire, say, you’d better get the numbers in the address right. But naming
things is important – I’ve come round to that. It depends who you tell, of course.’

‘Well, talking of numbers,’ he said, ‘since today is June first, I thought I’d fly out from New York to see my ol’ friend – I said
ol’
, not
old
.’

She laughed as he hugged her again, and said, ‘Happy-happy, and may you have only happy ones.’

Barris was telling her about the
Cosmopolitan
story when Cukor called her on set. Marilyn asked him to stick around – they could talk about the book and other stuff later. At
five-thirty that Friday afternoon, Marilyn finished her scene. Someone shouted, ‘Happy birthday, Marilyn!’ One of the crew produced the cake. The sparklers threw off stars, the Dom
Pérignon flowed. Barris thought it looked amazing, the light of the sparklers, the champagne bubbles, the tears running down her face, but he didn’t take a picture.

One summer day, almost fifteen years after Marilyn’s death, Greenson heard Capote was in town to play an eccentric billionaire in the movie
Murder by Death
. He
asked Joanne Carson, a mutual friend, to set up a meeting between them at her house, although he didn’t tell her he wanted to talk about Marilyn’s death. Carson obliged and, after
effecting the introductions, tactfully left the two men alone.

‘You knew Marilyn when she was still just an actress, before she became a myth,’ Greenson launched in. ‘I loved her, I’m sure you know that. You’re an intelligent
man. You know what
love
means in analysis, as well as out here, in what’s called real life.’

‘Are we talking about the same thing? I’m not so sure,’ Capote said. ‘Love seems to be a cure, as far as you analysts are concerned, whereas to me it’s the actual
sickness. There’s something vaguely ludicrous about it, like a children’s game where someone’s playing at being someone else’s mother—’

‘Love is a bond,’ Greenson said. ‘Two people form an object relationship. They give, they receive . . .’

‘Not two people,’ Capote retorted. ‘Two walking wounds. Two incomplete beings searching for something they’ll never be able to find in another person. You know how to
recognise that a relationship has changed from a sexual to a “loving” one? There are two signs, and they both relate to what’s little and
en bas
, as the French say. The
first is an undifferentiated intimacy, a regression to infancy in the Latin sense of
infans
: the one who does not speak, the vulnerable soul who is deprived of language, not that I should
have to tell a psychoanalyst that. Hence lovers’ private languages, their baby talk, pet names, teeny-weeny voices – cutesy little lovers with their cutesy little languages. The second
sign that love has entered the picture is a sense of entitlement to the anal, as I’m sure you know, Mr Analyst: the licence to talk to a person about their digestion, their excretion, their
shit.’

‘But how do you distinguish between what we call “transference love” and the other sort?’ Greenson asked, as if he hadn’t heard.

‘You’re incorrigible, you analysts!’ Capote exclaimed, in his sexless, childlike falsetto. ‘You refuse to admit that love doesn’t justify anything, doesn’t
prove anything or anyone right or wrong, that it’s all just a question of language. You’re so busy justifying yourselves:
But I loved her
. So what? Your love was the murdering
kind. That’s all there is to it.’

As Greenson was leaving the Bel Air mansion, Capote whispered in his ear, ‘It was
her
death, you know. Like my dumb film says, it was
Murder by Death
. Death was what killed
her. She didn’t kill herself. Neither did anyone else.’

As Capote turned away, he remembered a conversation he’d had with Marilyn when he’d gone to visit her in her house in Brentwood shortly before she died. He thought her beauty had had
a completely different cast to it, and asked whether she’d lost weight.

‘A few pounds,’ Marilyn said. ‘Fourteen or fifteen maybe, I don’t know.’

‘If you carry on like this,’ Capote said, ‘your soul will start showing through your skin.’

‘Don’t make fun of me. Who said that?’

‘I did. No one quotes an author better than he does himself. How are you feeling, by the way? How is your soul?’

‘It’s out of the country for a while. Romi, my saviour, is at a conference in Europe, sitting at Freud’s right hand.’

‘This analysis will be the death of you, Marilyn. You’ve got to stop!’

Capote didn’t like psychoanalysis and he loathed Hollywood. As for the Hollywood variant of psychoanalysis, he considered it worse than a fad: he thought it was a disease. ‘Everyone
in California is either in analysis, or an analyst, or an analyst in analysis,’ he’d joke, whenever anyone tried to convince him to go to Couch Canyon. But he did in the end and, as
ambivalent as ever, saw a male and female analyst simultaneously.

Capote’s got it back to front, Greenson thought, as he drove back to Santa Monica. It’s not analysis that gets everywhere in Hollywood, even the movies, it’s the movies that
take over everything, even analysis. People breathe, walk, talk – even shut off from each other in this goldfish bowl as if they’re on set. They’re constantly acting a part. Maybe
Marilyn’s analysis was scripted by some studio hack with half an hour to spare. Greenson had just read
My Story
, which had come out in 1971 as Marilyn’s autobiography under her
name, despite its having been compiled in the 1950s by Ben Hecht from conversations with her.

Maybe she was acting the part of Cecily after we stopped her playing it in the movie. Marilyn as Cecily: the quintessential hysteric with an Electra complex in a 1960s Hollywood version of
analysis, complete with healed traumas, disinterred memories and a kindly, bearded, irresistible therapist. What about her death, though? What script did that come from? When he had read in
My
Story
, ‘I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand,’ he’d thought Marilyn had played her part to perfection on
the night of 4 August 1962. Besides, hadn’t she called her memoir
My Story
, rather than
My Life
or
Memoirs of an Actress
, as if at the peak of her glory she knew she was
just filling in the gaps in someone else’s script? It reminded him of the time on the set of
Something’s Got to Give
when he had watched Cukor whisper to her her lines as she
forgot the entire script.

That wasn’t all, though, was it? he thought. He had played his part opposite her too. He had acted the role of the impossibly benevolent, far-from-objective analyst with skill and
conviction. In the imaginations of Hollywood folk, Marilyn Monroe’s death was a
film noir
all of its own:

Greenson had already visited Greece, Israel and Italy; now he was heading off to Switzerland. Marilyn didn’t try to ring him directly, but instead wrote down a list of
questions and got Eunice Murray to ask them over the phone. Greenson realised they were less important than the unspoken question, ‘When are you coming back?’, but he didn’t ask
Murray to put her on. Marilyn immediately embarked on a fervid bout of telephoning, ringing Lee Strasberg, Norman and Hedda Rosten, Ralph Roberts, Whitey Snyder and Pat Newcomb several times a day.
They thought she sounded lost, searching for herself.

When Marilyn didn’t appear on set the Monday after her thirty-sixth birthday, Peter G. Levathes, Fox’s studio head, announced he was going to settle the Monroe problem. Next thing,
Marilyn had arrived and declared herself not only ready but impatient to get back to work, even though she had been present on only twelve out of the shoot’s thirty-four days. The following
day, when she again didn’t appear on set, Cukor dismissed the cast and crew and resolved to call off filming if she didn’t turn up. Fox again threatened to revoke her contract, and
Cukor started considering replacements: Kim Novak, Shirley MacLaine, Doris Day, maybe Lee Remick. Contacted by Mickey Rudin on Marilyn’s behalf, Greenson promised to get back as quickly as
possible, leaving his wife to follow him the next day.