Read Marilyn's Last Sessions Online
Authors: Michel Schneider
Greenson pressed the pause button again. He never found out the rest of Grace’s life story because when he resumed listening, after a few laps of the swimming pool, Marilyn had moved on to
another subject.
I told you about the traumas I had filming
Don’t Bother to Knock
ten years ago. There was something in the script I couldn’t do. It was only talking to
you that made me understand. I don’t know if Baker and his screenwriter did it intentionally, but when Nell said ‘I never wore nice dresses of my own at school’, and that
she’d been put in a mental institution in Oregon, it reminded me of my last visit to my mother. I have to tell you about that, even if it’s painful. If you were here, you’d
say, ‘Especially if it’s painful. If saying something doesn’t come with a price, then there’s no point saying it.’
She was living in Portland, Oregon, in a seedy hotel downtown. I wish I could forget the scene. I hadn’t set eyes on my mother for six years. She’d left the San Francisco mental
hospital a few months before. She wasn’t eating, she wouldn’t look at anyone. It was January, a rainy afternoon. I’d gone to see her with André de Dienes –
I’ve already told you about him, my first lover, who I was crazy about when I was twenty. He had fitted out his Buick Roadmaster – he’d taken out the back seat and laid down a
mattress, with blankets and lots of pillows, so I could sleep when I wanted on the long drives. I called it the cage. I was his prisoner, and I was happy.
My mother was sitting in the dark in a small, sad room on the top floor. I had brought her presents: perfume, a scarf, sweets and some photographs of me André had taken. She
didn’t react, just sat in her wicker chair, no ‘thank you’, no sign of pleasure. Her mouth set, no smile, lipstick smeared over her lips. She didn’t touch me. At one
point, she put her head into her hands and bent down. I threw myself at her feet.
There was the sound of something like a nervy sob or laugh. Marilyn paused, then resumed in a more earnest tone:
I remember an earlier visit to San Francisco. Grace had taken me to see her. I must have been thirteen, or thereabouts. She didn’t move then either. She just said at
the end, ‘I remember. You had such pretty little feet.’ . . .
If you were here, you’d ask me why I was silent for a moment then. It’s because there was something I couldn’t say straight away. When my mother looked up – I wish I
could forget this – all she said was: ‘I’d like to come and live with you, Norma Jeane.’ Something in me snapped. I jumped up and said, ‘Mom, we’ve got to go
now, I’ll see you soon.’ I left my address and phone number on the table with the unopened presents and we headed south. I never got to see her again.
After another long silence during which Greenson could only hear the hiss and sigh of the tape, as if Marilyn had pushed the tape recorder away from her, she said,
It got dark after we left Portland and we stopped at somewhere called the Timberline Lodge Hotel, at the foot of Mt Hood, but it was full. We ended up down a narrow, winding
road at another place called the Government Lodge. It was full of slot machines – even the johns had them. It was like one of those nightmares when you can’t get where you’re
trying to go. It rained, then started to snow. I was very provocative with André that night, sexually I mean. He was sad, incredibly sad. All he said to me was ‘I didn’t even
think for a minute of taking pictures of you and your mother. I’ve never told anyone but my mother died when I was eleven. She threw herself down a well. It all seems a long way away now.
I don’t even know what country Transylvania is in, these days.’
It snowed all that night in the mountains in Oregon. It carried on the next day and the next night. We didn’t leave our room. While I was doing my fingernails and toenails, I held out
my hands towards André and showed him how the lines on my palm make a capital M. We compared our palms like kids. He told me that when he was a child in Transylvania, an old bell ringer
had predicted that the letters MM would be very important later in his life. ‘You know, Norma Jeane, at the time I was reading a strange old book and the man was worried that one page
began “
Memento mori
”.’ I was fascinated and we spent a long time talking about the Ms on our palms. André laughed and said they didn’t have anything to do
with death. ‘The opposite, they mean “Marry Me”!’ he said. André also told me about going walking in the forest when he was a child and carving a double M in a
tree. It’s odd, Doctor, don’t you think? That was only a few months before my initials became MM . . . We put our palms together. André took a photo of mine.
That night he made love to me. It felt like he was searching my body, desperately looking for something. I was in tears. He asked me why and I held him tight as if he was my child. I
didn’t know what to say. We had been travelling and taking pictures for a fortnight but this was the first time we made love. People use sex to win love, don’t they, or at least to
think they’re loved or that they exist, or that they’ve lost themselves without becoming somebody else’s, or that they’ve died but nobody’s killed them? I often
think I’m making love to the camera nowadays. It doesn’t feel as good as with a man, but it doesn’t hurt so much either. It’s just someone’s eyes owning your
body.
When Arthur Miller opened the copy of
Life
magazine he’d bought at a kiosk on East 57th Street and saw the photos of Marilyn emerging naked from the swimming-pool,
he couldn’t help thinking her defiant, wilful expression was forced, an attempt to cover up what he called ‘the wound of indignity’. He remembered returning to their Brooklyn
apartment three years before and finding her standing in a daze, without a stitch of clothing, like a lost bird that had flown in through an open window. She pushed her hair off her forehead and
went to sit on the edge of the bath, her eyes closed, her head bowed. He watched through the open door as she slowly came back to herself and to him, until finally she looked up and gave him a
tender smile. She shouldn’t have to do these sorts of things any more, he thought. There are other ways of getting through to people.
The interview Marilyn gave
Life
after being fired from
Something’s Got to Give
appeared the day before she died. In it she comes across as calm, happy, confident. She talks
about going to Grauman’s Chinese Theater as a child and putting her feet in the movie star’s footprints on the Walk of Fame outside. Uh-oh, she used to think, my foot’s too big! I
guess that’s out. So it was a remarkable moment when she was memorialised there herself. It brought home to her that ‘anything’s possible, almost’.
To fans, the Hollywood Walk of Fame stretches down Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street like a dazzling trail across a starlit sky, a triumphal procession through the history
of movie-making. The star with Marilyn’s name above the bronze camera is set in the reddish-brown concrete just outside the McDonald’s at 6774 Hollywood Boulevard, not far from
Grauman’s Chinese Theater where she’d spent whole afternoons as a child, on her own or with Grace McKee, losing and finding herself in the darkness.
Just opposite, number 7000, is the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, which hosted the first Academy Awards dinner two years after it opened in 1927. Marilyn posed by its swimming pool when she was
twenty-five, and often stayed there in the 1950s, in Suite 1200. The contempt her fame excited still came as a surprise back then: ‘It stirs up envy, fame does,’ she told Greenson.
‘People you run into feel that, well, who is she? Who does she think she is, Marilyn Monroe? They feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you, you
know, of any kind of nature and it won’t hurt your feelings. Like it’s happening to your clothing. You’re always running into people’s unconscious.’ In December 1985,
soon after the Roosevelt’s 1920s décor had undergone a dismal 1980s revamp, a woman on the hotel staff called Susan Leonard was cleaning a mirror in the manager’s office when she
saw a blonde woman in its reflection, coming towards her. She swung round but there was no one behind her. It took a while for the image to vanish. Later it transpired that the mirror used to hang
on the wall in Suite 1200. Among other relics of Hollywood’s golden age evoked by the hotel’s themed rooms, you can now ask to see the ‘haunted mirror’. It hangs in the low
corridor by the elevators.
Late in the morning of Saturday, 4 August 1962, Agnes Flanagan, one of Marilyn’s hairdressers and an old friend, paid an impromptu visit to Fifth Helena Drive. Shortly after she got there,
she said that a delivery man appeared with a parcel. The packaging had been torn and clumsily mended with sticky tape. It seemed to have travelled all over the world. A smudged stamp indicated a
date in Italian. Only three letters in the sender’s details were legible: ROM. Roma? Romi? wondered Marilyn. A message from the past or the future? Love is always an anachronism. The signal
reaches you after the source has ceased transmitting. Was the parcel in itself a message? She opened it and then went out to the swimming pool with its contents, a little stuffed tiger. She sat
down with her feet in the water, hugging it in silence. Agnes thought she must be terribly depressed, although she didn’t say anything. Not knowing what to do, Agnes eventually let herself
out. Photographs of Marilyn’s garden taken the following day show two stuffed animals by the swimming pool, one of which looks like the tiger.
She didn’t mention the strange object to her analyst, who came over in the late afternoon. After asking Pat Newcomb to leave, Greenson talked to his patient for two hours, then suggested
she go for a walk by the sea with Eunice. They walked a little way, but Marilyn couldn’t keep her footing in the sand, so they came back and she carried on talking to Greenson until seven
p.m. The telephone rang repeatedly, but Greenson wouldn’t let Marilyn answer. He picked up once and curtly told a dumbfounded Ralph Roberts, ‘She’s not here,’ before hanging
up.
The Greensons were going out to dinner that evening, so at seven Greenson had to go home and change. He had only just arrived when Marilyn rang in a state of animation to pass on some good news
about Joe DiMaggio’s son. She asked him, almost as an aside, if he had taken her bottle of Nembutal. He said he hadn’t, startled by the question because he thought she had been cutting
down on her use of barbiturates recently. She didn’t have any sleeping pills at her disposal as far as he knew, though, so he saw no reason to worry. In fact, Engelberg had prescribed her
twenty-five capsules at her request the day before, enough to kill herself. He hadn’t thought to tell Greenson.
Left alone, Marilyn stayed on the phone. At half past seven, she spoke to Peter Lawford. He thought she sounded terrible – drugs or alcohol, or both. He tried to warn her analyst but
Greenson couldn’t be reached, so he called his brother-in-law, Mickey Rudin. From this point on, accounts differ.
According to one version, the analyst and Rudin returned after dinner around midnight because Greenson, already in an edgy mood because he’d given up smoking, was concerned at the
condition in which he’d left his patient. When they got there, Greenson went into her bedroom. It was a mess. The wooden bedside table was piled high with plastic pill bottles, none of them
containing Nembutal, that jostled for space with a copy of Leo Rosten’s novel,
Captain Newman, M.D.
Marilyn was in bed. She mumbled something incoherent and he decided to let her
sleep. It didn’t occur to him that her mention of Nembutal in her last call might have meant: I’ve got what I need to kill myself and I may use it. The novel on her bedside table had
been placed face down so as not to lose her place. Greenson picked it up and read, ‘The psychiatrist, full of compassion, learned that the young man he had cured of his trauma had died in
combat. “Our job is to make the well,” the doctor remarks, “well enough to go out and get killed.”’
On the table there was also a letter she’d started to DiMaggio:
Dear Joe, if I can just make you happy, I will have succeeded in the largest and most difficult thing of all: to make someone completely happy. Your happiness means my
happiness, and
Rudin, however, told it differently. He said that Greenson had called him around midnight. The analyst was waiting for him at Fifth Helena Drive and immediately said that Marilyn had died. There
is also a third version of events, which says that Greenson neither heard from Marilyn nor saw her alive after their last phone call.
Night falls on the Pacific Coast. The Santa Ana, a hot, dry wind, sweeps through Los Angeles on its way to the ocean, bearing snatches of ‘Dancing In The Dark’,
the Sinatra song Marilyn is playing at her home in Brentwood. Her house has thirty-inch-thick cement walls and wrought-iron bars on every window. The sturdy hand-worked doors and gates are the
embodiment of solidity and protection, as the high stucco walls and soaring eucalyptus trees are of privacy. When she’d moved in, she had described her home as a fortress where she could feel
safe from the world. But this evening it feels like a prison. She thinks of Fitzgerald’s remark about Hollywood, city of ‘thin partitions’.
She puts on Sinatra’s ‘Dancing In The Dark’ again.
Dancing in the dark ’til the tune ends.
She remembers a night a few months earlier: they’d made love as if
for the last time, hopelessly estranged and yet unable to let go of one another, like survivors of a shipwreck clinging to debris in a lurching sea.
We’re dancing in the dark and it soon
ends
. It was the first time they’d circled blindly around one another as they made love.
We’re waltzing in the wonder of why we’re here
. Usually he wanted the lights to
be on. She loved the hungry, tender way he looked at her, the fact he could only orgasm if he saw desire in her eyes, the way he’d pull back at the last moment to take in her pellucid beauty.
But it couldn’t last. Dancers in the dark, their sad waltz had driven them apart and now all they had left was the night.
Time hurries by, we’re here and we’re gone
. Their
time was up. All they had was the moment, the darkness, their sweat, their clutching hands; no image of the other, no words, just the music and their bodies.
Looking for the light of a new love,
to brighten up the night.
She thought of Romeo. They’d also danced together in the dark, their bodies infinitely far apart but their hearts joined as if they had finally reached dry land.
And I have you love, and we can face the music together, dancing in the dark
.