Marilyn's Last Sessions (32 page)

On the other side of America, Norman Rosten was startled awake in the early-morning light of his New York apartment. He’d forgotten the cold stone balcony on East 57th
Street, but as he heard the phone ringing, part of him sensed this was the call he had been steeling himself for ever since. Superficially, though, his conversation with Marilyn couldn’t have
been more cheerful and excited.

‘Did you see the latest interview in
Life
?’ she asked.

‘You bet,’ he said. ‘It was great. Very brave and free. You talked as if you were someone who has nothing to lose.’

‘There’s always something to lose. But we have to start living, right?’

She talked about her house, which was almost finished. The tiles were in; the furnishings were finally on their way. ‘It’s Mexican, naturally,’ she said, laughing. ‘An
imitation, of course. I can’t wait for you to see the garden. It’ll be so beautiful, all new shrubs. By the way, the film may still get made. And I’ve had offers from all over the
world. Yes, some wonderful offers, but I’m not thinking about them yet.’

She barely paused for breath. There was something she was saying in code, a message between the lines he couldn’t quite decipher.

‘Let’s all start to live before we get old,’ she said. ‘How are you really? How’s Hedda? Are you sure everything’s all right? Listen, I have to hang up, got a
long-distance call on the line. I’ll speak to you on Monday. G’bye.’

Afterwards he thought she’d fooled him. She hadn’t said she was on the verge of suicide – perhaps she didn’t know yet. He and his wife were among the
thirty-one mourners at Marilyn’s funeral. The actress had left their daughter Patricia five thousand dollars to pay for her studies. When he got back to New York, he found a poem Marilyn had
written for him.

If this were
film noir
, it would open with a shot of the wind in the eucalyptus trees. It has come off the Mojave Desert, travelling over the salt lake beds strewn with
crystals to blow in, soft and warm, over Beverly Hills, Sunset Boulevard and Santa Monica. Now it’s passing Ventura Boulevard, gliding through Brentwood on its way out to sea. It’s a
peaceful Saturday night, no different from any other Saturday night in this part of LA.

Joan Greenson hears the phone ringing in her parents’ bedroom around three in the morning. Awake now, and feeling a little hungry, she goes into the kitchen to raid the
fridge. ‘I asked Mom what happened,’ she recalled afterwards. ‘She said there was a problem over at Marilyn’s, and I said “Oh”, and went back to bed.’

Shortly before dawn, Sergeant Jack Clemmons is on duty as watch commander at the police station on Purdue Street. The phone rings. The caller identifies himself as Dr Hyman
Engelberg. ‘Marilyn Monroe has died. She’s committed suicide.’

Thinking it could be a hoax, Clemmons asks, ‘Who did you say this is?’

‘I’m Dr Hyman Engelberg, Marilyn Monroe’s physician. I’m at her residence. She’s committed suicide.’

‘I’ll be right over.’

If this were
film noir
, a rewrite would put Greenson centre stage:

The screen goes momentarily black; a phone rings.

‘West Los Angeles Police Department. Sergeant Clemmons speaking.’

‘Marilyn Monroe has died of an overdose.’

‘What?’

‘Marilyn Monroe has died. She’s committed suicide.’

‘Who is this?’

‘Her psychiatrist, Dr Greenson. This is not a hoax.’

Driving down San Vicente Boulevard, Clemmons radios for a back-up patrol car to meet him at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive. He speeds down the deserted streets to Carmelina Avenue,
then turns into the short cul-de-sac. The address is at the end of the street. He goes into the house, enters a bedroom, and sees a body sprawled across a bed. A sheet is pulled up over its head,
leaving visible only a shock of platinum-blonde hair. ‘She was lying face down in what I call the soldier’s position,’ Clemmons said afterwards. ‘Her face was in a pillow,
her legs stretched out perfectly straight.’ He immediately thinks she has been placed that way, with one hand close to the telephone and the cord under her body as she lies diagonally across
the mattress.

A few weeks earlier in New York, Marilyn had told W. J. Weatherby, ‘You know who I’ve always depended on? Not strangers, not friends – the telephone!
That’s my best friend . . . I love calling friends, especially late at night when I can’t sleep.’

A distinguished-looking figure is sitting despondently by the bed, his head in his hands. He says he was the one who rang the police. Another man standing by the bedside table
introduces himself as Dr Ralph Greenson, Marilyn Monroe’s psychiatrist. He says she has committed suicide and points to the empty Nembutal bottle on the bedside table. ‘She took the
whole bottle. When I got here, I could see from many feet away that Marilyn was no longer living. There she was, lying face down on the bed, bare shoulders exposed, and as I got closer I could see
the phone clutched fiercely in her right hand. I suppose she was trying to make a phone call before she was overwhelmed. It was just unbelievable, so simple and final and over.’

Sergeant Clemmons finds Dr Greenson’s hypothesis odd. Why would she ring someone when Mrs Murray was in the house? Police Officer Robert E. Byron, who arrives on the
scene later, notes in his report that Greenson had taken the telephone out of Marilyn’s hand, no easy task once rigor mortis had set in. Studying the two doctors, Clemmons also notes that Dr
Engelberg seems uncommunicative and that the psychiatrist, who does most of the talking, has a strange, defensive attitude. He seems to be challenging him to accuse him of something. Clemmons says
afterwards he kept thinking, ‘What the hell’s wrong with this fellow? Because his attitude just didn’t fit the situation. There was something wrong about the look in his
eye.’

‘Did you try to revive her?’ he asks the psychiatrist.

‘No, it was too late – we got here too late,’ Greenson replies.

‘Do you know when she took the pills?’

‘No.’

Clemmons goes to ask Eunice Murray for her version of events.

‘I knocked on the door,’ Murray says, ‘but Marilyn didn’t answer, so I called her psychiatrist, Dr Greenson, who lives not far away. When he arrived, he also failed to
get a response on knocking on the door, so he went outside and looked through the bedroom window. He saw Marilyn lying motionless on the bed, looking peculiar. He broke the window with a poker and
climbed inside and came around and opened the door. He told me “We’ve lost her”, and then he called Dr Engelberg.’

Returning to the bedroom, Sergeant Clemmons asks the doctors why they’d waited four hours before calling the police.

‘We had to get permission from the studio publicity department before we could call anyone,’ Greenson replies.

‘The publicity department?’ Clemmons repeats.

‘Yes, the 20th Century Fox publicity department. Miss Monroe is making a film there.’

Clemmons subsequently tells several journalists, ‘It was the most obvious murder I ever saw.’

If this were a film, a shot of the ambulance containing Marilyn’s body under a white sheet would slowly fade out and be replaced by a black screen with ‘THREE
MONTHS EARLIER’ in white letters. Then it would cut to the rushes, a clapperboard saying, ‘SOMETHING’S GOT TO GIVE’, and underneath, ‘MARILYN, LAST TAKE’. The
unedited footage that followed would look like images from a dream, almost too real, the lighting and grain possessing a strange, gruelling clarity that a camera wouldn’t ordinarily be able
to capture. Marilyn had been a tightrope-walker who was oblivious to the drop beneath her feet, but now she knew she could fall. She looked like a ghost. The ghost of the star of
Sunset
Boulevard
, a blonde Norma Desmond.

Greenson never revealed much about the last time he saw Marilyn. In a phone conversation with the journalist Billy Woodfield, on the evening after the funeral, he said,
‘Listen, I can’t explain myself without revealing things I do not want to reveal. You can’t draw a line and say, “I’ll tell you that, but not that . . .” I
cannot speak about it, because I cannot tell you the whole story . . . Ask Bobby Kennedy.’ He did insist on one thing, though. He said she was asleep in the guest bedroom in the wing of her
house rather than her own, as if she didn’t feel at home. But he quickly added that she often slept there. When Woodfield asked him about the repeat prescriptions of chloral hydrate and the
‘youth shots’, Greenson said, ‘Everyone makes mistakes. Including me.’

Speaking to Norman Rosten, he said, ‘I received a call from Marilyn around four-thirty p.m. She seemed somewhat depressed and on large amounts of medication. I went over. She was furious
with a friend who had slept fifteen hours the previous night whereas she’d slept terribly. After I’d spent approximately two hours and half with her, she seemed calmer.’ Mickey
Rudin remembered hearing the psychoanalyst exclaim on the night of Marilyn’s death, ‘Goddam it! Hy gave her a prescription I didn’t know about!’

Rudin described Greenson as exhausted: ‘He’d had enough; he’d spent the day with her. He wanted to at least have a peaceful Saturday evening and night.’ Greenson also
explained to an investigating officer that she had been extremely upset on the phone at not having a date that evening – the fact that the most beautiful woman in the world was alone. He
thought she had died feeling rejected.

We know nothing directly from Greenson about the causes of his patient’s death. This was a secret he carried to his grave. Remarks in letters to Marilyn’s other analysts or comments
he made in conversations, which were revealed thirty or more years later, are the only clue to his reactions. In a letter to Marianne Kris two weeks after Marilyn’s death, he wrote, ‘On
Friday night, she had told the internist that I had said it was all right for her to take some Nembutal, and he had given it to her without checking with me, because he has been upset for his own
personal reasons. He had just left his wife. On Saturday, however, I observed that she was somewhat drugged and guessed what drug she must have taken to be in the state.’ He mentioned
Marilyn’s decision to stop therapy with him. ‘She wanted to replace it with recordings of her thoughts. I realised I was starting to irritate her. She was often irritated if I was not
absolutely and completely in agreement with her . . . She was angry with me. I told Marilyn we’d talk about it again, that she should call me on Sunday morning, and then I left. But that
Sunday she was dead.’

The psychoanalyst was questioned at length, first by the police, who called him in two days later to the Justice Department to make a statement, then by the district attorney,
who had commissioned a ‘psychological autopsy’, and finally by a collection of twelve experts called the Suicide Investigation Team. Robert Litman, one of two psychiatrists on this
‘suicide team’, was a former pupil of his. When he went to question Greenson, he found him terribly upset, and ended up acting more like a grief counsellor than a forensic
investigator.

According to John Miner, before Greenson had left to go to the dinner, he had made arrangements for his patient to be given sedatives by enema because she had a physiological resistance to
orally ingested medication. The chloral hydrate would help her sleep, and since Engelberg couldn’t be reached to give her her usual injection, an enema seemed the most effective and the most
familiar way of administering it. Greenson knew she had been having enemas for years because they had talked about it. In
The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis
he had even written
that an analyst’s interventions could be experienced as enemas, as pleasurable or as painfully intrusive.

Who gave her the enema? Greenson was in the habit of delegating the administering of drugs to others, so he might very well have entrusted it to Eunice Murray. Then again, he might never have
actually left Fifth Helena that evening and so been present at her final procedure. For many years, he said he’d gone out to dinner with friends at a restaurant, but he never said who they
were; neither did anyone come forward to corroborate his testimony. After his death in 1979, his family was never able to identify his dinner companions.

By his own account, Greenson behaved more like a doctor than an analyst in the last days and hours of Marilyn’s life. He knew better than anyone that physical contact
makes one less inclined to listen. The principle of omnipotence over the body that he would subsequently do his utmost to resist seems to have infected him, a fantasy of a root-and-branch analysis
with inevitably fatal overtones. A few months later he would write, in
The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis
: