Marilyn's Last Sessions (33 page)

In the years after Marilyn’s death, Ralph Greenson offered repeatedly to be questioned by investigators in the hope that, if he were interviewed enough, the criticisms and
accusations levelled at him would eventually be laid to rest. It was a vain hope. There are as many versions of what had happened as there were witnesses of wildly dissimilar degrees of
plausibility, but the finger was frequently pointed at him. He was alleged to have killed Marilyn either inadvertently – an inappropriate prescription leading to a fatal cocktail of drugs
– or intentionally, as part of a conspiracy. Left-wing, Jewish, a psychiatrist, he found himself accused of being a ‘psychoanalytic murderer’, a ‘Zionist conspirator’,
who had been blackmailing his patient, and a ‘Comintern agent’, who had been spying on the President of the United States’s mistress. Powerful and charming, he was portrayed as
anything from a venal, syringe-wielding doctor on the Mafia’s payroll to a lover in the throes of insane jealousy. Psychoanalyse the psychoanalyst! That was the name of the game. Even his
relationship with his twin sister, Juliet, ostensibly the beloved, supported, deeply admired artist of the Greenschpoon family, became a sea of love–hate, which was then projected onto
Marilyn in an act of massive counter-transference.

One witness said that Greenson often told his patients to keep journals between sessions, adding that he had disposed of Marilyn’s red diary before the police arrived.
Norman Jeffries, the odd-job man hired by Eunice Murray, said he saw Greenson with his own eyes trying to revive the actress with an intracardiac injection of adrenalin. Another account claimed the
murder weapon was a six-inch needle driven into Marilyn’s heart by a killer wearing latex surgeon’s gloves, and who used such force the needle snapped on her sternum. Twenty years after
the event, an ambulance driver named James Hall claimed that, when he was called to the scene, he saw Greenson injecting poison into his patient’s chest. According to yet another version, one
of the assassins sent by the Mafia- and CIA-affiliated Sam Giancana to kill Marilyn in order to compromise Robert Kennedy was nicknamed Needles.

Casting Greenson as an insane psychiatrist with a lethal penchant for injections reduces events to the plot of a B movie. It’s also striking how similar it is to the
Los Angeles
Times
’s account of Robert Walker’s death eleven years earlier. The actor’s arm was covered with blood from a struggle with the psychoanalyst who had given him the fatal
injection, and after the paramedics had established Walker couldn’t be revived, Dr Hacker had been seen wandering through the rain-sodden streets of Brentwood, in his shirt sleeves,
completely lost.

On Sunday, 5 August, Marilyn had an appointment with the powerful Hollywood journalist Sidney Skolsky, who had an office above Schwab’s Drugstore. Skolsky used to call
her ‘Miss Caswell’ after her character in
All About Eve
, and she’d dress up to meet him like a
femme fatale
in black wig, long gloves and scarlet lipstick. Skolsky
had known Jean Harlow personally, and Marilyn had been talking to him about doing a biopic of the original platinum blonde. She’d bought the rights to Harlow’s biography in 1954 and
they’d recently gone to see Harlow’s mother to get her consent for a picture and to ask her questions about her daughter.

As time went by, Marilyn projected herself onto the dead actress with increasing intensity. Harlow was her mirror, her destiny, her love. When she posed naked for the photographer Tom Kelley in
1949, she knew she was imitating Harlow, who had done the same twenty years earlier for Edwin Hesser in Griffith Park. Similarly, at Madison Square Garden, she knew that Harlow had been invited by
President Roosevelt to celebrate his birthday in 1937, a few months before her death, an invitation that caused her to leave the set of her last, unfinished film,
Personal Property
, and
subsequently be ostracised by Hollywood. Marilyn began her career using her mother’s name, then changed it, like her idol; Harlow had had an appalling relationship with her mother. Like
Harlow, Marilyn’s relationships with men invariably courted disaster. Marilyn liked Jean Harlow’s attitude, the way, at the height of her glory, she’d said, ‘I’d like
to
become
an actress.’ She even copied her ‘Mmm’, her murmur that could mean anything. Harlow had spoken the famous line ‘Gentlemen prefer blondes’ in a 1932
film,
Red-Headed Woman
, first looking at herself in a mirror, then to camera. She also appeared virtually naked in that film. Trying on a dress in a store, she positioned herself in front of
a sunny window and asked, ‘Can you see through this?’ Off-camera a store clerk said, ‘I’m afraid you can, Miss Lillian.’ Back came the triumphant reply:
‘I’ll wear it.’ When she was filming
The Misfits
, Marilyn was very aware that Clark Gable had made five films with Harlow, especially when he held her in his arms. He told
her that on the last picture he’d made with Harlow, he’d felt he was kissing a ghost. And when Marilyn put her hands in the wet cement on Hollywood Boulevard on 26 June 1953, she felt
as if she was reaching down into the past. Jean Harlow’s handprints, dated 29 September 1935, were next to hers. She had been nine years old when her mother and Grace had shown her the spot
in front of the Chinese Theater. ‘I know I’ll die young like Jean Harlow,’ Marilyn would often say, with a strange glint in her eye.

Skolsky was no stranger to depressions, and a heavy user of prescription drugs himself, hence the scurrilous gossip that he spent his days over a drugstore for ease of access.
That Sunday, he waited and waited for Marilyn to show, but it wasn’t until he, and the rest of the world, read in the paper that Marilyn had died that he realised
The Jean Harlow Story
would never be made. Instead, Harlow’s story had been re-enacted by the woman who, after dreaming of Harlow’s life, had lived out her dream to its conclusion.

Billy Wilder was on a plane between New York and Paris on 5 August 1962 when the news of Marilyn Monroe’s death broke. When the plane landed, he was surrounded by a crush
of reporters shouting questions:

‘What do you think of Marilyn?’

‘How do you explain her?’

‘What did you mean when you said she had a terrifying flesh impact, that she both loved and feared the camera?’

‘Is she a good actress?’

‘Do you think she cracked up because she couldn’t manage her role in her new film?’

The director asked what she’d done now.

She hadn’t done anything, they said.

Wilder wondered why they were all at the airport, what was so urgent, but nonetheless he came down very hard on her: ‘She can be the most malicious woman in Hollywood. She’s plastic,
a beautiful DuPont creation, with a chest of granite and a brain like Gruyère, full of holes.’

When he arrived at his hotel, Wilder saw the headline in the afternoon papers: ‘EXTRA: MARILYN MONROE IS DEAD!’

For Chrissakes, he thought. Those shits – why didn’t they have the good taste to tell me? ‘This is ridiculous, you know, because you ventilate your heart, and you say certain
things that you would not have said if they had told me she was dead. Marilyn didn’t deserve that. You get wonderful loonies in this world, like Monroe. And then they go and lie down on the
psychoanalyst’s couch and come out all doomy and uptight. It would have been better for her not to try and walk straight. She had two left feet, that was her charm.’

Years later, on a soaking afternoon in the summer of 1998 as El Niño blanketed California in rain, the ninety-one-year-old Billy Wilder gave an interview in his austere
office down a small street in Beverly Hills. The interviewer asked him what he had thought of her death.

‘It’s just so odd, you know, that she should have died at the moment of the greatest brouhaha in her life. Namely the thing with Kennedy. She was screwing Kennedy . . . she was
screwing
everybody
. He was too. I’ve had an idea for a picture about him for ages. He’s on his way to the Century City Hotel, where he had a suite, and an Air Force One
helicopter comes and lands on the roof. Cut to girls in different rooms in the hotel. They all go and turn on the shower, all hoping they’ll be chosen, you see. A few weeks before she died,
she went to New York, and she sang her interpretation of “Happy Birthday” . . . the Strasberg one. And then she killed herself. She always seemed unsure of herself to me, terrified of
who she was, even the way she walked. I found myself wanting to be her analyst not her lover, which was a surprise. I probably couldn’t have helped her any more than anyone else, but oh, she
would have been so pretty on the couch.’

Billy Wilder had a love–hate relationship with Marilyn, and for a long time after her death, he thought of her as the modern incarnation of the archetypal actress’s refusal to grow
old. He toyed with the idea of doing an update in colour of his black and white masterpiece,
Sunset Boulevard
, another portrait of an actress who clings to her image because that’s the
only way she knows to ward off insanity and death. He never made it, though, apparently because of the effect seeing
Something’s Got to Give
had had on him. But at the end of his
career, in 1978, he still did something along those lines: he made a stunning film about an old, reclusive actress on a Greek island, which he called
Fedora
.

A little old woman walks along a sidewalk splashed with sunshine in a small town in Florida. Gladys Baker doesn’t remember the time she worked in the film business, the
daughter she had – she has no memories of anything. When a psychiatrist at Rockhaven Sanitarium, where she is hospitalised, told her that her daughter had died, she didn’t react. She
doesn’t remember the girl called Norma Jeane; she doesn’t know who Marilyn Monroe is. It only registers a year later. On a dark night she escapes by making a rope out of her sheets. She
arrives in the Los Angeles suburbs clutching a Bible and a Christian Science textbook under her arm. A Baptist minister finds her in his church and talks to her before Rockhaven Sanitarium staff
come to pick her up. ‘Marilyn is gone,’ she says. Not Norma Jeane, the minister is very clear about that. ‘They told me when it happened. People need to know that I never wanted
her to become an actress. All her career did was hurt her.’

At birth, Norma Jeane was registered under her mother’s ex-husband’s name. The certificate reads either ‘Mortensen’ or ‘Mortenson’,
it’s difficult to tell which. She adopted her stage name, which she was known by when she died and under which she achieved immortality, at the age of twenty, but she kept her official name
until seven years before her death. Just two of the names that echo fatefully down the corridors of her life. From Mortenson to Greenson, from Catherine, Greenson’s mother, to Marilyn –
a love story links them, like a tape played again and again. Norma Jeane’s father could have been one of the lovers her mother took in 1925 after separating from her second husband. The
likeliest candidate is Raymond Guthrie, a film developer at RKO, who was in love with her for a few months. Gladys called her daughter after a wonderful actress of the time, Norma Talmadge.

Norma Jeane called André de Dienes one afternoon in the summer of 1946 and told him to come over to her apartment – she had important news. As he remembers it, when he got there,
she burst out, ‘Guess what? I have a new name!’ She wrote out her new name for him: MARILYN MONROE. He thought there was something almost preternaturally beautiful about the way she
drew the capital Ms.

In her last complete film,
The Misfits
, Marilyn literally played the role of her life, embodying Marilyn Monroe on screen in all her misfit glory. In her last days, however, she started
to live her life as though she were in a role, one moment playing Miss Caswell in
All About Eve
, a graduate of the Copacabana school of drama saddened by growing older, the next a nameless
woman in a nameless
noir
with a working title such as
Blonde, DOA
.

At 12.05 a.m. Sergeant Franklin is in his squad car, driving down Roxbury Drive. Just as he takes Olympic Boulevard, a Mercedes passes him at top speed heading for the San
Bernardino Freeway. Franklin figures it’s going about one-twenty, and notices that its lights aren’t on. He clamps on his flashing light and sets off in pursuit. The car accelerates,
weaving between lanes. The driver seems to be trying to escape something, as if he’s fleeing the scene of a crime. Franklin turns on the siren and the car finally stops near the Pico Country
Club. When he looks through the front window, he sees the familiar face of Peter Lawford, drunk and frightened and haggard.

‘Sorry,’ Lawford stammers. ‘I’ve got to take someone to the airport.’

‘You’re going the wrong way. You should be heading west, not east.’ Franklin shines his torch on the other occupants of the car. The passenger in the front seat is a
middle-aged man wearing a tweed jacket and a white shirt.

‘He’s a doctor,’ Lawford said. ‘He’s coming with us to the airport.’

Later, Franklin would recognise the man as Dr Ralph Greenson. ‘When I saw the news footage of the funeral, I knew Greenson was the man in the car.’ But at the time, Greenson
didn’t say a word. Franklin shone his torch on a third man in the back. The beam of light picked out the United States Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, his eyes half closed, his shirt
torn.

Sunday morning. The police question the neighbours. Witnesses report noises in the night: a helicopter, broken glass, shouts, a woman’s voice yelling
‘Murderers!’ In the dust of Arizona, a year earlier, Marilyn had shouted ‘Murderers, liars! I hate you!’ in
The Misfits
: She’d shouted it at the men trying to
lasso the mustangs as if they were pieces of meat rather than wild animals.