Marilyn's Last Sessions (34 page)

Looking in from the terrace, a shattered window reveals a bare-walled bedroom in an unremarkable Mexican-style hacienda. Inside is a naked woman, who looks far too white. The
sheets form pockets of shade around her body, like flecks of foam on a breaking wave. A man stands frozen for a moment, then silently climbs in. He loosens the fingers clamped round the telephone
and puts the receiver back on the base next to the bed. The woman’s mouth is half open. It was always open. He had never seen it shut in any photograph. Her eyes . . . He doesn’t see
her eyes. He knows they’re closed. He wants them to be, their blue, fleeting gaze, which he had never been able to fathom, especially when he most needed to – he wants that blue to be
at peace. The woman is Marilyn Monroe, the man Ralph Greenson. He is her psychoanalyst, but he can’t even look at her. The light has consumed her, drowned her in white. Her body has become a
blinding pool of light, an extinguished star that still shines. To be the first to see a woman dead, Greenson thinks, is a victory as bitter as being the first to see her naked.

After the body has been stretchered out and taken off to the morgue in a noiseless ambulance, Greenson leaves the house and notices a plaque in the paving stones by Marilyn’s front door
that he’s never seen before. It is inscribed with the Latin motto
Cursum perficio
: ‘I’ve finished my race.’ This is something St Paul says to Timothy in the New
Testament, he learns later, but that morning, as her body goes off for an autopsy, he smiles and thinks that she may not have finished her race, but he has.

The autopsy is conducted at Los Angeles County Coroner’s mortuary at ten-thirty a.m., on 5 August. Her body is brought over from the morgue, where the staff have refused
huge sums to allow people to photograph the most famous corpse in the world. Bids went up to ten thousand dollars, and Marilyn’s body had to be taken out of the refrigerator and hidden in a
broom cupboard. The coroner’s team proves more amenable. On Sunday evening, after the autopsy is over, compartment number thirty-three is opened and Leigh Wiener, a
Life
photographer,
takes pictures of Marilyn’s eviscerated body. Dying is, among other things, a process whereby one is turned into an object, merchandise, a piece of meat like the wild horses. For one last
time, Marilyn was reduced to the thing she had desperately wanted not to be any more: an image. Arthur Miller would later write, ‘The encounter between an individual pathology and the
insatiable appetite of a capitalist culture of consumption. How is one to understand this mystery? This obscenity?’

Greenson hadn’t even waited to sit in the chair facing Wexler before he asked, ‘Do you want to hear her tapes? Her last sessions. Her last solo.’

Wexler groaned. Greenson was entrusting him with Marilyn’s voice the way you tell a stranger in a bar a secret so you won’t have to think about it any more.

‘When she gave me the tapes to listen to,’ Greenson went on, ‘she said, “I have absolute confidence and trust you will never reveal to a living soul what I say to
you.” As she was leaving, she asked me to erase them after I’d listened to them. But I couldn’t. I feel shattered. I don’t know what I’ll do with them, but I’m
going to transcribe them at least.’

It was her voice more than what she said that prevented Greenson erasing the tapes. He always liked to think of himself as a provider of meaning, but her voice reduced him to
a helpless member of the audience. He gave the tapes to his colleague to listen to in private. He said they could talk about them afterwards, if he wanted.

Wexler played the first tape and started when he heard:

Marilyn moved on to a different subject on the second tape.

One night, as he was trying to get to sleep, Greenson was visited by an unnerving, long-buried memory. It was of one of the Master’s gatherings of his disciples, where
Freud had discussed ways to achieve closure in transference. He had used a strange term, ‘dissolution’, and explained that transference could create emotional bonds similar to those
that analysts experienced in their private lives. In these cases, the analysts could only detach themselves from the patient by forming another attachment – to another person or to another
aspect of the patient. ‘As long as one is alive and experiencing desire,’ Freud had said, ‘all one will ever do is exchange one hold for another, substitute one influence for
another.’ To dispel any lingering illusions on the part of his disciples, he had added, ‘To think these are the product of error in any way only leads one to make a succession of
further errors.’

For the purposes of illustration Freud, as he often did, had taken an example from literature, in this case the fairy tale
Hans in Luck
. He had left the room for a
second and returned with a book from the shelves in his consulting room. Quickly finding his place, he began reading in a husky voice. The low light in the waiting room, Freud’s tired voice,
the painfully slow way he read – all these gave the story a tragic dimension that might, Greenson thought afterwards, have been unwarranted.

The story was straightforward, as simple as fortune itself, a parabola that rose and fell in a swift, pre-ordained curve. After working hard for his master for seven years, Hans finally decided
he needed to go home and see his poor mother again, so he asked for his wages. Grateful for his work, his master paid him with a lump of silver as big as his head. The only problem was that the
silver was very hard to carry. So, at the first opportunity Hans exchanged it for a horse. But that was problematic too, for different reasons, so he exchanged the horse for a cow, then the cow for
a pig, then the pig for a goose, then the goose for a scissor-grinder’s wheel, and finally ended up with a heavy stone. After a while, tired and thirsty, he stopped at a well, rested the
stone on the edge and bent down to drink. But, as he did so, his shoulder nudged the stone and it fell down the well. Mightily relieved, Hans then set off with a light heart, his troubles at an
end, and walked on till he reached his mother’s house.

‘This is what I wanted you to understand,’ Freud had concluded, shutting the book. ‘As far as sexual drives are concerned, we can only end up with permutations and
displacements, never with complete renunciation or an overcoming or resolution of the complex, the ultimate mystery. That is sexuality, a permanent exchange in which every drive and act inevitably
provokes a succession of other drives and acts.’ This might not be word for word what Freud had said that evening, but it was the gist Greenson remembered, the moral being: everything has a
price in transference, just as it does in love.

That evening in Vienna, Greenson had felt emboldened to ask Freud what he thought the transferential exchange revolved around.

‘Sexuality, always sexuality,’ Freud had replied. ‘After forty years of practice I still find what I did when I started: the scenes our patients introduce us to are invariably
sexual. As are the traumatisms they involve us in, or play out before our eyes. If somebody transfers his infantile complexes onto us, it is wrong to assume that means he has shed them. He has
retained a part of them, the affect, in a different form, the transference. He has changed dress, or skin. He has sloughed off a layer and given it to the analyst. So it is a delicate matter, the
attempt to bring transference to an end, since this could simply mean the end of the subject who speaks to us. God forbid that he should now go forth naked and without a skin. As in
Hans in
Luck,
our therapeutic gains are always the result of an exchange. The last term of the exchange only disappears into the well when the patient dies.’ After saying this, Freud fell silent
for a while, then bade the trainee analysts farewell with icily punctilious courtesy.

As he lay there in the dark remembering this conversation, Greenson found himself thinking Freud had been mistaken – that people exchange throughout their lives not only
desires and objects, but also identities, whether simultaneous or successive, identities that are not simply sexual but also familial and social. He examined the fairy tale for insights that might
help him understand what had happened between Marilyn and him. Was the question of sex less central to analysis and transference than Hans’s constant need to exchange what he has, the quest
to free oneself of earthly burdens and return to one’s original state? Greenson was struck by the fact that Hans was going back to his mother’s house. He was returning to where he was
born in order to die.

He saw himself and his patient facing one another, talking like awkward actors, ‘dancing in the dark’, as Marilyn would sometimes sing under her breath when she found it hard to put
something into words. All their sessions had been like acts in a play, a comedy of errors in which they were the stars. Transference defined everything on stage: her memories, stories and dreams;
the costumes she wore to re-enact her experiences, the costumes she gave him to wear for his part in her inner theatre; the lines she delivered in the tragedy she had written; the time he spent
waiting backstage, like a clothes rail on which she hung her discarded costumes at every scene change.

But now the comedy was over, the curtain had fallen, and the enigma of her self was intact. Greenson went over it all. Her identity: the layers she constantly sloughed off in a permanent cycle,
revealing herself only to mask herself again. Her theatrical transference, her excessive displays of love towards him. Her passion for being naked. Her tremulous, exiled image that always seemed
about to lose its balance on screen. The way, in life as well as in the movies, she seemed to tread an invisible line between the rawest reality and the purest fantasy. He saw it all again and it
made no sense. He hadn’t tried to strip her of her identities, to estrange her from the characters she brought with her – it was her choice – and he was right not to have tried
to, he thought. Love is a skin. Being loved protects us from the coldness of the world. Identity is the onion you must be careful not to peel. Because when you remove the last layer of skin, what
have you got left?

Wexler was becoming increasingly exhausted by his colleague’s anguished, obsessive need to make him watch the film of Marilyn’s last weeks. Greenson spoke in a
halting, disjointed way, coughing constantly, as if he were an actor reciting lines from a script he hadn’t really learned.

‘Her last year. I should tell you about her last year. She had come to me because she couldn’t take any more. I put all my effort, all my language, into supporting her. Of course I
saw a warning in
Something’s Got to Give
, but I didn’t want to listen.’

‘I know you didn’t,’ said Wexler. ‘She was in agony when you left for Europe. You underestimated the schizophrenic element of her condition. In the brief time I saw her,
I was struck by the fact she often spoke about herself in the third person: “Marilyn would do that . . . She wouldn’t say this . . . She would play that scene like this . . .” I
pointed this habit out to her and asked if she heard a voice in her head saying “she”. She looked at me in surprise and said, “Don’t you? I don’t hear just one.
It’s more like a crowd.”’

When he returned the tapes to Greenson, Wexler was unsure whether to draw his colleague’s attention to an obvious but seemingly overlooked aspect of his and
Marilyn’s
folie à deux
. Eventually he decided to speak his mind even if it jeopardised their friendship.

‘You know as well as anyone,’ he began, ‘that massive acts of transference are always addressed to the mother and that the couch speeds up regression. In a way, by dying,
Marilyn has now rejoined her mother. She has shed the final veil, like a luckless Hans losing his final possession down the well . . .’

‘Well,’ Greenson started to agree, ‘that was precisely why I didn’t let her lie on the couch for most of our analysis – so she wouldn’t regress. She was ready
by the end, though. Those tapes were a method we developed for her to talk without seeing who she was talking to. But I don’t think I was playing a maternal role there.’

‘Hence your decision to grow a beard. You wanted to reassure her and yourself that you were a father rather than a mother.’

‘No. I was just copying Freud.’

‘All you ever do is deny things,’ Wexler snapped. ‘You’re constantly saying, no, I wasn’t her mother, no, I didn’t think of myself as her mother. But you know
from Freud that when someone says “This is not about my mother”, that’s exactly when you’re dealing with the mother. Do you want me to spell it out for you? You
couldn’t take each other any more. You left her physically, but you couldn’t leave her emotionally. She wanted to leave you, but you couldn’t let her go. Let’s face it. The
loss you felt was that of an abandoned child.’