Marilyn's Last Sessions (35 page)

Greenson stared at his colleague with a look of hatred, but didn’t say anything. Wexler decided not to push it any further.

Greenson never stopped thinking of himself as a father to Marilyn. On 20 August 1962, he wrote to Marianne Kris: ‘I was her therapist, the good father who would not
disappoint her and who would bring her insights, and if not insights, just kindness. I had become the most important person in her life, [but] I also felt guilty that I put a burden on my own
family. But there was something very lovable about this girl and we all cared about her and she could be delightful.’ He probably never acknowledged that his approach took him into areas far
removed from Freudian theory, where, instead of father, life, love and desire, the signature themes were mother, homosexuality, excrement and death. With the freedom allowed by transference,
Marilyn said unthinkable things on her tapes in the voice of someone who can’t pretend to be a nice little girl in love with Daddy any more. Raw things, dark things. Dark like her
mother’s hair and death; dark like the clothes of Paula Strasberg, ‘the Black Baroness’, or Joan Crawford in
Johnny Guitar
; dark like Eunice Murray’s uniform; dark
like shit or a dirty child. Dirtiness is sexless, like love, and, for Marilyn, these two states coalesced in the pure passivity of the enema.

What if the only way Marilyn could escape Greenson was by dying? Wexler wondered. And if the only way he could possess her was by killing her? When he listened to the tapes, Wexler felt he knew
that the truth that had played itself out between them was that you can kill someone by caring about them too much. He couldn’t say this to his colleague, but the piece of music Greenson had
wanted to play, a ‘transference in father major’, as it were, had mutated imperceptibly into ‘compassion for suffering in mother minor’. At first Greenson had decided not to
give her any injections himself, obviously because it seemed too phallic an act to him, but then he’d changed his mind and, towards the end of her life, had often given her tranquilliser
shots. And, at the same time, in leaving Engelberg to take care of the prescriptions and Eunice Murray the enemas, he had also imperceptibly assumed the place of the mother in Marilyn’s love
for him, and also in his love for Marilyn.

By the time
The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis
came out, relations between the two colleagues had cooled. So Wexler smiled indulgently when he read Ralph
Greenson, MD, declare, ‘It is the doctor who has the right to explore the naked body and who has no fear or disgust of blood, mucus, vomit, urine, or faeces [Freud, 1926b, p. 206]. He is the
rescuer from pain and panic, the establisher of order from chaos; emergency functions performed by the mother in the first years of life. In addition, the physician inflicts pain, cuts and pierces
the flesh and intrudes into every opening in the body. He is reminiscent of the mother of bodily intimacy as well as the representative of the sadomasochistic fantasies involving both
parents.’

An August morning in 1984. Truman Capote is being laid to rest in the centrepiece of a nondescript cemetery, a decrepit pink mausoleum approached by a tree-lined avenue. A
pianist discreetly plays airs from
House of Flowers
, the Harold Arlen musical for which he wrote the libretto, as cameras roll at the entrance to the funerary chapel. The atmosphere is one
of furtive animation, the etiolated bustle of old, ferociously social acquaintances meeting up after a long absence. People hug and whisper stagily amid a rustle of linen suits. Trembling lips
air-kiss an array of wrinkled or silicon-smooth cheeks. Feet shift unsteadily on the gravel. Eyes blink behind tinted bifocals as past conquests heave into view. The fading stars of the 1950s and
1960s embrace with frozen smiles; the Californian sun, affairs, stimulants and the passage of time have all taken their toll. And as they semaphore to one another, their slender fingers waving on
fragile wrists, the surrounding high-rises plunge the cemetery’s ill-kept lawns into the shade.

The same cemetery, twenty-two years earlier. It is one in the afternoon on 8 August 1962, when the Reverend A. J. Soldan conducts Marilyn Monroe’s remains to the
funerary chapel. ‘How beautiful the Creator made her,’ he preaches. Marilyn had asked for Judy Garland’s song ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ from
The Wizard of Oz
to be played. The tape recording sounds muffled and scratchy, a long way away. The service begins with a halting rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony on the organ, and then psalms. Carl
Sandburg has been asked by DiMaggio to give the address but he is too ill to attend, so Lee Strasberg speaks instead. The click and whirr of cameras from every news organisation in the world drowns
him out. The occasion doesn’t offer much in the way of a spectacle, though. Only close relations have been invited. Westwood may be nearby, but it is no Hollywood. Joe DiMaggio, who planned
everything, insisted that no one from the business could attend: no producers, no studio directors, no actors, no screenwriters. He is determined to play the part of Marilyn’s bodyguard,
which she had given him ten years earlier when they met, to the bitter end. She asked him to guard her body so she wouldn’t come to grief on it herself.

Marilyn would have been glad to see Romi there, grim-faced but dry-eyed, supported by Hildi and Joan, who, with their black veils and shining tears, add pathos to the scene. ‘There were
hundreds of reporters and photographers,’ Joan Greenson said afterwards. ‘At first, we weren’t allowed to enter the chapel, because the undertaker said “the family”
was with the deceased. What family? If she’d had a family, we wouldn’t have been there.’

Daniel Greenson is in tears. He had always thought of Marilyn Monroe as a ghost, really. He remembers talking to her about politics three months earlier in Santa Monica, trying to bring her
round to his militant position. He remembers how she put on a black wig and went out apartment-hunting with him when he decided to move out of his parents’ place. He remembers seeing her,
wearing the same disguise, sitting at the back of the crowded auditorium in Beverly Hills High School, avidly following one of his father’s lectures. He remembers the last time he saw the
woman they are now laying to rest. It was an evening in June. He had given Marilyn a goodbye kiss; he was going out, she was peeling potatoes.

This is the day that Daniel Greenson, who is studying medicine, decides to become a psychoanalyst – not in order to follow in his father’s footsteps, but to understand what he had
been a witness to: the game of hide-and-seek the actress and her psychoanalyst had seemed to play blindfolded, their verbal hand-to-hand, or soul-to-soul, combat. In time, his life and work would
bring home to him that one can never know the truth about a person, whether one is their son or their psychoanalyst. But he now realises that the truth always hides in words, in the brief notes
slipped under a door or the remarks whispered in a distracted ear in a cemetery avenue, which, like bodies dying if they are not touched, leave no trace unless they are recorded.

Last take, last scene. The bronze coffin with a champagne-coloured satin lining is open. Marilyn, in a Pucci green dress and a matching green chiffon scarf with a bouquet of pink roses in her
arms, is ready for her final role. Her team has been busy: Marjorie Pelcher, her dresser, has worked up her outfit; Agnes Flanagan, her hairdresser, has seen to her hair; Whitey Snyder has plied
his magic; even her old hairdresser, Pearl Porterfield, has reported for duty and now casts a knowing eye over the results. When the body was embalmed, cushion ticking was needed to compensate for
the damage done to Marilyn’s breasts by the autopsy. Her hair is in terrible condition and Agnes Flanagan ends up using a wig based on her screen image. The credits for this production would
have to make special mention of the faithful Whitey (whose nickname came from his skill at mixing whites without the result looking like plaster or snow). Years earlier, he had jokingly promised
Marilyn that he would make her up for the last time, make sure nobody else art-designed her final look. More recently, she had given him a jewel from Tiffany’s as a token of her affection: a
clip brooch mounted on a gold coin with an inscription, which he never revealed. ‘This is for you, my dear Whitey,’ she had said, ‘while I’m still warm.’ He was
Fox’s head of make-up, and had created the look of all the stars of the day: Betty Grable, Gene Tierney, Linda Darnell. Destiny had come full circle when he had done Marilyn’s make-up
for
Something’s Got to Give.
Now he has to drink a whole bottle of gin before he can make her up for the last time.

A short line of men and women dressed in black is silhouetted against an almost white sky. The coffin slowly makes its way past the crypts of two of her transient mothers, Ana Lower and Grace
McKee Goddard. Her crypt is sealed. If she could see the footage of her funeral, she would have one last surprise: of all her lovers and husbands, only one has come – Joe DiMaggio. Three
times a week for the next twenty years, he will lay flowers at her plaque, just as he had promised her he would. She had made him repeat his promise; she had wanted to know he’d be as
faithful as William Powell was after Jean Harlow’s death.

It is a sad, hollow ceremony, thoughtful but futile, like a passer-by picking up a toy that’s fallen out of a pushchair and carefully putting it on a wall, even though he knows nobody will
come for it. Everyone tries to give a meaning to it, but it feels like an image that can be neither articulated nor erased. ‘You know where our poor idol is buried?’ George Cukor said
later. ‘The cemetery entrance has a car dealership and a bank on either side; she lies between Wilshire Boulevard and Westwood Boulevard, surrounded by traffic.’

Capote is buried in the same cemetery a few feet away. A friend of Marilyn’s murmurs into the distracted ear of one of the mourners, ‘He loved her, you know, as
much as he could love any woman. Nineteen fifty-four in New York: that was their time. They used to go dancing in a club that shut down, the El Morocco on East 54th Street.’ There’s a
photograph of them: two bodies moving on a narrow, slightly raised dance floor that floats like a black circle in a ring of blinding lights. They were already out of it when they’d got to the
club. She kicked off her shoes so as not to tower over him and they danced themselves into exhaustion. A tiny man in a pin-striped suit, dark tie and tortoiseshell glasses clinging to a radiant
blonde, as if he’s shifting a grandfather clock. She isn’t looking at her partner but out at the smoke-filled room. He isn’t looking at anything, his whole body rigid either with
shame and sadness, or perhaps joy.

The musician Artie Shaw stands to give the address. In a low voice, he says, ‘Truman died of a surfeit of everything, of an excess of life, of living too intensely. Yet in the last few
years it seemed as if he were ready to give it all up. And in time, what will remain won’t be his celebrity or his dealings with celebrities, but his work. That is what he wanted us to
remember. Truman, your music will play in our ears long after we have forgotten the names of the figures who inspired it. Say hello to your friend Marilyn, who you never took in your arms and who
loved you more than most of the men she slept with. Your plaques are now separated by three walls bearing the inscriptions: “TENDERNESS”, “DEVOTION”, “PEACE”.
Those are what you gave one another and what life begrudged you so bitterly. Tell her that your friends have come to spend a moment with their beloved vanished stars, that we will remember her,
Marilyn, the white queen without a castle, and that we will never remember her so well as in your words. Now, in both your shadows, our memories turn to your splendid account of her. Truman, the
truest of writers, you knew better than anyone how to balance reality and truth in your novels. Goodbye, Truman, may you have a long, peaceful death.’

The last of the mourners disperse. Turning away from the headstones of Natalie Wood and Darryl F. Zanuck, they return to their cars by way of the north-east corner of the cemetery so they can
pay their respects to the plaque that reads ‘MARILYN MONROE’. So many graves, so many names. Years later, Dean Martin, Jack Lemmon and Billy Wilder will also be buried – if that
is the word for a bronze coffin slid into a niche in a breeze-block wall – alongside Marilyn in Westwood Memorial Park.

And in the distance, the overhanging hills with the white letters spelling out ‘HOLLYWOOD’ are already hazy in the smog.

Mickey Rudin had negotiated Marilyn’s last contract for
Something’s Got to Give
. When he arrived at the death scene, he accompanied her body to the nearby
mortuary, then rang Joe DiMaggio to ask him to help organise the funeral.

Among the invoices Rudin had to pay on the estate’s behalf was a final one from Ralph Greenson for $1,450 for sessions in July and the first four days of August, and another from 20th
Century Fox for a coffee pot, which the commissary had provided for her last birthday.

Marilyn Monroe’s estate was estimated at $92,781. Her last will divided the money equally between her mother, her half-sister and friends, and left various objects to a value of $3,200 to
Lee Strasberg. As far as licensing rights and royalties were concerned, the principal beneficiary was the Anna Freud Centre in London, an institute ‘dedicated to the emotional well-being of
children’. Marilyn had left a sizeable legacy to her former analyst in New York, Marianne Kris, ‘so that she can continue her work in the psychiatric institutions and groups of her
choice’. Kris had in turn chosen the Hampstead Clinic in London, a decision that Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud’s biographer, explains by saying, ‘Marilyn Monroe’s
bequest came to the Hampstead Clinic while the clinic was adjusting to the tremendously influential work that Anna Freud had undertaken outside it – work in which the plight of children, like
the young Marilyn Monroe, who had been bounced from one foster home to another, was central.’ Another patient of Marianne Kris, Jackie Kennedy, also bequeathed ten thousand dollars to Anna
Freud’s institute, probably on her analyst’s recommendation.