Read Marilyn's Last Sessions Online
Authors: Michel Schneider
Marilyn’s financial bequests, her transference onto whoever was the beloved analyst at the time, and her numerous sexual relationships, form a strange nexus around her death and her will.
Yet her relations with successive analysts had deteriorated so badly that one is entitled to ask whether she would have left her money to the same people if she had had time to alter her last
wishes. She had made it clear in the last months of her life that she was intending to rewrite her will, and had arranged to meet Mickey Rudin to discuss this on Tuesday, 7 August. She died three
days before. This meant that every screen appearance of the woman whom the Freudian establishment had refused to let play a patient of Sigmund Freud benefited an institution that bears the name of
Freud’s daughter.
Since the actress’s death, the broadcast rights for her films and songs have brought in approximately $1.5 million a year, more than Marilyn earned in her life. Hundreds of brands have
paid for the right to use her image for publicity or marketing purposes. Besides posters and T-shirts, Marilyn’s face and body are reproduced everywhere – even on schoolbooks, venetian
blinds, tights, billiard cues and cake moulds.
From the day she died, everything she owned became a cult object. Hyman Engelberg said he had hundreds of calls from women claiming that if they had known she was in such dire
straits they would have tried to help her. She had not only been an object of desire to men, he realised, but also a lost girl with whom many women empathised profoundly.
In December 1999, the possessions she’d left to Strasberg were sold for $13.4 million at Christie’s in New York. Everything she’d touched had become a fetish. The wool cardigan
from Saks, which she wore at the end of June 1962 in Barris’s photographs on Santa Monica beach, went for $167,500; the backless dress from
Let’s Make Love
for more than $52,900.
The designer Tommy Hilfiger paid a fortune for two pairs of jeans from
The Misfits
. Bidding on the Jean Louis muslin sheath dress encrusted with tiny rhinestones she’d worn for seven
minutes at Madison Square Garden went up to almost a million dollars. Her books, many of them with handwritten marginalia, were auctioned as a single lot for six hundred thousand. One lot consisted
of a scrap of paper with ‘He doesn’t love me’ scribbled on it – a remark that could have applied to plenty of men in her lifetime but virtually none today. Two other notes
were auctioned, one of which read, ‘If I have to commit suicide, I must go through with it.’ The other, folded inside a book, was a poem:
People say I am lucky to be alive.
It’s hard to believe.
Everything hurts so much.
A couple of years after Marilyn’s death, two screenwriters, David L. Wolper and Terry Sanders, began researching a film about her,
The Legend of Marilyn Monroe
.
They got in touch with Doc Goddard, the widowed husband of Grace McKee. He refused to be interviewed on film, but he did tell them the whereabouts of the white piano that had been bought by Gladys
Baker for her daughter, sold for $235 to pay for her hospitalisation when Marilyn was nine years old and subsequently bought back as soon as Marilyn could afford it. It was in J. Santini & Bros
Fireproof Warehouse somewhere in New Jersey. They shot it from below, like the sledge Rosebud in
Citizen Kane
, and added a voiceover: ‘This white piano was the child she never
had.’ As the camera zoomed in, there was no escaping the fact that the piano wasn’t originally white but had been repainted, probably for a 1930s musical comedy. It was as artificial as
Marilyn’s blonde hair, as the screen separating life from the movies, and psychoanalysis from madness in Hollywood. At Christie’s, it found a new buyer, the singer Mariah Carey, and
fetched $662,500 this time.
The gift shops along Sunset Boulevard still sell maps of Hollywood with Marilyn’s address included among those of living movie stars. Shots of the outside of her house
were used in a biopic in 1980 called
Marilyn: The Secret History
, with Catherine Hicks playing her. The director David Lynch, who for a long time planned to make a film of the last months of
her life, owns a relic of sorts of her: a piece of the fabric on which she is supposed to have posed for the famous nude calendar that To m Kelley shot, possibly the inspiration for his film
Blue Velvet
.
All these objects sealed off behind glass, the iconic possessions that have become part of collective memory, the images suspended like freeze-frames in a perpetual state of mourning –
they are the relics of a myth, these days. Her words are more complicated. Thousands of pages must have been written about her life: novels, essays, biographies, investigations, confessionals of
every stripe. Only the people who really loved her – Joe DiMaggio, Ralph Roberts, Whitey Snyder – haven’t put pen to paper. When Joseph Mankiewicz, by then retired, came across W.
J. Weatherby’s
Conversations with Marilyn
, in the mid-1970s, he was shocked that no one had asked Weatherby why he had waited fifteen years to gather together his memories and make
them into a book. Why was he only now describing in detail what she had said, her gestures, clothes and facial expressions, using notes he’d made in the last two years of her life? In his
preface, Weatherby said he wanted to strip away the ‘mental makeup’ she hid behind and reveal the ‘true Marilyn’. Mankiewicz hated people using psychology to justify
self-interest. Saying you’re doing something for love when you’re doing it for money, that’s real prostitution.
The range of motives for people’s public actions tends to be limited to either love, hatred, self-interest, honour, money or revenge . . . Often it’s only a variant of one thing: the
need to disguise what one is because one is afraid one might be nothing. Sexual anxiety is nothing compared to status anxiety, the fear of not being recognised by the society in which one lives.
Mankiewicz thought this was true of Marilyn. It was also true of her psychoanalyst, of her biographers, of everyone who’s written or made films about her in the hope that a little of the
stardust from her comet-like progress through the 1960s would rub off on them. But they shouldn’t talk about love, he thought. They’re selling her just as much as they’re selling
themselves.
The truth is that, while there may be hundreds of books about this woman and her death, the documents themselves have disappeared or been buried with her. The recordings of her voice have been
lost or erased. Thousands of hours of her speaking were captured by microphones all over her house. The tapes were hidden or destroyed after being processed by the public bodies or private
individuals who commissioned the surveillance. The two centres of power, political and psychoanalytical, that dominated the last months of Marilyn’s life tried to erase everything to do with
her in their archives. As for Fox, the studio that said her last movie could be a new beginning and offered her a glittering new contract, they gave instructions that everything related to her
final film should be buried in the files.
The death of his patient had a devastating effect on Ralph Greenson, although when he talked about love and grief in regard to her, it was open to question whether he was in
fact referring to
amour-propre
and social death. ‘Marilyn’s death was extremely painful to him,’ his widow would later say. ‘Not just that it was so public, which was
terrible in itself, but that Marilyn, he felt, was doing much better. He knew he hadn’t quite brought her through, but she was better – and then to lose her, that was quite
painful.’ Dr Greenson’s patients were surprised to see him grow a beard again. When a producer asked him why, he said he wanted to be someone else. Showing no inclination to go into
therapy himself, he started practising child therapy. His colleagues noticed he wasn’t the fighter he used to be; the beard was his way of turning himself into an elder statesman. ‘He
had lost a lot of the old fire,’ a member of the Psychoanalytic Institute said. ‘He still worked after that but he turned in on himself. He became a little strange . . .’
Photographs reveal a palpable physical and emotional decline. ‘He wanted to reinvent himself but ended up becoming a completely different person,’ another of his colleagues said.
A week after Marilyn died, he went to New York at his wife’s instigation to be analysed by Max Schur. The friendship between the two analysts dated from their medical studies in Bern and
Vienna. Their first session lasted hours, but Schur reassured him that he would soon be over the worst.
Initially unable to think or write, Greenson gradually realised that a kind of thin, almost transparent, veil of depression had settled over him. He began a memoir of his life, which he entitled
My Father, the Doctor
.
Marilyn Monroe was all I knew. She only used her original name, Norma Jeane, twice in our sessions, when we first met and just before I left for Europe. She never used
Mortenson, her family name, nor did she say why she had chosen her mother’s maiden name as her stage name. I didn’t make the connection with my need always to be on stage.
Don’t I treat my patients and give my talks and write my articles under an assumed name?
Romeo! As if. ‘Romeo the psychoanalyst’. However much he loved Shakespeare, my father didn’t have to call us Romeo and Juliet. I don’t know if Marilyn was thinking of
it at the time, but on the last tape she gave me, she said, ‘I’ll take a year of day and night study of Shakespeare with Lee Strasberg. I’ll pay him to work only with me. He
said I could do Shakespeare. I’ll make him prove it. That will give me the basics Olivier wanted. Then I’ll go to Olivier for the help he promised. And I’ll pay whatever he
wants. Then I’ll produce and act in the Marilyn Monroe Shakespeare Film Festival, which will put his major plays on film. I’ll need you to keep me together for a year or more.
I’ll pay you to be your only patient. I’ve read all of Shakespeare and practised a lot of lines. I won’t have to worry about the scripts. I’ll have the greatest
scriptwriter who ever lived working for me and I don’t have to pay him. Oh, Monroe will have her hand in. I am going to do Juliet first. Don’t laugh. What with what make-up, costume
and camera can do, my acting will create a Juliet who is fourteen, an innocent virgin, but whose budding womanhood is fantastically sexy.’ As for Greenschpoon, that felt too Brooklyn
Jewish. But I didn’t renounce my father’s name. Changing it was really to do with giving up medicine. My father remained a general practitioner all his life and I suppose I always
tried to show the same concern for my patients as he did. But what’s the good of writing about that?
Like Marilyn and Inger Stevens, the actress Janice Rule had taken Lee Strasberg’s classes at the Actors Studio and was one of Greenson’s patients. In the weeks after Marilyn’s
death, she thought he seemed shattered. He told her he felt ‘crucified’ by the press. During one session, he said something she found very moving: ‘There is no way in my lifetime
I will ever be able to answer any of this. I only worry how it will affect you as a patient.’
Suffering from heart problems that caused him to be frequently hospitalised, Greenson found his last years hard. Rule saw him near the end. Greenson had always urged her to vent her emotions
during analysis. She often used foul language in their sessions, so much so that one day he’d said to her, ‘I just have to tell you that it’s hard for me to put that face together
with what comes out of your mouth!’ They met up again when he was old and ill and had just had his third pacemaker fitted. He suffered aphasia and it infuriated him when he couldn’t
express himself. He said to her, ‘You taught me that “fuck” is a very good word. When I could finally speak, that is the first word I said.’
Greenson fought off physical and intellectual collapse for four years. One patient, shocked by how much weight he’d lost, his shortness of breath, said, ‘You don’t look like an
analyst.’
He lifted his shirt and showed her the scar from his pacemaker surgery. ‘We’re just as mortal as everyone else.’
Fate toys with Marilyn’s life story. Like a demented editor taking revenge on a director, it randomly joins the sequences, linking contradictory takes and juxtaposing
scenes with divergent meanings. On the editing table it rewinds the thirty months Romi and Marilyn spent self-destructively entangled in each other’s madness. The dénouement reverses
everything that has come before. Marilyn exists only through her voice and words. The only trace of the last hours of her life is the tapes she made for her analyst and the phone-taps ordered by
the Kennedys, or their enemies, and carried out, depending on whose version you believe, by Fred Otash for the CIA or Bernard Spindel for the FBI. The private detectives steal her words, as her
image has been stolen for the previous thirty-six years. The reel we’re left with, after Fate has edited it, shows Greenson as a man whom words haven’t been able to justify. His tapes
have been erased by time, and he has disappeared beneath the surface of the images that remain of him.
In one respect, Greenson reacted to his depression fairly quickly, drawing closer to the Freudian establishment and resuming his work on analytic theory. He saw fewer patients
and immersed himself in teaching and writing, focusing primarily on the subject that had fascinated him for the previous three years, ‘the working alliance’ between patient and analyst.
He studied failed analyses, the indications and contraindications for psychoanalytic treatment in severe cases, patients who were unsuited to analysis or who exhibited abrupt changes in
pathologies, and mounted a stirring defence of the therapeutic alliance as a means of resolving stalemates in transference.
At the urging of his editor, soon after Marilyn’s death he set about finishing
The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis
. It was to be his only book. In the preface, he pays
tribute to his father and mentions the name he was born with. ‘The transmission of knowledge can be an attempt to overcome a depressive state,’ he says, in a line he wrote before
meeting Marilyn. Books are often the children of grief. He might not have wept publicly for Marilyn, despite often referring to his sorrow and to his sense that he was in mourning for her, but his
book is a five hundred-page lament couched in the form of advice to débutant and seasoned analysts. A lament is always directed primarily at oneself, just as criticism of the failings and
weaknesses of others is always a sign of an inner struggle. In his work, therefore, Greenson treats with extreme punctiliousness subjects such as ‘The Weekend Is A Desertion’,
‘The Real Relationship Between Patient And Analyst’ and ‘What Psychoanalysis Requires of the Psychoanalyst’. His handbook lists in painstaking detail everything an analyst
should not do with a patient – a summation, in other words, of everything he had done with Marilyn during her thirty months of analysis.