Read Marilyn's Last Sessions Online
Authors: Michel Schneider
‘Milton, do you mind reading what I’ve written about our leading lady?’
‘You won’t be able to say anything about her. You’re the last person who could; you’re still caught up in the whole thing. Don’t think you can step out of the story
somehow and uncover the truth of it. It was a whole galaxy of affects and interests and people and relationships. You were both prisoners of psychoanalysis.’
‘You don’t need to remind me of all the connections. I’ve mapped out the settings and actors. You don’t know the half of it. Look at this . . .’
‘That’s an odd expression. An analyst would say “Listen to this.” Anyway . . .’
‘All right, listen, if you’d rather, and don’t interrupt. Marilyn was analysed by Marianne Kris, who had previously been analysed by Anna Freud, who also briefly analysed
Marilyn. Anna Freud had been analysed by her father, who had also been Marianne Kris, Otto Fenichel and Wilhelm Stekel’s analyst. The last two were my analysts, so I’m Freud’s
grandson twice over. Fenichel was Rudolf Löwenstein’s analyst, who was Arthur Miller’s analyst, Marilyn’s third husband. I was Frank Sinatra’s analyst, her lover. This
is the milieu Marilyn was analysed in—’
‘It’s not a milieu,’ Wexler interrupted, ‘it’s a structure. Which means that these are not just sociological coincidences. They are incestuous, psychological ties
that make up a system – a web, a network, whatever you want to call it – within which Marilyn’s psychological experiences and analyses ran their course. And when your patient
died, the system exploded. I’ve thought a lot about that photo that was taken on the
Manitou
four days after her funeral. JFK’s on the yacht with his brother-in-law Peter
Lawford, his sister Patricia Kennedy, who was Marilyn’s great friend, and Pat Newcomb, who did her press and was with her on the last morning of her life. If you look at those rows of white
teeth and actors’ smiles under the star-spangled banner, various things become clear. First: you’re not in the photo. Second: you could have taken it, because you’re the link
between everyone in the photo. Third: a tragedy was always going to part what Marilyn had joined. Death was always going to disperse that galaxy.’
This was the last thing Wexler said to Greenson. Over the following months, Greenson stopped seeing or talking to his colleagues, not that he could have explained why.
Neither analyst was in a position to be objective about ‘the Marilyn case’. Like all analytic case studies, it was essentially a fictional construct, a spiral of conflicting
interpretations, a trail followed in every conceivable direction. Not one of its facts, even now, is set in stone. Perhaps more information will come to light that will shuffle the cards once again
and fragment the narrative into a myriad of vignettes, opinions and uncertainties. It is, after all, a legend. A story is only true if someone believes it, and it changes at every telling. A case
study is not a novel that says what happened: it is, among other things, an analyst’s fictional self-representation. You can’t fully detach the analyst’s life from the
patient’s, and what is said in public bears no relation to how the particular lives intertwined in private. Even when some degree of the private becomes public, you still don’t get any
closer to the truth. What is known simply changes to incorporate these new elements and thereby create a new version of the legend. No one will ever know anything about what really happened.
Psychoanalysis doesn’t reveal the truth about the people who experience it. It just gives them a version of who and what they are that they can live with, and says how things might have
happened.
Taking a seat opposite the journalist he’d commissioned to co-write his memoirs, Wexler slowly began telling his life story.
‘Before I cross the final threshold . . . I’m eighty now, for goodness’ sake . . . I’m going to take a look in the rear-view mirror at all the strange, confused, pathetic things that went on in “the Marilyn
years”. You’ve no idea what analysis was like in Hollywood in those days. The directors were on our couches, and we were writing scripts for them. Freud thought you could read his case
histories like novels. Romi – Ralph Greenson – wanted his case histories to be like movies he’d directed. I preferred having someone tell me their story and turn it into a script
there and then – with a little bit of direction, naturally. But of course I owe Romi a huge debt. He introduced me to the whole show-business crowd. We’d go for brunch on Sundays at the
writer and producer Dore Schary’s house, where LA’s starriest would gather. Romi and I hit it off straight away and we decided to share offices. We worked together, we compared cases,
we co-authored articles. When Romi went on vacation, I’d fill in for him.’
‘What was he like?’
‘I’ll get to that. I’ve often wanted to make a picture about a movie-stars’ analyst, in the Hollywood I knew when the Psychoanalytic Society was after me. I don’t
know if the public would go for something like that these days, let alone a producer. A picture? Who’s in it? Who’s it for? Who cares? But if I did make it, I’d open with an
aerial shot of a sea of umbrellas and a bald head in the middle. That was me, yesterday, as the heavens opened, saying goodbye to the friend I’d lost. Actually we’d lost each other a
long time ago. It didn’t happen yesterday.
‘Romeo’s funeral at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard was a farce, like all funerals. I took a bitter delight in replaying all the old scenes in my mind and
trying to remember the last time we saw each other . . . No, don’t worry, it’s my age, it’s not tears. I’m legally blind. Clinically, my vision is nil. A blind psychoanalyst
is simply taking the Oedipus complex to its logical conclusion, after all. You can’t imagine how little I miss my sight. I don’t watch movies any more, I remember them.
‘Anyway, as I was saying, if I made a film about yesterday’s ceremony, it would go: “NOVEMBER 1979” in bold. General shot of cemetery, then cut to a wide shot of a
funeral plaque: “RALPH GREENSON”, and a voiceover of an old man saying, “They called me Romi. I wanted to be laid to rest in the graveyard of the stars. As for her – well,
she’s in Westwood Memorial Park. I’ve never gone back to her plaque. I don’t have a handprint in the cement on Hollywood Boulevard or a bronze star on the Walk of Fame. I’m
a low-level star, not one of those ones you see for centuries after they’ve burned out.”’
Milton Wexler had said his farewells to Ralph Greenson in the rain and fog the previous day. Concerned about appearances, images and symbols to the last, Greenson had wanted
his remains to rest in Hillside Memorial Park mausoleum, surrounded by movie celebrities. When Wexler saw the urn containing Romi’s ashes in its niche in the wall, he felt too intense a
mixture of hatred and tenderness to comprehend that he’d lost someone he loved. He decided that the only thing you can do when a friend dies is hate him, resent him for abandoning you and
think of all the mean things you couldn’t say when he was alive.
Poor Romi, he thought, as he left the mausoleum where Greenson resided behind a black marble slab, he didn’t understand much about this profession. His colleagues didn’t really
understand him either. The homage given by Robert Stoller echoed in Wexler’s mind:
Anyone can sense the power of that love in the many papers and books he published – especially his great
The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis
, and the
collected papers in
Explorations in Psychoanalysis
. And when we read them, from the very first to the very last – with their original, mischievous, gentle, provocative, outrageous,
erudite, funny, empathic, warm, forceful, inquisitive, steadfast, modest, abrasive, exhibitionistic, shy, and brave parts – then even a stranger is at least grazed by Greenson’s
presence.
For he could only think and write by pouring himself out, searching for the sources of mental life in the living, sentient experience. Only from that bountiful though mysterious well did he
then – later, carefully, with roots in the realities of the quickened analytic treatment – turn to theory . . . Then a catastrophe struck. Immediately following a routine pacemaker
replacement, Greenson’s heart threw an embolus, instantly shutting down his most joyous aspect, the capacity to communicate with words. For some months, he could not talk, write, or read,
and – most awful – he lost a priceless essence: he had stopped dreaming. So he found the therapists, the will, and the vigour and put himself back together: he learned to talk, to
write, to read. One morning, on awakening, he remembered he had dreamed. With that, he could return to his delight – clinical work – and to its gift: his thinking and writing on the
nature of psychoanalysis. Though speech never returned quite to normal, he again, with a quiet bravery (a counterpoint to his flamboyance when the issues were small), gave presentations,
discussed others’ papers, and participated on panels. But he was forced to give way, step by step. His heart could no longer support him. Finally there was nothing left. Work and Love.
Greenson’s life suggests a small addendum: when one’s life is well lived, work is love.
‘A labour of love. Maybe,’ Wexler resumed, as the cogs of the journalist’s tape recorder spun. ‘Analysis is that in a way . . . in many ways. But you always wonder: who
does the analyst stand for in the transference? And also, in the counter-transference, who does the analyst take himself for? The patient’s father, mother, child? Romi wasn’t a meek and
mild humanist. In a way, he was the opposite of Stoller’s portrait of him yesterday. He didn’t practise the talking cure – his was a cure by drama, tragedy. He was a violent soul,
a tiger that liked to trap its prey, a wolf that cried too obviously for anyone to believe him. He often said a strange thing: “Nothing is harder than to make people believe something you
really feel.” He didn’t believe in anything except his capacity to make others believe. Nothing was sacred for him, not analysis, or psychiatry, or psychology, or ordinary social
relationships. He questioned everything, dared everything. His contempt for rules and limits was what made him attractive. He was an actor, always on stage, always rewriting his part. A gambler.
That’s what I would have said at his grave if I’d been asked to speak.’
‘What about his analysis of Marilyn Monroe?’
‘A word that often cropped up recently in his conversation was “affliction”. He talked about his adaptation of Fitzgerald’s
Tender Is The Night
. Two people who
destroy one another, analyst and patient. The truth is, he didn’t understand what happened between the two of them. Perhaps he had been too much of a doctor, a man of the body, to be able to
listen to Marilyn’s suffering without wanting to cure it at any cost. And too much of an actor also to be an analyst through and through. But there was something else, I think. There’s
a conflict between words and images in all of us. Maybe, in the end, Marilyn was freed from the necessity of just being an image while images ended up overpowering Romi. He’d have liked to
make movies, been an
auteur
, an artist. But he didn’t ever dare. He gave his opinions from the wings, whispering suggestions about dialogue, composition, shots, adaptations. It got on
scriptwriters’ and directors’ nerves, but they had no choice. They had to accept the good doctor’s interventions if they wanted his patient to be the subject, or rather the
object, of their images. Images brought Romi to his knees. Then at the end, as you know, words abandoned him too. Fate is cruel: it gave him silence, and it has given me darkness. The word and the
dream, the twin shores on which analysis founders, have summoned us at the end of our lives. The images took him, and all I have left is the sound of voices. Write that down. It’s good,
isn’t it?’
‘Shall we move on to her now?’ the journalist suggested abruptly. ‘You treated her too for a while, I believe.’
Wexler fell silent, then drew a deep breath. ‘I am the survivor of an ugly story, like all stories that are made up of dreams and money, power and death. Poor Romi! He would have loved to
play the lead role as the love interest, or at least a supporting one. He didn’t realise he was going to be merely an extra in Marilyn’s life. With a lot of screen time, sure: the last
person to talk to her while she was alive, and the first, as far as anyone knows, to see her dead. Supporting role’s unfair, though: he was already a star on the lecture circuit before he
started analysing her, and his couch was a must for any aspiring member of the movie élite. But Marilyn’s death broke him. He survived, but he was never the same again. There was a
secret of some kind between them, a kind of pact whereby each said to the other, “I won’t die so long as I’m under your spell.”’
The day after Greenson died, his son entrusted Milton Wexler with the task of sorting through his papers and giving whatever he saw fit to UCLA’s psychiatry department.
Wexler spent days, with an assistant, going through them. In a file of carefully collated article drafts and random notes from some of the thousands of sessions Greenson had conducted with
patients, they found this note, which his colleague seemed to have drafted before a police examination.
It was in January 1960 that Marilyn Monroe first came to consult me. She told me I was her fourth analyst, but her first ‘male analyst’. I didn’t know I
would be the last (I don’t count Milton Wexler who stepped in for a few weeks in the spring of 1962). She was in such a fragile physical and psychological state that I knew it would be
touch and go and
The rest was missing.
Wexler remembered Greenson’s habit of comparing analysis with chess. One day, seeing Wexler obviously bored by his talk of opening gambits, pincer movements and so on,
Greenson had burst out, ‘But Freud’s the one who compares analysis to chess. Shall I read you what he says?’
He had rushed out to his office and come back moments later holding a crumpled sheet of paper containing quotations he’d clearly copied from an article. Almost as if he were declaiming
verse, he read, ‘“Anyone who tries to learn the noble game of chess from books will soon discover that only the openings and end-games admit of an exhaustive systematic presentation and
that the infinite variety of moves which develop after the opening defy any such description. This gap in instruction can only be filled by a diligent study of games fought out by masters. The
rules which can be laid down for the practice of psycho-analytical treatment are subject to similar limitations. Sigmund Freud, 1913.”’ Greenson spoke in a state of wild elation, almost
on the verge of tears.